Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around.
Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever.
So far I've only seen companies be decent until an idealistic founder leaves or dies, then the MBA's take over and the worst possible way to make the most money takes over pretty quickly.
I'm beginning to believe that it's just impossible to do advertising ethically. The hypothesis is that an advertising firm that attempts to do so will perform worse than ones doing unethical things, and eventually lose customers.
I've come to this conclusion a long time ago. If consumers have perfect information about a class of product from different producers then advertising would be completely useless and the market for that product would be completely efficient (on the consumer side). Of course consumers don't have perfect information, and that's what the marketing industry claims their purpose is to address.
But really the role that the marketing industry (at least for typical products and services) actually plays is to selectively give information to consumers to influence their buying decisions against how they would behave in an efficient market. And then it's a very short and slippery slope to just straight up lying about products and manipulating consumers through their insecurities, which we see happening all the time with how the marketing industry has developed for the last few decades especially with online advertisements.
It's corporate behaviour modification and social engineering. Perhaps not a surprise to anyone familiar with Bernays and his Propaganda.
I don't see it as information asymmetry, so much as mostly mediocre products and services designed to a budget trying to look more exciting and life-changing than they could ever hope to be.
The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it.
>The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it.
Yes, exactly this right here. It was straight up bizarre to grow up with near 0 advertising in commie Eastern Europe and get hit with a shockwave of fairly disgusting ad bullshit when we moved to the US. I was shocked at people putting up with it as if it is something to be tolerated instead of burned to ashes. I continue to be shocked.
I mean, the Stasi was pretty bad. Soviet political prisons were pretty bad. I'll take advertising as the cost of doing business if that's the alternative.
But is it? Was the Stasi responsible for the lack of advertisements?
I would argue it's completely orthogonal. You can selective adopt other cultural practices.
Resistance to advertising does not imply mass surveillance, it's actually the opposite.
Advertising, the entire industry, exists to convince you to buy something you don't want, hence why you have to be talked into it, through psychological manipulation, preying on your insecurities, repetition via repeat ad exposure, and insane amounts of money and testing to build brand recognition and create biases to certain companies dubbed "brand loyalty"... so, there is no such thing as ethical advertising.
Advertising is psychological manipulation at scale and it's effective. How does one ethically manipulate someone into doing something they wouldn't do if not influenced to do so? Ethical advertising can't exist, the same way two masses can't occupy the same point in space at the same time.
Thats a bit of a pessimistic if realistic take. Advertising in its ideal form is meant to inform you of something that could improve your life (happiness, productivity, health, etc...). It could conceivably be "let the consumer know that our product solves their problems that competitors can't solve or for a cheaper cost." Of course, cutting corners leads to more profits for less effort, so that's what often happens.
Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful.
Although, the sharing of useful information is different than an advertisement, entirely, so such a thing wouldn't be called an ad.
Wikipedia exists to share information and inform us of something we might find useful. It doesn't need to be pushed on anyone. It just needs to exist in the open.
Anytime something is brought to you that you didn't ask for, demanding your attention, there is motive behind why it's being done, be it a coworker pitching a tool to you trying to get buy-in and force a decision they want to be made in their favor, a flyer of sales happening at the grocery store that's delivered to your door on Sunday, or the blinking square ad impression telling you that if you just give up some of your money, they will provide you with a service that will make you feel like you're making progress on something (and then you'll convince yourself that's true even if it's not because nobody likes to admit they made a mistake and wasted time and/or money).
Ads are forced upon us, telling us something, and there is so much motive behind why it's being done, people will spend millions to make sure you see it. Even if it's just a tidbit of info, selling no product, whoever is motivated enough to pay a lot of money for you to see it, has motive to push an agenda which you seeing that info stands to benifet from. It's still manipulation. It's not possible to be ethical.
The only example of real world ethical advertising I can think of, would be the million dollar webpage. A webpage of pixels purchased to show an ad, that you have to willingly make the decision to navigate to and look at, and that website no longer exists, which proves my point pretty well imo
That isn't right. When the Wright Brothers went on tour to advertise their new contraption called the airplane, that was advertising, and it wasn't manipulation. Maybe someone could have argued they were just selling snake oil back then, but in retrospect.
Ideally speaking of course, there is room to advertise stuff. Like advertising a vaccine so you don't get sick or die; sure the vaccine maker is also going to make money on giving you that vaccine, but it is still an ad that might be "ehtical."
Sure, no motive or financial incentive to do so at all...
> The brothers contacted the United States Department of War, the British War Office and a French syndicate on October 19, 1905. The U.S. Board of Ordnance and Fortification replied on October 24, 1905, specifying they would take no further action "until a machine is produced which by actual operation is shown to be able to produce horizontal flight and to carry an operator."
> The brothers turned their attention to Europe, especially France, where enthusiasm for aviation ran high, and journeyed there for the first time in 1907 for face-to-face talks with government officials and businessmen. They also met with aviation representatives in Germany and Britain. Before traveling, Orville shipped a newly built Model A Flyer to France in anticipation of demonstration flights. In France, Wilbur met Frank P. Lahm, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Aeronautical Division. Writing to his superiors, Lahm smoothed the way for Wilbur to give an in-person presentation to the U.S. Board of Ordnance and Fortification in Washington, DC, when he returned to the U.S. This time, the Board was favorably impressed, in contrast to its previous indifference.
> With further input from the Wrights, the U.S. Army Signal Corps issued Specification 486 in December 1907, inviting bids for construction of a flying machine under military contract.[90] The Wrights submitted their bid in January,[b] and were awarded a contract on February 8, 1908
> In May they went back to Kitty Hawk with their 1905 Flyer to practice for their contracted demonstration flights.
> The brothers' contracts with the U.S. Army and a French syndicate depended on successful public flight demonstrations that met certain conditions. The brothers had to divide their efforts. Wilbur sailed for Europe; Orville would fly near Washington, DC.
This whole thread is classic overthinking. Advertising isn’t a binary good/bad morality thing. It is in many ways subjective. There have been times an ad helped me learn about something that solved a problem or need I have. There have been times where an ad was pushing something that I personally (subjectively) consider to be useless junk.
It depends. Ads aren’t inherently good or evil. Step back from dogma for a second.
> Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful.
Sure, if that existed in a vacuum, and not in a capitalist economic system where you are rewarded by doing unethical things to generate more profit. In reality, there is no way to successfully deploy ethical advertising. Even if one tried, it could never compete with the ones not being ethical, since they will have higher returns, and infinitely more budget as a result, to make it so your ethical ad is never even shown to a single human eyeball
I agree with you on the large scale, but once I zoom in, my thoughts get murkier. I can't think of any ethical digital advertising, but have a harder time condemning all advertising. How would you evaluate these kind of ads:
- Asking customer to place yard signs on their property
- Small businesses putting physical ads in other small businesses
- Printing shirts, hats, pop sockets, etc. . . and handing them out for free
- sponsoring local events/athletes/scholars
- Parade floats, community bulletein boards, festival/event booths
- wrapping company vehicles
I guess, after typing out this list, none of this is targeted advertising; maybe that's what separates them in my mind.
You're kidding right? Everything you listed is being done with because of a motive where they stand to gain somehow. They are not providing a public service. While the definition of advertisement does include "just telling someone something", in practise in the real world, advertisements exist because someone has motive to make them because they stand to gain from doing so, where as "just telling someone something" is never called an advertisement it's called an announcement or a broadcast.
> - Asking customer to place yard signs on their property
They don't ask the customer to do so out of the kindness of their hearts, they offer a discount on the bill for doing so. Another way to look at that same situation, is, extortion - "run our ad on your lawn for a month or you'll pay more for this work"... And, the discount compared to the length of time they get an ad spot on someone's lawn is probably very much in the favor of the company. Charging someone more money unless they advertise your business, not out of satisfaction, but because the other option is to pay more, isn't very ethical to me, as the customer basically is given a choice that isn't a choice unless they want to knowingly spend more money for nothing.
> - Small businesses putting physical ads in other small businesses
They share ads between each other to try to leach of off each others customers. Maybe even closer to "participate in our shared cartel or we'll send folks to some competitor who does.". Either way, it's not being done to inform folks of something, it's being done to profit and these users are already out, spending money, and close by, so it's the cheapest costing acquisition funnel.
> - Printing shirts, hats, pop sockets, etc. . . and handing them out for free
That merch given out is paid for by the company's marketing budget and that's because what they are buying is ad space with potentially unlimited and extremely cheap display time. You see a nice company giving you a shirt for free. What they see is a sucker who is happy to become a walking billboard that will go to packed concerts, bars, tv shows, friend groups, etc for the price of a cheap t shirt and silk screen, for the life of the tshirt, gaining brand recognition if nothing else the entire time. Manipulating a person into thinking the free shirt they were given is ethical advertising when they are actually being used to freely advertise their brand, not something I'd consider ethical.
> - sponsoring local events/athletes/scholars
All done to get a giant banner on the fence of the field, have your branding stamped on every helmet, bike, bat, glove, shirt, said in every annoucement, etc. They aren't "sponsoring" those things, they are paying for advertising space, and saying it's not that isn't very ethical. They aren't doing anything for the good of the community, they are doing it for mindshare. Redbull on every extreme sport for instance.
> - Parade floats, community bulletein boards, festival/event booths
Parade floats are so the company gets a mention or airtime or mindshare as it passes by people. Festivals and event booths, please see my free tshirt reply. That booth they purchased or conference they sponsored is advertising budget and used to push their product on attendees.
- wrapping company vehicles
> I used to do fleet vehicles for corporations. Company branding applied to company fleets is not advertising. It's so when those service vehicles arrive to a customer, they are recognizable by those expecting them (UPS, FedEX, DHL, Geek Squad, etc). They inevitably get used to advertise, because of course they do, but the only thing they can do is steal mindshare and force through repeat exposure a bias for the company just because you see their name more often. It's manipulation, and hardly ethical.
I'm not going to reply to example after example. No matter the application, no matter they given benifets or percieved value you think they are giving, the end result is for you to give them money, and the fact that so many forms of ads exist that people don't see as exactly that, companies talking you out of your money or otherwise using you to make money (walking billboard), shows that it's not possible to be ethical advertising. Ethical advertising is build a good product, let it speak for itself by being a good product, and let happy customers spread word when they want to, if they want to, and for no other reason than because of the product they are impressed with. If you're not selling garbage, or shit people don't need, you shouldn't have to spend money to manipulate people into thinking they need it.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].*
It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
It might be possible, were it not for the fact that the advertising industry has their customers so convinced that the stalking they do is truly effective compared to a mix of scatter-gun approaches and simply advertising in relevant places. No one will buy advertising services from a company that says “yeah, we don't do that thing that everyone else says is essential”. It doesn't actually have to be effective, those buying advertising services just have to be somewhat convinced that it might be.
(I'm separating the ethical matters in advertising from those in selling here, even if spreading awareness through advertising was made less unethical by removing the stalking and other irritations, that still leaves a lot of room for unethical sales techniques)
Google ads used to be great. Just include some ads based on the content you’re looking at. Not based on some weird history and cookies.
I don’t mind those ads. But just keep them small, light, non interesting, and don’t sell my data.. be the platform that protects my data when matching up advertisers.
All business is inherently unethical and relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery.
Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it.
People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business are simply unaware or willfully ignorant of its costs. Typically it is the latter, or as Upton Sinclair beautifully put it — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
My furnace broke after 15 years. I called a business to fix it. They replaced the dead pump motor and it worked again. The repair guy was paid well and I was happy to pay. What exactly is inherently unethical about this?
How about the cost of producing and shipping the new motor pump, and the cost of disposing of the old one?
And do you think the individuals who made the motor pump are treated and compensated fairly, or are they likely exploited in third-world dystopia to bring you (but mostly the business) cost savings?
And this is saying nothing of the actual use of the furnace and all the energy it requires.
And I have yet to see ONE example of a business which does not exploit someone or something, only cognitive dissonance.
So any lack of ethics in the supply chain (which presumably goes back to raw materials) means the entire thing is unethical? I am not sure what definition of ethics this is, but it is so strict as to render everyone and everything unethical, so perhaps not a very useful definition.
If you honestly believe the product is separate from the production and supply chains, you are either woefully misinformed or under the disillusionment of modern capitalist economics.
I didn’t say the product was separate; I merely asked whether you view everything as tainted if its supply chain has any unethical component. Sounds like you do!
What a load of rubbish... Your entire argument hinges on what you consider 'fair compensation' and your value judgement about energy cost. Guess what--living your life and using resources is not unethical
What is incongruous or dishonest about it? You have provided no counter-argument, no alternative theory, only petulance at my recognition of the facts of your sad life.
That is precisely my point though. Just to exist in this world is to have a negative impact on other humans, animals and the environment. The effect is magnified when you live outside of humans' ecological tropical niche as well. While I'm not judging or condemning humanity, I believe it is important to recognize it for what it is.
Ethics are not a law of nature, it's basically an opinion. Your opinion may be that all business is unethical, but most people disagree.
Most people consider it to be ethical to trade money for goods and services at an agreed price, for example.
Similarly I think most people would agree that hiding the truth from people in order to have them do things they wouldn't do if they knew the truth, is unethical. Tracking people's activity without telling them that you are doing it would be unethical by that standard.
what's the ethical alternative? everybody must produce everything they want/need without any sort of trading, and without owning any land? or does the government just force people to work and distribute everything anybody needs?
The ethical alternative is one that balances innovation and entrepreneurship with ecological and social responsibility.
You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits.
And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitative to some individuals, groups, or locations, you don't get to do it again.
This is not trivial to organise. But it's far more likely to lead to an R&D explosion than the current myopic and manic-depressive comic book version of "the economy" we're all supposed to have irrational faith in.
nothing to spur innovation like panning every idea through a global counsel of magicians who know what's best for the planet.
aside from global consensus on ideas like 'the planet', it'd require mass labor force control and government assignment, two ideas i'm not thrilled about.
I could see it working in a sci-fi novel, but I have a hard time closing the gaps between them and us.
How is aggressive centralized gating supposed to lead to R&D when history shows freedom leads to innovation and prosperity? You don’t need to have faith in anything. The economy exists and is all around us providing great value.
This is so theoretical it will never work in an acceptable way.
Because of who will decide is responsible and on what grounds?
What will come of it will most likely be analogous to the Communist system where just a central committee was in charge of making all the decisions. and to be quite clear: this system failed utterly and completely. Without the capitalist west there would have been famines in DDR and the east.
On what I agree is, that we need a strong state factoring in stuff like ecological consequences via taxation- so the decision to buy or make stuff is distributed.
Fair point, but if we're stretching the definition to the point where nothing can be ethical, then there isn't any meaning to the word "ethical" as it relates to a binary "is" or "is not."
If we agree that nothing can be fully "ethical," there still should be some continuum on which to place the current system, unless you contend that every system and/or action is ethically equal, which I would further contend erases any meaning of the word rendering the premise moot.
So that said, is there any system that is more ethical than the current?
I made a simple assertion: business cannot be ethical, but it is inherently exploitative.
I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case.
Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism. People would rather bury their head in the sand and think they're acting virtuously in this world. The cognitive dissonance here is frankly alarming, if it weren't so expected for entitled first-world engineers.
But you only quoted the first part of my statement and not the proof, which I did state:
> All business [...] relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery.
Are you aware of a business which does not have any externalized costs of production which have a negative impact on someone or something?
> I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case. Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism.
Please, point out where I did any of that sort.
And I asked for an example of a system that is more ethical, and got nothing but dodging and bitching. I don't think you have any ground to stand on to demand examples (certainly from me, who if you care to read again I'm not disputing your position that business can't be ethical, so it makes zero sense to ask me for an example). It seems unreasonable to expect of others what you aren't willing to give yourself. Dare I say that's ... unethical?
If you want to complain about the real world, then offer solutions that work in the real world. We can then consider and debate them and maybe get somewhere. If you just want to make philosophical contemplations, I'm actually up for that, but not if you aren't going to even bother getting your arguments straight. You just look like a troll in that case.
Actually I changed my mind. I am disputing your contention and here is my example. Please point out where the unethical parts are.
Person a and person b are stranded on an island in the South Pacific. There are no other humans around. Person A gets pretty good at catching fish, while person b gets pretty good at harvesting coconuts. Individually, person a can catch six fish and harvest two coconuts. Person b can catch one fish and harvest eight coconuts. Person b is concerned about not getting enough protein, so they approach person a and offer to trade two coconuts for one fish. Person a Agrees, and a mutually agreeable business transaction has taken place. Both parties are better off than they were before. What part of this is unethical?
By the way, please don't take offense by any of this. You seem to have thick enough skin to trade barbs, and honestly this has been an interesting discussion (minus some unneeded name calling but that's a minor detail between friends like us)
It is telling the only example of an ethical business is a contrived hypothetical scenario entirely removed from objective reality.
What makes it epically hilarious is it is also based on a completely false assertion "person b" needs protein from fish, because they cannot get it from coconut. Be sure to check the following links before you start clamoring about amino acids, too.
It's not entirely removed from objective reality. Firstly, there is no such thing as objective reality for humans. Secondly, the principles that underpin this scenario are highly active in the world today. Things like specialization, efficiency, division of labor, etc.
Not too long ago my neighbor cleaned the carburetor on my lawn mower, and I fixed his router config in exchange. He would have had to spend tons of time figuring out how to do it himself, but it took me 5 minutes. I could have cleaned my own carburetor, but he already had the cleaner and had freshly done one, so it took him 5 minutes but would have taken me 30 minutes plus a trip to the store. The same principles from the example are at play here.
And whether Person B can get enough protein from coconuts is entirely irrelevant. All that matters in this scenario is that Person B was concerned about it and wanted to trade.
> Firstly, there is no such thing as objective reality for humans
What? This is just silly. You don't know the difference between hypothetical fantasy and real life, or are you just being hyperbolic?
> Secondly, the principles that underpin this scenario are highly active in the world today
Still, it is irrelevant since I asked for a real world example.
> Not too long ago my neighbor cleaned the carburetor on my lawn mower, and I fixed his router config in exchange
Another contrived example which excludes the entire world. Who made the lawn mower? Who made the router? Literal slaves in a third world country. Surely you are not so ignorant you know this?
> whether Person B can get enough protein from coconuts is entirely irrelevant
It is not irrelevant; it is hilarious you don't know this simple nutritional fact.
It does not matter what I think; objectively and indisputably my existence in the world, especially in a first-world country, has an enormously negative impact on the planet. And I'm an individual with a conscience - now imagine a business with diversified shareholders!
Funnily I agree with this. But where you go with it sounds like a stubborn “iam14andthisisdeep”.
Language and values should be useful for us to make decisions on. Saying everything is bad and there’s no alternative can be true in a sense but it is not useful, and in most discussions just sounds inane.
Yet the true mental adolescence and gymnastics through this post is the abject failure to furnish even one example of a business which can be considered ethical, instead choosing to believe the false notion we can live, work and shop without consequence.
Maybe you’re missing the point. This is like having a conversation with a nihilist. Yes objectively there is no meaning in the universe. It’s all made up. Now what? We have to move on from that. We live in fictions and narratives that are useful for our success. Just calling everything unethical isn’t useful beyond a dorm room mental exercise.
I don’t think it does! But you shouldn’t be surprised when people are operating under a different framework when engaging with the world. And discussions won’t go anywhere trying to get different conclusions out of different starting points and motives. If everything is unethical then nothing matters, but people don’t want nothing to matter so they construct shades of grey to make choices and judgements on. Your “um actually everything is unethical” is irrelevant to the game they’re playing.
Not to mention it’s absurd a conversation this long hasn’t pointed out the relativity of ethical judgments or event attempted to define what ethical even means.
> Not to mention it’s absurd a conversation this long hasn’t pointed out the relativity of ethical judgments or event attempted to define what ethical even means.
> But you shouldn’t be surprised when people are operating under a different framework when engaging with the world.
The majory of people are idiots, so this part is almost certainly expected and acceptable.
> If everything is unethical then nothing matters, but people don’t want nothing to matter so they construct shades of grey to make choices and judgements on. Your “um actually everything is unethical” is irrelevant to the game they’re playing.
Where did I say everything is unethical? Where did I say nothing matters? This is the way people want to re-frame the conversation because it is too difficult for them to break through their conditioning to apprehend how the world works.
I can’t be bothered to look back up the convo tree. But I remember you saying or implying all commercial activity is unethical and refusing to discuss alternatives among other comments with similar thrust. Other people are trying to do comparative ethics and you’re not playing the same game so makes me wonder what you’re trying to accomplish with short comment bombs.
It’s like you’re walking onto a baseball field trying to play football. You should either surrender the field or undertake a much more in depth education session on the rules of the game you want to switch to. Else it’s just madness.
Patagonia is an example of a company that is trying to be "decent" even after its founder is no longer involved. So far, it seems to be working.
In tech, I am not aware of any good examples. I feel like Apple is one of the less bad compared to others. They are at least making efforts to be good about privacy, even if their motivation may be less than pure.
I would agree with you on most points; however, having worked within the fruit company directly on its chain of trust, I will tell you that the privacy angle runs extremely deep and is genuine. Regardless, that angle is obviously different and independent about being authoritarian within its privately-owned monopolistic marketplace.
I think the issue, though, is that people should realize that a company's "values" only go so far as to support the profit motive - thus, they're not really values at all, as the second they become an obstacle to profit, they will be jettisoned.
For Apple, who sells their own hardware and OS and has always desired tight ecosystem control, privacy usually helps their profit motive, but not always - look at their approach to iMessage. I mean, iMessage already, and always, has degraded to SMS when sending to non-iOS users. But SMS has zero encryption features and is pretty horrible for privacy. And the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat means nobody gets encrypted messages. If Apple truly cared about user privacy, they could easily provide an Android iMessage client, or publish a spec. Not only don't they do that, they specifically broke the one client that worked around their intransigeance, which, despite Apple's spin, was way worse for privacy, even for users that only use iOS (assuming they ever talk to an Android user).
The whole point of having values is they provide guidelines of how to behave even when behaving that way is hard. Corporations are simply unable to commit to anything that could threaten profit growth, so we should stop pretending they're capable of having durable values.
They cracked down on ads talking about privacy, to the applause of everyone. Then they launched their own ad tech service. It's obvious privacy was used as an excuse to make more money.
I hope you're not asking for any evidence of their authoritarianism, it should be apparent to anyone who knows anything about the company. They readily cooperate with authoritarian regimes; look at their behavior in China, or how they assisted the totalitarian regime in Belarus to the detriment of pro democracy protesters.
"Obeying local laws" is not a valid excuse for unethical behavior, but is very convenient if all you care about is profit maximization.
IANAL either, but I feel like the closest we had to something like this was the non profit part of OpenAI, which should’ve had the power to fire the CEO. Reality was a bit more messy than that, and profit won over ethics.
I can’t imagine Google shareholders not throwing a fit for not being allowed their cash cow to grow, and eventually finding a way to bypass the constitution.
A "company constitution", just like every constitution, is just a bunch of paper where someone drawed some letters. If there's something to be gained by changing it or trowing it out altogether, it will happen eventually.
It's just Goodhart's law. Our economy is profit centric. The way public companies are structured, the only metric anyone cares about is profit. Everything else just sloughs off over time.
> Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever.
It's possible. Of course hard to imagine the kind of investor that is going to want to invest in a company like this and SV pretty much runs on VC money.
If given a choice, I'll take 1st percentile salaries at company w/o profit cap constitution over taking a pay cut. It's like, if you make $350k+ a year...just sort of budget that you might one day lose that job.
The vast, vast bulk of the country pays all their expenses, cares for their children, elderly family members, sick relatives and so on with <$100k salary. You can insure yourself against any hardship in unemployment with a top 1% salary.
The company never had any integrity^1 and has always lacked a moral compass.^2
1. Paper at TREC announcing the search engine cited harmful influence of advertising and promised a search engine "in the academic realm". They never delivered. Sold out. That was before they even went public.
2. "Don't be evil". Given the amount of highly personal data it collects, and the lack of regulation, the company truly needed some sort of ethical code. But they never even tried. Instead they let their senior management engage in harassment, settled every suit brought against them for privacy violations, paid off the competition, and routinely accepted enormous regulatory fines. Pure, unaudulterated greed.
The Google playbook is the furthest thing from "keep the margins less than or equal to 10%". It's the work of SillyCon Valley. It's the same playbook adopted by Facebook to keep Zuckerberg from being ousted. Keep reasonable people from having any ability to change anything.
Not now of course, but I think that they lost their way mostly after the first decade.
For the first decade they launched a bunch of services that were so much better than anything else it seemed like sci-fi, and they did so without obtrusive advertising or shady tracking.
Even Chrome was cool, to outcompete Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS seemed impossible back then but chrome was just so much better than anything else that they managed to do it.
I think the extreme money-fountain from ads started the corruption, and the threat of Facebook created a paranoia inside Google that removed all the floodgates.
The allure of short term profits is largely the point of all companies. Google in particular was never decent, they struck data harvesting gold with Search and Maps, then used the infinite money they were making off of advertisers to ensure that no other option besides Google could ever be viable, through manipulation of search results, manipulation of business customers, regulatory capture, etc. Now they are free to let the quality of their products slide into the abyss without fear of users jumping ship. Where would we jump to? This is what every tech company you've ever heard of has been striving to do for a couple of decades now. It's either that or create hype -> pump valuation -> sell the business to a larger entity before they have to answer for long-term stability.
At which point they're more interested in maximizing the value of their shares, so they can do other things.
Therefore, they specifically leave their company in charge of profit maximizers.
It just takes a subsequent decade or so for the track record of decisions to finally make that unavoidably obvious to employees and the general public.
Yes it is inevitable, unless some luck charm happens to hit the company, it is no accident that most companies in mankind's history, never survive beyond the third generation since they were founded.
I don’t think you can have a company both be public and ethical in the way you’re describing, at least in the US where you’ll get sued for giving some profits back to employees instead of to the shareholders, for example. Though if the company stays private, they’re subject to the “benevolent dictator” problem where the company is only ethical because the leader is. At least with a public company (or a non-profit), the CEO is subject to discipline by the board of directors.
You can prevent this by bringing democracy into the workplace. Right now the workplace is like a dictator ran country or monarchy. Its a very top down tiered system In a co-op structured company it is owned and operated by its employees. You vote as a collective on how much the CEO makes, if you even need one. How the work is done, how much everyone should be getting paid, etc.
If you're taking, say, the Google of 2014 as a reference point, they appear to have had a relatively small fraction of their current headcount at the time.
As a user of many Google products and an old timer who legit appreciates how Google actually made it possible to search the internet effectively, I am no longer a Google fanboy.
I used to dream about working there while knowing that I'd have to study up for several months (I have a family, full time job + I do some consulting) and still probably get rejected.
I'm not dreaming about that anymore. Google has jumped the shark.
This is corporate America. it's your cool uncle when you're young and it's the same uncle when you realize as an adult that that's just not how adults should behave.
Pixel is not officially sold and supported in a substantial number of countries. It results in many issues, such as 5G not working when traveling from country to country. Or in case of Chromecast dongle, 5GHz Wi-Fi not working. Which makes my head explode, considering that they employ only "top talent" and has considerable resources to properly catalogue and implement all radio frequencies of the world.
Google cannot release any product worldwide. Their knowledge doesn't go too far beyond US market. You can call it Americentrism or just lack of competence of the ones in charge.
Institutionally, Google has the attention span of a Goldfish. Apple will continue to entrench their position as a leader in edge computing. Apple deserve their success; I hope they don’t get complacent once the Pixel division implodes.
Apple must turn a profit somewhere and charging a bit more to their high-end customers to give a bit more of a break to their low-end customers isn't a terrible method.
If you hate Apple's pricing, you have WAY more companies to hate on first.
This is misleading. Gross margin excludes operating expenses and taxes. Net margin or operating margin is more meaningful. Here's now the operating margins stack up for Q3 2023
Apple is still extremely profitable for a company that primarily makes and sells hardware. Nvidia has a higher margin but that's because of the AI boom.
Fair point perhaps, but they seem like the only game in town that seem to care about their customers. They’re far from perfect, but to me they are better than the rest. I really want Apple to feel some heat and have worthy competitors, but I just don’t see that.
I have been waiting my whole career to get a hold of their previous Nexus line. Then their Pixel line. Still no luck. It has been over a decade. Now it’s too late my whole family is now deeply invested in Apple’s ecosystem.
Honestly, I don't see anything that a phone manufacturer _requires_ to localise apart from frequency bands. How is Apple managing to sell iPhones with literally no other localisation?
I wonder what the reality is regarding Pixel's success; they lost me as a customer this year after it turns out the "free" Pixel 2 watch is mostly a paper weight because Fitbit and its new unified Google account requirement doesn't support Workspace custom domains. I pay for Workspaces, I paid for the device(s), but the penny has finally dropped in regards to their real motivations, they can't allow Workspaces to mingle with the private data regular accounts give them access to when it comes to Fitbit. Hopefully this will finally give me the motivation to wean off Google completely.
Cannot use them with a Google workspace account? Or cannot use them if you merely have a workspace account?
The former seems like it might be reasonable (and I wouldn't want to lock a piece of home infrastructure to a workspace account anyway); the latter seems utterly insane.
Google marketed Google Workspace (called “Google Apps” at the time) as a solution for individuals and families with custom domain. People still have these accounts and there is no way to migrate (e.g. purchases on Google Play, reviews on Google Maps, notes in Google Keep, etc.).
I can confirm - it’s both utterly insane, and true. A number of the individual problems have been fixed over the years, but then new ones pop up due to rushed backend integrations.
Microsoft has a similar issue with their ‘personal’ vs ‘work’ logins.
God help you if you try to use the store to buy some things on a work account, or login to some services using a work account.
I have a workspace account that is my main email and such. With the Pixel 2 watch I had to use a @gmail.com account in order to use it. Not a huge deal, but annoying for sure.
Would be the same issue for someone who doesn't have an @gmail.com account at all. They would have to create one in order to use the Pixel 2 watch.
Not a work workspace but our family workspace, so very unreasonable. They forced us all to migrate to that...
For many years Google Home with all the Nest speakers and displays have worked fine. But you are not allowed to use the nest cameras, thermostats, doorbells, etc with workspace accounts. Hence I regret buying those.
And now I can't upgrade my storage or share my YouTubeTV account from my old family Workspace account. And migrating off is basically impossible, it's so frustrating.
For Nest Protect (the smoke alarm), if you try logging in with a workspace account it just won't let you. Had to resurrect a very old, unused Gmail account just for that.
> non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones
That's a kiss of death. I remember while working at Windows Phone team at Microsoft, a lot of program managers and designers were using iPhones and Macs. Unsurprisingly their own product never got off the ground because they failed to develop a vision for it. Android at Google is in a slightly better position, but this kind of attitude of not using your own product but preferring a competitor's one leads to inevitable decline.
I recall around that time reading a story where if Steve Ballmer would catch you using an iPhone on the MSFT campus he would blow up. At the time, comments were "make a better phone" but I agree with your position. It's surprising though, eating your own dogfood is one of the golden rules of development. Such a pity Microsoft didn't stick with Windows Phone.
There are continuous internal wars that we don't often see. You can get a glimpse of those in most of Google's hardware products (from Pixel phones to hubs to tablets) when they seem to be randomly prioritised/de-prioritised/re-prioritised every year.
It is not like those pixel phone are hand made and tuned to exacting standards by highly qualified google engineers like Mercedes Benz does it on some of its expensive models.
It is a commodity gadget made at some cheap shop in Asia. So people worked pixel phone have not much to do with its growth or lack of it.
Google has been cooperating with Samsung very closely lately. Maybe there's a pressure on Google from Samsung and the other big Android vendors to scale down the Pixel effort.
Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.
For people that care about vendor lock-in (which granted doesn't seem to be many), Pixels are great. They are supported on just about every network and you can root it if you desire.
Pixel phones are OK. They are just not priced competitively. They are priced like iPhones. But who are you kidding? Pixel phones are nowhere near iPhones.
OTOH I browse JavaScript heavy websites on my phone and I believe due to single-threaded performance, Chrome on Android is noticeably worse than Safari on iPhone.
My point is, Pixels are better than iPhones for some use cases and vice versa.
I've had very good experiences with all my Pixels. Only phone that was better was a high-end Samsung ($1000) and I sold that and replaced it with a cheap pixel.
(I've had various android phones going back to the T-Mobile G1).
Count me as one anecdote that I love 'em! Best cameras I've ever used, paired with Google Photos means my wife is a happy camper and I get to look like a wizard fixing photos easily right on my phone. I can also install any .apk I want (hint: free youtube premium), why would I ever use a much more expensive, worse product like the iphone?
if it didn't spaz out while installing LineageOS on it, I'd still be using my Pixel 2 XL. it was probably struggling with some hardware failures (I dropped it a lot...) and wouldn't boot after.
Pixel 6s were on sale and I got one of those, no regrets. I am not enthusiastic about Google as a company, and I may consider an iPhone for my next cell, but I've been satisfied with the Pixel line so far.
I've owned several Nexus and Pixel phones and they universally sucked. Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Pixel 2. I think that's all of them. I sent the last one to be fixed under warranty and they basically ignored me for six months (which I spent with no phone) until I threatened to get consumer protection from my country involved.
Yeah yeah, why did I keep buying them? I have no idea. I guess I assumed the rest of Android phones sucked more.
I owned several Nexus phones as well as Pixel phones. I'd say that the Pixels were pretty decent; my main annoyance was with the fact that Google deliberately disabled some of the hardware features in that line-up to push their own proprietary solutions - most notably, there's no video output over USB-C nor Miracast, so that your only option is Chromecast.
I used to own a pixel phone and loved it. What made me move was the data collection, and to some extent lack of security updates on older models. Feature wise, I still like Android over iOS.
I work in Core Eng at google. Woke up this morning and saw my director - who we all loved and had been at Google for 20 years - is gone.
One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.
As an individual contributor software engineer, I've worked with offshore developers before and always found the experience unproductive. The problem is always management tells me to help them so they can learn. I don't mind being in a mentor role, but I'm not interested in mentoring a temp contract worker.
Google is a global company. They make money from developing countries, they should have employees in those countries as well. Or else the money flows only back to California.
But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages. 25 years ago, I was told there would be no software developers in America, and yet the number has gone up every year.
> But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages.
Google has a ton of employees in Bangalore that passed the same interviews and are paid way more than typical offshore devs, this just isn't true. Google gets the best people in India who wants to stay there, those are good enough to develop software without much help.
I work remotely for a big US company and I have heard talk of similar plans within the company, offshoring entire products' engineering work to India. Luckily my work is very niche (vuln research). I can only imagine the subpar and vulnerability ridden code we'll be seeing over the next few years from all the offshoring + irresponsible overusage of AI tools.
Why would the code be subpar? Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India?
What you are thinking about was outsourcing which is very different than Google hiring in India.
Just because you are paid more you are not a ‘better’ programmer
I've worked with both brilliant and mediocre people from many countries, including India.
It's hard to criticise offshoring without seeming racist. The problem that I have seen is not the developers - it's that the people in charge are fixated on the hourly rate as the key metric, and the suppliers are then complicit in gaming that metric.
As soon as you make the lowest hourly rate the most important metric in software development, I guarantee you that quality will suffer.
> Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India?
It depends.
There are people in India that are brighter and more hard-working than most people in the USA, just by statistical chance. But there is something that can happen there that I don't know what it is and affects some.
In another job our company had a site in India and I remotely supported them. Most people I interacted with wanted step by step instructions and hand-holding. One day someone news enters, bright and full of energy, so we could give him the documentation, point him in the right direction and he did the job. Until he didn't and also wanted step by step directions and hand-holding.
To this day I don't know what prompted the change. My only guess is that there's something cultural going on that can make people tone themselves down and not be proactive.
I've had similar experiences over the years. The Indian devs who were worth their salt were salaried employees; the ones that took all the ELI5 hand-holding were the contractors who seemed to have just graduated from a 60-day programming bootcamp and wouldn't tell you they had a problem and needed help if their lives depended on it.
I have always attributed this to the management of the consulting companies that supply the contractors - they're all about the billable hours, and quality control isn't really their problem so they don't focus on it.
This just isnt true about "statistical chance". The IQ distributions are very different and a huge amount of the top talent emigrates anyway. 130 iq is order 1/100 in america and more than 1/1000 in india. Population difference doesnt make up the gap.
You're going to hear the same answer you always hear, which never satisfies people, but it's a culture thing. Americans are more willing to say "no" or try and negotiate with their boss/leadership on what they can realistically accomplish. The end result is that engineering will push back against unrealistic deadlines or unreasonable feature requests - theoretically making a successful outcome more likely. You'll notice this has nothing to do with skill or intelligence (well, maybe "soft skills"). But - and this might be controversial - providing that feedback to leadership makes you a better programmer.
In the US the expectation setting works both ways: management tells employees what it expects of them, and employees tell management what they're realistically capable of achieving. Management will ask for extra, and employees will sometimes get less done than they promised (sometimes because there were unforeseen difficulties, extenuating circumstances etc), but in the end it all works out.
It seems like it's a two-way street, isn't it? If American devs are more likely to say "no" and push back, then American managers/bosses on some level come to expect that behavior.
I wonder what it's like at Indian tech companies with Indian engineers. Managers there must have a cultural way of dealing with this that works.
IMO, that's the big problem with offshoring. It's rarely the case that the company that offshores stands up an office in the other country and staffs it with people who were held to the same standards in hiring as candidates for U.S.-based jobs would be. If companies did it that way, they might be more successful at navigating cultural differences, but most of the time they use subcontractors instead.
It's not much to do with country/race and a lot to do with pay. I've been sitting through more interviews than I can count as my F500 company is trying the same thing. Despite alleged pre-screenings, I've been amazed by how many devs with 10+ years of experience on their resume that can't code fizzbuzz (let alone answer actual questions in a way I'd expect of a senior dev with that much experience).
Companies don't go to India for their best developers -- they go to save all the money they can. If a US dev costs $150k, they aren't going to spend $150k for an Indian dev. To make this scheme "worth it", they won't pay more than $75k (likely no more than $40-50k).
You get what you pay for. A smart, talented Indian dev isn't going to work for next-to-nothing. They're smarter than that. They'll relocate to the US/EU, work for a large Indian company (where they get better working conditions), or even work freelancer jobs instead.
Quality from India is awful. Both from functionality and just… caring. They don’t really care as much it’s always just good enough. They are generally very difficult to work with.
Once you get into a mindset of quality not mattering and only pushing down the costs there’s no coming back. Look a large retail brands and how disposable we treat things. They went from northeast to southern US to Mexico to China. The creation of the product will happen in the US for cultural reasons (you cannot outsource marketing generally), but it all hits a wall.
> Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India?
Yes. I can’t speak for Google employees but I’ve worked with Indian FTE teams at another big tech company. Indian FTEs are generally less competent than US FTEs at the same level. Upper management knows this and they don’t care because US employees are 3-4x more expensive, so they can hire 3 senior engineers in India for the cost of 1 in the US, which is still a good deal on a cost-per-output basis.
I think the reason for this competency discrepancy may be the huge incentive to move to the US because of pay. In other words, if Indian engineers were as good as their US counterparts, they would move to the US and make 3-4x as much, which leaves only those incapable or unwilling to move in the Indian market.
Yes, US engineers tend to be better. In India engineering is not a prestigious career. It is a stepping stone to management. So few Indian engineers stay in the profession long enough to get good.
Software quality has ultimately always been around requirements and understanding the problems being solved. That's already hard enough with collocated native speakers.
On top of this is the fundamental master/slave or imperialistic nature to first world/"third world" software development. It is of course buried under self-interest, desperation, and "professionalism". This will always lead to a reduced sense of involvement in the code and mission of the project.
There is the educational issues, where India values memorization and and devalues creativity and independent thought. Where those exist in Indian workers, the regimented nature of orgs over there (related to the imperalism vibe) stamp them out, and the rest is lost in other language and culture barriers.
I would also hazard to say that India is much more obsessed with cultural status (echoes of the caste system), and low software developer jobs aren't good enough on the hierarchy. They aren't Brahmin. Brahmins are managers and leaders.
Of course the cultural barrier represents a turf war. Indians want to own sections of code/orgs with just Indians. The managers explicitly scheme this. Of course all middle managers scheme, so I don't want to seem like I'm casting Indian managers as any more sociopathic than US ones. But it is still a turf war that divides along racial lines. The US-side companies expect multicultural cooperative work. Unless there is the owner/master dynamic, you don't see Americans of non-indian descent working in India except as liasons or owners/managers/bosses.
It's all related to the lifespan arc of software. The software is made/architected in the first world, and eventually is handed off for "maintenance" to outsourcing. Eventually that becomes untenable, and a full rewrite or rearchitecture is performed, and the cycle begins anew.
I apologize if anything I wrote offended anyone, I wanted to be as dispassionate as possible.
> One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian,
Yup, that's a very visible pattern at this point.
The other one is when entire reporting chains are mainland Chinese (or in the process of being converted to via "reorgs" such as this one).
And before anyone calls racism into the discussion, it's fairly easy to objectively check that it is the case in the internal eng. org chart if you work there.
Interestingly, according to Googlegeist in 2020, it was Asian folks that scored the highest in terms of "enjoying" working at Google. Caucasian satisfaction scores were much lower.
This is happening all across tech. Once again, the middle class is being hollowed out by a bunch of wealthy reptiles and we’re just sitting back and watching.
From my observation it’s all about comfort. Having reports, especially ones with their own, who share your own background makes communication more frank. In other words, like a sibling, they all share the same state, it makes your job easier. It’s very hard to leave the comfort zone.
I’ve seen leadership chain made up entirely white guys in their 50s because the guy at the top has a type.
For me, mine are diverse but all are kids of immigrants or recent immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia and West Indies. When everyone are qualified we tend to go with what we’re comfortable with. It’s unfortunate.
This has been the case from long before DEI. Indians rather have the highest entry barriers for expat entry into the US, waitlists for visa and green cards run towards hundreds of years for each candidate.
I think you are talking about the permanent residence program through job sponsorship. Yes, this is limited because it is based on the country of origin. Countries with fewer residents in the US are given residence quickly. Others are given residence slowly. Viable options for Indians to gain residence here have to be through means other than job opportunities, such as business investments or family ties or extraordinary talent.
A solution of course is for india to split into multiple independent states. Then only one or two states might be given slower residency programs. Others will be given faster programs.
5+ years ago, Big Tech was desperate to retain employees. This of course increased wages. Google, in particular, was always insanely profitable on a per-employee basis, at times exceeding $1 million in profit per employee.
The pandemic was really a perfect opportunity for these companies to reset the relationship with their employees. Layoffs weren't an issue if everyone was doing layoffs. Making people afraid for their jobs suppresses wages. All of this is just to increase profits.
This is going to backfire. Google, for example, allowed people to work on things. If it didn't work out, you'd go work on something else. Gmail famously came out of this approach. Google even studied this dynamic and determined psychological safety was key to success [1].
The lesson now? If you work on a project that fails, you may get laid off. The success or failure of that project will have almost nothing to do with your individual input yet you will still suffer the consequences. So employees will stop taking risks.
The other way this will backfire is that Big Tech employees are discovering they aren't above the same forces that dominate the existence of every other working person, namely that there is an adversarial relationship between employer and employee and the employer will seek to get the most work possible at the lowest cost.
What this will lead to is labor organization and collective bargaining. It will take awhile. White collar workers, and Americans in particular, generally have zero class consciousness. Collective action in general has been successfully demonized through decades of propaganda and a cult-like following of objectivism. But it will happen.
Don't forget that at Google promotions were based on successful launches, leading to multiple competing chat apps and a mountain of ther abandoned products. The company has been successful seemingly put of pure luck, and we're about to see how long they can milk the few cash cows they created.
Also, the employees at Google are compensated with stocks, so they see their fortunes rise as their ex colleagues leave the building in layoffs. This makes unionizing all that harder.
My dad worked for Swift & Co. for 45 years. Nonetheless, when I first switched jobs, he applauded me, with "They're not loyal to you, so why should you be loyal to them?"
A corollary to what everyone said here is: always be thinking about the value of what you're doing to someone else. They always give the big rewards to people who happily take on "relevant to this place ONLY" tasks. You get promoted if you suck up to the middle managers and acquire skills that absolutely no other company values.
So if you pursue skills that are strictly "looking out for ME" you can expect some blowback. Ignore it.
So, when the interest rates go up, you shrink the production because it shrinks your gross earnings which makes it easier to pay off the interest— wait, it doesn't. And usually the interest on the loan already taken doesn't change, does it?
The interest rate isn’t about loans you’ve taken. The interest rate on Treasuries is essentially the price of money.
The value of an enterprise is the sum total of its discounted future cash flows. If interest rates are at 0% then a dollar in 10 years from some pie in the sky AI is worth about the same as a dollar today. If interest rates are 10% for a risk free Treasury bond, then a risk free dollar in 10 years is worth about $0.38. You invest accordingly.
And to further explain, if you don’t increase your near-term profits/shift priorities from future growth to present returns as interest rates increase, under the discounted FCF model your current value decreases. AKA the price of the stock goes down, which shareholders and executives tend not to like.
When a company's existing debt is at 3 percent and they have to roll it over at 6 percent (they are rarely going to pay it off) their costs go up without anything else changing. They will have to cut expenses somewhere else. For forty years, the US (and much of the world) had the opposite phenomenon: 12 percent debt rolled into 11, rolled into 10, and more and more money was seemingly made through no extra effort.
Overpaid FAANG techbros losing their jobs wont cause a recession. Wake me when housing in Nashville, Raleigh, or Boise corrects then we can talk about a recession.
When it comes to large shareholders that wouldn't actually do anything. Nobody sells in these new blue chips; they just borrow against their positions.
I've thought about this for a long time. If we wanted to actually tax this wealth, we should just make people pay capital gains on marked-to-market positions every 10 years. Now before everyone starts shouting "yea, but the valuations aren't value," you could easily tax them on the lowest reasonable marked-to-market nominal value over the last decade, and you'd still get that tax revenue, just a decade later. It's just a way to have a property tax on a very speculative type of property.
I've been a casual investor my entire life, and I still think it's ridiculous that you can just hold an asset forever and never pay a property tax on it, but some guy scraping together a life for his wife and kid has to pay property taxes on his house every year.
Why not treat collateralization the same as a sale? Bezos puts 1B worth of AMZN as collateral? Sure, but now treat that as a capital gains event and trigger appropriate taxes.
When the loan is repaid and AMZN is uncollaterized, treat it as a new buy event with a new cost basis.
I have no expertise in the matter, but largely agree "realization" should be when "value is assessed and used for gain" and not a strict sale. That being said, I don't want the Pandora's box of redefining "realization" opened.
You can do it carefully and one clear scenario at a time. First, go with collaterization. Then, when billionaires find something else, go with that. And on and on.
If you wanted to tax the wealth.. have a wealth tax? It's a thing in countries including Norway and Switzerland, and similar things exist in others (e.g. Italy taxes assets in some weird non linear way).
This is a scheme to tax capital gains, not wealth. The point of this prescription isn't that "the rich have too much money," it is that we have gotten to the point where some of the largest capital gains go untaxed, period.
The idea that a gain isn't a gain until the asset is sold is nonsense. That'd literally be like saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett never made a dime on any of their stock that they are giving the charity. It's a ludicrous conception of capital gains, but it's exactly the one we use.
Our system would make sense if it was the case that the literal only way to turn and asset into money was to sell it. But, because assets can instead be used as collateral for loans, asset owners (overwhelmingly the wealthy in the U.S.) get to have their cake and eat it too.
I’ve never understood this reasoning. Loans need to be repaid at some point, so one must realize some income to pay them back, at which point they will owe tax.
I answered the way I did cause you wrote "if we wanted to tax this wealth".
Which is the point, really, cause nobody cares about the small person who got a 1000% return on 50$ of Bitcoin, we care about massive assets owned by a tiny minority who is able to dodge capital gains tax even if their asset growth is only 4% per year.
Let's say you have $1,000,000, and you by a share of Bershire or whatever that increases to $3,000,000.
A capital gains tax taxes the $2,000,000 unrealized -- but eventually effective -- gain.
A wealth tax taxes the $3,000,000 estimated net worth.
There is a real distinction. A real reason to incentivize productive capital, and that is you get to keep what you've earned. The point I'm trying to make is only that people should pay taxes, and an unrealized capital gain from literally 40 years ago isn't some unknowable investment outcome... it's a capital gain.
Makes sense to me. We already have a wealth tax of sorts. It’s called “property tax” which is mostly a house tax. We can tax other property too, including virtual assets such as shares.
Yes there is a wealth tax in Switzerland, but... it would have to be much higher to make a difference. Raising it will not pass a referendum, which it practically has to in Switzerland. It has one big advantage, though: official numbers about wealth distribution.
I think micro taxation on all transactions (including at ATMs) would work better. Easier to explain, harder to avoid since you tax both sides of each transaction.
Aren’t these taxations generally regressive given poor people spend ~100% of their income and ultra rich people spend <1%.
So you’re taxing the poor person on all of their money but barely taxing the rich person.
You could generate a lot of revenue via a rule (enforcement TBD) that requires people to establish a reasonable valuation on an asset before they can use the asset as collateral for a loan.
Then anyone who wanted material benefit off of their wealth would be required to pay taxes on it, rather than "benefit now, leave the gains to my estate".
Tax the sale of everything and the entire problem goes away.
At that point, it doesn't matter that they borrowed against their positions because spending the money they borrowed still taxes their stocks indirectly.
Exactly, people constantly debate this but it's a solved problem. Don't tax input, tax output.
It also gives you a better scalpel. Instead of trying to wrangle the different income structures (blends of w2, 1099, stocks, bonds, real estate, etc etc), differentiate via the purchases:
- superyachts: very high tax
- luxury cars: high tax
- vacation homes: high tax
- clothes: low tax
- staple groceries: no tax
Funny enough, this is already a response to a tax. 174 capitalizes software and general unproven R&D as the default now… ruining the cash position of many businesses that “made taxable GAAP profits”
The rules of the game have changed. We were allowed to expense all employee compensation tied to software or R&D in the year in which we paid it. Now we can only expense a small fraction of that because we have to capitalize the expense. That means if you paid and developer $100 to develop a piece of software then sold subscriptions totaling $100 you now have a profit. The old model you have zero dollars in profit the new model says you have something like $80 in profit that you know have to pay taxes on… with what cash?
I can only compare it to expensing for purchases that are considered assets. The typical example is that you buy a car for 30k, the car is still mostly worth 30k, so even if you’re out 30k cash you still own a car. So at the end of the year when you’ve made 50k profit and you wonder if you can deduct the 30k from the car, the government will say that the car is still worth a lot of money, so you can deduct 10% of that 30k you paid.
I guess that the government isn’t considering the expense of the employee as much as they are considering the value that the company has retained. Say the developer creates some software that you turn around and license to your customers. That software now has a value, and it will have a value next year too. It probably won’t have a value forever, which is why you can expense a certain percentage of it every year for x number of years.
The money you spent on the employee is probably a direct expense that year, but the product they created still has a value. The simplest way of valuing the product, from the governments perspective, is just to consider it equal to the development cost.
Now we can only expense a small fraction of that because we have to capitalize the expense.
This is how other businesses have always had to treat the work product of their IP generated from R&D...
Software businesses were exploiting a loophole, which was fine when they were limiting themselves to their own turf. When they started encroaching into and destroying other industries, it no longer made sense to keep this loophole in place. So basically, the software industry has only itself to blame for this.
The company used the developer that year and made the profit that year. It doesn't make sense to me why they would they have to expense it over 5 years.
It's not like the developer is a plumber, where the company gets paid per toilet they can replace in a year. The IP that the developer developed is an asset that will keep earning a return in ensuing years; in every other field of business, yearly depreciation is how you account for the cost of your assets.
No, DevOps/SRE salaries are considered COGS (cost of goods and services) so they’re accounted for the same as a cloud hosting bill–i.e. _not_ a capital investment
I don't know if its implied, but I would say since we are now talking about it, the money raised from this could go to meaningfully increasing things like unemployment benefits, for example.
Well, hopefully there's a silver lining to all this: Talented and underappreciated engineers (or those just caught in the crossfire of shitty policies) will go on and start new, more exciting companies.
Its an inevitability. As large companies focus on profitability of existing business lines, small companies entertaining risk will discover new markets. High growth in new markets (with fewer competing startups, easier hiring, and institutional blind spots) will make investment attractive -even in a high rate environment. Of course each dollar of fundraising will be hard earned - requiring those startups to have a much higher bar for adding real value and sustainable business model. This cycles repeats itself across history.
6 years ago, with cheap money and everyone eager to start new firms makes success more of a lottery than a systematized effort. I'd rather be a startup founder raised on lean capital with less of a crowded marketplace.
Then they will realize that the media has been fully monopolized and can't find get any users and that it's not so easy outside of the cushy confines of Big Tech.
I still haven't gotten over the fact that most of these corporate employees think that the majority of the population literally became crazy over the past few years.
They must think we all got long COVID with brain damage and that the vaccines protected them from this.
Have a family and esp these employees in high CoL cities? Very tough.
Speaking from experience. Been there done that.
"We'll have all this new innovation via new startups now!" is such a feel good sentiment to layoffs but in reality is nowhere close to a solution for the affected employees
This is why I hate working as a regular salaried employee. After this happened to me a few years after college, I spent over a decade building up a consulting business. I always keep multiple clients at the same time and I'm not devasted if one chooses not to renew my contract.
It's interesting that you think this is lower risk. Maybe that's a US thing? Typically employees are harder to cut than simply choosing not to extend contracts with consultants.
I would hope they make 3-10x running their own consultancy compared to working as an employee. The risk is still much higher, but it’s offset by the large reward.
Are layoffs becoming an annual thing in tech now? Last year there was the "macroeconomic conditions" excuse that every company used. How are they justifying this round?
The media has been peddling the idea that things are rosy economically but that’s not people are seeing and experiencing. December’s CPI is through the roof. The economy has been soft and with ZIRP gone, things are adjusting accordingly.
The media is peddling the opposite, that “things are still tough.” The numbers are clear: December CPI was hardly “through the roof”, wages ant anll levels are still growing faster than inflation and consumer behavior (spending) is robust. Most people are acting as if the economy is strong.
This is the USA: poor people continue to suffer and governments at the state and federal level are increasing their suffering, especially kids. That is also getting reported.
It’s like the crime stats: people believe crime is raging “elsewhere though not here” even though trends are down mostly across the board.
I find it really hard to believe crime is down across the board. I don't even have to look it up to know that isn't true in cities. Sounds like something a liberal politician would say, since it's bullshit.
Walgreens and such would not be pulling up stakes in places if it wasn't for rampant shoplifting. Other stores would not be pulling back on self-checkout either.
Since police are mainly following up on serious crime, people ease up on reporting lesser crimes like break-ins, window smashing, porch thievery, etc. And then politicians point to statistics --which given dampened reporting, means they "look" okay, but on the street it's not okay.
Never in my life have I see so much open selling of "not for individual sale, only for sale at $retail_store" on the sidewalks.
Are you guys and gals checking your grocery receipts? Eggs have doubled over the last two years. Milk, meats, fruits and veggies... I can't think of much that hasn't gone up at a higher rate than before the pandemic.
I applaud the Fed for hiking interest rates, free money can't go on forever if you want to avoid the fate of Argentina, but c'mon, the economy is not good. It's not bad, but it's not good.
Laid off people and those fired are finding it harder to find equivalent employment like they did before.
I would bet a good roll or money that if the opposition were in the whitehouse, we'd be hearing about how shitty the economy is right now. It may not be shitty but it's not rosy like they pretend it is.
This is often brought up and I'm fully willing to be shown that I'm out of touch, but where are people buying these supposed "expensive" eggs and groceries? I'll literally share my last grocery receipt (admittedly smaller due to already having most ingredients):
- Chicken thighs $6.24
- Ground beef $5.97
- Feminine items $9.97
- Bell pepper $0.82
- Lettuce $1.77
- Celery $2.98
- Shrimp $7.92
- Tortilla soup $3.82
- Yogurt (single) $0.64
- Diced tomatoes $0.96
- Black beans $0.82
- Yogurt (pack) $2.47
- Andouille sausage $3.94
Total: $51.24
Sampling from other receipts I've got milk at $3.33, lunchmeat $4.46, my last gas bill was $18.65 to fill up. So far in January, shopping at Walmart and with a crockpot, I've been able to feed myself and my girlfriend for around $139. Fair disclaimer I live in a LCOL metro but was it ever really cheaper than this?
I live in a high COL area and groceries are expensive, even at the stores that have had traditionally lower price points. Also, as long as I can afford it, I'm not eating ground beef that costs $5.97 or eggs with yolks that are barely a pale yellow in color. The quality of the your food matters a lot.
Those prices are really good. Admittedly, I don't shop at big box stores or warehouse supermarkets. But I do usually go to the same chain or interweekly I will go to a local grocery store (which have higher markups), never the less, the same basket of goods has gone up approx 25 to 30% over the last couple of years, in my experience. The most affected are baked goods, coffee beans, eggs, milk, juices, meats & seafood but also has showed up in things like flowers and herb plants.
They were touting easing inflation, but it came in hotter than they hoped for. They also pretend food hasn't gone up. People in this thread argue it hasn't gone up much. It has gone up --and that does not include the shrinkflation aspect.
They're fooling themselves. Come election time, people will let them know how they feel, one way or the other -Carville was astute.
"I used her, she used me and neither one cared. We were getting our share." - Night Moves / Seger.
In a sense, that's how I view work. I'm there to get a check, they are there to use my labor and make money. As long as we're both happy. It is all good. But... never forget we are using each other.
It's news because it's been repeated ad nauseam only recruitment, HR, sales and other non tech roles will be affected by layoffs in big tech companies. The numbers aren't important just that there are numbers because it relates to engineering and it's something the tech community didn't expect.
I feel like layoffs are like a lot of bad habits. Once you break the seal, it becomes easier and easier to give yourself permission to do it again and with more frequency.
Someone should start an massive incubator that takes in top laid off employees and gives them resources to build a competing product. They will be motivated as hell and have a ton of domain knowledge and generally have a good idea on how to do things in way more efficient way than what their former employer did. For kicks and to save money replace most of mngmnt roles with AI model.
Or having only ever worked at FAANG(s), many of them completely lack the skills that would make them effective as an entrepreneurs and it would be nigh useless to try to incubate new businesses out of them. Maybe. Not all. I am thinking of traits and skills such as actually talking to your users, selling product to customers, doing things small scale, being able to work without huge back office support, not having KPIs to game, and such.
Completely agree with this take. I worked in FAANG and before that I worked in various startups.
Most of the people around me are very adapted to this very specific hyper-structured environment that we are in. This is not a criticism - they are thriving in this environment and everyone is happy.
But no way would I want to take these people with me on a new venture. (the inverse is also true; I would not take a shoot-from-the-hip go-getter and put them into a mature product environment that with intense legal scrutiny)
How do you reconcile your final paragraph/sentence with your own ability to succeed[1] in both environments?
My experience is that the ability to adopt to structured/unstructured environments are not mutually-exclusive: some people may thrive in one but not the other, and others can do well in both (or none!) My motto is to make the right trade-offs in any environment - which is a universal superpower for engineers in my book; especially when coupled with curiosity and a willingness to learn.
You might be too charitable. There were hard transition phases where I was not necessarily considered successful.
And I probably only made it through because my employer had deep pockets and chilled while I took time to adapt. The other direction (big co -> startup) is no where near as forgiving.
Mottos are fine, but what we need to succeed is skill and practice with skills.
We are susceptible to innovators dilemma on a personal basis, and it’s hard to break habits and intuition hardened over years in a different environment.
And when I was in start up land I did watch a lot imported talent from FAANG come in and bomb out - they were trying to care about long term code quality and we needed to slap together a demo in 48 hours. It was like oil and water
Edit: btw I don’t mean to signal that it’s impossible to do to be someone who thrives in both situations. It was a comment on the original suggestion of “just start a new company and hire up all these lay offs to get rich quick”. I believe that’s not going to be a good strategy
There are often non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Depending on the country, they're not worth the paper they're written on sometimes. In others, legally binding.
A layoff isn't a firing unless you choose to not accept the package. Accepting a severance is considered voluntary separation. You sign a document stating this.
Not true as a general statement. May be true in certain cases. And certainly, in the case of a layoff (such as this one), with a severance package, a non-compete could be part of the severance agreement.
(Or not, depending on locale. For sure not in California.)
It would be rather interesting if it would be legal for me to hire somebody, then fire them the next day and they couldn't compete with me for some period of time. But then again, US employment law is rather different from EU so maybe that's possible there?
Are there any examples of companies successfully enforcing non-competes against rank and file employees? (I'm excluding high value targets like Jeff Dean here where it might actually make sense to put millions in lawyers behind a suit).
Google has a (deserved) reputation for cancelling projects. This will hurt them at some point if it hasn't already. People will be unwilling to start using a Google product because they expect it to be cancelled. Interestingly, Netflix is having the same issue.
Here's where this will backfire first: Google has studied team success and discovered psychological safety is a key component. Laying off people working on Google Assistant tells employees that if their project is canceled, you may be fired. Employees will respond by simply not working on anything that risks being canceled. Previously, employees had trust that they'd simply move to other projects.
The counterargument is that employees should be invested in the success of their project. That's a nonsencial argument. The average IC has zero impact on whether or not an SVP 6 levels above them wakes up one day and decides to cancel their project in favor of [latest hot thing] that day.
In fact, the very people who are responsible for the failure of a project are the least likely to get fired. They're the leaders who should be responsible for this. These VPs and above will simply move on to other projects.
As always, layoffs here are to suppress wages and create fear in remaining employees.
What is interesting is that now with all the layoffs we also have more CS graduates than ever [0] who were told that tech companies are struggling to find candidates to fill their vacancies. We are reaching a point, if not already at the point where we will have bunch of unemployed CS grads who will have to make a pivot into something entirely different.
I had a theory that FAANG (et al.) are implicitly trying to solve the problem of developer salaries.
If we take things back to basics: supply and demand.
If your biggest cost is developer salaries, then making a huge supply of developers is the best way to suppress those wages.
I have long felt that the push to get women and minorities into coding was driven by this: to get as many people coding as possible so that supply was not constrained and developers could no longer name their price.
I do not believe that Sundar carries Sergei's principles of making people want to work at google for a long time; I think of him more like a businessman (same as Tim Cook, actually). No strong principles, just pushing the company forward.
For them the "company" is the C-Level and the branding and the partners. Not the employed.
It's their own fault for driving CS grad salaries so high.
They are literally the cause why fresh CS grad with 1 year of experience says no to a 140k salary in NYC/Boston. (at least before the first wave of layoffs)
You may be interested in looking at the current Taulbee survey[1] - it surveys PhD granting CS and CE programs and collects MS and BS degree numbers as well.
I also found [2] that shows "computer and information science" graduates having a higher-than-average unemployment rate than other degrees. In 2018.
My anecdotal experience over the last 15 years as a person on the hiring side of the table is that my organization has received multiple qualified applicants for our open positions, several of who are almost always new CS grads looking for their first job. And my organization is in an area with multiple companies that hire software engineers and we typically pay somewhat below market. That experience makes me question if there is now (or even has been in that 15 years) an actual shortage of candidates for these types of jobs.
Are you sure we're reaching that point? The market has certainly cooled but tech jobs are still available. I do think that many new grads will have to adjust their expectations from high 6 figure jobs in FAANGs to normal-but-still-fine compensation in tier 3-4 companies.
I would also argue that it's hard to predict what the market looks like 4 years into the future. That's a reality people should acknowledge when they start a CS degree, etc.
Long story short - I would advise to not go into debt for a top tier CS degree, unless truly passionate.
I am fortunate enough to have been educated in Europe and without any student debt. I can switch careers, without needing to keep income at a level to pay living expenses and loans.
A lot of good comments here. I think there is a quote I learn from Thich Nhat Hanh that I wanted to share: "you could say you sacrifice a lot to be number one in your job, but it makes no sense to say you sacrifice a lot to be happy"
There you go.
And the lack of this practice across an entire industry. Margins are getting smaller and smaller and the successful companies will use such practices to inform all sorts of decisions, from building in house vs 3rd party vendor, to hiring, to R&D, etc.
The days of YOLO moonshots are over for our industry. Of course venture capital will continue to exist but perhaps directed to new industries.
I definitely wouldn’t say the days of YOLO moonshots are completely over (just look at the current level of investment in AI startups). Those days will return when the investment climate is improved, as it was prior to this recession and will be afterwards.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but these huge salaries of the past 5 years have really hurt technology. Instead of the best, hungriest minds working on the best problems in the most agile way, they're languishing in one of these gigantic megacorps working at a molassess pace on some improved way to sell you ads.
Companies are hiring right now (it has picked up) but it's very competitive as well. A recruiter friend of mine told me that they are getting more good candidates into the final interview stages and that it's definitely a buyers market right now.
So it makes sense in some ways for companies to cut out a percentage of the more expensive staff and reallocate to other teams and hire new people at better rates.
I'm surprised to see so many comments here taking layoffs personally, or talking about how layoffs are stupid.
Layoffs are not personal, and the corollary to that is that you should never treat your company as a friend. It's a company trying to maximize value.
Also, layoffs do work. Almost every large, successful company has done them at some stage. They are an expected, and necessary, part of operating a company and responding to changing market conditions.
Yes, it sucks. They are not nice. But it's expected and it's helpful to remember that.
It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it.
The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on the backs of the employees. These layoffs are often bound to the goal to have a return like Apple and not like General Electric (company examples are educated guesses).
In the end, the employees have a miserable life and products of the company are a shit show.
I guess we'll see if this turns out to be true. If it does, they'll realize their mistakes, and the competitors that didn't let people go should outperform them. If it doesn't, then it'll show that many tech companies simply overhired, which I think we all know they did over the past few years.
I myself work at a telco where business has stagnated over the past decade, due to market saturation and new, cheaper competition. We've had layoffs each year since I started since that's the only way to keep increasing profits. One day it'll probably hit me, but oh well. I know our company has fat to trim and if I'm actually not making any real impact, then I'm fine with looking for a job where I do. Efficient companies are important for a healthy economy.
It's not about killing experiments. It's about things that were advertised as the next big thing with fanfare to not be properly maintained and eventually killed even though they had a lot of users. That's the problem.
It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on.
Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have used a cycle of expansion and contraction to crush the working people’s power in the interest of controlling inflation (which is really largely the direct result of excess government money printing as a result of imbalanced spending), all the while consolidating more-and-more wealth in smaller and smaller circles of people. It’s an absolutely psychotic way to run a business cycle, and it kills a great many people directly:
The latest deleveraging of worker cries and demands for better conditions and pay comes as workers are asking for more work-at-home and flexibility, a more balanced work/life balance, and focus on similar health and wellness goals, as well as demands for salary raises to keep up with the ongoing inflation.
For three decades worker pay has been dropping. The gap between the growth of productivity and that of a typical worker’s pay has grown quite extreme, and continues to grow through the application of austerity principle:
While it looks like “inflation and interest rates are causing the problems,” it remains easily predictable economic theory that we would find ourselves here. People may not realize it, but since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.
This of course causes “inflation,” which is in no small part what the news likes to call “excess corporate profits.” Basically inflation benefits those that hold real assets and are closest to the money printers, while crushing those who don’t and are the furthest (often the most marginalized).
Consider that the market rewards these companies handsomely for their layoffs:
- Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.
- Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.
- Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.
- Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.
So it’s unfortunately financially rewarding to lay people off, and it’s a measurable economic impact you can show the board and your investors…
Meanwhile there are some CEOs who have figured out how to keep everyone employed, and it points to the fact that this model isn’t the only possible way for businesses to operate:
There will come a day when the current management ethos becomes unfashionable and mass layoffs become a sign of failure and poor executive management, but unfortunately the market rewards it right now, and ultimately products and employee quality of life are secondary concerns to our rather sociopathic business cycle.
Forgive my diatribe. I have developed quite a passion for this issue over the years, as my training taught me all about layoffs and how to do them, but after running companies for a long while, I’ve become quite unhappy with “business as usual.” This system sucks, and it’s causing massive breakdowns in trust between employees and employers that ultimately cause irreversible harm to actual global competitiveness. The system people live and work in has to be in those people’s best interests to proliferate and ultimately needs to align profit with the best interests of society.
In my mind, the long term concequences of the current system’s breakdown of trust is devastating to everyone involved and counterproductive to lasting global competitiveness (which requires cooperation, teamwork and a growth mindset these adversarial conditions cannot foster), and yet we happily pedal along as if everything is fine.
"since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation" - I've seen this notion repeated and I assume it's a reference to M1 as published by FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
The actual story, as far as I can tell, is that money that had previously been considered as M2 (=less liquid) is also counted as M1 due to rule changes regarding savings accounts.
To see this is the case, you can plot both together. If in fact, new money was printed, you would expect M2 to have the same jump as M1, as M2 is M1 + more stuff. However, you see a much smaller jump:
Companies aren't charities. Just because they can afford to hire or keep an employee doesn't mean they should or have to.
You're also forgetting that raw dollars are not how companies are viewed. Every company is viewed on how it performs agains the risk free return rate. The rate going from 0 -> 5+ means companies must now generate returns in excess of the RFR in line with their generally accepted risk. This is the ultimate outcome of raising rates to reduce inflation - across the board layoffs lowering averages salaries.
what do you mean by “earnings per staff member laid off”? are you dividing their total earnings by number of staff laid off? if so, then Apple earning 100 billion while laying off 10 employees would be “earning 10 billion per staff laid off”, or am i misunderstanding?
- The google metric doesn't make sense. In fact, the graph tells sort of the opposite story. Revenue per employee shot up and then they did layoffs in response... huh? My guess is that this graph is missing the forecasts that are being used to make these decisions. Google likely has a similar chart, but one that goes out 5-10 years and is showing a concerning trend (that was certainly the case when I worked there).
- Austerity is a government thing. I'm not connecting the dots between deficit reduction and corporate layoffs...
- I thought the money supply calculations changed recently which is why the metric shot up in recent years.
- How are you getting Microsoft was rewarded with 9.8M per employee for their "layoffs?" They cut 10k people, so wouldn't this mean if they had laid off 1 person, they would have earned 98B per layoff? This metric doesn't make sense.
- The "other CEO" you link to runs a company with 200 employees. I'm not sure this is comparable to a company the size of Google.
Agreed. As a legitimate inventor and innovator, these management teams are signaling to me that they are not worth working for. The rest of talent that creates actual value, whether in engineering, sales, management, or otherwise, should seriously pay attention and do the same.
This isn't the right way to view it -- it's not necessarily about a dollar amount. People making 6 figures and people making 5 figures are not enemies. The segmentation is between those tho provide work and those who perform it, with the former profiting off the surplus value provided by the latter
Are you insinuating that the workers (or the public) have the ability to self-determine through share ownership? You are aware that Alphabet stock is split, with the class B shares being owned by the founders, right?
Do you think FAANG SWEs aren't in the top 10% of Americans?
Investors aren't some distinct class, we're mainly talking about pension funds and the 401ks of similarly well-compensated professional-managerial workers.
I think you're arguing against a strawman. Nobody says layoffs are stupid because they're not a very "nice" thing to do. They say so because the statement "it's a company trying to maximize value" is contentious.
The long term objective of a company is not to save as much money as possible. It's to spend money toward endeavors that generate more money.
If the layoff is because of an efficiency improvement, that's justified - like a factory replacing labor with newer cheaper robots. However, that's not what the tech layoffs were about. Tech companies are basically saying we want to do less work. It's not an efficiency improvement, it's a downsizing of their business activities, and it's not clear-cut whether that's a good business strategy for companies that are wildly profitable and growing.
Most of the tech companies generate their revenue from their core businesses. For Google it's ~80% from ads, and probably even more of their profit comes from Ads. The history of companies being able to generate abnormal profits in other business lines is not favorable overall. I think experimenting and trying to find new sources of revenue makes sense, but the flip side of that is you have to kill those projects if they aren't going to pan out. It makes sense to shutdown even profitable businesses (or sell them) if you can make more by reinvesting in your core business.
It's naïve to think that frequent layoffs at the periphery of their business (itself not true - there were layoffs in Ads, Search and other similar "core businesses") won't affect their core business. Google loses a bit of its brand value every time it does a big public layoff. At some point, the Google brand will be most associated with the word layoff and nothing else. It affects morale for existing employees and makes the whole company culture just a little more selfish and paranoid.
Associating your company with unhappiness and strife does not come without a cost.
a company can have multiple products that are at different stages in the business cycle. If Microsoft never did layoffs in their entire history they would still have a dev team working on Zunes, and 95% of the company would be working on desktop windows
Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring (management's fault) or there was a big revenue downturn (market forces). This time it was because of over-hiring at the COVID mania. People left safer jobs to join FAANGs tempted with higher salaries and a prospect of improving their CV. And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years.
This is totally a fault of management and none of them are losing their jobs! People have a good reason to be pissed off.
had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023.
and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023.
They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hiring??? Each person added as much revenue as the ones before them.
Over-hiring would have been if post-Covid business would have dropped, which, guess what, did NOT happen for FAANG. It was, in the worst case scenario, stable (even then, slightly growing).
Revenue per employee is never a goal in itself. Only revenue, expenses, and strategic goals. If they can meet their strategic goals with less resources, they over-hired.
Don't forget there are also hundreds of thousands of external people. Bodies bought from different vendors, doing pretty much the same job as internals but with lower pay and almost no benefits.
They've been cut a lot last year, but no news about it.
Also there are cuts in high cost of living locations. Why to keep people in California if you can hire in Warsaw and pay x0.25 of US rate there?
I suspect that more of these layoffs happen in the US, both because it's the most expensive location, has the most staff and has the least friendly redundancy laws (for employers, that is)
>"And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years."
Is this the consensus then that is really rough out there right now? I know that big tech has been hit hard the last year but is the outlook equally bad for startups, enterprise etc. as well?
How does it make sense for Google to keep laying off people (many of them skilled overperformers) while continuing to hire? It seems they have alienated a large part of their workforce with these decisions. Plus they are running into legal fights in Europe where it's not so easy to randomly fire employees.
I would truly like to understand this, but I haven't heard an explanation of why the actions make sense for the organization as a whole.
The people they are hiring are probably cheaper than the people being laid off. The costs of the layoff are massive in morale, lost know how, missed opportunities, etc. But to the finance people, that's just as well because it's not their problem to deal with.
I understand it might make sense for specific managers who meet some goals and get bonuses, etc.
But I'm asking for an explanation of why it would be reasonable for the organization as a whole and for its shareholders (the ones who understand what's going on).
Managers are basically never consulted on layoffs. At a high enough level in the organization, you might find out a week or two before everyone else and mark some people as critical, but that's about it.
Basically every company I've worked at can be roughly divided into the finance side and the business side, and IME all the important shots are called by the finance people. The business side has to justify itself in terms the finance people set, not the other way around. As for how it makes financial sense, I can't speak to that, but things do tend to work out the way the CFO predicts. That's hardly surprising, because the other finance people working on Wall St. are looking at the same spreadsheets and following the same economic theory.
By the way, I don't think this is a good way to run companies. But it's the way I think almost all of them are run.
people are constantly job hopping, Google has to always be hiring just to negate attrition.
Second, there isnt a single budget for hiring that interviews everyone and ships them out everywhere. certain groups/products can be growing within google while others are shrinking. should the chrome team not be allowed to grow because google+ was in the trash can?
third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuffle everyone around the company. You cant just take someone from the google maps team and have them start working on nexus phones.
all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.
> third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuffle everyone around the company. You cant just take someone from the google maps team and have them start working on nexus phones.
True, but even so, you can train the employee for the new role. You need to do the same anyway for a new, external candidate (and it's even worse because they will need to familiarise themselves with internal tools and processes that the Maps employee would already be familiar with).
Google has been hiring people into the same roles and teams where they have laid people off.
> all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.
> Research has long shown that layoffs have a detrimental effect on individuals and on corporate performance. The short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are often overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation — all of which hurt profits in the long run. To make intelligent and humane staffing decisions in the current economic turmoil, leaders must understand what’s different about today’s larger social landscape. The authors also share strategies for a smarter approach to workforce change.
When a company has embedded itself so deeply in public life - globally - it's reasonable to have strong feelings about its actions.
When we say layoffs work, are we considering the way the same companies overhired just a few years ago, harming the rest of the employment market? Do we remember this in later discussions when we treat these companies as prescient hiveminds, in spite of them using overtuned bang-bang control for their hiring? Do we remember it in discussions about workers rights and the things we tie to employment in the naive assumption that only those who deserve it lose their jobs?
I find it a bit hilarious that programmers feel entitled being employed for life in one company. Did you ever consider finishing the project? Getting it done and delivered?
My first paid job as a programmer was like that. We made an exam software for university, a complete package covering the process from authoring test questions to making reports.
We made it in 6 months and it was done. Finished. Working. There was some maintenance/improvement, but that was a separate deal. We did not expect university to employ us for life to maintain it.
Shouldn't that be a norm?
Like, yeah, obviously Google has a lot of projects, so they can allocate programmers to do something different after something is done. But they didn't promise employment for life, did they?
Obviously, people like being securely employed. But, perhaps, that should be addressed at societal level - e.g. unemployment benefits.
I'm suggesting that it's up to Microsoft management to decide what software they want to develop, and programmers should expect they are hired to develop a product. Downsizing should be considered a norm.
People came to assume that a total comp >$100k is a norm, but it's really not.
E.g. engineer working on research projects for INRIA in France might get up to $3000 gross a month. (And you might get better job security in France but it comes with a bit of total comp hit, as you see.)
That's the reality for most people on Earth. Salary >$100k should be considered an insane arb opportunity, not a stable job expectation.
Microsoft makes a shitload of money selling Windows to billions of people, and is able to pay a lot to devs? OK, good for those devs. But would that last? Uncertain.
These companies make a lot of money because of supply & demand. They pay large salaries because of supply & demand. They have layoffs because of supply & demand.
It's free market. Stop complaining unless you can propose something better.
We should be clear that this isn’t a uniformly held attitude. Before the recent layoff wave started in late 2022, losing your job, even for layoffs raised eyebrows and questions. This has definitely changed the past year but im not sure the stigma is gone just yet.
For me it is the cycle of over hiring and layoffs that make me mad. Executives bear no consequences for their decisions instead the consequences are borne by the lower level employees.
What I would like to see is senior and executive management (Director+) bonuses cancelled for the year a layoff occurs. If they aren’t willing to cancel bonuses company wide then a layoff is really just stock manipulation. By making sure they bear some of the consequences maybe they will make better choices in the future.
A lot of people here have never worked in an economic downturn, and workers WANT to believe their job is more than a job. Why else would they devote so much time and energy to it? It may just even represent their self-worth.
I think what your parent meant was that, instead of just asserting that something is true, you provide some peer reviewed research or something like that which supports your assertion. For example, you might want to include a link to some article pointing to research which supports your assertion. For example, you can add something like
to your comment. Of course, this link points to two decades of research showing that your assertion is wrong, so you probably don't want to include this specific link in your comment, but you get the idea I hope.
>Of course, this link points to two decades of research showing that your assertion is wrong, so you probably don't want to include this specific link in your comment, but you get the idea I hope.
I think that the state of the telecoms industry will let you infer that I was being sarcastic and will also provide quite strong evidence that the study you cite is correct!
If the alternatives are not working at all, or working at a company that might have problems paying their employees , I think many will take the risk of working at a large tech company that does regular layoffs but gives generous severance
For me this is very offputting and definitly makes me move faster out of that system.
I can either work for the next 30 years 40h a week and create some 'value' for companies like google and have nice holidays, etc. OR i don't.
And yes i can afford a very basic version of not working anymore already or at least no longer playing the game in some companies.
Wasn't there some Gen X/Z meme about quite quitting? Guess what could incluence this? Having an appreciation for your company and your companies management style.
Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers. By forming a collective bargaining position the workers can prevent that from happening. With the tight labor market there are very few places where employers are able to exploit anyone, people can just move to another job. And in many European countries there are already strong worker protections in place through legislation. (I would argue too much, where I live).
So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers. I think being a member of one signals to an employer you may want to exploit them, rightly or wrongly, at least where I live it's often understood membership will hurt your chances of getting higher up in the organisation.
> Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers.
This is an overly narrow definition, so I label it is largely incorrect.
Think of it this way: society involves dynamically-shifting power balances. To the extent the goals of a society include:
(a) standardizing certain rights and norms
(b) providing checks and balances so the powerful have less temptation and ability to exploit the less
We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.
> So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers.
This statement is silly and ignores the realities I've seen. Sure, a union left to its own devices might be tempted to push too far. But given the dynamic one tends to see in western economies, there is always some kind of negotiation with the associated corporation. Such negotiation is quite similar to parties in the legal system hashing it out. Both may start off far apart but the negotiation tends to lead towards compromise. In the United States, unions that push to far face public backlash and even Presidential action.
I'm not making any dogmatic claims here. I'm simple rejecting overly simplistic arguments against unions. I will readily accept that unions are not silver bullets and there are documented cases of corruption and misaligned incentives. But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world. I laugh at people who aren't even trained economists who interpret their models as some kind of reality -- or worse, some kind of normative specification.
Very few dogmatic claims pro- or anti- union survive contact with reality.
You see this through a very American lens. I think you are trying to paint my statement as "anti union", it is not intended as such. What you describe is much better solved with government legislation and trade bodies. There is a reason union membership in some Northern Europe has dwindled from over 80% to less than 5%, they have simply outlived their usefulness.
Unions have the wrong incentives. They represent employees and have no incentive to think about future employees, employers, customers or anyone else. There are simply better ways to organise society.
> But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world.
You can say that about any topic, but what specifically are you proposing? Or do you just want to talk about stuff?
> We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.
Ultimately we need a cohesive strategy to convert your wishes and desires into actionable legislation and policies and consensus building around those - which is the hard part. It seems to me, few people want to take crack at that.
You were kinda wishy washy in your response. I'm bringing the conversation back on track. Sorry, didn't know you were so sensitive to language. I'll try to calibrate my responses to you.
I see your desire to "bring the conversation back on track". On your terms, it would seem. It came across rather heavy handedly. This is a request you can make, not something you can impose.
By "wishy-washy" do you feel like... I'm being indecisive? Not taking a firm stance? Changing positions?
Here's how I see it -- I often intentionally don't "hit people over the head" with my particular positions. It doesn't mean I don't have a stance; instead, I often prefer to frame the issue first. I consider this a starting point, not an ending one, so feel free to continue the conversation.
If you don't want to be laid off, don't get hired. It's just part of the process. Or get a government job. I hear people can last dozens of years in those.
Tangent to this: do you remember the rumor a long time ago about GCP having a deadline to become "something" (I don't remember if 'relevant' or 'profitable' or else). Have it got to that "something"?
In relative terms, it's not huge - NYT is no more specific than hundreds, so let's say 500, out of 182,000 - that's 0.27% (though obviously a higher impact on engineering - you might that would be what they'd cut last).
And it seems to be layoffs in hardware which, frankly, Google is not great with. Yes, Pixel has improved vs previous years. But Pixel is mostly US, Apple owns the US market and Pixel is not making any inroads (at best it is eating other Android devices). Google has no real runaway hardware hits. It's had a few promising launches but then they manage to take them in bad directions (Google WiFi going from a simple focused thing to becoming this giant Google Home mess that's a pain in the ass to use, Chromecast devices losing functionality, etc, etc). Google support documentation has been 100% useless every time I've had an issue (to be fair: so is Apple's).
Amazon's hardware (Alexa) is the market leader I think and even it was hit with layoffs last year wasn't it? Even specifically Alexa which Google's Assistant hardware line tries to compete with.
It's probably extremely rational to step back and conclude that Google sucks at hardware. I do like Google WiFi (it frustrates me but it is fairly set-it-and-forget-it for my parents/non technical friends) and Pixel (because I hate iOS).
Google as a company doesn't have the attention span or focus anymore to ship excellent hardware. "Everyone knows" that they don't stay focused on things, and I can't imagine that making it easy to higher top quality hardware and firmware folks. Once you eliminate good pay and stability, there's not a lot to recommend Google to hardware folks.
It's also not to only serve shareholders each quarter. It's none of those extremes: like everything in life, we must balance multiple stakeholders and responsibilities.
Which in turn, corporations including Google, lobby to make sure that taxes are as small as possible, and we aren't reasonably funding unemployment benefits. They haven't even kept up with inflation, let alone substitute a standard of living that's even approximately close to middle class. Unemployment is a hell hole of despair in the US. Its not some "blip" or something, like in other countries that have better safety nets, people lose their homes, get kicked out of their rentals and all other things. It can be really damaging for people, even FAANG engineers
Over half support higher taxes on corporations (particularly large ones)[0].
If the observational basis for this is simply that roughly half of the votes tallied in most elections are split between democrats and republicans, I posit to say that its a gross simplification of voters and their motivations.
In my study of US politics over the last 2 decades, a candidate that campaigns on higher taxes and lowering/simplifying barriers to receiving benefits will always lose to one that advertises benefits, but in reality it is debt underwritten by future federal taxpayers and/or they have numerous requirements to minimize the number of recipients.
As much as they might want to tax corporations, the voters (since they are older) don’t want their 401k/IRA/defined benefit pension plan balances to go down.
Another signal is there is never any mention of implementing a wealth tax (property tax). Politicians will keep knocking around increasing earned income taxes (which affects workers), but because the older people are the most important contingent of voters, touching property of wealthy people who do not need to earn income is off the table. In the most recent tax legislation, they even specifically left the 1031 real estate exchange intact, and got rid of other 1031 exchanges.
It should be very difficult to fire people, especially if you're making a massive profit. The idea that a company making that much money in pure profit needs to "trim the fat" is callous in the extreme, and probably deeply harmful to company morale. The employees of a company are absolutely entitled to a share of the profit they personally helped create.
> It should be very difficult to fire people, especially if you're making a massive profit.
What is the basis of this opinion, though? What gives you this entitlement that companies must employ people if they're well off (according to you)?
> The idea that a company making that much money in pure profit needs to "trim the fat" is callous in the extreme, and probably deeply harmful to company morale.
Who cares? You think business isn't callous or even cutthroat? You think businesses care about "morale" over the bottomline? You would be so wrong.
> The employees of a company are absolutely entitled to a share of the profit they personally helped create.
According to ... the petulant ranting of HN readers? Or do you have a more authoritative or objective reason to believe this?
I don't understand the point of this comment. Are Google employees not workers as well? Do they not experience suffering or what exactly is the point you are trying to make here?
Your insensitive comment is probably showcasing the fallacy of relative privation, but these are real people you're talking about, some are on work visas or are from single income families. Their lives have changed in an instant and instead of empathizing, your reaction is a sarcastic 'those poor ex-Google employees'? Shame on you.
Losing an at-will employment position is suffering? It's unfortunate, maybe, even a little sad. But to say this is "suffering" borders on entitled lunacy. Especially considering ex-Google employees can land virtually any job with it on their resume.
The risks of working at-will are well known, and one would be well served to understand them to avoid disappointment. Actually, the shame is on them for failing to adequately prepare for an obvious inevitability, especially if others are depending on them for support.
I've seen ex-Google employees passed on the resume pile based on assumptions about what that experience means and what sort of salary they may demand. There are no guarantees in this job market.
Google employees are just like any other tech sector employee. They are neither "lucky" nor "unlucky". There's not much difference, even if they managed to land a job at Google. After Google, their struggles are similar to other tech sector employees. At this point, many of them are uncertain about the future. Layoffs are demoralizing regardless of where one works.
I said they're not suffering, in the true sense of the word.
I am beginning to suspect the coddled and entitled readers of this forum are quite ignorant of what it really means to suffer. A trip to India or any other third-world country would quickly change that attitude.
Unfortunately, there is no originality in your comment, here or elsewhere in this thread. Just sad and meaningless self-flagellation (now also with weird condescension) with no actual regard for what suffering means to billions of other people.
I sincerely hope you find the maturity required to expand your worldview outside of the sheltered, entitled microcosm it presently is.
> A trip to India or any other third-world country would quickly change that attitude.
I don't suggest telling someone who just lost their job that they should keep a stiff upper lip. I certainly don't suggest you tell them that they should spend some time in a "third-world country" because, well, for one thing, that's rather crass.
But, also, I don't think you quite understand what "third-world" means. It's not based on economic status. It's based on NATO / Warsaw Pact neutrality. Any use beyond that is pejorative at best. Perhaps you mean a "developing nation" or an "economically disadvantaged" nation. Even then, it's complicated.
I love that you manage to insult an entire country by implying that it's a shit hole nobody would want to live in then use it as an excuse to tell us we shouldn't demand better conditions from our employers because you personally think we're "coddled".
> Losing an at-will employment position is suffering? It's unfortunate, maybe, even a little sad. But to say this is "suffering" borders on entitled lunacy.
How would you define "suffering?"
Merriam Webster includes "to endure death, pain, or distress" or "to sustain loss or damage" as part of the definition, which definitely seems to include getting laid off.
So suffering is a binary dichotomy? Or are there perhaps varying degrees of it?
If I stub my toe and claim I'm "suffering", any intelligent person would laugh at the proposition, because relative to a starving person, for example, it could not be considered a hardship or even mild distress.
I posit getting laid off from at-will employment at one of the most prestigious companies in the history of the world is not suffering, and characterizing it as such is tone-deaf and entitled.
Regardless of anything else a layoff at Google is an admission that the leadership team have nothing for those people to do that's worth keeping them around for. They're 'dead weight' because Google's ideas, ambitions, and taste for audacious ground-breaking projects have died as well. We should all be a little sad about that.
Google doesn't innovate anymore. The last attempt at an innovation I saw was Stadia (RIP). But, most Google products have a replacement now; Google can finally die.
Google is overrated. It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. You had talking heads yammering about how hard it was to get into Google, which to be honest, made the company even less appealing. Is this a software engineering company or some kind of hyped up nightclub?
Yeah, maybe it's a hard interview if you've been out of college for a while, haven't written classical algorithms professionally for years, and don't want to spend weeks or months of free time bashing your head on leetcode. What isn't pressure tested by the Google interview process? Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.
Obviously, Google has some good engineers, but my goodness was the hype around the company offputting.
I wouldn't characterize Leetcode interviewing as being biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class - it's biasing in favor of those (of any level of experience) who are willing to spend a few months practicing Leetcode.
I thought that Google/etc had at least dialed this back a bit, or maybe just dialed back the "how many gas stations are in the US" type questions, after realizing this wasn't the best predictor of good performance.
> or maybe just dialed back the "how many gas stations are in the US" type questions, after realizing this wasn't the best predictor of good performance.
These problems (known as fermi problems) have been out of vogue for over a decade now. Google is one of the companies that pioneered algorithm-centric leetcode problems as a replacement for fermi problems.
Leetcode problems are not hugely useful outside of the data given by solving a fizzbuzz. Rather, it’s just another excuse so interviewers can convince themself a person is smart, call it signal, and justify a hire.
The last time Google gave me a job offer, one of my interviews was literally a souped up fizzbuzz - straightforward imperative code with no trick, no complicated algorithms, and no fancy data structures. I suppose that may be the reason I got an offer, that I didn’t need fancy algorithms that I hadn’t prepared.
Ultimately it’s impossible to know if someone will be a good hire from an interview. Being a good engineer requires a bunch of traits that simply can’t be tested. The leetcode interview, as I see it, acknowledges this weakness and instead chooses to filter out low-effort candidates, as anyone persistent can practice leetcoding and interviewing (in theory).
This is pretty consistent with my experience. I had one hardcore algorithms question that I bombed, but the other ones hinged on things like "when should you use a map vs a list" that should be second nature to anyone who has been writing code long enough.
I think there's a lot more that could be tested that what current implementation-centric interviews measure. At my company for example, I feel like we've gotten a lot of use out of our debugging interviews.
Last year I went through a loop and a couple of the questions I got and mentioned to friends who are SWE's at Google thought they were too hard for an interview, especially after checking their proposed solutions in the internal problem bank.
So it's definitely still happening.
No I didn't get the job because they were too hard for me to even get a brute force solution.
It’s just sad, since of course those questions have nothing to do with the skills you actually need on the job: “the login authentication is failing once every 10,000 times, go fix it!” Oooh, shall I use a B-tree!?
> It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class.
What would you do instead? Threads about tech interviews are always the same: we all complain about the process with no real alternative when you want to hire at that scale.
In particular about:
> Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.
How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews?
If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested, even if they'd have to delegate some of their hiring to an external company. The fact that leetcode interviews are still so common indicates that maybe something is missing from alternatives, be it scalability, fairness or even whether they actually provide more signal than leetcode interviews.
I've seen plenty of HN threads where good alternative processes were described. I'm not going to be exhaustive here: writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does, coming up with and debating the architecture of a system, mock code reviews, etc.
You might say these don't scale as well as standardized testing of university classical algorithms knowledge. The general response to that would be that if you're optimizing for scale, then you're not optimizing for quality, so stop the hype around Google only hiring "the best."
It's telling that as Google has begun to regularly lay off engineers, they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process.
At big tech companies, "writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does" is not really a good, representative performance measure. Often times, you will be solving problems across multiple domains, outside of your area of expertise. You have to take on the role of PM, data scientist, SWE, researcher, etc.
Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. It is expected that you re-acclimatize and learn quickly. Giving you a take-home test to write some CRUD app isn't necessarily sampling those same attributes.
p.s.: also not a fan of classical algorithm style interviews. Clearly, they also have a bias.
> Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases.
This isn’t true. I’ve worked in multiple FAANG companies’ infrastructure orgs, including distributed kv stores, as a SWE. Anybody joining those kinds of teams are either specialists, very junior, or already had some kind of experience in the domain before joining.
Recruiters that say stuff like “we want strong generalists… blah blah” are not the people who are sourcing candidates for these deep systems roles. It looks a lot like the ML roles.
> Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases
This is a stretch. It's unlikely that an interview process would test such disparate skills directly, and a competent company will avoid moving an engineer into a role that requires a drastically different skillset without separate verification that they can handle the new role.
To your point, while I haven't interviewed with Google, don't they actually do a number of the things you're talking about (e.g. ask about system design or ask you to look at some existing code)? I'm guessing every interviewer isn't asking you some variation of "find a loop in a linked list".
I've been interviewing people for Software Eng jobs for more than 10 years an I haven't used leetcode style problems for like 8 of those years.
Leetcode interviewing is lazy interviewing. It's for when you don't want to put an effort in your interviewing process to check if the candidates have the skills you need for the position you are filling.
For example. My interview process nowadays is one web API interaction challenge: Https://challenge.bax-dev.com (in Spanish, so you may have to do a Google translate. Use with curl)
In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email. They arrive to my email and I check the code quality of submissions with my morning coffee.
Then in the ONLY 90 minutes Interview with me, we talk 30 mins about experience in their resume, 30 mins about our company and the position, and we code the "server" side to the web client they created .
We do it pair programming style. The questions I achieve to answer are: would I pair program with thus guy? (Like, is she cool to work with?) And does she know what she is doing?
I've had very good results with this method.
And, from the code exercises I am sure anyone can guess what skills am I looking for.
There was a great circlejerk on reddit in one of the outages where people asked whither Google engineers have inverted enough binary trees to bring their systems online. Basically saying that the skills they hire for are for Algirithm competitions, not for building enterprise software.
And I say this as a CompSci PhD who did his good share of data structure and algorithms during my time in academia.
How many people have you interviewed with this technique? After how many applications will you need to change your exercise, such that it becomes expensive to put that much structure into it? How do you deal with applicants knowing each other and giving each other the challenge and tips on how to solve it / what your reactions and probes were?
The pair programming part is not that different to how algorithm interviews are conducted at least in some places. You can definitely be silent for 1h and expect the best solution, or you can collaborate with the applicant and see whether their communication is good, their thinking is structured, etc.
> In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email.
I expect you can't do that in companies which are highly sought after because it's too easy to cheat, and the stakes are high enough that people will do it. Yes the pair programming part lowers the chances, but people already cheat on live coding through various means, it'd be even easier if parts of the challenge are untimed.
Overall I think the difference here is that of scale: if you hire a few people in specific positions, then fine. If you hire thousands (and you can rightly question whether that makes sense in the first place but that's the assumption for many of these companies), you can't have a specific interview for each and every position, you can't reuse the same interview question after having used it for 500 times, such that you can't invest that much into it in the first place.
Has your company pioneered some great open source software (Kubernetes, Go, React, PyTorch, Cassandra? No.
How do you even know that your method is correct, scalable? Answer is you don't know.
It's mind-boggling that people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people, think they know how to hire for firms that serve 4 Billion+ users.
1. I would guess that many of the commenters in this subthread work for Silicon Valley big tech, including some apparent (ex-)Googlers who are openly skeptical of their company’s interview process.
2. By reputation, most big Silicon Valley companies, including those that operate “high scale” apps don’t put as much stock into leetcode-style interviews as Google.
3. Silicon Valley, obviously, does not have the monopoly on high scale applications.
No offense, but most (ex-) Googlers have zero business / customer value sense. So, they have no weight in their opinions about how to build a $1T Business
So, with your interview process, assuming two people could complete the (very simple) task of doing a simple backend web service, how do you determine who is worth 100k and who is worth 300k?
How can you tell who is going to come up with the innovative solution to a challenging problem and who is just merely competent?
Lol not at all. I am actually part of a group of CTOs in my area and I know of a couple of people that have "copied" the method one way or another. For all I care I am happy for people to copy it. That's the type of process I would like to have. So who knows, maybe later I'll be applying for your company, and nothing better than following a process that I enjoy (or at least is not as asinine as the leetcode/whiteboard algorithm crap)
In Denmark we rarely perform tech interviews the way you Americans do. Part of this is because of how available education is, so virtually everyone who’s applying for a tech job comes with some sort of academic education, meaning that they’ve proven their worth to get it. I’ve worked a side gig as an external examiner for a decade now, I’ve got good confidence in anyone I haven’t failed.
Another part is that tech interviews are often sort of useless. One of the most expensive mistakes you can make as a manager is to hire the wrong person. Even in Denmark where it’s relatively easy to let a new hire go within the first three months, you’ve still invested an enormous amount of resources into the process as well as the impact a wrong hire will have on team moral. So what we look for first and foremost is cultural and personal fit within the team you’re supposed to be working in. We’re far more likely to do some personality test on you than a technical interview, not because we believe those are a science or accurate in anyway but because they are great talking points to get to know you in a high stress situation. We do this because technical skills can also be taught, and regardless of your background, we’re going to have to “adjust” you into the way we work.
We may ask you some technical questions, but they’ll typically be on a more theoretical level than practical because we want to know how you think about tech. Again to see if your “ideological” fit is good rather than to test your technical prowess.
In my anecdotal experience this is a far better process than technical interviews. But it is made possibly by education, precious work experience and the fact that if you really turn out to be terrible then it’s “free” to let you go. It also requires direct managers and often team members to handle the process with HR on the sideline, rather than HR handling the entire hiring process… but I can’t imagine working for someone I’ve never met.
> Part of this is because of how available education is, so virtually everyone who’s applying for a tech job comes with some sort of academic education, meaning that they’ve proven their worth to get it.
I interviewed hundreds of people in my career, 95%+ had university degrees, and in my experience, this is a much weaker signal than you make it. Only consistent takeaway I have is people with CS degrees from elite schools are unlikely to be completely terrible, but not much beyond that: the people with these elite degrees didn’t even necessarily pass coding/algorithm interviews, and people with less elite degrees would pass or fail with no additional signal from the degree. I’ve seen many, many people with CS degrees fail at things that I wouldn’t expect someone who passed an intro programming class to fail, things like keeping track of running maximum and an index of element at which the maximum occurs.
I’m not the kind of person to say that an elite degree is end all be all. But the kind of skill a person exhibits to get into a good college and complete a degree is not necessarily well exercised within the sprint that is a tech interview. Obtaining a degree, especially at a good school, is much more akin to running a marathon. To the extent that you need hires who can be marathon runners for your team, I’d upweight an elite degree accordingly.
That means that from the start, you rule out people who don't have this academic education. Then there's the question of the relevance of this education: either you only take CS graduates, in which case your applicant pool is quite small if you want to hire thousands of employees (but this might work if you only need to hire a few people). Or you broaden it, and you then have no guarantee that people will actually be able to write or understand code because they didn't have to to get your degree. That's without even getting into grade inflation and exam cheating.
> We do this because technical skills can also be taught, and regardless of your background, we’re going to have to “adjust” you into the way we work.
The thing is, after your technical fit, if you add a leetcode easy question, you can quickly check that the person you're interviewing can at least write a for-loop. Isn't this a useful filter?
Well yes, but as education is freely available, you’ll even get paid to study by the government, almost every applicant is going to have a relevant education. Or in the case of some people who’ve changed careers an education to show that they are capable of getting a degree and then a work history to show how they’ve transitioned into CS.
That being said your point isn’t completely without merit. But think about it from the management perspective, as I said, the wrong hire is the most expensive mistake you’ll make in middle management, so it’s more about risk management. If you get 10 good applicants, and pick the top 4-5 of those, then you’re likely left with 5 people who will each be a good hire. It’s not so much about finding the perfect hire, you’re just looking for a good hire, and part of the process of selecting those 4-5 people will be choosing people with good educations, or very good work histories. That might sort some people that are excellent out of the pile, but it also lowers the risk significantly.
In America, there is a history of using "cultural fit" as an excuse to discriminate against socially marginalized groups (both those that have and haven't escaped economic marginalization in the intervening years). So that's another criterion that Americans will have trouble with: it's difficult to be certain that your lack of "cultural fit" is something fundamental to do with your personality or work style, or if it's some aspect of your identity that is unrelated to your work performance (something that an effective, if biased, employer and team might discover if you were given a chance).
Cultural, personal and ideological (oof, what a word... kind of a red flag) are just proxies for "people _I_ like". Go far enough down that path and that is how you end up discriminating people for how they look/think/express themselves.
I'll honestly take Leetcode every time over this. I can grind algorithms, I can't change the fact that I'm Indian/Hispanic/Whatever.
It can be, again, being Danish makes this a little hard to talk about on the global scale. We’re very homogeneous to the point that I once worked in a team where 33.3% weren’t white men and that was so far above the organisations average that we were awarded… we had one woman and one Indian guy, so 2 out of 6, and that’s how homogeneous our society is.
But I’ve worked in a little bit of both environments. Usually it depends more on the people than the hiring practices in my experience. It’s always a danger that you’ll want to hire someone like yourself.
Agreed. The implication that a lack of algorithms testing during software engineering interviews has much of anything to do with successful innovation, as opposed to the infinitude of other factors that go into commercializing a product, is unpersuasive.
And do these leetcode style questions test innovation at all? I don't think they're asking candidates to invent new algorithms.
My 2c is that culture around work (in general - not specific to tech) and pay in Europe are a much bigger contribution than hiring. By no means am I trying to disparage European engineers or those who stay for a myriad of good reasons. But, it's also clear that some of the best EU engineers would rather work in the US for much higher pay. Even companies like Google* pay much worse if you work on YouTube in Paris vs the US.
"Yeah, it sucks for everybody and it doesn't work very well, but it scales!"
Not picking on you, this is a very common refrain. The apparent advantages of scalable processes seem to trump the demonstrable disadvantages, especially in hiring. The end result is a system most people acknowledge flat-out sucks, it just flat-out sucks in bulk. We say "hiring the right people is the most important thing we do, so let's mechanize it and spend as little time-per-unit as possible". I find it more sad than funny.
I think absolutes like "it sucks" are rather unhelpful when you need to choose something anyway, so it's not like doing nothing is an option. What would help is a clear alternative and how it does better one certain metrics while satisfying requirements. Yes scale does seem to be a constraint for big companies using this process, among other requirements making the whole leetcode process appealing. It's not only about costs.
Have you actually every talked about code and architecture to another peer? If levels are cca same it quickly becomes an effortless exercise where ideas flow quickly and topics are immediately picked up. Lets call it brainstorming.
Why can't we repeat that in interview? I don't care if some dev can code some method names or detailed algorithms from his head, when it takes 3 seconds to find exact solution. In other words, there is little real added value from such a skill. You get much better peek into somebody's head with above - but it requires significantly more effort on interviewee's side, heck maybe even some preparation.
You can to certain extent hack leetcode process by just doing leetcode. Its much harder to be verbally fluent about designs, concepts and libraries that you never used. And for the rest, there is a trial period, you can't skip that 3 months experience and cram it into interviews.
Are you referring to system design interviews, or are you describing something else? System design interviews are commonly used along with leetcode interviews, especially in senior roles.
> How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews?
OP said "just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer", for which leetcode is useless.
Communication skills, organizational skills, hell, even general knowledge isn't covered by leetcode-like interviews.
Personally, speaking as someone who doesn't like but has to interview potential hires, I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.
> If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested
I think this is a naive perspective. If there is any takeaway from the recent wave of layoffs, it would be that company wide decisions may be driven by factors that have no relation with actual financial performance. Google could have kept all these engineers and still make an absurd profit.
The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.
AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.
They clearly don't help to evaluate organizational skills, but no one said you should only have these interviews. I'm guessing no company does only leetcode-style interviews, at least I don't know of any.
> I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.
You could only evaluate this correlation among people who did pass your leetcode interviews and were thus beyond a certain bar, unless I'm missing something. The question is whether selecting according to this bar is useful, but it doesn't look like you evaluated this. Or did you do leetcode interviews and just hired anyone regardless of how they performed in them? I agree with you that beyond a certain bar, the signal becomes lesser. But being able to tell whether a candidate can write a for loop is a pretty strong (anti-)indicator for many SWE jobs.
> The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.
I agree that there's probably some of that. But companies are made of people, and if so many are still doing that decades now after they started and don't see a competitive advantage in switching, maybe it's the best they've been able to come up with, given their constraints. Again, there's real money to be made for those coming up with an alternative that'd scale and perform better.
> AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.
I want to specifically address this because communication can make or break teams. The kind of communication that you describe - conveying objective information - is not enough to build a well-functioning team. One of the most important questions, IMHO, is how do your teammates disagree with one another, especially on issues that don’t have a clear right answer? If you don’t probe for the answer to that question, then you’re hiring with a huge unknown.
There’s no way to know if Mrs. leetcode master X is a team player based on these kinds of interviews. She could come in and destroy a team with her personality. Granted a socially adept person can fake a pleasant personality during a few hours of interviewing, but the rare great interview processes will at least force a mini disagreement or few and gauge the candidate’s response.
This begs the question though: how do you evaluate communication skills better than this to encompass what you miss on technical discussions? It's easy to look like a team player in an interview setting where disagreements are low-stakes and theoretical. People do prepare for these behavioral interviews, there are whole sections in the same old reference book used for leetcode interviews. I honestly doubt people can tell between a well-prepared candidate from one that's a genuine team player before actually working with them.
I also want to reiterate the point that I don't know of any company that solely uses leetcode-style interviews, so they do tend to evaluate some kind of communication skills in another one.
I would hope no company relies solely on leetcode questions, but the common understanding was that Google was, at least in the not-so-distant past, among big tech companies, the closest to that style.
The weight that a company allocates to communication skills can also be measured on a spectrum. What I suggested in the comment to which you responded may be considered extreme by engineering interview standards, but the more you can probe an engineer’s communication style during an interview, especially in an adversarial conversation, the higher confidence you can have in their interpersonal compatibility with your team.
It’s one thing to answer questions about behavioral characteristics, which can be prepped. It’s another to induce the behavioral characteristics you’d like to test and see them for yourself. That’s a lot harder to fake.
You are absolutely correct. This discussion is pointless. When you have a 10k org you cannot allow ad-hoc methods because there are unscrupulous actors: people will sell the job, there will be nepotism, and discrimination.
Hiring at scale with some bar of quality needs industrial processes. That's a real constraint of the system.
Any alpha gets ruthlessly optimized away. Referrals? Now sold for split. GitHub Open Source? Now produced for cash or undifferentiated slop.
People who don't run large orgs don't get this. But also many people who run small orgs don't get this: you don't need to run large org machinery for small orgs. Part of the advantage is agility. Part of the advantage is that everyone is still on the same page and that it's obvious when they're not.
So big orgs have no choice. Small orgs have no need.
> Hiring at scale with some bar of quality needs industrial processes.
Sounds kinda logical, but is it really?
It's not like BigCorp only has one guy doing the interviewing for 100's of positions. You're interviewing for a job on a team regardless of company size, and presumably what matters to them is whether you are a good fit for the need they have on their team, not whether you pass some industrial scale screening test.
The heart of the problem is that people hiring for software engineering roles think hiring is all about "what you know". It isn't. To hire a good candidate, hire for "who you are" and "who you can become". You want to hire learners not "experts" (read: someone versed in the methods that are about to be obsolete). Hiring is always more about adaptability and soft skills, no matter what role you're hiring for except in very specific, usually time-bound circumstances. This is why true specialists are either on contract or are consultants. Most of the tech industry does hiring completely wrong because, as usual, most software engineers are hyper literal, narrow minded, and lack the social insight required to be effective on a fundamentally social problem.
Encourage a competitive market environment where there aren't just a handful of polarized "make it" companies that everyone is applying to regardless of fit or career objective because landing a job there is a golden ticket?
I did over 400 interviews working there, and many hundreds more serving on hiring committees. I never gave a leetcode interview, and saw only a modest amount of them in committee.
“It’s all leetcode BS” makes a great offhand d complaint but was not the actual truth.
I only interviewed once with them, but there wasn't anything I'd consider leetcode.
There was a rather aggressive interviewer who drilled me on an architectural web services question despite interviewing for a systems programming position on Fuchsia and having a resume solely in embedded/systems programming. From my limited experience I'd say the interview process is broken, but not in the way people on here think.
I’ve interviewed there multiple times over the years. It was full of typical leetcode shit. There’s a reason there’s a list of problems on leetcode tagged as Google having used them recently…
I watched this a while ago and thought I’m clearly too dumb to work at Google because I’m not going to come up with convex hull algorithms in an interview room.
Google reached out to me a few times to see if I'd interview with them. On the one or two phone calls I had with their recruiters, they explicitly advised me to practice algorithms (leetcode et al) if I wanted to move forward. Perhaps what you were doing was not the norm.
I personally did a lot of system design, debugging (systems or code), or deep technical dive (explain in more and more detail how something works and why it works that way).
I don’t think Google is necessarily overrated instead I think they have some issues being both an advertising company and something else.
I look at them from an EU enterprise perspective. Back 10-15 when the big move into the cloud started Google was ahead of their competition. They had online office, and they still have some excellent services that are sort of unmatched by both Amazon and AWS in terms of managed backends like Firebase, but today they make up almost no enterprise sales. This is largely because they never managed to transition into a world where they could sell their products to enterprise. One part is their data and privacy policies which are an obvious issue the other part is support. One of the most important things Microsoft sells to Enterprise is support, and I don’t mean the stuff you and I get as private persons, I mean how their headquarters will call your CTO with updates when something goes down, how you have direct channels to get things changed like when teams was turned on by default instead of something your IT department controlled, or how you can even visit their Azure server centres and look at “your” server if you’re a big enough customer. This is why AWS sort of “lost” in the EU, because when they first entered the market they had the automated support similar to what Google has now, where you can talk to a useless chatbot and never get anywhere even if you’re paying them millions of dollars. Unlike Google, Amazon quickly adjusted and suddenly they had better support and EU compliance than Microsoft (who still can’t guarantee that only EU citizens ever work on the maintenance of their data centres where your data is stored).
The one place Google was a little different was in Education. They actually seemed to know how to sell that, but even here their advertising roots are now losing them deals. Because now there is a focus on how everything in Google education is shared with Google, and while that data might be valuable to Google it’s losing them all their sales in education, which also means they lose the data…
Unless Google somehow changes course, and becomes both an advertising company, and, a tech company, they are just never going to be relevant outside of advertising again. At least for Enterprise, but even as a private customer, you’re probably thinking twice about their products considering how many of them they shut down.
I think it’s a shame considering a lot of their products are very good and affordable, but is what it is.
Having worked there I agree on some points. I thought the interview process was bullshit.
But, people generally work there for two reasons:
Pay and benefits top-knotch. I made two times there what I'm making now, post-Google, and I'm still making more 30% than my peers who work in-office for local companies do. (I work remote). Free food and other perks were also amazing.
Exposure to really large systems and scale. A lot of people really get off on building systems that scale as big as some of the Google stuff.
And honestly the internal engineering quality at Google is excellent. But conservative, and bespoke. They build their own everything, which they can do because they have buckets of cash. And what they build is mostly superior, and more consistently engineered. The internal code quality is generally meticulous.
I joined Google 11 years into my career. So while I had taken an algorithms class recently, I just reread the algorithm book I used in college and spent a bunch of time studying all of them. I actually found it a lot of fun, as it was a good refresher for myself.
The problem is it only works for a certain personality and thinking type that can do that under pressure in front of an interviewer. Most of us who have been in the industry for a while solve algorithm problems by working in an editor or REPL, and do so in a solitary way, with time to pause and think.
The Google-style process (that so many people copied) acts as if the ability to do that kind of thinking under time pressure and in front of a generally-elitist interviewer is some kind of marker of the ability to work on the job. It isn't.
Plus I worked at Google for a decade and the amount of times I had to do actual algorithm/data structure fundamental stuff was about 0. 90% of Googlers are wiring existing crap together, and if they stray outside of that they'll get spanked in a code review anyways.
Most "leetcode" questions they ask are just easy level programming puzzles. The fact that many developers seem to hate it and even struggle with it says more about the developers applying than it does about Google.
The fact that there are whole industries built on training these puzzles is a big signal that you're wrong.
Also it's funny that engineers leaving Google, Amazon, et all NEED to practice these skills in order to get other roles because it just shows that these skills aren't needed (read: exercised, grown) working in their day-to-day jobs.
> The fact that there are whole industries built on training these puzzles is a big signal that you're wrong.
I'm not sure that logic alone is a compelling: It's conceivable that this secondary industry addresses a real gap in university curricula, or a need for ongoing training of experienced developers.
But I think your overall point still holds, because there's a consensus that a large number of Leetcode-like puzzles require familiarity with problems and solutions that hardly every come up in real professional software development, and aren't even good proxies for the abilities that do matter.
>The fact that there are whole industries built on training these puzzles is a big signal that you're wrong.
Wrong about what? That they are easy? If you know binary search, sorting, sets, hash tables, recursion then it is easy. If you wanted to make it more aligned with what a developer does day to day the alternative is doing a small project in your own time which is more time consuming for everyone.
Leetcode "easy" questions are just common sense application of everyday algorithms and data structures. These might make sense for an automated screening test of "is this candidate lying about knowing the language".
But, then there's the ones that are all about specific techniques such as dynamic programming + memoization, or specific graph algorithms etc, etc. Any decent programmer can learn how to do these harder problems under time pressure (interview) through practice, but this is really about Leetcode grinding prep... these are not problems you would likely encounter in most jobs, and in the real world you'd just Google for algorithms or ask a colleague if you needed help.
> Most "leetcode" questions they ask are just easy level programming puzzles.
As a senior developer currently looking for work, I have mixed feelings about leetcode-like questions. Here's my take:
Pro: They rule out most/all applicants who lack basic programming competence.
Con: Any timed or live programming test can make some applicants fail because of performance anxiety.
Pro/con: Some of the problems require (a) very high intelligence or (b) familiarity with how people have solved that specific problem in the past.
I think (b) is a major source of complaints, because for most people the only solution is Leetcode grinding, which outside of the interview process isn't a good use of one's professional development time.
Con: At least for timed problems on Hackerrank, you have a dilemma: A simple, straightforward solution takes little time to code, and is easy to explain. But it might also take too long to run on some of the test cases, which then requires you to guess at the source of slowness, and try to fix it.
But in multi-problem Hackerrank tests, you don't necessarily know if you have enough time to do that, because the other problems in the set might or might not require lots of time as well. And you can't revisit an earlier problem once you've submitted a solution.
Your assertion is that Google asks “just easy level programming problems.” Assuming we accept this argument, that probably tells most of us more about Google than it does about some straw-man developer.
But I’ll give Google a bit more credit than you and guess that they ask questions that are at least above the “easy” level.
As I’ve grown more senior in age and rank I’ve come to realise just how important it is to carry on the selection process after the interview, during probation, and managing performance throughout your hire’s entire journey. It just feels so incredibly imprecise relying on a few hours of meetings to gauge if someone is good or not, and the probationary period is crucial for correcting mistakes. Frankly, we also can’t afford to say no accidentally to someone who would turn out to be a great hire.
I’m seeing this now through the lens of hiring at a 100 person org, but I’ve done hundreds of interviews as a FAANG employee too. The difference there, I would say, and what GOOG try to do is to shoot for the moon and get hiring nailed at the interview process. This comes at the expense of rejecting nine out of ten candidates because the candidate firehouse is free flowing and plentiful: something I don’t have at my much more normal startup.
I’ve don’t think I’ve ever seen engineers complain about the rejection rate of Google’s interview process. The more common criticism/meme regards the laziness of running candidates through a unidimensional leetcode gauntlet. Half joking, but why even have engineers run these interviews at all? A proctor could get the same job done at a fraction of the cost. If a proctor can run the interview process, then how valuable is the signal?
Unless you're willing to spend more than 20~30% of your engineer's precious time on the hiring process (or have GPT-7 or whatever GAI lol), it will always be BS. And that's not scalable; this could work when your hiring is mostly through employee's personal/professional network since ROI will be better than average, but when you need to hire thousands new employees it will quickly become a bottleneck.
The only thing you can do is designing an acceptable level proxy done with high efficiency. Unfortunately we don't really have a good way there to figure out something more efficient than coding interview + system design interview yet. A good interviewer can still extract a surprising amount of valuable signals within 45 mins but not everyone is interested in being a good interviewer.
I think there is some truth to this for sure, it doesn't mean you're hiring practical / driven people, it means you're likely hiring people who are good at rote memorization.
>many of their software products are bloated and slow as fuck
Which? I regularly use Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Home, Voice, and Takeout. I don’t think any of those are bloated or slow, but maybe I’m missing something.
The ones I think are top class are not really end-user oriented, it's core stuff like the search engine, their JS engine, etc. (IMO) The bloated ones are their webapps that suck up gigabytes and gigabytes of ram and CPU resources (client side) for basic stuff like showing you one couple of pages of emails or playing a video file.
That's bad news for the IT jobs market. The big tech companies are firing people - those people will have no problem finding another job, but that's a job taken away from more average folks.
Combined with high interest rates, that prevent businesses from starting new projects financed through credit. Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work. Probably demand for IT roles in 2024 is going to be lower than previous years and salaries may stagnate or go down.
Aren't googlers famously burnt out and only know how to use Google products because of dogfooding? I don't mean to demean the people just laid off, surely some of them at least know enough to operate other software suites, but hasn't this been identified as a common problem?
That was when they were the darlings who did nothing but grow and snagging one of their employees was a stretch. Doing big layoffs kind of tarnishes the image.
I wonder if the well-documented nihism of Google, coupled with how all the marvellous internal Google tools seem to work a lot less well without their product teams running them, is secretly an employee retention strategy.
Feels like a stretch to me, I have to say. The only tool that comes to mind is Blaze/Bazel, which I haven't tried outside of Google, but the friction people experience is likely down to the fact that, outside of Google, you have to deal with a world that's more complicated than a single giant monorepo.
Yep, not to mention that many of these engineers were already paid a fortune and are extremely over-hyped as they were basically just tiny cogs in a huge machine and they can't actually build anything on their own... Which is what is required for building software outside of big tech.
I agree. At the end of the day, FAANG engineers are just employees. I never understood the hype or the prestige they get. Also, unrelated but I've read your other comments and they are on point, you're too smart for HN. I say this unironically.
Thanks for the compliment. IMO, the concentration of smart people here is still very high. In most other forums, people don't even understand what I'm saying. Here it's like most people understand my comments but they disagree because they have an interest not to agree and so they require a higher standard of proof.
IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well, so if salaries go down then people change careers. For example, most people who can do IT could also become an electrician, for which the demand is currently high.
> Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work.
This is the sort of thing that increases demand for IT. Company had 40 artists and two IT staff, now they can get by with 10 artists but three IT staff, because IT has more work to do supporting the AI stuff.
> IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well
True to some extent, but IT salaries are high in my opinion because until recently there was a very limited tech talent pool but huge demand for IT talent. I mean IT was only really seen as a good career around 15-20 years ago.
We just got lucky. We had the right skills at the right time. We rode the wave of big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook growing into the most profitable companies in the world. With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some and with plenty of freshly well educated IT talent entering the market there's really no reason to not expect this high salaries to continue. In my opinion they'll most likely fall to what your more typical middle class job pays.
Actually, IT was seen as a good career from around 80-87 and from around 95-01. It comes in waves. Then there is a bust, and those who went into IT just because it was seen as a "good career", not because they love coding, are weeded out.
And with only the passionate developers left, the cycle starts again.
Compilers did the same thing. But over time, as more ways to apply code and software got found, demand massively increased beyond what it was previously. This will probably be the same, at least if AI doesn't completely upend every single knowledge job there is.
II'm fairly certain I could learn the theorethical, physical background required to be an electrician pretty quick but that leaves me with precisely zero practical experience of actually pulling cables or building a switchboard without killing myself/others and/or buring down the building.
Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
> II'm fairly certain I could learn the theorethical, physical background required to be an electrician pretty quick but that leaves me with precisely zero practical experience of actually pulling cables or building a switchboard without killing myself/others and/or buring down the building.
What do you think the learning is meant for you to learn? You have to terminate aluminum conductors differently than copper to prevent corrosion etc. Learning these things is what allows you to wire a building without causing a fire.
> Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
Apprenticeship requirements are unfortunate -- basically giving the incumbents in an industry the ability to rate limit new entrants -- but it's not as if no one has ever done it before. So you do the apprenticeship.
Most people who do IT can become an electrician ? Im curious why you think that. Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble
> Most people who do IT can become an electrician ? Im curious why you think that.
It's fundamentally the same kind of mix between following bureaucratic rules and manipulating man-made technology.
> Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble
Real estate prices are still incredibly high, driven by undersupply of housing, which is unlikely to abate soon. As long as prices are high, construction will be profitable. If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.
There also seems to be some political support for doing something about the high housing costs, like relaxing zoning rules, which would allow new construction in places it's currently prohibited.
> If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.
The Empire is global. If the Fed lowers interest rates, not only can foreign nationals borrow at lower rates directly or indirectly from US banks, because of that the central banks in other countries tend to follow suit.
> At least where I live it takes ~4 - 5 years education to become an electrician.
That's about the same as it is for IT, isn't it? Most decent IT jobs wanting a four-year CS degree.
And changing careers has retraining costs but not for some 18 year old who hasn't picked one yet. Which can balance out the supply and demand five years from now just as well as a 30+ year old changing careers.
> Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?
Do you know a lot of people in IT whose salary got lower?
They can do this too, if the difference in salaries becomes large, but it's obviously less expensive for someone who hasn't taken on the training cost for either industry yet so those would be the first to move.
Apparently not, this has been going on for decades. This is a small culling compared to 2001 and 2008. Google is now a shit company just collecting rents, has been for probably 15 years, and this is indicative of a shit company just collecting rents.
It is striking to me that a vast majority of comments here amount to i.e. "every person for themself" -- or at best i.e. "build relationships with individuals". If you are reading this, step outside your usual mindset. Can you see the individualistic bias in the comments here?
One need not be a pro-union progressive to simply recognize that we would all benefit from considering other alternatives. Hard-nosed libertarian economists who study game theory know it isn't a complete accounting of human interactions. Collaboration and alliances are worth seeking out. It doesn't _have_ to be a race to the bottom where employees all scurry around terrified, meanwhile hoping they claw their way up into management.
Just a day ago I was reading a comment from a - funnily, google - engineer gaslighting another engineer that had a hard time finding a job in this market.
I'm seeing so many people doing this at the moment. "Maybe you need to reskill". "You need to work on your interview skills". "You're not applying to the right positions". Etc...
You can't know what the market is like until you're looking for work, and as someone who's been in this industry for 15 years and has been applying to roles recently, I know it's really rough out there regardless of what some are saying. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. I'm getting messages from colleagues every week who have been recently laid off and can't find work. Some are now getting desperate.
We did some hiring where I work in Dec. We had over 150 candidates and only extended offers to 9 candidates. Your chance of being hired was literally only 5% IF the recruiter thought your profile was at least good enough to send over for consideration. I'm guessing the actual number that applied was likely 300+. That's absolutely brutal compared to anything I've ever experience. Typically if I applied for a role in the past I might have a 20-25% chance of getting an offer, and during the last 5 years that was probably as high as 40-50%.
People in jobs need to consider themselves extremely lucky right now. In this market a good developer probably only as a 2-3% chance of getting any job they apply for and will likely need to take a decent cut in pay too.
I agree that job hunting is brutal. However, my experience in doing interviews recently is that half the guys who got through the screening interview with our manager were worthless. And he probably rejected 90% of the candidates sent by the recruiter. Of the 2 people hired, one is kind of mediocre, and we are not talking FAANG standards.
Not that I particularly love the big G but
why are top comments taking this seriously? Google grew in 2022 from 150,000 to 190,000 then down to 170,000 in 2023. What are couple of hundred down in such a large company? This is just some FUD piece.
Nothing FUD about highly respected engineers I know personally getting fired when the company is immensely profitable. The FUD is created by Google’s senior leadership.
> The Silicon Valley company laid off employees in its core engineering division, as well as those working on the Google Assistant, a voice-operated virtual assistant, and in the hardware division that makes the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches and Nest thermostat, three people with knowledge of the cuts said.
Why would this hit core engineering if the company needs to focus on AI ? I'd imagine these people would be ever more valuable
> Google confirmed the Assistant cuts, earlier reported by Semafor, and the hardware layoffs, earlier reported by the blog 9to5Google.
Nice. So one can reasonably expect the Google Home device et all to get even worse at all the basic functionality it used to be quite good at as far as 2017.
Vote with your labor and be willing to change immediately jobs (that is why remote is great). If you did not like what the manager said in a random meeting quit on the spot, find another job online. No more notice courtesies.
Yeah this is what Amazon said about warehouse employees and now they have to pay them $25 per hour and offer free tuition programs in addition to fat sign up bonuses.
Workers have the power. They just need to remember it.
Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever.
So far I've only seen companies be decent until an idealistic founder leaves or dies, then the MBA's take over and the worst possible way to make the most money takes over pretty quickly.