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Comment by blululu | Hacker News Reader

>>the people getting laid off never should've been hired in the first place

This is a bullshit take. I've seen enough LinkedIn posts from people getting shit-canned after doing excellent work at X company for the past >5 years. They shouldn't have been hired 6 years ago? They shouldn't have been given good performance reviews for the past 6 cycles? Fire Sundar Pichai if you must, but avoid making sweeping generalizations that unfairly disparage a lot of people who did great work.

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Well said. From my LinkedIn feed anecdata the Google layoffs seemed especially capricious. People that had been there 5+ to 10+ years. Seems likely tied to high comp though I saw recent hires as well. AFAIK no managers were consulted either.

In one way that's good vs. some of the CEOs that publicly said "these folks are the fat and we're trimming it" which is especially cruel.

If you hire 30k people that you shouldn't have hired, when you let 30k people go it will probably not be the exact group of 30k that you hired, some will be folks that have been there for a while.

And to anyone complaining I just say: "welcome to the tech industry?". Layoffs are a very normal part of our industry and it happens all the time. And as former Google engineers, I'm sure none of those laid off will have trouble finding work again.

it doesn't happen all the time. for Google, this is the first time they've ever done a large set of layoffs in their 25 year history.

Ehh... Kinda. They used to focus more on cutting orgs/teams. Google was pretty notorious for doing the whole "your teams has been shut down, you have X days to find a new role or you can take this package and leave now."

Sounds like a regression.

Doing excellent work doesn't automatically mean you earn the company any money. It's one of the harsh realities of capitalism that you can do an absolutely shitty job and still earn your company a ton of money (and have job security) and vice versa: Working your ass off without adding anything in terms of revenue - not even by proxy.

The OP didn't disparage them, because they're referring not to the skills of those employees but to the economic case for hiring them. He's disparaging the analytical skills of the people who hired them. Given the difficulty of economic prognostication, I take that with some reserve too.

Surely, it would be better for talented people to work at a thriving business that can bring their qualities to the market. Shifting those people from less to more successful services is the Schumpeterian-creative-destruction upside of layoffs.

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