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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

> I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths.

There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision" and it's partly ceremony for the sake of appearances - if you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is using this language, that's a problem with you, not with them.

It's like being indignant when a friend or a colleague replies with "I'm fine, thanks" when they aren't fine, or when they say "I can't complain" when they're in fact capable of complaining - it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.

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It's because of an asymmetry in role. As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up. You face consequences. Highlighting the fact that Sundar is responsible for this is saying two things- yes they were his decisions and it's his job to get them right, but secondly, he's going to face no consequences for getting that decision wrong. Instead, the employees- who clearly aren't responsible are going to face the consequences. So it points to a broken system, for the masses, you take responsibility and you take the consequences, for the elite you take the "responsibility" but the masses will still face the consequences.

Of course he faces consequences for getting that wrong. He's losing the services of 12k (soon to be former) employees and the costs it takes to separate them. Those employees are now job searchers, but they were able to take advantage of months or years of Google's infamously adequate pay and benefits. They shouldn't have any trouble finding jobs with Google on their resume.

I get the impression from your writing (and others in this thread) that you feel Google owes something to it's employees other than adequate compensation and a mutually acceptable working environment. That's not how (US) companies work. The CEO has obligations to the board of directors (to run the company in a way they approve) and to the shareholders (to be profitable). No obligation exists to employ as many people for as long as possible, particularly when to do so would impact the aforementioned actual obligations of CEOs. This is why layoffs happen.

When labor is cheap and business is booming, you hire. When labor expenses increase or business declines, you fire. Sometimes that means layoffs to hit quarterly goals. Sometimes that means your five year strategy has a pandemic and economic downturn happen in year three and you have to downscale. The CEO has to take responsibility for that, as he does for everything the company does, but any apology relating is simply a socially graceful admission he lacks omniscience.

Wall St usually looks at cost reductions favourably, so his share options will likely go up making him many more millions. Those are the consequences for him.

(Edit: Before the obvious replies of "but but Google stock is already down 30%", the whole market is down over the last year.)

This was a point that was brought up after the Meta layoffs. Yes the executives lost a lot of money before the layoffs - but they also benefited the most from the post layoff bounce! And none of them were laid off…

> As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up. You face consequences.

Is this really true? For software devs specifically I don't think it's common for someone to get fired when they ship code with a bug in it. Or when they make a production change which causes an outage, even if that outage costs millions of dollars in losses and an untold amount of reputational damage.

I've seen it happen to engineers who were bad at their jobs and aren't socially savvy. If you make people like you, it's hard to get fired for performance from what I've seen. However, the company I work for is very intense and I don't think is normal in how often people are fired. It's a little scary, but i kinda like it. It's really frustrating working with people who don't know what they're doing.

n = 1, but I've messed up a decent amount and never been fired or even laid off in over 15 years. Never seen anyone else mess up (in an accidental way) and end up getting fired for it, either.

> As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up

I'd hate to work somewhere like this. When you fuck up, you take responsibility, you fix it and you ensure no one can fuck up the same way. You don't just fire people who fuck up, or people won't ever do anything for you.

You can tell the places that do this immediately: every action is surrounded by 10x the effort of paper pushing to ensure that the “right person” is fired when the thing goes wrong (which it will, because such organizations are incapable of institutional learning).

It seems like this model would say that Google should not hire without an ironclad assurance that they will never need to do layoffs. Is that fairer - to never employ people in the first place?

> So it points to a broken system, for the masses, you take responsibility and you take the consequences.

What's should happen, but it won't is that the responsibility for hiring too many people and facing a change of perspective should be to have to keep these people event if it means a decline of profit, as long as they don't face bankruptcy they can take the loss and move on.

That's why there are labor laws and worker unions, so the asymmetry can shift a bit to the employee side.

"Some of you may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"

> it's his job to get them right

But he didn't say he got it wrong.

>To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.

He kinda did.

That's implying that he never intended these at-will employees to have tenure beyond the short term.

But he didn't. Kind of like how you might get an estimate wrong, it doesn't mean you made an error. Operational decision making are best-guess / heuristic by nature - and he never said he made a mistake in anticipating the economic reality that happened.

What is he taking responsibility for then?

The decision. He was responsible for making it.

If it was the correct decision what responsibility is there to take?

If that was the right decision, none. But it might have been the right decision, it also might not.

The best part about people who take every word literally and demand punishment is that no punishment will ever satisfy all of them.

It wouldn’t matter if Sundar took a pay cut (like Tim Cook) because the same people would say he’s still worth hundreds of millions. It wouldn’t matter if he fired himself because there would be some other, equally fallible human being in the same role that he vacated. That person would be capable of making the same mistake Sundar did.

Have these people never worked in a real organisation where people make mistakes? When an engineer causes an incident, we fixed it and then did a review to understand how we can improve the process to prevent such an incident in future. We didn’t point fingers, we didn’t demand punishment.

Here’s the thing - Sundar is still probably the best person to helm Google, despite this mistake. In fact, a person who has had to lay off thousands will definitely think twice before going on a hiring spree in future. Exactly the sort of person you want in charge.

> When an engineer causes an incident, we fixed it and then did a review to understand how we can improve the process to prevent such an incident in future

Yes, sure most of the time its the process's fault. But not always. The big issue is that unlike an incident review where agreed, measurable fixes will be put in place, in business there is no such thing.

Sure, Sundar admits that he made the wrong call. But, why? what information lead to that call, what changes are going to be made to how decisions are made in the future? how can the rest of the company be sure that this is a one time thing, and not a systemic information bias.

I assume there’s been a post-mortem for this incident, considering the cost to the company in terms of morale, pain for former employees, damage to hiring brand etc. They’ve probably learned lessons from this so they don’t repeat them in future.

It’s hard to make the results of the post-mortem public because most of this would be decisions taken by specific people, instead of systems misfiring. They would not want to publicly throw the people under the bus.

> I assume there’s been a post-mortem for this incident

That requires trust. The sysadmin team where I work have a weekly incident review, its vaguely public and although I don't often go, trust is built because results are not private or hidden.

> It’s hard to make the results of the post-mortem public because most of this would be decisions taken by specific people,

Public yes, but wider inside the company, less so (there are some caveats.) but as for throwing people under a bus, that's never the aim for an incident review. Sure if someone clearly acted with malice, then perhaps action might be taken.

The point of incident reviews is to work out what happened, why, and if its likely to happen again. The general rule is that if you allow people to speak honestly in a review, and not punish them after, you get a better result.

> In fact, a person who has had to lay off thousands will definitely think twice before going on a hiring spree in future. Exactly the sort of person you want in charge.

How about someone who doesn't have to lay off thousands to before they figure this out? Someone with imagination and foresight? Maybe they would be more of an exact match.

Yes, I’d love to find the person who has never made a mistake to be the CEO. Undoubtedly you must be speaking from personal experience of being infallible?

Personally, I don't see taking a paycut or leaving a position of power to be "taking a responsibility". The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary. If you just reduce to the baseline, it's not really a punishment. Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.

> The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary.

This is quite funny, since the 'victims' we're talking about are some of the highest paid people in an already highly paying profession.

> Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.

Also, we should not have error handling because we only hire competent developers and therefore our app doesn't crash, ever. This is clearly absurd.

Plus, the economic situation did change. Calling Satya incompetent for making mistakes while steering a trillion dollar company feels a bit like the management equivalent of "I could build StackOverflow in a weekend".

I am not sure you understood the argument I am making. At least I am confused what you're trying to argue.

All I am saying is this: If I am giving you a handsome reward for a job, and it turns out you are doing it badly, then giving you just half the reward is not a punishment. Even giving you no reward is not a punishment (because you got a chance to do a well-rewarded job). Punishment, to mean something, would be losing more than you would get for doing the acceptable job.

Your argument seems to be that punishment only exists on an absolute scale (or relative to the overall population, not relative to the individual). Am I understanding it correctly?

If so, I heavily disagree and hold the opposite opinion: Punishment (and reward for that matter) are heavily individual. E.g., Only playing with a playstation for 30 mins a day might be a punishment for one kid, as they were playing 2~8h a day before, and a reward for another, as they haven't had access to that before. It is relativ to their life situation and independent of general playstation playtime.

But there are cases where punishment is somewhat absolute, mostly for severe infractions like violent crime. Even then, the degree to what a sentence might feel as a punishment might heavily diverge based on the person receiving it. E.g., a homeless person without a job might feel very different about going to prison for 5 years than a highly paid investment manager.

Of course the punishment should be considered on absolute scale, based on typical (or perhaps even lowest status) people in the society, because it is ultimately administered by the society! Otherwise justice would lose any semblance of fairness.

Thank you for confirming I understood your argument correctly.

Maybe we shouldn't have megacorporation CEOs in the first place. Maybe we shouldn't have billionaires.

(And no, before the pedants come in, the absolute amount isn't what matters, the absurd level of inequality is.)

The point being made is that there are no negative consequences to being responsible, so it's an empty statement. It doesn't even mean anything. They're making the decision because they're being rewarded for it by maintaining a certain level of profitability in the financial reporting game.

>The point being made is that there are no negative consequences to being responsible

What "negative consequences" would you like to see? You want to see executives fired over something like this? How do you think that would affect future hiring practices?

Personally, I would like to see C-Level executives financially responsible for their decisions. Instead of firing a percentage of his staff, he should be sent a bill. With great reward should come great risk; at least thats how it works for the rest of us.

A temporary C-level/VP/director/manager compensation cut (say, a couple quarters to a year) whenever "large" layoffs are executed seems fair.

Sure, let 5-10% of the company go, but it should echo financially up the chain as well.

In the sense that those people can't afford to do that thing that they'd been planning on doing, and might have to budget a bit harder.

Seems minimally fair when others just lost their jobs.

C-level annual comp dropped 30% due to stock price decline.

That's "lost" money in the sense of compared-to-being-paid-in-gold.

One could also say that dollar-based annual comp dropped 7% in 2022 due to inflation.

And out of the three of those, stock has the best prospects for future appreciation, if one can afford to hold, which I imagine most C-levels can.

> at least thats how it works for the rest of us.

Is that true? If you make your SF salary of >$200k and manage to down production, are you sent a bill for lost revenue?

I don't think so. In fact, since CEOs are (usually) mostly compensated in stock and their job is to create shareholder value, their income is likely far more related to their performance than for your average engineer.

If you cost the company enough money, you will be let go. It is true that you probably will not be sent a bill (although that can happen depending on the circumstances).

The C-Level executive suite, however, will see no repercussions, even though, in reality they are ultimately responsible for overseeing the hiring, training and compliance processes. Even when there are shareholders and a board of directors to answer to (which isn't always) consequences are rarely seen.

In fact, I don't see how they could ever truly be held responsible for anything that goes wrong with the company, but they sure do win (with bonuses and related comp) when things go well while employees usually do not.

The exec made a calculated gamble, to generate profits and make gay while the sun shined. Why do you think it was a financial misake?

If it turns out that the layoff were a mistake, punishment will come.

So, if people lower in the totem pole mess up, they should never be fired? Because it might impact future hiring practices?

The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it seems to matter how well you actually do your job.

It's so wild seeing people making claims like these on hn, considering people here also get treated similarly. Are you going to get fired from your job for minor mistake? Would you go work for a company that will fire devs over minor issues? Why should CEO be treated differently?

I'm not sure what's wild about it. As far as I've seen, what I said is entirely true.

- If someone very low on the totem pole (ex. factory worker) is late a few times, they're far more likely to be fired than someone higher up.

- If a low/mid level manager at a company screws up a project so bad that a bunch of people under them get layed off, they're far more likely to lose their job then a VP that does the same.

The point isn't that everyone should get laid off for every mistake. The point is that, the higher up you are, the less likely you are to face _any_ consequences at all for any mistakes. And it's also not a certainly; just a probability.

It's wild because it's completely separated from realities of the business. If you fired CEO over any minor mistake (overhiring sucks, but for CEO it is a minor mistake), the company would die much sooner, because people wouldn't want to work there. You as a developer also are quite high on that pole, and you (probably) won't get fired if you bring down prod for a moment due to mistake in migrations, why should CEO be treated differently?

me> The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it seems to matter how well you actually do your job.

you> If you fired CEO over any minor mistake

Do you see the disconnect here? At no point did I call for a CEO to be fired over a minor mistake. Rather, I pointed out that, no matter the size of the mistake, the higher up you are the smaller the repercussions. You are responding with what is a perfect example of a straw man argument.

To be clear; no, I don't think a CEO that makes a small mistake should be fired. But I also don't think that a CEO that causes the downfall of a major company should walk away and into the arms of the next company, doing the same job, for just as much (or more) money. And, in between those two, there's a large area where repercussions are currently few and far between.

> What "negative consequences" would you like to see?

None. But if taking responsibility for someone else's injury just involves saying that you're taking responsibility, it's nothing but playing with words.

If your grandmother got sick, I don't think you should be punished. But if you take responsibility for your grandmother getting sick, in English people will expect that you're at her house taking care of her until she's well.

Considering that thousands of people just lost their jobs through no fault of their own, one more who did screw up massively doesn't seem like it should change much, right?

It's like a murderer saying:

"I don't regret what I did, I don't think it was wrong, I would do it again, I haven't been caught BUT I take full responsibility for the death of the victim."

No, it's not like that at all, because "murder" presupposes a crime.

> they’re making the decision

This is what being responsible for something means.

Being responsible means two different things:

1. Causing something.

2. Being held accountable for something, and facing its consequences (e.g. compensating for damage)

It's possible that someone can cause something while avoiding its consequences, deferring the responsibility of making up to someone else. This usually happens due to asymmetry of information or power.

That said, we cannot say definitely in this particular instance that Sundar could have foreseen the financial circumstances or economic crisis of any kind, and it's also possible that Sundar might resign or get fired in the future as a consequence. Still, one can argue that the phrase "I'm taking full responsibility of [...]" is a bit overused in general, and used in a rhetorical manner without actually meaning it.

The honest way to phrase this is "I'm the one who caused this."

"Responsibility" is ambiguous as you said, and that's exactly why he chose that word.

Thats what 'Power' means.

You've got your dictionaries mixed up

It’s because guy „taking full responsibility” will still be able to carry on whith his life like nothing happened, having financial security for him and everybody in his family to live off the interest of his bank for generations, and people he just laid off will now need to wonder how many weeks or months will their savings last them before they can find a next gig letting them maintain their living. Or maybe thats impossible and they’ll have to relocate somewhere cheaper, potentially uprooting all their and their partnere and kids life and trying elsewhere?

>It’s because guy „taking full responsibility” will still be able to carry on whith his life like nothing happened

Why is it that some people believe that people reach some level of success and become inhuman, robotic automatons? He had to fire a bunch of people. Have you ever had to fire someone? It sucks. I'm sure he's not happy about it. What else do you expect him to say or do?

>having financial security for him and everybody in his family to live off the interest of his bank for generations

If we're going to play the game of relative wealth, I don't think you're going to find much sympathy for the laid-off Google engineers; these people aren't going to be at the food bank any time soon.

> I'm sure he's not happy about it.

Why is it that some people make up internal states for people that they've never met? He may have fought for months internally in order to lay off 12K people. He may be disappointed to the point of despair that it wasn't 20K, as he may have originally recommended.

Being against making up callousness shouldn't be responded to by making up concern.

> He had to fire a bunch of people. Have you ever had to fire someone? It sucks.

He didn't fire anybody. He reduced a number in a spreadsheet. This is Dunbar's number at work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Happy no, but he didn't fire them because he had to. He fired them because that's what's expected of a CEO, maximizing shareholder value.

You know, he could have fired 11k instead of 12k. I'm sure he sleeps just fine and would have also been okay with 15k.

You don't accidentally become the CEO of a megacorporation by not being an inhuman robotic automaton.

> There's some infantile obsession with this phrase in every layoff thread. "I take full responsibility" is partly a polite way to say that they aren't blaming anyone else for what's happening, it partly means "I'm the one making this decision" and it's partly ceremony for the sake of appearances

Yes, we know, on the left we have a word for doing that, it's called "lying."

> if you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is using this language, that's a problem with you, not with them.

The point of the comment is that we _should_ make it a _them_ problem.

> It's like being indignant when a friend or a colleague replies with "I'm fine, thanks" when they aren't fine, or when they say "I can't complain" when they're in fact capable of complaining - it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.

Yeah, sorry, but if someone does white lies and can't communicate, they ain't a friend.

> perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.

I think that depends on how you view the situation. If you see it as twelve thousand people have just had their personal and financial circumstances very significantly disrupted, then this choice of language is very much not normal. I suspect that most normal people would be of the view that taking personal responsibility for such a damaging act would normally be accompanied by actually demonstrating some personal contrition, or accepting a sanction of some kind. I don't think that this pov is infantile or indignant.

If you see it as an exercise in cost reduction then I guess the way it is expressed is pretty normal - but only because abstracting-out the human consequences of such business decisions has been intentionally normalised by corporations.

I suspect what Pichai is really saying here is that he accepts responsibility for the hiring decision because he is taking credit for the firing decision. It's as simple as that. For him, at least.

Also to add to your point, this "I" is very specific as opposed to "we leadership", it is out there in public. Board and/or shareholder can use this to cut Sundar's salary/bonus or whatever that is personal to him. Theoretically, this statement can also be used to fire or demote him, or sue him and not Google.

All hypothetical I know, but he easily could have used some other non-committal words.

"If someone lies, it's your problem, not theirs."

What sort of argument is that?!

They are not "taking responsibility" to the slightest degree. It's an empty, enraging statement like, "Thoughts and prayers."

> are not "taking responsibility" to the slightest degree

They’re not atoning to the internet’s satisfaction. But they are taking responsibility by saying as much.

The infantilism charge is accurate. Taking responsibility doesn’t require symbolic atonement like standing in a corner. Recognition is sufficient. If they deleted that line, would anyone be satisfied?

What does responsibility mean without consequences? The consequences here are all for people who bear none of the responsibility.

The problem is, you do not like their actions. And that's perfectly fine!

However, no matter what they say here, what platitudes, what attempts to comfort(or lack!), you will still find fault with the words.

Stop complaining about the words, and people will stop arguing with you over them. The words are unimportant.

Instead, complain solely about the act, leave the words out of it.

Empty? Yes.

Enraging? That's your personal choice.

> it's perfectly normal language for the situation and it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.

That's imposing US cultural norms on the rest of the world.

Given that we are talking about a US Citizen working as a CEO of US Company...

So all of those 12K people are going to be in US offices? Noone outside of the US is going to get fired?

> it's understandable to anyone who has developed the skill of not taking every word literally.

HN is going to be a tough place for you. A mild, undiagnosed case of autism is not uncommon around here and a non-trivial amount of people seem to mistake that as some superpower for "seeing things how they really are".

> undiagnosed case of autism

Autism is actually...

(/s; couldn't resist; your points are absolutely true)

I'm more inclined to agree with parent for the reasons stated by child.

I would be more impressed if they did something like this: 1. internally decide we need to trim the fat 2. Announce the problem and what they need to target, and give the employees a deadline to hit that target 3. Encourage employees to look for new jobs on the job 4. or encourage people to take early retirement 4. or take the plunge on starting their own startup, 5. or let them switch to part time even. I'm sure many of these people are married and switch to their spouses insurance.

They all have Google on their resume, it's not going to take long. These companies are the top of the food chain, they could at least act like it.

This turns it back into every other business problem we solve day in and day out. The big dogs at the top are the deciders, and the ones at the bottom are the do'ers.

No, it's more like a soft version of the Monty Python line:

"Some of you will die ... but that's a sacrifice I am prepared to make!"

Saying you "take responsibility" is hollow if you don't suffer at all for your alleged failure.

> the Monty Python line: "Some of you will die ... but that's a sacrifice I am prepared to make!"

That’s from Shrek

I would like to see him take responsibility for the Google Pay fiasco.

Here you have a perfectly good payments system, but between some combination of FOMO and reverse imperialism (writers like E.F. Schumacher have talked about inappropriate developed world technologies failing in the developing world, here is an example of the opposite) they wrecked it for themselves and their users.

I'd like to see some responsibility taken for this.

Saying "I'm fine" when you aren't doesn't usually involve abruptly robbing thousands of people of their livelihoods.

You're right, what they should say is, "Mea culpa! You just lost your house, your family will have to uproot its life, your credit rating is about to be ruined and we booted your ass out in the worst tech job market in a decade.

The good news is I can still afford two buy a new private G40 this year! Wahoo!"

> You just lost your house, your family will have to uproot its life, your credit rating is about to be ruined

Except nothing of this happened to me when I was laid off in 2020. And I was not making 500k/y, not even close. I have full sympathy to those who are getting laid off now, but I assume googlers will be fine.

Yes, this is called survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

My point is that a person who earns 500k/y and have Google in their resume will most likely suffer much less than many many others. Too much drama about it honestly.

If anything, it's actually a faulty generalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

What's "infantile" about it?

Thinking words mean things and aren't just tools of manipulation is childish.

> you're outraged that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company is using this language, that's a problem with you, not with them

Not so long ago, if you got raped, it was your problem, not the rapists.

No saying the situations are identical, but the language used is equivalent and so is the logical rigour behind both statemets.

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