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Google to reduce workforce by 12k

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Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#861

Post by outworlder »

charles_f wrote: post #656

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here

That's a meaningless statement. They never face any consequences. A CEO taking responsibility for layoffs should add their name to the list too.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#862

Post by tipalti_layoff »

jedberg wrote: post #835
charles_f wrote: post #656

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…

From the point of view of a CEO of a public company, no post-mortem is necessary because nothing went wrong. Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. Grow when money is cheap, stabilize when it's not. If you don't do that, then you'll get out-competed by the companies that are doing that.

I'd kind of disagree with this sentiment. Sure, that works for Ford at the assembly line, but you have to get tech companies a little bit more credit. They don't scale with the number of heads if they are doing it right ;-)

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#863

Post by ok_dad »

outworlder wrote: post #861
charles_f wrote: post #656

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here That's a meaningless statement. They never face any consequences. A CEO taking responsibility for layoffs should add their name to the list too.

No shit, this guy took ~$250mm in stock in each of the last few years from what I can find, and even if that is worth half of what it was before this year he could give each outgoing employee about $10k of that stock (to sell maybe) to make their lives easier.

Instead he gave them a few words written by some PR manager.

Taking responsibility must mean something different to a CEO than it does to me, a common dude.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#864

Post by charcircuit »

charles_f wrote: post #656

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that. What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Euro…

>I've never seen a company produce one after that.

Almost every company does. They may not make it public, but yes leadership will reflect on this.

>"I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well

This isn't how most large tech companies work. If someone causes an outage that costs the company 7 figures there are no consequences assuming it wasn't done maliciously. It is more about learning and figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future and it is not about punishing people.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#865

Post by edgyquant »

dzonga wrote: post #30

I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not market dynamics. companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent. now it's a war on talent. and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits…

You’re not wrong but at the same time I was hiring for a senior engineer a year ago and the market was ridiculous. Seniors only wanted to work if they could do part time for six figures and the consensus was they should be allowed to work 2-3 companies at once.

This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it may suck to be an engineer compared to the ones hiring them: that’s just the nature of our mode of production.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#866

Post by mathteddybear »

pjc50 wrote: post #705
7ewis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they aren't getting rid of the talent. It's more likely to be a fat trimming exercise. The market has reacted in the way you'd expect, share price is currently up 4.3% today. It's easy to use the recession to restructure and leave room for new potential talent to come in.

> fat trimming exercise The company that is most notorious for having an aggressively difficult interview process has "fat"? How?

No hiring process prevents bad oncall rotations.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#867

Post by compiler-guy »

robocat wrote: post #855
chippiewill wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google don't have to worry about such activist shareholders in the same way that other companies do. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have the controlling share in Alphabet thanks to their Class B shares. They only have a fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.

Perhaps there is an large internal pressure from the employees themselves? If many employees have a large amount of salary dependent on the stock price, then those employees will really care about GOOG falling in price on the market.

I lurk on all the generally open Google-internal fora, and I think I have only heard one person try to make this case. The vast majority of employees who say anything about this are opposed to layoffs to increase the stock price.

If there is internal pressure from everyday employees advocating to accomplish this, they are being extraordinarily quiet. Unlike basically every other cause for which employees try to pressure the company. Google is quite open internally to people saying we should change this or that. It's almost a past time.

So I think this explanation is very unlikely.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#868

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

warunsl wrote: post #857
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a company with a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits. The average employee laid off is going to have 2 months of work - paid - to find a new job, plus an additional close to ~$80k or so to hold them over til they find a new job. If Google hires people they don't need anymore - regardless of how good they are - are they supposed to just keep them on payroll indefinitely? Why? Why are we feel…

One thing that is easily overlooked is the % of the laid off employees who are on a work VISA. This can be easily looked up and it is not insignifcant. Once an employee on a work VISA is laid off, he/she has a clock ticking. Imagine if such a person has invested their and their kids lives here -- mortgage, school, etc -- this puts an enormous mental stress on such families. I am one of those. Don't get me wrong I am…

Yes, I did overlook this - and you're absolutely right, and I couldn't agree more. Thanks for calling me out on it.

We shouldn't be booting out some of the most productive / educated people in this country just because they get laid off.

We should be trying as hard as we can to keep them in this country!

To the extent that - a lot of people feel if a company does layoffs - the company should be forced to layoff H1B workers first. I think that is complete BS. Layoff the people it makes sense to layoff - not the people on the other side of the lottery.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#869

Post by twblalock »

robocat wrote: post #855
chippiewill wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google don't have to worry about such activist shareholders in the same way that other companies do. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have the controlling share in Alphabet thanks to their Class B shares. They only have a fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.

Perhaps there is an large internal pressure from the employees themselves? If many employees have a large amount of salary dependent on the stock price, then those employees will really care about GOOG falling in price on the market.

It's a serious problem for retention when people's total comp drops by a large amount, and some companies (e.g. Doordash) have given people extra stock to make up for it.

Re: Google to reduce workforce by 12k

#870

Post by mshenfield »

robocat wrote: post #855
chippiewill wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google don't have to worry about such activist shareholders in the same way that other companies do. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have the controlling share in Alphabet thanks to their Class B shares. They only have a fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.

Perhaps there is an large internal pressure from the employees themselves? If many employees have a large amount of salary dependent on the stock price, then those employees will really care about GOOG falling in price on the market.

I've never seen anyone directly make this case. Most people seem to want their colleagues (many of whom are friends) to keep their jobs more than they want the stock price to go up.
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