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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

The (editorialised) title [0] is classic Anchoring [1], me thinks.

Google did not fire folks because they were making losses. At some level, they got rid to appease Wall Street given their shrinking profit margins. I mean, here's a business that brings in revenues of £500M / day (over £150M / day net); an astonishing amount. Anchor against that? Never let the less spectacular get in the way of a click bait, I guess.

[0] The original title was something along the lines of, Sundar earned $226M while laying off thousands

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

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Maybe google didn't fire them because things didn't go well, but still, having to fire people (instead of reallocating them to better-fitting positions or not hiring intge first place) is a management failure for me, in a scale which a CEO resigning(or at least lowering their income/bonuses) would be justified. But maybe this is just a difference in opinion.

What if hiring them in the first place was the mistake? What are your options in that case?

CEO fucked up, get rid of him/her. Why'd you hire so many people if you don't need it? Sounds like C-suite made the wrong call, in that case.

Getting rid of someone because of a fuck up is amateur leadership (or politics to appease the mob). The relevant question is whether or not a decision was appropriate, given the information and parameters at the time of making the decision.

No one is perfect.

> Getting rid of someone because of a fuck up is amateur leadership

So you're saying that all these people who were mistakenly hired by Google and were now let go, shouldn't have been let go?

Not at all. Ending someone's employment because they are predicted to be insufficiently beneficial to the organization is a different topic than terminating someone because they made a decision that turned out to be suboptimal, which may have been unreasonable to be able to forecast.

It is possible that the suboptimal decision of overhearing was made in such a manner such that indicates the decision maker may not be beneficial to the organization, but not necessarily.

The amount of self loathing in display here is astounding. Or I guess, "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome?

A hiring decision is a huge change in an employee's life. People uproot their lives, may have to move away from friends and family. They might need visas.

For a big company CEO, getting fired changes basically nothing material. They still have millions of dollars, they most definitely aren't on a work visa.

A rich, profitable company for sure can afford and should try to salvage every suboptimal hiring decision, at least once.

Except for the CEO, that basically gets all the money and no real risk. A CEO will never starve, will never get kicked out of the country, etc.

If anyone is held to a perfect standard, shouldn’t it be someone making $220 million in a year?

>If anyone is held to a perfect standard

The premise does not make sense to me. See:

>No one is perfect.

Ok. Can we agree that some people are expected to be more perfect than others? Say the janitor versus the brain surgeon? Or the CEO versus the staff software engineer?

Sure, different people can be expected to have different capabilities. But I don not see how that relates to the context of this comment chain.

Specifically being able to predict the future a few years during and after an unprecedented pandemic.

Who’s job is it to predict the future hiring needs at companies? The staff software engineer or the CEO’s and executives? This is a primary role of a CEO and failure to predict this is a failure of their primary role.

But why not then fire both parties was my question?

yes, CEO fucked up, should he now fuck up more by not firing them?

you come home from the grocery store, you bought frozen goods. you are unpacking, and think you're done, so you sit down in your couch to relax, a couple of minutes later you realize you forgot to put the frozen stuff in the freezer, do you just go "oh well i dun fucked up, nothing to be done here, i'd best just admit defeat and let my wife fire me from grocery duty"

Well, it depends, did you blow the budget on meat because of your mistake? If so, yeah I think the grocery budget should be coming out your fun money personally.

and if i didnt blow my budget?

Why doesn't Wall Street want to give rid of Sundar Pichai then as it's obvious he's dropping the ball and have been for the last years

I never understand these comments. Are you suggesting Google is a charity?

If they don't need some employees, should they be forced to keep them?

They should. Not out of charity, but out of labor protection. You take on a worker, you take on a responsibility.

Ok, and what responsibility do workers have? Should they be compelled to stay in jobs they no longer want?

Have you considered what an increase to employment costs might do to broader employment?

The larger the company, the larger the power differential between employer and employee. Power comes with responsibility.

This doesn't answer my question at all. I asked about employees, not companies.

What responsibilities should employees have?

First of all, we are talking about ethical responsibility here, not contractual or legal responsibilities. Generally, one’s responsibilities are related to the possible harm caused or contributed to by one’s actions that one is in control of. Concerning employees quitting their job, for example the tech lead of a small startup whose survival critically depends on their knowledge can be considered to have a bigger responsibility to not quit on short notice and without compelling reasons out of their control than, for example, a dispensable and easily replaceable entry-level dev in a big tech company.

Companies however also have some responsibility to not make themselves too dependent on individual employees, to the extent practical. The responsibility for the harm caused to the company by an employee quitting is therefore shared. This is in contrast to a layoff, where the employee usually shares very little responsibility for the harm caused to them by the layoff, because it’s largely out of their control.

Imposing that on companies by whatever means(legal, social) will lead to less hiring overall to make it low risk. As much as it sucks to get laid off, I am sure a lot of laid off folks who were hired in the last 2 years would be glad that they have Google on their resume. That will set them up for a good career, since Google is known for a rigorous interview process.

So, going through a rigorous interview process is indicative of expected performance on the job? Shouldn’t the work they did for two years matter more than the few hours of interviewing and solving puzzles?

"Shouldn't", "ought to" etc. don't hold in real life regardless of what we want or think as devs.

A good illustration of this: https://old.reddit.com//r/recruitinghell/comments/qhg5jo/thi...

The reality is that having passed an interview at a FAANG company, having any work experience at a FAANG company on your resume opens a lot of doors while looking for a new job, even if it's a few months. Being laid off from a FAANG company is still bad, but if it was part of a broad layoff for cost reasons then it's not bad.

You can argue till you're blue in the face about how this is a bad thing but that does not change reality that those laid off from Google are better off in a job search than people laid off from random companies that no one heard of.

You can argue till your blue in the face that it opens doors and another can just as easily argue that it closes doors for reasons not worth discussing.

My point had nothing to do with either argument as it not interesting to me. My criticism was in the statement regarding the interview process validating the value of an ex FAANG employee over their experience from working at FAANG.

> another can just as easily argue that it closes doors for reasons not worth discussing

Why is that not worth discussing? Because there aren't any or are pretty weak?

Because it expands this discussion into yet another area I never intended to address.

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