https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/8/23590864/google-ai-chatbot...
I haven't used a stapler in years.
How do the other 99% of American companies manage? /s
Coincidence or not, their stock has slowly fallen and they've lost their shine since then.
I think "broadly cutting tiny costs" means the company is done believing in itself.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Nickel and dimming would be requiring approvals and paperwork to buy a stapler. This is Google just not buying them. That seems reasonable at a tech company?
Note that none of us are discussing the fitness classes. Staples, though? Seriously? How did that make the memo?
So each stapler use requires, say, a 5 minute detour (minimum, not counting lost focus or queueing) to the receptionist. At Google salaries, that's easily $10 in cost, so it's difficult to conceive how Google is expecting to come out ahead in the bargain.
Not literally fraud, but that headline makes me wonder what Google is hiding and if they are close to failure.
Up to now, I assumed all the acting was there to prop the stock prices. But the nickel-and-dime things can't save enough to impact anything.
The rich are the Phds and the Management is a crew asleep at the Helm...suddenly Kubernetes takes a whole new meaning...
I am sure their finance people can read the expense %ages just as well as HN commenters: e.g. changing your cleaning supplier to a much cheaper one could actually save more $$$ but will not be staff-visible for a while. Perks are mainly signals, not cost centers.
Source: led down-sizing and kept perks when I wanted to retain people, reduced perks where I preferred some additional attrition.
A. over the course of 20+ years in this industry I've noticed a trend that when companies start worrying about things like tape dispensers or staplers (or the free coffee in the cafeteria, or the cost of the subsidized sodas in the breakroom, etc) it's almost always a Really Bad Sign for their future.
B. (related to A of course) when this stuff starts happening, it tends to send the best employees heading for the doors, either because they feel slighted, and/or because they assume (rightly or not) that the company is spiraling the drain. And the best employees leaving can have exactly the effect of sending the company spiraling down the drain...
These things have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies (or at least self-reinforcing negative feedback loops). At best, it's vanishingly rare for this to be harbinger of anything good.
Your average company in average times, sure your heuristic makes sense. I'm guessing this will give many other companies the green light to cut back their perks as well.
Just a thought - where are all those "best employees" going to go? Everyone is battening the hatches for a recession and VCs don't have tons of cash to hand out for new startups.
The last time I looked there were almost 2 job openings per unemployed person in America. Unemployment right now is around 3.6% which is a slight uptick from other recent numbers, but still close to "historically low" territory. There are jobs out there.
Everyone is battening the hatches for a recession and VCs don't have tons of cash to hand out for new startups.
I would say it's a bit myopic to think that tech workers can only go to work for tech startups, or even companies that identify as "tech companies". So maybe somebody from Google winds up at John Deere, or Kohls, or Farmer's Insurance, or what-have-you. Now of course there's always going to be those people who have the mindset "I'm too good to work for company that makes tractors, pppffawwww." or whatever. So sure, they might not be rushing to leave unless the flood waters are literally swirling around their ankles. But clearly not everybody is going to fall into that category.
So, yeah, Google is swirling the toilet because someone has to walk to the receptionist's desk once a year to get a piece of tape or borrow a stapler. I'd be more worried about a company that just hands out shit that no one uses, without ever once asking if anyone actually uses it.
It’s pretty clear the company has lost its innovation culture.
I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...
-xoogler who saw him come to power and the complete lack of direction since
https://youtu.be/DtJ28qOEG1g at 28:07
I guess there is no such thing as a completely secure job, even at a company like Google.
Running a quick Fermi calculation, multiplying my personal rate of staple usage over the past year by the number of employees at Google we get... $0 spent on staplers.
This may be an underestimate.
Still... here's 5,000 staples for 4.29, with no particular effort put into price shopping: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/749601/Office-Depot-B... which yields 1.2 million staples for a cool $1000. In reality I'm sure bulk buying could push that down even more.
I'm finding it hard to believe even Google goes through much more than that in a year. But even if I'm wrong, does it go through 120 million staples per year, necessary to get up to even a semblance of one employee's salary?
What an astonishing message to send to stockholders and investors.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t...
and of course those authors aren't paid. But I'd take them to the Google Store and let them pick out a gift for themselves, as a small thank you. They were all very modest in their choices. Eventually Google imposed a hard limit on the amount they could spend. Think of the savings!
But staplers! Good grief, how many staplers did I go through? (actually, I don't think I had one)
I guess the purpose of a company-wide email is to signal "Tighten your belts." But it absolutely makes sense to cut back on supplies that aren't needed as much or don't need to be refreshed as much--or on services that aren't being utilized with fewer people in offices.
I have, over and over, seen companies burn the cost of a decent laptop at a rate between one per quarter and one per month per employee because they try to cheap out and the shitware they force on their workers runs like crap on anything that's not fairly powerful, wasting hours per week per employee.
Whole divisions at some larger companies lose incredible amounts of money every year over reluctance to give the mere worker-drones nice hardware.
Now, one could argue that Google has been going down this path for a while, but I still think it's a sad sign. What I think is even sadder is that I haven't seen anything come out of Google in the past couple years that clearly and clear-headedly addresses some of their well-known cultural problems (that are often discussed on HN). For example, if Google senior management said they were totally overhauling their "promotion-oriented development" style, or that they were finally deciding on a better way to handle "Killed by Google" products so that customers aren't scared to try their new stuff in the first place, or that they were becoming more forthcoming in their roadmap visibility, I'd be thrilled. But instead we get the oldest-of-old-school "cost cutting will continue until morale improves" MBA spiel.
And if you are worried about google handing out things nobody uses.... I have really bad news for you. :D
As one who used to have enough Microsoft-branded shirts to wear one to work everyday for a month and not repeat myself, I'm under no illusion that a large corporation doesn't hand out a lot of useless junk. :-)
There is a sort of quirk here that causes people to focus on things like this, even if they are overwhelmingly insubstantial.
Wasting physical objects feels bad. Something about the physicality of it. Whereas salary is more abstract and intangible - we experience it as numbers changing on a screen. Important numbers that greatly affect our lives, but the visceral impact of this is more removed.
Reducing waste is good, obviously. But in a cost-saving effort, basic office supplies are a completely useless thing to focus on.
that definitely seems like the sort of expense a company should review from time to time. assume that tape is a similar expense, the person who changes the policy from "we give you a stapler and tape whether you want it or not" to "if you want a stapler just come and get one" has saved the company 2-3x their annual salary. i'm sure there's plenty of staff at google who are less effective than that.
Presume an employee proposes this change. Some additional people have to approve and implement this new policy, updating documentation training and budgets and adding it to some inventory system and now you've spent in total, weeks or months of collective effort to maybe come out ahead but maybe just break even.
When working on the office, it makes perfect sense to buy plenty of them so everybody would have one nearby (at the same cabinet as the perforator, folders, printer paper, extra sticky notes, pens, and whatever else).
When working at home, I'd guess it's used exactly never, so yes, it doesn't make sense to buy them.
Does everybody at Google work at home?
Anyway, the stapler is the most interesting part of the headline. How much did it cost to decide to stop buying them? Does it save enough to pay the decision-making?
As an aside, the organization I worked at before had two to four secretaries per floor. Before the pandemic, most were in their offices when you needed anything practical, like staples, batteries, etc. After the pandemic, most of them work from home most days of the week. That's great for them, but I've had days that I had to go through the whole building to get this or that.
These small informal conveniences and ways-of-working aren't on the organization's radar, and when they're gone, it takes some doing to get them organized again. Until then, and until everyone in the organization knows about the new ways of working, this can be quite frustrating and inefficient.
Maybe some intern realized they could arbitrage $0 work staplers into >$0 eBay staplers.
Collectively, 401k holders don't have much of a voice. I suppose Vanguard might, but even so, retirement accounts are specifically balanced such that they have less short-term risk the nearer they come to fruition, and Vanguard's motive, in theory, should be to provide me with better long-term gains, not short-term savings at the expense of a worse retirement.
I think I want to see a stronger argument for "the shareholders" … and/or these sorts of (idiotic) decisions (that we see far more companies doing than just Google; cf the McD's article that trended earlier where McD is laying people off while beating profit expectations!) would seem to fall squarely on bad management.
I've read that activist investors have pushed for this at several tech companies and even heard theories that that's what actually kicked off the layoff avalanche.
Are you sure?
If it is actively managed, it cares about a whole lot of things that you don't know about. And if it passively invested, it cares about what the average of the active managers care about.