Good luck.

Damn that sucks. I’ve been laid off before, and I was lucky enough to have a bunch of references and ins at other jobs right away.

Just keep making friends and building marketable skills on the company dime, is what I am doing anyway

deleted by creator

I’m not sure the nerds ever really had the best intentions, so were probably really easy to buy off

It’s cute that you think any new corporation of that calibre will be born in near future. It will get bought out before that happens

It’s a well travelled path for any company in the tech sphere. Start out as a disruptor and breath of fresh air in a stagnant industry and then slowly crank the dial toward enshittification over time hoping that the reputation you previously built will keep your customer base from jumping ship too quickly.

Unregulated capitalism ruins everything if given enough time.

It’s unfair to discount Google’s early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed “don’t be evil?” I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about “more wood behind fewer arrows” as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.

Notable: Google Home can no longer set timers and does not understand what “stop playing” means. It’s basically only usable for asking for music to be played since it has declined so heavily.

What’s a technical architecture? Serious question.

I loved Google for so long, but they have really lost it. I switched back to Firefox last year as a meek sign of protest. My work still uses Gmail and my personal email is still Gmail, it’s gonna be rough to extricate myself. My fucking phone number is Google voice

Tough times create rough workplaces, rough workplaces create strong employees, strong employees create unions, unions create better workplaces.

When times are tough

Work environment gets rough

Delete stuff from prod

To keep things interesting enough

Burma Shave

They famously threw out “Don’t be evil” when they formed Alphabet, a move that was, I have to admit, surprisingly honest of them.

“Don’t be evil”. Not-evil people don’t need to say such things.

That was a reference to Microsoft. They were on trial / convicted for abusing their monopoly in awful ways to screw over any potential competitors, and making the experience terrible for Microsoft users. As bad as Google might be today, they’re nowhere near as bad as Microsoft was. And, in the early years, they were definitely the anti-Microsoft in the tech world.

Managers from unaffected departments who are glad they have less internal competition. And that’s pretty much it.

Certainly only certain people have email addresses that can even send to his inbox. Everyone else would be blocked.

Expect this from corporate and political types alike.

We had a coworker that got fired a while back, man that was a relief for the entire department. That person was absolutely toxic to work with, or even near.

I can imagine it, but just a few really awful people. Google, like any company, will have some extreme right-wingers working for it. And, working for Google tends to go with big egos. I can imagine some dude looking at his stock options thinking “yes, all those useless people were holding down the value of my options, now that they’re gone I’m going to be rich”.

Even the press isn’t fooled. Sundar isn’t fooled. The other employees aren’t fooled. We, the outside observers, aren’t fooled. You have to wonder what the point of all this was.

Managers are also ‘workers’ according to people like this guy, so they’re the ones saying thanks (because they are kissing ass.)

Yeah, I thought his clueless reaction not only didn’t dispel but just confirmed the problem.

He’s in a bubble, clueless that Google is now staffed by up-managing promo-seekers and not people who care about solving problems in a “googly” way like it was 10 years ago. His toadying to Wall Street and corporate culture shift did that, and now he doesn’t even notice that people are telling him what he wants to hear and complimenting his policies even when they don’t work.

Google employs, what, hundreds of thosuands of people now? All of them have stock options, many are millionaires from their Google stock. They also have big egos, and are often engineers (i.e. not very empathetic).

I can imagine a few people not caring about co-workers they never met being let go, and believing management’s story that they were letting go people who weren’t needed and were just a drag on the company. Some, especially right-wingers, probably look at their options, see the share price going up, and are happy about the layoffs. They mistakenly believe it wouldn’t happen to them because they’re much more valuable, and they see themselves more as Google stockholders rather than employees.

Still, a competent CEO knows that those kinds of employees are terrible for the culture of the organization. Rather than admitting that some employees like it their fellow employees are let go, he’d be smarter to say “it’s tough for us because we’re a family, so nobody likes it when we have to lay people off, but sometimes business realities make it necessary.”

I had to verify the current situation in the United States is what you stated because it’s intuitively so wrong. I can’t believe an employer can set terms for compensation and, through no fault of the employee, legally prevent that employee from completing those terms.

Land of the free!

Yeah, my company just re-organized their shares and reset my vesting schedule after 5 years. And are trying to get rid of me.

Can’t think why just can’t open contractor positions and keep things honest. "This is a year contract " great, pick if that’s your path and move on when it’s over.

AI will replace middle management.

They’re common in small orgs. Once you go public and the only thing that matters is the quarterly bottom line, you almost have no choice but to replace them with people whose only though is “make number go up”

Workers: “our bosses are inept”

You: “the gays are making their lives worse!”

This is what Fox News does to people’s brains. Truly sickening.

I read that as DEI hires

Say you’re racist without saying your racist speedrun

My company had a big diversity push, but it worked well for us, and ended up making it a much more pleasant to work.

Are you sure those are DEI hires, or just the kind of people your co-workers want to be around?

Racist, misogynist, xenophobic, bigoted, made-up story about a company hiring women+minorities into dedicated departments which then don’t do any work

They must have a lot of departments full of white, straight men to compensate, otherwise the company would surely go under. /s

edit: before anyone thinks I actually meant this seriously…I was reacting to a ridiculously bigoted comment by some troll (I know…I shouldn’t have reacted) claiming their company had entire departments full of women+minorities not doing any work. The comment no longer exists of course. I

Great idea! Here’s a starbucks gift voucher for your initiative! Now if we can just figure out how to simulate pizza…

Or a Skynut-style ejaculate-powered-robot testicle gas station bioenergy plant even.

Every day is pizza day here!!! That’s what makes us a “Great Place to Work” (GPTW^TM)

Would you care for a chair massage?

A good example of a bottom-feeding boomer who went batshit insane.

This makes me so sad, I really enjoyed the comic for years and years. Then he had to go and open his fucking mouth and ruin the entire thing. Now I feel a twinge of disgust rather than delight when I see a reference of him.

I didn’t know what this was about. I found this that can serve as context for others unaware: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159580425/newspapers-have-dropped-the-dilbert-comic-strip-after-a-racist-rant-by-its-creat

[…] Adams urged white people “to get the hell away from Black people” during a racist rant on his online video program last week, during which he labeled Black people a “hate group.”

On his video show last week, the 65 year old said he had been identifying as Black “because I like to be on the winning team,” and that he used to help the Black community. Adams said the results of the Rasmussen poll changed his mind.

“It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be white,” he said, adding that he would re-identify as white. “I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off,” he said. “I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying.”

This is not the first time Adams’ strip has been dropped. Last year, The San Francisco Chronicle and 76 other newspapers published by Lee Enterprises reportedly dropped Dilbert after Adams introduced his first Black character. Quinn noted that the move was “apparently to poke fun at ‘woke’ culture and the LGBTQ community.”