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

    • rhymepurple@lemmy.mlEnglish
      22·
      10 months ago

      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?

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • mlen@awful.systemsEnglish
        25·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • The Pantser@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • stealth_cookies@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          I’m not going to bother with speech on it as I don’t really like talking to my devices. How assistant is definitely in consideration for the screen though if I don’t get magic mirror working to my liking.

    • darganon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      The commute to work on smart screens going away is a headscratcher. How complicated could it be?

    • ChapulinColorado@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Seems like mine magically started working one day for calling. Don’t need or want that function though.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    35·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • kameecoding@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      I have read during the last layoffs that those employees got snatched up by small and mid sized companies

  • Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    10 months ago

    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

    • GreyBeard@lemmy.oneEnglish
      10·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • stevecrox@kbin.run
        2·
        10 months ago

        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…).

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Every big company suffers from “not invented here” syndrome. It’s not always just because of arrogance. For example, as an engineer at Google, it can be less hassle to use a first-party library than a third-party one.

          Also your list of examples is pretty bad. Guava is one I remember filling a real need when I worked at a small Java shop, and as I recall there was no widely used alternative to Protobuf when it came out. Gradle isn’t even from Google at all!

  • sorghum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    Anyone got a self hostable smart display and smart speaker setup? If I can build the devices myself, even better.