If it were any other team I would have understood. but devs? makes no sense.
They were caught in the innovation dilemma [2] where improving the search engine will diminish their revenue. I now see several row of ads after a search. More than a year ago, and a year before that.
The basic mindset is summed up by a bunch of Eli Goldratt books, which, y'know, don't make them into a new Bible for business or anything, but they raise better questions than the ones you started with. You, oh corporate leader, look out upon the business and reason, "Well, I'm supposed to increase profits. Profits are revenues minus costs. As for revenues, money is coming in through these pipelines, and that's governed by these deals and those contracts and that's fine, there's not much I can do about that. I've got my sales staff, they are paid on commission, that's humming along just fine. So the main thing to increase my profits must be to cut my costs. So let us engage in broad-spectrum cost-cutting to reduce headcount, reduce benefits where we think we can, tighten belts, and then we'll be running a lean, mean, production machine."
This happens especially but not exclusively when companies are either experiencing or worried about hard times and money is getting tight.
The problem is, the broad spectrum. The easiest way for me to communicate this is pure numbers. You want to think that your company has an 80/20 rule, so 20% of your employees ultimately drive 80% of your performance. You shrink headcount by 10% and you try really hard to use some objective measurements to target that on the 80% of less-performant employees, but you don't succeed fully. Maybe that 20% becomes 19.5% while the 80% becomes 70.5%, to get your 19.5% + 70.5% = 90% and you have cut 10% of headcount. Great, you did so much better than chance! And in theory your performance is only 96% of what it was, so you take that 6% and pocket it as extra profit, right? Except, wrong. The people who were fired were doing something and even if you can work out ways to cancel half of it, you still have 90% of the people doing 95% of what the company did, and this 5% inefficiency is spread across the whole company with no regard for high or low performers.
So you actually basically break even, maybe make 1% more profit but it's hard to tell. And the next cycle you have the exact same calculation. It again seems like you'll make 6% more profit by removing the 10% lowest performers, so you do it again, and you don't make the extra profit again.
Weird, I have exactly the opposite view. I love the Mac laptop hardware (it's clearly the best in class, with by far the best battery life), but I don't like MacOS. I would much prefer to run Linux (with proper battery performance tuning) on a nice Macbook Pro.
I don't enjoy using any of the "big" equivalents of those things on Linux (like Libreoffice or Firefox), don't like any of the options in some cases (any kind of Preview replacement—all contenders are much worse), and the ones I find tolerable are all way on the low end as far as developer attention and user-share, so tend to be even jankier than the platform median for desktop software, and certainly aren't as well-integrated with one another (Abiword, Numeric, Gnome Web / Epiphany or Surf)
To be fair to Linux, the same would be true if the same thing happened except with Windows. Though Paint.net and Notepad++ are really nice. [EDIT] Yeah, I know, those aren't first-party programs, just trying to give any credit I can.
The software—not even the fancy stuff, just the same sorts of programs we've had on desktops for decades—is a big part of why Apple's ecosystem is sticky for me, and it's hard to justify leaving even when they're not bringing their A-game. Being on their platform gets me access to my favorite well-supported programs in several crucial program categories.
> Particularly the keybindings of linux are a non-starter for me.
I spent my first 18 or so computing-years on Windows and Linux, barely touched a Mac. When I finally switched (was issued one at a new job) I decided within a year that Macs had simply the most-correct default English keyboard layout and shortcut-set, and it's not a close contest. It's really, really good. Replicating it on Linux is weirdly difficult to achieve, fully and without issues, considering being able to customize everything is one of its core draws.
I bought a pair thinking my Macbook would let me configure all the settings that you can on an iOS device.
I'm an outsider, but Sundar is a man who knows how to make the money machine print money. I'm sure he would claim that he is all for innovation and research, but if you're at google but not a part of the immediate money machinery, I doubt if he thinks about you at all.
But on the other hand... the money machine keeps printing money. https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/earnings/
Other roles in the company also bring in value, and can be considered a "core asset"
lmao
Step outside the echo chamber and realize macro-economic trends have replaced the need to innovate with a basic instinct to just survive the coming storm caused by a decade of free money.
This is not about survival. Google and Meta and all these other companies are clearly not struggling to survive like some startup running out of runway.
The part that is divorced from reality is when they manically over hire (because pandemic investment and consumption is permanent I guess?) then try to layoff their way back to the way it was which incredibly costly both in money and culture.
Computers that can display information on back of your eye lids maybe (with gadgets no more than an earphone while lasting several days on a charge) so that you don't even have to hold your phone.
But that's really far far into future and even probably downright forbidden by the physics.