Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
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Is it inevitable? Will the allure of short-term profits kill every good company? IANAL but it seems to me it should be possible to have a company "constitution" that prevents it, somehow. "If the profit margin of operations exceeds 10% the CEO has to be replaced" or whatever.
So far I've only seen companies be decent until an idealistic founder leaves or dies, then the MBA's take over and the worst possible way to make the most money takes over pretty quickly.
In tech, I am not aware of any good examples. I feel like Apple is one of the less bad compared to others. They are at least making efforts to be good about privacy, even if their motivation may be less than pure.
IANAL either, but I feel like the closest we had to something like this was the non profit part of OpenAI, which should’ve had the power to fire the CEO. Reality was a bit more messy than that, and profit won over ethics.
I can’t imagine Google shareholders not throwing a fit for not being allowed their cash cow to grow, and eventually finding a way to bypass the constitution.
It's possible. Of course hard to imagine the kind of investor that is going to want to invest in a company like this and SV pretty much runs on VC money.
If given a choice, I'll take 1st percentile salaries at company w/o profit cap constitution over taking a pay cut. It's like, if you make $350k+ a year...just sort of budget that you might one day lose that job.
The vast, vast bulk of the country pays all their expenses, cares for their children, elderly family members, sick relatives and so on with <$100k salary. You can insure yourself against any hardship in unemployment with a top 1% salary.
1. Paper at TREC announcing the search engine cited harmful influence of advertising and promised a search engine "in the academic realm". They never delivered. Sold out. That was before they even went public.
2. "Don't be evil". Given the amount of highly personal data it collects, and the lack of regulation, the company truly needed some sort of ethical code. But they never even tried. Instead they let their senior management engage in harassment, settled every suit brought against them for privacy violations, paid off the competition, and routinely accepted enormous regulatory fines. Pure, unaudulterated greed.
The Google playbook is the furthest thing from "keep the margins less than or equal to 10%". It's the work of SillyCon Valley. It's the same playbook adopted by Facebook to keep Zuckerberg from being ousted. Keep reasonable people from having any ability to change anything.
There is nothing "cool" about it.
At which point they're more interested in maximizing the value of their shares, so they can do other things.
Therefore, they specifically leave their company in charge of profit maximizers.
It just takes a subsequent decade or so for the track record of decisions to finally make that unavoidably obvious to employees and the general public.
They would find a way around that, for example by buying other companies in order to not make a profit.
I used to dream about working there while knowing that I'd have to study up for several months (I have a family, full time job + I do some consulting) and still probably get rejected.
I'm not dreaming about that anymore. Google has jumped the shark.
This is corporate America. it's your cool uncle when you're young and it's the same uncle when you realize as an adult that that's just not how adults should behave.
That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.
Google cannot release any product worldwide. Their knowledge doesn't go too far beyond US market. You can call it Americentrism or just lack of competence of the ones in charge.
The reason they are doing this is probably because the non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones.
It seems that this year Pixel lost.
The various third party android phones have severe drawbacks in their manufacturers tweaked android or inferior hardware.
It is a commodity gadget made at some cheap shop in Asia. So people worked pixel phone have not much to do with its growth or lack of it.
Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.
Maybe resetting the engineering department is the only chance of innovating, when the company is so big and the (maybe bad) culture is so pervasive?
Apple has fired Jony Ive, and nothing bad had happened (quite the contrary).
Google has fired the head of computational photography, and nothing bad had happened.
One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.
Google is a global company. They make money from developing countries, they should have employees in those countries as well. Or else the money flows only back to California.
But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages. 25 years ago, I was told there would be no software developers in America, and yet the number has gone up every year.
Yup, that's a very visible pattern at this point.
The other one is when entire reporting chains are mainland Chinese (or in the process of being converted to via "reorgs" such as this one).
And before anyone calls racism into the discussion, it's fairly easy to objectively check that it is the case in the internal eng. org chart if you work there.
Only one of the trio that effectively run the company are Indian
The pandemic was really a perfect opportunity for these companies to reset the relationship with their employees. Layoffs weren't an issue if everyone was doing layoffs. Making people afraid for their jobs suppresses wages. All of this is just to increase profits.
This is going to backfire. Google, for example, allowed people to work on things. If it didn't work out, you'd go work on something else. Gmail famously came out of this approach. Google even studied this dynamic and determined psychological safety was key to success [1].
The lesson now? If you work on a project that fails, you may get laid off. The success or failure of that project will have almost nothing to do with your individual input yet you will still suffer the consequences. So employees will stop taking risks.
The other way this will backfire is that Big Tech employees are discovering they aren't above the same forces that dominate the existence of every other working person, namely that there is an adversarial relationship between employer and employee and the employer will seek to get the most work possible at the lowest cost.
What this will lead to is labor organization and collective bargaining. It will take awhile. White collar workers, and Americans in particular, generally have zero class consciousness. Collective action in general has been successfully demonized through decades of propaganda and a cult-like following of objectivism. But it will happen.
[1]: https://allwork.space/2022/10/psychological-safety-is-the-ke...
Also, the employees at Google are compensated with stocks, so they see their fortunes rise as their ex colleagues leave the building in layoffs. This makes unionizing all that harder.
A corollary to what everyone said here is: always be thinking about the value of what you're doing to someone else. They always give the big rewards to people who happily take on "relevant to this place ONLY" tasks. You get promoted if you suck up to the middle managers and acquire skills that absolutely no other company values.
So if you pursue skills that are strictly "looking out for ME" you can expect some blowback. Ignore it.
The amount of wealth that big google shareholders hold in the 1T+ tech companies is mind boggling.
Perhaps US should consider raising capital gains tax.
I've thought about this for a long time. If we wanted to actually tax this wealth, we should just make people pay capital gains on marked-to-market positions every 10 years. Now before everyone starts shouting "yea, but the valuations aren't value," you could easily tax them on the lowest reasonable marked-to-market nominal value over the last decade, and you'd still get that tax revenue, just a decade later. It's just a way to have a property tax on a very speculative type of property.
I've been a casual investor my entire life, and I still think it's ridiculous that you can just hold an asset forever and never pay a property tax on it, but some guy scraping together a life for his wife and kid has to pay property taxes on his house every year.
The rules of the game have changed. We were allowed to expense all employee compensation tied to software or R&D in the year in which we paid it. Now we can only expense a small fraction of that because we have to capitalize the expense. That means if you paid and developer $100 to develop a piece of software then sold subscriptions totaling $100 you now have a profit. The old model you have zero dollars in profit the new model says you have something like $80 in profit that you know have to pay taxes on… with what cash?
Which what money?
With these interest rates and Section 174, it's pretty rough out there to start one as compared to ~6 years ago.
Have a family and esp these employees in high CoL cities? Very tough.
Speaking from experience. Been there done that.
"We'll have all this new innovation via new startups now!" is such a feel good sentiment to layoffs but in reality is nowhere close to a solution for the affected employees
The media has been peddling the idea that things are rosy economically but that’s not people are seeing and experiencing. December’s CPI is through the roof. The economy has been soft and with ZIRP gone, things are adjusting accordingly.
We’re now paying the piper —a little.
"I used her, she used me and neither one cared. We were getting our share." - Night Moves / Seger.
In a sense, that's how I view work. I'm there to get a check, they are there to use my labor and make money. As long as we're both happy. It is all good. But... never forget we are using each other.
"Ain't it funny how the night moves
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves"
Ain't it?
I don’t want to make light of anyone losing their job, but this just doesn’t seem meaningful at this scale
Here's where this will backfire first: Google has studied team success and discovered psychological safety is a key component. Laying off people working on Google Assistant tells employees that if their project is canceled, you may be fired. Employees will respond by simply not working on anything that risks being canceled. Previously, employees had trust that they'd simply move to other projects.
The counterargument is that employees should be invested in the success of their project. That's a nonsencial argument. The average IC has zero impact on whether or not an SVP 6 levels above them wakes up one day and decides to cancel their project in favor of [latest hot thing] that day.
In fact, the very people who are responsible for the failure of a project are the least likely to get fired. They're the leaders who should be responsible for this. These VPs and above will simply move on to other projects.
As always, layoffs here are to suppress wages and create fear in remaining employees.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...
If we take things back to basics: supply and demand.
If your biggest cost is developer salaries, then making a huge supply of developers is the best way to suppress those wages.
I have long felt that the push to get women and minorities into coding was driven by this: to get as many people coding as possible so that supply was not constrained and developers could no longer name their price.
I do not believe that Sundar carries Sergei's principles of making people want to work at google for a long time; I think of him more like a businessman (same as Tim Cook, actually). No strong principles, just pushing the company forward.
For them the "company" is the C-Level and the branding and the partners. Not the employed.
I also found [2] that shows "computer and information science" graduates having a higher-than-average unemployment rate than other degrees. In 2018.
My anecdotal experience over the last 15 years as a person on the hiring side of the table is that my organization has received multiple qualified applicants for our open positions, several of who are almost always new CS grads looking for their first job. And my organization is in an area with multiple companies that hire software engineers and we typically pay somewhat below market. That experience makes me question if there is now (or even has been in that 15 years) an actual shortage of candidates for these types of jobs.
[1-pdf] https://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2023/05/2022-Taulbee-Survey-Final.pdf
[2-pdf] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_sbc.pdfI would also argue that it's hard to predict what the market looks like 4 years into the future. That's a reality people should acknowledge when they start a CS degree, etc.
Atheletes winning championships are happy, they sacrificed to get there.
Watching my kids have fun at disney land makes me happy, I sacrifice my time and own interest to make it happen
And the lack of this practice across an entire industry. Margins are getting smaller and smaller and the successful companies will use such practices to inform all sorts of decisions, from building in house vs 3rd party vendor, to hiring, to R&D, etc.
The days of YOLO moonshots are over for our industry. Of course venture capital will continue to exist but perhaps directed to new industries.
So it makes sense in some ways for companies to cut out a percentage of the more expensive staff and reallocate to other teams and hire new people at better rates.
Layoffs are not personal, and the corollary to that is that you should never treat your company as a friend. It's a company trying to maximize value.
Also, layoffs do work. Almost every large, successful company has done them at some stage. They are an expected, and necessary, part of operating a company and responding to changing market conditions.
Yes, it sucks. They are not nice. But it's expected and it's helpful to remember that.
The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on the backs of the employees. These layoffs are often bound to the goal to have a return like Apple and not like General Electric (company examples are educated guesses).
In the end, the employees have a miserable life and products of the company are a shit show.
The long term objective of a company is not to save as much money as possible. It's to spend money toward endeavors that generate more money.
If the layoff is because of an efficiency improvement, that's justified - like a factory replacing labor with newer cheaper robots. However, that's not what the tech layoffs were about. Tech companies are basically saying we want to do less work. It's not an efficiency improvement, it's a downsizing of their business activities, and it's not clear-cut whether that's a good business strategy for companies that are wildly profitable and growing.
This is totally a fault of management and none of them are losing their jobs! People have a good reason to be pissed off.
I would truly like to understand this, but I haven't heard an explanation of why the actions make sense for the organization as a whole.
It makes me worried about investing in GOOG.
https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...
When we say layoffs work, are we considering the way the same companies overhired just a few years ago, harming the rest of the employment market? Do we remember this in later discussions when we treat these companies as prescient hiveminds, in spite of them using overtuned bang-bang control for their hiring? Do we remember it in discussions about workers rights and the things we tie to employment in the naive assumption that only those who deserve it lose their jobs?
I remember a recruiter recommending a person who was laid off to me: "Oh, he was was part of a layoff, it's not like he was fired or something".
Of course it still absolutely sucks to be laid off, but everyone knows there isn't much rhyme or reason to them other than "companies want money".
The person who is laid off has to scramble in order to say, not have to move countries, or pay for their healthcare bills.
It's not personal for the company, but it is personal for each person who was laid off
What I would like to see is senior and executive management (Director+) bonuses cancelled for the year a layoff occurs. If they aren’t willing to cancel bonuses company wide then a layoff is really just stock manipulation. By making sure they bear some of the consequences maybe they will make better choices in the future.
I can either work for the next 30 years 40h a week and create some 'value' for companies like google and have nice holidays, etc. OR i don't.
And yes i can afford a very basic version of not working anymore already or at least no longer playing the game in some companies.
Wasn't there some Gen X/Z meme about quite quitting? Guess what could incluence this? Having an appreciation for your company and your companies management style.
So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers. I think being a member of one signals to an employer you may want to exploit them, rightly or wrongly, at least where I live it's often understood membership will hurt your chances of getting higher up in the organisation.
Amazon's hardware (Alexa) is the market leader I think and even it was hit with layoffs last year wasn't it? Even specifically Alexa which Google's Assistant hardware line tries to compete with.
It's probably extremely rational to step back and conclude that Google sucks at hardware. I do like Google WiFi (it frustrates me but it is fairly set-it-and-forget-it for my parents/non technical friends) and Pixel (because I hate iOS).
What. This was a product that had many prior failed predecessors from other companies.
Yeah, maybe it's a hard interview if you've been out of college for a while, haven't written classical algorithms professionally for years, and don't want to spend weeks or months of free time bashing your head on leetcode. What isn't pressure tested by the Google interview process? Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.
Obviously, Google has some good engineers, but my goodness was the hype around the company offputting.
I thought that Google/etc had at least dialed this back a bit, or maybe just dialed back the "how many gas stations are in the US" type questions, after realizing this wasn't the best predictor of good performance.
What would you do instead? Threads about tech interviews are always the same: we all complain about the process with no real alternative when you want to hire at that scale.
In particular about:
> Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.
How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews?
If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested, even if they'd have to delegate some of their hiring to an external company. The fact that leetcode interviews are still so common indicates that maybe something is missing from alternatives, be it scalability, fairness or even whether they actually provide more signal than leetcode interviews.
“It’s all leetcode BS” makes a great offhand d complaint but was not the actual truth.
I look at them from an EU enterprise perspective. Back 10-15 when the big move into the cloud started Google was ahead of their competition. They had online office, and they still have some excellent services that are sort of unmatched by both Amazon and AWS in terms of managed backends like Firebase, but today they make up almost no enterprise sales. This is largely because they never managed to transition into a world where they could sell their products to enterprise. One part is their data and privacy policies which are an obvious issue the other part is support. One of the most important things Microsoft sells to Enterprise is support, and I don’t mean the stuff you and I get as private persons, I mean how their headquarters will call your CTO with updates when something goes down, how you have direct channels to get things changed like when teams was turned on by default instead of something your IT department controlled, or how you can even visit their Azure server centres and look at “your” server if you’re a big enough customer. This is why AWS sort of “lost” in the EU, because when they first entered the market they had the automated support similar to what Google has now, where you can talk to a useless chatbot and never get anywhere even if you’re paying them millions of dollars. Unlike Google, Amazon quickly adjusted and suddenly they had better support and EU compliance than Microsoft (who still can’t guarantee that only EU citizens ever work on the maintenance of their data centres where your data is stored).
The one place Google was a little different was in Education. They actually seemed to know how to sell that, but even here their advertising roots are now losing them deals. Because now there is a focus on how everything in Google education is shared with Google, and while that data might be valuable to Google it’s losing them all their sales in education, which also means they lose the data…
Unless Google somehow changes course, and becomes both an advertising company, and, a tech company, they are just never going to be relevant outside of advertising again. At least for Enterprise, but even as a private customer, you’re probably thinking twice about their products considering how many of them they shut down.
I think it’s a shame considering a lot of their products are very good and affordable, but is what it is.
But, people generally work there for two reasons:
Pay and benefits top-knotch. I made two times there what I'm making now, post-Google, and I'm still making more 30% than my peers who work in-office for local companies do. (I work remote). Free food and other perks were also amazing.
Exposure to really large systems and scale. A lot of people really get off on building systems that scale as big as some of the Google stuff.
And honestly the internal engineering quality at Google is excellent. But conservative, and bespoke. They build their own everything, which they can do because they have buckets of cash. And what they build is mostly superior, and more consistently engineered. The internal code quality is generally meticulous.
I’m seeing this now through the lens of hiring at a 100 person org, but I’ve done hundreds of interviews as a FAANG employee too. The difference there, I would say, and what GOOG try to do is to shoot for the moon and get hiring nailed at the interview process. This comes at the expense of rejecting nine out of ten candidates because the candidate firehouse is free flowing and plentiful: something I don’t have at my much more normal startup.
The only thing you can do is designing an acceptable level proxy done with high efficiency. Unfortunately we don't really have a good way there to figure out something more efficient than coding interview + system design interview yet. A good interviewer can still extract a surprising amount of valuable signals within 45 mins but not everyone is interested in being a good interviewer.
Combined with high interest rates, that prevent businesses from starting new projects financed through credit. Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work. Probably demand for IT roles in 2024 is going to be lower than previous years and salaries may stagnate or go down.
> Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work.
This is the sort of thing that increases demand for IT. Company had 40 artists and two IT staff, now they can get by with 10 artists but three IT staff, because IT has more work to do supporting the AI stuff.
Can we get a merge? There is a lot of discussion in this other topic.
Apparently not, this has been going on for decades. This is a small culling compared to 2001 and 2008. Google is now a shit company just collecting rents, has been for probably 15 years, and this is indicative of a shit company just collecting rents.
One need not be a pro-union progressive to simply recognize that we would all benefit from considering other alternatives. Hard-nosed libertarian economists who study game theory know it isn't a complete accounting of human interactions. Collaboration and alliances are worth seeking out. It doesn't _have_ to be a race to the bottom where employees all scurry around terrified, meanwhile hoping they claw their way up into management.
You can't know what the market is like until you're looking for work, and as someone who's been in this industry for 15 years and has been applying to roles recently, I know it's really rough out there regardless of what some are saying. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. I'm getting messages from colleagues every week who have been recently laid off and can't find work. Some are now getting desperate.
We did some hiring where I work in Dec. We had over 150 candidates and only extended offers to 9 candidates. Your chance of being hired was literally only 5% IF the recruiter thought your profile was at least good enough to send over for consideration. I'm guessing the actual number that applied was likely 300+. That's absolutely brutal compared to anything I've ever experience. Typically if I applied for a role in the past I might have a 20-25% chance of getting an offer, and during the last 5 years that was probably as high as 40-50%.
People in jobs need to consider themselves extremely lucky right now. In this market a good developer probably only as a 2-3% chance of getting any job they apply for and will likely need to take a decent cut in pay too.
Why would this hit core engineering if the company needs to focus on AI ? I'd imagine these people would be ever more valuable
Corporations hate hiring when going into the unknown time period.
For better or worse, managers don't understand AI, and it is pretty hyped.
There could be hiring freezes just in anticipation of 'some change is coming so we should pause hiring just in case'.
Nice. So one can reasonably expect the Google Home device et all to get even worse at all the basic functionality it used to be quite good at as far as 2017.
Vote with your labor and be willing to change immediately jobs (that is why remote is great). If you did not like what the manager said in a random meeting quit on the spot, find another job online. No more notice courtesies.
It's gonna be great.
Posting beat after beat and carpet bombing Sunnyvale like fucking Curtis LeMay at the same time is offensive to everything about being an American, and a hacker, and really just a human.
https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=GOOG&p=d
Layoffs happen, markets go dry, the world moves on. But stuffing your pockets until it's spilling out while walking around the Bay Area with a Samurai Sword drunk from Fucki Sushi?
I won't help them drag you out of your Tesla and beat them to death with your own iPhone. But let's quit while we're ahead assholes?
Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense.
After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm. Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
You can be somewhere for 10 years. have glowing performance reviews, feel like you're making a difference, think it'll never happen to you, not even be aware the company is in shit, and then... tomorrow you're gone.
Your job is NOT safe.
> Your job is NOT safe.
Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
I think a better way to put it is:
"A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. You must rely on yourself"
This line of thinking still means diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work, keep doing interviews from time to time, spend some cycles thinking about "what would I do if I where to build my own startup", etc. But it will not put you in the "oh my I need to accept whatever they offer me right now" path.
Especially on FAANG companies, it very easy to "get lost in the technical work" and to "offshore your life's direction to the company", so to speak. If you think this might be happening to you, I recommend involving someone else - a coach, a therapist, a friend, a brother or a priest. Whatever works for you. Someone from outside the company. It might be scary and uncomfortable at first, but taking the driver's seat of your life is worth it.
The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter. So, your risk increases with your salary. That's fine because it enables you to mitigate such a scenario by having savings.
I've been part of a big layoff round once. It wasn't personal. That was just my employer rounding up a large group of people to cut some meaningful chunk out of their salary expenses. It wasn't the last round either. The company, Nokia, ultimately got out of the phone and map business (I was in the maps unit). The final head count reduction was in the tens of thousands. A lot of those have since had successful careers and the Nokia implosion spawned quite a few successful companies.
But getting layed off is a bit of a rough ride. You feel bitter, angry, insulted, etc. But on reflection I actually got a fair deal and honestly I needed the wake up call that job security is a big illusion. I was just coasting in my career and a bit too comfortable. The moment was perfect as I was still in my thirties. This stuff gets harder as you get older, less flexible, and more dependent on job security. I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.
Your job never has been safe. Well, not in "big tech firm" territory anyway. I've not gone more than 3 years without seeing some kind of downsizing or shift in strategy or whatever. I swear that companies are like dogs, they roll over and scratch every once in a while, and have layoffs.
Sometimes it's just a distant boom over the horizon ("I hear they're getting killed over in Consumer"), sometimes it's like they line everyone up everyone in your division and boop! every fifth person and it sucks pretty hard.
I won't pontificate on another boring survival strategy, except to observe that I've nearly always switched jobs and technologies after five years anyway. I would be scared for my career if I spent ten years working on one thing.
Sometimes you're saved by smart, sometimes you're saved by lucky, and most of the time you'll be wrong about which one it was. :-)
Companies will cut you in a random layoff at the drop of a hat. I've seen this enough times in my career. It doesn't matter if they promise its the only/last/whatever cutoff, or it was for performance only, or whatever..
People in your network will pick you up and refer you / hire you on at the next gig.
My prior employer just did a wave of deep cuts and the stories I heard out of management were pretty crazy. Directory level people were basically given an hour to cut $X Million off their people budget from their directs and all their skip level staff. They then begin laying them off the same day. This was not a well planned or thought out process. So obviously the people I saw getting laid off were a mix of underperformerss, great-but-expensive, random personal grudges from the director, and unfortunately biased towards a lot of "lifers" who'd been there a long time.
They go in to public companies, they hire MBA's, and they try to improve profitability of company by letting engineers go.
Your money have come a full cycle :)
Our organization has a policy that it hires developers on 3-year contracts, and renews them no more than two times. So when you have reached 9 years in the org; when you have become intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out.
I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.
I've seen a manager at a large company make "once in 10 year cuts", then the next year make similar cuts. This was maybe 5/10 years ago and they still cut like this today - how on earth they are still operating I don't know.
One of the tricks they pulled was to sack a senior role and simply add the entire senior role to a junior role, but keep pay, etc, the same. The sell the idea to the junior employee they told them that it would help with promotions. 5 years of no promotions and insane stress they were out.
They are also legally required to have some positions filled with qualified people, but they have unqualified people working those positions with "on the job training".
The company itself has declared internally it will be bankrupt as early as next year without some form of financial assistance. COVID just about killed them with excessive borrowing to make up for missed revenue, to survive and come back into a poor economy.
I know two people working for this company, one is looking for another job, the other is stuck in the company as they did a deal with University support in return for being retained for some years.
> Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm.
How many people work for a company now that they believe will be around in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time? There's an extremely high chance you will far outlive the company you work for.
> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
Given how things are going, I would suggest tangible assets that can be easily liquefied, even if in a poor economy.
But still your point about the absurd uncertainty of big company roles, even under glowing performance gauntlets as you so aptly say is well taken.
you highlight a paradox between the values the company espouses, and the ones they actually keep. In where it appears that, no loyalty is returned to the employee from the company in which the employee invested their loyalty so heavily.
Indeed, folks may quibble with this characterization, or even strongly disagree, but when cuts are made like this, even when valuable people could afford to be kept, that’s what it really comes down to.
Poor Google. The pain! What have they done to deserve this, oh heavens?
"no longer" -> this might be the time to seriously talk about unionization. Programmers used to have a huge advantage at the bargaining table, going in as an individual. If parent is correct (I tend to agree) these days are over and they're not coming back. In that case, collective bargaining promises better results.
I see a lot more unionization efforts in software lately. Maybe it's just my own confirmation bias but maybe it's just that others are coming to the same conclusions.
I've been an executive and every position along the chain in the lead up to that within my industry. If I took anything away from my time in it (I have since moved back to practical hands on roles) it is that your above statement is sadly, quite accurate.
My time as an executive has left me soured on the industry full stop long term now i've realised its shit all the way up. I just kept thinking i'd get high enough to find people who like me, had morals or beliefs which they may apply to their decision making. But no, morals have no belonging it would appear in the executive class, which to be fair, I should have known about in advance, but my continued promotions were really quite accidental over the years and I am obviously niave.
I expect in the next 2-5 years to see a dynamic flourising of innovative companies started by these unshackled workers.
And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.
Your advice is sound: exchange your expertise for money, invest the money, leave.
Maybe your job(s).
But there are certainly companies out there that actually care about the welfare of their employees. Usually family owned and such.
That's where I choose to work and they have always taken care of my needs and listened to me.
I never really understood why people have such a desire to work for these big companies that don't care about you. I guess it's just different strokes...
I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.
Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.
"Maybe a recession is forthcoming?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.
"Maybe LLMs will reduce programming needs?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.
I can adapt to an increased level of cynicism, even to the point it informs my concrete career decisions.
But this level of bad faith itself must do some damage to the economy, mustn't it? There must be some concrete value that would be generated by increasing good faith between employers and employees, musn't there be?
As you gain experience, you get really good at parsing and identifying axes of flexibility in statements from the power structure. In general, professional managers in a power structure will always distort or mislead with any statements they make to turn any announcement into a steering opportunity. This is just how it is and it's really not about "trust", it's about manipulation.
Manipulation is _everywhere_ in the tech companies. Nothing is more amazing to me than an experience I had early on that woke me up: the day after I attended a meeting about how the company was working on a project that was incredibly unethical (think google's china search engine-level unethical or worse, like Nokia's building anti-dissident features into their 3g networking for Iran), I attended a company all hands where the entire message from every exec, including those that were involved, was about how we were a force for free speech, freedom, etc. I already knew but it was stark.
They also engage in constant attempts to blur things. Google, in particular, spends a lot of money to help muddy the job-vs-personal waters because it gives them power. For their first decade and a half, at least, they ran the whole company like college - extracurricular activities, etc. This wasn't just because the founders had no professional experience prior, it was strategic to make it very hard for people to leave (and when they started leaving for FB, that was to another place that was similar).
So forget about "trust" - start thinking in terms of "what is this person not saying, what is this person trying to imply without putting it in words, what flexibility are they reserving for themselves with their statements" etc.
Second this, because it so hard. You pour yourself into something, and then management changes, direction changes, and suddenly your baby turns into crap. Your creation probably isn't even put out of its misery, it is allowed to live, but gets tortured, and mangled into some unholy abomination.
It can be very upsetting. I still dwell on a big project, get angry, tense, it is very unhealthy, and also difficult to let go.
I was a manager there. I was demoted while my newborn was in the NICU (neonatal ICU) at the beginning of my paternity leave. And my position was eliminated a few weeks after I came back to work. As a condition of getting severance, I can't officially talk about it.
That is the culture of tech companies today.
See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering
- goal of your company / values - need to grow - need to perform and be seen as such - need to belong
so often we can read warnings about not falling for this, but it's so common .. it's wired in us it seems
Very sane advice, but unfortunately not always an option.
The likelihood of making real (not paper) life-changing money in a few years has considerably decreased in 5-10 years.
It will only come back with a good pace of IPOs and investor-positive acquisitions.
This seems like a really negative and self-damaging perspective. I'm the direct manager for 14 people with whom I have hard-won relationships, built on trust and caring over long periods of time. We're not friends or family, but I honestly care about them. I share as much as I can, and try to include my confidence and assessment of what I share. If they follow your advice and unequivocally discount it all, I think they're actually in an even WORSE situation. Regardless, what a sad, scary way to live.
See a recent HN thread: "Signs that it's time to leave a company" _ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38943040
When you see that management people can't be direct, plain-spoken, and authentic with employees, you should realise that there is a cronyarchy... and you are not in the special club.
You achieve the goals that are aligned with the business - business pays you.
I've been a contractor for 10 years and never took a dollar unless the goal is achieved. Ended up getting full-time position as a head of engineering hefty compensation by one of my clients.
My company made some bad decisions and had two rounds of layoffs as a result. I was cut in the first round. My boss is also a friend and confirmed over beer that the highest paid of us were the first to go.
I had negotiated higher pay based on past experience when I joined. So it goes.
That will lead you back to the same place when the fund runs out.
Invest in yourself instead of Google. Especially as a SWE. It's never been easier to start your own company.
Consider that that's only a part of the picture. Revenue minus costs, combined with the growth dynamics and constituent nature of both tell a fuller picture. Top line alone is almost meaningless
You can in SMEs. Avoid VC-owned or public companies. Of course, there are no guarantees.
Doesn't this apply to everyone?
I read once somewhere that the phrase “my job”/“your job” is one of the biggest oxymorons ever termed in America. You do not possess the job. You do not own it. You never did. There never was a time where anyone did. The “job” is owned by the employer. You may be assigned it. It may be unassigned by the employer. Or reassigned by the employer. Or redefined by the employer. “Your job” never was.
On the flip. It’s your life. Own that. We came up with the ideas of continuous integration, apply that to the relationship. Constantly renegotiate how your life overlaps with your employers job.
And yet, like in love, the trick is to love again.
Sure, be wise and have high standards about money. But there are some good entrepreneurs here. I was employee #250, it went IPO, became a millionaire. And now that I’ve created a startup, I try to pay it forward.
Large corporations, of course no.
> This essay examines the arguments that many self-proclaimed libertarians make against unionization. It examines whether unions could be expected to arise in a libertarian utopia; whether we could expect them to arise in both the private and the public sector; what limits, if any, we could expect to be imposed on union organizing and behavior; and specifically, whether rules that make the workplace a union shop – that is, a place where all non-management employees are required to be members of the union and contribute to the cost of collective bargaining, or whether rules similar to those embodied in what are typically called “right-to-work” laws are more likely to prevail and be thought consistent with the demands of libertarianism. Finally, I close by examining the relationship between libertarianism and some popular conceptions of liberty a little more closely and argue that, while many people who think of themselves as libertarians believe that maximizing individual negative liberty is fundamental, this is actually a mistake. Libertarianism actually rejects that concept of liberty in favor, I will argue, of a more republican conception, under which liberty is defined as an absence of domination, and a high degree of unionization and this form of liberty are totally compatible.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/in-the-name-of-libe...
[1] I personally reject "elegance" as the driving first principle when weighing ethical and normative theories. There are higher standards to seek: most importantly, a rejection of dogmatism and the embrace of continual learning. Any calcified definition of "elegance" cannot stand the test of time; what is elegant to one generation may be deeply immoral to the next. To be clear, I don't mean to say that notions of ethics must be left ambiguous. I certainly do not defend ethical "systems" which amount to little more than evergreen debates over weighing contradictory principles. Rather, I mean ethical systems must improve as our intelligence and awareness improve.
I don't get why people get offended by it. we are not living in a "fair world" whatever that means.
You can die tomorrow or live another 50 years, nobody knows why. All of it is just luck.
The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine who to lay off?
If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is simply bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.
jeff+hn AT nimbleprecision DOT com
To your point, I can't make any promises that folks will be able to work at the company forever, but I can say that the ambition is to build a company for the long term and I do think there's a lot of value in having a long tenured engineering team insofar as the context folks build up for the problem set, the code base, and the team can be immense.
I would ask about second careers to get away from SWE.
But to do what? What job is safe now? Safe and pays.
Doctor? That would be a tough second act.
It hasn't been for 20+ years, except there was maybe a 4 year period from 2018 to 2022 where it was safe.
It was boom and bust in the dotcom era, there were tons of layoffs during the financial crisis, microsoft was always known to stack rank, IBM and Oracle do layoffs as an annual company tradition, etc.
I worked for a mega-corp in 2015 and there were constantly layoffs and reorgs and hiring sprees and divisions culled. This is all how it goes.
This was never a safe field. It was an exciting and interesting one.
These companies are companies. Meant to maximize profit.
We've also gotten to the point where we're pursuing Capitalism for Capitalism's sake. The idea of how layoffs affect people doesn't matter. That's for society to figure out.
Oh, and these companies which have high earnings (I avoided the use of "profit" because these companies often shuffle money around to manufacture or negate profitability), a also pay some of the lowest marginal taxes by entities in our society. Sucks, that's not their problem... they're hear to maximize shareholder profit.
Just an ouroboros of capitalistic sociopathy.
They are often late to the game and then they try to do a rip off of the other tech companies services and they fail.
Those that are really good services, they don't have the vision to stick with and improve until it works. They expect to get to a billion users in 2 years else the project goes on resource deprivation and then cancelling.
They are starting to hit the cap on advertisement market, filling Search results and YouTube with crappy ads, hurting user experience. YouTube had turned into a house of pain because of the number of ads. You cannot keep growing Ads revenue year after year by 20% indefinitely.
Their Deepmind folks overpromise and underdeliver. Their Gemini model is not even as good as GPT3.5 in benchmarks, let alone GPT4. And their folks don't really care about the products, they want to work on cool AGI stuff instead. They have been promising AGI next year for the last 10 years if not more, yet their model cannot even compete with GPT4.
Bard has few daily users, and no paying users, while OpenAI has over 100 million daily users.
No one is really responsible to user experience, the company is built from a bunch of dysfunctional silos don't their own thing competing with other got resources, no one knows how many chat apps they have launched to users and then killed. People get promoted through a dysfunctional system by hoarding resources and growing org sizes without delivering value to users.
Internal incentives for engineering and project folks are set towards launching new things, not delivering value to users.
They don't execute well because of mismanagement at higher levels and they are trying to address execution problems by laying off people who ended up working on the wrong project that the upper management was highlighting a while ago in their earnings call.
Their Cloud is doing ok, but they are far behind AWS and Azure from market share perspective and Azure seems to be growing much faster.
Their CFO is stepping down after cutting a lot of projects and investing and losing billions of dollars in real estate during covid and doubling the number of employees in 2020.
There are rumors that Sergey Brin came back to help Sundar Pichai deal with challenges but it doesn't seem to be working so far.
The relationship between their higher management and general employees seems broken and dysfunctional. The employees do not believe in the upper management.
Overall Google seems to be in big trouble. The future for Google doesn't look bright. They are likely going to end up like Yahoo!
At the company of a friend of mine, the white collar employees do charity events for the blue colar ones and while the blue colar ones participate on labour day events, the white collar ones are too cool to be with them.
But when the actual non-workers(the true elite) feel like they can make more money by laying off some white collar workers, the cool white collars go through the exact same process as the blue collar ones they chipped in for.
Also, these are not even high earning white collars, they just happen to work in a pleasant environment. Many blue collar workers make more money in comparison to white them and are closer to the non-workers since they can actually do highly paid short term contract work.
There's a strong cognitive dissonance going on among white collar workers, having trouble to process the signals on if they are the cool elite or the working class. In Europe, this is not as strong because of the unions and regulations pushing all workers to earn more less the same and the work environments are safe and clean. In places outside of EU there can be workers which are 10x or 100x beter off than those at the bottom because the top can be higher but usually the bottom is also much lower and this gets the better off ones very confused.
Also unions in the US have quite often rewarded seniority over skill and effort, making them less attractive to high performers.
Early on in tech I outperformed all those I started with, and was able to make significantly more as a result. My friends in union jobs (electrician, auto plant workers, ..) did not get any such opportunity to shine, and they even had to strike (i.e., no pay) when the local shops decided they should. They're not allowed to work outside jobs, they have a terrible time starting new shops, since the existing union power brokers like the control over their employment.
I looked into moving to the UK, and saw how few startups in the EU become big, how hard it is in most countries there to make new businesses compared to the US, and decided against it. The EU is ~450M people, the US is ~330M. Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies.
Increased benefits to workers for one facet of employment is not free. Laws adding costs per employee to an employer are not simply paid out of magic money.
Another is that during layoffs, unions may force the company to lay off people based on seniority instead of competency.
If you compare salaries for developers between Germany and the US, I think this point becomes blatantly clear.
The media has very successfully demonized unions, and many skilled workers believe the company line that unions drive down average wages, make it impossible to fire useless people, charge heavy membership fees, etc.
And even if they had a good union, I fail to see how it would have prevented this.
SWEs are used to being in a good negotiation position and not in need for collective bargain.
My employer has a works council, but no union representation. That council is mostly occupied with dealing with compensation (provisions, product assignments, ...) of sales people, who make the largest group, thus most votes. SWE needs aren't seen.
I can give you a real-world example. Our company (Italy) office was relocated, and unions entered negotiations to obtain three days of remote work for the entire personnel. However, I and others refused to sign the agreement because, with more negotiation power, our target was full remote work. However, in doing so, we were undermining the union positions, which made them unhappy. Fortunately, things ended well; all personnel got the three days, and a few other people were granted full remote work.
The problem with unions is that if you are a top performer it's harder to get promoted, if you're crap it's harder to get rid of you.
Overall it's great for non productive people who can pay a little and coast, great for everyone else. I can understand unions for low paid jobs the should be done by machines (eg. factory workers) but it doesn't make sense for knowledge work where performance has huge impact.
Oh and they want money to do that.
US restarted hiring quickly after the layoffs, but EU has still a hiring freeze in several FAANGS.
I personally have no interest in joining a union. I don't think companies are my friend but I also know that it is bad to become complacent which I find a lot of lifers at big companies can become. I am not suggesting you need to be working 90 hour weeks but I do think a lot of individuals, including engineers, fall into the trap of doing one thing well and nothing else and stick into a single role for such a time that they lose plasticity. The employee - employer relationship is not a war against each other but a market balance, I need to be adding incremental value and the employer needs to be recognizing it and we are left to negotiate the terms.
How many large tech. companies has Europe produced ?
Why would (or even: could) anyone start/build a cutting-edge tech. company in Europe given the hell that labor laws are over there ?
Labor laws in Europe are a giant hindrance to economic growth.
People in most European countries have made a political choice: safety and stagnation over wealth and growth.
That's their choice, fine, they're free to do as they please in their own house.
But when you make a choice, you can't ignore the consequences of these choices.
That's why "not in the US":
Different political choices, betting on growth, agility, innovation, running fast, and yes -- ooooh, what a terrible thing -- taking risks, and among others that employment may come and go because the world is not a static place.
Yeah things have changed. It may be time for Software Engineers to unionize.
There's also a huge disparity between the SWE salaries and the rest of the society in Poland, I can imagine fears that unionization overall would flatten out those differences.
Another factor is that in places where we have unions (leftover fields still highly tied to the government, e.g. teachers) they tend to not function very well in practice (not enough employee advocacy, unhealthy level of union politics affecting people's outcomes in the workplace etc.).
Lastly, we're still pretty fresh to the whole capitalism game as a country, so we're scared of anything that resembles a step backwards.
We are stuck in a self-reinforcing feedback loop where unions represent a very small portion of the employees therefore most employees avoid being associated with unions because it makes you look like an activist.
As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.
On the other hand almost everyone in the world uses something made by American corporations.
Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.
The world’s most valuable company comes to mind.
Like going to the masseur during working hours?
Are there other corporate layoffs that round out this intrigue?
This might be wishful thinking, but looking at their size, these are fairly normal layoffs, and the worst part is over. (Remember 25% Meta and Google layoffs )
People need to understand that just because you have a little bit of RSUs and a 200k base doesn’t mean you’re God.
You’re an asset like a machine. And you’re expensive to the bottom line.
This is literally explicitly laid out now with section 174.
If you’re taking this personally ask yourself why you’re even working for arguably some of the best most efficient capitalists on the planet. Maybe you should work for a government agency or smaller company. But you want that 400k plus right?
The reason I work for a soul-less telco, is that it is hard (for me at least) to find a job in the first place. I've been at plenty of small companies as well. If I could have gotten in at Google I would have done it in a heart beat, not just for the money, but to have FAANG on my resume.
The fundamentals remain the same: they are workers who support families of arbitrary needs and complexities and not just themselves. Are they expensive to the bottom line? Good -- they _allow_ the bottom line because they are the ones generating value.
Not the shareholders and upper managers calling for layoffs to maximize their stock prices who you seem to appreciate more.
I mean no disrespect, but fundamentally a company is only able to do one of the two things: either hire, or fire people. Nobody is taking this away from them, and why would they? Once the leadership has spoken, it's up to employees to either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say. The union statement reads awfully like "We refuse to believe."
I'm not sure that's helping anybody!
I'm always sad to hear when someone loses their jobs, but the headline borders on being click-bait.
If Google laid off ~3k of it's 182k employee base, that's only 1.5% of it's workforce.
It wasn't long ago that companies had a standing rule to let go it's bottom 5% annually.