Comment by burningion
1 year ago
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.
I think you contradict this statement in this very thread:
> Yeah, no way am I beta-testing a product for free then risking my job to give feedback.
An environment of layoffs raises the reputational costs of being a critical voice.
The Gemini team is not at risk of layoffs. The thing is, I'm not on that team. Also, I wouldn't have spoken up about this even before layoffs, because every training I've taken has made it clear that I shouldn't question this, and I'd have nothing to gain.
In fact, we had a situation kinda like this around 2019, well before layoffs. There was talk about banning a bunch of words from the codebase. Managers and SWEs alike were calling it a silly waste of time. Then one day, someone high up enough got on board with it, and almost nobody said a word as they proceeded to spend team-SWE-months renaming everything.
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