skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was impossible to import a larger wp site to ghost for me when I tried. Publii could do it.
Cutting your current pay and then paying you it in a few months doesn’t change that… it’s just stretching the same pay out over longer
>To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.

He kinda did.
I consciously reduce my output to be at about the 70th percentile of whatever team I'm on, with short bursts of max productivity when I subjectively feel like it will help the team get out of a pinch. People like me a lot more this way.
I'm only a slightly above average programmer, but I'm probably 5x when it comes to finding better, faster, more efficient ways of doing things.

I'm more of a gordian knot cutter than a programmer.
12K? What is that 5 to 7% of the total employment.
Just don't hire for 120 days. Accomplish the same results and you don't even need to make a press release.
So many highly skilled people, put to good use can multiply profits no?

No. If true, merely having skilled people would immediately lead to a win for any startup.

How would you interpret massive layoffs when a company is not making losses?

I would only care to try, to spend the hundreds or thousands of hours to analyze google's actions (instead of guessing), if I cared to invest heavily it.

To the above I will add, a well run company does not wait to lose money, but manages finances ahead of the game.

Beyond that, share price is how google acquires, yes? So if share price plummets, acquisition capability plummets...
> Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023

Gen Z? Or just not familiar with the technology? Protocols don't die just because the newer generation doesn't understand them.
No, it's more like a soft version of the Monty Python line:

"Some of you will die ... but that's a sacrifice I am prepared to make!"

Saying you "take responsibility" is hollow if you don't suffer at all for your alleged failure.
We need to talk about infinity X developers.

I don’t care if someone is 10x faster than average at building a CRUD app, but there are developers who come up with solutions that an average dev would never come up with, even given a lifetime. I’m talking about innovations like Lisp, Deep Learning, React framework, the first 3D engines, CRDTs, Git version control, Bitcoin, etc…
As a european, there is no way I would host anything remotely critical with a company who cannot even create a compliant cookie consent banner (clicking deny sends you to google.com...)
I asked ChatGPT to generate a layoff announcement email for comparison:

Dear valued employees,

It is with a heavy heart that I am writing to inform you that the company will be undergoing a restructuring process that will result in the layoffs of 12,000 employees. This decision was not made lightly, and we understand the impact it will have on our workforce and their families.

We have been closely monitoring the economic climate and have determined that this action is necessary to ensure the long-term success and sustainability of the company. We are committed to treating all affected employees with fairness and respect during this difficult time.

We will be providing severance packages, outplacement support, and other benefits to assist impacted employees in their transition. Additionally, we will be working closely with local authorities to provide job training and other resources to help affected employees find new opportunities.

We understand that this news is difficult to hear, but we are committed to supporting our employees through this transition. We appreciate your contributions to the company and wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,
Sundar Pichai
CEO, Google LLC
> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished.

"These people" don't deserve punishment any more than a developer who had to make a tough decision does. It's the same situation at a different level with more visibility. Management has its own set of challenges.

> that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working

It wouldn't be fair to them to keep them employed if doing so meant weighing down the company, which could eventually cost everyone else their job. Better to have strong companies that continue to adjust to fit people's needs and let workers move among them.

> these antics require revolution

Revolution to what economic system, exactly? I don't want to live in a world where companies are forced to keep workers in unproductive jobs out of a misplaced sense of goodwill. That sinks the ship for everybody.
Needing to find a new job in your lucrative industry after a nice golden goodbye from your previous one is not equivalent to a breast ripper.
> it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.

HN is going to be a tough place for you. A mild, undiagnosed case of autism is not uncommon around here and a non-trivial amount of people seem to mistake that as some superpower for "seeing things how they really are".
Thanks, I had missed at first. After I realised it also made me think about a famous movie scene [1] involving a financial guy and the Genesis lead singer. Wonder if the founders of this company had that in mind when they set it up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yM7Xe3HrT8
Same. I don't have a twitter account and don't browse it. Is it because it's crypto related? So much weird anger out of all those accounts.
I wish these Terminator-esque articles would stop.

Self aware AI is the same leap as spontaneous life from all-the-right-chemicals in a petri dish.

The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real.
Didn't this used to be solved by the simple and incredibly efficient method of having a bathroom heater?

One thing I don't understand about Nest et al is - virtually no houses have actual zone cooling or heating. So when we say "make bathroom 21c at 8pm" we are actually saying "heat up entire house until bathroom is 21c at 8pm". Turning on electric heater in bathroom for 30seconds seems incredibly more convenient and efficient.
> All that being said, I take full responsibility. As your CEO, I must do better, and I will.

This has been super tiring to read, announcement after announcement.
On the last par: suppose that it is true that a) 10 years ago people were less self-centered, impatient or poor than they are now and b) 10 years ago there were more parties.

Does this form the basis of a well-evidenced claim that there are fewer parties because of increased poverty, narcissism or impatience? Of course not, because there are lots of other time periods we can easily look at.

For example, in the 1950s young people were probably on average poorer than they are now. Perhaps they were also more narcissistic, or equally narcissistic as they are now. Were there also fewer parties? If not, this suggests there is something wrong with the theory.

My question to the GP is: do they believe that there are no time periods like the 1950s in my example, which might raise doubt about their theories? If they think there aren't any, is it because we have never been so poor and narcissistic as we are now? Or is it because there have never been so many parties at any prior time period, as there were in the golden age they identified where we were at our least poor and narcissistic (whenever that might be)? If there are such periods, why isn't that part of their theory? If 'the 1950s' were different, what is it that makes them different, and is that reflected in the theory?

It should be clear here, that any variable which has moved monotonically in one direction for ever and so is currently at a global extreme, is correlated with every other, especially if it is a phenomenon which can't be measured in formal units (like narcissism or fear of strangers). Saying that (satirizing the GP here) 'we have never had so many smartphones, and we have also never had so many allergies, therefore allergies are caused by smartphones', is laughably easy to dismiss, for a number of reasons.
And what departments are relatively safer than the ones you mentioned?
Concerned by knock on affect to other industries.
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are

Ah, the heavy cost of a troubled mind /s.
I agree with this.
There is an economic cycle and this always happens.
But…isn’t this kind of how life really did start?
Anyone who quotes early Billy Bragg lyrics at me on HN definitely deserves an upvote.
> To whom may I write to explain this situation and have my account unlocked? There is no one. I really despise this behaviour

They will probably never hire humans for support tickets. But they could "hire" their star model PaLM to solve support questions. It could be a good demo and a product useful for many companies. Even if it is only 70% or 80% effective, still better than nothing.
I think it’s the dishonesty that irks me. And the poor human capital management of not planning and allocating.

I remember when GE and Microsoft did their ranking and culling the herd processes of perpetual annual layoffs. They got a lot of flak for that (and I think stopped) and I saw presentations from Google HR about how bad that was and they wouldn’t do that because they are so much smarter.

They are full of shit and would do it if they had better PR. And that’s what they are doing now.

Hiring and firing is expensive. Layoffs are short term corrections and long term inefficiencies.

Google is for profit. And they are managed poorly to have such a layoff. If they were smarter they wouldn’t have to do this. If they were smarter they would retrain and reassign to new projects.

I don’t work at Google. I applied years ago and didn’t even get an interview. I wouldn’t work there now.

I suspect that they only need about 10% of their workforce to make 95% of their earnings. So everyone left is probably wondering if their imposter syndrome is real or not.
I didn't realize the Raleigh, NC metro was in the middle of nowhere. ;)
Security Cryptography Whatever

https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/
Yes, exactly what I'm talking about behind the consumer facing physical UI.

You can buy single DIP switches in parts catalogs:

https://i.imgur.com/isfVR18.jpg

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/CUI-Devices/DS01-254-L-...

I thought 'everybodyknows' that. ;-)
"And now a Man will shut it off." ~ Riker
> Google is an advertising business. And advertising revenue is extremely sensitive to changes in the economy

Very true
The moral compass points to the money
> An alternative solution would be to allow only autonomous vehicles and have these vehicles in a mesh network so can coordinate to drive efficiently and avoid mishaps.

Why should more public space be given up for private transit? At that point we would be better off building a wide network of autonomous trams with small capacity and high frequency.
That tech stack concern and attitude only affects a small-poulation collection of startups.

"Morally opposed to Google" affects a tiny sliver of professionals who boycott Google products or choose to use it despite allegedly being opposed to it.
ㄷㄷㄷ
Per my experience, nothing beats the "i work on what i love and passionate".

Coorporate environment of course has some advantages, for what they called "the real world experience". But it doesn't mean they're more capable than "lonely hackers" that can build his own universe by the weekends.

"Learn/Work by heart" is a dangerous thing.
Due to tech giants' overhiring and overpaying policies, a lot of people re-qualified in recent years. Now those Juniors can't find their easy-to-get-dream-jobs f or months and situation is getting worse for Seniors, too, as both bigger and smaller (and also both public and private) companies are doing hiring freezes, layoffs, invoke no-raises policies and all sorts of cost cuts.

Sure - all those people could try to go back to what they were doing earlier but there are layoffs and freezes in not only tech and related industries.

Those people are being punished for doing what the giants-led market demanded.
These sound similar to the video intercoms in Star Trek (1966). They sit on desktops and can rotate.
You should check out this guy called Marx, he wrote a couple books about how labor is always disadvantaged in such a system because their power ebbs and flows with the fluctuations of the market. The main check that labor has on this power is to bargain collectively. Seems tech missed that opportunity five years ago when it was top of mind but many people felt things are good why would we need a union.
It's like a murderer saying:

"I don't regret what I did, I don't think it was wrong, I would do it again, I haven't been caught BUT I take full responsibility for the death of the victim."
I'd love property-based testing in big data cluster computing applications done in Databricks/Spark. However, (Py)Spark is very high-latency, even in local mode, so Hypothesis would have to generate a list (DataFrame) of thousands of test cases to be evaluated in parallel. That is where I got stuck. Has anybody ever done this successfully?
We can keep discussing this forever and get nowhere if nobody defines what is meant with 10x. Ten times what compared to what under what circumstances?

Is the baseline the average developer worldwide or the average developer in any particular team?

Are we measuring jira tickets fixed or net profit produced for the business, or the impossible-to-measure “productivity”? Are we measuring a single task or consistent performance over years?

The anecdote in the OP is about a developer solving a task in a tenth of the estimated time. Great, but this seem more like an issue with the estimation process which presumably didn’t involve the devloper. Would an unrealistically low estimate mean they were a 0.1x developer?
> You just lost your house, your family will have to uproot its life, your credit rating is about to be ruined

Except nothing of this happened to me when I was laid off in 2020. And I was not making 500k/y, not even close. I have full sympathy to those who are getting laid off now, but I assume googlers will be fine.
I wish Linux didn't make managing huge pages such a pain in the ass. You have to "allocate" huge pages ahead of time by editing a file in /proc/sys before you can map the huge pages.

Why can't free memory automatically be converted to huge pages when I call mmap(HUGE_TLB)?
Wikipedia Gets a Fresh New Look: First Desktop Update in a Decade Puts Usabilit
Replacing Pandas with Polars
In the US, you can usually tell by where they work. Firms with bad reputations are pretty easy to identify with some searches.
Every algorithm is a psychopath. My savings account is a psychopath. My roomba is a psychopath. My dishwashing detergent is a psychopath.

Etc etc.

Don’t anthropomorphize corporations. They aren’t people. They are algorithms to maximize shareholder equity.
Yes, this is called survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
You assume that nothing was done to mitigate this but you do not have that knowledge you only assume it. You assume there's some alternate universe available to us where everything is good for everyone all the time.

Let's look at the universe where Google becomes a social security service instead of a competitive entity. If only 12,000 people are on the bad side of that one we'd be improbably lucky.
Rhai: Embedded Scripting for Rust
Layoffs make it easier to get rid of underperforming people without having to file too much paperwork, so it probably has a better effect on the median employee quality to do layoffs instead of a hiring freeze.
Personally, I don't see taking a paycut or leaving a position of power to be "taking a responsibility". The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary. If you just reduce to the baseline, it's not really a punishment. Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.
Are all of these layoffs essentially collusion to reduce wages?

If they all end up with the same headcount but with a reduced wage in the next year, there should be a class action. Not that those help anyone but lawyers, but it's nice to have an official punishment on record.
Could you give a few specific examples of unorthodox and heretical topics you wish you could find?
We can criticize but this will never change. A CEO is the face of a company, everything they say publically is basically a PR stunt.

- They won't say the company is falling apart until the insolvency, it's some new strategy or refocus.
- They won't say they sold the company for money, it's a new chance to reach out to more people.
- They won't say they laid off people to increase profits, it's all for some other reason.

We cannot stop this without some draconian laws, but let's criticize it and increase awareness, so that other people aren't fooled by it.
9-10 words chosen at random from a list of 10k common words in you native language will get you to 128 bits. Sure not trivial to memorise, but far from impossible.
I've been using a Macbook Air M1 with 8gb of ram to run a bunch of Chrome tabs, multiple iOS simulators, docker, an external display, plus the obligatory slack and zoom apps simultaneously and never ran into any issues. I assume most linux distributions would handle this even better than MacOS but anyone correct me if I'm wrong.
If only it were that simple. You can't automate IQ, experience and vision. 10x developers are regarded as such because of the quality of their output, not just sheer volume.
For simple work, sometimes you can only optimize a little, let alone - 10x.

For advanced stuff, the difference is not 10x. It is infinite. Some people would do it well, some poorly, and order(s) of magnitude longer, most - not at all, even if they put decades into that.

Think: how long would a regular software developer take to do John Carmack's work on Wolfenstein and Doom?
Judging by the comments I think it's safe to assume that the "taking responsibility" part is a meaningless statement at best. What I want to understand is does he even owe anyone an apology? Isn't employment just an agreement to provide services in exchange for money and benefits? Anywhere I work I expect my employer to fire me the moment they don't need my services or find a better/cheaper alternative, I wouldn't think twice if I found a better employer. So why would I be owed an apology or someone to "take responsibility"?
Hypothesis also has automatic test input reduction, using a rather clever general purpose mechanism.
At this point neither the "investors" nor the people builing those systems can claim plausible deniability.

Nothing good has ever come out of crypto/blockchain, it's all just scams left an right.
Legal people aren’t people. This just means that rights given to people also apply to organizations and groups of people.

Otherwise the state could say “yes prepend, you have freedom of speech, but the church you belong to can’t say stuff.” Etc etc.
Powered by fusion generators it pretends are still experimental?
The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by definition.

As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in this case. They are just looking for even more profits. It's not even close to a "struggling company".

But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules. Of course under these conditions companies will always choose to fire people and keep making profits to its owners.

But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s) profitable.
Yes, but now you're redesigning a normal electricity setup for a large building like a school. This is the system that was, presumably, replaced by the broken IoT system, plus the absolute minimum of traditional kit outside of that.
> When an engineer causes an incident, we fixed it and then did a review to understand how we can improve the process to prevent such an incident in future

Yes, sure most of the time its the process's fault. But not always. The big issue is that unlike an incident review where agreed, measurable fixes will be put in place, in business there is no such thing.

Sure, Sundar admits that he made the wrong call. But, why? what information lead to that call, what changes are going to be made to how decisions are made in the future? how can the rest of the company be sure that this is a one time thing, and not a systemic information bias.
The authors of that paper have long left Google and are on a bunch of startups. So you could say they already lost that advantage.
A temporary C-level/VP/director/manager compensation cut (say, a couple quarters to a year) whenever "large" layoffs are executed seems fair.

Sure, let 5-10% of the company go, but it should echo financially up the chain as well.

In the sense that those people can't afford to do that thing that they'd been planning on doing, and might have to budget a bit harder.

Seems minimally fair when others just lost their jobs.
Using AI art to show the history of the world
> Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life

This isn’t what the comment you’re replying to said. They just said don’t let work slowly kill you. I think there are plenty of people whose work consumes their lives whose work isn’t also slowly killing them. And if you disagree with that I guess I’d say that everything is slowly killing everyone.
I use coding tests to weed out potential employers. As a general rule I'm barely willing to even interview. I can't remember the last time I spent more than 30 minutes "interviewing."
0.2x developers and 2x developers
What a great article. I’m a proud Ars Technica subscriber so if you enjoyed this article consider subscribing.
The Toki Pona Baby Sign Language Guide
The US breaks their own laws and international laws when going after individuals who embarrasses the US government, including deploying the military if it suits them.

It is a bit like when telecom companies sent bribes to terrorists in order to gain telecom contracts. It not that they intend to do bad things, but occasionally they have to break the law when law stands in the way.
Overtime work is like an afterburner in a jet engine: it does allow you to get somewhere faster, but at a disproportionately higher cost than normal.
While this is always bad news, this is also a cold shower - back-to-reality check for anyone who thinks that working for a company is anything beyond just a job.

I hope, that for the ones affected, in the end this will turn up as an opportunity.
Modern users expect everything to integrate with Google Calendar, unfortunately. You can't avoid them when it comes to developing scheduling applications.
> I think 10x developers, like world-class athletes, musicians, and authors, absolutely do exist.

Most of the issue with the 10x developer as a concept is (involuntarily) summarized in this quote: 10x developers don't exist, merely because 10 times is a lot! World-class athlete don't run ten times faster than anyone, and a F1 can't drive ten time faster than a cheap car. In most competitive situations being just 10% better than the competition will make you win most races and earn most of the awards.

Do 2x programmer exist, probably, but that's about it. Or you can call then 10x if you want, in binary ;)
No, corporations are not people, and legalities which apply in very specific circumstances and not relevant.

Do you, as a person, have a CTO by law? Have your value listed on a stock exchange? Can you be sold? Dissolved at the whim of the state?

A corporation is only a person in a very, very narrow set of conditions.
That's implying that he never intended these at-will employees to have tenure beyond the short term.
It really depends on how you see work and companies on an almost philosophical level. It hasn't always been as bleak as it is now
> Is it last in first out or first in last out?

Aren't they the same?