G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.
If everyone is gunning for L6 after 8 years or L6 -> director in 8 more years, then the culture will be much worse. Assuming the long-tenured senior SWE is actually a solid engineer but doesn't want to play politics or manage up as required for L6+, this was a person who made G a very pleasant place to work. I know many L5 like this: smart, helpful, and made excellent colleagues.
That being said, I doubt it was mostly targeting people who were tenured too long without enough promos. My guess is these are people without the full backing of their upper mgmnt chain. Since even directors had no input into this layoff round, you needed your VP's support.
Added: maybe the person above is right since the grad changes are already moving G's culture into a more aggressive mode. G will slowly become like the other big tech companies (G will just pay slightly less since people will still have the outdated perception that the culture is better).
I wouldn't call Amazon Prime same day. Amazon had prime now for awhile in response to Google's Express program; these were both same-day services that delivered in 2-4 hours from order placement. Both programs were cancelled when it became clear they were unsustainable.
Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.
The chapters on Watson are super interesting. If Isaacson had written the book primarily about Watson, it likely would've been at the same level of Steve Jobs.
The last sentence is only true if you believe the Fed will actually sell back the assets. When I look at this chart, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL, I have very little confidence that the Fed will sell a meaningful portion back (notice the Fed already gave up BEFORE covid when we supposedly had one of the best economies in recent times). In fact, it looks to me that the assets held by the Fed are growing exponentially and definitely growing faster than our productivity growth.
That's correct. If you're a software developer and interested in maximizing pay while minimizing stress, you obviously avoid the gaming industry. The only news here is that the company seems to have reneged on the promise it made, but it's not obvious how a union would have solved this problem. Would the union help get the game shipped on time?
I disagree. This would prove why big government is dangerous. This is the perfect example of how powerful individuals can leverage governmental power to enrich themselves. He's like Trump, pointing out all these problems while exploiting them to the max.
Is eating live seafood animal abuse? I also don't see how this channel is directed towards children. This type of food looks expensive and I don't think kids normally eat this stuff.
It also depends on if you include retirement accounts. It seems nuts to have 3-5 years of savings as cash in taxable accounts. But this is easily doable if you include retirement accounts, which you would start withdrawing from if things were really bad and the choice is to lose your house or withdraw early from 401K/IRA.
Airbnb is better off than the hotel chains IMO. The hotel chains have to keep paying their staff and rent while revenue drops, but airbnb just sees the revenue drop.
It exposes the people who bought properties to list on airbnb on aggressive margins or like the example in the article of someone buying a car just to put on the platform. I wonder how much rental prices will be affected when the properties that were bought to use for airbnb are brought back to the long-term rental market.
You can get the original promo price if you threaten to cancel. There's a song and dance with CSR but once they transfer you to the retentions dept, they are authorized to give you the original price again for a year. Actually, Comcast did give me a different deal once where the price was slightly higher than my original introductory offer but speeds were also better.
The key factor that doomed the big 3 car makers in US is the unions. They forced a high cost structure and no one was able or willing to fix this (automation that reduced labor costs meant less jobs). The big 3 were forced to make giant SUV's/trucks that had higher margins, but sales evaporated when gas prices went up in 2000's. This is documented in Paul Ingrassia's Crash Course. As long as the tech companies don't unionize, I don't think they will require government bailouts. In fact, we've already seen the pattern; tech companies that pass their peak undergo layoffs.
You work on ads at Google and feel that ad tech is a house of cards?
I actually disagree, primarily because of the auction. It's an incredibly clever way to ensure Google's incentives are aligned with the advertisers'. Assuming rational bidders, Google can only charge more per click if the clicks deliver more value to the advertisers. If Google just sends a bunch of garbage clicks to the advertisers, they will just lower their bids.
a) How do we know these clicks are bad? A sample size of 3 is pretty early to make any conclusions.
b) If clicks are not delivering value, advertisers should lower their bids. As Google encourages advertisers to switch to bids set on hitting ROI targets, what really matters to advertisers is that they achieve their targets. If the clicks are "bad" and conversion rates are poor, then bids will be adjusted down, presumably by everyone.
The fact that prices are set by an auction makes the system inherently sustainable unless you think many of the bidders are irrational.
This project doesn't seem that expensive to run and it resulted in a Nature paper. Seems like a favorable ROI already even for a for-profit company (given Google's size and possible benefits in PR and recruiting).
You're overstating the issue here. Deepmind wasn't forced to control units using the standard control groups. My understanding is they could directly issue commands to arbitrary group of units. If you watch the replays, the APM/EPM is not too abusive. The main advantage is that it doesn't pay the cost of context-switching so it's very strong at multi-pronged attacks. It still didn't seem smart in the replays I saw on Youtube. Basically it's very good at developing mid-game timing attacks that humans tend to struggle with (not because of APM, but because it's easy to make mistakes when so much is going across the whole map).
You have it backwards. If you directly replicate an ETF by buying stocks directly, you can capture the loss as soon as one stock goes down (and buying a share of something equivalent to stay approximately indexed). In the ETF, you only get a tax loss if the whole ETF has gone down. If no stock goes down, you don't have to sell, same with an ETF. For tax efficiency, direct indexing is superior than an ETF. This means you have to keep injecting money into the fund to keep the portfolio properly allocated (ie, you must avoid selling stocks that have gone up).
I think the key reason to present min wage vs ridesharing wage is to ask how much pressure is there to raise wages for drivers. The article presents some data that wages for drivers in these countries is high relative to other jobs (or no previous job in many cases). Uber/lyft are in trouble in USA because even though the pay is not much higher than min wage, people keep demanding that uber/lyft pay their drivers higher.
This is a big reason why people buy SUV's. That, and the belief it's safer since momentum is mass*velocity, so the winner in a crash favors the heavier car. I think we need some more taxes to punish the externalities of driving taller/bigger/heavier vehicles.
I think your previous answer using the word "fun" was spot-on. I have a non-CS PhD that's not really related to what I do today. I would describe what I did previously as "fun"; despite the intensity and worse WLB than life in a big-tech company, you're ostensibly choosing projects that you and your adviser consider fun. In bigtech, you have a lot less freedom to choose what to do. Seriously, if you don't consider your PhD fun, you should just drop out now; if you plan on just going to industry later to make money (esp as a SWE), there's no reason to get a PhD.
I wonder at which point he gave up on paying back the loan. I think they were reasonably frugal for the first four years (the $400/mo MB being an exception). It seems like when they started the orthodontics school they considered entering this, and definitely by the time they bought the house, they had no intention of repaying the student loans.
I work at one of the companies mentioned in the article although not doing ML. From what I can tell, these stories do a disservice since all these people come into the company wanting to do ML when most work is not nearly so glamorous.
It's pretty naive to make statements like this. Uber came into being when interest rates were near-zero for 5+ years (in comparison, interest rates were 5%+ in the first dot-com bubble). Money was basically free in 2009-2015. Uber likely had extremely favorable terms for its funding rounds. Now that the fed is finally raising rates again, we'll have to see if Uber can become break-even within a few years.