Google offering ‘voluntary exit’ for employees working on Pixel, Android
Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel and Android were merged into one division, and Google today announced a “voluntary exit program.”
This is the best way to do headcount reductions imo. In large organisations there's always someone who's been there for a long time and gotten tired of the work, and that would gladly take this type of offer if it's lucrative enough.
To demonstrate - imagine that you've been considering quitting your job for a while. Then someone comes along and says that if you do that, you also get some additional cash for free. You'd probably take it, right?
And if you necessarily need to reduce headcount, then there's also the argument that if someone leaves voluntarily, then someone who wants to stay doesn't have to get pushed out.
So yeah, I'm not against this
In my experience with this format, only the good ones are leaving and you're stuck with the rest.
My last job did this. They offered more for those who had worked there longer. People with over 15 years got about a years pay and they all took it. People who had been there under a year got nothing so they all stayed.
I was going to take then they withdrew the offer for all devs. I think a lot tried to take it and they realised no one would be left. I would have got 3-4 months pay. Loads of institutional knowledge lost though, i left anyway a few months later.
Absolutely. The ones who've resigned mentally are fine within their positions. The people with all the business connections and references will be the ones to grab the money and simply start something new. It happened at my company. I was only 3 years in, so it wasn't enough money for me to quit. But loads of good people left the company.
Depends on if the good people have better places to go, I guess. My guess is that you're probably going to lose people who have some amount of tenure, especially if you're the kind of company that gives equity that vests on a 4-year schedule. Even if you're not, people with some amount of tenure will be the ones trending towards being checked out already.
Losing people with tenure means you lose organisational memory, which can definitely be negative.
This is all to say that as an organisation, you should think twice about doing any kind of layoff. They are all bad in their own way. This just happens to be the format that is least bad for most workers, which is why I prefer it.
Neither pixel nor android teams should need reductions, this is Google being cheap and fucking with employees' income for no reason other than blind greed.
Fuck is Pixel going to go away? Apparently the pixel 9 sold well
Maybe they just want to downsize cause there isn't as much to do nowadays when the OS is so mature?
This is not the way to do that. This is a way to get rid of your best people because, as the United States government is about to find out, when you offer a voluntary exit to people with a severance package the ones who know they have ability and are competent will take that package and leave and get better jobs. And the ones that know they suck or are too lazy are going to stay. There's actually a list somewhere of companies that have done this and have gone under because of it.
First, we'll take away the headphone jack.
Then, we'll remove everything else!
I can't imagine so, they're only just now prepping the first pixel phone on their own in-house CPU (pixel 10) and development is underway for the following generation (pixel 11). To axe the line now would be crazy.
To be fair, to axe that would be a very Google thing to do.
Can Sundar Pichai please take the offer?
And Prabhakar Raghavan aka worsener of search
Sideways rectal pineapples for that chucklefuck.
Imagine all of this talent going to work for grapheneOS and/or hardware company willing to make a phone with grapheneOS as its OS.
I'd rather see phones with Ubuntu Touch, PostMarketOS, and Mobian OS's.
Same, I'm really tired of the annoying Android logic. I wish we could have a logical OS where we could manage our files properly instead of the filesystem mess we currently have with stuff all over the place.
It didn't matter when the phones just had a few megs of storage, but you can carry some serious data on those things nowadays.
i will second this too!
Yeah but AOSP practically does most of the heavy work for graphene.
ASOP fork, donation model (pay as you feel) pls.
Please voluntary redundancy google staff. Please
(Realistically I know this is a tall ask considering this is people's livelihoods we'te talking about)
Sign me up babyyyyy
I really should switch to Graphene
Can I install my bank app on it yet? I remember having problems with attestation in the past.
What about full application backups? I've got a few offline apps, I'd like to transfer the data to/from. However, I thought grapheneOS needed the application developer to "approved" this backup/restore method - or you needed root (which invalidated attestation)... I don't recall which it was (but I really miss titanium backup).
my bank app is specificially listed as working but i would def check
here is a list of compatible banking apps, however the list is crowd sourced so trust but verify.
And as a follow up question to this, are there any container apps to run those apps that won't work in a way that they think they are running on stock android?
I assume Graphene won't work with my employer's MDM software. :/
Depends on the bank. Graphene has support for seedvault backups, or you could use syncthing-fork to sync the data over. Or any one of those Foss airdrop clones
Nope, but you can use their web apps.
Not sure about backing up apps, never looked into it.
What’s making you choose Graphene?
Lots of reasons but mostly privacy and a boner for doing nerdy shit.
Privacy
I also went Graphene, and it's privacy for me too.
I really don't want Google Play Services running, and GrapheneOS gives me that option. I have three profiles:
I spend 99% of my time on main, and most of the rest in "work" (need it for MFA). My phone reboots every 4 hours, so Google Play eventually stops running in the background (tried more frequently, and it was annoying).
There are other Android ROMs, but GrapheneOS has really rapid security updates, perhaps faster than anywhere else. The other projects are good too, it's just the first I tried and I've liked it so far.
Hilarious, I just got a reach out for working on the Pixel camera
Are you sure that wasn't a reach around, instead of reach out?
plz
Verizon let me root my 2018 phone and stop installing candycrush on it you fucking pieces of shit!!!!
If you have any intent to play with Android OS variants or the stock OS, don't buy Verizon devices. Ever. They will not give you the decryption key or unlock key.
Apple, Google, Samsung and Motorola all sell devices on their websites as full price or up to 36 month financing. You can get them carrier unlocked. Motorola and Google offer bootloader unlocking should you want to.
Verizon will let you transfer the phone to a different carrier after like 3 months of owning the phone.
Carrier unlock and bootloader unlock are very different things. All my 60x motorola Z phones can use any carrier Well, they could if I hadn't replaced the antenna with a dummy resistor but that's beside the point. The point is I cannot have administrative access to my phone and that means I cannot change something I really really need to change on them to make them useful for my purpose.
Essentially, I cannot "sudo" on these phones and that's making them very difficult to use.
Are you able to buy unlocked directly from Google? I typically avoid the carrier when I can.
Buy an unlocked one from box box stores. Bought mine from best buy. Immediately threw GrapheneOS on it. Coming from a locked down Samsung s9 that I couldn't root to an degoogled android experience I didn't even have to root is fucking awesome!
So you're being "voluntary" fired? You can't quit when you want?
You don’t get severance when you quit.
Severance is usually worse if you wait to get fired rather than taking a voluntary exit.
If you aren’t happy at a job, taking an offered exit is often a good decision.
Get a payout for volunteering to quit. People are fired if not enough volunteer
It's probably implied that if not enough people take this offer - people will be fired.
I've been through tech layoffs. Random people are axed and people who thought about leaving anyways stay. This is a much better solution where those who considered leaving anyways can take them up on the offer.
Have you considered voluntary redundancy?
No.
Have you considered involuntary redundancy?
Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel hardware and Android software were merged into one division, and Google today announced a “voluntary exit program” for employees working in the Platforms & Devices group.
At least there's some plausible reasoning for this, instead of blanket headcount reduction to pad profits. Reasoning doesn't change much of course.
It's still just an excuse to pad profits.
The whole market's about to roll into recession. All the companies are trying to get ahead of their firing before the market goes tits up.
Probably.
I hope they join Mozilla 😏
I don't work for Google. I'm but a voluntary product customer. But if they could offer me a way to get away from them, I'd gladly take it.
Right now I'm moving my personal domain over to cloudflare and email to mxroute. Considering setting up some calendar and similar groupware stuff on kubernetes on Oracles free tier as well.
That's the other rub...if I want to cloud host anything, I get to choose between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Alibaba. Wonderful selection we have there.
(I recognize there are smaller players out there like linode and ovh and a trillion VPS providers...only reason I'm considering Oracle is because they give so much free "forever". And kubernetes is fun for me in like a jigsaw kind of way. Not like the puzzle but the guy from Saw)
Sorry for being harsh, but if you use the "free "forever"" offering of any company as alternative to what google offers you learnt nothing from using google.
I think free cloud compute offerings are a bit different. Different motivations. They aren't trying to harvest your data, they are trying to advertise their product.
They want sysadmins to play around and convince their bosses to buy in on Oracle. They want web devs to build demos and get their clients to host there. They want companies to get their feet wet risk free, before spending tens of thousands of dollars migrating existing workloads to them.
Harvesting data from those customers would be a scandal, and have massive negative repercussions.
And honestly, even with the announcement of Stargate and Oracle being a partner, I'd probably rather give them a couple dollars a month to run a couple small buckets than to give it to Amazon.
I can't self host at home because no incoming IP. Unless I want to switch to my only other option, Xfinity. Which I don't.
And...let's face it...if the government wants to find me, they are going to find me. It doesn't matter if my Bluesky PDS or my kids Minecraft server is hosted at home or up there. It's tied to me either way.
I replaced most cloud services with my own Nextcloud instance. I like Nextcloud.
It rules!
Forever is only forever until profit margins get tight or they have a bad enough fiscal quarter...
I've seen enough traps set by Oracle to be extra afraid of any wooden horses they are offering up.
Oracle has been coasting on legacy crap for a long time. They're just like IBM.
I have two free forever servers, they are alright, but they route weird. When I'm in China they go from Beijing to Japan and then to Korea causing packet loss and delays
Did they title the offer "Fork in the Road," too?
Ah yes, we need more laid off tech workers in the sector. We nearly don't have enough!
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993
50 States, 50 Protests, 1day
Feb 5 @ your downtown.
Is that where they put a loaded gun on the table and then turn around?
Have they done layoffs yet?
