'Long-tenured', i.e., older and better-compensated. Silicon Valley worships youth. So this layoff trend is a convenient way for FAANG-type companies to get rid of people they view as 'too old', keeping the younger, hungrier employees who are willing to work for less.
they don't really provide any details to back up that claim, but I will say there's nothing about tenure that compels one to be a good employee. Let's hope for the sake of justice they managed to weed out those who have transitioned to the rest n vest lifestyle.
There's going to be a lot of surplus elites shaking their heads at low 6 figure offers from non-FAANGs. I'm guessing we'll see a ex-google/ex-Facebook multi-millionaire tech lead influencer boom on YouTube and Tiktok.
It means that the person making the comment is a bigot and has bought into the “coastal elite” and/or “tech elite” that conservatives use to dehumanize and delegitimize people who aren’t similarly bigoted.
This string of high-tech layoffs this feels like a wage-war to me.
At some point engineers & scientists of various disciplines need to form country-wide unions. Imagine for a moment that CS & software engineers, electrical engineers, MechE's, ChemE, CivE's, etc. formed unions and then maybe collaborated to occasionally act an unified super-union.
Those unions would wield incredible power over national economic policy and the dealings in a lot of company board rooms.
It's hard enough to get factory workers, who it's way more clear are being exploited, to vote for a union. There are professional people whose sole job is to create FUD about unions when there's a campaign on, and it works on people making minimum wage.
I am completely with you morally, but with the amounts we make, I have a very hard time seeing it ever get any traction.
If the workers ever unite in a real way, we could possibly make something happen in that context, but I have a hard time seeing that too. I can more easily see robot slaves getting here first.
I think the film industry with it’s variety of specialist guilds is the model that could be followed by tech people. As opposed to the unions that you get with more traditional job-jobs.
That is not at all what Hollywood guilds are like, though.
As someone who lives in LA, and is very close with people who work in the industry, the unions should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from
The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs.
That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families.
There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year.
The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.
Imagine if software engineers could hop from project to project at different companies working on just things they were interested in?
Part of the guilds’ power is that they have rules and agreements with the other unions that disallow using non-union labor if other union labor is involved. Or if certain rules are broken. Bargaining is much more powerful when the actual product cannot be shipped if the unions strike or don’t work on your project. Software does not really have this restriction.
And as someone who also has many friends across various roles in the Industry (and once tried to break in), there is one not-oft talked about downside: it is rather difficult to get into the guilds, with a lot of unpaid internships and nepotism involved. And even with the great union contracts, hours are long, the work sometimes dirty, and the culture on set often times incredibly toxic.
So yes. The guild model probably the one that is more applicable to SWEs. But also don’t copy the model Hollywood has built too closely.
You're advocating sectoral bargaining. Common in the EU. It's probably The Correct Answer™. Though organizing by craft or industry may also achieve what you want.
The USA has enterprise bargaining. Sectoral bargaining was proposed. But the corporations (plantation class) nerfed it.
The comparative power of Labor, USA vs EU, speaks the merits of sectoral over enterprise bargaining.
"Sectoral collective bargaining is an aim of trade unions or labor unions to reach a collective agreement that covers all workers in a sector of the economy. It contrasts to enterprise bargaining where agreements cover individual firms. Generally countries with sectoral collective bargaining have higher rates of union organisation and better coverage of collective agreements than countries with enterprise bargaining."
Yep. And most employees who make more than most don't see a problem and don't see the need to organize. If corporate workers had any sense, they'd quit megacorps and form tech worker-owned co-ops to capture the value that they generated rather than let is slip by.
> form tech worker-owned co-ops to capture the value that they generated rather than let is slip by.
Lawyers have it good. They’re the smart ones. They made it illegal to own a law firm unless you’re a lawyer. Because “shareholders vs clients would be a conflict of interest”. No more so than other industries!
Bridge designer or aerospace engineers vs shareholders seems an even greater conflict of interest than lawyers. Engineers should create the same arrangements for their own work. Instead of trying to be a “staff” engineer at a big tech company you’d try to be a partner at a tech firm…
You know, software engineers at FAANG earn enough money after a few years that 10 of them could seed a nice capital base for a startup. Yet they don't do that en masse, preferring instead to take (and risk!) investor's money instead of their own. All the while pulling a regular salary regardless of the company's financial health.
It might be that outside of Marx's text that were already dubious in the 1800s people know that "surplus value" is a BS one-dimensional concept that totally disregards time-value, risk appetite and a preferrence for stable income vs moon-shots.
I don't think it was easy in the 1800s, I think it was easier. Now people are very materialistic, and in debt. Most of us need cars to live. We'd have to give up more now, to strike and unionize, than we did in the 1800s I think.
Aren't unions, once they're formed, just participants in the free market who wield market influence? The other participants in the market will just have to compete with the unions for better conditions to get the labor they need.
Why do you need to unionize if you actually can do some job and there is a well defined social welfare? So if you can not do a job you shouldn’t be hired at all. If you can do a job but get laid off because of economic conditions we should push for a better social welfare system.
BTW, Layoff is the natural consequence of over hire, but did you feel angry when companies are over hiring? Probably not. It means employees are just as blind as employers.
No thanks I have zero interest in paying union dues for the bloated salaries of their cancerous "leaders". The idea of a union is far nobler than it's execution because at the end of the day it is run by people and people are greedy. Consider unions for doctors that lobby to keep residency slots low each year and consequently their own salaries high.
I am more than happy to continue negotiating on my own as I always have. I don't trust anyone to do that on my behalf.
They already are, and a union could actually prevent it.
A union could say something like "if you want any union workers, you can't have more than X% of open jobs be to non-union workers (or non-US workers)". This is pretty standard fare, and I doubt most (US) companies would forgo US software engineers entirely.
Look at yelp, their official hiring policy is almost "anywhere but the bay". (its technically more nuanced, and closer to "distributed across major global metros", but basically the implication is lower cost workers outside of SF.
I don’t understand the motivation for yelp to express the policy that way. Just say “here’s the job, here’s the required skills, here’s the pay offered…”
If that pay attracts someone from the Bay Area, what’s the problem at all? If it doesn’t, what’s the problem vs the current policy?
Yelp is a Bay Area company that used to be made up of Bay Area employees paying Bay Area rates. Then they started moving overseas to lower the cost of hires.
If you’re an American software engineer, inside or outside the Bay Area, that’s a worrying trend.
Professional licensing is messy in a different way. First, it’d be harder to retroactively license people. Second is the there is significant variety is specialty (ML, kernel research, front end) so it’d be harder to create a standard for licensure.
A license creates scarcity, and deputizes a few people as “licensed” which grants them some special privileges. But not quality of life privileges, work privileges. My mother is a licensed engineer in another discipline. She has to “stamp” or approve anything before it can be built. A lot of her job is resisting management requests for her to stamp everyone else’s work (cheaper unlicensed engineers). She says the extra job security is more than ruined with extra stress and fighting. If she says someone else’s work is inadequate… it’s a problem for everyone including her to fix. So… we could require that licensed software engineers approve all code reviews that go to production…? But not do anything to mandate quality of life improvements. You couldn’t even prevent outsourcing because you can have one licensed American whose sole job is approving the overseas code reviews. They may not even be team specific. Sounds terrible to me.
The benefit of a union is negotiation. A Union could say “no unpaid oncall”, and “you have to hire x% union workers”. With a license…? How would you enact those protections? How would you slow layoffs, or ensure jobs don’t get outsourced? One thing people always forget: unions don’t have to dictate pay.
There are examples of unions today. Google had a union. It wasn’t very popular because no one thought they needed it, but it was there. Most government jobs in the US have a union. Hollywood actors have a union, and those actors get paid very well. The union uses the actors as bargaining power - if you want the famous actor, you need the union cameraman and sound guy. It prevents a lot of the behind-the-scenes work from being outsourced.
Union camera, sound, lighting, makeup, costume, directors, editors, screenwriters. Literally almost impossible to make a film outside of union rules in LA.
It works for film due to some historical circumstances but don’t known if it will work for software
Outsource to where? Outsourcing isn't exactly new and many large orgs already outsource as many activities/projects/roles as possible. Even with outsourcing there is still a skilled tech labor shortage.
When GM or Ford wants to outsource, they need to pour billions into new plants in Alabama or Mexico or other non-UAW locations.
If google wanted to outsource, they could hire people globally, with very little cost or efficiency loss. All else being equal, a dev in Baton Rouge (or Bogota, or Buenas Aires, or Bangalore) is as productive as one in San Jose. And it doesn't cost anything extra to bring one on.
When I read Google lays off 6% of workforce I thought they just fired the lowest bucket in the most recent performance review. Maybe they fired also those who submitted it after a deadline? On the other hand, quite a lot of laid off stories were from new hires, and the performance reviews underwent some changes last year...
> I thought they just fired the lowest bucket in the most recent performance review
They did not.
Should they have? Maybe.
They for sure impacted some groups more than others. I was in Nest (Devices+Services), and I hear we were impacted worse than Search. For example, Fuchsia OS team had heavy cuts. Interestingly, it did impact even AI/Search/Ads, which I didn't expect. Maybe there was a performance component, but it is quite opaque, and there definitely were good/average performers who were impacted. Certainly plenty who weren't in the bottom 6%.
Can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We end up rate-limiting and/or banning accounts that keeping doing that. You've been doing it repeatedly, but fortunately not for very long, so this should be easy to fix.
I'm also aware of low performers who were not fired and high performers (both in terms of prior perf ratings and proposed ratings for this year) who were fired.
Performance was probably used as a sorting mechanism but it wasn't the primary one. If your team was chosen to have somebody fired, then get fucked - somebody is getting fired.
The layoff literally means the the role is eliminated, it can be eliminated because of your performance, or it can be because companies doesn’t need the role anymore even if you are performing well. Not to say we should feel sympathy for these people but Why is this so surprising?
The layoffs are all across the board, from Chrome to Cloud to AI to Fuchsia to their research division, so it's not like there is a specific role they don't need anymore. The employees also woke up to the news the same way everyone else did; they might have even seen the HN article before finding the email in their corporate inbox. It's a confusing situation, as the article describes, and the company seems to be handling it as smoothly as all the projects in its graveyard.
In the grander scheme of things, I am sure companies will use this and the other layoffs as an excuse to stifle raises, lower bonuses, and squeeze more out of the workers who are presumably on a spree of unproductivity scratching their hairy balls at home. The article also touches a bit on this.
There are no answers other than go update your resume and find a new job. Managers find low performers, directors find low performers, vp's find low performers and they all get axed. Your just a name on a list unless someone protects you.
Google and others IMO are just following a trend that in the long run will hurt them in the long term for for future hires. They'll just have to buy companies to acquire talent like IBM has done. Sucks losing any job, but learn from it and find something better.
Google enjoys a cult like status in people from a certain south asian country which idolizes "prestige" and also produces millions of software engineers a year. I don't think they will have any trouble recruiting people.
But out of those millions how many are Google material or can be decent devs by western standards?
From my experience the working culture of India stays in direct opposition to the working culture of the US.
So even the best devs might be often not good enough due to cultural differences unless they’re naturalized or truly exceptional in one way or another (a few out of every 100k?).
Google's "standard" till L4 is just leetcode. Average college students in that country are cramming 1000 leetcode questions. Even if 5% are decent, however you define decent to be, that's 50K engineers.
I agree the cultures are different and I think more Indian people are driven into the field of software who perhaps shouldn't be there based on natural inclinations, but I disagree strongly as to the degree to which this is an issue
When people idolize things, they put that thing on a pedestal, and as soon as that thing slips up, they quickly abandon it. Google's first layoff probably isn't enough to damage its image, but if they don't keep that mystique and aura of prestige, they could find their fanbase drying up.
Right out of the HR playbook, manager fires resources, directors fires managers, vp's fires directors. Everyone let go is pointing fingers at each other. Company loyalty has been a joke for the past two decades, just something you should expect.
Apologies if this is naive, but it seems like Google employees need to understand that its no longer a company that has their interests at heart. The company leadership is making it clear through their actions. Is the expectation that leadership will really provide more clarity on why high performers were laid off? Why? What will the employees do if they don’t, or more likely let consultants come up with nonanswers?
> Google employees need to understand that its no longer a company that has their interests at heart.
Google has spent decades trying to create this image, but you're right.
> Is the expectation that leadership will really provide more clarity on why high performers were laid off?
The company said nothing. If you don't know why someone was impacted, you can't know how to avoid future impact if you survived. Its bad for morale if everyone is looking over their shoulder.
If the company hit low-performers, than its flawed if coworkers perceive a high-performer impacted (which is scary, since you could be the false-positive next).
If its based on team (more important team, less important team), than people in "low priority" teams will want to prep their resume.
> Why?
Morale. If your employees are scared, they may work harder now, but they won't be loyal, and you may have issues long-term. Compare google to amazon.
I know nearby teams that were unaffected that have short-tenure underperformers at multiple seniority levels. I had a solid performer with upward rating trajectory on my team fired.
That is 100% a judgement on the relative importance of my team vs other teams.
I don't know what mechanism was chosen once the teams were chosen, but I'm almost certain that it started with the teams.
I feel like recently promoted -> sudden dismissal would have a case, if a bunch of people in CA hadn’t bought into “right to work” BS that only guarantees the right to causelsss dismissal.
Why are only google employees the ones who are so entitled they are demanding unions.
Every other company laid off tens of thousands and you didn’t hear anything in the comments sections or twitter.
But Google?
Omg my union! Whiniest people on earth. Seriously! Most entitled. It’s all over twitter and hacker news comment sections. Because it’s a concerted effort.
I know this will be downvoted because union activists are promoting this on every social channel but it has to be said: You are not entitled to your 7 figure income.
This is not even a biased post, it’s just facts. Google has the most entitled culture and you see it come out in these moments. They need to CUT HARDER.
My hot take is that my LinkedIn feed is being filled with reposts of “I was affected by the layoff…. {proceeds to humble brag about Ivy League college they attended and other Valley companies they’ve worked for, and express concern about finding another job ASAP despite having months worth of severance}” and it rubs me the wrong way. This is the general trend of ALL layoff posts I’ve seen from ex-Amazon, Google and Microsoft people recently. It’s:
1. I was laid off, but I’m not bitter.
2. My resume is prestigious.
3. Please help me find another role.
So I do believe “entitled” fits.
If I were given a 3-month paid vacation, I would take the damn vacation.
This is fair rebuttal, but consider that MOST SWEs, remote or no, make somewhere between ~$100k and ~$170k, and MOST SWEs do NOT get severance when they lose their job involuntarily. Base salary between FAANG and non-FAANG is not so different, but FAANG gets the RSUs/bonuses that can often "double" one's salary. To rely on RSUs/bonuses to maintain one's lifestyle is.. unwise.
So from the perspective of a SWE who makes "only" $140k and has never been the recipient of severance, nevermind 3 months' worth, I think these people have it really, really good.
Not just Google - tech in general is rife with people who think their poo doesn't stink. Profits (or lack of) have a way of snapping things back into focus!
Yes and no. It seems like employees are paying for the mistakes of the CEOs. Take Google- Pichai hired too many people, so he made some vague threat about underperformers knowing who they are and needing to resign, then announced layoffs.
So lack of profits might be snapping something back into focus, but I think we can safely say Pichai still has a direct line from his ass to his nose and an ego to match.
I saw someone who was laid off after being at Google for 16 years. I saw their resume and they had only been a manager for the last few years and before that they were just Senior. I think if you’re only L5/L6 after 16 years then you’re probably a low performer. This is especially true at a company like Google which was a rocket ship in the last 16 years which means there were a million opportunities to get ahead. Your future value is lower than someone who made L6 after 8 years because that person may be a director in another 8 years.
If everyone is gunning for L6 after 8 years or L6 -> director in 8 more years, then the culture will be much worse. Assuming the long-tenured senior SWE is actually a solid engineer but doesn't want to play politics or manage up as required for L6+, this was a person who made G a very pleasant place to work. I know many L5 like this: smart, helpful, and made excellent colleagues.
That being said, I doubt it was mostly targeting people who were tenured too long without enough promos. My guess is these are people without the full backing of their upper mgmnt chain. Since even directors had no input into this layoff round, you needed your VP's support.
Added: maybe the person above is right since the grad changes are already moving G's culture into a more aggressive mode. G will slowly become like the other big tech companies (G will just pay slightly less since people will still have the outdated perception that the culture is better).
> I think if you’re only L5/L6 after 16 years then you’re probably a low performer.
L5 is supposed to be a “terminal level” so there isn’t an expectation for employees to want to advance further. But perhaps there are some implicit assumptions on max tenure at that level.
I wouldn't infer that the person is a low performer. However, I do think it's fairly likely they were either unknown at the VP level or not viewed as worth fighting to keep by VPs.
Large layoffs are typically discussed and orchestrated only at the highest levels of management, so if you're an IC if you want to be protected you need to be on the radar of your boss's boss's boss's boss (or something like that). And I think you're right that someone who sat at L5/L6 for 15+ years wouldn't be a stand out at that level by any stretch.
