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Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#331

Post by Frost1x »

twh270 wrote: post #262
otikik wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you are saying. I am an engineer-turned-EM and you don't know me, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt: > 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. Yo…

"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused. It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything. As oth…

>"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.

In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.

This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.

Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#332

Post by ken47 »

nly wrote: post #35

My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %) 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…

Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe.

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.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#333

Post by yreg »

mindwok wrote: post #98

I'm surprised to see so many comments here taking layoffs personally, or talking about how layoffs are stupid. 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…

How does it make sense for Google to keep laying off people (many of them skilled overperformers) while continuing to hire? It seems they have alienated a large part of their workforce with these decisions. Plus they are running into legal fights in Europe where it's not so easy to randomly fire employees.

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.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#334

Post by carstenhag »

Extasia785 wrote: post #312
laurels-marts wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European I'm curious which unions and industries are you talking about? I've been working tech or tech-adjacent jobs my entire life here and I've never been in a union nor do I know any friends (developers / designers) that are in a union. And I'm going to conferences and meetups on a regular. I'm not saying unions don't exist (probably more so in certain industries), but for devs to be in a union in Europe? Nev…

Unions in Germany aren't really split up by profession, but by industry. So if you e.g. work in the car or manufacturing industry, there's a good chance that most workers in your company are part of "IG Metall", which is the biggest union in Germany. And that union then negotiates the salary & working conditions for every normal employee, even if you aren't part of the union. So if you ever met a developer from Sieme…

As you said, they are only under that umbrella because of the sector. Outside of those companies, there's basically no unions at all in IT/Mostly-IT companies.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#335

Post by laurels-marts »

Extasia785 wrote: post #312
laurels-marts wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European I'm curious which unions and industries are you talking about? I've been working tech or tech-adjacent jobs my entire life here and I've never been in a union nor do I know any friends (developers / designers) that are in a union. And I'm going to conferences and meetups on a regular. I'm not saying unions don't exist (probably more so in certain industries), but for devs to be in a union in Europe? Nev…

Unions in Germany aren't really split up by profession, but by industry. So if you e.g. work in the car or manufacturing industry, there's a good chance that most workers in your company are part of "IG Metall", which is the biggest union in Germany. And that union then negotiates the salary & working conditions for every normal employee, even if you aren't part of the union. So if you ever met a developer from Sieme…

Interesting. I think that makes a lot more sense for the heavy industries in Germany. I've been working for many years across the border in the Netherlands (South Holland specifically) where there's a lot of tech/design companies and studios and I just haven't come across anyone in a union or even heard of people being in a union.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#336

Post by asvitkine »

ponector wrote: post #265
oblio wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't agree with this line of thinking. > Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring Ok, let's define "over-hiring". Google... had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023. and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023. They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hirin…

Don't forget there are also hundreds of thousands of external people. Bodies bought from different vendors, doing pretty much the same job as internals but with lower pay and almost no benefits. They've been cut a lot last year, but no news about it. Also there are cuts in high cost of living locations. Why to keep people in California if you can hire in Warsaw and pay x0.25 of US rate there?

Is there a source for higher cost locations being affected more than lower cost ones? I didn't get that impression.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#337

Post by paweladamczuk »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #127

Seriously, why people in tech are opposed to unions? In Europe, unions and Betriebsrat (works committee) are the norm. Why not in the US?

In Poland most people scoff at any mention of unions for software developers. I think this is because we're still in the phase of quick SWE salary growth powered in large part by the best performers in the field being good negotiators in salary talks with incoming foreign capital. They drive the companies' labor cost expectations up and it benefits everybody in the field.

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.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#338

Post by steveBK123 »

nly wrote: post #35

My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %) 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…

Be loyal to people, not to companies.

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.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#339

Post by ken47 »

geraldwhen wrote: post #251
sz4kerto wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotio…

This is just unrealistic. When layoffs happens, whole departments can get cut. They don’t differentiate performers. Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment. Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.

You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#340

Post by jmyeet »

5+ years ago, Big Tech was desperate to retain employees. This of course increased wages. Google, in particular, was always insanely profitable on a per-employee basis, at times exceeding $1 million in profit per employee.

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...

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