Intel is only around today because the leadership was decisive enough to lay off most of the company early in its history, and they then proceeded to release a whack of innovative microprocessor products after these massive layoffs.
It's what happened. Intel was primarily a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips in the early 1980s. They pivoted hard to CPUs instead when it started looking like the IBM PC clone platform is a winner and their 386 chip could define the industry.
I don't know whether your comment is true, but the way to do layoffs while keeping innovation as high as possible is to do one round that is big enough that you can and do give guarantees to the employees that are left behind that they have jobs for life. Multiple rounds of layoffs is what really takes your innovation to zero.
Dell has a talent to do the exact opposite. HR should hire your service. But they would fire you since they wouldn't like your advice.
For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list.
CEO? He also has to follow orders.
Who's to blame then? I wonder.
The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.
From what I understand, the modern Dell (much like many airlines, for that matter) is in a sort of weird banking/finance business rather than technology and innovation. They are really good at managing capital and that is how they derive much of their profits.
Yes. And while Starbucks offers a decent service, Dell's has rather become absolutely mediocre.
I'm not even sure Dell has been that good at capital management as of late. His last good shot, and an amazing one, was to buy out his own company at a much undervalued price, with plenty of financing support from investment banks. 10 years ago already.
I’ve been through dozens of rounds of layoffs. That part I almost got used to. Staying innovative, and being seen as innovative by my boss, was the way to ensure I wasn’t on that list.
What killed it for me was when new management came in, refused to talk to anyone internal, brought in outside hires to be the innovators and change agents, and then shut down any of the legacy employees who tried to speak or bring ideas to the table. A lot of really talented people have left, and maybe that was the goal, as it avoids having to pay severance.
Funny. Here I was abandoning their products because they don't SUPPORT them. I dare say Google could have easily used their laid off staff to better maintain their existing products and through that restore confidence in their products and be able to achieve higher sales and profit margins.
Compared to Covid boom years... let's normalize the Covid years to their past trend and add the 2022 and 2023 data points as regular years. I'm sure they'd look just fine.
There are definitely cases where companies have true existential risk and layoffs can help get them through that.
That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway.
I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
> I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.
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