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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
Readit News
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.
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.
[0]: https://9to5google.com/2023/02/02/alphabet-q4-2022-earnings/
[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/revenues
[2] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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''.
One of the 10 000:
* https://xkcd.com/1053/
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 C-Suite are out of their minds.
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).
Dead Comment
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.
Company dies, another spawns, cycle continues.
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.
"Who knows about this data?"
"X and Y do, but they're gone. These people know a little bit about it."
C'est la vie.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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 how to log in, where to click to get to the right place and what to fill into fields to enable the button.
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 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.
Hold the wealthiest corps accountable.
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.
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.
Laying off an employee of 16 years in such an undignified fashion is even more distasteful than firing them as such.
semantics.
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.
"We need more staffing on this project." --> OK
"We need more engineers on this project." --> OK
"We need more people on this project." --> OK
"We need more resources on this project." --> Not OK. Go to hell.
No, you are firing people, not "reducing roles."