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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
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The only staff who need firing is Sundar. Google and android should have been easy better by now but he made them stagnant.
Android is still the best mobile os but it could have been even better under better leadership. Plus they could have enabled and experimented with the OEM’s to allow for additional hardware buttons, button remapping, a native Dex on all Androids, official gcam port to all OEM’s so they don’t need to make their own camera algorithms and even the cheapest droid could have had flagship level cameras.
And we haven’t even touched on software yet…
Fire his useless ass
Why would it be in googles interest to provide better cameras to OEMs? Google has to love that people buy pixel phones because other vendors cameras are years behind
Pixels are a minuscule fraction of Android devices. Google would get more money by improving Android than by trying to increase their own marketshare.
This
Because the market is bigger than Pixels and they could license much of it (I’d like to see more of it as open source, but it’s easier for a corporation to justify licensing the cutting edge stuff). I think a lot of OEMs would like access to Night Sight
Of course a lot of OEMs would like it, but google is incentivised to keep the best part of Android as pixel exclusives.
Regardless of the actual software processing details, in the wider population of Android consumers I’m pretty sure it’s Samsung that has the reputation for photography.
Samsung’s advertising focus is on advertising things that people understand and think they want, not AI assistants and cleaner versions of Android. Most of the reviews of the Pixel 8 criticise no telephoto lens while Samsung tends to have an excess being shown off.
Like everything Google does, I’m not sure it is any good at understanding people as humans rather than people as aggregate statistical models and that shows in its consumer devices.
Samsung’s 10x camera is amazing, I’m pretty miffed they dropped down to a digial zoom 10x though and made it a 5x on the S24 series, even if it gives other benefits like higher quality mid zooms between the 3x and 10x.
I really hope they bring it back or someone else has a good 10x lens by the time I need a new phone.
Fuck only having a 3x after having a 10x
Ahhh, the truest sign of a company in decline, cutting costs by firing talented people.
While reporting record profits! lmao you can’t make this shit up.
Until a couple years from now when they wonder why other companies are destroying them, and they become a shell of their former self. THE literal case study on this is GE.
Cheaper labour in the most expensive town in a country that is well known for high labour costs?
Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.
Take home or total cost?
For instance, is there a pension to be funded with costs not included in that 100k?
Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap.
So is West Virginia or Oklahoma.
True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.
If only there was a way to, like, have workers work on things without having to be anywhere near the office. Like distance workers or something, then you could hire people from all over the country in cheap places! Ah well, we need that face time though! ~Executives
Yeah, but you still have to pay social taxes on top for every worker. That’s why salary and labour cost are two different things. And boy is it a difference in Germany.
And as far as I’ve been led to believe, workers in the USA will be bullied into not taking any time off. Germans will take their entitled holidays and use sick leave when they are sick.
Workers in the US may not even have sick time. They do make more money though, probably because lots of European tech workers come to the US for better pay.
In practice anyone with this salary is likely to have at least 2 weeks + 10 or so federal holidays. It’s the retail and factory folks who are hurt most there.
Vacation time is not sick time. If you want any type of vacation at all, you need to plan ahead of time. Offering only 2 weeks is a joke. If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.
Monitoring and rationing sick time is like limiting bathroom breaks or coffee time. if your job does it, you have a crappy employer.
If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.
I have never worked anywhere in the United States with a policy like that. It may be your experience but it’s certainly not the norm.
But salary does not equal labour cost.
Even doubling the salary is far less than what you’d pay in the US, and as a rule of thumb, German labour, including all the indirect costs, is about twice the gross salary.
Even doubling the salary is far less than what you’d pay in the US,
I’m certain there’s plenty of Python programmers available in the United States for less than $200,000 per year.
These python programmers are literally maintainers of the language. They’re not a dime a dozen. Not saying it’s impossible or anything but you’re looking to get very high caliber engineers for under 140k
When you have a much better social safety net, work-life balance and in general can expect to be treated like a human and not a work-battery to be used up and discarded, people are satisfied with much less money.
Should they maybe instead just try that in the US? Nah, of course not.
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/san-francisco-bay-area
vs
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/munich-metro-region
Even if you assume that additional labour costs are a bit higher in Germany, there’s no way on earth that it could explain the difference of the Bay Area-median being over 3 times higher.
Could easily be that they have a bunch of people in Munich they can not fire since German labour laws are at least compared to a lot of places not that bad and they have to come up with some work for them. So having them work on this is still cheaper then having the people in the valley plus “useless” people in Munich.
Maybe they will save money because they don’t have to offer healthcare?
That was my first thought.
Employers in Germany have to bear half of the mandatory social security contributions.
This is on top of gross salary and includes mandatory health insurance.
You know where there is also cheaper labor? Other places in the US that are not in Bay Area CA.
I don’t think Google pays significantly less in other US cities.
Besides, the kind of people who has the right experience to be hired by Google isn’t cheap.
Making CEO decisions, is easy for AI. Cant AI just replace these CEO’s more readily than programmers.
“you are a corporate ceo of a large web search and web services company. Write a document detailing corporate strategies to increase profits by 6%”
Very well! To increase profits, increase the price of every service you offer by 15%, as that will offset potential customer losses and come to a 6% profit increase!
hot take: Sundar Pichai is the first LLM CEO.
What about zuckerbot? I thought he was the first
He at least looks more like a robot
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter_layoffs/
Perhaps a bit better source. At least a bit less irritating to read.
For a blissful moment I thought the headline was saying “Google Lays Off Sundar Pichai”
Before I got the hyphen I was starting to get down on the floor.
Even if he gets layed off or even fired, he will still receive a larger compensation package than either you or I will receive as compensation in the whole of our working lives, most likely both of ours together his compensation package will dwarf even ten times what we will make together our whole lives.
And this is if he does the shittiest job he can possibly do and gets fired.
…why isn’t he hiring hindu people instead? 🧐
Was the former python team working on the surface of Io?
Google, who was famous for employing Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) is now firing their python team. I wonder why they didn’t reassign them to the ML/AI division.
Guido van Rossum is working at Microsoft now.
München is not cheap city to reside in nor are the suburbs.
True, but San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Munich is the most expensive place to live in Germany and one of the most expensive in Europe so the move is still somewhat questionable.
Someone else in the comments said that it might be due to having a workforce in Munich that can’t be easily fired because of German labor laws, and that could be an explanation
More than even Berlin? God dayum.
Compared to… San Francisco?
CEOs are sociopaths.
To be totally honest, i might be a sociopath too if i only have to work for a year and have enough money for a many generations
Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not
Money isn’t quite zero sum, but you don’t need to zoom in very far for it certainly look like it.
Then you start trying to think about better solutions. If you’ve got a decent understanding of human history you can see the solutions you come up with played out over the last 5,000 years of human civilization with various levels of success or massive failures resulting in war, slavery, or famine.
Then you think about what would happen if we all return to subsistence farming to avoid all that where our entire world be what we see with our eyes in the morning when we get out of bed. Then again you realize you’re back to war, slavery, or famine except on a micro scale with just yourself and your neighbor instead of on a nation-state sized version.
The least-worse (not the best, because there is no best) solution I can think of at the moment is a nation that jumpstarts on war, slavery, and/or famine, and transitions to an egalitarian socialist society when its powerful and rich enough. That still doesn’t remove the very human element of corruption or exploitation that just want more than that ‘perfect society’ would produce.
Sundar Pichai-led company
Is that really a better description than just saying Google?
Hindustan Times is an Indian site. Sundar Pichai is Indian.
Personally I like seeing his name nailed to the worst era in Google’s history. The company has gone into the shitter since he arrived.
It’s not Google technically: it’s alphabet. Which is why they phrased it like that.
Why not just: “Alphabet (e.g. Google)”?
It’s about accountability
Microsoft and Google have indian CEOs so they can penetrate the billion people market (indians are deeply patriotic, and it plays into overall brand loyalty) and these companies plan lower costs while doing so.
What’s a few million dollar paid for a (specifically chosen for the purpose) CEO, when you can make billions by using it to gain grounds in a emerging market.
Win-Win
CEOs. Name them. Shame them.
What exactly does this accomplish?
The board of directors probably plays bigger roles when it comes to layoffs than the C-Suites.
So no ones at fault, if companies knew that they could save so much money. Apparently CEOs do fuck all and banking hundreds of millions.
Folks need to start naming Prabhakar Raghavan, he’s the mother fucker that fucked up the search side to increase ad revenue, which is what Pacai hired him to do like a good little McKinsey alum
he’s also the guy who wrecked yahoo search. fuck Prabhakar Raghavan.
Everyone needs a union
removed by mod
The irony is that they are moving to Germany, one of the most unionized countries in the entire world. Also not exactly “cheap” labor.
the IT wages in Germany aren’t as high, you’re looking at €3000-€5000 above your typical factory worker for the type of work they seem to be looking for, BUT therefor they also have German levels of workers right XD, just wait 5 years when Google decides to outsource somewhere else again, and realizes it can’t afford to pay the severance of all those employees
IT wages may not be as high in Germany as in Silicon Valley (cost of living is also a lot lower), but they are certainly a far cry from “cheap.” Also, German workers have much, much better labor conditions overall than US workers. They aren’t easy to cast aside like Google has a habit of doing.
I really hope you don’t mean the python people, the last thing I want in German IT is python dumbfucks… :(
Cheap labor = moving entire python workforce to other countries.
Capitalism 101
Yet we stubbornly refuse to eat the rich. It would take just one billionaire CEO cannibalized in front of the company’s headquarters, and the vibes would flip.
I’m sitting here with my knife and fork, waiting.
Lot of knowledge to just throw out there, Sundar.
Let’s hope your documentation can handle it, or a whole lot of important stuff is going to take forever to fix if/when it breaks
Really dumb considering the recent FTC noncompete ruling lol
They’re just going to throw a few more projects on the Google graveyard then
