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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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