-At a former employer, the upper management managed to one-up this by telling those of us still working there that we were the damaged goods; during an all-hands meeting where it was announced that we were to acquire a competitor, our CFO managed to blurt that
'We've learned from past acquisitions, and this time we will ensure that the onboarding experience is a good one. We can not and will not end up with a repeat of our former acquisition, where the bulk of the people we were interested in, left...'
Oh, for the usual reason, I guess. When the acquired company was to be integrated into ours, lots of effort was expended on stating that the new company would try to take the best bits of both companies to make us even better yada yada - after which, any project they'd been working on was promptly killed off, to be replaced by projects we had been working on. HR then promptly proceeded to maim any and all agreements between the old company and the unions, after which pay grades were 'harmonized', which basically meant that all employees of both the aquisitor and the acquisitee (if those are even words...) found themselves taking a pay cut.
The only thing which made me stay on for a couple more years was that we had a couple of customers which were an absolute delight to work with. They are now customers of my current employer and still a delight to work with.
Sorry that was a rhetorical comment, meant to imply that the top performers understood what the current management was like and noped the hell out of there
Thank you. I figured as much, but I will admit if still irks me a bit how what was mostly a good company was run into the ground, so whenever I am given half a chance, I vent. :/
Don't blame Google yet. This is Forbes fabricating a story for clicks, and the Independent parroting it uncritically. It's possible (and IMO likely) that Google will undergo layoffs (but you don't need to be Nostradamus to predict "company will undergo layoffs" during a recession), but both Forbes and the Independent appear to be misrepresenting their speculation as special knowledge.
Yes, this is not a real story. Pure speculation. No real sources.
IMO as a Google employee, I don’t see layoffs happening. The company has started hiring again. My coworkers are flooded with interviews. We’re still having holiday parties and other “fun” spending seems to have returned. I have no inside knowledge, that’s just my own personal observation.
I don't want to be a party pooper but it's unlikely that Google will not undergo some sort of reduction in workforce. I really really hope that I'm wrong but based on the messaging this will happen.
Interesting: two conflicting reports from inside Google (assuming they are really working for Google). Perhaps only some departements are affected from reduction in workforce.
With the exception of companies going under or closing divisions or departments what kind of companies shave off “high performers”? Sure some high performers could erroneously slip trough but the intent is predominantly to lay off poor performers (sometimes high earners or older employees, but not usually)
Layoffs can be horizontal (cut departments or divisions) or vertical (rank and cut the bottom).
In horizontal layoffs, usually a lot of talented people and even turn-key teams are available on the market.
Sometimes companies try to turn horizontal layoffs vertical by offering internal mobility for high performers from the cut teams, but sometimes they don’t.
Publicly stating that layoffs are purely vertical is very bad for the employees who are laid off as they no longer re-apply with the “benefit of doubt” that they may have been caught as collateral damage in horizontal layoffs.
Layoffs are often about retrenching on verticals we think we can turn a profit on. If decreasing your overhead by 5% makes or breaks your company then you don’t have a viable business model.
You can have plenty of people who are very good at a skill you either don’t need or have an oversupply of bus numbers on. At least a third of the people in any group you shut down completely are going to have been good people. More than half if the problem was in management (which is usually is).
You’re dunking on these people and telling the rest of the universe not to hire them. But we already knew Google was shitty so this isn’t exactly news.
Going from default dead to default alive is huge. But a 3% profit margin just keeps you alive until some disaster occurs and then you’re still dead.
Going from 5% to 10% might be leverage in the market, but you were still going to limp along anyway. When I’ve been at startups trying to do things like this, it’s very clear that the investors have in their head some notion of multiplying your profits. Every company I worked for that pulled this ended up cutting to the bone later. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
These days I’m not sure labor is a big enough part of the cost mix for a 10% layoff to actually show up as 5% margin. I pulled that out of my butt and now I’m having second thoughts.
This is Bain Capitals MO actually.
The whole point is to layoff the highest paid people and have the company coast along on previous momentum, making the profit look better so they call sell it off.
Layoffs are because management screwed up. It's blame-shifting.
And let's not act like you can actually truly quantify employee performance generally. It's largely guesswork and politics in the hands of the said management-who-screwed-up doing the layoffs.
One of the wisest people I ever met was in a meeting, after another Fortune 250 bought our Fortune 250 (as a "merger of equals," which ended up in a textbook raid). The question at hand was: "What do we do about all the people who are going to quit and leave?" His response? "I'm more concerned with all the people who quit and stay." This keeps echoing in my mind as I read about these tech layoffs, 25 years later.
When you are the size of Google I’m not sure how to tell managers across the company to assess poor performers and _not_ have it leak to the press. It’s not like this is a company press release.
The NBA has extreme requirements. You can be an incredibly talented athlete and not be in the NBA. If you bring have what it takes you are out.
At Google, or any large company, there are plenty of people who for various reasons just aren’t good performers but don’t get cut. The requirements to stay on there are not “extreme”.
it's deliberate, and necessary to achieve the intended effect. these statements and mass firings discipline developers as a class. it serves as an excuse and monetary whip to inflict desperation and reduce compensation generally across the board.
you can agree or disagree if it's honest or justified, but materially that's whats happening.
What actually happened is that, many months ago, Google announced it would start marking a larger portion of people per performance cycle as low performers. That’s it.
Only recently a bunch of news outlets are trying to spin it as a layoff and running away with their own narrative. It’s quite literally fake news
What is happening is that a lot of people want to hate Google so there’s a lot of demand for “Google bad” articles like this and all the inaccurate ones about RTO, truth be damned
There's legal implications that I don't understand fully. But laying off people you have already defined as poor performers can be a hedge against lawsuits for wrongful termination including the WARN act (and other state laws).
For what it's worth, I wouldn't look negatively at someone who was fired due to alleged poor performance. Poor performance means different things in different context when rated by different people.
I do not think I personally know any googlers so I might be victim of marketing, but unless they are HR dept ( yes, I don't like HR ), from where I sit, even 'low performing' Google dropout is likely a steal for a company.
But now that I thought about a little more, I think I understood one more layer to this. Google is telling the other employers: 'You can pay them less you otherwise would have.'
I have to admit that this entire employer vs employee cycle has left me speechless over and over again ( 'we are in this together', 'commute is good for you', 'we will be even better together', 'RTO now!', 'RTO later since some of you ungrateful bastards are not willing to budge', 'Recession would bring those people in line'.. ). It is absolutely stunning and we are actually expecting our CEO to deliver speech in Dec on the economy as a whole, so I am sure we are all somewhat anxious.
even 'low performing' Google dropout is likely a steal for a company.
I'm not so sure about this. Most companies work in a level of chaos and mess I think most Googlers wouldn't be able to go adapt too very easily.
I find it's very hard to hire people that can work productively through the chaotic and dysfunctional way most companies I work at operate. This is not to say we still don't deliver valuable, even highly profitable things. It's just that we're not often working as a 25 year old mature corporation with decent management would.
I've not worked at Google but from what I've told, it sounds leaving Google for most other companies is like going from first class back to coach and I don't think that is an easy adjustment for many.
If Google is only laying off poor performers, why hire anyone who has recently worked at Google? Guess you better work harder or be shunned from the industry. Google is a very evil company these days.
Still, no reason to give the same priority to Google’s poor performers when you can poach people moving the needle at other companies with salacious offers of higher salary and better benefits.
Because "didn't perform" without any explanation is just defamatory. It could be health, family or work issues. Or surprise, surprise! the evaluation could be wrong and they over-hired post covid boom.
I'm not if you are serious or not, but in case you are: it is extremely difficult to assess someone's performance at work in a fair way, especially in tech. The ways to measure performance like LoC are largely inadequate and say nothing about the quality of one's work. And in some areas like DevOps, good luck assessing someone's performance - you can discover your mistake once that person you've fired is gone.
Usually in large orgs there is multi-layer reviews, and this is a quite efficient indicator;
if the colleagues say that you are not doing your job well
+ the managers say you are not doing your job well
+ the people under you say you are not doing your job well.
+ the customers say you are not doing your job well.
Then why an employee would even stay in a company where literally everybody thinks they are not helpful ?
When you are a relatively large customer/partner of Google, you sometimes interact with genuine impostors, who are not helpful, but you still have to go through them because there is no alternative.
So a bit of clean up in the bad elements is actually good for both bottom and top line of the company.
If everyone is saying you’re not doing your job well then they might have a point. The issue is that’s it’s often just a PM or EM saying it and no one else. Firings are often made based upon how the manager feels and that’s all it takes.
People who ruffle feathers of PMs and EMs are often the best performers but get axed for questioning authority. But are they fired for asking questions? No - they’ll be axed for “performance” when in reality it’s more due to not wanting anyone to undermine their authority/job security.
I’ve worked in SV for a while - it’s extremely political and not based upon meritocracy at all. People who get promoted are most often the biggest boot lickers and average performers.
Most firings I’ve seen are pure bullshit and are only due to someone in an authoritarian position wanting slaves and not engineers.
> if the colleagues say that you are not doing your job well
> + the managers say you are not doing your job well
> + the people under you say you are not doing your job well.
> + the customers say you are not doing your job well.
How often is it actually that 1 employee is exposed to all of these groups simultaneously, and all of them are technically qualified and have visibility and insight to pass the judgment about the parts of performance that were under that employee's control?
My bet is somewhere asymptotically approaching 0.
My follow-up question to this would be - how did this person even pass the interview process to get into a position where there are people under them?
I completely agree, but we are talking about two different things. If my colleagues, customers, people from other departments say I'm not doing my job well, I should be fired - but immediately, without waiting for any global layoffs.
However, yearly performance reviews are a joke. At least in all places I worked at, and in spite of various efforts by the management to rationalize them. And I'm saying this in spite of getting great reviews all the time.
The notion of "poor performers" is a sign of bad management. They bloat the company to where they can no longer get their billion dollar handouts, er, payouts, and then take it out on people who actually care about their jobs and claim they are "poor" at it. While scaring the shit out of everyone else.
I know there are going to be a bunch of bros who think, "Yeah, that's not me, I'm fucking Tony Stark," but in reality, part of their brain will noodle on this gaslighting whether they want it to or not. So it really affects everyone.
It is a sign of toxic rot in a culture when they start branding people this way. But it's Amazon, it's a synonym for toxic.
As a current employee: this is so, so accurate. This whole “article” and the 10 others just like it this week are just a bad rehash of the exact same article posted below, but baselessly (I.e. with no quoted source at all) ratcheting up the stakes from
“Under the new system, managers have been asked to categorize 6% of employees, or roughly 10,000 people, as low performers… In the previous performance review system, managers were expected to put 2% of employees in that [low performing] bucket.”
To “google is laying off 10k people lol trust us”. The first quote isn’t even correct! They added a new “moderate” bucket that covers the 2nd-6th percentiles, which I think is obviously different from expanding the very worst rating to be 3x bigger.
Unfortunately my take is probably not the whole story. There’s likely some grain of truth to this reporting in terms of a reduction in force being planned, but nobody is sure what form or strategy will be employed.
It’s been eye opening to see Google, FAANG, et al to gradually be transformed from the “rebel” to basically the core of corporate America - with the corresponding structures and incentives they once said to have despised.
Early on, they set out to keep the “startup” culture internally - to drive ongoing innovation. But it turns out that this requires a tremendous amount of both trust and capital to waste to do at scale. The skills to survive and progress at a large organization don’t resemble running a new, daring business.
> Early on, they set out to keep the “startup” culture internally - to drive ongoing innovation
There are a lot of companies outside the US that keep their original culture way into their maturity at global scale. Hetzner, for example - started as an upstart hosting provider that prioritized engineering. It became a global entity with DCs in Europe and the US, possibly the biggest datacenter operator and cloud provider in Europe. Their engineering is still top notch. So much that even as a $50/month paying customer, your technical support related ticket gets attended by an engineer every time. Impressive feat considering how they have ~200,000 companies as their customers - in addition to the individuals that use their services. Especially their network quality was praised a lot when they first came out. Their network is still top quality. Their inital culture as it was known has not changed.
What destroys American companies are the American laws that force the board to thrash the company, the employees and the users for the sake of shareholder profit. If you don't sell your soul to the devil and suck every cent as profit for the shareholders every quarter, the shareholders have a right to sue, depose you and put there someone who will.
There is no way in hell US companies can protect their original culture and keep theier missions intact as long as such rapacious laws enable the worst profiteers in the American society to burn down everything for short term profit.
> If you don't sell your soul to the devil and suck every cent as profit for the shareholders, the shareholders have a right to sue....
That's not actually true, except insofar as anyone can file a lawsuit for basically anything.
Long discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674 but in brief, Dodge v. Ford is a tough case that gets overinterpreted. More recent ones give enormous latitude to the company's management.
> More recent ones give enormous latitude to the company's management.
That's the problem with common law - more recent ones set a different 'precedent'. The next case can set a totally different 'precedent' and you as a ceo can be part of that 'precedent'.
While I think a lot of their culture has definitely changed, which makes sense given their size, the much bigger difference over the last 10 years has actually been the media's take on Big Tech.
Around 2015, there was a very noticeable shift in almost all media from liking tech companies to being super anti tech companies.
The founders are done with each other and long gone. It's just a financial entity maximizing profit. It's amazing to watch the full circle of Google's brilliant birth to slow plateau.
I was told at some point by someone that a layoff can’t be done based on performance, because that would mean it’s a firing instead. An amazon manager told me they were careful to avoid mentioning perf as a factor in their latest layoffs. Is that accurate and if so how does this jive with that at all?
I don't know how it works exactly but there is a meaningful difference between being fired "for cause" vs just being fired in many jurisdictions. For instance, if you're fired for cause then you may not be eligible to collect unemployment insurance. But as I understand it (and IANAL) this would apply only to things like gross misconduct (eg stealing from the company, assaulting colleagues, showing up to work drunk, etc) and poor performance wouldn't really count as being fired for cause.
In the US though employment is "at will" meaning you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. There are various exceptions to this but the burden of proof is generally on the employee to show that they were wrongfully terminated (eg if they were fired because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, etc).
> [...] but the burden of proof is generally on the employee to show that they were wrongfully terminated [...]
This is same for Switzerland and probably Europe. In Switzerland you have three month's notice for resigning and for being laid off. You can be fired for cause without notice, but this applies only if the cause is severe enough that a continuation of the employment shouldn't be asked of the company or the employee any more. This has consequences for unemployment insurance. Usually the ex-employee needs to wait 4 weeks for unemployment benefits. It's the same if the employee resigned.
What's worse than being laid off from Google? Laid off from Google while being publicly labeled a "poor performer", in this job-hunting environment.
I'd prefer more ambiguity about why people were separated, such as varying reductions by team, offers to take a sweet separation package, etc.
One silver lining about the Twitter massacre is that it appears so crazed that it's easy to imagine many of the people most valued by Twitter either getting the axe or fleeing. So less stigma hurting people as they job search.
Why would Google hire "poor performers" in the first place?
Google, in part, built credibility with its talent because it's hiring process selected for exceptional talent and Googlers levereaged this into basically a passport to work anywhere. Google is shooting itself in the foot by framing it this way in the sense that it destroys the illusion that they have better hiring practices has the cost of not attracting the exceptional candidates they once could.
Because it's an excuse to fire people, what else?
Also the company is producing bad products and nothing innovative at all. They just try to copy and fail, look at Stadia and others.
Without count Angular and everything around it.
The biggest problem with these stack rankings is that the variation isn't evenly distributed. Across the entirety of Google engineering half are below average, but they might all be in single division/group/team and you may be destroying extremely productive teams by forcing them to cut bottom performers.
This article and the others like it are baseless speculation based on perf process changes from earlier this year. There’s no new information they are reporting on.
It'll be interesting to see how this (and the Meta layoffs) are reported on, compared to the to weeks of non-stop outrage over the goings on at Twitter
Google has dozens of moonshots which add nothing to the bottom line, to say nothing of the software projects they launch all the time which people look at and go "it'll be dead in 6 weeks" (and they're right). Meta spent 10 billion dollars on Metaverse stuff no one uses. If Meta had done 0 Metaverse things, they would have lost no revenue, but would have 10 billion more dollars.
So those two have areas, probably entire departments, they can trim. By comparison, Twitter was all muscle.
Surely now we'll see a barrage of articles about how those respective CEOs are terrible, how they are associated with left-wing figures (as it is frequently pointed out that Musk is right-wing as a perjorative), sob stories of the laid off parties, journalist inquiries to their advertisers if they intend to halt ads (with the implication that they should), guides a on how to flee those services and providing free advertisement for their competitors, etc.
So now it seems that all big-tech was keeping tens of thousands of poor performers for years. I believe those performers were not really poor, it is probably matter of bad management so people were not able to present their true skill, but in any case - why they kept so many people as it seems they never needed them?
A few months ago I interviewed a candidate who was being recruited internally.
Few days passed and the delivery manager reached me to arrange a meeting with some other people who interviewed the same person.
Apparently their assessment was very different and they didn't want him in their project, so they were curious why mine was generally positive. We went back and forth on this and eventually I asked how long he's been in this organisation.
Two years.
He's now in a mostly solo project and I occasionally review his work. It's fine. I've seen much worse around here.
> Under the new system, managers have reportedly been asked to categorise six per cent of Alphabet’s workforce – corresponding to about 10,000 employees – as poor performers.
I'm sure it's already been said, but I genuinely avoid all new Google products/services like the plague. I don't see how anyone could comfortably invest time into a Google service when they have a graveyard of over 200+ cancelled services.
If I were an employee, I would be incredibly demotivated. Why build anything new at all? Why work hard at all?
Usually hiring managers are a bit compassionate about hiring workers laid off by other companies. But in this case, when an application of someone recently at Google comes up, the first question is going to be if they were fired due to performance reasons. Whatever happened to the do no evil.
Is the current macroeconomics really a good reason to lay people off? It feels to me almost like double speak for a company that just made less money than they expected and blaming it on the economy rather than taking any responsibility.
If your primary business is selling ads and ad spending by companies is down (a macroeconomic factor), that seems a pretty logical connection between the macro and the ad company's response to it.
I seem to recall that entrepreneurial projects employees work on get regularly canned.
Any Google venture that they want to sell as a setvice is very likely not going to be taken up with much enthusiasm in the market because of this. I’d not be blaming employees for this!
Knowing enough about obscure algorithms to pass a tech interview does not automatically make someone productive in a gigantic company. They'd also need to be able to work/communicate effectively in a team (and across teams), write performant and maintainable code, navigate huge legacy code bases, etc.
Go to http://archive.ph, paste the original URL into the input box, and click "save". You'll be redirected to the archived page, and can copy the archive's URL from your browser's address bar.
If the article has been previously saved, this will happen quickly. If not, you'll need to wait in a queue for the article to be archived.
> “so many people are apathetic to the atrocities commited by Google.”
Maybe so many people simply don’t view these as “atrocities”? Your wording suggests a privileged life, and ignorance of the practices of the vast majority of companies in the US, abroad, and throughout history. This is particularly true if Google is your idea of a company that treats its employees poorly, to the point that this almost must be taken as parody.
EDIT: Ah, it seems that spreading pro-Amazon, anti-Google sentiment is your main purpose here on HN. A short sample of recent posts:
> Apple and Amazon are adding real values to the economy and making positive contribution to society. Google and Meta are parasites
> I wonder if this bugs exists on FireOS. It's obvious that bugs like this will happen in a spyware company product like Google.
> I wish everyone would start using Twitch, so that we can have a proper alternative of Google/Youtube.
> Everyone should move to Twitch and make it a proper alternative to Youtube. I trust Amazon way more than an ad company like Google.
> Thank you for posting this. Moreover Google is a spyware company that holds users hostages for money. I wish Twitch can replace Youtube someday.
> I really wish Amazon would take charge of the internet infrastructure. I prefer customer obsessed infrastructure Amazon than spyware and adware companies like Google and Meta.
> This is outrageous. We need to find a way to stop Google. Google invades our privacy. Google holds us hostages for more money.
> I wish people would use Twitch more to make it a more viable Youtube alternative. Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google.
> I wouldn't trust any Google hardware - decomissioned or not. You don't know what kind of spyware they are running on their hardware.
> Exactly. IDK how people can use Google software. You never know when they will quietly inserts some spyware or adware into their so called open source software.
> Amazon is an amazing customer focus company. Google is a spyware company that only wants to make more by invading our privacy. Of course Amazon products will be better than Google.
The driver thing could be regional. I have always lived in a less dense area and the drivers always were happy and helpful. Didn't look at all like what I'd expect from the news.
I dunno if 10k tech employees getting laid off with generous severance packages and unemployment qualifies as an atrocity.
Is your issue with them trying to quantify what a "poor performer" is? Or do you think it is immoral for a business to lay off bad workers? Or do corporations at a certain scale and profitability have a moral imperative to employ people just for job creation reasons?
I am just asking because laying off poor performers sucks and it must be a soul-searching moment for whoever it happens too, but I don't know if a business doing it is inherently evil.
