<story><title>Google to reduce workforce by 12k</title><url>https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>charles_f</author><text>&amp;gt; I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here&lt;p&gt;When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you&amp;#x27;d expect at the very least a post-mortem. I&amp;#x27;ve never seen a company produce one after that.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;What was the root cause?&lt;/i&gt; crazy hiring, massive wage war&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Could the current situation be anticipated?&lt;/i&gt; hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Europe, petrol production going down, supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation going massively up... Don&amp;#x27;t need an MBA to anticipate the economy was par for a correction.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;what could you have done to prevent this?&lt;/i&gt; realize it was too good to be true. Don&amp;#x27;t enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from happening again?&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;I take responsibility&amp;quot; is a beautiful thing to say but it&amp;#x27;s completely empty if you don&amp;#x27;t take the consequences as well, and don&amp;#x27;t learn anything in the process. I bet you that if&amp;#x2F;when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn&amp;#x27;t move and we see the same move in another 5&amp;#x2F;10y. So I guess the answer to this question is &amp;quot;none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>int0x2e</author><text>I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes.&lt;p&gt;Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit:
1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn&amp;#x27;t have to lose anyone.
2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire at a crazy rate, often competing with insane offers.
3. When the war started, we again went into a hiring freeze, and now a round of layoffs.&lt;p&gt;In my experience - our management basically did what everyone else did, which meant we couldn&amp;#x27;t leverage any of our unique advantages and beat the market in some way.&lt;p&gt;The reason I joined the company I did after the megacorp is that they had a very simple strategy for hiring - hire top talent in strategic areas when you can find it, but ignore anything else, don&amp;#x27;t lower the quality bars, don&amp;#x27;t make insane offers, etc.
It&amp;#x27;s almost as if having common sense is such a rare thing now, that it&amp;#x27;s become a winning strategy...</text></comment>
<story><title>Google to reduce workforce by 12k</title><url>https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>charles_f</author><text>&amp;gt; I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here&lt;p&gt;When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you&amp;#x27;d expect at the very least a post-mortem. I&amp;#x27;ve never seen a company produce one after that.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;What was the root cause?&lt;/i&gt; crazy hiring, massive wage war&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Could the current situation be anticipated?&lt;/i&gt; hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Europe, petrol production going down, supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation going massively up... Don&amp;#x27;t need an MBA to anticipate the economy was par for a correction.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;what could you have done to prevent this?&lt;/i&gt; realize it was too good to be true. Don&amp;#x27;t enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from happening again?&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;I take responsibility&amp;quot; is a beautiful thing to say but it&amp;#x27;s completely empty if you don&amp;#x27;t take the consequences as well, and don&amp;#x27;t learn anything in the process. I bet you that if&amp;#x2F;when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn&amp;#x27;t move and we see the same move in another 5&amp;#x2F;10y. So I guess the answer to this question is &amp;quot;none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MuffinFlavored</author><text>&amp;gt; you&amp;#x27;d expect at the very least a post-mortem.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn&amp;#x27;t think &amp;quot;hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months&amp;quot;. It changed. I am now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the bandwagon and correcting.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Now I don&amp;#x27;t actually have proof that interest rates directly affect Google (who is probably flush with cash&amp;#x2F;very profitable&amp;#x2F;has high margins&amp;#x2F;has lots of money coming in).&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with &amp;quot;cheap debt&amp;quot; and now they can&amp;#x27;t. Not sure how inflation plays into it.&lt;p&gt;I just like to tell myself &amp;quot;these people weren&amp;#x27;t top performers and if you work for a company like Google (and get paid a lot), you are expected to do a lot&amp;#x2F;be a top top top performer&amp;quot;</text></comment>