
Google Memo on Cost Cuts Sparks Heated Debate Inside Company - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-26/google-memo-on-cost-cuts-sparks-heated-debate-inside-company
======
flunhat
I've heard that getting promoted at Google is kind of a shitshow -- that your
manager can't vouch for you and it's basically up to how well you summarize
and present your work to a faceless promotion committee (i.e. how well you
play politics). I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, per se. In light
of this memo, however, I wonder if the layered bureaucracy of the promotion
process is an intentional way of not promoting promotion-worthy employees and
keeping costs down.

~~~
drewg123
Xoogler here: I was promoted L5 -> L6 (senior -> staff SWE) in 2015, so I can
talk a bit about this.

Your manager can actually be helpful, but the process is byzantine. In my
case, my promo committee approved my promo. However, at L6 there was an
automatic review of all promos to that level by a 2nd committee. The review
committee denied my promo. My manager came in at this point and lodged an
appeal on my behalf to the review committee's decision. That appeal took the
promo to a 3rd committee that ultimately approved it.

I did not know any of the details of what was happening. I only learned what
happened in my 1:1 with my manager when he told me the whole story. He was so
happy and proud of himself that he managed to help me get promoted. The sad
thing is that this was the 1:1 where I told him that I was leaving for Netflix
(much better offer due to non-monetary factors).

The truly kafka-esque part of this: Since promo at Google is a huge deal, and
since you if you are hired back, you retain the level at which you departed
at, I really wanted to leave as a L6. So I delayed my start at Netflix until
my promo went through. I resigned effective a day after the effective promo
date. However, in the HR system, the resignation cancelled the promo. So I had
to jump through some hoops to get the promo re-instated. I know it went
through, because I had friends check go/epitaphs and I eventually got my promo
jacket..

~~~
sitkack
> However, in the HR system, the resignation cancelled the promo.

Can I ask you about occurrences of fence post errors?

There was a very important eng who was basically a sole contributor on a
difficult component in a system. He announced his retirement date well in
advance, but after the bonus payout period. HR terminated him early, denying
him the bonus and leaving the team to scramble and organize a mini-summit to
do knowledge transfer. The team itself had no control over the date. I believe
it was a similar company.

~~~
pkaye
I left my last company the day after our quarterly bonus and HR managed to
reverse the transaction. To be honest I didn't even realize te bonus was due
that day and I gave my usual 2 week notice. They could have not even deposited
the amount and I would have not noticed. HR leadership used be a lot kinder at
that company until there was a shift to a new HR director.

~~~
tomerv
That sounds illegal.

~~~
vkou
It doesn't matter if its illegal or not, if he wants to dispute it, it will
probably go through binding arbitration.

Arbitrators do not need to have any understanding of the law, and are
notoriously employer-friendly.

------
drugme
_Perhaps the most significant change in the proposal called for trimming the
rate of promotions. Each year, a certain number of employees are up for
promotions based on performance and other metrics. The slide deck suggested
reducing this by 2 percentage points. The document said this could be rolled
out without upsetting staff because workers didn’t know what the existing rate
was, so wouldn’t notice if it declined._

That last sentence is quite telling about Google's attitude toward its
employees.

~~~
DannyBee
It also said that Google doesn't have enough higher level work for people if
it promoted them (because the promo rate is so much higher than industry
average, and Google has shifted right in levels) but just about everyone
ignored that.

You can't create larger scope/etc roles out of thin air (you actually have to
need the work done), and levels always seem to right shift over time.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Then maybe Google needs to stop advertising that it needs and has the most
intelligent engineers in the industry. If they don't have enough work to feed
them, they don't need to have them.

~~~
i_am_proteus
Does Google hire them to work at Google, or to not work somewhere else?

~~~
mehrdada
This is the key insight that many people ignore, straight out of The Monopoly
Operating Manual. When you are Google size, many of your investments are, and
should be, wisely targeted at buying insurance against risks to future
revenues and cash flows, not just growing them.

------
GhostVII
> One worker asked why Pichai was paid hundreds of millions of dollars, while
> some Google employees struggle to afford to live in Silicon Valley

I mean I understand getting upset at the income gap between CEO's and regular
people, but it seems kind of strange to be complaining about your salary as a
Google employee, where you are almost certainly making well over $100k, and
walk past rows of camper trailers and homeless people on the way to work.
Saying that you are struggling to afford to live in Silicon Valley seems like
a bit of a stretch if you are an engineer at Google. I can sympathize with
non-tech workers at Google who are probably making less though.

~~~
CydeWeys
You haven't looked at housing prices in Mountain View recently. If your goal
in life is simply to own your own home (which seems reasonable to me), then
even lower-level engineers are struggling.

~~~
nostrademons
That wouldn't really be affected by how much Google pays its engineers,
though. There's a fixed supply of single-family housing in Mountain View, and
>>> available supply seeks to live there. Under those conditions, housing
prices adjust upwards until they reach the amount that the Nth bidder (where N
= houses for sale <<< Google employees in Mountain View) is willing to pay.
Increase salaries and you just increase the amount that everyone is willing to
pay, and then you still get outbid by your coworkers.

Assuming that owning a single-family home is non-negotiable, the _only_ ways
out of this are a.) get all your coworkers fired or b.) move out of the Bay
Area. Mountain View (and the rest of the Bay Area) is basically fully built-
out: there simply is no more land for 1/4 acre lots.

(If you're willing to compromise on "single family home", there's another
alternative: build up. This is the most realistic solution, but requires that
people give up on the idea of a detached house with a yard and settle for
condos instead.)

~~~
brown9-2
> There's a fixed supply of single-family housing in Mountain View

Well, that is the whole problem right there. It doesn’t have to be fixed.

~~~
01100011
Single family housing? That generally refers to a detached home so yes the
supply is very much fixed.

Even if we're talking about multi-family housing, there is still a limit on
space, resources, traffic capacity, etc.

~~~
brown9-2
Then let’s start building vertically.

It is a social choice to limit housing like this.

------
saagarjha
> The document also discussed how the proposals could be best presented to
> employees to minimize frustration, according to one of the people.

> The document said this could be rolled out without upsetting staff because
> workers didn’t know what the existing rate was, so wouldn’t notice if it
> declined.

I really don't know what they expected. You're cutting the salaries of your
employees; the _best case_ , yet highly unlikely scenario is that nobody
notices. More likely, your attrition rate will increase as Google becomes
slightly less attractive for employees to stay at, or the worst case but
highly likely scenario is that you have these slides get out and now everyone
is unhappy because they're being paid less _and_ having information willfully
hidden from them.

~~~
Gibbon1
GF worked at a game company. When she started they'd give bonuses based on the
profits. Later they changed bonuses based on how well the company beat Wall
Streets expectations.

Really demoralizing when the company posts a fat profit, the top managers take
home a large bonus, you you get nothing because the quarterly profit was a
little under expectations.

~~~
fyfy18
I'd be surprised if there haven't been economic studies on this type of
action. So either the executives don't care, as they know people are
replaceable and it won't hurt the company either way, or they don't care as
they know they will be moving on soon enough, and they just want to milk their
positiion for what they can.

------
tmp092
This is only semi-related, but I just finished Bad Blood (Theranos book) and
started looking up some of the characters on LinkedIn to see what they were up
to. The infamous HR person (Balwani's right hand person) just started a new
position at no other than Google less than 2 months ago!

~~~
i_am_nomad
That is indeed troubling. Keep in mind, though, that lots of great people
worked at Theranos - I’ve hired one and she’s the standout on an already very
talented team. And of course, I would hire Tyler Schultz without a second
thought.

~~~
tmp092
Sure, would have no issue with an IC or someone not cozy with management, but
this was a specific senior HR person close to Balwani who was complicit in
intimidating/spying on employees and trying to get them to sign shady NDAs,
among other atrocities. And Google still hired them.

IMO it speaks to the "skills" that big tech want in their HR people. The fact
that they did all these things is exactly what they look for in "good" HR
people e.g. protect the company at all cost and no mercy for employees.

~~~
trhway
any regime needs the same police.

------
BossingAround
It seems to me like Google is slowly becoming another one of these huge
corporations that one works for simply to simply pay the bills. I mean, sure,
it may not be such at this particular moment, but that's what it seems they
are heading towards. Though they still have an amazing reputation, I don't buy
it anymore.

~~~
rleigh
It already looked this way to me when I interviewed with them 8 years ago. But
it takes time for public perception to catch up with the reality. When they
scaled up and hired tens of thousands, they became yet another faceless
corporate entity. Perhaps not intentionally; I feel this is simply a factor of
growing and having to establish the same corporate bureaucracy as all the
rest.

~~~
vidarh
This reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinsons "Three Californias" trilogy. One of
them is set in a future where to counter many of the effects of large
corporations, companies are strictly restricted in terms of number of
employees and other things. No company in the novel can have more than 100
employees. For projects that require more, companies have to establish
consortia, but each company remained independent.

I have no opinion on whether that'd be viable or beneficial, but it's a
fascinating idea to think about the consequences of, both externally in terms
of effects on wider society, and what it'd mean for corporate cultures.

~~~
1123581321
You may be interested in reading the economic paper, “The Nature of the Firm.”
Here’s a link to a summary:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)

Thinking along those lines would suggest we need to reduce a lot of legal and
communication friction or else capping corporations will make everything much
more expensive. It’d certainly be worth improving those things regardless of
the end goal. Whether we would naturally see average company size reduce is
unknown, but the theory that they would recognize the financial incentive to
do so is plausible.

~~~
humanrebar
I reference this paper, at least mentally, when explaining to colleagues why
using their tech needs to be better for me than using off the shelf tech. If
I'm only using in house tech because I can't fire them or if I have to do more
work to adopt them compared to using an off the shelf option, they're wasting
money, time, and energy.

------
throwaway15273
Maybe I need to stop reading Google related articles on HN. I'm joining Google
in less than a month, and some of the comments in threads like these get me
worried.

I graduated less than a year ago and have been working at a startup in my
hometown since then, and didn't bother applying to Google because I thought
I'd never make it. Actually it was a thread on HN that convinced me to go for
it. I'm moving away from everything and everyone I've ever known because I've
always heard that Google is the place to be to really grow as an engineer.

I'm still excited, and I was nervous with or without reading these threads,
but can someone chime in and give me some hope?

~~~
scarejunba
All my friends at Google are happy. You're going to be fine and you'll find
that your work will probably be enjoyable.

If you listened to the Internet, my town of San Francisco is a faeces filled
shithole where people will mug you at every corner. My other home in London is
a bastion of knife crime and Sharia law with a bit of terrorism mixed in. I
should live in perpetual fear that my life may be ended at any moment by
actively malicious people bent upon religious and culture war.

In truth, life is pretty good in both these places. I love them both.

What you actually should do is stop giving these people any credence. Any fool
can write a blog. And recycled news like this article is usually written by
bottom feeders.

The world is a lovely place. Don't let the losers keep you down.

~~~
mindfulplay
A vocal tiny majority has gotten hold of the loudest most annoying sound box.
It's hard to even close your ears.

------
partingshots
To me, it feels like people not getting the promotions they think they deserve
is an extremely mundane problem. That’s fine though, since I can see how such
a thing might be of legitimate concern for many of us and is worth discussing
overall.

What mainly bothers me mostly, is how click-baity this article is. Such a
heavy emphasis on drama and controversy, with every attempt to garner as much
divisiveness as possible. It’s annoying, and I notice Bloomberg is notorious
for almost always putting out these types of highly charged articles.

Do authors get bonuses for releasing fiery volatile articles at Bloomberg or
something?

~~~
googlerx
> To me, it feels like people not getting the promotions they think they
> deserve is an extremely mundane problem.

Google management to this day claims that eligibility for promotion is based
solely on whether or not an employee is consistently performing at the next
level on a well defined job ladder. If they are, they're promoted.

The problem is not the lack of promotions. The problem is that introducing
promotion quotas or limits directly conflicts with the merit-ONLY-based
promotion system that management claims exists.

------
Animats
_" Most of the cost cuts that emerged since then have focused on divisions
outside the core internet business, such as drones, wearable devices and other
"moonshots."_

Google/Alphabet is still doing badly at anything consumer-facing that isn't
ad-supported. Not for lack of trying. Google Fiber, Google Express, etc.
They've had some success at enterprise apps and cloud services, but they're
not the major player in that space. The self-driving car thing is not going as
well as expected. Ads are still 94% of Google revenue, and they're probably
overstaffed for that business.

~~~
manigandham
The entire ad industry is overstaffed. Could easily remove 50% and have no
effect, or actually improve results.

~~~
stevenwliao
You're now the dictator of the industry. Which 50% needs to go and how do you
identify them? How do you prevent your metrics from being gamed?

~~~
asdff
For every new hire two people have to be fired or quit.

------
owaty
> The document also discussed how the proposals could be best presented to
> employees to minimize frustration, according to one of the people. That
> caused the most anger among some staff after the document was circulated,
> said this person.

Not leaking this slide deck was rather important to minimize frustration.

~~~
aboutruby
"In case of employees having knowledge of those slides, ..."

------
akhilcacharya
> The brainstorming deck also proposed reducing wage bumps when workers get
> promoted. It also suggested changing Google’s approach to "spot bonuses,"
> sums that managers can award at any time of year. Managers receive emails
> reminding them to dispense this money. The slide deck proposed ending the
> emails, arguing that few people would notice. The proposal also included
> converting holiday gifts to staff into charitable donations -- something
> Google did at the end of 2016.

As someone that works at a notoriously “resource efficient” company the fact
that people would be mad about this is absolutely _hysterical_.

~~~
dlubarov
As a former Googler, the way the company ended holiday gifts was irritating
just because of the pretense. Leadership spun it as "we're redirecting the
funds into Chromebook donations". As if money wasn't fungible, and the
decision to donate Chromebooks was somehow intertwined with the decision to
end the holiday gift.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Yep most of us would have just been fine with them just saying "you're all
paid well enough, the company is too big, we're stopping the holiday gift".
Instead it was a long slow process of "pick your charity from the list" w/ a
song and dance around it.

~~~
UncleMeat
Given the nearly continuous stream of internal shitshows getting leaked to the
press by unhappy people, I'm pretty confident that the response wouldn't have
been positive if they had said this.

------
miguelmota
I've worked in a large corporation before and getting promoted is not easy
because you're just a tiny cog in a large machine so it's hard for people in
position of giving out promotions to see that you're worth being given a
promotion because you're seen as any other grunt in the company. You pretty
much need to suck up to the managers and the managers need to suck up to their
managers, etc till it reaches someone with promotion powers.

Working at a startup however is much easier because you work very closely with
execs and people in positions that have power to give you promotions so the
value you bring is easily visible and recognized.

~~~
sethammons
The advice I've heard: if you want to grow professionally, work at a place
that's growing.

------
artpop
The tech boom is over. Now we should incentivise the restoration of the
environment to keep both the economy afloat and us breathing.

------
austincheney
Weird that people are complaining about this now, but not a few years ago when
$16m salaries (not bonuses) were a common thing at Waymo.

[https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-1...](https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-1-ab&ei=mFpMXNfdJtHCwQK43ryQAQ&q=google+self+driving+car+serious+fuck+you+money&oq=google+self+driving+car+serious+fuck+you+money&gs_l=psy-
ab.3...6244.8133..8428...0.0..0.255.1632.0j4j4......0....1..gws-
wiz.......0i71.HZCHol-cd6A)

~~~
vonmoltke
> $16m salaries (not bonuses)

The second link in that search explicitly says they were bonuses, and the
first strongly implies it.

------
warp_factor
I would love to see more details on the actual compensation at Google.

My anecdotal feeling after discussing with multiple googlers is that the top
performers are overly well paid, but most engineers are paid under what they
could get at another company.

They use their marketing hype/PR and their brand name to be able to achieve
this, with an unlimited supply of fanboys that want to get in even possibly
while being paid under market rate.

~~~
koalaman
This is not true. Google pays better than pretty much everybody except for
fintech and Facebook.

~~~
victorhooi
I used to work in fintech, and yes, the pay was substantially better there
(I'm at Google now - I took a pay cut to go across).

Likewise, I had an offer from Amazon around the same time as Google's offer -
which was actually quite a bit higher. So from my own experience, and from
friends, Amazon does indeed pay substantially more than Google.

I've heard other tech is sightly higher - however, I didn't go to Google for
the pay (although I wouldn't say no to competitive pay, haha), but there were
other drivers for me (work/life balance etc.).

~~~
joshuamorton
Interesting, I've seen the opposite from Amazon (and ofc Amazon stock
refreshes are worse), so in the long term Google is probably better.

------
tomrod
I know how much it hurts to have these kind of documents become known. It's an
unfortunate reality in corporate structure that the incentives of employers
are not aligned with the best interest of employees. That doesn't mean every
employer is out to get employees--only that discussions of this type are a
harsh reality among folks who are judged by how much they cut costs.

------
shereadsthenews
Remember that Google pays Porat over $40 million per year to do what is
probably one of the easier jobs at the company. If I was going to cut costs I
know where I’d start.

~~~
cobookman
Her job is not just to cut costs. And its not a simple job by any stretch.

~~~
shereadsthenews
Neither is writing optimizer passes for llvm, but the people doing that are
making less than a million a year while having a huge impact on the company’s
bottom line. For some management clown to come along and suggest that those
people should not get promoted so that Porat et al can continue taking
helicopters to work is disgusting.

------
vkou
This is precisely why tech employees need to negotiate collectively. When your
employer is posting record profits, but is lowering compensation, you have a
much stronger negotiating position when you work as a team.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Only you don't.

If you go to a competitor and negotiate a 25% higher salary and bring it back
to your current employer, either they give you a 25% raise or you leave.
Either way you get 25% more money.

If you go to a union and ask for a raise, they go to the employer, the
employer can't afford to give _everyone_ a 25% raise, so they give everyone a
2.5% raise. Then you have to quit and go work for the competitor. Only now
they won't pay you 25% more because now they know your current salary based on
where you work, your position and the terms of the union contract, so they
know they only have to pay you 5% more. So either way you're making less.

Meanwhile the competitor is still offering more, so your current employer
starts bleeding talent, which reduces revenue generation and thereby the
amount of money they have to pay employees in the future.

It's not as if many people still aspire to work for GM.

~~~
danaris
But chances are, no matter who you are, at any given time, you _can 't_
negotiate a 25% higher salary from a competitor. If you could have done that,
why did you take this job in the first place?

On the other hand, at any given time, the union is always going to be fighting
for you to get reasonable raises based on your position, and will be available
to help you show that you deserve a significant raise if your current
compensation does not match the going rates for what you're actually doing.

This is ignoring all the other things unions do, that don't directly relate to
compensation, like ensuring that employees aren't taken advantage of by the
company in a variety of creative and quasi-legal ways.

Frankly, if software developers of various types unionized, I would be shocked
if that union bore much resemblance to the propagandistically stereotyped
picture of unions we've had painted for us over the past several decades. I
think it's much more likely that, given the prevalence of attitudes such as
yours, it would be primarily concerned with the aforementioned protections, as
well as setting wage _floors_ for given levels of expected performance, while
leaving the _ceiling_ free for people who, like you, think they can negotiate
something better.

It's not like there's some "union rulebook" that all unions _must_ follow as
soon as they come into existence, that says, "First, make sure absolutely
everyone makes the same amount of money. Next, make _really crappy employees_
unfireable."

Unions are made up of people in the industry they represent—that's the whole
damn point—and their goals are set _by_ those people. So in all likelihood, if
there _were_ a programmers' union, and you were in it, and you're really as
good as you seem to think, you'd have negotiated your way to a position where
you have at least some say over union policy. Then, even if there _were,_ for
some reason, union rules specifying that compensation for position title X
could be no more than Y, you could work to change that.

~~~
YawningAngel
At least in the UK, job markets are so wildly irrational that I doubled my
salary twice in two years. Both the salaries I ended up having doubled were
more-or-less the best thing available at the time.

