Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is sure notable how quickly they are throwing their employees under the bus.
While I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes a ton of money working two hours a day, I have even less sympathy for executives who created, championed, and perpetuated the thinking that encouraged that to happen and now try to shift blame for their own philosophy onto the people they proactively lured into their firm.
Google execs thought they would continue to make tons of money by treating certain engineers like gods. The second they suspected that might not be the case they demoted these gods to lazy slacker deadweight. Don’t fall for it. The real deadweight is running the company. The real blame lies with the decision makers. They have been blowing hot air about what enlightened managers they are for 20 years and suddenly realize they might be revealed as frauds. Step 1, blame the victims of your incompetence, the people you will soon lay off. Smear them, with no honor or decency, hurting their chances of recovering from the very situation you put them in.
What a company.
When you look at Sundar Pichai, what exactly has he brought to the table? Which unique insights and strategic decisions from the CEO have made Google richer? It's not enough to point at the profit growth; Google owns a historical money-making machine in its Ads business and any half decent administrator could have increased its profits over the past years.
I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
The quality of decision making is seen when the rules of the game change and the companies are forced to adapt. This may or may not happen this cycle, depending on what happens to interest rates.
The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.
Google makes themselves out to be an innovative company that hires the best engineers in the world, but I'm struggling to think of anything notable they've created over the past decade.
In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent.
They spent decades building the image of “one of the best” employers for skilled software engineers, and they could potentially throw that away with just a few bad decisions.
It’s precisely because they’re still making boatloads of money that this makes even less sense.
The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings).
But I only interact with a tiny fraction of Google's total employee base, so there is a good chance this happens. We have too much work, and it's pretty obvious when there are coasters in our midst.
At a different company, a friend told me (who was a manager at this company) that he liked keeping coasters/slackers on his team, so that when he was told he had to fire someone (due to a company wide RIF (reduction in force)), he would have someone to sacrifice. But I've never heard of Google doing a RIF, so that doesn't apply here.
[0] https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...
And if your productivity is very low you will get put on an improve or out plan.
The impact & output of work within Google follows something like a perato distribution and yet the payscale is pretty flat. It creates this weird incentive system that almost encourages some base level of slacking unless you really want that promotion. And the difference in output makes it pretty hard to staff project and superstars often end up overworked which is hardly fair to the people doing the work.
This wasn't always the case, but is probably the norm at larger companies. It does seem to me like the way comp is modeled isn't ideal, but I'm definitely not a comp expert. My guess is that more discretion in pay would open companies up to all kinds of legal liabilities not to mention actual unfairness.
All that is to say that there is likely some extra slack that can be let go with little effect.
These people aren't on teams you interact with. They have a low enough employee ID and/or a sufficient level that they just mill about on a passion project.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/google-ceo-says-he-hopes-to-...
What Google cannot afford is for that incredibly talented dead weight that they have go off an make a COMPETING search engine and associated platform ecosystem (i.e. android, g-mail, chrome). That talent is not just sitting on its ass for no reason.
Google was started from a garage with bare-metal linux servers on hardware that is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi cluster today. Making a search engine using someone else's cloud is vastly easier in 2022 than in 1999. Replacing the platform ecosystem lock-in is significantly harder, but doable with the right talent. Its in Google's interest to keep at least a proportion of that talent inside the company.
So they "rest and vest".
It's his fault, that the "Don't be evil" motto had been erased from Google's culture. And it's his incompetence that made Google spending money in areas which were not only not profitable enough, but rather such money pits that he has to squeeze money out from profitable divisions so hard that it makes Google's users switch to alternatives like Apple or make them degoogle their lives.
He and the likes of his are a cancer that is growing at Google.
See: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/google_ceo_sundar_pic...
Basically search for any articles about "Google CEO" and "productivity".
Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations.
The first one is "I'm going to get fired ASAP if I don't improve".
The second one is still viewed as a failure even though you're meeting every aspect of your current role.
The third one is "okay good, maybe i can go for promo if I string together 4 of these performance reviews as exceeds expectations"
Obviously, there needs to be a balance between being constantly busy and just slacking all the time.
Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).
