It's an odd feeling to have seen the rapid decline of QoL on the interior, know it was to drive margins back above 30% / $25B/quarter, leave because of it, then profit from it. Feels unethical.

I guess that feeling is just having the dissonance of the nature of business in your face. Though I do hold that the decisions made to squeak out a couple extra % points will be crushing in the long run.

Even just today: reality is Google is 4th place to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in AI and its not really close.

Each individual step is arguable, but the cracks are there. And leadership is too MBA-y/trend-following to do anything about it. Ex. through August '22 the line was there was going to be a special pot of increased raises to combat all the talent leaving for Meta. Then once Mark started firing, all that went far away, promo quotas to manager level were dropped to ~0, there's ceremonial cullings weekly, and its not of managers.

Edit for child comment:

I respect what you're saying: I'd advise its better to invite conversation, than say its all a simple binary option, especially in the face of me pointing out the same thing.

Ex. morale is trash, outsourcing is rampant, virtually all new headcount is overseas, and _actual_ efficiency, productivity, is lower than it ever has been.

The more simplistic view would advise companies could just fire 90% of staff and go into maintenance mode, but for some reason, they never do.

Also, note that "efficiency" on HN arguments of this form means "get the managers / slackers out of the way" -- economic effiency means "profits are 0". Neither happened here. Never been a better time to be a manager, and slackers aren't going away, if their slacking was visible to managers, they would have been gone already.