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Businesses Google Games

Stadia Leadership Praised Development Studios For 'Great Progress' Just One Week Before Laying Them All Off (kotaku.com) 119

Developers at Google's recently formed game studios were shocked February 1 when they were notified that the studios would be shut down, Kotaku reported Tuesday, citing four sources with knowledge of what transpired. From the report: Just the week prior, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent an email to staff lauding the "great progress" its studios had made so far. Mass layoffs were announced a few days later, part of an apparent pattern of Stadia leadership not being honest and upfront with the company's developers, many of which had upended their lives and careers to join the team. "[Stadia Games and Entertainment] has made great progress building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong lineup of Stadia exclusive games," Harrison's January 27 email read, according to sources. "We will confirm the SG&E investment envelope shortly, which will, in turn, inform the SG&E strategy and 2021 [objectives and key results]."

Five days later, Harrison appeared to reverse course completely, announcing in a public blog post that the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Jade Raymond, left the company, and Google would "not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E." Stadia developers learned the news, first reported by Kotaku, at almost the same time as everyone else via an internal email and conference call with Harrison. The messy rollout came after an already grueling year working through the pandemic. It was reminiscent of Stadia's own launch, which appeared rushed and left out many features promoted during the service's reveal, only to be added months later. In this case, however, Stadia's own developers were the ones impacted by the botched planning. Released in November 2019, Stadia initially struggled due to its monetization model and a lack of games.

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Stadia Leadership Praised Development Studios For 'Great Progress' Just One Week Before Laying Them All Off

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  • Don't do that (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @04:38PM (#61070100) Journal

    " the company's developers, many of which had upended their lives and careers to join the team"

    That was a mistake.

    • Re: Don't do that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by crobarcro ( 6247454 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @04:44PM (#61070118)
      Yes everyone knows that anything Google except search and ads should only, if you must, ever be dipped into gingerly with the tip of one toe. Don't be diving in, the water might be gone before you touch it.
      • It's ok to join Stadia (for a lot of different reasons, maybe you just liked some of the people there and wanted to work with them). But if you are upending your career and life to join any company as a software developer, you should think long and hard.

        Every career move you make should be positive or neutral in software development. The only way for it to not be is if you don't learn.

        • if you are upending your career and life to join any company as a software developer, you should think long and hard.

          And get a guaranteed contract.

      • by Sebby ( 238625 )

        Don't be diving in, the water might be gone before you touch it.

        The truth is there's no water to begin with - it's just a mirage.

        • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @04:57PM (#61070158)

          That is not quite true. There is some liquid there. It's just that special yellow water. ;)

          • by Anonymous Coward

            --
            If you can read this, you died, and we couldn't bother to inform you. To verify, check if the sky is blue instead of the

            No, it's still the. In fact I think it's more the than it's ever been. Does that mean everything's okay?

      • Yes everyone knows that anything Google except search and ads .

        Or Chrome, or Android, or Gmail, or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/etc., or ChromeOS, or...

        Basically, anything Google does that has a billion users is safe. Anything with a hundred million users is probably safe. Anything with uptake in the tens of millions or below is probably going to get cut at some point, unless it seems likely to grow.

    • That was a mistake.

      That depends on the employee contract. On a risky thing like that, I'd tell them I need a golden parachute just in case they shut it down (like google tends to do with practically everything that isn't search)

      • That depends on the employee contract. On a risky thing like that, I'd tell them I need a golden parachute just in case they shut it down

        How on earth does a developer negotiate a contract with a golden parachute? I've negotiated some weird contracts as a developer, but I've never gotten that one. Hook me up, tell me the secret!

        • by Hodr ( 219920 )

          Golden parachute is the wrong term since that applies to executive level personnel. But I have negotiated an up-front severance package before when I wasn't sure about taking a job. 3 months salary available from day one plus two weeks per year.

        • How on earth does a developer negotiate a contract with a golden parachute?

          The same way you negotiate it with a real human being. However, the golden parachute might not respond to queries.

      • Golden parachutes are for executives, not workers. I'll bet that Phil Harrison has a nice one.

      • That depends on the employee contract.

        And the employer's past actions / reputation. I moved for the job I currently hold - 22 years ago.

        Then again I also haven't had a significant raise in 5+ years, so, tradeoffs...

      • "Golden parachutes" are for high level execs. Developers are low level disposable workforce. They'd be shoveled into a furnace if they didn't burn like shit and stink up the place.
    • Re:Don't do that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @04:55PM (#61070152)

      Also, this line struck me as particularly hilarious, or sad, depending on your point of view.

      It seemed like Google was in it of the long haul, up until it wasn’t.

      I mean, Google is practically famous for throwing projects against the wall, seeing what sticks, and shit-canning everything else. Why in the world would anyone expect Stadia to be any different? I mean, I'm a game developer myself, so I know how volatile our industry can be. I don't mean to kick fellow game devs when they're down, but they HAD to know it was high-risk working at Google on Stadia of all things. Well, hopefully they find other jobs or positions quick and land on their feet.

      • I think being a game dev monkey for some big business always already counts as being down.

        It's really quite horrible, treating creativity like a product off an assembly line, and even a Gulag would sometimes be a better environment for doing goos creative work.

        I presume they will all be replaced by shitty mapping tensor ("AI") functions, so the last remains of human emotion can be stamped out.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          It's really quite horrible, treating creativity like a product off an assembly line, and even a Gulag would sometimes be a better environment for doing goos creative work.

          What the fuck do you know about working as a game developer? That's some patronising shit you've come up with right there.

          Your posts might be more interesting if you weren't constantly fishing for mod points ...

      • by Luthair ( 847766 )

        I would say they're unfairly singled out in this, all large companies have a similar track record.

        If you've ever looked at killedbygoogle or whatever the site is, it lists random features, and many products that were replaced. If we followed that logic we'd be complaining that Microsoft killed Windows 95 and Apple killed the ipod classic.

        • Re:Don't do that (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:37PM (#61070334)

          Yes and no. It's true that every large company tries new things, and discontinues old products. But I think there's a difference in that Google typically doesn't sell products, but offers services.

          Thus, if you bought a Microsoft Zune, it continued to work long after Microsoft discontinued the line. Same with your old iPod. Traditional software is often the same, in that it will continue functioning just fine, even if the company that sold it no longer supports it. Just because my copy of Office 2010 is no longer officially supported, it continues to function just fine.

          But when Google kills a service, it goes away forever. No one can continue using it. So, anyone actually relying on that service tends to feel the loss a bit more keenly than if a product has been discontinue and is simply no longer sold.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            I think the poster was saying that some or many of the "killed" services were simply moved to another equivalent or better quality service and that killedbygoogle is padding their numbers.

            Saying that killedbygoogle pads their numbers is fair, but yes, Google has definitely and explicitly killed many services after asking or even demanding people invest in them. Not to mention the number of abandoned but live services, or their pile of "80% finished is good enough" services. Not to mention their APIs that mi

          • My beef here isn't with google making a decision to discontinue some venture. It's not actually contradictory to kill it even though it was making great progress - sometimes business conditions change. Having your project killed is not necessarily a reflection on you at all.

            My beef is that they apparently made no real effort to reassign the workers, and instead just laid them off. That is uncool.

        • Re:Don't do that (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Slayer ( 6656 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:47PM (#61070358)

          When Microsoft moved beyond Windows 95, they did not abandon the whole operating system division, they did not fire all their employees working on Windows 95. I am quite sure, that Apple found suitable tasks for most of those involved in the iPod Classic as well.

          All of this was expected, because after building up some knowledge about the inner workings of a company, and especially one product line within this company, one would expect these workers to be especially valuable to that company in their ongoing operation and continued development.

          None of that seems to be the case with Google, which appears to build up whole product lines, only to tear them down shortly afterwards without much prior notice. I feel sorry for their employees, who likely expected different from a large and reputable employer. Everyone else should at least take note of Google's behavior before responding to an employment offer.

          • Your cases are an incredible false equivalence. Google isn't "moving beyond" Stadia. They are getting out of the Gaming studio business. If MS stopped selling OSes I'd expect their OS division to be largely handed "thanks for your service" letters. Apple also didn't abandon the iPod classic. Their hardware division responsible for the classic continued to develop iPods, as well as design the audio hardware in the iPhone itself, to say nothing of the fact that the software platform itself became the platform

            • by storkus ( 179708 )

              Your cases are an incredible false equivalence. Google isn't "moving beyond" Stadia. They are getting out of the Gaming studio business. If MS stopped selling OSes I'd expect their OS division to be largely handed "thanks for your service" letters.

              I could say the same thing to you: Google COULD have sold Stadia to another company and those employees would have kept their jobs. Either there were no buyers (everyone else thinking it would never work) or Google simply didn't care & didn't bother to shop it around.

              • Google COULD have sold Stadia to another company

                Probably not. As designed it probably won't work anywhere but Google. Why would they design it to work on anyone else's platform? They don't have enough customers to be worth buying for the customer base, and the product is not desirable enough to be worth porting to another platform since users don't want to buy games twice.

              • That's a really interesting comment. Most companies do try to find a buyer when they get out of a business ("refocus on our core"). Does Google have any history of doing something similar? I can't think of any from the top of my head. In the past, you could argue those businesses were from their 20% of time employees can devote to random stuff, but it cannot be the case for every single thing Google has discontinued. It's obviously not the case for Stadia. Why does Google not try to sell a division?

                I've
        • . If we followed that logic we'd be complaining that Microsoft killed Windows 95 and Apple killed the ipod classic.

          As luck would have it, I have recently (within a few years) had occasion to use both Windows 95 and an iPod Classic. Both worked just fine. They weren't day-to-day technology, but edge cases do come up.

        • I would say they're unfairly singled out in this, all large companies have a similar track record.

          No, they most certainly are not. It's not just that they cancel products. They cancel products inexplicably and without warning, often after they have failed solely because no one ever heard of them. Stadia they at least advertised, and it had no real chance to succeed because it was a stupid idea (I have to buy games again and they're worthless when Stadia is inevitably shut down? Fuck that.)

          You can't count on Google to keep a service running. Nobody should bother subscribing to literally anything from Goo

      • I mean, Google is practically famous for throwing projects against the wall, seeing what sticks, and shit-canning everything else. Why in the world would anyone expect Stadia to be any different?

        Google is also practically famous for heavily standing behind what does stick. Android, Drive, Gmail, all of these were some startup projects at some point.

        I still remember 20 years ago Google used to be praised as a company that would try things and that this is what made them so great to work for. Now the narrative seems to be that you'd be mad to be part of anything new because it may not be successful enough to make money.

        • by chrish ( 4714 )

          Hey Google, where's that Linux version of Drive?

          I mean, there's Android, and Google sure uses a lot of Linux in-house, but they've never gotten around to releasing their Linux Drive client. Sure there's support on Linux, but you have to go commercial to find something reliable and actually maintained (InSync works very well for me).

          • Hey user, where are the rest of you?

            I get the desire, but developing for Linux remains an expensive shitfest if you don't own the system. Android is easy since the system requirements are given / mandated. But you just got to look towards Dropbox and all the fun they had with file systems and support on Linux. It's a lot of effort for a small user base.

    • Upending your life and career to join a PHIL HARRISON-led project, no less. Do they know nothing about the industry in which they work?

    • by Anonymous Coward
      When upending lives and careers, it's important to calculate the value of the lives and careers upended and to make sure that the signing bonus covers that value fully.
    • I literally came here to say this.

    • The sick part about all that is the executives knew, but they played it close to the vest while they sold stocks before the announcement that would devalue their shares. Ive seen it before. Your lives mean nothing compared to their stock investments.
    • I wonder how much of Stadias failure was the fact that you did not rent the games like some other services, but had to buy a copy.

      then given how often Google cancels services and no guaranties were given that you could "take your games with you" in such situation people did not want to throw out the money..

    • It was a gamble, as is playing slots or buying gamestop stock. Welcome to free society, everyone is free gamble their life away if they so choose. Even bad decisions have good outcomes sometimes (someone wins the lottery many times each year).

      Perhaps those developers should think of it as an expensive lesson in risk management - only take risks you can afford to lose.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Google has no honor, no integrity, no decency, and, worse, no strategy.

  • by Sebby ( 238625 )

    Phil Harrison sent an email to staff lauding the "great progress" its studios had made so far. Mass layoffs were announced a few days later

    Wow, even their great news get the graveyard treatment [killedbygoogle.com] - in record time!

  • It's really quite amazing, how some people can fail to monetize a "business" based exclusively on protection rackets for traps.
    Why did they start offering at all, if they couldn't even manage to acquire a attractive trap from their thugalikes? Not making anything new yet raking in billions is the whole point of the "industry". And they start with "Let's make something new." Leave that to actual creative people please. It is not a business.

  • Terraria (Score:5, Informative)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @04:57PM (#61070160)

    And don't forget about what Google did/is doing to the dev of Terraria. Last I checked his gmail account is still locked.

    • One thing I haven't forgotten is that we've only heard one side of this. There are far less influential people who are not Google partners who have had more complex problems resolved more easily.

      There is a lot more to this story than what Spinks is tweeting.

  • by big-giant-head ( 148077 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:02PM (#61070188)

    I'm not a big M$ fan, but you have to admire how they keep slogging money at something until it turns a profit. They could've walked away from Office ( it's great now, the MS Dos version in 1990 sucked) , Xbox, Cloud ... I'm sure there are ones I'm forgetting. Once they decide to push a project .. they just keep on plowing money into it!

    • by DrSpock11 ( 993950 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:18PM (#61070262)

      I'm not a big M$ fan, but you have to admire how they keep slogging money at something until it turns a profit. They could've walked away from Office ( it's great now, the MS Dos version in 1990 sucked) , Xbox, Cloud ... I'm sure there are ones I'm forgetting. Once they decide to push a project .. they just keep on plowing money into it!

      There are plenty of projects/products Microsoft has killed as well. Windows Phone being probably the biggest consumer facing one. On the development side of things; there are still people angry about them not continuing to develop VB6. When they stopped Silverlight development in 2012 it screwed a ton of companies that had just invested fortunes into re-writing their apps into Silverlight UIs.

      • by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:33PM (#61070320) Homepage

        Microsoft has a ton of these. Silverlight is a good example - they created it, hyped it, then dropped it in a few years time. But... VB6...? They supported it for many years after they made a replacement. What's the complaint there?

        • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:36PM (#61070332)
          The runtime is STILL supported and included in windows now. I am truly stunned with how much legacy support they have provided for VB6 despite having a replacement for 2 decades.
          • I guess Windows just has so much legacy code in all the technologies used over the years, it's simply impossible to remove the runtime libraries without breaking it.

            For example, if they wanted to give the axe to cmd.exe and the rest of DOS legacy, they'd first need to at least scrub some 7 .bat scripts that still dwell around.

            • nothing in windows is dependent on the VB6 runtime, it is there purely for enterprises that have legacy code. for a while it was not included but they got so many requests they put it back in.
        • Zune.

        • I was working at a company that had spent years and a lot of money developing VB6 products. We were all waiting to see what new features would be in VB7 and instead they announced that they were ditching the whole thing in favor of .net. It was a huge kick in the guts because the technology was fundamentally different (garbage collection vs reference counting etc) so you couldn't just recompile or use their migration "wizard". All our potential customers suddenly saw our product as a legacy product and were
        • Once HTML5 was on the horizon it was painfully obvious to everyone that it would be going away sooner rather than later.

          • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

            HTML5 does not have nearly the feature set of Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft could have reimplemented Silverlight to use HTML5 as the back-end and kept it going. Microsoft never intended to support it. It was a "me too" technology where Microsoft wanted to claim that they had a path toward cross-platform development, but they really just wanted to keep people on Windows. This is why some of us won't adopt Blazor even though it rocks: I fully expect Microsoft will cancel it in a year.

      • There are plenty of projects/products Microsoft has killed as well. Windows Phone being probably the biggest consumer facing one.

        A handful of users does not a big project make.

        Windows phone was a small project in that they didn't invent an OS for it. Also, they never really committed to it. First it was based on wince and then it was based on NT. All they really had to do in order to make it work on a mobile device was strip stuff out of it, and make a phone app. And they sucked at even doing that. Wince-based windows mobile stunk on ice. NT-based windows mobile was fine by all accounts but basically had no reason to exist, there was

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      you have to admire how they keep slogging money at something until it turns a profit.

      Zune? Windows Phone? Tay?

    • by darkain ( 749283 )

      Microsoft buy Mixer. Adds a "Share to Mixer" button on the Xbox controllers... Just in time to shut down Mixer.

      No, M$ isn't innocent, or lacking the ability to just can things outright for no reason.

      In fact, M$ is quite the opposite. WinFS? Photosynth? Microsoft cans products before they even make it to market, so nobody even knows.

    • I'm sure there are ones I'm forgetting.

      Surface. The biggest slog of them all.

      • Apparently its users swear by it. It's overpriced for what it offers, but it offers much. If Microsoft could make it affordable, it could be quite successful.

        Unfortunately, Microsoft is not in position of Apple. If it was exactly as it is, same features, same price, only Apple brand, it would be selling like hot buns.

    • I'm not a big M$ fan, but you have to admire how they keep slogging money at something until it turns a profit. They could've walked away from Office ( it's great now, the MS Dos version in 1990 sucked) , Xbox, Cloud ... I'm sure there are ones I'm forgetting. Once they decide to push a project .. they just keep on plowing money into it!

      There are many MS failures, Zune and Windows Phone are 2 of the more famous ones. However, maybe Redmond culture is a little more forward looking than Silicon Valley culture these days. I am actually surprised they saw XBox through because the launch was a bit rough and Sony is a fierce competitor. Also, MS of today is not the MS of Gates/Ballmer. Nadella is more open minded as to what he'd invest in and is very interested in playing nice with the rest of the world. The fact that they make so much mon

      • They used to be disappointing and pathetic and Google used to be exciting and cutting edge. We could very well see it switch and we all get excited about MS launches and bored by Google ones. I certainly felt bored by the Pixel 5 launch and excited about the XBox Series X (which someday I hope to buy if they can actually make enough to get them in stores). I am excited by the Surface launches and honestly don't know if Google makes chromedbooks or tablets any more.

        AFAIK, Android development for tablets has stopped some time ago.

        But at some point, they'll have to pay large companies to get behind their latest fads otherwise nobody will take any interest.

      • Apparently some people use it and enjoy it. I don't generally like subscriptions but I find ridiculous paying Google each month for the privilege of streaming games taking into account that it requires basically a perfect Internet connection.
        Since don't really spend much money on games I prefer to spend some money on hardware (that I use for much more than playing games) every 5 years or so and then pay a bit just for the games I want and not have to worry about my Internet connection not being perfect (I
    • Hey now, before you cock gobble on old bill gates, just remember all the damn customers he fucked over every single time he tried to make an iphone and failed. Everytime the market interest shit a whopping 200,000 buyers well short of the millions they were anticipating. Every time they yanked up the carpet and left the customers who bought their turd without any support or fixes. I used to say never ever invest in a Donald Trump project (this was long before he was president) because the only person that e
    • Once they decide to push a project .. they just keep on plowing money into it!

      No, they push a project when they see a potential to make money in it. Google do exactly the same thing, the difference is they exert themselves more and more in attempts to develop fringe and new markets while MS largely attempts to push into established markets.

      Google's risk is higher, and so is its potential reward, but it would be mindbogglingly stupid to keep investing in something without a pathway to profitability. That and the vast majority of things killed by Google were simply supplemented by othe

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You think MS Office is "great"? Do you have a case of early-inset dementia?

  • I know there is always the desire to jump into the "next great thing" with gaming, but the "next great thing" with gaming is doing things entirely with open source and free software" I know, you are like, how the heck can you kill the old gaming business models, well, look at how much things have changed in the past few years, look at cell phone games, look at steam. Things are not going to stay the same, and google, the big bloated company that they are, thought they could "inovate". Google doesn't inno
  • People will say casual players don't notice latency increases below 10ms but they're wrong. A casual player can easily notice the difference. It's not as important to them sure, but do not make up lies about them not being able to perceive it. You need to go below 1ms for input latency to not be noticeable.
    • I played all of Half Life: Alyx on my Quest 2 using wireless virtual desktop which adds 25-26ms of input latency. Had no real perception of latency at all and no problems with it. VR is famous for needing to be lag-free otherwise it results in nausea.

      Playing Beat Saber in the same set up (not for very long), I did feel like the latency might be affecting me, things felt a 'little off'. But I only played that way for about 20 minutes tops so not entirely sure I was actually perceiving the latency. That's a f

    • Players don't notice the latency increases, but they do notice what that causes. That is, they won't be able to identify why something is off, but they'll know something is.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Sorry but that is complete bullshit. For the majority of people they really have zero ability to detect 10ms of latency. 10ms is 1/100 of a second and is imperceptible to the majority of people. Having said that Stadia still sucked balls as what people DO notice is inconsistency in latency.
    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      LOL who the fuck are you kidding. You think input latency needs to be less than the latency of on your monitor to be unnoticeable? The action of just pressing a button for even the fasted twitch gamer will be measured in the 10's of milliseconds. Generally anything under 40ms is ok for a gamer (about 2 frames), anything that is 10ms or less is freakin phenomenal as it is less than a frame. under 1ms is simply pointless as your monitor can't even keep up anyway so the difference between 1ms and 10ms percepti
  • I imagine this is material enough that Google needs to inform investors so they can't really broadcast to hundreds of employees ahead of time. Its also possible that a week prior the decision hadn't been made (though may have been under discussion by executives).
    • by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      I imagine this is material enough that Google needs to inform investors so they can't really broadcast to hundreds of employees ahead of time. Its also possible that a week prior the decision hadn't been made (though may have been under discussion by executives).

      This appears to be exactly what happened, and the submitter utterly fails at reading comprehension, because they included it in their submission. From the summary:

      . "We will confirm the SG&E investment envelope shortly, which will, in turn, inform the SG&E strategy and 2021 [objectives and key results]."

      This is a "rah-rah, go team, our future is bright!" email sent by someone who appears to have legitimately believed that, only to find out they were wrong.

  • Whats ironic (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @05:39PM (#61070340)
    is that a lot of this stuff would utterly disrupt their respective fields if Google would just maintain a modicum of support. Sketchup could have transformed 3d modeling introducing something thats actually intuitive and easy to learn in an area where all the tools are buggy hacked together 90s era autodesk monstrosities or the convoluted UI of Blender. Theres nothing quite like Tiltbrush. Project Ara could have dwarfed the iphone's impact on mobiles. But I guess Google just can't be bothered to shift a tiny grain of the billions they are sitting on and pause from interfering in politics and pandering to SJWs to do something worthwhile for a change.
    • Anyone who pretends Google does more than pay lip service to the idea of "social justice" is undoubtedly performing another kind of lip service on the corporate lord and master who owns them.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    These moon shot projects are a game to management. They are expected to fail by definition. But the managers compete on how to phrase the projects in order to hire people into it.

    For me it was an elaborate gaslighting from day one (not Stadia, but a different equally bonkers project). If I had concerns and voiced them, well I'm new and I need to learn more about the project before passing judgement. Six months later, and I know more and am now more worried. Well ... I'm just making a mountain out of a mole

    • by Jarwulf ( 530523 )
      Google culture is like the leftwing version of the stereotypical hypocrite movie Christian. All virtuous on the surface but as backbiting and animalistic as the worst of people on the inside.
      • Google culture is like the leftwing version of the stereotypical hypocrite movie Christian. All virtuous on the surface but as backbiting and animalistic as the worst of people on the inside.

        I question your description of them seeming virtuous on the surface. I can't imagine viewing Google's culture that way.

  • Just the week prior, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent an email to staff lauding the "great progress" its studios had made so far. Mass layoffs were announced a few days later,

    Don't listen to ANYTHING that upper management of a corporation says. It's worthless.

    I work for a large corporation ,but at one of the smaller manufacturing facilities, which I still like because it isn't TOO "giant corporation" here. A few years ago some VP of something told us to our faces, "We had an unprecedented quarter for revenue! It was amazing! We made so much profit, we are going to have to explain to investors how we were so far off!" Seriously, they were going to have to answer for making

  • Never rely on Google anything apart from search and Gmail.
    And I'm not too sure about Gmail

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I never used Gmail (I run my own mail server, it is not that hard). I recently dropped google for search. Their results are becoming crappier and crappier.

  • And now... You are all out of a job.

  • After a fairly nasty layoff I had a director of engineering get all of us survivors together. Rather than the usual consoling and mapping out what the road ahead would be, he repeated "We are ALL temporary employees" several times and demanded that we get all of our sniveling out then and there and that he didn't want to hear grousing in the hallway once we left the room. Nobody spoke up, obviously. My resume was blasted out before the week was over, and I was gone a couple months later. He spent my las

    • Is there anyone out there who does not yet know that the most efficient way up the salary ladder is upgrade your employer roughly every 18 months? So you're hanging around in the hopes of that elusive promo, huh. You're playing the lottery and leaving money on the table. The better you are, the more you will be appreciated somewhere else.

      Or you could just stay where you are and fatten up on the free junk food, waiting forthat inevitable day security walks you out the door with ten minutes notice so HR can b

  • Who wants their GPU in the cloud? Google, that's who. So they can sell more underpowered chromebooks. I'll stick with my GPU, thanks, and have submillisecond latency CPU to screen.

    ping google.com
    64 bytes from xxx17x12-xx-x13.1x100.net (1xx.xxx.x.206): icmp_seq=1 ttl=119 time=10.7 ms

    • 10ms is jack diddly in the grand scheme of things. If you could count on that kind of latency then it would be fine for almost everyone. But you can't, the internet doesn't work like that. Packets sometimes arrive out of order, you certainly can't expect them to all have the same trip time.

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      "CPU to screen" latency don't mean much. What is it? A more useful measure is "motion to photon". That's the time it takes between, say, the moment the mouse starts to move and the moment you can see the pointer moving. On a typical game that's around 50ms. In VR where latency is critical, we can expect around 20ms today.

      Adding 10ms of network latency isn't that big unless you are doing VR or if you are a high level competitive gamer. And even with VR, people are quite happy with the virtual desktop mode of

      • You're right, "motion to photon" is a much better measure, no need for me to introduce my own private language.

        Adding 10ms of network latency isn't that big unless you are doing VR or if you are a high level competitive gamer.

        And then it's the difference between competitive or not, or headache or not.

        And even with VR, people are quite happy with the virtual desktop mode of the Oculus Quest, which I think adds about 20ms compared to a typical wired headset.

        By adding another 10 ms that goes up to 30 ms. Intolerable, really. Remember, gamers turned their noses up at 60Hz monitors long ago. That's 16ms refresh, now you want them to accept 30ms or more?

        Plus, 10ms was just average latency. It's worst case latency that kills, and that is way, way worse. Particularly nasty for a vid

  • So their diversity ( as with the VPOTUS ) is more important that their talent ?

    All you need to know.

  • It's all part of a post-scarcity economy. Videogames are among those things of which there are more than enough. Capitalism and thus ROI is working less and less. We have negative interest rates and pure cash is losing its worth. Google is quicker at setting up and tearing down entire business sections, we all know that. But I myself, who couldn't ever score a job with Google, am seeing more and more jobs where there is little more to do than busywork or putting out stupid fires set up by management.

    Just as

  • Just remember that CEO's and Management exist to please the owners/stockholders of the company and inflate the stock price till their stock options mature and they can cash them in. They don't give a damn about the employees unless it can hurt the two items already stated.

    Withholding information from investors is illegal. Withholding information from Employees isn't. :-( That pretty much says it all.

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