The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they'll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.

If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals' stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.

And, in the end, they'll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated "we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button" basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.

Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don't actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.

Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.

Source: I've done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).

That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they'll pay you every year is meaningless if they'll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.

They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we're a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.

Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how "fun" an office could be. They're now relegated to normal companies...and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP's move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?

IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They'll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.

• Pichai ignores the fact that part of the reason the pay is so well at Big Tech is that they’re paying you to not have ethics. His failure to understand that is gonna seriously hurt Google.
• Looking for cheaper labor.. in Germany? Where worker protections are WAY stronger than in the US? Lol. (That’s not a shot at Germany. That’s commentary on American labor protections, or lack thereof).

Its not a death spiral but a typical downturn caused by poor leadership. nothing hard for a capable board to rectify.

At googles core their business model could still stomp the competition with capable leadership. AI is simply not the disruptor being marketed.

Dunno where I saw the headline but supposedly big tech isnt the place fresh graduates dream of going to as their first place.

Google is too big to fail. Yes they'll lose a lot of customers and products but they only need to keep the ads and maybe google cloud engine running. Everything else is irrelevant until Google.com becomes irrelevant.

You're missing the whole "growth starts to plateau so management looks for ways to cut costs"

And

"Product comparatively stable so it gets hired out to contractors who inevitably fuck it up because they're cheap and there was 0 knowledge transfer but it's too late you laid off the entire original team"

Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending

I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops "trending". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.

But also you're not just supporting the language. You're supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.

Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.

Also, the story of Boeing's planes-that-don't-fly-good. Decades of engineering out the door to save money in a single quarter means accumulating tail risk that you - a manager who will be up or out in another five years - never have to deal with.

This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing

Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That's the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm's bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.

Where is the "legacy system needs to be maintained, salary goes up"? But yeah, it's a pretty good picture of the tech landscape

Sounds like these CEOs suck at CEOing

CEOs. Name them. Shame them.

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.

Hindustan Times is an Indian site. Sundar Pichai is Indian.

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

It's like he looked at Carly Fiorina's run on HP and said "hold my beer".

The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it's Raghaven who's being enabled by Sundar to do it. They've been hit with the problem that Ads isn't growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it's no wonder why. It's clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it's enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he's deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.

Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.

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.

You know where there is also cheaper labor? Other places in the US that are not in Bay Area CA.

Maybe they will save money because they don't have to offer healthcare?

https://www.levels.fyi/...

vs

https://www.levels.fyi/...

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.

While reporting record profits! lmao you can't make this shit up.

"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%"

hot take: Sundar Pichai is the first LLM CEO.

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

Compared to software developer compensation in California, Germany is waaaay cheaper.

Heck, Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any of their US offices. You would make more by working for Google in Raleigh, North Carolina than in Munich.

The only European city that pays as well as the US is Zürich. The pay is really good there, about the same as Seattle.

Yeah, how’s that going to be cheaper? Unions in Germany aren’t known for that. Unless Germany has an easier route to cheaper foreign workers with visas working there?

I bet they won't be paying upwards of 200k salaries there though.

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.

You are only starting to think that NOW?

It got much worse around 2018, but they are speed running.

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

I think he might be an infiltrator

The irony is that they are moving to Germany, one of the most unionized countries in the entire world. Also not exactly "cheap" labor.

Compared to..... San Francisco?

München isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than San Francisco

For shareholders, he has increased the share price and dividends.

It seems he has done this via Boeing route of management, short term gain for long term decline.

Really dumb considering the recent FTC noncompete ruling lol

They're just going to throw a few more projects on the Google graveyard then

Their financials are doing pretty great, but like any enshitification, the UX is degraded by the day to squeeze money out of everything.

They brought it upon them.

Python team was ~10 people I think

I believe it was entirely big.

interesting

G8 b8 m8