this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Laying people off instead of offering to move them to the now-more-important projects has to be one of the dumbest management moves that tech companies repeatedly do. These are people already trained on all the policies and procedures and tooling and "culture" specific to your company.
It's going to be more expensive to hire and train new people when the dumdums in upper management finally figure out the mistakes they made that got them to a point where they decided they need to cut jobs and projects, and the ramp-up time before you actually start seeing progress on those priorities is going to be seriously lengthened. Of course they won't acknowledge it was their fault in the first place, and again the heads roll on the wrong end of the corporate ladder.
If I'm reading their CEOspeak right, their objective is to fire the very experienced people, that costs a lot of money, and replace them with people that costs less.
I never worked at Google, so I don't know for sure, but it sounds like the Python team is important and that this will backfire. As the people that costs less will also be less skilled, and Python is an important piece for AI/ML research, where Google is already lagging behind. The AI people in Google will get lower quality help with Python, and Google will lag even further behind.
That what happens when the CEO is an MBA and not an engineer.
Engineers over index in their own ways, but I think you're spot on with decoding the PR speak.
The Python team was very involved with the Python Software Foundation and was influencial with directing priorities for the Python programming language reference implementation (which is by far the most widely used implementation of Python). Google just gave up their say in how the language will evolve. Seems like an incredibly bad strategy. But then again, Google has been, from a financial perspective, nothing more than a digital classified ads platform for decades. If a smart MBA were running Google they'd start spinning off divisions into new IPOs and cashing in with dividends like other large conglomerates have done in the past when they have stopped inovating or actually commit to their projects long term.
Maybe we just need CEOs to be more receptive to developers' wishes.
They are not stupid at all. Their interests are in conflict with the interests of tech workers and they are winning effortlessly, over and over again.
The big tech companies are all owned by the same people. If these layoffs cause google to lose market share to another company, it's fine because they own that company too.
What matters is coordinating regular layoffs across the whole industry to reduce labour costs. It's the same principle as a strike: if the whole industry does layoffs, workers gradually have to accept lower salaries. In other words, the employers are unionised and the employees are not.
This process will probably continue for the next 20 years, until tech workers have low salaries and no job security. It has happened to countless industries before, and I doubt we are special.
I'm sure the next big industries will be technology-focused, but that's not the same as "tech". They won't involve people being paid $200k to write websites in ruby.
That's why we need to negotiate in block, likely through unions.
Unfortunately that's not the case. Those who have been laid off are those paid high salaries to build up the foundation. Now that the foundation is already there, they future work won't be as complex as before and need less training. So why would they still pay the very high salaries? They'll just get rid of the used-to-be-important programmers and hire the can-be-hired-for-a-lot-less programmers from India. It's sad, but that's the reality.
Small-to-medium companies see you at least as investment. So this is where i work.
They're hiring replacements in Germany, not India.
have you seen the salaries in Germany? still much much cheaper than Bay Area
Yes. I was just giving accurate information, not making any sort of argument.
LOL, LMAO even.
Yeah, at least give you argument so I can also laugh at myself too.
Anyway, take a look at this article that just came out just earlier, which means that by no chance it's been referenced when I wtote my earlier comment. And do take note of the BOLD words.
It's not dumb. They understand what they are doing. They think firing multiple people at once can flood the market with developers, and the situation could be used to hire new people with a lower compensation.
Don't think the rationale behind this is work quality or developer productivity. This is a power move. For Google and many big tech companies devs are replaceable and are just cogs in the machine. The problem is that they became too costly with the advent of COVID.
They fired 50 people. What market is that going to flood exactly?
I don't mean this layoff but all that are happening in the last months.