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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#131
post #39
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not been laid off myself, but I'm still being absolutely hounded by recruiters. There are still a ton of tech jobs out there, at least in the UK.

The correlation between how much you're being "hounded by recruiters" and how many open positions are out there, is either 0 or negative.

These are specific roles they're recruiting for. Job sites are still filled with open positions.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#132
post #4

Question for those who got laid-off from tech recently (say since Aug last year): how hard did you find it to get another tech job? Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited: https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-f... If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true…

I like to categorize jobs into 3 tiers. Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews. Tier 2: Great comp and medium level difficulty interviews. Tier 3: Companies that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes don't even have a coding interview! for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective. I've passed "high bar" technical…

There are plenty of places that pay below market rate and think Leetcode hard is the last word in interviewing engineers.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#133
post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

Agree with that. The wording is very human and focus on the bad parts of it. I hate the term "let people go".

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#134
One hypothesis is that the big tech companies are just better at sensing what the market is doing and reacting accordingly as quickly as they can, while companies from other industries are sleeping at the wheel. If that's true, we can expect those other companies to eventually follow with the layoffs.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#135
post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life. Seeing someone else say that was very refreshing. It’s so true that when you’re gone, the company hardly notices. Being let go with no severance and zero days notice was the last straw for me to ever put my soul into a soulless company again.

Luckily there are cool ones out there worth putting yourself into. I managed to find one. Weirdly I now seem to enjoy staying up till crazy o’clock hacking away or doing stuff over the weekend. But only because it’s so much fun; it’s still a selfish motive. Lots of devs really believe that they have a duty to the company or whatever, which is a huge mistake —- one I made too many times.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#136
post #51

I guess someone has to write this comment: > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are. It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.

> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession. I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession. However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per…

> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.

I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”.

Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#137
post #104

Not a bad email, and a decent follow up on the ones that are affected. It is also a reminder that killing yourself slowly at the workplace is meaningless. Management has no responsibility to you, and no promise is certain. It’s your responsibility to take care of yourself. My take, don’t be bitter. Take the severance as soon as possible and get back on your feet. Having Google on your resume is a very good thing.

Do you know the subject line of the follow up email (for those laid off)?

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#138
post #65
post #51

I guess someone has to write this comment: > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are. It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.

I always find these comments a bit silly. Saying something is "my fault" is not the same as saying they intend to die on their own sword.

I know but in general when you admit something like that, people also do expect like some preventive actions for the future.

All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location.

Look at that: https://careers.google.com/

They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself.

Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?

It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#139
post #48

Does anyone know what "Outside the US, we’ll support employees in line with local practices." exactly means? In Germany I could imagine it to be "You're fired. Go to the Arbeitsagentur and find a new job". Of course within the legal forewarning period.

Usually EU countries have quite strict rules for layoffs, it's not like US at-will law. In NL mass layoffs like this have to be approved by the unemployment agency, you have to fire people LIFO and you get 1/3rd of your monthly salary for every year you've worked there. The approval is quite difficult to get so usually a higher severance is offered to leave voluntarily.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#140
I work for a company about twice as big as Google. Getting permission to hire anyone is very difficult, and everyone is always 100% busy just to meet customer deadlines(which we often don't).

I guess Google and other FAANG-type companies must work in a different way that I can't comprehend if they can just randomly decide to fire 10% of their workforce.

If 10% of the people on my project were fired, our customers would sue us for not delivering on the contracts we signed.

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