They did it again in 2024 and then switched to continuous drip of small "layoffs" and encouraging attrition. They have tried various layoff flavors: random, strategic, political, voluntary, and now in their continuous microlayoff era good luck distilling a consistent simple explanation for the day to day decisions of many thousands of managers.
Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes, and eliminated many perks and benefits that were peculiar to Google. As the unique characteristics of Google as an institution are pared away, it makes sense that they would also adopt the standard approach to layoffs and that is what we have seen since 2023.
YouTube Kids is also full of garbage. The bar to get content into YouTube Kids is substantially higher than YouTube but still the average video's educational quality is abysmal.
There are people at YouTube/Google/Alphabet who care but at the end of the day we get what the invisible hand gives us. Market forces have not yielded a well-curated educational video experience on YouTube.
The Assistant can't reliably set timers either, though I guess 80% is considerably better than 0. Still, I think it used to be better back before Google caught a glimpse of a different squirrel to chase.
A lot of people lately are complaining about a lack of price stability, it seems like a good angle.
Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year.
In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.
IDK this is my experience over the past few years with 10+ appointments with two specialists and three PCPs in the SFBA; my understanding is that it is typical in this area and becoming typical in other regions of the U.S. as well.
The waiting is similar in the U.S., only the cost is wildly different. Actually, it sounds like you can see a family doctor the same day in Germany? That would make it better in Germany.
In the U.S. I can see a midlevel the same day by paying $200 for an annual membership in a mass-affluent pseudoconcierge practice plus $800ish for the appointment+labs, the $800 may be partly or entirely covered by insurance depending on how the conversation goes with the "provider". I have to wait several months if I want to see a real doctor outside of an emergency room. 6 months is about right for seeing a specialist with a preexisting relationship, might need a little more lead time for an initial consultation.
I was on dev teams inside industrial-age companies before I went to FANG, and I saw it go both ways.
In one company, the hourly customer service folks who sat adjacent to our patch of the cube farm (that's right, no noise isolation between the call center and the software development team) complained about engineers arriving half an hour after customer service shift start, so we salaried engineers were instructed to be at work by 8am or whatever. In another company, the hourly people were not allowed in the executive barbershop, the executive dining room, or the executive washroom and had to park in the surface lot instead of the garage. Actually, garage access was denied even to most software engineers but whatever.
I'm sure it's generally true that "MVPs" get exempted to varying degrees. My point is that the policies themselves are fairly capricious in the first place and the identification of MVPs is unreliable too. Performance management for managers is probably more difficult even than performance management for software engineers and my experience makes me highly skeptical about the whole prospect of professional management.
Now that AI means LLM specifically I guess you are right, but if you'd told me 20 years ago that we'd have cars driving themselves around major cities by now, I'd have been pretty impressed.
I heard about the self-flying helicopter at CMU and robots playing soccer, but really finishing the science and engineering to have computers mundanely outperforming humans at safe city driving is remarkable. Except of course to current industry observers & wall street analysts, who are asking "will this ML mumbo jumbo ever amount to anything practical? Or is lane keeping with human vigilance and alarm-setting the pinnacle?"
The complaint is not that Google is too efficient. It is that Google is achieving apparent improvements in efficiency by taking steps that improve the short-term metrics and have net negative long-term impact. So, OP is disputing the senior management claim that this cost base reengineering is legitimately "durable."
It is a reduction in per-kwh rates coupled to the introduction of a universal flat fee. You can see in the graph in the article, for PGE and SoCal Edison it shifts the burden from users of more than 515kwh to users of less electricity and for SDGE customers the burden shifts from users of more than 313kwh to users of less. Of course there is also an income-based distortion to soften this for poor people.
This seems kinda nuts, why would we incentivize electricity consumption? I guess there is some infra cost to connect customers to the grid but how can that be worth 8--18% of the cost of the kwh?