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- Sundar Pichai said Google cut manager, director, and VP roles by 10% as part of an efficiency drive.
- Google has sought to boost efficiency by reducing layers and reorganizing teams.
- The company has been facing challenges from OpenAI and other AI rivals.
After an engineer is there long enough, they’re likely to become a manager. They’re way more expensive to keep around. Google wants to lay them off and churn them for college grads. Looks better for PR if they say it’s an “efficiency push” rather than “we don’t like to retain employees because it’s expensive.” So this was definitely an arbitrary number
This isn’t as true in tech companies as it was in traditional companies years ago. Most high level engineers take an individual contributor role that allow you to be promoted without becoming a manager. At Google it’s called a staff role. At Amazon it’s a principal role.
To be fair, it’s totally possible that they just have too much management. Then you get into a case where a very large portion of everyone’s job is endlessly trying to keep in any with various management and you end up with too many managers competing for not enough work which makes the environment more political
Certainly possible, and I’ve definitely been a part of orgs with just too much management, but I’m wary of Google saying that, considering how many products they kill every year. I’m sure there would certainly be space for their employees to expand horizontally if their product lineup wasn’t so volatile