As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people.
But the layoff process has been sadistic.
And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff.
Today's Google really sucks.
Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult."
I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
Take responsibility for the people they hired and have an ounce of human decency and empathy?
Don't need extra people? Fair enough. Then stop hiring! No one is pointing a gun to their head telling them to hire. Layoffs (for reasons unrelated to people's job performance) is such an asshole thing to do because with a competent/non-sociopathic management it's completely unnecessary, as you can just do a hiring freeze, and your headcount will reduce by itself through normal attrition.
The management of a lot of corporations acts this way, prioritizing "shareholder value" over people while giving exuberant bonuses to themselves, and then they make a surprised pikachu face when people hate them and individuals like Luigi Mangione come out of the woodwork and take matters into their own hands.
Remember in 2014 when Nintendo was having huge financial troubles? What did the CEO do? Did he fire half of his people? No, he kept his people, halved his own salary and kept going. And this was when they were losing massive amounts of money, and not breaking revenue records making 100 billion in profit. That is how a CEO and a leader should act, and not like the sociopath CEOs we have nowadays.
On some level yes. With the massive disparity in who owns the markets, your argument is basically “Is google doing a good job of making the rich richer?”. Hiring H1Bs and offshoring while firing American labor is not a good look.
Why keep a company like that around?
That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
The one it claimed to be, in the past, with a broader holistic mission, claiming to attract the world's brightest to make information accessible? Using its hoard of cash to do a bunch of neat stuff and hire really smart people do it?
Or is it what we always suspected all along, a cynical money printing machine that turns ad impressions into shareholder value and nothing else?
It's always been a mix of both. Those of us who worked there certainly saw in the inside the gradual transition of the internal discourse from "justifying B to support A" to "who cares about A."
They can do whatever they want, they're a private business. But they still trade on a certain reputation, and have the advantage of a quasi-monopoly status in many things.
I would hope that advancing them any kind of good will as any kind of "special" company (which our profession tended to do, before) and muting criticisms is just over now.
They built their money printing machine in part by swallowing competition and exterminating it.
My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.
This has changed. But it's worth noting it is a change. Larry and Sergey retained controlling stakes in Google's IPO specifically because they intended to build a company that didn't operate like other companies... In essence, they didn't plan to give two shits about shareholder capital, they expected the money would work itself out if they just kept making brilliant products people wanted.
But, the founders have left and Google is now just another company.
I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.
You can read the HN threads from when this happened. People expected its imminent collapse.
It was done during the 2022 FIFA World Cup and you had people here predicting that it wouldn't last through the weekend due to that.
Worse, it continues to trend downward.
Most sane tech CEOs would prefer to keep their upward trend and $5+ billion revenue rather than saving $1 billion to lose $2.5 billion and invert their slope.
Also, most layoffs don’t cause huge cuts to advertising spend on their platform because of personal spite or political reasons. The product for all intents and purposes as an advertiser is the exact same.
This is a success at Sundar's level.
They're doing exactly that, veiled in euphemisms like "making our talent pool more reflective of our user base."