I was laid off from Google. I keep seeing posts from people who, I have to assume, just figured out how the world works and want to teach us. Guys, seriously, who didn't already know this?
Some companies stay lean, plan for difficult times. Others spend like crazy in good times and cut back in bad. Google always prided itself on being small and scrappy. That changed under Sundar, the current CEO. They started hiring a ton and now they're cutting back. The CEO still hasn't come to terms with the fact that he fucked up. He made comments in leaked meetings like, "Just imagine if we continued to grow and didn't have all of those extra people. Where would we have been?" Dude, you would have been fine. You don't grow a business by sticking more people in it. This is how accountants think about business, not leaders.
The thing is that Alphabet made a $13.62 billion profit in Q4 of last year[0] so these are not "lean times". Their profit was down from $13.91 billion in the previous quarter.
In other words, this is a company that is making at least $50 billion a year in profit yet is pretending to be so poor that layoffs are necessary! Even if Google lost a billion or 2 in a lean year, that's still a drop in the bucket compared to their profits and what an actual leader would do.
Revenue is generally highest in Q4 due to Christmas spending.[1] So comparing 2022 Q4 to 2022 Q3 isn't really fair. If you compare it to 2021 Q4, it's much worse. Operating income declined from $20.6B in 2021 Q4 to $13.6B in 2022 Q4.[2] Disclosure: I work at Google but don't have any insight into company finances.
Dude, it's still 13.91 Billion in income. Unless they are projecting losses I don't see where the need for layoffs is. It's smells like investor greed. I don't think they hired 12000 people in the last year, so justifying layoffs due to a loss of profit is plain and simple greed.
From the same report, Google had 156,500 employees on 2021-12-31 and 190,234 employees on 2022-12-31. That's a growth of 33,734. Amount hired would be even higher than that due to people who left during that period.
I see your point, and acknowledge my oversight, but I still stand by what I wrote. One downward trajectory point in profits should not prompt a mass layoff. People uproot their lives to come work somewhere. It's not just about money, but I guess nobody wants to admit that companies are made up of humans.
Fresh, starry-eyed people enter the workforce every day. As long as new humans keep being born, there is no point at which anyone is ever finished teaching the same lessons over and over again.
Unless you assume you're not the first one to be experiencing a particular situation. On a broader scale that's the reason why you doomed to repeat history.
I think this is a little uncharitable to… everyone actually.
First to the employee laid off: I’m not against layoffs in principle (maybe I’ll change my tune if/when it happens to me) but companies can take a more human-centred approach to things. Publicly shaming them when they don’t is one of the few tools people in this position have left to try and push them to better behaviour.
Second to Sundar: he’s not crying “woe is me,” he’s explaining the company position. I don’t even think he “fucked up” here because these situations are simply difficult to make the right call. Yes, maybe Google would have been “fine” but CEOs aren’t paid to keep things “fine.” They’re paid to put the company in a position to go after opportunities when they crop up. Even these layoffs will factor that goal in. Only time will tell who made the right decisions and who didn’t.
> imagine if we continued to grow and didn't have all of those extra people
This is the problem with FAANG, to a very large extent with all VC-funded companies, and to some extent with capitalism in general. Everyone looks at total dollar value, not at efficiency (loosely revenue per employee) and certainly not at anything hard to measure in dollars (e.g. quality of life). The only way to keep driving that number up is to grow, not to improve. Growth is mandatory, necessary even, and ultimately becomes like that other thing that keeps trying to grow without bound: cancer. Innovation is an uncertain route to growth over the long term. The sure routes are monopolization, regulatory capture, rent seeking (especially in the form that Cory Doctorow has called "enshittification"), and so on. So guess which one CEOs - whose pay is tied to that growth and not to more human-oriented metrics - go for. Every time.
To tell you the truth I think Sundar was not the one who fucked up. It was Larry and Sergey.
That guy doesn't have what it takes to be the CEO of one of the most important tech companies in the world, just like Trump/Biden are probably not the most talented leaders of the most important country either.
Eric Schmidt was great, and Google has lots of other much more talented leaders who understand programming on a deep level.
When we asked Eric Schmidt years ago of why some stupid things are happening (Christmas present of donating Google laptops to US children especially when most of us are from poorer countries), his answer was ,,I'm not the CEO''.
> Companies no longer care about loyalty. And neither should you.
The article's author is absolutely right, and I agree.
But the long term damage this is already doing & has done to the industry is maddening. People — rightfully so — don't stick around long enough. Before you can take a new engineer from "new hire" to "has learned our systems and has a good understanding" to "is productive and can make changes on their own in the system" to — and this is about the point where most people have found greener pastures — "understands the theory of the system and is actively poking holes in it, and is coming up with far better ideas on their own", but they're already gone, and those super long-term insights are gone with them.
So many times — easily multiple times per week if not per day — I am having to answer "ah, that system. Alice would know the answers, be able to guide you, is the resource you need … alas, she left/was laid off." We'll get the job done without her, but it'll take us 5×? 10×? as long.
The way interviews (and hiring) is conducted sense this as well, illustrate it. Giving it the (alibi of) equality prinicipal treating everyone the same with standardised measures and whiteboard tests effectively looking for new people fit a simplistic API, possessing the standard communication style and returning the expected (here simplistic) results allowing a hot swap attitude for human components.
There should be additional proper internal training and discovery of hidden talents and diversity, also retention measures (this automated firing method seems to be the opposite) if they want to avoid stagnation into predetermied style by standardised persons. With the dynamicity of the industry stagnation puts giants in danger of stepped over or trip in a shorter period than a top manager's tenure (earlier stagnating giants could live for decades due to their mass, for the pleasure of top executives).
It is the zombie disease. Companies start off, have people with tons of knowledge, people don't get into higher positions, politics happens, they leave, and now you have someone that's there just for the job and is surviving off of limited knowledge. They leave because they don't own the system, and now the org is inefficient and cumbersome, effect becomes worse with the next hire, etc.
Seeing this happen to my company, management layer is bloating and engineers are dropping away leaving juniors in their place. The result is calendars are becoming more ladened with endless meetings where managers all try to dominate a conversation and come to the end without a single actionable point, well I am wrong there, the action point is to discuss it at the next meeting.
Well the main trouble is that you don't get rewarded for sticking around, being paid essentially the same as a "new hire" as "can poke holes and come with ideas" being very similar in pay scales.
Only way to scale is to hit your knees in every two years to get a proper pay raise. Even if detrimental to your knowledge and work place.
yep, the attitude towards layoffs isn't just dehumanising, it actively discourages company loyalty. It's clear that the company sees employment as a purely financial transaction, and all the complaining about "quiet quitting" will not stop that attitude being reflected back.
> We'll get the job done without her, but it'll take us 5×? 10×? as long
But you accepted a salary that does not pay overtime and the trend is that people will work the overtime to meet the totally made up deadline. C suite doesn't care about Alice and is hoping cutting her loose will make everyone else work harder to keep their jobs. They normally do. Who's out of their mind in this scenario again?
I'm surprised that the government hasn't started cracking down on unpaid overtime. It not only violates workers' rights, but also means less tax revenue. In other countries it's required by law to pay double for any overtime.
If you are paid a salary (you make $X / week), there is no overtime (or unpaid overtime). You get the same amount each week no matter how much or how little you work or how much or how little you accomplish. If you make at least $684 / week and are an exempt employee paid on a salary basis, there is no overtime.
To get to the "you get overtime for working more than 40h/week" people need to switch from being salaried to being hourly (and then they would be paid for all hours worked - note that exempt employees don't get a 1.5x overtime increase).
However, I will note that a lot of people start saying "don't track me", complaints of time sheets, and there's a fair amount of boasting of only working 20h/week.
You want to get to "no unpaid overtime" - the path there is through working hourly rather than salary and only getting paid for 20h if you only work 20h.
> However, Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA provides an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for employees employed as bona fide executive, administrative, professional and outside sales employees. Section 13(a)(1) and Section 13(a)(17) also exempt certain computer employees. To qualify for exemption, employees generally must meet certain tests regarding their job duties and be paid on a salary basis at not less than $684* per week.
> Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), any employee that’s categorized as an exempt employee is ineligible for overtime pay—even when they put in more than 40 hours of work in a week. Because many salaried positions are categorized as exempt, they would fall under the overtime exemption umbrella—and, as such, not be entitled to overtime pay.
Well, frankly, they are gone because the raise they get is less than competition will pay time right from the start at new job.
> So many times — easily multiple times per week if not per day — I am having to answer "ah, that system. Alice would know the answers, be able to guide you, is the resource you need … alas, she left/was laid off." We'll get the job done without her, but it'll take us 5×? 10×? as long.
I think that in particular is problem with knowledge transfer and retainment, sure, it will usually take longer for someone else to pick up but it should be documented enough (and cross-trained if needed) that it isn't x10. After all Alice might just be on long vacation instead of leaving the company and stuff shouldn't stall because one person takes a vacation.
> We'll get the job done without her, but it'll take us 5×? 10×? as long.
This begs further reflection.
Is it because Alice was amazing? Is it because the code is bad? Is it that the other engineers aren’t seasoned enough? Maybe that system is badly implemented.
Also, people leave all the time so you have to be ok with an Alice leaving (or die). You cannot depend on people being around for ever to ensure continuity.
It's like levels of caching. Having information in someone's head is like having it in an L1/L2 cache. Having documentation is like having the information in RAM. And having no documentation and putting things together from scratch is like hitting a hard drive.
That's an amazing similitude, I must note it down. I reckon the last bit could be even "got to fetch it from the network", since you'll likely have to hit Stack overflow..
To stretch out the metaphor, asking a knowledgeable coworker could be "read from RAM", then documentation could be "read from disk"; or vice versa. But I find having someone to bounce questions off of easier than reading docs
I'm leaving a role where I've been the sole supporter for 5 years of a Windows app written by amateurs. Every antipattern you can imagine if in there.
I compare it to a maze that I've traveled many times. I know my way around the maze, but I don't think the team that I'm KTing this too is going to figure it out.
I predict they're going to just freeze the code and leave any existing bugs as is.
Sure, someone can do it. But Alice had spent several months becoming an expert on that particular part of the software. She knew the domain, had good contacts with the micro-service owners, knew the API off by heart and of course she wrote the code. All of that can be learnt again but it will take another few months. Now the feature that would have taken a weak takes seven weeks. Would it have been cost effective to have two engineers becoming experts at the same time in case Alice left? No. Will he carefully written docs she left help? Maybe, but until we have another expert on that feature, every modification will take much longer.
Sometimes places have high turn over because they ask people to move fast while cutting corners because have high turn over and don't know how long people will be there and so they ask people to move fast while cutting corners because they have high turn over...
Generally it's because nothing is documented. All the knowledge about a system is in the previous employee's head.
Now it all has to be pieced together from what code and configuration exists. Nobody documented the shortcuts, the rationale for why it is coded/configured that way, or the quirks or bugs in the system.
Of course none of this can be put into a spreadsheet thus it doesn't exist, as far as management is concerned.
There is no real way to document a large software system even if you wanted to. You would have to update the documentation every day assuming someone is going to read and digest it even if you make it available.
So the answer to GP's point "Also, people leave all the time so you have to be ok with an Alice leaving (or die). You cannot depend on people being around for ever to ensure continuity." would be that if the trend was for people to be rewarded for sticking around longer, even if alice quit there would on average still be a Bob or an Eve with the same level of experience in the team who could hanlde this?
I thought about remarking on documentation, but I wanted to keep the comment brief.
Even where we have documentation, what experience buys you — what Alice in the example has — is that she's going to the documentation to spur her memory, as a quick double check, and just to give her a good guide rail to make sure she hasn't missed anything. But because she knows the area, she can still be quick about it. Someone new to the system are stuck using the docs not for reference, but for tutorial and basic understanding. They're going to need to read every word, and worse, comprehend every word, and that will take far, far more effort than the "I'm a bit foggy on detail D, what did the docs say? Oh right." that Alice would be doing.
But let's accept your "Maybe that the system is badly implentmented" — quite possibly! But it's the experience of having worked with it, learned how it modeled its problem, and learned how its model falls down and then, finally, that insight into "this would be a better way". That takes time and understanding, if you want to build a next system, particularly one that avoids a second-system effect.
Oftentimes, the questions or problems are of the form "we have tool X, and it does job J, but we have this other job, J', and it's … sort of like J? Can tool X do it?" Now tool X has never encountered this particular problem — by definition it cannot be documented — and it might be we need to change tool X. Again, experience makes this take a lot less time. Even for a well designed system, it still requires someone new to it to dig in and figure out first how it ticks before they can even approach such a question.
The reality is, of course, far less rosy, and there are many places where the docs could be better, often a lot better. But we've lost the most qualified person to improve them!
It is because Alice knows the code, so she does not have to spend time figuring it out. It is because Alice knows what was important requirement and what was emergent property, so she knows what she can sacrifice.
It is because Alice knows how to log in, where to click to get to the right place and what to fill into fields to enable the button.
Hmm I don't know if that's an absolute. Really depends on everything in the details.
Business rules are usually what drives complexity, and a spaghetti of interlinked SaaS is unlikely to be better than a spaghetti of code you have full control over, at least if you have a software team.
But the details matter a lot. Some businesses are better staying as just a spreadsheet instead of trying to bring in or build software. Some businesses really do need custom software for their business requirements.
I meant more ancillary things like custom source control, custom testing frameworks, custom database, custom build tool, hand configured servers that only Alice knows how to provision, maybe even a home-grown programming language.
Edit: Since the original article is about Google, I should perhaps clarify that Google is big enough that it can do get away with having all or some of the above. But they are wise to open source most such things, so that they ensure their versions stay competitive rather than becoming a drag.
Yeah that's fair enough, there are a lot of third party and open source toolchains and frameworks to use now. One of the big benefits of using a framework is distributed knowledge and hiring people who already know your stack.
I think the bubble is bursting with big tech employees that think they have tenure once they reach a certain level. Big tech isn't some anomaly where layoffs don't happen. It's just that their growth has been uninterrupted for a decade.
No kidding; in one of the most sought after jobs at one of the most recognized companies and get laid off after 16 years?
The blogging on this like it’s new is crazy. I’m mean the automated email is bad, but hey, that’s the automated brave new world our profession has built.
An automated email is unacceptable in any context there, even if they had only been there for a month. An automated email is a dishonest deflection from executives having to face the people their decision making affects.
I don't know an honest owner that wouldn't pull even their worst worker aside and tell them why they're fired at a minimum. I've seen CNC shops where the owner finds new jobs for the people they had to lay off.
The interesting aspect is the tech folks being laid off right now with automated email, could just as easily have developed the automated tools that automated the email. You have to wonder how many really spent much time outraged to the misfortune of those automated out of jobs by the software they develop (cashiers, accountants, entry clerks..)
I am not saying we should not write software, but don't go crying when the realities of capitalism come for your cushy privileged tech job too.
Tech is interesting in that it’s one profession that’s trying to automate itself out of a job.
I think automated emails for layoffs are par for the course; we don’t complain about tools like AWS that have automated whole swaths of stuff we used to have to do and manage ourselves…
I understand the sentiment in the context of being laid off, but I respectfully disagree.
IDK, maybe what is meant here is that we should not be too much emotionally attached to our employer. Makes sense, although depends on the context (like, not the same if you own a part of the company).
Unless you achieved FIRE (which not many did), work is a part of your life for a big part of it. The sheer amount of time is 7-8 hours per day: that's at least half of your day time. What is left for the "life" then? I do not want to concentrate a lot on the amount of time alone, but it is a good graphic example. What I want to say is that work is a part of our life and our life experiences.
I am not evangelizing the Aristotle's "do what you love and you won't work a single day of your life" either, because I understand it is not always possible, is a bit too rosy, and the work is not always pleasant even if you generally do what you love, and you can be laid off, etc.
What I think is that if possible, we should consciously choose what we do as work, and explain its place in our life to ourselves. I understand this sounds cliché a lot, but I truly believe that setting goals and giving the meaning to things is a powerful tool in our minds.
A more accurate title would have been Google laid off (as opposed to "fired") 12000 employees (as opposed to singular "employee") over email. Current title is misleading.
Terminating one employee of 16 years is a very different story than terminating 12000 employees of unmentioned lengths of employment, even if both are true.
Laying off an employee of 16 years in such an undignified fashion is even more distasteful than firing them as such.
It certainly doesn't feel like that to me in the UK. Being fired is generally because you are incompetent or do something unethical/illegal. A good employer would try hard to work around the former. To my interpretation, being laid off/made redundant implies no fault. That has legal financial consequences like redundancy pay, but also hopefully a good reference and possibly even help to get new work.
I think you misinterpret my comment. Being "laid off" is being fired (in consequence) because of the incompetence of your management. It is ironic that the incompetent jerk who ran the business into the ground does get to keep their job.
Now, you raise another point. Unfortunately in the US, being laid off is not supposed to carry a stigma. But ironically in fact, possibly illegally, it really does. Because companies think "gosh: google has 120,000 people. They laid off 12,000, therefore you are in the lowest 10%". Companies are also often very reluctant to fire for incompetence. So a layoff can serve as a cover for "cleaning house". The consequence is that it is always a question afterward: did this guy get laid off because he was the problem child? Why him/her?
When you have a job the recruiters beat a path to your door. When you are laid off, you are in a cycle of endless interviews and are regarded as damaged goods for the fault of bad management.
A friend of mine got laid off from Stanley: that's not an IT company. Same thing: after 12 years in, an email saying he's been fired, all his accesses have been cut off and he'd only be able to come once more to the office to pack his personal stuff.
Legally they could have asked him to work for x more weeks but they said they don't do that: concerns about fired people not performing well or even trying to sabotage something, steal documents, complain to co-workers, etc.
After 12 years in the EU he got a very nice package: I think one year full salary paid.
That accesses are cut off before or at the same time the email is sent is normal.
I know it feels brutal but that's how big companies roll.
The first line of the (also automated) email I got from Google notifying that I was laid off was
> We have some difficult news to share. We are reducing our workforce and are very sorry to tell you that your role is impacted and we no longer have a job for you at Google.
There's a legal aspect to this under US labor law: if you "eliminate the role" it's different than if you fire the employee. The employee is fine, just their role no longer exists, for <reasons>.
That is a useful point, though I think it means that the wording difference does double duty. There is the legal aspect you mention, and the public relations improvement of papering over the human problems that arise when, "roles are impacted."
As a guy who likes precision in language, it seems to me that the last option seems perfectly acceptable because resources aren’t always human, correct? Maybe it means additional officers, hardware, or cloud?
Going to be absolutely hilarious when the recession that all these cuts are supposed to be in preparation for doesn't happen or is a lot less severe then predicted and suddenly Wall Street starts screaming about how all these firms are understaffed and can't launch new products.
More likely they’d be wondering what all those extra people were doing in the first place when they realise Google is still operating as usual and churning out features and products.
> I was laid off from Google. I keep seeing posts from people who, I have to assume, just figured out how the world works and want to teach us. Guys, seriously, who didn't already know this?
Hard agree on this. Did this employee expect Sergey Brin to call over to his desk with flowers and a hamper of fancy goods, and lament their loss?
A few friends of mine were let go last month in a tech company in Portland, and similar thing, automated email followed by people openly weeping at desks. It's never a pleasant thing I know, but I suspect they bought too much into their company's "culture" declarations of being at one with the universe and loving everyone etc. etc.
Probably the type of people building up something viable for years (popular expression I heard: raise their children), with years of work and commitment, then operate it and improve when necessary - keeping alive in hard times - without overgrowth is not extinct yet. In those companies laying off is a hardship, not as easy as changing a component to a newer one in a machine, quite the opposite. Older the component the harder it is. Almost inevitably these are small or medium places where people know each other's culture (not by adopting it from some pompous policy document or pretentious HR event).
For those having the opportunity working for such groups long the world works differently.
I always cringe and pull people up when they refer to work / teammates as family. We are all a family here at 'wootsie'.
NO!
Family means you will stick by people no matter what. Your Brother is an ass, he stole your PS5 to score some fentanyl, he is still your brother, you're frustrated with him, but he will always be family. That is a very different loyalty to the people you work with. Fuck up and they will drop you like a hot rock.
Tbh, i don't even agree with that view of family. You give people more chances, but chances do run out. Don't let yourself be abused by bad people just because you shared a few years of your life.
I never said you cannot cut them out of your life until they amend their behavior (tough love), but you very rarely likely to completely disown them 'not my brother', especially if they redeem their flaws. Nothing like that will ever play out with a work colleague.
Seems like Google and Intel and many other tech companies are self-destructing, but I don't see Apple in this list at all. My prediction: between government regulation efforts and plain incompetence in the C-suites, along with a complete lack of willingness to apply antitrust law to Apple for some reason, in 5-10 years Apple will become a monopoly in western nations and it'll be completely unavoidable to own an iPhone or use non-Apple computers or operating systems. So while people under Chinese rule will be stuck under the Great Firewall, westerners (and especially Americans) will be stuck inside Apple's Walled Garden.
Lots of leaps and bounds made in what you've written there.
Connecting Google and Intel self destructing leaving a company that isn't on the list of firing its staff becoming successful enough.
News flash, almost every company in the world is mostly Microsoft, using either Windows machines and/or running Windows servers and/or using Microsoft Cloud services.
Yet I don't see you mentioning them as part of this walled garden. When you slap together Active Directory, a Domain Controller, Microsoft Sentinel and a feet of Windows machines, you have yourself a heavily Microsoft reliant company.
I think we will be fine in comparison with what China have implemented.
So it sounds like we'll have a few different realities then:
1. An Apple near-monopoly for mobile devices and personal computers (i.e. laptops) owned by individuals, and probably big inroads into corporate desktops too.
2. A Microsoft monopoly for enterprise crap and most business computing.
3. Linux for internet stuff and rebels. The problem here will be poor hardware availability if you aren't building servers, unless that Asahi Linux project (Linux on Mac M1/M2) works out.
I don't think these realities are completely black and white.
1. While Apple is popular they're not in EVERYONEs hands, Samsung still has a large hold on consumers globally. Not just in the computing space but appliances as well.
2. Microsoft is still the operating system of choice for gamers and many other enthusiasts. I can quite easily build myself an excellent PC using an enormous market of hardware that is highly compatible, if not even more compatible that it has ever been.
3. Linux for a long time as it always has been will be for enthusiasts. Furthermore Linux is used in many corporate environments as it is an extremely reliable operating system.
I don't like this idea of breaking things down into distinct supposed realities from complete conjecture.
I also don't see why there is so much hate for SOME monopolies. If a company continues to make excellent products that people buy, then they inevitable become a monopoly. It is OKAY for a company to hold a large market share. It is NOT OKAY if they use that power to reduce competition.
I have had Macbook's since 2008 because I think they're excellent products. I have switched from Nokia to Windows phones, to Android and back to iPhone and I have stuck with Apple because I've had the best experience. I have built PC's for the last 13 years because I enjoy it and I enjoying gaming.
There's no way to have an Apple monopoly that doesn't reduce competition; we've already seen it with them. Where's the M-series MacBook that you can easily run Linux on? It doesn't exist because Apple doesn't allow it. Where's the iPhone that allows using different app stores? Same thing.
What do Samsung appliances have to do with computing devices? Are you going to mention their shipbuilding division next? Samsung cargo ships have nothing to do with smartphones or other computing devices.
That's the situation right now. But Apple is pulling way ahead of Intel/AMD in laptop CPU technology with their M1 and M2 CPUs. I don't currently see a good future ahead for Intel, and AMD doesn't seem to be doing much except continuing to push the obsolete x86 ISA, while Apple has freed itself of this by moving to their ARM and achieving far better MIPS/watt performance. Maybe we'll get lucky and Samsung will decide to become a real competitor in the CPU space and come up with something much like the M-series, and get Microsoft to make a version of Windows to support it (while Linux of course would have no trouble switching).
Apple is unwilling to participate in scummy OEM schemes like Dell and HP does. Therefore they can't take over everything PC side yet.
Windows OEM's are all about selling useless IT solutions, "support", and lying to get people to buy their products. They shove defectively designed things all the time, yet corps around the U.S. still buy the crap.
> or some reason, in 5-10 years Apple will become a monopoly in western nations and it'll be completely unavoidable to own an iPhone or use non-Apple computers or operating systems
In Europe, Apple is way less common thank you think.
For now... what happens when Google implodes after shooting themselves in the foot too many times? We're not that far from having a choice between Apple and Chinese smartphone makers. We do still have Samsung though, and they can fab their own silicon, so maybe they'll take over the Android ecosystem outside of China.
Keep that in mind if you have qualms about leaving your company for a higher salary (or more meaningful position) elsewhere. You are just a "human resource". Get used to it.
What's the size of the cohorts by years of employment at Google? I'm guessing it's an exponential but maybe a fractional exponential (guessing because it's unlikely to have been linear)
I also expect it has discontinuities at vesting times.
Some employers (Cisco, old HP maybe) fire engineers who can't transition out to senior roles almost as a matter of policy.
Google has employed some of the best people in the world, talented engineers, sales people, massage therapists, I'm sure they will have no trouble getting a job somewhere else. They are top of the food chain. I'm not worried about Google layoffs at all. Just a bump in the road.
By that logic it's also impossible to provide 12.000 with computer, desks and lunch. But it happened because as you scale numbers of engineers you also scale the para-military to sustain them.
So they could have had a one-on-one face-to-face time with each one of them. But they decided to treat them like Cloud resources.
They needed to get it over basically in one day (per site). This is actually standard, and gets into issues of computer security, personal security, and lots of CYA.
They've scaled up to setting up whatever hundreds of new employees every monday. There's no way they're ready for 12,000 HR 1:1s in one day.
If you can hire 12000 employees, then this is not impossible. Not even difficult. And not only was this person literally an employee, but they were an employee for 16 years. I really can't tell if I'm responding to an AI bot.
For half or one percent of outliers, you could give them an earlier heads-up. But for 99+% of the people in a massive layoff, I do think you need to do it in a single day for the practical reason that you want everyone to get certainty as quickly as possible.
Can you imagine the chaos in a company if layoff certainty takes a week or two weeks to achieve? This is not a time for eventual consistency.
If the boss is inconvenienced by treating workers with respect, then so be it.
Workers' interests are often at odds with their boss's interests. If you're just figuring this out then I sympathize with you on that point, but I side with the workers here.
I believe that reducing the uncertainty window from 1-2 weeks to a single day is entirely for the purposes of treating workers with respect. I think it's fundamentally disrespectful to send people to sleep multiple nights and perhaps over a weekend while in a state of grave uncertainty for their near-term economic future. The greater respect is respecting their psychological needs rather than the performative respect of whether the notice was delivered by email or in person.
I'd much rather get fired by email [or "all clear" by email] on the first day layoffs begin than to get fired in person 10 calendar days after layoffs begin. I don't think I'm an outlier here.
The layoffs at these companies have been 12,000 people, 18,000... no, 1:1s just aren't going to happen. Massive layoffs like this require swift execution, not dragged out over the weeks or months it would take to give everyone a personalized sendoff. In fact, the basic premise of these mass layoffs is that they're not personalized. Entire departments and teams are cut, etc.
You may disagree with the very idea of laying off tens of thousands of people at once, but this is still the only reasonable way to execute them.
I’ve oscillated between small companies and the largest companies my whole career. While I have enjoyed both, I’ve definitely been treated better at the large companies compared to startups and family shops.
I’m not sure what you mean a better understanding? If you mean did I contribute a larger percentage of code compared to all existing code yes, I “grokked” more at the small companies, but that didn’t mean I got treated better.
Some companies stay lean, plan for difficult times. Others spend like crazy in good times and cut back in bad. Google always prided itself on being small and scrappy. That changed under Sundar, the current CEO. They started hiring a ton and now they're cutting back. The CEO still hasn't come to terms with the fact that he fucked up. He made comments in leaked meetings like, "Just imagine if we continued to grow and didn't have all of those extra people. Where would we have been?" Dude, you would have been fine. You don't grow a business by sticking more people in it. This is how accountants think about business, not leaders.