Comment by burningion
1 year ago
Google did giant, fiscally unnecessary layoffs just before AI took off again. They got rid of a giant portion of their most experienced (expensive) employees, signaled more coming to the other talented ones, and took the GE approach to maximizing short term profits over re-investment in the future.
Well, it backfired sooner than leadership expected.
I don't think the layoffs have anything to do with this. Most likely, everyone involved in AI was totally safe from it too.
A high performance team is a chaotic system. You can’t remove a piece of it with predictable results. Remove a piece and the whole system may fall apart.
To think the layoffs had no effect on the quality of output from the system seems very naive.
Yes, it has some effect on the company. In my opinion, lots of teams had too many cooks in the kitchen. Work has been less painful post-layoffs. However, it doesn't seem like anyone related to Gemini was laid off, and if so, it really is a no-op for them.
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