> “to be deeply committed to our mission and focused on building great products, with speed and efficiency"
I hate this language. It sounds culty. Why can't a job just be a job? Why does everything have to have a god damn "mission"?
Either way, have some percentage of 2 million feds on the job market, and some percentage of the Google employees on the job market. Like somebody noted in the Verge comments, Zuckerberg's making a lot of the same sounds.
Q: 'What about the looming “low-performer” layoffs?'
Z: “The right thing to do is just rip the band-aid off. I think, in a lot of ways, it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it anyway.”It seems better than doing random layoffs, no?
I guess I'm just sick of companies massively overhiring, creating a ton of redundant employees in the process, and deciding to get rid of a ton afterward. We give these corporations so much power in our lives and they treat us like pawns. They control our healthcare and dictate where we live, they should treat this power with the responsibility it deserves.
Way less of a morale hit than layoffs, but it suffers a similar problem to all RIF methods where your high performers say "hmm conditions are that bad you're getting rid of people huh? I guess maybe I will take 6 months my annual salary and go get another job."
Thankfully, I MDM my personal devices and can neuter most of it from there.
Yeah, but their hand may be forced:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/21/24326402/google-search-a...:
> The Department of Justice’s list of solutions for fixing Google’s illegal antitrust behavior and restoring competition in the search engine market started with ... breaking off Chrome, Android, or Google Play as the DOJ’s filing considers
It's almost as if Google doesn't really care anymore.
If Google takes the foot off the pedal on mobile, it will leave a gap in the smartphone market wide enough to drive a truck through.
A group of smart folks who worked on Pixel & Android can take voluntary redundancy together and start a company with the tech and their experience.
What a wonderful world that’d be - to be able to buy SOTA devices made by a company that doesn’t also make tracking software that tracks you all over the Internet, and that doesn’t want to show you ads. A company that just wants to sell you a product that you buy with your money.
This is what anti-monopoly regulation is for - we all just forgot during the recent period of lax enforcement.
How did that work out for Andy Rubin and the Essential Phone?
It takes more than money, experience, and collective brain power to build a modern smartphone of sufficient dependability. Unfortunately, most companies in this space, both new and old, are more likely to shoot themselves in the feet than offer a compelling alternative to the incumbents like Apple and Samsung.
I think the opportunity is most likely going to be taken Huawei's HarmonyOS than something like Lineage or Librem.
As such we should consider this almost a-kin to a DeepSeek level threat to international security. Google did a lot to secure our phones [0], and we were lucky their economic incentive forced them to be as open as they were.
[0] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/android-overview/#google...
May be a paid OS with a 10-15$/year subscription to fund the development might work if enough people are interested, but seeking how the mod ecosystem has stagnated I don't see how will this work.
That said, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the current tech ecosystem (where everything is either ARR-driven, or “free”) building an OS that isn’t bloated with tracking and spyware.
The part that can't easily get jobs elsewhere?
If I was in that bucket I would definitely take this offer.
Looks like all the large tech companies are doing aggressive stack ranking right now.
Assuming the events are independent, P(you get laid off) x P(you don't find a new job) will always be less than 1.0 x P(you don't find a new job)
What does seem to be happening is that the core "user facing" Android (vs all the AI stuff and Play Services-based apps like Maps) is getting more and more settled as a stack and Google is cutting development staff to reflect that. To be fair, I can't speak deeply as to what's happening under the hood, just the touchy bits.
My phone started with Android 9 and is now on Android 15. 10, 11 and 12 all had (compared to now) larger changes. However, if you held a gun to my head and asked me what has changed with Android 13 and on, my answer would be "stuff seems a little rounder" ...and maybe a new font? But it sorta just feels like a new version of the old font. You just don't need that many people for Android's current evolution rate. Which really sucks for all the folks losing their jobs.
Guess we know what’s coming.
Very interesting that this only applies to US based employees. I wonder how long before Google completely moves overseas and drops most of their domestic employees.
Voluntary exits are generally more humane, and have been used across Silicon Valley for decades before layoffs became common, so hopefully it minimizes suffering of layoffs.
Also, I’m surprised the title just calls out Pixel and Android, because this also affects most of their hardware efforts (Fitbit, Nest, Chrome, VR, etc)
Edit: I’ve heard from people there that the buyout is worse than previous rounds of severance from layoffs - namely, no stock vesting
Layoffs cause huge emotional trauma to people who are affected. People often slide into serious mental health issues, financial issues, etc. Often people get laid off while their peers were eyeing the door. This at least allows people to quit and take the heat off their coworkers.
It's a way to avoid 3% or 5% layoffs. That's a big group. With how fast their AI Labs group is moving, I could see some employees not being fans of the direction this group is taking.
What a fucked up company to work for.
Somebody was paid good Google Salary to make decent Presentation style materials: https://developer.android.com/teach#teach-a-class only never to be updated... Those were good in 2020 but now not so much.
Sure, active learning is usually better such as Codelabs, but there should be decent presentation style teaching that is updated once a year.