They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
It's a question of what kind of business Google is/wants-to-be.
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.
> Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
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?
Now take it one step further. Google and other large megacorps are merely the inevitable outcome of capitalism running to its logical conclusion. So the real argumenmt is, “Is capitalism doing a good job of making the rich richer?”, and the obvious question for the rest of us then is, why keep an economic system like that around?
This is an important point.
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.
Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service.
That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."
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.
>> I don't know anyone who expected this
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.
Twitter generated $5bn in revenue in 2021. Since Musk bought it, it's been on a rapid decline. In 2024 it generated $2.5bn in revenue... 50% of its pre-Musk numbers (46% with inflation)!
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.
Remarkably - it’s more profitable now.
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.
That's just objectively not true.
Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had.
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.
Many if not most engineers are working on things 2-5 years out, not keeping services running.
i think the total reduction was about 2/3 if memory serves? so 1 in 3 is that number you'd be looking at for "actually useful". heavy air quotes on that.
Google's strategy, traditionally, was basically what you're describing (modulo the "until their net income is 0" part). Because their belief about engineering was if you get all the smart people and give them some creative freedom, they invent Gmail. And Tensorflow. And Kubernetes.
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.
> What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0?
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.