22% YoY revenue increase.
Doing something right.
Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
22% YoY revenue increase.
Doing something right.
Maybe mass layoffs like Oracle/Meta/Amazon are doing isn't actually a good way to grow a company after all!
I have internal knowledge, I am closely affiliated with Google.
Infrastructure and scalability has been and is key, as well as technical expertise still absolutely super top notch.
Let’s put it this way: Google is the only company that knows how to find, store and utilize information beyond a specific narrowing. And I mean it really in the sense of curating, compression, long time storage, load balancing as well as compliance and world wide redundancy with a focus on speed and efficiency.
Under the hood of AI is pure engineering genius. Google might be trashed as the Search Engine giant that only displays ads now, but reconsider.
Why does all AI provider except for Google have massive problems with load time, reach, etc? Apple chose Google mainly because of the infrastructure. They eat everyone for lunch here. And they earned it.
Engineering at Google etc. are still the finest you can read about software engineering at the highest level. It is highly impressive how Google managed to not fall behind OpenAI. Who else was able to join the race? Microsoft? No. Apple? Oh well… Meta etc. won’t get there ever.
I think that Gemini is 3rd behind OpenAI and Claude but mainly because Google being Google, they kind of have no versioning for their AI and therefore the results are pretty much random in quality, less predictable than the others.
But the creativity and tooling like Nano Banana - fantastic.
There you have it. People don’t get that it is the infrastructure the moment they complain about Claude outtakes here.
Gemini is not reliable whatsoever: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview/uptime (the orange chart is either AI studio or Vertex, I suspect AI studio, but it's not good either way).
The reason you don't hear people complaining (esp on HN) is because noone is using Gemini with coding agents. Claude Code, Codex (and IMO OpenCode et al with open weights models) are miles ahead of Gemini CLI/Jules/Antigravity/whatever other coding products Google have.
I tried gemini-cli.
While the model was "ok" everything else was trash.
Constant 429s or 502s for "reasons".
10 different ways to try and pay for the stupid thing and none of them clear.
My favourite was as a paying customer I could not get it to use the latest model. Sometimes it would but most times it would dump me to 2.5.
All of my experience is exactly the opposite of the gp comment is saying.
The gemini-cli repo is gong show too https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
If you don't pay for it, you don't get much in the way of quota.
Earlier on (okay, until recently), Gemini CLI's quota management didn't work very well.
Antigravity tends to have better quota management behavior.
That is what was infuriating.
It was paid for through code assist enterprise and had all the flags enabled for the "preview" models. Still the only way to get gemini 3+ was to open and close the application 5 to 10 times and sometimes you would get 3 for a bit and then get dumped back to 2.5 and no matter what you do it would not use 3.
I tossed it after spending like 3 hours total messing around the google cloud console and trying a bunch of shit from the github issues. The other offerings don't waste my time (or waste less of it anyway). If they want me to beta test their shit they shouldn't charge for it.
I noticed early on that Gemini responded multiple times faster than claude and chatgpt do, which is why I use it as my main daily LLM (claude code for coding, gemini for all general queries).
Don't you worry, Leadership will get us off this reliable Tech Island and onto the shit-infested Tech Continent that the rest of the world lives on.
This is such an interesting take. Thank you.
Seconding that, not sure if it's the full take I'd stand behind but the perspective is definitely food for thought and way more thought out than my own.
Google was one of the earlier companies to do mass layoffs, back in 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-peop...
AFAIK this is literally the only time google has laid more than a few thousand off at once
They did it again in 2024 and then switched to continuous drip of small "layoffs" and encouraging attrition. They have tried various layoff flavors: random, strategic, political, voluntary, and now in their continuous microlayoff era good luck distilling a consistent simple explanation for the day to day decisions of many thousands of managers.
Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes, and eliminated many perks and benefits that were peculiar to Google. As the unique characteristics of Google as an institution are pared away, it makes sense that they would also adopt the standard approach to layoffs and that is what we have seen since 2023.
Link? I don’t recall any mass layoffs in 2024, and by mass I mean multi thousand
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-e...
I’m talking multi thousand though. More than a few. Google has never done it other than that 2023 layoff. Google like all mega corps have layoffs all the time though sadly.
Only if you count a single day. If you count yearly Google has not stopped layoffs of "more than a few thousand" since 2023. And I bet some months get above 1000. The big layoff in 2023 was not actually the first time by the way, that was much earlier (there was a wave of office consolidation in the 2010s). Also the 2023 layoff was at least 3 distinct waves.
And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale you'd expect today.
Link?
Google has been continuously laying people off for a few years now
Layoffs might not be the best way to keep talent. Imo, Nintendo did it best back in 2014 [1].
[1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/01/iwata_and_miyamoto...
Google is also doing layoffs. They just aren't making the news because they are PA by PA and they are preceded by buyouts. But we've had layoffs every year since 2023.
Uhh have you seen the revenue growth of them? Oracle 22%, Amazon is 17% (if im reading it right) and Meta was 33%
I don't think any of them are learning the lesson you think they are