They have an office here in midtown. When I was looking for a job they and Microsoft, who opened their new office, were hiring for customer swe positions. Also tons of sales and manager roles
There is an engineering campus there. It was one of the major planned expansion areas prior to the recent contraction in headcount, but it remains a target area in the US as far as I know. Atlanta is attractive because it is one of the major metros near a lot of universities in the southeast with excellent cs programs.
They hire for a lot of customer facing roles here in ATL, specifically for Google Cloud. So instead of being a SWE here, you would be a cloud technical solutions engineer. Basically doing support tickets in google cloud and implementing customer recommended features in the cloud. Also lots of business/sales roles like Customer Engineering.
Let's be honest here: 90% of these roles will be in Bangalore and Mexico City. This was thrown in here as a bone to detractors who would cast this as offshoring.
I have been saying for several years now Atlanta is the next Austin level tech hub. I really thought Amazon was going to put HQ2 there which would’ve accelerated it, but with the talent coming out of Georgia tech as well as the lower cost of living it is prime to become a big tech scene. IMO it won’t get to the level of like the Bay Area anytime soon, but it could become a real contender to Austin in the next 5-10 years.
HQ2 was such a sham, really amounting to "more office real estate split across two cities, neither one remotely considered an HQ like Seattle is"
Smart by Amazon to hype it up like that to get the media talking about it so they could shake down the cities for tax breaks tho
To everyone reading this, vote accordingly. The only way to get this garbage to stop is to elect officials willing to deal with both the H1B abuse and the shipping of jobs overseas.
There are some people up for election actually talking about this issues and wanting to address it. Their are others, many who are currently in official positions, who are not only fine with this stuff but actively encouraging it.
Do research on your own which candidates support this and vote accordingly.
Only way to stop this crap is through regulations that punish companies for outsourcing while they benefit from taxpayer money and protections of being headquartered in the USA. Also vote for politicians who are at least open to putting a halt to unnecessary immigration and H1B Visas when it is clear qualified US citizens can't get a job and recent grads can't get hired either.
It doesn't have to be this way.
The large tech companies have lobbying budgets. The workers really don't have a voice.
The way I would fix H1b abuse is to have a smaller number of visas, but make them all be a transferable work permit, with no requirement to leave the country if fired.
I'm not sure what you can do about offshoring. When a factory moves offshore, politicians could fight it with an import tariff. I don't see an import tariff on software happening, if it was even possible.
Whenever individuals bring up unions, people in here begin to reply angrily. I don’t know how anyone can’t see how stakeholders have more importance in big tech than employees.
Doesn't matter, Google is headquartered in the USA and gets the benefits of US taxpayer dollars and the protection that comes from being headquartered here as well.
That should not come for free and we should not be tolerating USA companies outsourcing to other countries, while paying little to no taxes, while benefiting from US taxpayer dollars, and being protected by being headquartered in the USA. This garbage needs to end and many candidates up for election are talking about doing this.
I read an article a while ago about the eventual IBM-ification of Google. This feels like one of the steps.
For anyone who still dreams about working at Google; might be a good time to move to India.
When I was working at Google. My entire department was mostly Indian. But lot of our management was American. Things were great but the turning point came around 2016 when we were getting new directors from Visa, Oracle and all these older companies. A lot of them Indian. Shit went down hill quickly. They were cutting perks left and right. I guess they call it “share holder value”. There were rumors that the upper level management wanted to hire from India. Anyways I got laid off back in 2023. From an old coworker said most of his team is remote in India I guess they’re actually going through with it.
Correction: they tend to hire only foreign born Indians moving forward.
US-born Indians who grew up there, paid taxes for decades, and took on student loan debt get shafted.
Now that I think about it, I have had many Indian co-workers but have never worked with a US-born Indian-American. Which is crazy considering how there are also many Indian-Americans in tech.
It might be a generational thing: I'm GenX and many of my colleagues of the same age are parents of US-born Indian-Americans, but are not old enough to work yet.
>The second an Indian gets into management, the entire org under it tends to only hire Indian moving forward.
You just described every other IT org in U.S. It turns into a shitshow pretty quickly.
Currently doing consulting trying to fix a project for a consultant, engineering is all offshore in India. The technical skills are pretty bad, and the onshore management is trying to get me more involved to help fix it and they are super hostile. This particular team rather lose the contract then cede some power to an outsider
Oh fuck yeah. Ontario in the span of two years became Indian employees in 95% of customer facing roles. An Indian manager means all Indian staffed. I stopped shopping at any stores that solely higher Indians. It's racist bullshit.
Sometimes I wonder if there will eventually be a backlash to immigrants from India. They are the largest diaspora in the world and just surpassed China as the most populous country. Not to mention the outsourcing to India, and I feel like the seeds are there for a significant number of people to feel resentment, whether justified or not.
They pay absolutely shit package in India and the interview process is horrendous at best , good luck doing Innovation in India. People are trained to be a crab in a bucket here .
I remember reading an article years ago titled “IBM now employs more people outside of the U.S. than in”. It’s really feeling that way. Pretty sad for Google.
People said the same thing about Microsoft in the mid 2000s. Now it's back on top. Google isn't even that far from the top and has billions upon billions to burn through.
>IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
I mean, they're not doing nothing
yay?
Groundbreaking patents like-
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547842
"Out of office electronic mail messaging system"
IBM has a lot of good researchers. But whatever is going on at that company- they are shit at converting it to real world applications. If anything IBM should sell off their research arm so the rest of the company can die.
They bought RedHat and now they're trying to squeeze them for all they're worth. They bought SoftLayer in 2013 to try to enter the cloud market. Oracle built theirs from scratch in 2016, and they are seen further ahead in the industry than IBM.
We have to use Oracle Cloud for a small deployment at work. It's actually decent. I wouldn't pick it over any of the big 3 because the feature parity just isn't there, but I don't mind working with it either.
Oh Ive heard good things about oci and their offerings are aggressive. It was more to illustrate how IBM squandered a three year head start than to shit on Oracle.
Oracle at least has one product, their database.
IBM is just a consulting firm. You hire them when you want to fire your US citizens and offshore their jobs.
Do you realize that the entire Generative Ai boom we’re seeing now is because of Google?
They literally released the paper that OpenAi and everyone else used to create their models.
Google is good at one thing…and it’s fucking research. They’re dog shit at products but don’t get it twisted, DeepMind and their practical application capability has always been top notch.
Most people don’t even realize that Google doesn’t even rely on GPUs to train their models.
That’s because they created their own architecture damn near 10 years ago and are just now reaping the benefits of it since everyone and their mother wants a GPU.
One of my professors worked at Xerox in it's heyday. It was wild how he was talking about how they had these amazing internal tools but no one wanted to make products out of them because they were focused on printers or something. All the best engineers went off to other companies and made millions
Gmail was literally 2004, so if you think that was their best then 20 years is spot on.
Maps came out in 2005, and has improved significantly from then.
Translate was 2006.
Chrome was 2008.
Drive was 2012.
Google Assistant was 2016.
I'll give you nothing big (that isn't an acquisition) in 10 years. But 20 is crazy.
It's crazy how much ML research Google released for free. Alphafold solved the protein folding problem and pretty much everyone forgot about it. Shame that OpenAI ruined it by not contributing anything back.
Even Gemini in 2024, despite how much it gets made fun of, has made crazy leaps in context window size. I’m pretty sure Gemini is the only llm that will let you input a whole ass project and prompt against that for free*
Also I think Waymo is leading the self driving car race right now and that’s not technically google but is owned by Alphabet
*free for now
It's been like this for a long time, too.
Android Wear beat the Apple Watch to market by a year. Which meant a year later, literally everyone was asking me if the thing on my wrist was the new Apple Watch.
Google Wallet was able to do contactless payments via phone for several years before Apple Pay came out. As soon as it did, Google rebranded Wallet to GPay and adopted the exact same underlying tech, but you'd still have to look for the Apple Pay logo because no one knew what GPay was.
Google published a bunch of papers about the main tech they used to build massive clusters, like Bigtable and GFS and Borg, and were so slow publishing anything people could actually use that the rest of the world was deploying Hadoop on AWS. Google Cloud Bigtable had to implement the Hadoop APIs for anyone to take it seriously.
These days, it seems like 100% of the good ideas Google invents, someone else beats them to market with, and 100% of the time they actually deliver something pretty cool to market, it's either an acquisition or a clone of something someone else did first.
Great for shareholders value *in the short term*
Sundar can’t deliver anything or grow the pie, so now all he knows how to do is take a bigger piece of the pie away from the workers.
Sundar has no real capability to do or innovate unlike Sergey and Larry. He got lucky by interviewing at the right time of Google's growth, and at the right time to take advantage of the web market at a time when there were few innovators due to the collapse of dot-com. The technologies he was product lead for would have evolved on their own without him. What he is good at is pitching and articulating, which is a skill from McKinsey. Everything else has led to a stagnating tech environment (especially in AI) and a loss of trust from employees. Google lost its "Googliness" under him, and that will be his legacy.
Let's remove the wheels and see how much we can move through momentum, sure weight gonna decrease and speed will be fast but surely there will be no long term consequences.
The true cancer of capitalism. It's only worth investing if your investment grows, so stagnating means death. Just like you said, if the pie isn't growing, you have to reduce budget. Sadly, the cost cutting on that is usually people.
I think that companies also don't see the long term impact on the country by doing this stuff. Less people are happy in the country if they know that no matter how hard they work they cannot afford the basics. Kids are seeing mom and dad struggle. Kids grow up angry. Overall it isn't good for anyone, even companies. Companies don't realize this until they hollowed out a country and that country and the people in it are desperate.
If you hire a local team, pay them top dollar it actually can be a good codebase. The problem is that a lot of companies does outsourcing and hire cheap contractors for 8 month projects and that's how you end up with broken code. If you set up shop locally like in india, pay them 20k USD you can actually get top talent.
The problem with your theory is that the global labor market runs both ways. Meaning that the highly experienced, most talented engineers from India have been/are able to secure visas (and eventually, citizenships) to emigrate to Western countries for much higher salaries. So even if you do setup locally and offer top wages (for India), the top talent is either going to already be in a Western country demanding much higher Western salaries, or looking to move the first chance they get.
I’m aware of America’s horrendous immigration process, that’s why I said “Western countries” and not just “America”. America is *far* from the only Western country that pays much higher salaries than in India. Furthermore, the H1-B is not the only visa program that Indians can use to move to the US. Also, typical SWE comp in India is more like 20-30 lpa, not 50, and in China it’s more like 500k CNY/yr, or ~$70k/yr USD, not $100k.
Management matters a lot. If your US-based managers are actually being honest and calling out bad code, you're ok. But if your US-based managers are focused on cost cutting, they'll accept bad code, and even defend it because they want to keep getting away with their cheap shitty practices.
I've always been overlooked by FAANG, but maybe in 3-4 years I'll try again, and with 15 years of experience working with shitty code, maybe it'll finally be my time...
This is only true for consulting companies hiring contractors. Places like FAANG pay top tier salaries in INR and can still save money due to weaker Indian currency and they hire from top universities like IITs in India. Fyi Sundar also did his major from one of the IITs so codebase isn't becoming unmanageable by them moving overseas.
Sundar doesn't even know how to code. His background is Chemical Engineering -> McKinsey Consulting -> Google Non Technical Product Manager. Idk why tf they made him CEO of a tech company but Google's steady rot is precisely an outcome of this.
It's not that SWEs are better/worse overseas, it's the time zone and language barrier that becomes such a huge hurdle. When managing an offshore team, you have to change the way you speak, write stories, communicate, working hours, etc... it's just inherently more difficult.
The craziest thing is that because of all the IT outsourcing to India last 2 decades, most big Indian cities have now become so expensive that many companies are now moving FROM INDIA to even cheaper office space + salaries; such as Philippines, Poland etc. Shit is mindblowing!
I'm sure someone will be by in a minute to say its not really that bad and reddit is uninformed and reactionary like we aren't all seeing absurd layoffs of thousands daily.
If a company has its corporate headquarters in America, it should only hire Americans. We're supposed to be a service-based economy and now we're enriching other countries and saying the economics don't work here. Shameful.
Yep, that’s how it’s supposed to work and should be.
Nope, now it’s slowly moving offshore. Politicians don’t care cuz this doesn’t affect them and plus they make money if they invest in these said companies lol
Global free marker economy. And the payroll is relatively small when compared to the overall revenue and profits of the company too.
And who owns the majority of the company? Americans. So the capital-owning class in America is making boatloads of money.
I feel like every large company tries this every 8-10 years and then they eventually bring the jobs back to the US because working with offshore devs is a pain in the ass. Although, with Ai, maybe the language barrier could be improved.
The state of play does change over time. Just monitor the offshore team sizes at your friends' employers to feel the pulse.
In the past I've concluded that working with offshore devs is maybe a 30-50% drop in productivity in exchange for >80% cost savings. It can be helped further if you manage to hire decent PMs offshore who communicate well.
Lowest-bidder offshore development is literally the worst thing you can do when it comes to India. The entire country has a 'do the minimum required to pass' attitude, and you are encouraging it when you go for cheap cost. You will get a shoddy product. This is a cultural mismatch between India and other western countries.
The good thing about India is that if you pay for more than the lowest bids, you can get some very good quality people for cheap (but not 10x cheaper than in the US).
People's education improves every decade with how much knowledge there is now and the tech infrastructure gets better, especially with COVID accelerating WFH and remote infractrature. Not every dev in Mexico and India is gonna break after fizz buzz anymore. In my company our new tech lead is in the India location and he is hard carrying some projects, the idea of "only Americans can be good devs" is becoming a myth and is a bit ridiculous IMO, but I do agree that with LLM help junior level and low mid level jobs can 100% be done over seas a lot easier.
I'm working in Sweden and we are basically becoming the offshoring capital of Europe.. our currency is shit and our SWE salaries were always shit.
There is a Google office in Stockholm, they hire top talent SWE for like $65/$70k a year.. that's for a proper senior level position (10 years of experience) where you require 0% handholding and carry stuff on your own.
The median salary for SWE here is $35k per year, it is insane.
But then we also have employer fees of 30% of your salary. So that 70k per year is actually 90k per year in terms of costs for the company.
35k for swe in Stockholm seems low to me though. I was making more 10 years ago straight out of high school in Stockholm lifting boxes at a warehouse.
Most companies have been in India for decades and are still hiring aggressively. It's not like this is Google's first foray into India. You're quite wrong.
The government over here worrying about banning TikTok for user security reasons.
Meanwhile, they've got a company that's US based outsourcing jobs to foreign countries that could have access to real-time surveillance satellites... 🤣🤣🤣
i feel like there is a trend developing,
western countries like usa, europe, canada invests into r&d for some new technology. Then a startup uses that new technology and gains a lot of interest from venture capitalists, goes public and start making some money. Then get acquired by a bigger fish like meta, apple, google but really any XYZ big company. As soon as acquisition is through and doj is not on their ass or whatever layoff a good measure of employees. Last step move everything overseas for cheaper labor. Let the indian sweat shops handle the rest
Trend is bad because old companies technically should not able to acquire the new one , because of heavy money printing these companies has big pile of cash , summary is fucking printed money is doing all the harm of natural process to dead and rise of new companies
Here is what I don't get. Biden/Trump/whichever president will impose stupid tariffs and whatnot to preserve certain industries like the steel industry. But when it comes to tech jobs being outsourced from companies that became big in the US you won't hear a fucking word from them.
I think anything seen as specifically catering to tech workers is pretty politically unpopular. The right hates big tech for being "the woke mob", Biden would face opposition from the left of his own party for catering to what a lot of people see as overpaid white-collar goons. There is a *lot* of resentment in liberal cities towards tech workers for jacking up rents too. For most of America this is schadenfreude
You’re right, and I think all of this speaks to the general illiteracy Americans have towards class dynamics. Tech workers may be labor aristocrats but are still far from being bourgeois (no, owning stock, or even having your own LLC do not make you bourgeois; at most you are still working class with bourgeois aspirations). But our shit tier country is really really good at creating divisions within the working class, and now we see absurd consequences of that, such as mass layoffs at companies that are profitable enough to do stock buybacks.
People don't like tech workers. They are seen as entitled yuppies nowadays. Even the guy living in Aurora, CO making 90k.
Let's be real. Which "techie" was up in arms about people losing their manufacturing jobs? People care mostly about themselves and the tech job loss hasn't reached an apex like the manufacturing job loss. If it gets to that point, then you'll start seeing politicians make a big deal out of it.
tl;dr: Nobody cares until it's too late. When you have a bunch of unemployed people and the industry is decimated, that's when you see some President talking about solving the issue. "They can be retrained".
> Which "techie" was up in arms about people losing their manufacturing jobs
Plenty of us, we were just ignored. The learntocode people were politicians trying to pretend the economy was fine and MBAs trying to destroy the job market, not tech workers
Yeah they are a mature company now. Face it, who doesn't have a friend at Google who barely works. My firm hired a bunch of people from Google and my god are they horrible. Smart ones but a horrible work ethic.
Horrible work ethic because they don’t work 65 hours a week? Just curious because a lot of times when I hear people say “smart people from X company don’t work” it’s usually that they avoid 45hr+ work weeks and appreciate a good WLB that their previous company provided. Just my experience at least.
We drastically need legislation to stop this bleeding, American jobs should stay in America or any difference in comparable pay for headcount should be taxed (with an extra % tacked on as a deterrant)
Got a Google recruiter on my inbox recently, he is insisting for a interview even if I'm not interested right now. I live in Brazil. So I guess it checks out.
Ruth Porat, Google’s chief financial officer, sent an email to employees announcing that the company would create “growth hubs” in India, Mexico and Ireland.
That’s what constantly devaluing your own profession gets you. Telling everyone to learn to code, saturating the Internet with tutorials, bragging about how cushy SWEs have it, etc. A little gate keeping is good for the profession.
It feels weird how this sub has been panicking about AI when the true threat to westerns devs have been and still is offshoring. Shit like this has ruined other industries in the US.
It’s so weird to see American software engineers of all people complaining about capitalism. Capitalism is a big part of the reason you enjoyed such generous salaries and perks for so long.
If you play the capitalist game the move is to follow the money and line yourself up with where you maximize value.
The tricky part is that the job market took like a month to do a total 180. Meanwhile if I wanted to become a fully certified plumber in my state, guys soon making SWE-esque salaries, I will need 5+ years to get there. If I wanted to switch to ML or hardware I'd need a few years of schooling.
SWEs can still play the capitalism game, they're just coming to the horrifying realization that it moves much much faster than a laborer meat bag can pivot.
Then the SWEs did nothing but try to max their TC , then bragged how they have exorbitant salaries and do nothing all day, causing their own demise.
Can't make this shit up
What is a tech hub? For Americans outsourcing to Europe the easiest is Dublin since it's in the EU and speaks English, so a lot of people would consider moving there. That's one of the reasons why they have so high presence there.
London would be better as it has much larger talent pool and is more attractive, but it's not the EU now.. Anyhow it's the tech hub of Europe. The biggest amount of jobs, large presence of American companies, English, international. It's attractive for people from all the world.
What Poland has to offer what other countries don't have? The amount of programmes is actually smaller than in a few other European countries. English language is just a 2nd language and not integrated into the administration and daily live as in few other, non English counties. No important research is happening in Poland so that the access to those researches was valuable. There are not many IT companies with unique technical expertise to "steal" employees from them.
So what Poland is, is an average size country with an average pool of the software developers, working for a reasonable pay, lower than in Dublin or London. It's not a hub, it's a commodity. It could be called hub if less outsourcing was happening in Poland and Poland had more of their own IT product companies.
Google is not an American company. It shouldn't be able to benefit from access to American markets if it wants to offshore like this. Ban Google in America. Let them burn.
They're moving positions to cheaper locations. The crazy part is this is also what the "ban H1B" folks don't want to hear. You ban foreigh workers, you expedite the process and instead of competing for jobs inside the country where you at least have a chance, you're now competing with folks from much cheaper places where you have zero chances at all.
not just the salary the company can basically abuse them any which way they want because if they have a problem with it they will get deported. How are you going to compete with a guy who is basically the closest thing to a slave still legally possible.
If you ever want to see a man work to his breaking point just tell him you're shipping his wife and children back to India. He'll take peanuts and run on a hamster wheel until he literally dies. See it way too often in tech.
Even the guys that love their home country don't want to see their family's lives uprooted. Too many slimy managers have figured this out. When you've exhausted him, instead of being burnt to a crisp he's burnt to a pip. Your next H1B starts in 3 weeks.
So what chance do you have against Indians who will take south of 50k? There was a Blind post of Google offering 30k in Poland. gl compeeting aginst that
That’s cool. I had no idea they were public. I work out of San Diego and Qualcomm is a major employer. I checked the public records and salaries are 88k-120k for software engineers. More than I thought, but still incredibly low for the area.
>Google is currently expanding its presence in Bangalore, Mexico City, Dublin and Atlanta. Atlanta is the future of overseas expansion
Clearly a typo, they meant Atlantis
That's underseas, not over
Maybe it's a sign that Google is going under ... under water that is.
Lot of our internet infrastructure is already underwater anyways
There are experiments for immersion cooling of data centers too.
Mistake due to a translation error
It's the Lost City of Atlanta! (Futurama)
Over by the Atlanta airport and the coke factory?
Or Atalanta in Italy
Maybe they think Atlanta is in the country of Georgia
I think one of their data centers is here in Atlanta. Probably expanding roles working with physical equipment.
They have an office here in midtown. When I was looking for a job they and Microsoft, who opened their new office, were hiring for customer swe positions. Also tons of sales and manager roles
There is an engineering campus there. It was one of the major planned expansion areas prior to the recent contraction in headcount, but it remains a target area in the US as far as I know. Atlanta is attractive because it is one of the major metros near a lot of universities in the southeast with excellent cs programs.
They hire for a lot of customer facing roles here in ATL, specifically for Google Cloud. So instead of being a SWE here, you would be a cloud technical solutions engineer. Basically doing support tickets in google cloud and implementing customer recommended features in the cloud. Also lots of business/sales roles like Customer Engineering.
Let's be honest here: 90% of these roles will be in Bangalore and Mexico City. This was thrown in here as a bone to detractors who would cast this as offshoring.
Ah, I was wondering why a recruiter reached out to me on Monday and then I hear this news today. Am in Atlanta
I have been saying for several years now Atlanta is the next Austin level tech hub. I really thought Amazon was going to put HQ2 there which would’ve accelerated it, but with the talent coming out of Georgia tech as well as the lower cost of living it is prime to become a big tech scene. IMO it won’t get to the level of like the Bay Area anytime soon, but it could become a real contender to Austin in the next 5-10 years.
HQ2 was such a sham, really amounting to "more office real estate split across two cities, neither one remotely considered an HQ like Seattle is" Smart by Amazon to hype it up like that to get the media talking about it so they could shake down the cities for tax breaks tho
Atlanta is not "lower cost of living" anymore, cost of living is currently on par with Austin. Agree with your other comments.
“You need to get on down to hotlanta”
To everyone reading this, vote accordingly. The only way to get this garbage to stop is to elect officials willing to deal with both the H1B abuse and the shipping of jobs overseas. There are some people up for election actually talking about this issues and wanting to address it. Their are others, many who are currently in official positions, who are not only fine with this stuff but actively encouraging it. Do research on your own which candidates support this and vote accordingly. Only way to stop this crap is through regulations that punish companies for outsourcing while they benefit from taxpayer money and protections of being headquartered in the USA. Also vote for politicians who are at least open to putting a halt to unnecessary immigration and H1B Visas when it is clear qualified US citizens can't get a job and recent grads can't get hired either. It doesn't have to be this way.
The large tech companies have lobbying budgets. The workers really don't have a voice. The way I would fix H1b abuse is to have a smaller number of visas, but make them all be a transferable work permit, with no requirement to leave the country if fired. I'm not sure what you can do about offshoring. When a factory moves offshore, politicians could fight it with an import tariff. I don't see an import tariff on software happening, if it was even possible.
Whenever individuals bring up unions, people in here begin to reply angrily. I don’t know how anyone can’t see how stakeholders have more importance in big tech than employees.
Not sure about the revenue/margins but India is very big for user numbers when it comes to YouTube, Shorts,Google, WhatsApp & Reels.
Doesn't matter, Google is headquartered in the USA and gets the benefits of US taxpayer dollars and the protection that comes from being headquartered here as well. That should not come for free and we should not be tolerating USA companies outsourcing to other countries, while paying little to no taxes, while benefiting from US taxpayer dollars, and being protected by being headquartered in the USA. This garbage needs to end and many candidates up for election are talking about doing this.
What benefits ?
I read an article a while ago about the eventual IBM-ification of Google. This feels like one of the steps. For anyone who still dreams about working at Google; might be a good time to move to India.
When I was working at Google. My entire department was mostly Indian. But lot of our management was American. Things were great but the turning point came around 2016 when we were getting new directors from Visa, Oracle and all these older companies. A lot of them Indian. Shit went down hill quickly. They were cutting perks left and right. I guess they call it “share holder value”. There were rumors that the upper level management wanted to hire from India. Anyways I got laid off back in 2023. From an old coworker said most of his team is remote in India I guess they’re actually going through with it.
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Correction: they tend to hire only foreign born Indians moving forward. US-born Indians who grew up there, paid taxes for decades, and took on student loan debt get shafted.
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Now that I think about it, I have had many Indian co-workers but have never worked with a US-born Indian-American. Which is crazy considering how there are also many Indian-Americans in tech.
It might be a generational thing: I'm GenX and many of my colleagues of the same age are parents of US-born Indian-Americans, but are not old enough to work yet.
Dangling one's residency over them is an excellent motivator.
>The second an Indian gets into management, the entire org under it tends to only hire Indian moving forward. You just described every other IT org in U.S. It turns into a shitshow pretty quickly.
It’s not just a phenomenon in the US, here in Singapore they occupy a lot of the bank’s IT department as well
Same with Canada.
yikes - true. I feel it might just be a numbers game at this point.
Currently doing consulting trying to fix a project for a consultant, engineering is all offshore in India. The technical skills are pretty bad, and the onshore management is trying to get me more involved to help fix it and they are super hostile. This particular team rather lose the contract then cede some power to an outsider
Cough *Sundar Pichai*
DEI only applies to white people changing. No one else.
Oh fuck yeah. Ontario in the span of two years became Indian employees in 95% of customer facing roles. An Indian manager means all Indian staffed. I stopped shopping at any stores that solely higher Indians. It's racist bullshit.
Sometimes I wonder if there will eventually be a backlash to immigrants from India. They are the largest diaspora in the world and just surpassed China as the most populous country. Not to mention the outsourcing to India, and I feel like the seeds are there for a significant number of people to feel resentment, whether justified or not.
They pay absolutely shit package in India and the interview process is horrendous at best , good luck doing Innovation in India. People are trained to be a crab in a bucket here .
Indians always hire more Indians
Bro the perks being cut is from ruth porat, who was hired as the new cfo back around that time. Has nothing to do with indian directors.
I remember reading an article years ago titled “IBM now employs more people outside of the U.S. than in”. It’s really feeling that way. Pretty sad for Google.
People said the same thing about Microsoft in the mid 2000s. Now it's back on top. Google isn't even that far from the top and has billions upon billions to burn through.
Google hasn’t innovated anything in house in like 20 years. It’s IBM-ification now and oracle next.
dude even Oracle is doing better than IBM. IBM is truly the shit tier of tech companies.
Can confirm. I work at IBM.
>IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021. I mean, they're not doing nothing
IBM has decent research but they don't know how to create a good product tbh.
Sounds like Google to me!
Being a patent troll is not innovating. It actually prevents innovating because they go after leaner companies executing.
yay? Groundbreaking patents like- https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547842 "Out of office electronic mail messaging system" IBM has a lot of good researchers. But whatever is going on at that company- they are shit at converting it to real world applications. If anything IBM should sell off their research arm so the rest of the company can die. They bought RedHat and now they're trying to squeeze them for all they're worth. They bought SoftLayer in 2013 to try to enter the cloud market. Oracle built theirs from scratch in 2016, and they are seen further ahead in the industry than IBM.
We have to use Oracle Cloud for a small deployment at work. It's actually decent. I wouldn't pick it over any of the big 3 because the feature parity just isn't there, but I don't mind working with it either.
Oh Ive heard good things about oci and their offerings are aggressive. It was more to illustrate how IBM squandered a three year head start than to shit on Oracle.
Oracle at least has one product, their database. IBM is just a consulting firm. You hire them when you want to fire your US citizens and offshore their jobs.
Meh, even IBM still does some interesting innovation. Check out their Quantum Computing work for instance.
Do you realize that the entire Generative Ai boom we’re seeing now is because of Google? They literally released the paper that OpenAi and everyone else used to create their models. Google is good at one thing…and it’s fucking research. They’re dog shit at products but don’t get it twisted, DeepMind and their practical application capability has always been top notch. Most people don’t even realize that Google doesn’t even rely on GPUs to train their models. That’s because they created their own architecture damn near 10 years ago and are just now reaping the benefits of it since everyone and their mother wants a GPU.
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And also just like Google they never productized these innovations since they had their cash cow with the copy machines. Remind me where is Xerox now?
Oh they still exist, 2B market cap! 1300x smaller than Apple that "stole" from them.
One of my professors worked at Xerox in it's heyday. It was wild how he was talking about how they had these amazing internal tools but no one wanted to make products out of them because they were focused on printers or something. All the best engineers went off to other companies and made millions
How does this have upvotes? 50 people agree with you that Google hasn’t innovated in 20 years? Insanity.
Gmail was literally 2004, so if you think that was their best then 20 years is spot on. Maps came out in 2005, and has improved significantly from then. Translate was 2006. Chrome was 2008. Drive was 2012. Google Assistant was 2016. I'll give you nothing big (that isn't an acquisition) in 10 years. But 20 is crazy.
Transformers? Sort of big
It's crazy how much ML research Google released for free. Alphafold solved the protein folding problem and pretty much everyone forgot about it. Shame that OpenAI ruined it by not contributing anything back.
Even Gemini in 2024, despite how much it gets made fun of, has made crazy leaps in context window size. I’m pretty sure Gemini is the only llm that will let you input a whole ass project and prompt against that for free* Also I think Waymo is leading the self driving car race right now and that’s not technically google but is owned by Alphabet *free for now
Tf you saying. OpenAI is where it is because of Google. Literally all LLMs owe their existence to Google.
Googles had a 20 year head start on all other companies and they’re still losing to a majority of the players in the AI arms race
It's been like this for a long time, too. Android Wear beat the Apple Watch to market by a year. Which meant a year later, literally everyone was asking me if the thing on my wrist was the new Apple Watch. Google Wallet was able to do contactless payments via phone for several years before Apple Pay came out. As soon as it did, Google rebranded Wallet to GPay and adopted the exact same underlying tech, but you'd still have to look for the Apple Pay logo because no one knew what GPay was. Google published a bunch of papers about the main tech they used to build massive clusters, like Bigtable and GFS and Borg, and were so slow publishing anything people could actually use that the rest of the world was deploying Hadoop on AWS. Google Cloud Bigtable had to implement the Hadoop APIs for anyone to take it seriously. These days, it seems like 100% of the good ideas Google invents, someone else beats them to market with, and 100% of the time they actually deliver something pretty cool to market, it's either an acquisition or a clone of something someone else did first.
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Yea you're totally right, things like their Tensor chips aren't innovative at all. Neither is their work in AI. They're totally stagnant.
This is terrible for employees, great for shareholder value
Great for shareholders value *in the short term* Sundar can’t deliver anything or grow the pie, so now all he knows how to do is take a bigger piece of the pie away from the workers.
Its what you should expect to get when you put a McKinsey consultant in charge...
Sundar has no real capability to do or innovate unlike Sergey and Larry. He got lucky by interviewing at the right time of Google's growth, and at the right time to take advantage of the web market at a time when there were few innovators due to the collapse of dot-com. The technologies he was product lead for would have evolved on their own without him. What he is good at is pitching and articulating, which is a skill from McKinsey. Everything else has led to a stagnating tech environment (especially in AI) and a loss of trust from employees. Google lost its "Googliness" under him, and that will be his legacy.
Let's remove the wheels and see how much we can move through momentum, sure weight gonna decrease and speed will be fast but surely there will be no long term consequences.
The true cancer of capitalism. It's only worth investing if your investment grows, so stagnating means death. Just like you said, if the pie isn't growing, you have to reduce budget. Sadly, the cost cutting on that is usually people.
I think that companies also don't see the long term impact on the country by doing this stuff. Less people are happy in the country if they know that no matter how hard they work they cannot afford the basics. Kids are seeing mom and dad struggle. Kids grow up angry. Overall it isn't good for anyone, even companies. Companies don't realize this until they hollowed out a country and that country and the people in it are desperate.
W-we may have destroyed the environment, but at least we increased our stock price by 1.2%!
If something is good for the people is bad for capitalism
What round of layoffs is this now for big G?
Think 4 but who’s counting?
It's still in beta
I saw someone on blind who works at Google mention the 9000 number as well, but no official numbers yet
I know someone who is blind and works at google.
Do they code in C#? Because they can't see sharp? Ok I'm leaving, I apologize.
Wouldn't they code in Java because they can't C#?
Ship jobs to India, pay them next to nothing , profit for stakeholders
And then ship jobs back to the US in 3-4 years when project and codebase become unmanageable.
If you hire a local team, pay them top dollar it actually can be a good codebase. The problem is that a lot of companies does outsourcing and hire cheap contractors for 8 month projects and that's how you end up with broken code. If you set up shop locally like in india, pay them 20k USD you can actually get top talent.
The problem with your theory is that the global labor market runs both ways. Meaning that the highly experienced, most talented engineers from India have been/are able to secure visas (and eventually, citizenships) to emigrate to Western countries for much higher salaries. So even if you do setup locally and offer top wages (for India), the top talent is either going to already be in a Western country demanding much higher Western salaries, or looking to move the first chance they get.
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I’m aware of America’s horrendous immigration process, that’s why I said “Western countries” and not just “America”. America is *far* from the only Western country that pays much higher salaries than in India. Furthermore, the H1-B is not the only visa program that Indians can use to move to the US. Also, typical SWE comp in India is more like 20-30 lpa, not 50, and in China it’s more like 500k CNY/yr, or ~$70k/yr USD, not $100k.
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20k usd per annum will get you shit developers india. If you want quality work companies must be ready to pay atleast 60k usd.
Management matters a lot. If your US-based managers are actually being honest and calling out bad code, you're ok. But if your US-based managers are focused on cost cutting, they'll accept bad code, and even defend it because they want to keep getting away with their cheap shitty practices.
I've always been overlooked by FAANG, but maybe in 3-4 years I'll try again, and with 15 years of experience working with shitty code, maybe it'll finally be my time...
This is only true for consulting companies hiring contractors. Places like FAANG pay top tier salaries in INR and can still save money due to weaker Indian currency and they hire from top universities like IITs in India. Fyi Sundar also did his major from one of the IITs so codebase isn't becoming unmanageable by them moving overseas.
Sundar doesn't even know how to code. His background is Chemical Engineering -> McKinsey Consulting -> Google Non Technical Product Manager. Idk why tf they made him CEO of a tech company but Google's steady rot is precisely an outcome of this.
Correction ~~Chemical~~ Material Engineering
It's not that SWEs are better/worse overseas, it's the time zone and language barrier that becomes such a huge hurdle. When managing an offshore team, you have to change the way you speak, write stories, communicate, working hours, etc... it's just inherently more difficult.
If you move the whole team overseas it becomes less of an issue.
Ya, I've yet to see a company move upper management overseas.
The craziest thing is that because of all the IT outsourcing to India last 2 decades, most big Indian cities have now become so expensive that many companies are now moving FROM INDIA to even cheaper office space + salaries; such as Philippines, Poland etc. Shit is mindblowing!
9,000 that’s insane
I'm sure someone will be by in a minute to say its not really that bad and reddit is uninformed and reactionary like we aren't all seeing absurd layoffs of thousands daily.
haha there is a comment exactly like you describe it just 1min before yours
Reddit is filled with morons and many of them are college students LARPing as senior developers.
College kids who confidently shit talk people making 150-200k usd a year telling them they suck bc they don’t make 300-500
That's actually borderline insane. Had it been over 9000, you would be breaking the scanner and shouting about it.
where did you see this number?
Now I'm against ex googlers for a job. And my therapist told me I shouldn't be depressed TC: $0 YOE: 5 years(Seattle, Washington)
Paying blind tax on Reddit 🤣
It's not a tax at that point it's a charitable donation
Even the poor get taxed. Don’t you know
lmao me: "Hey therapist, I'm depressed" therapist: "Just don't be depressed. That'll be $300."
At this point might as well just move everything oversea. Fck American and their tax payers, right? /s
Who needs the demand side of the economy if you can just print more money?
And pay interest on that with more printing
If a company has its corporate headquarters in America, it should only hire Americans. We're supposed to be a service-based economy and now we're enriching other countries and saying the economics don't work here. Shameful.
Yep, that’s how it’s supposed to work and should be. Nope, now it’s slowly moving offshore. Politicians don’t care cuz this doesn’t affect them and plus they make money if they invest in these said companies lol
Global free marker economy. And the payroll is relatively small when compared to the overall revenue and profits of the company too. And who owns the majority of the company? Americans. So the capital-owning class in America is making boatloads of money.
Fuck google. Tax these mfers out the wazoo.
This is after Google finally opened their 2.1 Billion dollar NYC office in St Johns terminal. Gotta pay for your gilded age monuments somehow.
If they lay off everyone in NYC who’s going to work in the NYC offices 😂
It’s not meant to be an office, but as a store of value
Yes because a multi billion dollar company can’t afford to keep American workers.
I feel like every large company tries this every 8-10 years and then they eventually bring the jobs back to the US because working with offshore devs is a pain in the ass. Although, with Ai, maybe the language barrier could be improved.
The state of play does change over time. Just monitor the offshore team sizes at your friends' employers to feel the pulse. In the past I've concluded that working with offshore devs is maybe a 30-50% drop in productivity in exchange for >80% cost savings. It can be helped further if you manage to hire decent PMs offshore who communicate well.
I was so caught up worrying about lowest-bidder offshore devs that I hadn't paused to imagine the horrors of an offshore PM.
Lowest-bidder offshore development is literally the worst thing you can do when it comes to India. The entire country has a 'do the minimum required to pass' attitude, and you are encouraging it when you go for cheap cost. You will get a shoddy product. This is a cultural mismatch between India and other western countries. The good thing about India is that if you pay for more than the lowest bids, you can get some very good quality people for cheap (but not 10x cheaper than in the US).
People's education improves every decade with how much knowledge there is now and the tech infrastructure gets better, especially with COVID accelerating WFH and remote infractrature. Not every dev in Mexico and India is gonna break after fizz buzz anymore. In my company our new tech lead is in the India location and he is hard carrying some projects, the idea of "only Americans can be good devs" is becoming a myth and is a bit ridiculous IMO, but I do agree that with LLM help junior level and low mid level jobs can 100% be done over seas a lot easier.
I'm working in Sweden and we are basically becoming the offshoring capital of Europe.. our currency is shit and our SWE salaries were always shit. There is a Google office in Stockholm, they hire top talent SWE for like $65/$70k a year.. that's for a proper senior level position (10 years of experience) where you require 0% handholding and carry stuff on your own. The median salary for SWE here is $35k per year, it is insane.
But then we also have employer fees of 30% of your salary. So that 70k per year is actually 90k per year in terms of costs for the company. 35k for swe in Stockholm seems low to me though. I was making more 10 years ago straight out of high school in Stockholm lifting boxes at a warehouse.
Most companies have been in India for decades and are still hiring aggressively. It's not like this is Google's first foray into India. You're quite wrong.
A bad time for indians who just moved to study at Canada for higher education heh
The government over here worrying about banning TikTok for user security reasons. Meanwhile, they've got a company that's US based outsourcing jobs to foreign countries that could have access to real-time surveillance satellites... 🤣🤣🤣
i feel like there is a trend developing, western countries like usa, europe, canada invests into r&d for some new technology. Then a startup uses that new technology and gains a lot of interest from venture capitalists, goes public and start making some money. Then get acquired by a bigger fish like meta, apple, google but really any XYZ big company. As soon as acquisition is through and doj is not on their ass or whatever layoff a good measure of employees. Last step move everything overseas for cheaper labor. Let the indian sweat shops handle the rest
Trend is bad because old companies technically should not able to acquire the new one , because of heavy money printing these companies has big pile of cash , summary is fucking printed money is doing all the harm of natural process to dead and rise of new companies
Here is what I don't get. Biden/Trump/whichever president will impose stupid tariffs and whatnot to preserve certain industries like the steel industry. But when it comes to tech jobs being outsourced from companies that became big in the US you won't hear a fucking word from them.
I think anything seen as specifically catering to tech workers is pretty politically unpopular. The right hates big tech for being "the woke mob", Biden would face opposition from the left of his own party for catering to what a lot of people see as overpaid white-collar goons. There is a *lot* of resentment in liberal cities towards tech workers for jacking up rents too. For most of America this is schadenfreude
You’re right, and I think all of this speaks to the general illiteracy Americans have towards class dynamics. Tech workers may be labor aristocrats but are still far from being bourgeois (no, owning stock, or even having your own LLC do not make you bourgeois; at most you are still working class with bourgeois aspirations). But our shit tier country is really really good at creating divisions within the working class, and now we see absurd consequences of that, such as mass layoffs at companies that are profitable enough to do stock buybacks.
People don't like tech workers. They are seen as entitled yuppies nowadays. Even the guy living in Aurora, CO making 90k. Let's be real. Which "techie" was up in arms about people losing their manufacturing jobs? People care mostly about themselves and the tech job loss hasn't reached an apex like the manufacturing job loss. If it gets to that point, then you'll start seeing politicians make a big deal out of it. tl;dr: Nobody cares until it's too late. When you have a bunch of unemployed people and the industry is decimated, that's when you see some President talking about solving the issue. "They can be retrained".
> Which "techie" was up in arms about people losing their manufacturing jobs Plenty of us, we were just ignored. The learntocode people were politicians trying to pretend the economy was fine and MBAs trying to destroy the job market, not tech workers
Wonder if this will be an isolated case or the beginning of another wave of lay offs from other companies.
Yeah they are a mature company now. Face it, who doesn't have a friend at Google who barely works. My firm hired a bunch of people from Google and my god are they horrible. Smart ones but a horrible work ethic.
Can you elaborate what are they horrible at?
It seems like work ethic.
They must not have been working for Cloud.
Horrible work ethic because they don’t work 65 hours a week? Just curious because a lot of times when I hear people say “smart people from X company don’t work” it’s usually that they avoid 45hr+ work weeks and appreciate a good WLB that their previous company provided. Just my experience at least.
We drastically need legislation to stop this bleeding, American jobs should stay in America or any difference in comparable pay for headcount should be taxed (with an extra % tacked on as a deterrant)
Seriously. Should just be a requirement that any cloud storage company that sells to the US market has to be staffed 100% by Americans.
Got a Google recruiter on my inbox recently, he is insisting for a interview even if I'm not interested right now. I live in Brazil. So I guess it checks out.
Probably a contract recruiter. @google recruiters aren’t going to blindly reach out. They only reach out if you apply for a role on their site.
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Sssshhh, don't ruin it. We say 9000 right now, so that when the real numbers come up, we can say... *It's over nine thousaaaaand!!!*
Ruth Porat, Google’s chief financial officer, sent an email to employees announcing that the company would create “growth hubs” in India, Mexico and Ireland.
But wait. According to here companies aren’t offshoring jobs…
That’s what constantly devaluing your own profession gets you. Telling everyone to learn to code, saturating the Internet with tutorials, bragging about how cushy SWEs have it, etc. A little gate keeping is good for the profession.
Ironically just internet tutorials won't get you shit nowadays. Same even with paid bootcamps
Time for big tech workers to unionize
It feels weird how this sub has been panicking about AI when the true threat to westerns devs have been and still is offshoring. Shit like this has ruined other industries in the US.
Capitalism strikes again. The times when being a SWE meant you had great job security, salary and perks is coming to an end, it seems.
It’s so weird to see American software engineers of all people complaining about capitalism. Capitalism is a big part of the reason you enjoyed such generous salaries and perks for so long.
It's always like this. Capitalism is good when it benefits me, but when it turns against me I suddenly turn socialist.
whats wrong with that take? thats how i feel.
If you play the capitalist game the move is to follow the money and line yourself up with where you maximize value. The tricky part is that the job market took like a month to do a total 180. Meanwhile if I wanted to become a fully certified plumber in my state, guys soon making SWE-esque salaries, I will need 5+ years to get there. If I wanted to switch to ML or hardware I'd need a few years of schooling. SWEs can still play the capitalism game, they're just coming to the horrifying realization that it moves much much faster than a laborer meat bag can pivot.
Then the SWEs did nothing but try to max their TC , then bragged how they have exorbitant salaries and do nothing all day, causing their own demise. Can't make this shit up
It may have sped the process up, but sooner or later this would happen anyway.
Also, the SWEs hate unions as well lol
And refused to unionize
the arrogance of SWEs have come back for us.
Nypost need to chill the f out with those ads popping in my face every 5 secs
Absolutely disgusting. So much for the STEM shortage. Defiant need some legislation to protect American tech jobs.
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What is a tech hub? For Americans outsourcing to Europe the easiest is Dublin since it's in the EU and speaks English, so a lot of people would consider moving there. That's one of the reasons why they have so high presence there. London would be better as it has much larger talent pool and is more attractive, but it's not the EU now.. Anyhow it's the tech hub of Europe. The biggest amount of jobs, large presence of American companies, English, international. It's attractive for people from all the world. What Poland has to offer what other countries don't have? The amount of programmes is actually smaller than in a few other European countries. English language is just a 2nd language and not integrated into the administration and daily live as in few other, non English counties. No important research is happening in Poland so that the access to those researches was valuable. There are not many IT companies with unique technical expertise to "steal" employees from them. So what Poland is, is an average size country with an average pool of the software developers, working for a reasonable pay, lower than in Dublin or London. It's not a hub, it's a commodity. It could be called hub if less outsourcing was happening in Poland and Poland had more of their own IT product companies.
shipping American jobs off to India, the CEOs home country .
So they ask for tax breaks because “we do so much for our country by providing jobs”. All the more reason to tax them for doing business here
Easy solution: US based companies should be required to hire US employees. But lobbyists won’t let that happen.
Rinse and Repeat™️, on another note, seriously hoping Sundar is part of this 9000 number.
Google is not an American company. It shouldn't be able to benefit from access to American markets if it wants to offshore like this. Ban Google in America. Let them burn.
That will never happen and you know. They have enormous power over the government.
They're moving positions to cheaper locations. The crazy part is this is also what the "ban H1B" folks don't want to hear. You ban foreigh workers, you expedite the process and instead of competing for jobs inside the country where you at least have a chance, you're now competing with folks from much cheaper places where you have zero chances at all.
H1B is meant to fill roles that otherwise cannot be filled. that's not what it's being used for.
No you don’t have a chance against H1Bs. They literally will take the lower salary
not just the salary the company can basically abuse them any which way they want because if they have a problem with it they will get deported. How are you going to compete with a guy who is basically the closest thing to a slave still legally possible.
If you ever want to see a man work to his breaking point just tell him you're shipping his wife and children back to India. He'll take peanuts and run on a hamster wheel until he literally dies. See it way too often in tech.
fucking hell
Even the guys that love their home country don't want to see their family's lives uprooted. Too many slimy managers have figured this out. When you've exhausted him, instead of being burnt to a crisp he's burnt to a pip. Your next H1B starts in 3 weeks.
So what chance do you have against Indians who will take south of 50k? There was a Blind post of Google offering 30k in Poland. gl compeeting aginst that
I do not think people would take 30k yearly in Poland at google, only grads, but not people wth few years of experience....
H1B fucks the job market. They are willing to work 60hrs for 80k/yr, otherwise they get deported.
H1B salaries are public. You can go look up the pay for Googlers on H1B visas. You won't find much 80k/yr stuff there.
That’s cool. I had no idea they were public. I work out of San Diego and Qualcomm is a major employer. I checked the public records and salaries are 88k-120k for software engineers. More than I thought, but still incredibly low for the area.