This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Google is abusing most of their workforce through major pay cuts.
Fixed that title for you, Business Insider.
Dance, monkeys, or we will give your job to AI!
(We will give your job to AI regardless, then hire you back at a lower rate when it goes to shit).
My employer did basically this and it's really only used for nickel and diming employees. At best you get 100% of what you would've been due, but you probably end up getting 95% of it. So while you might miss out on a couple hundred dollars the company saved millions by doing this across the board.
This is a downgrade worded like a upgrade.
google is a master of doing that
For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
Amazon is doing the same thing.
It’s phrased as giving top tier employees ability to penetrate bands.
In practice you have to be rated Top Tier (which is assigned on a curve and only 5-10 percent of employees will hit) 3 years in a row. So if you have an off year or a new manager then you’re screwed. I’d wager that’s less than 1% of the company that’ll hit that.
For everyone else it was a 10% pay cut. Woo?
the ability to penetrate bands
That's traditionally called "promotion". So they're not promoting employees anymore?
For engineers at least it’s always been a pain.
L4 (the starting point) -> L5 is expected within a few years. After that it’s a fucking crapshoot. You can be stuck in L5 the rest of your career.
I should know, I've been a software engineer for over 20 years and an engineering manager for over 10. I've promoted many engineers.
I don't know what L4 and L5 map to in your company, but usually the gap between levels widens the higher the level. It's much easier to go from entry-level (recent graduate) to mid-level, than from senior to staff. The skills required to make that jump are much harder to acquire, there's less opportunities to put them in practice and a lot more dependencies on external factors you don't have control over.
Sounds like anyone intelligent and talented will find work in a less exploiting environment.
And the ones that stay behind will be the kinds of teammates nobody wants to work with.
Google is already falling behind in pretty much every area where they have competition and getting sued in all the areas where they have driven the competition out. It will really be great to see their business shrink given what they have become in the 2010s.
On the other hand, it's also really sad to see what they've become too. They used to be a really admirable company around the early 2000s. So many people were cheering for them as a company run by engineers, doing things differently and running all over the incumbent assholes everybody hated like Microsoft. There was a time when it felt like Google was a company for real people fighting back against the machine. But then they became the machine themselves.
The good Google is dead. I'd love to see them get completely buried.
I sure hope so. Google doesn't deserve their efforts.
Time to unionize
IWW is for all trades, even tech.
Google's talent pool must be a joke these days. Every single product I can think of that they make is just awful in 2025.
Google now is like IBM in the 1980s: it has a great future behind it.
If there were an alternative to Street View, i would be completely Google free
Google has entered the IBM era.
No wonder a lot of their top engineers have been leaving recently.
Maybe they should try the Elon way and fire everyone.
Lololzzz
