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Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

But that's not the intended message when they send out these memos.

They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So, sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired."

I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go."

Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is often a rational thing to do.

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Right, because they didn’t know it wouldn’t last hence taking the risk. The message is being written after the fact, and the message isn’t a lie per-se, rather, it’s a human framing of the situation with the subtext of we are a company and a company is not a job factory but a shareholder value factory.

Every message every company ever writes that leans on any amount of humanity is, in your characterisation, a lie… and while, sure, that’s technically true, we all take part in this big theatre production where we expect companies to pretend to have humanity — your problem is with all of us participating in this system pretending a company gives a single solitary fuck about any of us.

These performative messages are just one small part of the performance, writing an “honest” message where they say “you’re all fired and we don’t care” wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be doing a million other pieces of performative humanity.

I think we can give Google executives a little more credit.

They care a bounded amount.

A rough approximation of how much they care would be the rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to employees that Google can afford due to their dominant market position.

Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but they aren't going to matter in the face of another $100,000 in salary.

Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred bucks tho.

I don’t think nice things can be characterised as caring, though. If their decisions were actively harming the company in order to benefit the humanity of their employees, that would be reasonable evidence that they care, but I don’t think we can interpret every nice thing for a person as caring.

For example, providing benefits above and beyond what other companies provide has a clear justification for the business: happier employees means better work from people that are better retained.

A good question would be: if Google stood to benefit from making their employees lives miserable, would they do it? I’d argue, yes, absolutely, and there’s much evidence of it. For example, Google (and many other big tech companies) pay human moderators low wages to do work that causes psychological damage.

Caring about people as people and not employees isn’t demonstrated by giving them nice benefits around the edge, it’s demonstrate by putting their humanity above their employment.

Google does not have evidence that their outrageous salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line outside of the door.

The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make people stay later.

Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.

This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it every time.

The exact lines change depending on local customs and competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin businesses have shittier working environments - there's more competition and less room for executives to care.

> we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today

Did people not also take jobs at google in order to milk the situation for everything they could?

Could those people not have foreseen an economic downturn, which happens at least every 8-10 years the last one being 14 years ago?

What specific lie did google tell, or are you speculating?

Nope, pretty sure Google is not the one being milked here.

The implied lie that this is just an unfortunate and unforeseeable circumstance. The unwillingness to be transparent about it. That's the lie, and it's not speculation if I'm observing their own words.

I think your framing of this as a predictable cycle is deceptive. This isn't about regular crashes. This is about a temporary pandemic-driven situation. Yes, employees hired in the rush could have seen this coming. But it's unfair to assume 100% of them did. I don't think it's unfair to think it would be shockingly foolish for the entire tech leadership class to not have seen it coming.

All I'm saying is: Own it.

I'm not saying it was evil. I would probably have made similar decisions.

But I would have been more transparent about it. I would have hired people on contracts with the explicit understanding that this was surge hiring. That way no one would be surprised when the contracts weren't renewed. That would have been honest.

They did - the employees. The annoying part is the execs pretending like this is all unexpected. They could have skipped that line, just stay quiet. Don't pretend like you didn't know it was coming.

So if I buy a bunch of stock in $RAND because conditions favor their business, and then conditions change and I sell the stock, I’m lying when I say I changed strategy because of changing conditions?

In this oddly specific example: Only if you had every reason to expect things would change, didn't warn anyone, and felt the need to blame the market for your actions. In that case, technically, yes, I would consider that dishonest.

But: To whom did you owe honesty to when buying stock? I'm not sure you owed honesty to anyone there.

When you hire people, you're making decisions that have impacts on their lives and those of their families. In the case of companies like Google, they're impacting entire communities.

So I would say they have a moral (if not legal) obligation to be more transparent with their workers about their intentions. But you, in this stock situation, would not have any moral obligation whatsoever.

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