Google offering ‘voluntary exit’ for employees working on Pixel, Android

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.

I mean, you're probably right, but between this and regular layoffs? This every day of the week

Neither pixel nor android teams should need reductions

Oh, you work there? Please regale us with your insider knowledge

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.

To be fair, to axe that would be a very Google thing to do.

I have pixel 9 which is my first pixel phone. I agree

it's got 8 years of updates right? You think it'll last until Google comes back into a pro hardware phase?

Sideways rectal pineapples for that chucklefuck.

plz

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!

Why would you rather see that over graphene? Don't know enough about either

Imagine using Ubuntu Touch with Waydroid for Android Compatibility. Would be sick.

Same. They just don't do what I need on my phone. Hopefully that changes, but PinePhone HW kinda sucks (poor battery life and audio quality), and most of the other phones w/ Linux support have some pretty serious caveats.

it is also doing a lot of shit it shouldn't ;)

Isn't android technically linux?

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

Lead dev accepts donations for the project (username "thestinger" on github)

No, they will give me root access to the devices that I own. Or they will cease operations on this planet.

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.

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!

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.

Which banking app? I can try to install and launch it, tho I probably won't ask for your login to test that, haha

They have sandboxed Google services if you need it. But kind of defeats the purpose of Grpahene OS.

I have been on Calyx for a year now. Bank apps in my country totally works with microg.

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.

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:

1. main - no Google Play Services, most apps are from F-Droid
2. work - Google Play Services, and only the apps I need for work
3. "google" - Google Play Services, and only apps I need occasionally (e.g. Google Watch/Wallet, Maps, etc)

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.

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 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.

It rules!

Oracle has been coasting on legacy crap for a long time. They're just like IBM.