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3 lata temudiscuss

G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.

4 lata temudiscuss

If everyone is gunning for L6 after 8 years or L6 -> director in 8 more years, then the culture will be much worse. Assuming the long-tenured senior SWE is actually a solid engineer but doesn't want to play politics or manage up as required for L6+, this was a person who made G a very pleasant place to work. I know many L5 like this: smart, helpful, and made excellent colleagues.

That being said, I doubt it was mostly targeting people who were tenured too long without enough promos. My guess is these are people without the full backing of their upper mgmnt chain. Since even directors had no input into this layoff round, you needed your VP's support.

Added: maybe the person above is right since the grad changes are already moving G's culture into a more aggressive mode. G will slowly become like the other big tech companies (G will just pay slightly less since people will still have the outdated perception that the culture is better).

4 lata temudiscuss

I wouldn't call Amazon Prime same day. Amazon had prime now for awhile in response to Google's Express program; these were both same-day services that delivered in 2-4 hours from order placement. Both programs were cancelled when it became clear they were unsustainable.

4 lata temudiscuss

Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.

4 lata temudiscuss

This makes no sense. Google makes more money when users click on some crappy landing page filled with display ads?

4 lata temudiscuss

The chapters on Watson are super interesting. If Isaacson had written the book primarily about Watson, it likely would've been at the same level of Steve Jobs.

5 lat temudiscuss

The last sentence is only true if you believe the Fed will actually sell back the assets. When I look at this chart, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL, I have very little confidence that the Fed will sell a meaningful portion back (notice the Fed already gave up BEFORE covid when we supposedly had one of the best economies in recent times). In fact, it looks to me that the assets held by the Fed are growing exponentially and definitely growing faster than our productivity growth.

6 lat temudiscuss

That's correct. If you're a software developer and interested in maximizing pay while minimizing stress, you obviously avoid the gaming industry. The only news here is that the company seems to have reneged on the promise it made, but it's not obvious how a union would have solved this problem. Would the union help get the game shipped on time?

6 lat temudiscuss

I disagree. This would prove why big government is dangerous. This is the perfect example of how powerful individuals can leverage governmental power to enrich themselves. He's like Trump, pointing out all these problems while exploiting them to the max.

6 lat temudiscuss

It's not worse than US: http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ (third plot on page)

6 lat temudiscuss

Is eating live seafood animal abuse? I also don't see how this channel is directed towards children. This type of food looks expensive and I don't think kids normally eat this stuff.

6 lat temudiscuss

It also depends on if you include retirement accounts. It seems nuts to have 3-5 years of savings as cash in taxable accounts. But this is easily doable if you include retirement accounts, which you would start withdrawing from if things were really bad and the choice is to lose your house or withdraw early from 401K/IRA.

6 lat temudiscuss

I don't follow this logic.

Bird/lime own their inventory.

Airbnb is better off than the hotel chains IMO. The hotel chains have to keep paying their staff and rent while revenue drops, but airbnb just sees the revenue drop.

It exposes the people who bought properties to list on airbnb on aggressive margins or like the example in the article of someone buying a car just to put on the platform. I wonder how much rental prices will be affected when the properties that were bought to use for airbnb are brought back to the long-term rental market.

6 lat temudiscuss

There is some evidence that humidity and temperature do influence the transmission rate: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767

6 lat temudiscuss

You can get the original promo price if you threaten to cancel. There's a song and dance with CSR but once they transfer you to the retentions dept, they are authorized to give you the original price again for a year. Actually, Comcast did give me a different deal once where the price was slightly higher than my original introductory offer but speeds were also better.

6 lat temudiscuss

The key factor that doomed the big 3 car makers in US is the unions. They forced a high cost structure and no one was able or willing to fix this (automation that reduced labor costs meant less jobs). The big 3 were forced to make giant SUV's/trucks that had higher margins, but sales evaporated when gas prices went up in 2000's. This is documented in Paul Ingrassia's Crash Course. As long as the tech companies don't unionize, I don't think they will require government bailouts. In fact, we've already seen the pattern; tech companies that pass their peak undergo layoffs.

7 lat temudiscuss

You work on ads at Google and feel that ad tech is a house of cards?

I actually disagree, primarily because of the auction. It's an incredibly clever way to ensure Google's incentives are aligned with the advertisers'. Assuming rational bidders, Google can only charge more per click if the clicks deliver more value to the advertisers. If Google just sends a bunch of garbage clicks to the advertisers, they will just lower their bids.

7 lat temudiscuss

a) How do we know these clicks are bad? A sample size of 3 is pretty early to make any conclusions. b) If clicks are not delivering value, advertisers should lower their bids. As Google encourages advertisers to switch to bids set on hitting ROI targets, what really matters to advertisers is that they achieve their targets. If the clicks are "bad" and conversion rates are poor, then bids will be adjusted down, presumably by everyone.

The fact that prices are set by an auction makes the system inherently sustainable unless you think many of the bidders are irrational.

7 lat temudiscuss

This project doesn't seem that expensive to run and it resulted in a Nature paper. Seems like a favorable ROI already even for a for-profit company (given Google's size and possible benefits in PR and recruiting).

7 lat temudiscuss

You're overstating the issue here. Deepmind wasn't forced to control units using the standard control groups. My understanding is they could directly issue commands to arbitrary group of units. If you watch the replays, the APM/EPM is not too abusive. The main advantage is that it doesn't pay the cost of context-switching so it's very strong at multi-pronged attacks. It still didn't seem smart in the replays I saw on Youtube. Basically it's very good at developing mid-game timing attacks that humans tend to struggle with (not because of APM, but because it's easy to make mistakes when so much is going across the whole map).