Google lays off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams

www.reuters.com /technology/google-lays-off-hundreds-working-assistant-software-other-parts-company-2024-01-11/

Google lays off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams::undefined

22 comments

And they announced this morning some pretty significant feature rollbacks: https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/13971691?visit_id=638405848924404696-2744922006&p=assistant_is_changing&rd=1
- Calls made from speakers and Smart Displays will not show up with a caller ID unless you’re using Duo.
  
  Is it possible to use Duo still? Google knows it discontinued/merged Duo with Google Meet nearly 18 months ago, right?
- I appreciate how Google has replaced a bunch of the hands-free functionality with "just Google it, idiot." Worsening their catalog of services will hopefully encourage people to step away from them entirely.
  
  Accessing or managing your cookbook
  
  I vividly remember the image of a 2010s housewife bent over a counter, hands covered in dough, asking the ever-present Google Assistant for the next step in her recipe.
  
  That's how they sold the Kitchen of the Future to us: Google would speak instructions aloud, rather than us illiterate women having to read the instructions off a handwritten 3x5 card.
  
  RIP
- I just don't get how all of these "Smart" devices continue to get stupider. Why are they removing existing features or making them worse to use?
  
  It's gotten to the point where I'm currently working on a project to roll my own dumb smart display and speakers with a RPi, Magic Mirror, and a DAC/amp hat.
  
  Google has no maintenance culture. Maintenance is simply not rewarded. Instead in order to get rewarded one needs to launch new things to show "impact". At some point the only way to move forward is to deprecate some unmaintained features or the entire product.
  
  Take a look at home assistant to power the speech part of the display. They have done a lot the last year and even have wake words working.
- The commute to work on smart screens going away is a headscratcher. How complicated could it be?
- Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages.
  
  You could never make calls. I remember trying to find my phone by asking Google to call it and it just saying “calling xyz”. Never rang, not while I was using a Google voice number, not on Google Fi, not on T-Mobile/mint.
  
  Also, didn’t see anything about asking the assistant on the living room something and the device in the bedroom answering and vice-versa. Not sure how something so simple could be messed up. We kind of gave up on using it due to that, it isn’t even good enough to Google a question any longer.
  
  Seems like mine magically started working one day for calling. Don't need or want that function though.
- Also most wear os phones do not support Google assistant since the new generation
How cool would it be if all the smart people working at massive tech companies like google actually were working in places where their efforts could improve the world instead of being swallowed up by the dumb dysfunctional politics of a too-big-to-fail company that hoovers up interesting ideas through acquisitions and unceremoniously strangles them.
- I have read during the last layoffs that those employees got snatched up by small and mid sized companies
Jesus fucking Christ stop flooding the goddamn job market with geniuses. I can't even hold down a job because I can't solve shit fast enough, I don't need to fight people better than me for basic ass jobs to feed my family
- I've spent most of my life thinking I wasn't good enough to be a Google engineer, but as I got older, I realized that they aren't smarter, they just had a better resume. I don't doubt that some of them are way smarter than me, but most of them are just smart, or at least domain smart.
  
  they aren’t smarter, they just had a better resume.
  
  I kinda worded it badly, but my main gripe is how difficult it's getting to get jobs, so this is the only part that matters.
  
  The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.
  
  If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc.. there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.
  
  The Google staff just don't think to look outside Google (after if Google hasn't solved it no chance outsiders have) and so wrote something entirely from scratch.
  
  Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great "Its by Google so it must be good!" Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.
  
  The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren't owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc..).
Anyone got a self hostable smart display and smart speaker setup? If I can build the devices myself, even better.
- Look into Home Assistant.

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