661–670 of 1001 posts
Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hou…
That was painful to read. I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition. Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs,…
Everyone is replaceable/expendable, even if you actually aren't, it doesn't matter. It isn't worth investing so much emotional energy and your personal identity into a company unless you are a major shareholder.
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That person is basically you under less dire circumstances.
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You are using people from a marginalized group (the poor), of which I am assuming you are not a part, as a bad faith shield to justify your anti-worker viewpoint.
you gotta do more to make your point here, because that's not an obvious inference from what they wrote
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does, but if you've removed the damage they can do, then to the company it's preferable to have more people angry who can't do damage, than less people angry but some of them will do damage. It's a sad reality. For some people a "dignified exit" won't do a single thing to lessen the rage they feel that they were wronged. It's a sad situation all around.
> It does, but if you've removed the damage they can do, then to the company it's preferable to have more people angry who can't do damage, than less people angry but some of them will do damage. Eh. That's a bad way of thinking, but one that I think is tempting to software engineers. It's basically taking software security thinking (appropriate for things ) and applying it to people in a context where the consequenc…
This has nothing to do with software engineering. It's about business risk management. I'm not justifying it, just explaining the sad reality of it.
> You know, you're not required hire those kinds of people in the first place. Hire people who get along with others.
I'm glad you have a crystal ball to perfectly predict how everybody will act in future situations. But sometimes it's the people who seem the most pleasant and helpful who take layoffs the worst, because they feel the most betrayed after everything they gave emotionally in good faith. Humans are complex and they can act unpredictably.
All the talk about doing great things as a team is usually all b.s. It’s just excellent theater. Most of us are side actors in someone else’s script and believe we have the lead role.
The plan was to come into the warroom and just hang out. Your manager would come and get you and take you into a private conference room to discuss your package with an HR specialist. The packages were pretty decent, at least.
In gallows humor I drew some stick figures on a white board for each of my team with their unix logins below them. As people were RIFfed, I would go over and put a universal red circle and slash "no" symbol around the figures who were laid off.
My time came and I marked myself as a "no" and handed the red marker to a co-worker.
I remember being a little ticked off at my manager, but when I came back to say goodbye to everyone I noticed his figure / login name had been exed out. The last thing he did before metaphorically being shot in the head was to metaphorically strangle half his children.
"What was deluxe became debris, I never questioned loyalty. But this dead end demolishes the dream of an open highway."
I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck. To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers…
Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly. What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years. Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that unde…