Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico
Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico
Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
The latest cuts come as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.
Repulsive.
So they ditch the people who helped make them successful? What kind of ass-backwards strategy is this?
There's a recent podcast talking about this if you're interested - https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search
TLDR; they fired the guy largely responsible for building google search and replaced him with the guy running google ads.
"Do no evil" was abandoned long ago.
Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
They'll say the work is not needed. That's because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. "Industry hasn't innovated in x years" okay that's on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that's left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don't have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it's not something they negotiate and protect. "No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote." Break the terms... instant strike.
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
Sure, it can, because I'm going to blow your mind: businesses aren't about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company's best long term asset--they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs--yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it's still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn't going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn't really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it's not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla's ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn't look like it's going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn't make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it's not really that bad. It's not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it's way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the "professionals" are able to handle the complex tasks that others can't/don't want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.
Ask a professional plumber which they find more taxing: being bent into awkward spaces on their hands and knees all day, or sitting at a desk thinking hard about a problem someone has likely already solved.
I'm an infrastructure engineer working at a government contractor and I'm in a union with OPEIU 1010, the tech workers' local. Others are unionizing independently, with CWA, etc.. It's still early days for the tech industry but there are examples. We're really not that different from other industries with a larger union presence.
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as outsourcing.
Not even outsourcing, they are internal hires, just elsewhere.
Outsourcing is the problem and you are called racist or xenophobic if you even mention it. Unions have nothing to do with it, they would only exasperate the speed of the transfer of knowledge and jobs to lesser developed countries with lower cost labor.
The government needs to break up these oligopolies who have more money than the government itself. That money is spent on people who have no idea what is going on in the tech world, they just listen to the lobbyists, accept their checks and investment returns. They couldn't care less about the long term effects.
You know, firing C level employees creates a lottttttttta cap space for actual employees!
OMG what if Google moves to India/Mexico permanently and is subject to the TikTok ban.
Oh, I can dream. Haha!
What exactly do you mean? I know tiktok is banned in India. not sure about mexico. Are you saying that google would be banned like tiktok is?
This always comes down to the fact that labor is competitive. Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year? Competition drives the prices of labor down. Maybe there needs to be better regulation for labor competition like corporations enjoy.
Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year?
Assuming the same job's quality, a possible answer is "because to live where your company is you need to be paid $200K/year"
What I don't understand is why does competition matter for workers but somehow not for CEOs? I kind of understand and agree in the free market to an extent - if you're fine with hiring a dev for $100 instead of another dev for $1000, and you're okay with the difference in quality / time / etc. then go for it. But where is all this competition happening for CEOs?
Surely someone must be as qualified as Bitchai and willing to do the same job for a measly 100 million a year instead of his 200 million.
Ceo pay is advertised and used against each other to get top dollar. Lowers like us have out pay hidden so companies can low ball without us knowing. That's what needs to change. It should be law to be advertised pay rate so the lowballers get exposed and no one applies, forcing pay to go up.
I can work for 20 dollars a year
Spez you just got a $193 million dollar compensation go buy TikTok or something.
Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a 'reason' that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, "If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there's nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."
There isn't a reason the company couldn't hire someone to do their job from an office in India or the Philippines either though.
Availability of talent used to be the traditional issue. Judging from the current trend of growing teams in these areas, either the talent pool has been growing there or the outsourced jobs are not the talent seeking ones. India, especially, has a low reputation as an outsourcing target.
Outsourcing was a thing way before the pandemic, but it was always a failure for, they never dared replace us when they noticed the bad results.
To be fair there are still a bunch of other aspects that may prevent even full remote jobs to be outsourced to other countries. Among others: language skills, time zone differences, cultural differences, legal frameworks and probably many more.
To give an example for issues that may arise from these differences:
An employee might cost your german company triple the salary in Germany compared to India. On paper it seems like an easy choice, you just outsource and even if you have to pay 2 person to do the job you still save money. But suddenly you run into many problems:
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They will likely not speak German and maybe not even great English. This might be irrelevant for the actual work to be done. But do they exactly understand what the task is, can they give accurate feedback, can they make use of existing resources or do those need to be translated, can they communicate with the rest of the company or your customers?
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They work in different time zones. And while most remote work is probably time agnostic, meetings with other team members, departments or your customers suddenly become much harder to schedule.
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Their culture might be different. So e.g. they might not be as straight forward when running into problems and instead try to hide them, which will mean everything looks fine until the house of cards suddenly crumbles.
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Having employees in different countries means you will need to have different workflows for hr to deal with contracts, payrolls, retirement plans, health insurance and so on. Also how does the other country handle IP, patents and non compete clauses? Could the employee just walk away and start their own business or go to your competitor? Or in reverse can you ensure that they e.g. don't copy/paste code from somewhere else ignoring licenses.
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If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there's nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."
That's one of the reasons I went into a field of technology where the work is mostly hands-on.
Hardware maintenence, troubleshooting, installation and repair isn't something that can effectively be done remotely.
Clever human!
There needs to be a tech workers union. The abuse from employers needs to end. Especially the endless free overtime.
Every day, they somehow figure out ways to get even more evil. We're dialed up way past 11 now.
Is it a move to save money or a move to weaken the position of all those employees who objected to the questionable contracts with many intelligence agencies?
I can bet that they will ensure that the new employees will be selected among those who have no qualms.
India is pro-israel. Especially upper class Hindus who are the majority of tech workers in IT companies.
Just got laid off 2 days ago. They laid off the entire marketing team leaving only the head developer and the web manager.
They then had the galls to ask us if we wanted to stay for 6 months so we can train OUR FUCKING POSITIONS TO INDIA FOR THEM. We could take that or just leave and take a 2 month severance.
1/2 of me wanted to take the opportunity so I can sabotage the company by making it worse for them, but my dignity wouldn't let me do it.
Back to job boards again....
Also, while I'm on this soapbox, wtf is up with these fucking companies asking people to do FREE work just to be considered for an opportunity. Wait, this is a LIVE campaign? My work might be used for things other than to show my abilities.
arg~!
Still keeping the Fart Button team?
I'm sorry who TF does your accounting?
Ok but like as an immature idiot that's my jam please keep the fart button team Google, but you should've kept the others too.
Standard capitalist playbook. Been that way since the 80s
I don't understand why the US keeps allowing that. They should have learned that moving the production facilities to othercountries to reduce costs just lead to a massive job loss and brain drain in the manufacturing sector, now they allow the same to happen in the tech sector. It won't be long until the US is a dried out husk of a country
Greed rules every sector of business Overarchingly so. No concern for anything except monetary profit.
Just Doctorow's enshitification in action.
Coworkers India for Silicon Valley teams = hope you like standup before bed.
Coworkers from USA for Indian teams = hope you like to work from 4pm to 4am.
India, the nation everybody hires to when they need something hacked?
This seems really bad.
It's like when we sent all our manufacturing to China.
Your comment is kinda racist.
You think about India as a call center scam country because that's mostly the only personal experience you have with Indians.
Also, Indians are more commonly known for social engineering scams than anything. (which is also a pretty racist stereotype).
I think it's bad form to call everyone who disagrees with offshored work a racist. Moving the entry level jobs away from the US has created this situation and that stereotype. You are denying the very real problem by saying it's a racist/xenophobic stereotype. Like all stereotypes, there's roots in reality.
The technology industry there has been growing since the US started giving away it's entry level tech jobs and the training that comes with it. The enormous scamming industry is a direct result of the rejects from the call centers. Those call center rejects see their friends and neighbors succeed but can't hack it in that environment but they too want their pieces of pie. They are useless to M$ (and the like) but even though they failed there, they picked up skills that make them valuable to criminals.
Same shit happens in the US, it's how people who suck at their jobs generally continue to get hired. Nothing wrong with discussion about it just because it's happening to another country.
Maybe we should stop letting companies become oligopolies through antitrust allowing them to dictate whole global markets and have more money than the governments of many entire nations.
Nations don't have skin color, people do.
Please go accuse somebody more deserving of racism.
I feel like it's more ethnocentric than racist, which is a bit less bad. Some developers have had negative experiences with offshore talent. I've personally had mixed experiences, and some of that comes down to communication issues and experience issues. Sometimes you get an offshore developer who is really skilled, but generally the very skilled developers get their work visa and come to the US.
You also get absolutely garbage developers in the states, but of course nobody ever mentions that. Lol
Borrowing from the Simpsons...sorry Gupta and Raj and all my other Indian friends..."hey Mr Google! Don't eat the cookies from the Cookie jar!" But instead of cookies it was pickles. And then Mexico! My friends and family.... Google will have to figure out how to de-drug, and de-kidnap the place. It's really dangerous going there now and it has been like that for decades now.
Ha, just when it looks like regulations are coming they hop ship. Fuck em, we don't need em.
Sundar is a cunt
To my natal country México huh? You Google like cheap man-power don't you?
Considering that we've been shoveling raw material (data) into.the furnace (the algorithm) for years for free... yes, Google does like it's man-power cheap.
Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.
That is the double edge sword of remote work: if your job can be done from anywhere, it can be done by someone else in another country where wages are lower.
Headline: "Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees"
In the body of the article: Google is laying off at least 200 employees
So hundreds is 2 of them, 2 hundreds. Literally the lowest definition of the term "hundreds" to still be accurate. Why the Clickbaity headline, CNBC? The truth was enough.
That's not clickbait. Its the literal truth, and gives you a possible range of 200-900 people, as after that they would have said "thousands."
Its not exactly 200, or they could have said 200. They have an ambiguous number to convey, so they used the ambiguous "hundreds" to do it.
Pretty direct and reasonable, honestly.
I'm gonna be that person...
thousand
Why the Clickbaity headline, CNBC?
You clicked it and read the article, so it worked as intended. As long as this shit works, they will continue to do it.
I would say it is fine. It would increase the wages in India and at some point the pay would equal to the person who lives in the USA.
Location based pay shouldn't be there, as I have seen the differences in real life.
A bunch of people works on a ship, all part of same team does same job. But their pay is based on their home location.
People who came from Nordic region earn more and people from east Asia earns way less, though the job is exactly same.
It would increase the wages in India and at some point the pay would equal to the person who lives in the USA.
Are you in the market for some prime riverfront property? I have a lot you may be interested in. Unique, one of a kind.
The thing is, what constitutes a living wage is based on the home location, and all other wages reflect to that level. Most of the wages go to the cost of living everywhere, especially to housing. There is the leeching class, landowners, leeching the fruit of labor from the workforce, and in the west they are leeching that much more in pure dollars. The sad thing is that wages increasing in India wouldn't go to increasing the value of life of the workforce, but the landowning leeches of that region.
This guy sees the cat
The fact they chose india is probably for the low wages. So I wouldn't get my hopes up.