Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google.
Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually make it worse - so for example, the timing of this (which the person complains about) is because (AFAIK) they now have one day a month where ~all role eliminations that are going to happen that month, happen. Or so i'm told this is the case.
Ostensibly so you don't have random role eliminations every day, which makes some sense, but then you have no way for people on the ground to do anything more compassionate (like move the timing a bit) because they can't get through the bureaucracy.
In the end - it's simple - if you disempower all the people from helping you make it compassionate, it will not be compassionate. The counter argument is usually that those folks don't know how to do it in legally safe/etc ways. But this to me is silly - if you don't trust them to know how to do it, either train them and trust them, or fire them if they simply can't be trusted overall.
Google didn’t used to be quite so bad at this. Back when they closed the Atlanta office, people there got a lot of notice and opportunity to find another role. The complaints were about not being allowed to go full-time remote.
I wonder what changed?
Ruth and Fiona aren't Patrick and Laszlo.
It feels like there was leadership turnover in the late 2010s where "conventional company" people assumed the reins of power and started managing it like one.
The founders are complicit too. People like to think "before Larry and Sergey stepped down…" but the founders still control the board (tacitly or explicitly approving of the company's current behavior). Plus, there's Sergey's "60h/w or GTFO" note from a few months back.
Yeah, this is really common at Big Tech, I saw it happen at FB, and it's only gotten worse since then.
The issue is that if you keep hiring leadership/people from the rest of the corporate world (which is basically unavoidable if you are growing) then you'll end up trending towards the median of corporate behaviour over time.
It's mostly unavoidable, unless you never hire external managers (which would be very very difficult to do).
Sundar Pichai. That's what changed. He's one of the most uninspiring tech leaders of today who just wants to run an already established business with more and more ads with some AI sprinkled upon everything. And cost cutting. That's all, that's his entire vision.
It's him and CFO Ruth Porat. Both happened in the same year. The latter is your stereotypical banking type.
When these businesses are in their growth phase, they're relatively lenient about spending and generous to employees. When these businesses run out of opportunities for market growth or entering new markets to improve the bottom line, they turn to cost cutting and squeezing more out of employees to improve the bottom line instead. It's a natural progression for every megacorporation as they hit the limits of their growth.
IIRC during Google's first few mass layoffs in January 2023 and in January 2024, it gave people lots of notice, including opportunities to find another role. As time went on, it just stopped caring.
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this.
That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?"
And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care.
There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc.
What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki.
As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events."
Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows.
Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
When I was there, someone getting fired was extremely rare, which doesn’t seem to fit well with “you can always replace people” line that you’re talking about?
But Google is a big place and it was long ago, so perhaps it’s a “blind men and the elephant” thing.
Yeah, I probably should have put firing in quotes since there are a zillion ways to get someone to leave. Being "Laid off" is a form of firing, telling someone all of their multipliers are being zeroed out so that they "quit" is a form of firing. Putting someone on a "performance improvement plan" where the requirements to get off that plan is to do really unpleasant work is a form of "firing." Lots of ways to get someone to walk out the door without having to escort them out. And if you went to the managing within the law class they gave it was clearly explained it was so much better if the employee "chose" to quit than Google "firing" them because involuntary termination carried with it the risks of being sued.
Did you ever run percent when you were there? I started at Google in 2006 and one of the 'fun' things people did was run the 'percent' command that would tell you what percentage of Google employees were 'newer' than you, so if it was 10% you knew that 10% of the people were new. I was curious how it worked and found that it just counted rows in a database that had active employee names and start dates. Pretty simple hack.
The amazing thing was how quickly the number grew! And at TGIF there were the Nooglers in their propeller caps and everyone was like wow look at all those newbies. About 6 months in I noticed two things, first there was like 25% of the company was newer than I was, and that the number of employees being reported in the financial reports was about the same as when I joined. One could do the math. Waves of people would be hired, large chunks of them wouldn't survive the first year, and another chunk wouldn't survive 'slotting'. They were just no longer at the company. After a couple of years, as I remember it there were three of us, out of about 30, from the group that joined when I did, still at the company.
When I looked for it, it was pretty clear there was a tremendous amount of 'churn' in employment. I asked Lazlo Bock about it once, he was heading up 'People Operations' at the time and he assured me there were always plenty of candidates in the pipeline and Google wanted only the best and brightest. The people we had? Well they weren't always a good fit "culturally" with the company, after all Google was unlike any company that had ever existed, right?
It was just one of the more egregious times where the 'actions' and the 'words' didn't actually communicate the same message.
Yes, there was lots of turnover and "percent" started looking pretty extreme for me after a few years. But at the time, I assumed that's just how it is with software developers in Silicon Valley. We can and do change jobs frequently. It was well-known that it's the best way to get a raise. But I also knew more old-timers at Google than at other places.
For better or worse, tech has become a cyclical job and we’ve seen big firms printing billions due almost annual layoffs. This started around Covid and will continue likely as the new norm.
Prior to that, I only saw layoffs during market downturns (2001, 2008, 2012) and generally much smaller.
Recruiting is quite expensive, and employees naturally lose to the market rate by staying at one company for a while. I don't think this really matches what you're suggesting.
Remember that bit about billions of dollars every quarter in free cash flow? That's after spending on things like 'recruiting' and 'building another 50MW data center' kinds of expenses. If you're a startup, recruiting costs are an annoyingly big chunk of your burn, if you're Google, not so much.
Another big thing at Google was data science, or "Using data to win arguments" as a prominent Google engineer once wrote. I would not be surprised that someone has code that assesses the cost of replacing people where they figure out "current pay package of existing engineer" - "recruiting costs" + "new pay package" and the manage the list of people who are now 'replacable' because that number has gone in favor of replacement.
I was pitched a project to work on when I was there called "find and expert" or something which was designed to identify individuals who were 'experts' and relied on by the organization. Reasonable thing right? Know who your experts are. But the folks putting this together were also associated with People Operations trying to replace people. It didn't take too much effort to connect the dots on that. Was it evil? Yes? No? Kind of? It was more like "we want a company where everyone is easily replaceable without risk to the company." That certainly plays well with the shareholders. Felt a bit like the Borg trying to integrate ones technical distinctiveness into the collective.
It has always been a career limiter of mine that I care about the people more than I care about the company.
That comes out of a different budget though, so people care less.
Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude.
Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.
Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters.
I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline.
The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume.
He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions".
I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate.
Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.
Oh ya this. Also their recruiters aren’t the best but they are the most persistent. Meta seems to be going in the Amazon direction unfortunately, I still think Google is the least bad of the three.
> I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that.
Many, many years ago I sat next to HR in an open plan office while on a freelance gig.
They treated almost all candidates like subhumans, both when talking about the candidates within the team and when speaking on the phone to candidates.
They handled everyone from factory worker and janitorial roles, to specialists to director level. I very clearly got the impression that they only treated candidates well if those candidates could turn into people who had any power over them within the org.
I've carried that with me since and I often recognize it in HR staff I interact with now.
Linkein is now full of recruiters looking for work, who never had any network.
The barrier of entry to become a receruiter in general is very, very low.
At Amazon? Yes, very likely.
I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again."
Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
I had a similar experience with Facebook, although my email was much more aggressive (this was when their recruiter contacted me right after I got tripped by one of their UX dark patterns in a way that translated to real world harm). I kept getting invites until I put a clear statement expressing my desire to never ever work for Facebook into my LinkedIn profile
FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.
Well the guy was technically in line - your conditional wasn’t satisfied.
I think I wrote an email along those lines, at some point, although it was as much annoyance with the persistence of a particular recruiter as it was a desire not to work at Amazon.
+1, it's been a while since I interviewed with Google, but this brought me back to how annoying it was. I've never had a good interview experience with Google. I only interviewed during college for internship and then a full-time new-grad role and got a consistent "we're doing you a favour by even talking to you" attitude from them— the delays, the impersonality, the delays to the general vibe of the emails, etc.
They became significantly more attentive when I got an internship offer from a competing big-tech company, but as much as my recruiter seemed to try, the process just seem to be deficient beyond their capacity to do anything about it. It had to go through many steps, and be reviewed by many people who seemingly had better things to do.
Eventually they reached to the right people to tell me my decision before my other deadline. I _was_ going to get an offer. They couldn't get me the actual offer letter, or tell me if I had guaranteed host-matching though. I happened to know Google can send intern offers that don't guarantee you'll be matched to a team, and if you're not, the internship just doesn't happen. In my book that's not only as good as no offer really, it's also just disrespectful. I knew people who had this type of offers and didn't get teams.
I took the other offer. "You will get an offer, the details are just taking a while" is not enough to decide on, and the whole process didn't particularly warm me up to Google. For comparison, and to give credit where credit is due, the other company was Meta (then FB). My recruiter was very response, understanding, and personable, which is especially appreciated as an college student— you're nervous, unexperienced and have a lot going on beyond interviewing. They sent me pictures of their dog to lighten the mood. I had told them I'd appreciate quickness, and by the time I was eating dinner after my on-site, I had the offer letter in my inbox.
I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.
It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.
They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"
Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.
Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
This doesn't pass the sniff test.
Why would the candidate be on the hook for the flight change and extra night at a hotel?
When I interviewed with Google ~10 years ago, they booked and paid for my my flights (from China to the US), hotel and car hire. I didn't have to book, pay and then ask for reimbursement, let alone foot the bill myself.
The 'two days' sounds weird to me as well. In my experience (on both sides of the table) face to face interviews were scheduled to be on a single day.
Perhaps things have changed or your friends were interviewing for very specialist roles?
The phrasing “from start to end” got me thinking—tangential, but—they were an extremely cool company when Millenials were in school and looking to join the workforce. Anybody would have jumped at the opportunity to work for them.
Actually, I can’t even think of a similar company nowadays.
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a really bad hiring pipeline as a result. Why work on the skill of hiring, if people will jump through flaming hoops to work for you.
As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
> As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
Shocking how real this is.
Just wait for IBM to turn into Red Har Linux or maybe Infosysl
That would be nice, if it turned into Red Hat.
But IBM was first, right?
IBM owns Red Hat, and companies grow to resemble their acquisitions all the time, though I think more people believe Red Hat is already deep in being borgified to be IBM Linux more than the other way around.
I’m aware… it just seems too good to be true, that IBM could be corrected by Red Hat.
Sometimes, good things are worth the wait. The two times that you accepted roles other than Google, did they turn out better than waiting for Google?
I am surprised that you accept. I would never waste my time. If these companies refuse to provide reasonable interview feedback, why would you provide it to them?Bazel is an incredibly productive tool at the right scale. I could not imagine working on a giant monorepo without it.
If a startup is killed by Bazel, it probably wasn't the right tech choice for their scale, and it would be more accurate to say that the startup was killed by bad technical leadership.
> somebody like Marissa Meyer
Marissa Mayer left Google like, 13 years ago...?
"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive"
So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure.
But some of the data here is just very wrong.
Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has:
1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed.
2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well.
...
So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :)
It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think.
As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount.
I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's.
For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it.
(Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured)
Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment.
That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not.
There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process.
The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days.
I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits:
Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits.
Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them?
Them: Yes
Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all?
Them: No.
> But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive,
That’s the thing, they might be winning all the productivity battles there are (and I genuinely believe that they do, on top of great tools Google employs good-enough programmers to make use of those tools), but at the same time they’re losing the general war. Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.
The botched Google+ launch broke them in that department, or maybe that was just a symptom of how badly-broken things already were inside the company. They’re still making lots and lots of money, though, so that’s still a good thing for them.
> Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.
People repeat this a lot, but it's obviously not true. Google Photos is recent, really good, and had more than a billion users really quickly. Waymo is like a decade away from eating the entire urban taxi market. Gemini is the best LLM for writing code right now. I guess you could call these "rare exceptions" but I don't think that's a useful way to describe them.
Hell, even YouTube improves every year by leaps and bounds from both a revenue/profit standpoint, AND from a creator support standpoint.
Google deserves to be heckled mercilessly for how easy engineers have it there and how eager it is to kill off products, but suggesting that it's a dying company coasting on ad money is just totally wrong.
If Photos is recent then Google search was recent when Photos was released!
It’s a decade old and that’s only if we don’t count what it was before it was spun into its own product, google’s more recent integrations spun as “releases” non withstanding.
YouTube INCREASING creator support? That’s news to me and every other YouTube creator. Creator support peaked around the time Photos released, nearly a decade ago and has only gotten worse since (although if we were to graph it, it would certainly have peaks and valleys).
Photos was brand new in 2015. Search is from 1998. I'm not a mathematician but that means that search is about three times older than it...
If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it, I don't know if there's much of a point to me trying to convince you
> If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it
Well I didn’t say anything like this or anything that implied anything close to this so I suppose you’d have to engage with what I actually said.
Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015. Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age. I don’t think even IBM would consider a 10 year old product a recent release.
> Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015.
Google has had several previous photos apps! The actually useful one is the most recent.
> Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age.
So you swear you aren't demanding proof that services released in the past five years are successes, but you're complaining that pretty much anything older is too old.
Dude, I am engaging with what you said. Almost no product is wildly successful in less than 10 years by Google's standards, because Google measures users in billions.
If you still wanna ignore Photos, then talk about Gemini, Cloud, and Waymo. The Pixel phones are also doing pretty well, considering how dominant Apple has been.
My point here is that you're ignoring numbers that would be INSANE for any startup because the product is from Google. It really seems to me like you're looking for reasons to discredit the company instead of the truth, which is that non-ad revenue is 25% of the total and growing.
That's pretty significant and in absolute terms makes Google a giant even without search.
I am SO confused and have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think you’re talking to someone else?
My post was Thesis: Photos is not new
Supporting evidence: everything else.
I am not OP, I am not saying anything you’re responding to (and when I look at the OP you responded to they didn’t say what you’re responding to either).
I’m not ignoring any numbers they just don’t have anything to do with my post.
Additionally, Photos was a relaunched app that’s why I’m saying the 2015 is a little misleading, I am aware Google had other photo apps before Photos and I’m not talking about that.
I can say “your examples are bad” without espousing “Google doesn’t do anything”
> My post was Thesis: Photos is not new
> Supporting evidence: everything else.
I am getting my number from Wikipedia, because that's when the actual "good" version of Photos launched. I don't know what the status quo was before the relaunch, because the app wasn't useful to me before it got the ML features that caused it to blow up and become a wild success.
The point I am trying to make is that Photos, on its own, would be a multibillion dollar startup. In the context of billion-user apps, even being 10 years old is still pretty recent.
My complaint with your take is that if you exclude anything younger than that, OBVIOUSLY there will not be as many (or any) wild successes. It takes time for a product to become successful.
That's not what they said.
They said, if Photos is currently recent (aka 2025-2015 = 10 years = recent) then Search was recent when Photos came out (aka 2015-1998 = 12 years = recent).
Which given the overall timeframes, I'd say that's close enough to say 10 years ~= 12 years. And they said they'd actually count the non-Photos time of Photos as Photos, so add some to the 10 years.
2015-1998 = 17, not 12.
Yeah this is what drove me a little crazy about his reply. That's almost a factor of 2.
ROFL, HN needs Cap'n Picard face palm. You are of course correct. slowly walks out backwards while trying to turn less than lobster red
And if you believe that, @DannyBee's productivity isn't real.
Or maybe it's a business problem that Google shares with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.
Microsoft has struggled to find any new products that will really move the needle in terms of revenue but they support their old customers with enduring loyalty while making the occasional absurd-but-bold move like Windows 8 and sticking to businesses that seem to make no sense like XBOX.
Facebook is the captain of cringe, not cool, but at least they're investing big in VR as a platform. They subsidize great rigs for Beat Saber because Zuckerberg will never forgive himself if he gives up and somebody else succeeds. [1]
Apple will never find a product as big as the iPhone. To do so they've have to make an iCar or iHouse or skip Starship and go straight to O'Neill Colonies. At least they are indisputably the best at what they do and they can occasionally take a hopeless shot at someone else's turf (Vision Pro) feeling justified that the only rival platform has a trashcan for a logo.
Google has trained us all that anything new from Google has a shelf life less than day old bread. They go at new projects as if they a startup that didn't get into Y Combinator or like the kind of company that Marissa Mayer starts these days [2] -- they don't realize part of the special opportunity of being a huge company like that with an absurd valuation is you can do really big, audacious, and irrational things.
[1] I learned for myself how dangerous this attitude is but all I could do was max out my HELOC.
[2] see https://sunshine.com/ not to put it down, I might be involved in something like that if I wasn't doing what I am doing
Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.
> Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.
So? It's not a weird callout, it's an example where the whole arc is well known.
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this
The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012.
It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door?
Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.
> "I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012."
Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.
Can confirm as well, was laid off from Microsoft in 2023, and I kept access for about a week and a half (and then was paid for an additional 60 days after that, but no longer had access to anything, this was just the WARN period).
Same thing for people just leaving. I left in 2024, and my login and everything around it kept working until my announced leave date (and I gave more than a month notice).
I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.