Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

I don’t think people were fools for falling in love with their employer. Naive maybe. But Google was really nice to employees and (intentionally) made it easy to forget you were a number in the capitalist machine. They listened and responded to employees, they made work more comfortable and easy with perks, and they regularly changed to stay up to date on what helped employees.

> ...and hopefully no one is naive enough to think Google is "done"...after next earnings I expect an even bigger round

I haven’t seen it talked about anywhere. I’m an ex-googler from layoffs. My old team was massively impacted and some coworkers were put on “delayed exit” to wind down their projects by fall. I don’t know the extent of it company wide but on my old team, the lay offs and delayed exit were 1:1 roughly.

There are _definitely_ great companies out there, depending on what makes a place great FOR YOU. Working on great products with smart people? Yeah, there are places out there like that, and not always in the 'obvious' places. Great compensation? Yeah, there are places/industries that still offer that. Getting everything combined with one employer? That's more of a unicorn problem and you might have to compromise on something.

As someone who worked at Google for 15 yrs, who also worked at Oracle and IBM, I can confidently say that Google was the least toxic, least overworked place I've ever been. That's not to say there aren't management problems, especially around the erratic way they launch new projects and kill others with no real rhyme or reason, but working environment was never one of the complaints.

At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly be in meetings with shouting matches. People were tear down others. There was excessive territorialism. Googley culture, although it changed over time, did promote cooperation and constructive criticism. Post-Mortems emphasized what went wrong and what could be done better, not who went wrong. Other teams were often, if not always, eager to partner or share their work.

Work location flexibility, the cafes, all of it was very good.

Now, I did perceive a cultural decline, I think it was sometime around the launch of Google Hangouts, I started sensing a more bean-counting approach, I think because the Seattle office brought in a bunch of MS managers in too short a period of time for them to absorb Googley culture. At one point, the initial launch of Hangouts didn't have presence indicators, and when employees brought it up, one response was "You are not the audience". As if presence indicators are something only elite engineers want, and not regular folks. This was totally antithetical to way products like Gmail were built, out of personal desire and need.

I didn't work in Cloud, but I suspect Thomas Kurian brought a more Oracle "Sales Engineer" driven approach, and that too can change culture. Might be bad for culture, but good for external customers.

One of the issues over the years that I feel an acute sense of now that I'm looking for a job again, is that Google invented a lot of technology early internally, from Borg to Map/Reduce/etc. Eventually, the outside world cloned these, and when they became on-par and standardized, at that point I really think Google should have switched their internal stack to the OSS equivalents. For example, Google still builds products on the internal Borg system, rather than using GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform/etc. If GCP/Kube is missing functionality to run say, Maps or Gmail, then perfect, that indicates a good driver for improving the external facing product. Working on some of Google's tech stack feels like an alien world compared to working on stuff outside.

In ML at least, there's synergy, as Tensorflow and JAX are used internally and externally. But in terms of major systems, there needs to be a lot more of this. Blaze was opened as Bazel way too late for example, should have been done years ago.

Not sure what the author expected Google to do. Are they supposed to have individual meetings and a farewell party with 10K (ex) employees? My dad worked for the same company for 35 years then retired. In my 20 year career I have worked for at least half a dozen companies. There's no such thing as job security anymore, as long as you are employed by someone else you are disposable, no matter how hard you work and how loyal you are to your employer. If investors want more dividends they will let people go, doesn't matter if you are sick or just bought a new house. Actually the person making the decision to fire you probably doesn't even know your name. Think about how depressing that is. For that reason I became a consultant. It sounds harder and scarier than it actually is, but once you figure it out you realize how much more enjoyable working for yourself is and there's absolutely no way you will ever work anyone else again. I hope some of these ex Google folks take this opportunity to do something on their own.