Alex Heath

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Alex HeathJan 22, 2024

Inside Google, there’s “a pervasive sense of nihilism that has taken hold.”

This vibe check comes from an engineer named Diane Hirsh Theriault who has been at the company for over 8 years:

Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.

With rolling layoffs continuing to hit different teams, including the X “moonshot” division today, Theriault writes that “executives are cashing out their human capital at the very moment it seems to me like they really need it.”

Diane Hirsh Theriault

[LinkedIn]

Alex HeathJan 20, 2024

One of Google’s goals for this year: “deliver durable cost savings.”

I published the full list of Google’s 2024 company goals that were recently shared internally in the last issue of Command Line:

1.⁠ ⁠Deliver the world’s most advanced, safe, and responsible AI.
2.⁠ ⁠Improve knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity.
3. Build the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices.
4.⁠ ⁠Enable organizations and developers to innovate on Google Cloud.
5. Provide the world’s most trusted products and platforms.
6. Build a Google that’s extraordinary for Googlers and the world.
7.⁠ ⁠Improve company velocity, efficiency, and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings.

That last line, plus CEO Sundar Pichai’s warning to expect more “specific resource allocation decisions” (translation: layoffs), has a lot of employees on edge.