It's been an unsupportable business model from the beginning. Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product. They don't have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them. I honestly don't believe the majority of Google Engineers actually do anything innovative anymore as most of those people left the company when their pet projects were shut down in the first round of cost cutting measures (around the time Google became Alphabet).
They pretty much have a monopoly with YouTube.
Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.
It's one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It's another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.
Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one.
That's probably why it's getting enshittified so quickly.
And search
Yeah, but that one is replaceable if people want too.
Everything is replaceable if people want to. The problem is the inertia it takes to substitute it
YouTube is really hard to replace without the money of a multi billion company.
Video is hard and attracting creators is even harder.
So is a good search engine. As much as I love DuckDuckGo and daily drive it the results are much worse than google’s
No, you can switch to a different search engine right now and the results will be perfectly fine. I use DDG exclusively.
What video platform can you switch to that has even remotely close to the amount of content as YouTube? (Pornhub doesn't count)
Twitch, but that comes with its own problems.
It's also different as there only a few privileged channels get to keep their content forever. A lot of channels can only keep it for 2 weeks or 2 months based on their status, and a lot of creators upload their content to youtube to keep it for longer
Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product
They built their entire culture on teams building new products. Which means a team would build something cool, get promoted, and leave that project. Who wants to join the maintenance side of things when all the promotions are being handed out to the ones who make new products?
It's a broken system and best of luck Google!
These layoffs didn't happen because Google is out of money. It's insanely profitable.
They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them.
Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There's also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.
As for what Google engineers do, it's mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it's small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.
Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone, if we use a reasonable definition of “few”.
We asked Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini to say if this was the complete and total number of job cuts in this round of layoffs, but she stopped replying at that point, only confirming existing layoff reports at 9to5Google and Semafor.
The New York Times reported on the engineering team layoffs too.
When we spoke to Mencini earlier this evening about the Google hardware layoffs, she did not mention the other layoffs — but did write that “a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better” and that “some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
If so, though, it won’t work: The Verge is among the news outlets that takes a hard line against planted information, and we pride ourselves on finding the bigger picture.
Parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total.
The original article contains 360 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 43%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"Same procedure as last year?"
"Same procedure as every year!"
Is the bubble finally bursting? I think CEOs finally got pissed off that all those dev salaries didn’t go straight in their pockets. Is anyone looking for a car mechanic? I only have personal experience but I’m expecting ten times the salary because I got addicted to my lifestyle.
This isn't about dev salaries at all. It's about cheap investment money, you got huge amounts of funds with a very low interest rate.
Now the interest rates are up, money lending is no longer cheap. Suddenly all those companies actually need a profit to run, which they don't have.
Google has literally been reporting billions of net profit every quarter.
This is about appeasing shareholders. The capitalist class hates that tech employees have been able to command decent salaries and has been striving to push back for a while now.
Google only made $1,586,880 per employee in 2022, how could they possibly sustain lavish salaries?
Won't someone think of the shareholders?
O no! Usually I have compassion for people or families losing employment/income but this headline feels more along the lines of The empire lays off 1,000 Stormtroopers
I have compassion for people or families losing employment/income
Doubt
I took a huge cut in pay fifteen years ago to take a job serving the under-resourced. I'm still doing it and our family makes sacrifices for it every year. I'd still help ex-Google employees haha.
“You and your fucking dog are evil because you’re just trying to survive.”
You don’t appear to have compassion for anyone but yourself.
The tech industry is so massive with so much opportunity abound. It's not been difficult to work for a company with morals.
There's also some metadynamics to be noted here. It's basically impossible to talk about these issues online because so many are tech nerds who sold their soul to big tech a long time ago.
There aren't that many jobs where you can pretend to keep your hands clean. My husband's first job was at a startup he described as "helping rich people gamble with their money". I'm currently working for a public university, which I felt pretty great about from a morality perspective, but the pay is probably around 2/3 of what I would be getting in the private sector.
You think you are siding against the empire but you are siding for the empire. Corporations get huge kickbacks when they do mass layoffs.
It's been an unsupportable business model from the beginning. Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product. They don't have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them. I honestly don't believe the majority of Google Engineers actually do anything innovative anymore as most of those people left the company when their pet projects were shut down in the first round of cost cutting measures (around the time Google became Alphabet).
They pretty much have a monopoly with YouTube.
Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.
It's one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It's another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.
That's probably why it's getting enshittified so quickly.
And search
Yeah, but that one is replaceable if people want too.
Everything is replaceable if people want to. The problem is the inertia it takes to substitute it
YouTube is really hard to replace without the money of a multi billion company.
Video is hard and attracting creators is even harder.
So is a good search engine. As much as I love DuckDuckGo and daily drive it the results are much worse than google’s
No, you can switch to a different search engine right now and the results will be perfectly fine. I use DDG exclusively.
What video platform can you switch to that has even remotely close to the amount of content as YouTube? (Pornhub doesn't count)
Twitch, but that comes with its own problems.
It's also different as there only a few privileged channels get to keep their content forever. A lot of channels can only keep it for 2 weeks or 2 months based on their status, and a lot of creators upload their content to youtube to keep it for longer
Copilot/Bing Search might put a big dent in that in the future. People will just ask an AI instead of "googling".
They built their entire culture on teams building new products. Which means a team would build something cool, get promoted, and leave that project. Who wants to join the maintenance side of things when all the promotions are being handed out to the ones who make new products?
It's a broken system and best of luck Google!
These layoffs didn't happen because Google is out of money. It's insanely profitable.
Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There's also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.
As for what Google engineers do, it's mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it's small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone, if we use a reasonable definition of “few”.
We asked Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini to say if this was the complete and total number of job cuts in this round of layoffs, but she stopped replying at that point, only confirming existing layoff reports at 9to5Google and Semafor.
The New York Times reported on the engineering team layoffs too.
When we spoke to Mencini earlier this evening about the Google hardware layoffs, she did not mention the other layoffs — but did write that “a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better” and that “some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
If so, though, it won’t work: The Verge is among the news outlets that takes a hard line against planted information, and we pride ourselves on finding the bigger picture.
Parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total.
The original article contains 360 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 43%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"Same procedure as last year?"
"Same procedure as every year!"
Is the bubble finally bursting? I think CEOs finally got pissed off that all those dev salaries didn’t go straight in their pockets. Is anyone looking for a car mechanic? I only have personal experience but I’m expecting ten times the salary because I got addicted to my lifestyle.
This isn't about dev salaries at all. It's about cheap investment money, you got huge amounts of funds with a very low interest rate.
Now the interest rates are up, money lending is no longer cheap. Suddenly all those companies actually need a profit to run, which they don't have.
Google has literally been reporting billions of net profit every quarter.
This is about appeasing shareholders. The capitalist class hates that tech employees have been able to command decent salaries and has been striving to push back for a while now.
Google only made $1,586,880 per employee in 2022, how could they possibly sustain lavish salaries?
Won't someone think of the shareholders?
O no! Usually I have compassion for people or families losing employment/income but this headline feels more along the lines of The empire lays off 1,000 Stormtroopers
Doubt
I took a huge cut in pay fifteen years ago to take a job serving the under-resourced. I'm still doing it and our family makes sacrifices for it every year. I'd still help ex-Google employees haha.
“You and your fucking dog are evil because you’re just trying to survive.”
You don’t appear to have compassion for anyone but yourself.
The tech industry is so massive with so much opportunity abound. It's not been difficult to work for a company with morals.
There's also some metadynamics to be noted here. It's basically impossible to talk about these issues online because so many are tech nerds who sold their soul to big tech a long time ago.
There aren't that many jobs where you can pretend to keep your hands clean. My husband's first job was at a startup he described as "helping rich people gamble with their money". I'm currently working for a public university, which I felt pretty great about from a morality perspective, but the pay is probably around 2/3 of what I would be getting in the private sector.
You think you are siding against the empire but you are siding for the empire. Corporations get huge kickbacks when they do mass layoffs.