It seems like just about every tech company is doing 15% layoffs.
> They include the development of technology for Dexcom’s G6 and G7 continuous glucose monitors (CGM), the smallest CGMs of their kind.
That’s very cool! I have worn a Dexcom for 2 years and I had no idea. CGMs are extremely helpful for people who need them. While the market is fairly small for t1 diabetics, it’s expanding to people engaged in fitness.
> It seems like just about every tech company is doing 15% layoffs
It's "selection" bias or confirmation bias or some kind of fancy word bias that we see headlines posted here (or other places) about ____ doing 15-20% layoffs.
If you combined all the headlines we've seen past 6-12 months about layoffs, what % of companies out there would that represent total? 5%? 10% max?
How routine is 1/10th of every tech company in the country doing 15-20% layoffs in terms of business cycles as far as history goes? Quite common? Are we overblowing the significance?
Historically it’s been unfortunately common. Folks tend to avoid companies with past layoffs as the company has a suboptimal cap table from a down round - or is public and only cares about profits.
Either option is limiting for a tech worker. So historically successful companies have tried to avoid layoffs like the plague. This has likely lead to some excesses in firms who haven’t adjusted over time.
Won't that the the place to join? - The parts where they hire is where they see the business going, which might be more stable than a random corner in a corporation, which didn't the rif, yet.
Maybe, but if it’s a series D or less that means that most of the growth potential/capital has been spent. The company will be focused on profitability which in some cases may never occur at the level required to justify the previous valuation. VC firms don’t want to disclose losses, so they’ll happily keep the company private and barely profitable indefinitely.
Mega caps struggle to understand what matters and what doesn’t - the track record for mega caps is that once they start layoffs, they don’t really stop until the company is irrelevant. See IBM.
Ironically, unlike getting decimated Google and Facebook-style, IBM's stock went up in the past year and they seem to be doing ok (hundred plus years into it). Some parts of IBM are still very relevant, many others are depressing, but it's more like a whole country of different people than a "company" that I can comprehend. Also, curious that their headcount went down from mind-boggling 466k in 2011 to 282k, talk about downsizing (quietly fired 200 thousand people?)
What I wonder is how it's affected by almost every commentator, analyst and corporation in the world saying "we're expecting very poor economic conditions". Id' theorize that hearing that makes people less likely to commit to purchases and hiring. Pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I didn't know this either that's kind of a bummer they are laying of people from one of the few alphabet subsidiaries that is without a doubt improving life for people.
that's what they want you to think. what has it delivered that is worth the investment and number of people? it's a bloated org full of researchers talking about big ideas.
Speaking as someone whose life has been saved several times by a Dexcom G6 (for whatever role they had in that one), and is looking forward to the Dexcom G7 (which they seem to have a larger role in), I'm pretty grateful for their big ideas.
well in this case it seems like Alphabet is finally getting more disciplined around spending when it comes to all these unprofitable “moonshots” that have largely gone nowhere.
I think being more disciplined about moonshot investments is actually a terrible thing. Tech in our modern society has some absolutely ridiculously profit margins - since those margins aren't being taxed in a sane manner it'd be nice if they at least went to far out there research and development that occasionally produced interesting and novel tools for us to use.
Tech companies are also in a really unique situation when it comes to layoffs as a way to appear economically healthy. Outside of critical infrastructure like ops and a few other key tasks required to maintain tool quality - development can pretty much be full stopped for a few months without seriously degrading the quality of the product or expected revenue - yes, continued feature development and maintenance is needed to keep a company relevant in the long term but in the short term nobody is going to notice if the maintenance patch that would've been released this week is delayed until June. Our (as in customers, even power users like HN folks) ability to comprehend code rot in the products we're using is extremely weak - sure you might subscribe to the git repo of a tool or two that you're specifically interested in, but it's infeasible to track the good news about every single application that passes through your hands on a daily basis. And, while this isn't true for everyone, I think it's reasonable to assume that even most of us tech literate HN users only really notice software patches when they break things. Humans are very biased to noticed negative changes.
Usually not in the case of press releases since the press releases and similar forms of corporate communication tend to include more spin, have bad titles, language that spawns lots of repetitive irritated comments, etc.
(on that note, we still need a [paywall] suffix for links like these. Great for folks who have subscription, near-useless to the rest of us who only get to see 5 links a year)
Spent 1 paragraph telling people they are doing layoffs, immediately followed by a long bullet-point list saying that almost every leader is keeping their jobs or getting more responsibility.
The big egos who keep their jobs, pat themselves on the back with a bonus and don't actually suffer any negative effect when "taking full responsibility", who else?
If we're keeping this "an Google/Alphabet Bet" component, can we decide to use "an Alphabet/Google Bet" or "a Google/Alphabet Bet" instead? Thanks so much.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Alphabet, is in fact, Google/Alphabet, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Google plus Alphabet.
Ok fellas, we all know this is b.s. bandwagoning right?
Put another way, these companies are participating in a hype-train where the only objective is to prepare for and therefore ensure a tech recession. Kind of like shorting your own companies stocks. The only question is, is this pure greed or are these companies doing this to legitimately protect their future and succeess?
They have to signal to the Fed there is capitulation before they will stop raising interest rates and this is the sort of signal the Fed is looking for.
The feds look at raw numbers and not how many people were laid off. AFAICT: there are plenty of job openings to go around, I haven't seen any evidence of underemployment in tech. As a matter of fact, unemployment levels are close to record lows, consumer demand is still stubbornly high, so the fed is unlikely to lower rates any time soon.
I think the fed will move faster than it has in the past to try something new, it’s been overly late for a long time. They are playing a much higher frequency betting game than they used to.
Wow, I didn't even think of that. I can totally believe that they're playing with people's ability to make ends meet so they can pay less on their loan's interest.
I really hope this ultra-cringe trend of referring to our employees and colleagues by twee corporate demonyms comes to a swift and timely end, especially in serious contexts like this one where the CEO is announcing that a bunch of people are being booted out.
We apologise for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible have been
sacked.
We apologise again for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible for sacking
the people who have just been sacked,
have been sacked.
The directors of the firm hired to
continue the credits after the other
people had been sacked, wish it to
be known that they have just been
sacked.
Why not just axe the division? What exactly is the P/E ratio at Verily, Waymo, GoogleFiber, AugmentedBS, etc? Let's put more wood behind more intelligent arrows, rather than dulling extremely dull arrows that obviously go nowhere - or just do stock buybacks.
IMO Waymo has the most credibility with autonomous driving.
Google Fiber is, as far as I can tell, one part naïveté and one part long-term strategic plan to keep Google's main business running. Fiber dreamed big and it turned out that they underestimated the logistical and bureaucratic hurdles involved in all that last-mile business. But... Fiber is also a strategic asset so Google can more easily face certain types of threats posed by companies like Comcast. Just my take.
I don't know about the rest. My understanding is that the strategy is to invest in a bunch of ideas with median P/E of 0, but average P/E much higher--at least, over a long enough term.
Google fiber wasn't intended as a profitable enterprise. It might have been if the stars had aligned, but the goal was to have a credible threat to force ISPs to up their game. The alternative was Google slowly getting strangled. It succeeded enough to prevent that and they were able to pivot to a much more sustainable buildout plan with webpass.
Waymo is actually one of the few ventures whose TAM might rival their ads business and they're the market leader.
On paper. I interviewed for a position there a few years ago and it was very clear that they were still quite dependent on Google operationally. It actually left me wondering when one of the ’bets leaves Google how they would manage the transition. My guess is most would actually have to be acquired.
> Our most immediate priority is ensuring that these Veeps
FFS, who teaches these people that referring to their employees with these cringeworthy names, especially in a layoff announcement, is a good idea? They're not "Veeps", they're people who have an identity and existence without reference to their roles at Verily. Just call them people. "ensure that these people..." Is that hard to do? Can you not resist the ra ra corporate bullshit for two damn seconds? Gross.
Oh right, I assumed it was meant as VPs, like the TV series. I didn’t realise that was a cute way of referring to anyone working at the company.
I was wondering why anyone generally would be caring so much what happened to the Vice Presidents of each division, especially when they’re being laid off.
Now that I know what he actually means by Veeps it sounds even more stupid.
> Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (2d ed.) defines “peeps” as a slang term originating in the 1980s on college campuses and in the black community. It's derived from “people” and it means parents, friends, people in general, according to Cassell's.
> They're not "Veeps", they're people who have an identity and existence without reference to their roles at Verily
The words used by HR from this and other companies clearly show that for the company, they are not people with an identity, existence or raison d'être other than providing some kind of service to the company. The invitation is to treat them accordingly.
Made doubly awful by the fact 'veep' already has a meaning in US English - vice president. So it could be read that they are giving all the credit and sympathy to the VPs.
The veeps can now veep themselves into unemployment. Publishing this kind of thing makes you look like really bad. In what world do people publish this and think they come over as reasonable, mature and compassionate?
> This sentence is a play on words, using the homophones "it's" and "its" in different ways to create a pun. The first half of the sentence is using the phrase "it's not it is" as a way to say that something is not true, while the second half is using the phrase "it is its" as a way to say that something belongs to itself. The second sentence is in similar way "it's it's" meaning " it is its" and "it is it's" meaning "it's is it"
When layoffs like this happen, I cringe for these companies and the poor souls who keep joining them. What HR really needs to do is a full retracement.
Who hired "X" employee, and why? Follow this up the chain. Follow it as far up as it needs to go, to the very email or slide deck from an upper-level exec whose failure of a pet project was greenlit to begin with. Fire the entire chain of command complicit in the lowest level employee's firing.
Truly, drain the entire swamp, otherwise the execs will keep making bad choices and playing music chairs while the boots on the ground get mutilated for them.
The issue appears to start from the funding model VCs often use where companies are incentivized to grow (in in headcount) as fast as they can to justify its current round of investment and then seek more, and then become a publicly traded company so that investors recoup their money, and the founders get even richer.
Sadly, none of these companies will likely do what you suggested because mass-hiring is just part of the game when there is too much money flowing into their accounts from VCs.
Nice to see that someone who recently vested $200 million in Google Class C stock hasn't gotten soft, still knows how to take the axe to worthless scientists and roboticists.
Maybe life expectancy should also be regarded as a 'K' shaped recovery. How do the numbers look for the top 50% of earners? What if we separate liberal states vs conservative?
This sort of already exists in Vancouver, BC, Canada. There is more to it than just salary, but there is a huge gap at the neighborhood level.
“ But zoom in to the neighbourhood level — what Statistics Canada calls “census tracts” — and you’ll see that life expectancy can vary by as much as 30 years.
The area with the lowest life expectancy is the Downtown Eastside, where the average resident is expected to live 60.2 years.
The area with the highest life expectancy is the University Endowment Lands, where the average resident is expected to live 90.4 years.”
