this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
637 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

59589 readers
3148 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Google is laying off more employees and hiring for their roles outside of the U.S.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 220 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The latest cuts come as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.

Repulsive.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 104 points 6 months ago (5 children)

So they ditch the people who helped make them successful? What kind of ass-backwards strategy is this?

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 107 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

"Juice the next 3 months."

Thats it. Thats the whole strategy each exec uses until they leave.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

How can I get one of these jobs? Important detail I’m not rich.

Seems like a low skill job.

[–] Daft_ish@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Quick answer this one question.

You are given a button that upon pressing kills 100,000 people. The button does nothing else.

Do you press the button?

[–] Promethiel@lemmy.world 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Of course not. Why would I risk limiting our market share that way?

I demonstrate synergy and the ability to run an agile ship by instead outsourcing development of an app charging 1,000,000,000 people $15 monthly for the privilege of pressing the button and posting that they weren't it this month.

Then I press it, because we must make sure our actions align with increasing shareholder value.

[–] Daft_ish@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Sir, please wait by the door for your hummer limo straight to the upper crust.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Dinsmore@sh.itjust.works 26 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There's a recent podcast talking about this if you're interested - https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-man-that-destroyed-google-search

TLDR; they fired the guy largely responsible for building google search and replaced him with the guy running google ads.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 18 points 6 months ago

Yup, and that's why monopolies are bad. Once you get a dominant position, the way to increase profits is by abusing your market position. And publicly traded companies need to increase profits because that's what shareholders expect.

In this case, reducing the quality of search means people need to search more often, which means they see more ads. As a double-whammy, if you improve the relevance of the ad results while reducing the relevance of the regular results, you get more click-through on the ads. So Google has little incentive, while it has a dominant position, of having a good search product. They'll only care again if that dominance gets threatened.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

It’s called

Late Stage Capitalism

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Wrench@lemmy.world 28 points 6 months ago

"Do no evil" was abandoned long ago.

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 146 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (15 children)

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.

[–] RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 23 points 6 months ago (13 children)

First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.

And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.

[–] MentalGymnastics@sh.itjust.works 23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

They'll say the work is not needed. That's because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.

Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. "Industry hasn't innovated in x years" okay that's on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that's left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (15 children)

First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.


"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.

There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."

https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf


i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.

And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.

Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don't have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.

load more comments (15 replies)
[–] Veraxus@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it's not something they negotiate and protect. "No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote." Break the terms... instant strike.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] expr@programming.dev 15 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.

But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it's not really that bad. It's not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it's way less taxing imo.

Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)
[–] ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world 62 points 6 months ago

You know, firing C level employees creates a lottttttttta cap space for actual employees!

[–] Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com 60 points 6 months ago (1 children)

OMG what if Google moves to India/Mexico permanently and is subject to the TikTok ban.

Oh, I can dream. Haha!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] PhAzE@lemmy.ca 56 points 6 months ago (4 children)

This always comes down to the fact that labor is competitive. Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year? Competition drives the prices of labor down. Maybe there needs to be better regulation for labor competition like corporations enjoy.

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 28 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Why pay someone $200k/yeae when someone will do the job for $80k/year?

Assuming the same job's quality, a possible answer is "because to live where your company is you need to be paid $200K/year"

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 21 points 6 months ago (7 children)

What I don't understand is why does competition matter for workers but somehow not for CEOs? I kind of understand and agree in the free market to an extent - if you're fine with hiring a dev for $100 instead of another dev for $1000, and you're okay with the difference in quality / time / etc. then go for it. But where is all this competition happening for CEOs?

Surely someone must be as qualified as Bitchai and willing to do the same job for a measly 100 million a year instead of his 200 million.

[–] PhAzE@lemmy.ca 17 points 6 months ago

Ceo pay is advertised and used against each other to get top dollar. Lowers like us have out pay hidden so companies can low ball without us knowing. That's what needs to change. It should be law to be advertised pay rate so the lowballers get exposed and no one applies, forcing pay to go up.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] athos77@kbin.social 53 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a 'reason' that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, "If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there's nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."

[–] pleb_maximus@feddit.de 51 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There isn't a reason the company couldn't hire someone to do their job from an office in India or the Philippines either though.

[–] RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Availability of talent used to be the traditional issue. Judging from the current trend of growing teams in these areas, either the talent pool has been growing there or the outsourced jobs are not the talent seeking ones. India, especially, has a low reputation as an outsourcing target.

[–] best_username_ever@sh.itjust.works 26 points 6 months ago

Outsourcing was a thing way before the pandemic, but it was always a failure for, they never dared replace us when they noticed the bad results.

[–] golli@lemm.ee 14 points 6 months ago

To be fair there are still a bunch of other aspects that may prevent even full remote jobs to be outsourced to other countries. Among others: language skills, time zone differences, cultural differences, legal frameworks and probably many more.

To give an example for issues that may arise from these differences:

An employee might cost your german company triple the salary in Germany compared to India. On paper it seems like an easy choice, you just outsource and even if you have to pay 2 person to do the job you still save money. But suddenly you run into many problems:

  • They will likely not speak German and maybe not even great English. This might be irrelevant for the actual work to be done. But do they exactly understand what the task is, can they give accurate feedback, can they make use of existing resources or do those need to be translated, can they communicate with the rest of the company or your customers?

  • They work in different time zones. And while most remote work is probably time agnostic, meetings with other team members, departments or your customers suddenly become much harder to schedule.

  • Their culture might be different. So e.g. they might not be as straight forward when running into problems and instead try to hide them, which will mean everything looks fine until the house of cards suddenly crumbles.

  • Having employees in different countries means you will need to have different workflows for hr to deal with contracts, payrolls, retirement plans, health insurance and so on. Also how does the other country handle IP, patents and non compete clauses? Could the employee just walk away and start their own business or go to your competitor? Or in reverse can you ensure that they e.g. don't copy/paste code from somewhere else ignoring licenses.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] phubarr@lemmy.world 48 points 6 months ago

There needs to be a tech workers union. The abuse from employers needs to end. Especially the endless free overtime.

[–] Fixbeat@lemmy.ml 43 points 6 months ago

Corporate shenanigans afoot at many companies it seems. I'm sure this will pay off grandly.

[–] Veraxus@lemmy.world 38 points 6 months ago

Every day, they somehow figure out ways to get even more evil. We're dialed up way past 11 now.

[–] FortuneMisteller@lemmy.world 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Is it a move to save money or a move to weaken the position of all those employees who objected to the questionable contracts with many intelligence agencies?

I can bet that they will ensure that the new employees will be selected among those who have no qualms.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] jaschen@lemm.ee 33 points 6 months ago

Just got laid off 2 days ago. They laid off the entire marketing team leaving only the head developer and the web manager.

They then had the galls to ask us if we wanted to stay for 6 months so we can train OUR FUCKING POSITIONS TO INDIA FOR THEM. We could take that or just leave and take a 2 month severance.

1/2 of me wanted to take the opportunity so I can sabotage the company by making it worse for them, but my dignity wouldn't let me do it.

Back to job boards again....

Also, while I'm on this soapbox, wtf is up with these fucking companies asking people to do FREE work just to be considered for an opportunity. Wait, this is a LIVE campaign? My work might be used for things other than to show my abilities.

arg~!

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 26 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Still keeping the Fart Button team?

I'm sorry who TF does your accounting?

[–] ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 15 points 6 months ago

Ok but like as an immature idiot that's my jam please keep the fart button team Google, but you should've kept the others too.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 24 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Standard capitalist playbook. Been that way since the 80s

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 20 points 6 months ago

Just Doctorow's enshitification in action.

[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Coworkers India for Silicon Valley teams = hope you like standup before bed.

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago

Coworkers from USA for Indian teams = hope you like to work from 4pm to 4am.

[–] WamGams@lemmy.ca 10 points 6 months ago (8 children)

India, the nation everybody hires to when they need something hacked?

This seems really bad.

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›