Google CEO tells employees not to ‘equate fun with money’ in heated meeting | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO tells employees not to ‘equate fun with money’ in heated meeting

cnbc.com

179 pointskjhughes357 comments

> Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.

What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.

As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.

The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.

So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.

It’s fine to say the best engineers want to work on the most interesting problems, and that’s totally valid, but truthfully Google and other big tech companies need an army of highly skilled engineers to turn the red button blue. A simple fact is that maintaining the behemoth requires lots of skill and relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale to the army that Google would need to employ (even if it reduced its current headcount).

I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing. It's not much different than compiler optimizations that squeeze out tiny efficiencies that are not noticeable and irrelevant to 99.9% of use cases. If you can make red button blue and quantify its effects in terms of UX (people being able to find the button or make reality more aligned with expectations of the user), I think that could be interesting. But I would love to hear from someone that has labored over such a task.

If I were hiring someone to figure out which buttons to turn from red to blue, I would at least try to find people curious and serious about the task. I wouldn't just accept that its monkey work, throw some money at it and hope for the best.

It is not monkey work. But A/B testing can often be more a trapping of scientific than the real thing. Google UXR is hit or miss. They have done a number of poorly run studies on what shade of blue to color buttons without thinking about multiple comparison corrections, seasonality or evolution in display technologies. I am increasingly unconvinced that these efficiencies are meaningful for UX. Compilers are different and those optimizations are real and matter for both the bottom line and UX.

I was using the phrase “turning the red button blue” as a description of the fundamental toil that goes into maintaining complex systems. There might be thousands of people who find that work interesting, but there are millions of buttons.

Learning whether the button should change colors is different from actually changing the colors.

I agree that the learning part is interesting but at google I suspect those are two different jobs.

> I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing.

That's why Google ends up with 25 shades of blue because each button is "scientifically interestingly A/B tested to death": "When you desgined 5 screens in Figma, but couldn't be bothered to chose the better buttons, fought with managers and requested an A/B/C/D/E test" https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1555686876274630656 and https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557755746686754818

> relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale

Every time i see businesses taliing about passion, they are aiming to underpay and exploit employees.

Gaming industry has the most passion, very skilled people and the worst working conditions in the entire IT.

Capitalism for me but not for thee

I agree with this 100%. I don't work in the gaming industry, but always used to be the "passionate/caring/agreeable" person in my team, until I realised that being so agreeable made me work more for less.

The place I work is actually nice, but since that realisation, I managed to get an offer from a different place, to make my current company to counter with a massive salary increase.

I know and also share the salary numbers with most of my closer friends in the company, so I know how good I'm doing. If they stop giving me the fair regular salary increases, then I'll leave without any regrets.

Lesson for me that blind loyalty - even in nice places - will give you nothing but frustration and exploitation.

Airline pilots are also exploited for their passion (most people don't rack up the needed flying hours by accident).

It's also a false dichotomy: I am both passionate about my work and could do it for free (which I do with F/OSS contributions), but I also care about my compensation.

In fact, if you see that on a job post it's a red flag to steer clear from that company.

The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems for a pay that is high enough to cover quality of life.

If your company shows a slowdown in growth--not loss: less growth--the idea that you're suffering from macroeconomic effects and need to cut spending makes very little sense. You're still making a profit quarter after quarter, where's the financial hardship?

(You might go "what about that 4 billion dollar fine from the EU??" To which the response is "did you look at their earnings report? Google made just shy of 20 billion in operating income last quarter alone, on a 30+% profit margin. $4b is literally still a trivial amount as a fine, constituting less than a month's worth of earnings)

The unfortunate truth with any publicly-traded company is that the CEO's job depends on that growth.

The simplistic relationship is as follows: - The share price is (theoretically) a reflection of the future earnings expectations of that company - Slowing growth means lower share price/lower dividends - Lower share price/lower dividends means reduced profits or losses for shareholders - 80% of stock is likely owned by institutional investors that have automatic triggers for sale of stock based on certain performance thresholds (think pensions like CALPERS) which further incurs losses for shareholders in the event of sustained periods of lesser growth

So when the shareholders band together and demand growth, they will expect the CEO to deliver it or they will replace that CEO with someone who they think will deliver that growth, simply because the system is structured such that growth is expected/required with some minimal level of risk.

Personally, I think there are better systems we could come up with that would ensure better stability for employees and shareholders even in the face of temporary slowdowns in growth that are caused by structural economics, but any of them would likely lower shareholder returns by some small amount, and the institutional investment plans would balk at that. (That small amount would translate to billions of dollars in projected future equity and would likely make the institutions insolvent at some point in the future.)

The fun thing about Google, though, is that Page and Brin still have majority stockholder voting power because even though they own less than 15% of the shares, they also own pretty much all the super-vote stocks. The shareholders can't vote out the CEO (or really, vote for anything to pass) unless Brin and Page are on board (or don't care). So really, the only threat a Google CEO has is from the board.

While your argument might work when it comes to regular publicly traded companies, Google is nothing like a regular company. As a tech giant LLC, the general public can buy shares, but those shares buy them nothing except for a cut of the profits.

> The unfortunate truth with any publicly-traded company is that the CEO's job depends on that growth.

Well, boo hoo for him. That's what he gets the comically outsized paycheck for.

We as an industry need to stop accepting that as an excuse for CEOs cutting wages, hiring, and perks for regular employees (not talking about the executives here) when the company is still making massive profits. If there's a genuine cash-flow problem, then yeah; it sucks but it happens. But screw this "We've got record profits, so now we need to shaft the lot of you that got us there so that we can juice those numbers even higher in order to further increase our high scores!"

People respond to incentives. If you want to change behavior, you need to change incentives.

The CEO's stock is tied to that performance. The better the company is doing profit-wise, the more payout the CEO gets. That's why it doesn't make sense for us, the ground employees. But makes perfect sense when you look at it from who calls the shots. Always follow the money!

A month's worth of earnings isn't trivial for any company. Agree that Google can weather it easily though.

It is when you are guaranteed to make it, with a cash reserve many times the fine itself.

I wonder whether the mention of swag in the reporting was a red herring.

I would've liked to see the full question, and all the other questions, and whatever could be learned from their absolute and relative votings.

Questions on my mind:

1. How many people are concerned about loss of swag, and if so, why? (Is it because they want the swag, or see it as a canary, or because they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?)

2. If some people are concerned about travel, is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?

3. How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?

4. Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to? (For example, were some people already feeling like they were overextending themselves, or stressed over pursuing a promotion, and now they're wondering whether changes will make make that situation harder?)

(I'd like to understand how different organizations are feeling, and how that changes with circumstances, and the news article's mention of swag might be confusing things. And also, I've always had a soft spot for Google, and I want it to be its best self.)

It sounds like a gas lighting attempt to paint employees as selfish and entitled children worried about losing their toys. Most people don't care about that stuff, it's all superficial anyway. Things like this usually means employees asking about why benefits are cut for them and not for executives.

Further down in in the article, if readers made it that far, it implies just that:

> Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. Pichai brought in total pay last year of $6.3 million, while other top executives made more than $28 million.

The later on:

> Bret Hill, Google's vice president of "total rewards," fielded a question about raises, equity and bonuses and how they will be affected by the changes. He said the company doesn't plan to deviate from paying workers “at the top end of the market so we can be competitive.”

Which leads me to believe employees know what they're talking about, and the swag question near the top is just clickbait. Employees actually want real answers, and they got none.

can't speak for everyone else, but it seems like a canary. They grew really fast the last few years, so many people joined google recently, with all their reputation for tons of perks. Their new perks are going away, that they just joined for. That's probably a bit of a shock as well.

> they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?

When you make a median of $300k, being told you need to cut a $50 sweatshirt this year out of the budget, its pretty confusing and concerning.

> is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?

Probably all of the above. With COVID, lots of teams (at lots of companies) became more distributed, and meeting in person is important occasionally (IMO). Travel is fun, and google tends to be in the fun cities with fun offices (SF, NYC, etc) so traveling to those cities is probably an enjoyable trip compared to flying to eg. Milwaukee. With a "fun budget" even if you have to work, you'll probably enjoy those trips beyond the work.

> How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?

I imagine considering the the earlier claims of "20% productivity increase", product cuts and stalled hiring, layoffs probably feel around the corner for many people. Having to output 20% more is no easy feat unless you really weren't working very hard.

> Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to?

I think its just that lots of people are new to this lucrative perk-filled rich company and its an affront to their expectations and potentially reason for joining.

I'm not a googler, but I'd see this as a canary. Steve Blank's[1] The Elves leave Middle earth - The sodas are no longer free explains why auch "small" changes portend larger cultural shifts

1. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

In a distributed company travel becomes essential to keep team coherence: anything from team activities to meeting up to decide on the direction of big projects (no online tool can beat a single room with a single whiteboard and a single marker in terms of usability and speed).

There are also meetings and travel to partners, to industry conferences and forums etc. (depends on teams).

In "tough times" all that is suddenly cut off, and only "essential travel" is allowed. But then some teams get to spend two weeks in Malibu on an "essential travel spa retreat" while their teams cannot even send engineers to a high stakes technical discussions with external party integrations. And of course "essential travel" somehow doesn't include various levels of sales, management and marketing.

So, people get grumpy.

Not Google specifically, but in general:

1. Some people are excessively (IMO) attracted to swag and taking away any benefit, however minor, often attracts outsized opposition.

2. Especially people who aren't on the road most of the time, find a trip to an event a nice change of pace and an opportunity to develop professional connections both within your own company and elsewhere. There is business value but it's also often viewed as a significant perk.

3. Well, Pichai has made statements at least suggestive of staffing cuts. And even if there's some trueing up going on with RSUs, I expect a lot of employees used to getting a lot of their comp in stock in a rising market are looking at effectively significant cuts to their TC.

Once a business segment gets mature enough, this comes for every firm in it. This happened to storage system vendors in the early and mid 2010s.

It isn't like the trade is that we get to work on interesting problems because the travel budget is slashed. Because of headcount clawbacks and concerns about backfill what I'm seeing is teams becoming more conservative and focused on keeping core customers happy rather than focusing on exciting new problems.

> focused on keeping core customers happy

What a shocking business priority!

Sure. I think that Google can and should prioritize this more. But when the above argument is something resembling "good people like working on flashy and interesting technical problems so why worry about the travel budget" then it becomes relevant to talk about how there also isn't going to be an unlimited amount of flashy and interesting technical problems.

Maybe they don't get to deprecate another chat service and have to support it longer this time or someone has to work on making Google Drive as fast as competitors.

Of note is that you and peers moved to more enriching work after making above your needs for a time.

Those choices are easier when you have a nice cushion.

>For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.

It is funny how people always consider their own politics as neutral. This is an inherently political statement as it sets up "advancing politics" as opposition to "meaningful work".

For some people the "meaningful work" they "just want to do" is to make the world a better place and that often isn't possible without "advancing politics". Maybe the "interesting product space" is to get one of the world's largest companies to reduce carbon emissions. People like that might view building adtech as the chore they endure for the opportunity to do "meaningful work" of fighting climate change.

I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM. They're a huge company that consistently has neat ideas that they cripple with mismanagement and are slowly looking to squeeze what they have harder and harder with time to keep up profit growth.

As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.

YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.

Google search barely works anymore.

Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.

Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.

Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure

In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.

You clearly don't remember television. A 30 minute TV slot had ~7 minutes of unskippable ads, and that's not including the product placement inside the shows. YouTube will have more like 1-2 minutes of skippable ads for a 20-30 minute show, plus an ad inside the show you can fast forward past.

I agree Google search barely works anymore though. I've currently switched to yandex which is still broken in other ways, and I've had bad luck with brave search and DDG results.

Have you watched YouTube much in the past week? They've overhauled their ad frequency. Videos are now starting with two unskippable ads and ads are now being displayed at a frequency of about every 5 minutes of content.

I agree here. I've started watching Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube and for a 40 minute episode there's usually 2 ads to start the episode and another 4 or 5 breaks for ads. The breaks are either 2 ads that can be skipped after 5 seconds or a single 15 second unskippable ad.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the creator decide on the quantity and ad placements? I've seen hour long videos with one every 5 minutes.

I used to think that. I was watching a video from a guy (Rick Beato) claiming to not monetize the particular video I was watching (he's never claimed not to monetize any of his videos). He no more than said I'm not monetizing this video when it stopped for an ad. I watch a lot of music instruction videos and it's obvious the content creators are not in control of ad placements. Ads appear whenever Google damn well decides they'll appear, even if it's the most inopportune time for the video. In that way YouTube is actually worse than TV.

You have to have a certain level of subscribers before youtube will let a content creator decide how the ads work.

I subscribed to YouTube Premium a year or so ago after somebody mentioned it here on HN. It was worth it; YouTube is a much more pleasant experience without ads.

I was already paying for YouTube Music, which I’m not as satisfied with but have stayed with ever since Google Play Music ended. Adding Premium for videos increased the subscription price for me by just a few dollars a month.

In the early days of cable, one of the benefits offered was few to no ads[1]. The idea was subscription fees would usually cover the cost of the programming, and advertising wasn't needed for revenue.

I definitely expect the cycle to repeat, personally.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

This is clearly and obviously a well worn trope and false.

Cable TV started as a method to rebroadcast broadcast TV with ads in places that could not get broadcast TV.

Then HBO came along. But was always a premium channel.

Then the Superstations came along that were rebroadcast of local channels nationally like TBS and WGN with ads.

Then cable channels like CNN, MTV, and ESPN came along - with ads.

There has never been a time that cable TV was ad free.

Yes, and if one reads that article--rather than just the headline--it's largely about how many viewers assumed that paying for cable would mean they'd have fewer ads but that wasn't actually happening.

Agreed. It's smart business to offer ad free to get people hooked, then ramp up the monetization once you have dominance.

If people will continue to pay and get ads you are leaving money on the table as a business.

TV ads were skippable too if you used a DVR, and also, they are a lot easier to ignore. I used to only watch things live when I really wanted to be part of the shared experience of having seen the premiere (and the associated discussions). By virtue of being further from the device, it seems like TV ads are less onerous on attention than youtube ads.

> YouTube will have more like 1-2 minutes of skippable ads for a 20-30 minute show, plus an ad inside the show you can fast forward past.

You must be using different YouTube than the rest of us. Or you're trolling. Or you work for Google.

Most episodes of "hour-long" shows from ten to twenty years ago are 42 minutes long. That's because US television had standardized on 18 minutes of ads per hour. I don't think YouTube is quite there yet.

Maybe not the duration due to the "skip" button, but YouTube seems to interrupt way more frequently, and you watch the same ad way more often than you would on TV. And the interruptions are just right in the middle of a sentence.

This definitely has some nostalgia from the good ol’ days going on or something…

It was not uncommon to see the same ad in a single hour of content. I’d see the exact same ads for years when watching tv.

Did you forget when shows would stop running late at night and it’d be a 4 hour straight advertisement?

> Google search barely works anymore.

This seems a bit exaggerated. Can you provide some examples? Also for the problem you are encountering, what alternative do you use? I have no issues with Google search that I can think of.

> Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.

I can't speak for their phones, but the Android OS has been rock solid for me for years. I loathe the Apple experience - on both iPhone and Macbook Pro - so this idea that they can't compete with Apple is not something I can agree with. I'm not even sure if it's a fair comparison as they have different goals aside from the mobile experience.

I agree with everything else you said though.

I find myself using the `site:` keyword much more often than before when searching for quite obvious stuff using Google Search. The first page of search results always consists of some useless SEO-optimized shit or is simply missing relevant results.

A month ago or so, when I was researching some MS tech topics, Google Search results did not include any links to the docs.microsoft.com website. However, the results included some Chinese mirrors of docs.microsoft.com with weird names (blablahxyz321.GFWproxy.com or something like that). This never happened before, so something is really broken.

And it's just one example of many. I have to switch between three search engines thorough a day, and it's frustrating.

>I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM. They're a huge company that consistently has neat ideas that they cripple with mismanagement and are slowly looking to squeeze what they have harder and harder with time to keep up profit growth.

Because they still pay at top tier levels so the hustle cult kiddies are still obsessed with it.

> Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.

There are things that can be improved in Android software, and some of those upstream problems, plus vendor add-ons, can cause phones to be buggy. But there are three billion active Android devices in use - buggy or not, it is in significant use.

It's also nice being able to compile AOSP (or in my case LineageOS), and sideload it onto my Motorola Edge 5G and be able to futz around with it.

In this case I'm thinking of the pixel series, where Google owns the stack and should be able to make a phone without issues, but has consistently failed to do so.

Not just pixel either. Their slate project had similar problems.

> I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM.

Because they aren't?

> As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.

This will happen whether or not employees love them. Every company gets replaced. Very few have staying power. Id be shocked if <insert your favorite tech company> isn't replaced.

> Google search barely works anymore.

Oh? I've been able to find everything I'm looking for, and the new QA cards, leaving aside the ethical argument, actually saves me so much time. Not sure which google you're using.

> YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.

Hmm, on your version of youtube are you able to skip parts of the video you find boring? On your TV does watching certain videos serve up more videos in the same vein? If not, then they are nothing alike.

> Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.

Maybe tensorflow doesn't mean much to you, but I bet others would be thankful for its release. Besides they have no obligation to release any new AI development to the public. This is just your personal expectation of them.

> Their phones have all been pretty buggy.

Every phone is buggy compared to Apple, but their own phones are significantly less buggy than 3rd party android phones. Have you used an Oppo or Xiaomi phone?

> Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure

Not sure this is relavant. This probably highlights more of the other two's strength's rather than GCP's weakness. Personally for new projects I use GCP over AWS for various reasons.

> In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.

All companies die.

This seems really defensive and has a lot of misdirection.

Yes, all companies will die, but Google appears to be over that hill. That's significant.

Google should be able to make amazing phone hardware, not praised because they do better than cheap bottom dollar phone companies.

Tensorflow isn't a product. It's a very good library, but with Google's prowess something like stable diffusion wouldn't exist. Imagine Google search being able to generate the image you're looking for, for example.

And television is worse than YouTube, but they're slowly adding ads and it's getting more obnoxious over time. The natural endpoint is that there are so many ads people just leave the platform.

And Google is the biggest website in the world. They're failing to enter new markets. Aws and azure shouldn't be stronger than Google is, and it's a sign they aren't able to compete.

It's common practice to append reddit to Google searches to find what you want. That shouldn't happen either.

Failure and flaw after failure and flaw. You can't keep up that way forever, and I haven't seen signs that they are turning around

Disclaimer: I work at AWS in Professional Services and I’ve work with AWS and Microsoft (less so Azure) on the other side as a dev lead as a customer.

Cloud and the enterprise is very high touch and requires understanding the customer and meeting them where they are and not try to convince them of the “one true way”. It also requires respecting the customers business processes and understanding the politics of any large organization.

I have no opinions about GCP and even if I did, it would be gauche to criticize a competitor. I’ve never had a reason to have any dependency on anything Google as part of my work. Google itself doesn’t have the DNA that is required to work with the enterprise. Microsoft has been building those competencies since the mid 80s and AWS has first mover advantage.

It’s also the same reason that Google struggles with consumer products compared to Apple. Apple has spent decades selling to consumers, having human customer service, a network of Apple Stores, etc.

It's defensive in comparison to your initial diatribe. You equated them to IBM. Maybe they will be IBM in 10 years if things don't improve, but for now they are pretty far from it.

Not sure what misdirection you are referring to. Your reply right here primarily talks about how they haven't met your expectation. That's very different from declaring a company is on the verge of becoming a dinosaur.

> The natural endpoint is that there are so many ads people just leave the platform.

Assuming that no one on google is looking at their viewership data and don't notice the "leaving". If that happens I'm sure they days as a notoriously data driven company is over and they will in fact die on all fronts. But for now they still show signs of experimenting, however minor, in all the major products they have.

> It's common practice to append reddit to Google searches to find what you want. That shouldn't happen either.

This is for a extremely specific query type. I do it only when I am looking for people's opinions on certain things, and is certainly not something I do every day. I know lots of others who don't do this either, especially the millions of non reddit users.

> Aws and azure shouldn't be stronger than Google is, and it's a sign they aren't able to compete.

Yea, primarily because GCP has the worst corporate sales team. AWS and Azure routinely do conferences and meet and greets with dev communities and are constantly pushing their product. Azure especially. I would squarely put the fault there rather than the product itself. GCP has a significantly cleaner interface than AWS and can do almost anything AWS/Azure can do. Other than the "specialty" products of course.

> AWS and Azure routinely do conferences and meet and greets with dev communities and are constantly pushing their product

So you think its because of marketing. Not because of something else...

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

I remember when my old company cut the "swag" to the tune of about $100,000 a year. The CFO was proud of himself but the work environment wasn't great before that, which lead to a few key people leaving. They had stayed not for swag but the social parts of the job were keeping people happy. A few more followed them. It wasn't long before half of the tech team had gone.

At the time we were spending about 40k for recruiter fees to replace each engineer. During my exit interview I asked the CFO if he thought that math worked out. He had some regrets.

It's interesting that the Software Dev job market has been on fire for over a decade but retention strategies have evolved at a glacial pace. The industry just collectively decided turnover is to be expected and eat all the associated costs - which are significantly higher than many other professions inside the org.

I mean, in general, management as a group has no idea how to retain employees.

Part of this is because (as you allude to) a very significant chunk of them don't even believe that's important to do: employees are just interchangeable cogs in their system, grinding along to produce bonuses for them.

But part of it is because retention is about motivation, which is a very, very complicated topic, and any attempt to create a one-size-fits-all solution to it will inevitably fail.

Of course, a large percentage of those who do believe that retention is important are deeply convinced they know exactly what one-size-fits-all solution is The One True Way, and anyone who doesn't respond to it is just some degenerate weirdo.

So they go on missing, and we go on shaking our heads.

Not even expected: Preferred! Every company I've worked at would rather pay $X+2 to a fresh new employee than retain an experienced employee by raising his or her salary from $X to $X+1. I can't explain it.

Let's not forget they also colluded to prevent poaching and still have employees sign illegal non-competes.

It's somewhat of a chicken and egg sort of thing. If some segment of your workforce seems to have high turnover in spite of efforts to retain people, maybe it makes sense to stop trying so hard and accept that it's just a market dynamic.

I sense there's a bit of a crisis with top tech firms. They cannot afford to keep paying the wages the tech market demands. Costs must come down. It's feels things are reaching a tipping point.

> It's interesting that the Software Dev job market has been on fire for over a decade but retention strategies have evolved at a glacial pace

Capitalism. The absentee shareholders' interests trample everyone else's interests. Even the actual founders' interests...

I doubt he had any regrets as long as his boss was happy with his decision.

Very few people give a shit if something is cost effective, ethical, or even intelligent to do if their boss is happy with the decision or they’re able to placate their boss.

I was at this meeting.

Seriously, Googlers are the softest, whiniest people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. We are coddled and spoiled and at the first hint of not being spoiled, people are falling apart and crumbling.

One person had the nerve to say Google was “hurting” employees by taking away the travel and entertainment expenses. Hurting? I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.

Another characterized Google as “aggressively cost cutting.” Holy fuck. All they did was freeze hiring and stop unnecessary T&E. If they think this is aggressive cost cutting, their mind will be blown if a recession hits is hard.

I wish Google would go through the Meta route and lay off 15%. I’ve never worked with a lazier, more spoiled group of people in my life.

On the one hand, you're not wrong that getting amazing perks taken away shouldn't produce complaints like this.

On the other hand, what the hell is the justification for it? Google's making money hand over fist over knee over ankle. Their quarterly net income (not annual, not gross) is in the double-digit billions.

This is telling every Google employee who actually works on stuff (as opposed to managing people) "you, your comfort, and your professional development are less important to us than a tiny, tiny fraction of our quarterly profit. We at the top need to focus on making our dollar-denominated high scores go up even higher, so you all just have to tighten your belts and accept that you don't matter."

> This is telling every Google employee who actually works on stuff (as opposed to managing people) "you, your comfort, and your professional development are less important to us than a tiny, tiny fraction of our quarterly profit. We at the top need to focus on making our dollar-denominated high scores go up even higher, so you all just have to tighten your belts and accept that you don't matter."

Basically, yes. I would use much more polite phrasing but you basically got it right. I think anyone who is offended by the underlying message here is misunderstanding how valuable an employee is. An employee is only as valuable as their replacement cost. And, that’s often completely detached from a company’s earnings. It’s not a pleasant message, but it’s reality and people would be better off if they realized this. To be clear, this applies to managers and execs as well.

You may see it applying to managers and execs as well, but it's (almost) never applied to them. It's always "growth didn't meet expectations, gotta lay off an entire division", never "profits are down, gotta cut the CEO's salary from $300 million down to $125 million—hope he didn't want to buy three yachts this quarter!"

We've spent far too long worshiping at the altar of Number Go Up. That is not the purpose of companies. They exist, fundamentally, to improve life for real people, and too many people have lost sight of that.

> That is not the purpose of companies. They exist, fundamentally, to improve life for real people,

From where do you get that idea? From a legal standpoint, the purpose of corporations is ambiguous (take a look at the Articles of Incorporation for any of these corporations for details). Corporations are simply a legal structure to protect officers from liability, define decision making power, and distribute profits to shareholders.

Ultimately, the board has the power to control company direction. So, to the extent that there's a "fundamental purpose of a company", it is whatever the board wants it to be. And, in almost all cases, that purpose is to maximize profits.

I can understand if what you're saying is that you WISH all corporations' fundamental purpose was to improve life for real people, but that simply isn't reality, legally or practically.

So I was also at this meeting. I agree that its a really spoiled discussion. But there is also a lot more un-published cost cutting. They have been aggressively slashing budget for servers (!) and hiring. Also I don't think the very ad-hominem attacks on employees are warranted, they're spoiled but they've been given the leeway and been told its ok and to expect that.

Freezing hiring is typically considered pretty aggressive.

> I wish Google would go through the Meta route and lay off 15%. I’ve never worked with a lazier, more spoiled group of people in my life.

I think making people just be more productive is probably better. I'm sure existing attrition is enough. I do think the fun budget cuts and that sort of thing are pretty silly to cut. If the median salary is 300k, then a few hundred per person is a drop in the bucket.

> One person had the nerve to say Google was “hurting” employees by taking away the travel and entertainment expenses.

Sounds just the culture of the US, or at least the Google management encourages such culture. Anything is hurting. Words are weapons. Everyone is victim. Military is evil. Gebrus are oppressed. How many times did people apologize for using the word "guys" or get yelled for using the word because it was not "gender neutral"(for the fuck's sake it is, BTW)? Yeah, I saw a few times. Compared with such "hurting", yeah, cutting travel and entertainment definitely hurts.

> Military is evil

You are suggesting that the US military is not evil.

I was suggesting that military is not entirely evil and the US needs military, just like Ukraine needs one.

> Googlers are the softest, whiniest people

It is hard to tell what percentage of Googlers feel the same way as you do. Maybe those voicing issues over cuts in travel represent the small minority?

Anecdote but my close friend joined Google about a year ago. His sentiments are pretty similar to yours - he says he’s never experienced such entitlement before. Not sure if Pichai is taking the right approach but I can see where he’s coming from.

> Googlers are the softest, whiniest people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with

Because they complained about a TRILLION dollar company trying to cut a few hundred dollars per person to maximize absentee shareholders' quarterly profits. At the cost of reducing employee satisfaction? Even as it makes $72 freaking BILLION dollars net profit every year?

They don't seem whiny or soft. You seem naive, and very exploitable. With that kind of 'tough, enduring guy' mentality that prevents you from reading in between the lines and protecting you and your groups' interests, you will be the perfect cog in the machine wherever you work.

I know Google employees who pretty much took arbitrary time off during Covid. There was seemingly no accountability as the cash cow kept on producing and stock prices kept on going up.

Google employees who feel hurt by these actions can feel free to find a better deal elsewhere. After all, they're clearly the cream of the crop by virtue of being paid huge sums of money...

I believe the classic is "Be careful what you wish for." Petty bullshit and disregard for feelings of underlings is what got us the Traitorous Eight in the first place. Telling them basically "Grow up and get up early and wear a suit and tie." proved to be a failure of epic proportions.

Failure for the company, but great for the industry!

Wouldn't you argue this is a good thing as all of these people can go on to take risks by starting new companies?

A long time ago at Google ,,fun'' was equal to user and customer obsession (looking at logs and other data and trying to understand how to make the products better).

Sundar is an amazing sales person and PM, but Google went too much on the PM/Sales side and puts too much pressure and impossible amount of work on engineers (I started my last quarter by knowing that I won't be able to finish most of the OKRs that were put on by other people from other teams to me, I signaled to my TL, but I didn't care at that point as I was planning to quit anyways).

The pressure is so high that the best engineers and engineering managers there that I know are moving to research where they are left alone to do great and fun stuff.

Hasn't been my experience at all. I worked mostly decent hours at G, while at startups they demanded 10-12h of work a day, if not more, with little to no perks and lower comp.

Google is far down on the path to becoming a "rest and vest" place like Microsoft, and they don't want that to happen.

When you say you wouldn't be able to make OKRs, is that working normal hours, or working extra hours? From my understanding, Google OKRs are only supposed to be hit at 70%-90%. If you hit 100%, they failed at putting the bar high enough.

I never had an experience like this in ten years at Google. If I ever felt done trying to get promoted, I'm confident I could have worked 25 hours a week and gotten "meets expectations" forever.

That kind of work doesn't satisfy many people. Especially not people who manage to get a job at Google. I went crazy resting and vesting once I realized that 5 -> 6 would be nearly impossible in the position I had.

It wouldn't have satisfied me either, I just wanted to counterbalance the idea that Google consistently demands 50 hour weeks.

> puts too much pressures and impossible amount of work on engineers

My understanding is this varies widely by department/manager, and that on average big tech companies work way less hours per day than engineers at startups, for higher base pay & more liquid options. With much more support structure as well.

So basically Google starting to look like Apple with Pichai looking like Sculley?

> Google went too much on the PM/Sales side

Did they?

They are still deprecating products on people's faces. And combining/renaming/tweaking product names.

When was Google about anything more than collecting user data to display ads. No user has ever said “it would really be great if we had more ads”. Giving the user what they want is antithetical to profitability for any company whose business model is anything else besides “customer gives us money and we give them goods and services”

This is such a reductive view of most tech companies that have ads.

Sometimes "giving customers [most of] what they want" is profitable - so they come back later and have a multi-year relationship and use a variety of profit-generating products. Even if that means forgoing short-term profit from extra ads.

Google’s entire business model is giving users stuff for free to serve ads - as is FB.

We aren’t talking about Apple giving three months free to entice customers to subscribe to AppleTV+ or Apple Music.

Have you ever been to one of those websites that had so many ads you couldn’t see the content (when it loaded 30 seconds later)? Banners and pop up’s and auto playing video all stacked on top of each other…

Google and Facebook don’t look like that. Those sort of sites will never become a lasting concern like google or Facebook because users hate it. Google could make more money if 50% of search results were ads but then people would stop using search and they’d lose all their business. Instead they put less ads and hope you use maps, which also has a few ads, then YouTube which has a few ads then… then… then… It’s a lot more sustainable to “increase inventory” by increasing surface area for customers than using a bigger % of existing area. Same reason cable gets more channels instead of bigger % of existing airtime going to ads. Just like television- you can have a good show, even though ads are in between. that doesn’t make the writing any worse, the writers will still do their best. If you have a good experience with search, you’ll use it for years, and you may use other products since you had a good experience.

I worked at Google as an SRE. I'm at Meta now. I always disliked all the swag (goes straight into the trash) and parties and travel. But I'm a suburban mom so I don't need more junk and I like to be home with my family. Remote work is all the perks I'll ever want or need. Maybe tech companies should hire more suburban moms. We can be placated with boxes of wine and zoom yoga classes lmaooo.

> Remote work is all the perks I'll ever want or need. Maybe tech companies should hire more suburban moms.

TBH, as a hiring manager outside of a FAANG, "mid-career parents who want to work remotely" is really the sweet spot for me.

I can't offer enough compensation to compete with FAANGs for new graduates of elite universities, so I have to look at lower tier institutions. That's not to say they're bad or anything... I and many of my best employees dropped out of state schools. But generally, the ceiling is lower, and identifying a new graduate's value is really hard.

And because I'm at a tech company which is not in a super exciting tech hub, I have to be exceptionally remote friendly to land good candidates.

But the thing is: there are tons of employees out there who are smart, get things done, and want to clock out for the day with enough time to cook dinner and play with their kids. We've even hired a few ex-Amazon/Googler's who left because the pay was great but they wanted to have a family.

I selfishly find myself hoping that remote work isn't embraced by those places, or else I'll lose my hiring edge.

As a mommy who is thinking of having another child the thing that would make me leave Meta would be part time work. If I could work remote 3 days a week I would take much lower pay. Even though I have a track record of saving companies a lot of money with my projects and a great resume it feels like nobody wants to considering hiring me at 3 days a week. I'll keep trying, or eventually I'll leave the tech industry and do something for myself where I can bill clients directly....

You should sell the swag. Apparently there are people across the country who buy/collect corporate swag. Especially swag of ones that are dead startups or failed businesses.

I suspect that, like many things the right person would want but which don't have a lot of intrinsic value, connecting them to someone who would actually put cash on the barrel is probably more trouble than it's worth.

That's what eBay and internet aggregation is for.

I have sold on eBay and it's a pain in the neck especially for a random one-off sale, and I'm probably not going to get >$100 for a random box of tech swag--which is what it would have to be for it to even start being worthwhile. I also have a big stack of laserdiscs. Same thing.

> We can be placated with boxes of wine and zoom yoga classes lmaooo.

You may have a business idea there.

Huh I was at this meeting and it didn’t seem heated.

To me it felt like a CEO explaining difficult choices and the reasoning behind them.

My work place has been going through its “return to office” discussions and if there’s one thing it’s taught me it’s that tone and perception are wildly different among people. One persons “direct and no bullshit” is another’s “uncaring and defensive” is another’s “angry and abusive”. And if a news company can’t find one person to think something is “heated” or “dismissive” or “angry” they will latch onto that person for their headlines.

Google's net income in just Q2 was 16 billion dollars.

These are not "difficult choices". But they do like to make them at the expense of employees.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings...

Just a reminder that Google had a net income of $76 billion in 2021, and are sitting on cash equivalents of damn near $130 billion. The end is near!

So many difficult choices. Less swag, more stock buybacks because that's how executives get paid!

This. Pichai doesn't need to cut the perks/ travel expenses and freeze hiring. He just wants to. It's a weird power play.

To echo the other answers to your comment.

What the CEO's answer revealed exactly how much he values employees at Google.

Also I would recommend you remember his answer next time the executives' compensation is adjusted.

Depends on how you interpret Memegen...

Memegen lead to a much toxic culture at google.

imo the problem with big tech executives who rose through the ranks in the growth phase of the company is that after the exponential growth in the employee count they expect the individual performance to be the same as their time in the company without changing anything in the leadership style.

being scrappy might work when you have <1000 employees since the chaos might be manageable but when you have 100000 people working in the company scattered around the world, the leadership must also adapt otherwise you get bloated companies that are ran like a headless chicken.

Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors for having fun instead of working and slacking off but it's so hard for them to hold themselves accountable for the situation of their companies. They get their bonuses when the company is performing well but when times are tough it's because of a regular employee slacking off. ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.

> ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.

This is the lifecycle of all corporations.

Before Google and Facebook we had Yahoo and Myspace. Now TikTok is doing the same thing and Sundar and Zuckerberg are crying about it.

They shot themselves in the foot de-platforming and censor content creators. Those creators were welcomed with open arms by Google and Facebook competitors. I see more and more creators pushing their YouTube and Instagram audiences over to Rumble or TikTok. Clearly it's starting to be a real problem for the bottom line.

Before you say TikTok does the same, that's true, but it's not the point. Creators don't like having to walk on eggshells if they can avoid it.

Yes I’m sure that Google is going to lose billions because it deplatformed some fringe folks.

If they were such a powerful voice, Truth Social wouldn’t be struggling.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

The inescapable fact of the matter is TikTok is eating Instagram's lunch. I bet we'll see Rumble do the same to YouTube in a year or two.

> Yes I’m sure that Google is going to lose billions because it deplatformed some fringe folks.

In the long run, yes. Because what's defined as 'fringe' and undesirable can change any moment like it had in the past with changing governments and corporate sentiment, and the next 'fringe' group may be a group that you are in. Even if it feels like that would be nigh on impossible at this moment.

If QAnon, election deniers, and their backers - including the former President - becomes mainstream, we are all in deep shit.

https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/qanon-trump-conspiracy-the...

The problem with deplatforming the fringe is that fringe is not measured in absolute terms. It's measured in relative terms. After the fringe group gets removed, the Overton Window shifts and a new group becomes fringe.

Eventually what is fringe gets too close to the average group of people, and they start getting wary.

Should Facebook not ban post on voting misinformation?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-election-exclusi...

Facebook can't accurately identify "misinformation", but you think they're qualified to be the arbiters of what's true? Give me a break.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

> Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors

That will do much good to their hiring process...

Money for me, but not for thee. During times of record profits and huge cash reserves, difficult choices must be made. If you are not passionate about making stakeholders and leadership more money while they decrease spending on you, then you need to rethink your priorities!

Most of Google comp is stock, so wouldn't that bode well for employees as well? At my current position my base is about 20% of my TC.

Sadly citing that would do nothing for the budget. 10$/employee in ones org is many multiples of that outing

This morning I saw a Google Cloud executive post on their LinkedIn page that they had an offsite where they made custom Nike shoes that looked like Noogler hats.

Um, maybe you should start your cuts there.

he's been CEO for the last 7 years, any drastic culture change is on him.

Funny to watch these CEOs try to shift blame for their failures recently. All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason and now are crying about "deadweight" employees. Perhaps the people who approved the hiring plans are who should be blamed?

And it'll also be hilarious in a few years watching them scramble to hire again once they cut the 'deadweight' and all those guys just to move to Ohio or something to work in regular companies without much loss in TC (but half the CoL).

If you don't need the engineers, plenty of companies are hungry to snatch them up.

> And it'll also be hilarious in a few years watching them scramble to hire again once they cut the 'deadweight'

Yep. 'Discarding people like trash' will be added to Google's reputation of 'discarding users like trash' with their 'deprecations'.

Yea but then they have to live in Ohio.

I learned something when I worked at Google that would never have occurred to me. They hired a ton of people from the midwest- smart computer people who couldn't find good jobs in the midwest. They moved out to Sunnyvale and Cupertino and hated it. Many of them wanted to return to the midwest, but got accustomed to Google pay and didn't want to take a cut moving.

As a Bay Area aficionado, I couldn't quite get this, but when I saw how these folks lived in Cupertino and Sunnyvale (tiny, overpriced houses with ultra-competitive school districts) I could kind of understand the desire to return to an Ohio, or Illinois, or Indiana.

As someone who lived in Ohio for a little while but is now back in the bay, I get it even if I wouldn't do it.

If you're from the midwest, the quaint little midwestern culture is what you know. And it is super cheap, so the cost of entry is low. I know people who moved to Ohio when I was there - "temporarily", and fell in love. You can move to a (small) city, and it has home-town vibes and the people there are townies. Its so easy to make friends and just click and feel like you belong. Everyone does the same things (or some subset of the same things) and goes to the same places, so there's a strong shared cultural overlap, because, yes, that's your friend groups favorite bar too!.

That said, I hated the weather, it was awful compared to the bay. Many cities have "Detroit syndrome" where the business left and everyone is talking doom and gloom about how their city will never make a comeback (even if its in the middle of a comeback). If you're not straight and white and American you may connect less to it, since its got strong "All American" vibes in the 'burbs and a strong religious majority. You're less likely to find the crazy driven type-A overachievers since they moved out to bigger places.

Anyone who wants a break from the Bay or NYC I always point them to Cleveland. Every major sports team for you to root for, houses cost less than a VCR, a few good schools feeding the local businesses, and a great history full of cultural places in the city. Some of the best public schools in Ohio (rocky river, shaker heights, etc). Some of the best museums anywhere, and the best off-broadway theater district. And one of the best hospitals anywhere, because you never know if you'll get sick/hurt. Truly amazing considering the COL can be 1/10 that of San Francisco.

Google hasnt made a great product in longer than 7 years though. He took over a listless ship. It's been a lot of freefall and coasting.... being kept afloat my an advertising monopoly. Now that the monopoly is starting to unravel a bit Google has realized things will need to change, fat needs to be trimmed and innovation must return.

And to make it more fun it has yoyo'd. In 2020 it was panic, doom and gloom. Then suddenly it's irresponsible party time. And now back to doom and gloom.

The roaring 20s...

Not exactly how I'd characterize it :)

But the Google interview process is so hard, and requires either an active theoretical math / CS practice knowledge or months of studying algorithms.

Surely such a system would never filter on the wrong employee type.

And when they reverse gear, it is usually not the "dead weight" that gets axed, as the dead weight's priority is on looking after number 1, while good engineers get duped into caring about 'challenging problems' or 'the company'.

> All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason

Management broadly assumed the pandemic boom was the new normal, but now they are sacrificing labor to placate the wrath of Wall street gods in order to keep their jobs.

The pandemic also seemingly threw off some hiring patterns and companies ended up increasing overall headcount faster and sooner than they planned to.

Tech workers became too cocky and this is basically a message from the ones in charge, the billionaire class to say “know your place”.

Your money and privilege can be taken from you at any moment.

This is not about economy or things slowing down. It is about showing the tech workers they are just cogs in the machine, the laborers that should focus on work and not talk back to their employers.

This is exactly what it's about. Google has made a point of ensuring their employees think of themselves as the absolute best. They have nurtured an attitude of arrogance, because it has benefited them greatly from a recruiting perspective and created a positive brand in our prestige-obsessed current market. Now that the ship is turning a bit, execs are wanting to redirect company resources back to themselves at the expense of employees, and they need the employees to know their place.

Googlers: I'll sign up for a random conference to get an all expenses paid trip to Europe

Google: actually in light of recent macroeconomic conditions, don't do that

Googlers: bruh!!! You are treating us like COGS in a MACHINE!

> Googlers: bruh!!! You are treating us like COGS in a MACHINE!

Yeah. If you expect that much excellence, committment, prioritizing the company over their freakin family from who you hire, you are responsible with treating them the way you promised them at the start.

Exactly this. The labor market has been heavily weighted for the laborer lately, and this whole "macroeconomic headwinds" chant we're hearing from leaders of every Fortune 500 right now is simply them trying to stave off further increases in wages. The macroeconomic issues aren't going to realistically affect Google or most large companies.

> The labor market has been heavily weighted for the laborer lately

Is that remark missing some context?

Employers have posted record profits while making savage cuts. They've availed of massive subsidies without any oversight. The wealthiest have hoovered up damn near all of the productivity gains of the last 50 years, and are still doing it.

This while rent has skyrocketed and the cost of living has inflated hugely. We're now at the point where many fully employed people across the neoliberal world are homeless, and many others are barely surviving, while their employers are buying new luxury cars and yachts.

It's perverse, and you might want to be careful saying that laborers have it easy out there in the real world because there's quite a bit of resentment about it all.

> fully employed people across the neoliberal world are homeless

Until you people start having the courage to name capitalism instead of using escape words like 'neoliberal', things will keep worsening the same.

To be fair, there are a lot of inflated egos among the rank and file of FAANG laborers.

> Your money and privilege can be taken from you at any moment.

They can just quit and find even better employment elsewhere. With more stock options, more autonomy and perks.

Lodging in city centers has become outrageously expensive and I talked to several people at Meta recently who were struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets. If I had to stress out about affording a room during a mandatory work trip, I'd be pissed too. If you can't afford to put your staff up at a decent hotel near your office, don't make them travel.

These big companies clearly hate remote work as it seems. Even Apple is forcing its workers to go back to the office.

I guess they want workers to be presential but don't want to pay them enough for the expenses huh.

Why do you say "even Apple"? I would have expected Apple in particular to be against working from home and for on premise secrecy

Apple is trying but not succeeding very well (from my friends who work there - some of whom do go in nearly daily).

Google and Apple campuses are quite empty most of the time.

I had to travel for work from London to Ottawa. They put me up in a suite hotel; there was a kitchenette, a huge TV, another huge TV in the bedroom, a second double bedroom, and a bathroom with twin washbasins.

The next day I discovered a utility room with a washer and dryer; and a second bathroom, also with twin washstands. The only problem was that the hotel had no bar; to get booze, I had to go to the hotel next door.

I later learned that there was a major international conference going on in Ottawa at that time, and all the hotel rooms had been taken by politicians and diplomats. They weren't doing me a favour; they were just ensuring as best they could that I didn't jump on the next flight back to London.

> struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets

Don't they have a travel department to worry about booking accommodations? I can confirm hotels in some cities (downtown Boston, for example), are crazy pricy these days. It seems like you can't even find a bad hotel under $450 depending on what is happening that week or weekend.

A travel department? I work in consulting at $BigTech. We go into Concur and book our travel. Sure we have a policy about how much we can spend on hotels. But if I book “our of policy” for any reason, my explanation can be as simple as “I wanted to be in walking distance to the site” and have never gotten push back. Especially when it was for in house traffic (ie not billing a customer)

Urban hotels seem to have gotten back to something like pre-COVID levels depending on what's going on at a given time. I live far enough out of Boston that I occasionally book hotel when I'm at a multi-day event and pricing in Boston and Cambridge are pretty much in line with NYC, SF, and other top dollar places.

> Google launched an effort in July called “Simplicity Sprint,” which aimed to solicit ideas from its more than 174,000 employees on how to “get to better results faster” and “eliminate waste.” Earlier this month, Pichai said he hoped to make the company 20% more productive while slowing hiring and investments.

> One of the top-rated questions posed by employees at this week’s meeting asked Pichai to elaborate on his commentary regarding improved productivity and the 20% goal.

> “I think you could be a 20-person team or a 100-person team, we are going to be constrained in our growth in a looking-ahead basis,” Pichai said. “Maybe you were planning on hiring six more people but maybe you are going to have to do with four and how are you going to make that happen? The answers are going to be different with different teams.”

Lol, this reads like Google just got bought by a private-equity firm. Just desperately trying to cut costs any way they can, with little regard to how that will play into the core business

I'm obviously biased here, but imo an engineering organization succeeds by hiring smart engineers, making them happy, giving them agency, and giving them just enough structure so that they're working towards useful goals instead of spinning their wheels. This is what made Google so successful in the earlier days.

The more you constrain with management and process, the more you slash-and-burn costs, the more you kill that energy:

> Pichai admitted that it’s not just the economy that’s caused challenges at Google but also an expanding bureaucracy at Google.

Sounds like Google's on the downhill. Subjectively feels like it started around the time Pichai became CEO- though correlation isn't causation.

> Google has record profits and huge cash reserves

It's clear this is being driven by short-term shareholder demands instead of actual operational desperation. Sad to see Google get strangled like this (though maybe also not sad, given what they've morphed into over the years).

It's embarrassing when a company puts out a giant suggestion box to figure out how to be efficient. It means the company has no clue how it operates. You shouldn't have to ask random employees what the problems are. You should already know, because identifying and eliminating inefficiency (in order to improve quality) should be part of your standard practice. Putting out a giant suggestion box is the laziest and least useful way imaginable. You have no idea which 'suggestion' is a bigger problem, you have no metrics, no context. It's just 7,000 people complaining about 7,000 random things.

Don't get me wrong - the low-level people always know what is wrong and know how to fix it. But nobody in upper management gives a shit. Which is why your company is inefficient. Soliciting advice from random ICs now will result in the same dont-give-a-shit syndrome by management. And management continues to do whatever bullshit helps themselves rather than the company or ICs.

Google is not well run. People need to get that through their heads. They were so profit and cash flush that many bad behaviors were left unchecked.

Well run is Amazon or Apple. Not perfect but the best run large companies out their today

Sometimes, a suggestions box is a hunt for a scape goat. Do you plan to make an unpopular change but don't want any of the blame? Gather a bunch of suggestions, then choose one close to your original plan. Now nobody can say your choices show your disconnect from regular employees.

A company that releases three messaging apps during their yearly conference and leaves city roads in ruins because they are no longer interested in one of their projects, is not “well run”.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

Never really thought about it until you laid it out, and yeah it is troubling.

At my company there have been meetings on how to be “innovative.” The suggestions are straight out of Dilbert. Someone said we needed more meetings and everyone agreed. Another said that everything we do is innovative and everyone agreed.

I have no idea how a modern corporation is suppose to work I guess. Maybe the dream is be innovative me become large then watch the next few generations of leadership slowly tear the company down into irrelevancy.

I forgot where I read this but there’s an idea of a “manager” class that refuses to innovative or change anything because rocking the boat potentially means losing out on bonuses or stocks or promotions, so you do everything in your power to maintain the status quo until you go to the next gig basically playing a game of hot potato until you retire. The “manager” class has taken over the corporate world for decades.

I think this was Econ talk but I’m unsure.

Last year I signed up for YouTube premium, but cancelled it after a few months.

Then, a few months later, I noticed that Google was still billing me -- so I put in a complaint and explained the problem and pointed out the receipts I had... and they just rejected my complaint after "careful review" (lol) and didn't reimburse my money.

It was only about $75, but I remember thinking to myself that Google is obviously going to &%^.

I felt like I had no recourse and Google had just stolen $75 from me and then told me to #$%^ off.

I realized this year that the big tech companies are no longer the scrappy startups I grew up with. They're the IBM and Sears of today. Their days are numbered.

It's been well over a decade since Google has been anything like a scrappy startup. What surprised me about this incident, however, was that Google flat-out robbed me and apparently does not care one iota about their reputation or the goodwill of their user base. The message to me could not have been clearer: WE STOLE YOUR MONEY, NOW FUCK OFF.

Similar thing happened to me with Stadia, signed up for free month, cancelled, noticed they billed me 2 months. Pointed it out to them, they said they wouldn't reimburse me. They'll never get a cent from me again.

As a sibling commented: "WE STOLE YOUR MONEY, NOW FUCK OFF."

Why have you not initiated a chargeback?

that's a good question -- I wonder if I still can

Back up your google data (gmail, google drive, etc.) before you do, because there's a pretty high chance they'll premaban you after that.

> “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” he said. “Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”

Google is not small. Is too regulated to be scrappy. And is NOT a startup

It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.

Yes it’s an ads monopoly with only 40% share at most and it’s competing with Amazon and Facebook.

> Is too regulated to be scrappy.

There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations.

This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.

It's so funny to me hearing Sundar Pichai of all people advocating for scrappiness considering he is probably the most overpaid CEO in the world [1]. Now also consider that Google's profits have never been higher [2]. The amount of net income per employee is eye-watering.

This is end-stage capitalism and the relentless search for profit growth that ultimately squeezes the workers who make that profit possible.

Years ago when I still worked at Google Patrick Pichette (then CFO before Ruth Porat) got up on stage at an annual meeting and announced that their scrappiness efforts had saved $40 million and that's a lot of money. Someone produced a meme saying "yes, that's the difference between your pay rise and mine". He did in fact get a pay rise that year of $40 million.

The employees are right. Even when I was still there there were clearly cuts in the food, cuts in the MKs, cuts in swag, cuts in entertainment budgets and so on.

[1]: https://qz.com/1979291/alphabets-sundar-pichai-is-the-most-o...

[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...

Pichette also virtue-signalled (scrappy-signalled) by insisting on taking public transportation in busy cities instead of private transport. Some folks thought this was great but I thought it was a waste of his time given his pay level and the lost work opportunities.

Google works on interesting things? I guess to PhDs into ML.

They scrapped cutting edge R&D and became a one-trick ad-pushing pony. When the companies trajectory has been away from interesting ideas into ad laden messes and Gmail UX refreshes, the perks are all people show up for. I could work on shoving 10 ads in a YT video? Sign me up!

I question whether Sundar is a good CEO. Google succeeded given the broader economic shift to tech, not his leadership. Pedaling nostalgia for a time when growth was easy suggests to me he has no idea how to iterate forward in interesting ways.

Please don't "equate fun with money" says the executive with the multi-million dollar compensation package.

I don't even disagree, it's just hilarious coming from a CEO of one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world.

Anyone remember that Larry Page guy who used to run Google and created the brilliant culture that's now starting to fade away? He's now currently in a remote island in Fiji and has been since the start of the pandemic. What the hell happened to make him completely drop out of business and tech?

That's actually way more relatable and human than being compelled to squeeze additional percentage out of an ads machine, imo.

He became a billionaire.

<< Pichai responded by saying that telling the entire workforce of cuts is “not a scaleable way to do it,” but he said he will “try and notify the company of the more important updates.”

Importance is clearly in the eye of the beholder. If I were an employee, I would like to know. Trying to hide may do more damage than just adding it on internal news portal. Heavens know I get tons of notifications on everything. This would likely qualify as such a notification, I think.

He’s right, I don’t get why companies feel the need to do six figure morale events off campus. When I worked at a smaller company, we would do a company picnic in a park and play kickball and drink a keg of beer or sodas and just eat cheap food, and it was 100x more fun than the elaborate offsites I attended at Microsoft. Microsoft’s idea of a morale event is to rent out a stadium or a boat and have Macklemore or Walk the Moon do a concert

"We operate on the second derivative of cash-flow which has gone negative."

Your engineers are smart enough to understand this.

They're also smart enough to understand that this means this is a phase change into maintenance mode.

>> > Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.

What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic. It's generally not stuff I need, or want, it's wasteful, and there are much better ways the company could be spending that money (and the HR/marketing employees time). I've stopped adding my address to the list at this point when they ask for it.

There's an influential article from 2009 called "The Sodas Are No Longer Free": https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Small conveniences and tokens of appreciation really help with employee morale. Many people, even those who believe they cannot be bought so easily -- definitely can be swayed by this stuff.

It doesn't take much to invest in relationships in a way that returns much larger dividends than the stock market can offer.

Offering to take someone out for a $20 lunch can move mountains.

Conversely, though, if you've already lost the trust of your employees—by overworking over the course of years, underpaying them, and generally treating them poorly—those small gestures suddenly seem very paltry and, in some cases, insulting. Because it makes it seem as if you think you can make up for all that abuse just with a few free lunches and free donuts in the conference room.

I think the main point of the Steve Blank article was about the people who are actually not swayed by these tokens. The mere removal of a perk could cause someone who doesn't even use the perk, and is happy with his job, to wake up and think about leaving. The removal itself is a signal to start looking, regardless of whether you care about the actual thing being removed.

It’s not that you’re swayed. It’s that if the company is tightening the purse on something as insignificant as soda then alarm bells should ring.

Even if you’re cost cutting there should be a million places to make huge savings than the few $ of free drinks an employee goes through a month.

"Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity." -Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2004

It's kind of nice to get a T-Shirt with a Team Logo on it when you join a team. Especially if you see other people on that team already have that T-Shirt.

It's kind of nice to celebrate a major accomplishment with a coffee cup that has some cool art on it.

It's kind of nice to see what interests other people have by noting the stickers on their laptops.

It's kind of nice to get a surprise nice new backpack when you wouldn't normally bother to take care of yourself by getting one.

It's kind of nice, as a manager, to send some token appreciation to your team when you see them working hard to solve a problem.

It's kind of nice.

Some people kind of like it. If you read the book "Love Languages," you'll see that different people feel appreciated through different ways. Some like token gifts. Some like words of appreciation. It's worth learning how someone else likes to feel appreciated, because it costs you very little to express your appreciation in a way that they particularly enjoy.

"Expect us to get bored of running google and go on to do dumb rich people things with the money you employees made us" -- Probably Page and Brin sometime in 2014

To be clear, it's not marketing swag which is what people usually think of when they think of "swag" that's given to potential customers.

It's more like custom team t-shirts, custom figurines, custom bobbleheads, and whatnot. Special rare acrylic desk pieces for every patent your team has generated. Stuff that says "hey, we're a team and we've been through some stuff, like important launches and inventions that we're proud of, and these are symbolic reminders of that".

Similarly, traveling -- whether to a conference or a team-building prototyping retreat -- is a way to build bonds and trust with your coworkers, in a way that just doesn't happen in the regular 9-5 in the office or (worse yet) over Zoom.

When you work in a 100,000+ person company, it's really, really easy to feel depressingly lost and just a cog in the machine. It's both the little mementos and the big travel experiences that help us remember the path we've been on and get to know the people we work with as human beings.

So it really does feel like nickel-and-diming when these are some of the most effective long-term investments you can make in a team.

I also don't understand the "swag obsession" (well, maybe except for the Rust Ferris, Go Gopher and Dart Dash plushies) but neutering conferences and travelling would make me frustrated.

Travelling to conferences is a huge learning opportunity: you can upskill by having fun with people all over the world for two-three days.

If I worked for a FAANG company where I am supposed to be or become an expert of a technology, and they don't want to pay me for one or two conferences per year, I'd also feel frustrated.

Yeah, I'm not with a FAANG but I'm having an experience where we seem to have replaced all learning opportunities with horrible online presentation style courses. It's like they've taken as many bad practices about providing a learning experience and automated them.

Monotonous speaker? Check. Visuals that don't relate well to the content? Check. Wall of text slides? Check. Lack of opportunity to ask questions? Check. Asocial learning environment? Check. Bad pacing? Check. Prescriptive teaching style which doesn't give learners an opportunity to broaden their understanding? Check. Uncompelling or just nonexistent narrative? Check. Badly targeted subject matter? In spades.

Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so. Pichai is right to tighten the purse strings.

I guess this might be hard to believe, but lots of people DO like it. It just depends on what kind of person you are.

Eg. lots of people love those forced team building things.

Different people like different things. For a large company though, it's hard to distinguish who wants what, so they default to just sending it to everyone.

I just opt out, or more often don't opt-in for a lot of the swag things that come my way if they're not something I'm interested in

I've seen statistics saying an employer can get a bigger morale/retention boost from giving people a $500 monitor than $500 cash.

This makes sense, you'd be staring at the monitor for hours a day but likely would spend the $500 on <something> and forget about it or more likely it would be direct deposited and just end up washing in with whatever monthly purchases you normally make.

If my employer gave me $500, I’d put it in savings. If I spent it on a monitor, my wife would be pissed.

Taxes are a non-trivial consideration. Google employees in California have an almost 50% marginal tax rate plus I imagine Google gets better prices than retail monitors (plus someone else maintains it for you).

So they'd need to give you ~+$1000 in salary/bonus instead of a $500 monitor to get the same monitor for personal use.

There's probably some division doing Swagalytics and measuring the ROI on forced employee advertising. Time for swagblock Origin, I guess.

This has always been my intuition as well. The employer gets free advertising and the employee gets free stuff. Ideally, the employee gets a bit extra to offer to friends and family for bonus marketing.

Maybe Google thinks they don’t have to market anymore?

My big company stopped sending swag/care packages to employees shortly before they started pressuring everyone on RTO. Before that RTO campaign there was a lot of language shared about employee satisfaction and "taking care of each other", etc.

They also acknowledge the employee NPS score has gone down but have used a lot of corporate speak to "speak to" that score without initiating any responses to it. I'm pretty sure they, and probably like many others, think the lower ENPS scores and RTO are the only correlation for employee attitudes right now.

So no, the care packages aren't really important, but they're usually commensurate with other endeavors from the top that may not sit well. As another example, the company has done nothing to acknowledge nor address rising attrition... which started before the economy turned (I fully acknowledge they may be happy with it). But the attrition -- even welcomed -- usually has a negative impact on morale overall.

I don't care about t-shirts, but the best backpack I've ever owned was given to me when I worked at Google. I probably never would have bought a $200 hackpack on my own, but it's great.

Yeah I've used a small Google duffel bag for 12 years. The key is that the swag is higher quality and not landfill-bound junk.

I’ve got a Google “exclusive swag” branded messenger bag, it’s a lovely timbuk2 hand made from excellent materials. It’s been my bag of choice for 7 years, only just started to show signs of wear despite travelling with it extensively.

I’ve never worked at Google, I won it at a charity auction for PyLadies at a Python conference and not only was it for a good cause but worth every dollar. I don’t think I’ve had a better bit of swag. Its even been a humorous conversation started at times when people assume I either work for or used to work for Google because I have the bag, particularly at software conferences.

Some swag is definitely higher quality and I think Google put some serious money behind their bag selection at least for the years between your bag and mine.

I kept the backpack google gave me as a noogler for probably 6-7 years and most of my T-shirts are Google gifts. Those gifts made me feel valued as an employee and also acted as free advertising (I no longer wear those shirts in public, as I don't want to advertise for them).

I have /two/ best-ever backpacks that were team swag.

> I probably never would have bought a $200 hackpack on my own

That's weird being on Google salary. It just resonates with me because I'm getting one soon, on a fraction of that pay :)

A lot of people are paying off student loans, and then they're saving up to buy a house, which requires a down payment, and then they're paying a mortgage, and then they're paying for day care on top of it. $200 for a backpack is a luxury, when it's easy to find perfectly decent backpacks for $30-50.

And it's not just about a single $200 backpack. Many times people feel the need to either be the kind of person who responsibly saves money, or you just buy whatever you want all the time, and it can be hard to be in-between. If you're dropping $200 on a backpack without thinking about it, you're probably spending $1,000+/mo. on things you don't really need... and there goes a big chunk of money.

Personally, spending $200 on a backpack sounds like insanity to me. But I've also had the similar experience where someone got me a $200 something as a gift and it turned out to be amazing, and I would have bought it if I had known, but often you don't even know whether something is worth it until you've tried out owning it for a month or two. Nine times out of ten, the $200 item isn't worth it compared to the $50 version. So getting it as a gift and discovering you love it is just really, really nice.

Because people like free stuff.

More seriously, it's a way to build a "clique" organically, same as for sports teams. It's a non mandatory uniform in a way.

There's a large number of tech employees who only wear swag clothing and supplement with Uniqlo when required.

The number of friends and colleagues that have chosen companies based on SWAG and free food is *insane*

In my mind it’s pure entitlement and another example of the staggering divide between the tech world and the real world. It makes me very sad.

Would it be less entitled to choose companies on the basis of salary?

I feel like that choice is at least more relatable, no matter what industry you're from.

Yes, considering that's more and more common as you go down the economic ladder.

I'm a sucker for a free shirt, hat, or jacket. Any other swag (like posters, pens, notepads, etc) is fine I guess, but I could take it or leave it.

Really? The clothes are my least favourite of the swag items. Send me it without the company logo and it's a great gift. But if I have to walk around looking like I'm in uniform then I'd rather buy my own.

> I'm a sucker for a free shirt, hat, or jacket.

When I lived near a large metro area, I liked to hit second hand stores, mostly thrift stores, to pick up really cheap T-shirts. When there's a lot of school districts concentrated in one area, there is often a nice selection of older style logos of local HS teams, which is what I was after. I was fully grown by my junior year, so I can still wear kids' clothes. Anyone that noticed my flare assumed I was local and from that area, so it was a cheap way to assimilate and be left alone.

>What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies?

Cheap substitute for pay rises or benefits improvements.

> What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic.

idk how to say it without it sounding bad but lots of developers are manchildren and treating them like manchildren seem to work very well

I feel like it's so wasteful. I have so much crap collecting dust. A denim jacket with the logo. A bright silver logo that actually shines. A jersey. Idk who is picking this either. Idk what to even do with it?

Every time I get asked to give my size for a piece of swag, I tell them that the only “swag” I want with the company’s name on it as shares. Everything else is worthless and wasteful.

not all swags are of same quality. some are much higher quality than others. i often wear my old employer's hoodie that i got on my first day 9 years ago. it's still going strong and comfy af. same goes for a Yeti tumbler. it's not a huge thing but definitely something to look forward to for some people.

Have they replaced the toilet paper with a lower grade?

Not sure where that reference comes from, but it was something like someone saying "i knew it was time to leave when people were arguing with management about the reduction in quality of their toilet paper"

As a business customer of Google, I’d venture to say they could cut 20% of the non-engineering workforce without missing much of a beat.

After years of of doing business, I have yet to run into an account manager that added any actual value. Most seem to know little about the product with only a tiny set showing even a passing knowledge of advertisers’ actual issues. This isn’t to say they aren’t nice. They sure are, but value? Nope.

I’d also recommend giving the boot to whomever is coming up with new ad products in general. A great example is the rollout of Performance Max. The product is absolutely awful and the grand rollout is terrifying given how poorly campaigns tend to actually perform after a week or two of burn in.

I get that in ad tech companies have to reinvent themselves every couple cycles in order to keep the money flowing in on speculation, but it’s really sad to see a company like Google become so bloated with that kind of overhead.

It’s only going to fall back on the engineers like it always does.

The alternative services for users and ways to avoid Google are now many and mature. Google sees more dark data ahead and these threats as cutting into their top line at an accelerating pace. They need to resize to this new world. It is a similar situation as that for Meta and other megatech companies in future. What areas of Google's business is really growing?

I wonder how many years of swag and travel cuts it will take to pay for the decades of miss-managed product development.

Take Google's discontinued messaging products for instance. Is it five now? That all basically did the same thing?

We're going to be here a while if the payment plan for is travel and swag.

I haven't set foot in a Google campus for a good 9 years, but I remember every time I visited one (I went to Mountain View, YouTube, and SF on business) thinking about how it gave me flashbacks to Hewlett-Packard, both in action and appearance. OK, so HP would never have a big slide and photo booth like Google did in San Francisco, but that just felt like it was trying too hard.

(Granted, the food was a lot better at Google, and what a view of the Bay Bridge...)

I don't think it's been a scrappy startup for a long time.

LOL. Imagine your executive class are such worthless leaches that you have to ask your rank-and-file employees for ideas on how to improve the business.

Oh, you'd be an American (really global) corporation.

Except if we equate the working environment with school then traveling to conferences is basically a school trip.

That is the most fun, people who are lucky enough to having been in a sports team when they were younger understand that being on the road is the best.

If you were a student/athlete then going on the road was a unique mix of working for a future shot in the world of pros AND fun being on the road with your mates.

Covid was exceptional but in general I can't see how Google would escape the transition to a traditional corporation tied to stockholder expectations and macroeconomic conditions. This is just reality and whining about snacks and travel being cut is not helpful. Return to office, on the other hand, is a really interesting question and generally not handled well by leadership.

> This is just reality and whining about snacks and travel being cut is not helpful.

Tyrany in Russia is a reality too. So was loosing your hand in a machine without compensation.

Whether rights or snacks, if you want to keep them, you have to fight for them.

If all Google employees quit on the same day, and refuse to return without getting a seat in the board, maybe they get somewhere.

> If all Google employees quit on the same day, and refuse to return without getting a seat in the board

You're expecting way too much. I know plenty of people who work at Facebook all the while claiming that "they know it's bad for the world", and guess why? Because those $400,000 a year are still flowing in.

I am just saying people should be honest about not being willing to make a stand.

Instead of talking about it as a law of physics

We had this same kind of discussion a few weeks back. The funniest thing to me was how the CEO was hiding behind “the budget” for why they would not give raises commensurate with inflation.

You know, the budget that the CEO and his cronies create?

But anyways, apparently we don’t need COL adjustments because of the “total compensation package” and “amazing corporate culture”.

Wearing company swag is the most cringe-worthy thing you can do, second only to wearing a Harvard sweatshirt.

Pichai's annual salary is close to $300 million.

I understand the dynamics and inequalities that are inherent in capitalism. However the insane CEO and corporate board member salaries are simply not justifiable.

'fun' so often means climbing the mountain. Something we will do no matter how poor we are. Google's goal is to harness that to use it against all their users.

I'll tell you now I will never work for google; I will die destitute in the middle of the Atlantic on my boat before I contribute the whores you have brought.

Of course I know that won't happen. Computer science has a lot in common with "so called magic" and those that understand it can conjure the spirit in the machine. Those at the top are jealous and confused and we know where we are and what we want.

EDIT: well that's a lot to be downvoted on hackernews for that. We know who we are and we can see who we're not. Come after us and test this principle.

I did not downvote you, but to give you some feedback, I really don't understand what you are trying to say.

So i get it the shareholder dividend is zero this year. Dont be medieval.

> according to audio obtained by CNBC.

Was this audio provided by Google intentionally, or was it a leak?

And yet this is the company that pampers them and gives them everything from massages to daycare. Cry me a river.

I can agree that money != fun but !money == !fun.

> "Pichai, who expressed some annoyance during the meeting, said “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” and added that, “We shouldn’t always equate fun with money."

Put your money where your mouth is, recommend the board make your CEO salary and compensation the same as when Google was 'small and scrappy' in the early years. Lead by example.

I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore. That’s a pretty negative environment. It seems like a reasonable statement to say, we should try and find ways for the work itself to be fun, and not only expect expensed travel and offsite to be the only source of fun.

> I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore.

Small and scrappy is fun for many. I don't want to work in a megacorp with forced annual trips organized by a large HR department. I want to work on and build interesting things with smart colleagues who are similarly engaged and motivated.

The folks at Google are already working at a megacorp. That small and scrappy ship sailed two decades ago.

If I had to guess, most Google engineers aren’t working on cool greenfield stuff, they’re maintaining and extending huge legacy projects with decades worth of cruft, where minuscule changes take days to land.

If you want great engineers to work on that stuff, you need to pay them and shower them with perks. Otherwise they’ll move somewhere small and scrappy that’s actually fun.

Same. I don't hate my job, and often enjoy it, but the second I was paid a cent less than promised I'd be looking for a new one.

Google spent a decade throwing every perk imaginable at it's engineers, from swag to massages to free food, etc. Now people are getting upset that they're cutting back despite making more money then ever and they are confused?

I go to work exclusively to trade labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t go to work to have “fun”. I don’t hate my job any more than I hate breathing. They are both necessary for my survival.

Exactly. And lol that the corporate ruling class wants to call you a "quiet quitter" that isn't a team player because you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself to further enrich them.

I really wish I could figure this trick out. I envy people who are able to say this. Having gone through multiple burnout angry mood swings over the last few years, I would love to be able to do this.

My basic problem (I think) is that I get bored of this disposition. I like to be creatively engaged. But it’s 8+ hours of 5/7s of my waking time!! I don’t spend anywhere near that time sating my appetite, and my hindbrain wants to be the “breathing specialist” on the team, so I cede that to him. I just struggle to go on autopilot and do the disengaged worker bee thing, watching the day go by, caring only as much as needed to deliver nominal output. Every time I try this approach to save my sanity, the “newness” is cool for a couple of days, and then I find myself gradually reinvesting again, because 8 hours of “it doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m just sitting here wiling the time away pondering what interesting things I might be able to do in the scant remaining non-work hours” robot mode just bores the heck out of me and sucks my soul dry.

If you’ve got advice on how to get to this mode that doesn’t involve an IV drip of alcohol induced euphoria, I would love to hear it.

A lot of us have "enough money" that food and shelter became boring years ago. Diminishing returns happens pretty quickly. So, when money no longer matters as much, fun becomes pretty important.

You're reducing the relationship to that of the proverbial cog.

"I provide the teeth, you provide the torque, I get money, you get profits. Anything else is wasting company resources."

...Where's the joy in that, and what benefit is there to rejecting company-funded efforts to inject joy?

I’m sorry if you feel that way. If there is absolutely nothing you can find that is fun about your job then honestly yeah I would rather not have you on my team because it sounds like it would be a pretty bad time working together.

If you have to do it for 8 hours a day anyway, might as well enjoy it

Good point. Seems like Google and similar companies are really filled with 30-40 year old children. Will throw tantrums if favorite food or TV shows are not provided when demanded.

Different levels of maturity (see Tribal Leadership).

P2 - Apathetic member

P3 - Performing-but-solitary performer

P4 - Performing-and-coach in the company

P5 - Collective intelligence and ability to introduce P3-P4 to other P3-P4 because they’ll do awesome work together.

You may be at P2, but the risk of communicating too much about it, is to demotivate potential P3 into P2.

> we should try and find ways for the work itself to be fun

No. Those who are pocketing the $72 billion/year net profit should do that. Not you. If you are doing that yourself without being compensated for the value you generate, you are being exploited.

They didn't reduce comp, only perks, which affects him as well. If he cuts comp, I'm sure he'll do the same to himself.

And honestly, swag is a great place to cut. It's such a waste of material and money. Most of it ends up in the dumpster.

They cut non-business critical travel which many employees for some reason felt was a perk of the job. I heard second hand that some employees would do "office tours" just to try the lunches at the different offices (under the guise of doing some in person meetings that certainly could have been done online). Cutting that kind of wasteful travel is necessary in an economic slowdown (and even necessary before that).

Perhaps necessary in an economic slowdown when you're a paper company with 2% margins... Let's be honest, Google does not "have" to do anything. They're just trying to grab some pennies.

The interesting part is that they felt the pennies nearest at hand were in their employee perks, rather than in expanding their business. That is always a bad sign even if the company we're talking about is as profitable as Google.

Not every business needs the best people working there, nor does every business need its employees to be highly motivated - it's a valid move in the extreme for Google to transition to being like SAP, but I can't believe all of the people in this thread that are defending that they have a right to do it without asking what their executives know that makes it seem so appealing.

That is pretty decadent actually. Financials aside, I do believe frivolous activity like that creates a culture of unseriousness

I admittedly have more swag both from tech events and my own company than I know what to do with. But, especially when it's individually shipped to me at home, I usually roll my eyes a bit when I get some package of random branded Chinese crap in the mail. I do have some swag I've gotten over the years that I really like but don't mail me a T-shirt or a lunch bag.

Most of it's dirt-cheap; tee-shirts and baseball hats aren't expensive. If they give you tech toys, they bought them on a heavy discount.

I'd always sooner have a pay-rise, and choose my own toys.

How much did they typically spend on "swag" per employee per year?

I remember when Google was small and scrappy

He joined Google in 2004, the same year as its IPO. The company had 3021 employees at the end of that year.

To be fair, a 3,000 person company can feel a lot different from a 10,000 person company and certainly from 150,000 person company.

Would you be happy if they paid him $1 a year and drastically increased his equity stake? That's what CEO comp looks like in small and scrappy. I expect he would take it, and so would most anyone else.

> and drastically increased his equity stake

But he also to roll a critical three times in a row on a D20 to get a payout. Just to make it have the same feeling as small and scrappy, you know.

So like Musk's performance based equity comp package that depends on him hitting certain goals?

You can't increase his equity without buying back shares and that's going to cost money. But yes the general sentiment is if you are serious about reducing costs, then reducing salary is a major way to get there. The idea is cut costs and the share prices will rise as the company becomes more profitable.

That's not really how equity works. A company can issue equity out of thin air, and in fact, this is how most employee stock based comp works. In fact, Google specifically is criticized on their financial returns because of how much of their compensation is based in equity which dilutes existing shareholders outside the company. You can read about the high level ideas of this at https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/modeling-stock-base...

Equity doesn't buy me breakfast, and nor does a dollar a year. You have to be rich already, if you're going to work for a dollar a year.

Equity in public company vests frequently and you can sell it.

To be fair I'm sure Pichai would be happy to get paid the amount of equity that early founders did...

Isn't Pichai personally invested in Google? I can't see what it would matter, given the amount of stock I would think he must own at this point.

All the more reason to do it then, at least show your subordinates that you're serious about taking measures to reduce expenses.

> I can't see what it would matter

Because getting rid of perks means higher or stable profits which means the stock goes up and Pichai makes more money.

Sorry I was not clear, I meant his salary is irrelevant. I have no idea why he would collect it in the first place.

LoL, does that include his (early) stock package?

I remember a time when Google was still interested in people and doing good, not being Just Another Tech Conglomerate.

You actually believed that?

Well let’s just say it didn’t get any better, quite the reverse

I find it hard to believe that workers of Google caliber can't fathom the golden rule of capitalism.

Ahhahahah! Who's fun? Why make a profit at all then? Why even make money? Just to hoard it in a bank so no one else can have it?? This is some real Scrooge McDuck shat going on right here. Google the next Amazon! Welcome to the sweatshop ladies and gentlemen!

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