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 hour of announcement. The CEO detailed the process of selecting people. The severance was very generous (3-6 months pay) along with health and other benefits. The impacted employees were allowed to keep the laptop and any other assets they took from the company. They even paid the same severance to contractors.
After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.
Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google.
Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually make it worse - so for example, the timing of this (which the person complains about) is because (AFAIK) they now have one day a month where ~all role eliminations that are going to happen that month, happen. Or so i'm told this is the case.
Ostensibly so you don't have random role eliminations every day, which makes some sense, but then you have no way for people on the ground to do anything more compassionate (like move the timing a bit) because they can't get through the bureaucracy.
In the end - it's simple - if you disempower all the people from helping you make it compassionate, it will not be compassionate. The counter argument is usually that those folks don't know how to do it in legally safe/etc ways.
But this to me is silly - if you don't trust them to know how to do it, either train them and trust them, or fire them if they simply can't be trusted overall.
Google didn’t used to be quite so bad at this. Back when they closed the Atlanta office, people there got a lot of notice and opportunity to find another role. The complaints were about not being allowed to go full-time remote.
It feels like there was leadership turnover in the late 2010s where "conventional company" people assumed the reins of power and started managing it like one.
The founders are complicit too. People like to think "before Larry and Sergey stepped down…" but the founders still control the board (tacitly or explicitly approving of the company's current behavior). Plus, there's Sergey's "60h/w or GTFO" note from a few months back.
When these businesses are in their growth phase, they're relatively lenient about spending and generous to employees. When these businesses run out of opportunities for market growth or entering new markets to improve the bottom line, they turn to cost cutting and squeezing more out of employees to improve the bottom line instead. It's a natural progression for every megacorporation as they hit the limits of their growth.
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this.
That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?"
And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care.
There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc.
What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki.
As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events."
Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows.
Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude.
Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.
Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters.
I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline.
The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume.
He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions".
I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate.
Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.
I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again."
Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
I had a similar experience with Facebook, although my email was much more aggressive (this was when their recruiter contacted me right after I got tripped by one of their UX dark patterns in a way that translated to real world harm). I kept getting invites until I put a clear statement expressing my desire to never ever work for Facebook into my LinkedIn profile
FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.
I think I wrote an email along those lines, at some point, although it was as much annoyance with the persistence of a particular recruiter as it was a desire not to work at Amazon.
> I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that.
Many, many years ago I sat next to HR in an open plan office while on a freelance gig.
They treated almost all candidates like subhumans, both when talking about the candidates within the team and when speaking on the phone to candidates.
They handled everyone from factory worker and janitorial roles, to specialists to director level. I very clearly got the impression that they only treated candidates well if those candidates could turn into people who had any power over them within the org.
I've carried that with me since and I often recognize it in HR staff I interact with now.
+1, it's been a while since I interviewed with Google, but this brought me back to how annoying it was. I've never had a good interview experience with Google. I only interviewed during college for internship and then a full-time new-grad role and got a consistent "we're doing you a favour by even talking to you" attitude from them— the delays, the impersonality, the delays to the general vibe of the emails, etc.
They became significantly more attentive when I got an internship offer from a competing big-tech company, but as much as my recruiter seemed to try, the process just seem to be deficient beyond their capacity to do anything about it. It had to go through many steps, and be reviewed by many people who seemingly had better things to do.
Eventually they reached to the right people to tell me my decision before my other deadline. I _was_ going to get an offer. They couldn't get me the actual offer letter, or tell me if I had guaranteed host-matching though. I happened to know Google can send intern offers that don't guarantee you'll be matched to a team, and if you're not, the internship just doesn't happen. In my book that's not only as good as no offer really, it's also just disrespectful. I knew people who had this type of offers and didn't get teams.
I took the other offer. "You will get an offer, the details are just taking a while" is not enough to decide on, and the whole process didn't particularly warm me up to Google. For comparison, and to give credit where credit is due, the other company was Meta (then FB). My recruiter was very response, understanding, and personable, which is especially appreciated as an college student— you're nervous, unexperienced and have a lot going on beyond interviewing. They sent me pictures of their dog to lighten the mood. I had told them I'd appreciate quickness, and by the time I was eating dinner after my on-site, I had the offer letter in my inbox.
The phrasing “from start to end” got me thinking—tangential, but—they were an extremely cool company when Millenials were in school and looking to join the workforce. Anybody would have jumped at the opportunity to work for them.
Actually, I can’t even think of a similar company nowadays.
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a really bad hiring pipeline as a result. Why work on the skill of hiring, if people will jump through flaming hoops to work for you.
As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.
It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.
They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"
Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.
Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
Sometimes, good things are worth the wait. The two times that you accepted roles other than Google, did they turn out better than waiting for Google?
> after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined
I am surprised that you accept. I would never waste my time. If these companies refuse to provide reasonable interview feedback, why would you provide it to them?
Bazel is an incredibly productive tool at the right scale. I could not imagine working on a giant monorepo without it.
If a startup is killed by Bazel, it probably wasn't the right tech choice for their scale, and it would be more accurate to say that the startup was killed by bad technical leadership.
"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive"
So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure.
But some of the data here is just very wrong.
Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has:
1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed.
2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well.
...
So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :)
It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think.
As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount.
I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's.
For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it.
(Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured)
Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment.
That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not.
There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process.
The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days.
I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits:
Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits.
Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them?
Them: Yes
Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all?
> But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive,
That’s the thing, they might be winning all the productivity battles there are (and I genuinely believe that they do, on top of great tools Google employs good-enough programmers to make use of those tools), but at the same time they’re losing the general war. Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.
The botched Google+ launch broke them in that department, or maybe that was just a symptom of how badly-broken things already were inside the company. They’re still making lots and lots of money, though, so that’s still a good thing for them.
And if you believe that, @DannyBee's productivity isn't real.
Or maybe it's a business problem that Google shares with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.
Microsoft has struggled to find any new products that will really move the needle in terms of revenue but they support their old customers with enduring loyalty while making the occasional absurd-but-bold move like Windows 8 and sticking to businesses that seem to make no sense like XBOX.
Facebook is the captain of cringe, not cool, but at least they're investing big in VR as a platform. They subsidize great rigs for Beat Saber because Zuckerberg will never forgive himself if he gives up and somebody else succeeds. [1]
Apple will never find a product as big as the iPhone. To do so they've have to make an iCar or iHouse or skip Starship and go straight to O'Neill Colonies. At least they are indisputably the best at what they do and they can occasionally take a hopeless shot at someone else's turf (Vision Pro) feeling justified that the only rival platform has a trashcan for a logo.
Google has trained us all that anything new from Google has a shelf life less than day old bread. They go at new projects as if they a startup that didn't get into Y Combinator or like the kind of company that Marissa Mayer starts these days [2] -- they don't realize part of the special opportunity of being a huge company like that with an absurd valuation is you can do really big, audacious, and irrational things.
[1] I learned for myself how dangerous this attitude is but all I could do was max out my HELOC.
[2] see https://sunshine.com/ not to put it down, I might be involved in something like that if I wasn't doing what I am doing
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this
The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012.
It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door?
Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.
> "I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012."
Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.
Can confirm as well, was laid off from Microsoft in 2023, and I kept access for about a week and a half (and then was paid for an additional 60 days after that, but no longer had access to anything, this was just the WARN period).
Same thing for people just leaving. I left in 2024, and my login and everything around it kept working until my announced leave date (and I gave more than a month notice).
I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.
Having experienced layoffs in both US and EU companies, the difference is massive. In my experience there is very little respect for "the human" being laid off in US companies
People literally would just disappear day to day. I've had several instances where I only found out a colleague had been fired because I tried to write them on Slack only to find that their account had been deactivated
Personally I felt constantly worried working in such an environment and I don't want to work for another US company again if I can help it
There are of course bad cases in the EU, but in my experience it's way less common than in the US
Layoffs in US companies are a BCP event. It's like an earthquake or a tsunami. Weeks of chaos while you figure out who survived, and who's now doing the work previously done by a team that no longer exists.
I watched a layoff take out half the security team during an incident. That was fun.
The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
There's likely a good bit of analysis that could be done on TLAs. Consider TLA itself is {Adjective : Count} {Noun} {Noun}. Meanwhile, DUI is {Gerund} {Preposition} {Noun} with the stop word 'the' removed.
It might be interesting to take a sample of TLAs used and look what words can be used in those spots. If the third position is 90% likely to be a noun, that could change the distribution... guessing not in a significant way itself but it could be interesting to see.
BCP events. This makes so much sense. At a previous mega corp I was always confused why such emphasis was made on BCPs for war or natural disaster scenarios which are so rare compared to how much time was spent on the plans. Literally months later we had massive layoffs. The layoff was the (un)natural disaster they were preparing for!
If anyone here has only worked in the EU and wants to see what the US layoff process is supposed to be on a good day, just watch the movie Margin Call and the scene where Eric Dale is called into the office by HR to be fired.
There's a scene where they put a folder in front of him with a brightly-coloured sailboat on the cover labelled "LOOKING AHEAD." It's exactly as grim as it sounds.
Another "fun" thing about that movie is you see the HR lady who delivered the news with a bunch of false empathy walking out the building with a box in a later scene.
"I hope, considering your [pause to check personnel file] over nineteen years of service to the firm you will understand that these measures are in no way a reflection of the firm's feelings towards your performance or your character"
I know they probably made this up for the movie, but I almost went through my file cabinet to look for that exact folder because I have been through several layoffs and it looked so familiar
American companies play mental games and gaslight everyone by calling it “a hard decision” and try to place the empathy back on the executives who get paid 10-100x the employees they just fired without warning. It’s sociopathic behavior.
I don’t think that’s really fair. It can certainly be a hard but necessary decision. And what does it matter that a CEO makes more than his employees? Even if he makes 50 times what they make, that means even if he gave up all of his salary he could only save the jobs of 50 employees.
Having worked in a (now defunct) US co in West-EU I can say it’s a subtle blend of the two. The layoff was announced, shortly after a few people received a call by HR, were escorted to their desk by security and had to turn in all company belongings on the spot. They were not allowed to touch a computer or telephone and were then escorted out of the premises. Afterwards, we learned that they had received a severance package that met local rules.
Most of my colleagues were shocked by the treatment. Moral took a dive after that.
Well US companies now take the cowards way out generally - tell everyone to WFH that day (despite prior RTO mandates) and then just disable peoples access so the first way the laid off find out is when they can't login for the day.
I work for a US company but in western Europe. The layoffs have been much more humane here than in the US. There was a negociation process which lasted several months, and the severance was better and on a voluntary basis. I don't think a company making profit can easily get rid of employees over here, but probably depends on the country. Regarding performance-based layoffs, they did manage to fire people too, but again it was technically a common agreement.
That being said, if they want to get rid of employees, they always find a way. And the European market isn't as dynamic as the US one, so there are pros and cons. Personally, all things considered (risks of layoffs, PTO, cost of living) I'm happier in Europe but it really depends on individual situation.
There are rules, but one can decide to not follow them.
One thing that I saw (but never experienced myself) happen with North American companies wanted to leave EU is just doing their usual things (thus not following local rules), and then people have to sue and wait many years to be compensated.
A company that has to "follow the rules" is way less desirable to work for then a company that embraces the spirit of the rules. I'm in the US so can't really speak for companies in other countries, but many US companies are doing everything they can to skirt the letter of the law and spending a ton of money to have them rewritten to be less favorable to employees and more favorable to the business. Finding a company that truly cares for employees is a very rare treat!
It's a fundamental problem with large organizations.
In principle, an organization that is built on reciprocal loyalty is more productive than one that treats people as interchangeable cogs, because people are individually happier and go to greater lengths to achieve the shared goals, making them more productive. However, this arrangement can only be built on trust, and trust doesn't scale well past the Dunbar number. Thus, spirit of the rules is replaced by letter of the rules (which can be meaningfully enforced).
Thus, the larger the bureaucracy, the more soulless it is even in individual interactions between people within it, and the more it treats those people as interchangeable cogs that are there solely to serve the overall function of the organization. If the organization is a for-profit corporation, its overall function is profit, and thus megacorps always tend to optimize squeezing their employees.
Short-term this can be reversed somewhat if leadership is concentrated and opinionated. E.g. when the company grows out of a startup dominated by a single founder, and that founder has certain ethical standards or beliefs that they enforce on the org, overriding the natural tendency. This arrangement never lasts long-term, though - either the founder goes away and is replaced by generic management which has neither the desire nor the capacity to go against the current, or the founder becomes corrupt.
That's absolutely happening in US-owned companies in EU that used to be great places to work before they became US-owned. They do pay a premium for their bullshit of course.
Well, sure, but unless the US company is willing to set up an EU subsidiary and employ you via that then you'll be working as an independent contractor. That status gives you zero employment rights, because you're explicitly not an employee.
Many cases where someone is in practice functioning as a full-time employee are legally employment relationships according to both US and EU law even if the contract and payroll procedures say otherwise, and even if the contractual relationship is directly between a US entity and a worker in the EU. This includes whatever employment rights are supposed to exist, for the number of employees (whether or not misclassified as independent contractors) the company has in that country under its national employment laws.
Lots of US tech companies like to pretend otherwise, but a complaint or two from the misclassified employee can create plenty of pain for the employer for lying to both the US and foreign governments about the genuine nature of the relationship. And these penalties generally go not to the employee but to the employer, since the noncompliance is generally around employer tax, payroll, and reporting obligations as well as laws which are meant to protect employee rights.
In practice, US tech companies literally buy their way out. They pay such a premium for those independent contractors that there would be no such complaints in the first place.
But for example, someone who is fired or laid off in a way that wouldn’t comply with local employment protections if the employment relationship were correctly classified might assert their misclassification claim so that they can also get compensation for their wrongful termination.
If that happens, then the company not only has to scramble to catch up on the overdue social contributions for the complaining employee and pay any applicable penalties, but also likely have to undergo an audit of their other workers in that country plus the same consequences for them.
There’s a reason why any US tech company that’s big enough to be a juicy financial target tends to do this correctly, and why companies like Deel, Remote.com, and their less tech-branded competitors (such as Velocity Global) are gaining popularity among people who want to do this correctly at smaller scales than those for which it makes sense to set up foreign subsidiaries.
When smaller companies take this particular shortcut, are risking severe financial consequences for the company if the authorities discover it, and in many cases this also comes with personal liability for some of the executives who are neglecting their legal duties.
That's usually illegal, unless you're a genuine independent contractor that completes work packages for multiple clients.
If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.
I'm only familiar with UK rules on the topic, and of course the UK is no longer in the EU, but here at least the standard for determining employment status is quite complicated. The ability to work for multiple clients is one of the factors, as it speaks to the control and mutuality-of-obligation tests set by IR35, but it would probably not (alone) be enough to determine employment status either way.
> If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.
That wouldn't work because it would be an obvious sham designed mainly to avoid the EU company's responsibilities under employment law. Courts see through those shams very quickly.
Technical people -- including me -- like to try and reduce the law to a series of digital if/then/else tests, but reality is much more analogue. If you're one of a small number of highly-experienced remote contractors engaged by a US-based client with no local subsidiary, the authorities are likely to accept the arrangement, or at least not to spend significant amounts of time investigating it. If you're one of very many Uber-driver-like "contractors" working for a company that is obviously dodging its local employment law obligations, then they're much more likely to be interested.
Is it, really? Aren't US tech interview notoriously difficult? Many rounds of interviews, background checks, etc.?
Most purely European companies don't do that. Actually, unfortunately, some of them do, because of American influence. But for sure they didn't use to.
There are 2.8 million developers in the US. Most of them don’t work for “tech” companies. Most of them work for boring enterprise companies without multiple rounds of enterprise companies and many let you just do behavioral questions and techno trivia on the stack they care about.
I personally have interviewed for 7 enterprise dev jobs and I have had 2 coding interviews and those were simple.
IME, this was true four years ago. Few rounds, assessments were mostly take homes or in-person "implement a feature" style, interview questions didn't seem to be built to trip you up.
Now, every job I apply for has 4-5 rounds, leetcode is more common, they do behavioural and system design rounds that you have to prepare for, etc. One job I applied to even asked me two behavioural questions via email before I even talked to someone. Something's truly off.
Wait till you get a self recorded behavioral interview. I truly wonder if there is that much value to be extracted out of 10 minutes of people awkwardly responding to questions while trying their best to fill in the silence.
What he meant is that the whole capitalist culture, less regulations, creates a more thriving economy which creates more jobs and hence more options to go to.
I've heard this type of comment a lot but in my experience there isn't any shortage of tech companies in the EU.
What EU regulations hamper isn't job creation, it's employee and customer exploitation. The distinction between "job creation" and "employee exploitation" is important.
What the former means in practice is that there is a massive contractor market in the UK and EU. So if companies need temporary staff, they'll hire a contractor. If they need permanent staff then they'll hire an employee. And contractors in the UK & EU are paid significantly more than their employee peers. In fact their pay is much more equivalent to US employees. So companies will make constant tradeoffs between more expensive labor for short-lived projects vs cheaper staff and knowledge retention but stricter employment laws. It's a fair trade most of the time.
So a more accurate way of comparing US vs EU businesses in terms of employees would be US employees vs EU contractors. Things then begin to look a lot more equivalent.
I doubt the tech workers making three to four times EU wages in the US feel “exploited”.
My job is purely transactional. I’ve worked for 10 companies in almost 30 years. I gave them labor and they gave me money. Whenever one side decided the arrangement wasn’t working, I moved on to another job.
Tech is always boom/bust. We’re lucky to have had a long boom.
I’m personally well acquainted with many people in tech, especially big tech. Many of them are doing little or nothing, certainly not justifying $300k+ salaries.
What you do has risk but is fundamentally more honest - your skills are around technology and output, not navigating corporate bureaucracy.
I am always skeptical of claims that some workers are just lazy bums skimming money.
I don't think most folks graduate college and think, "You know what sounds amazing? Sitting at a desk doing nothing five days a week!"
I expect most of the time they have good reason to be "unproductive," and would respond positively to those reasons getting addressed, or you're not capturing their contributions accurately with whatever metrics you're using to find "slackers."
It’s not the people, it’s the process. In a big organization you need to be actively managing your career to be in the right places.
And people are doing things, I’m not saying they’re sitting making paper airplanes — just things with no value or that drain their value. I had a high school friend who was brilliant, but his career got nerfed when he stuck with a bad tech/business unit.
If you’re the world’s premier expert in some peculiar process that only exists in one place, that’s no mas. Companies have been rolling in dough for a long time and some have way more people than they used to. One big company I deal with went from an account team of 6 to almost 50.
I haven't seen it on any team I've been on. But also I don't think the implication is people doing literally nothing. Just people doing things that are not worthwhile at all, wasting other people's time, and kinda just puttering around.
Some of it boils down to ineffective management and lack of mentoring, for sure, and could be addressed in a better way. Some of it is people getting in way over their heads.
Your post somehow suggests that when a bust comes European companies won't start laying off people. And in the same boom period the US dev will make much more money (and have a biggger safety pillow) than the European one.
A cursory amount of research shows that the average premium for an insurance policy on the open market through the ACA is between $400-$2000 a month depending on options - family status, deductibles etc.
There is also COBRA that lets you stay on your employer’s plan. You have to pay the entire premium. I pay $600 a month now and my employer pays $1200 a month. That’s me + family.
During the first “bust” in 2000 I had four years of experience and living and working in Atlanta - far away from a tech hub. Boring old enterprise dev jobs at banks, insurance companies, etc weren’t affected and I was easily able to get offers.
I worked at a company where utility companies sent us data files and we created, printed and mailed bills.
In 2008 during the financial crisis the next time I looked for a job (my third), I had two offers relatively quickly - one programming point of sales systems and the other that I accepted programming ruggedized Windows CE devices for field service workers.
Fast forward to 2020 at the height of COVID, I got my one and only BigTech job working at AWS (my 8th job).
Unlike the author of the submitted article, when I got Amazoned 3.5 years later, I shrugged, my $40K severance was deposited in my account and I reached out to my network and targeted outreach to some recruiters in my niche and had four interviews and 3 offers within 3 weeks. Why would I waste time getting emotional about a company knowing that the CEO is 6-7 positions up on the career ladder and I’m just a random number to most of the organization?
A year later in 2024 around 9:00 PM I had a “1-1” with my manager invite for the next morning. I already had my suspicions and told my wife that I am probably going to be laid off in the morning. She said let her know how it goes and we went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning, was notified about my layoff asked when I would get my severance and responded to a recruiter that reached out to me about a week prior.
I started the interview process and three weeks later I had a job making the same as I was making at AWS.
I don’t need to “justify” what I’m making. I have a skillset and experience that are in demand and companies are willing to pay me for it because by employing me they get a positive ROI.
You're focusing on one word and missing the meat of my comment. The EU equivalent to US employment in terms of employee rights and pay is contracting.
People in IT who take the employment route rather than contracting, do so because they want job security. eg they might have families. And much as you might be happy with your arrangement, there are plenty in the UK and Europe who do prefer longer-term job security over a few extra £££ in their pocket.
I think the bust of the job market played a bigger part here. When IR35 originally came in, some companies would bump pay inside IR35 to compensate elsewhere risk getting poorer pol of talent. Since the job market crashed there have been fewer jobs all round, which has pushed the contractor market down too.
But you’re right that IR35 really hasn’t helped situations either.
Some of my friends have commented that the last few years has been the worst time in their 20+ years as a contractor.
That take is a bit reductive - it downplays the structural collapse of independent contracting in the UK post-IR35 reform. This wasn't just a "bit of market downturn" or a few companies cutting rates. People lost the ability to operate as businesses, to manage their tax affairs fairly, to invest in their own skills, and to retain profit. What they got in return was, at best, a modest day-rate bump—hardly compensation for losing all autonomy, business deductions (like training, equipment, downtime), and legal protections.
It forced highly specialised professionals into employment in all but name, just without the rights, security, or support. A square peg jammed into a round PAYE hole. And the long-term effect? Exactly what you'd expect: the best talent either left the UK, shifted to servicing overseas clients (where Chapter 10 doesn't apply), or left the field altogether. The real talent pool shrank, not because of market conditions, but because there was no longer a viable way to operate independently.
To make matters worse, the government compounded this by lowering the barriers to import cheaper labour from abroad ("Boriswave"), creating a race to the bottom on wages, with zero incentives for local upskilling or long-term investment in the domestic workforce.
So yes, the job market took a hit - but IR35 didn't just "not help" - it actively accelerated the decline by removing the last flexible, self-directed model for highly skilled work. The damage wasn't cyclical. It was engineered.
You may think I’m being reductive but I think you’re massively overstating things too.
For example:
> People lost the ability to operate as businesses, to manage their tax affairs fairly, to invest in their own skills, and to retain profit.
I don’t know a single IT contractor that lost that ability. Maybe in other business sectors, but we are talking about IT here.
> What they got in return was, at best, a modest day-rate bump—hardly compensation for losing all autonomy, business deductions (like training, equipment, downtime), and legal protections.
This is also an exaggeration.
And you’re overlooking the point that IR35 only affects contractors working on BAU or who have worked with the same company for more than 2 years.
Firstly 2 years is a long time in contractor terms. And secondly, most occasions for hiring contractors was to work on new developments. So most of the IT contractors were still outside of IR35.
That’s not to mention that many companies would describe the work in ways that are favourable to working inside IR35 (not to the extent of tax fraud, but to the extent where any BAU responsibilities that were required weren’t the primary responsibility in the job specification.
Ironically places hardest hit by IR35 were government departments rather than businesses. Some of who ended up just adding ~40% to the contracted salary so the government still ended up covering the tax rather than the contractors.
And the very few contractors who were inside IR35 and didn’t get a bump in the contract fee would tell me they were still better off contracting rather than being employed (even taking loss of perks into account).
Now I’m not going to say that IR35 made things easier for contractors. Clearly it didn’t. But it wouldn’t have been catastrophic for the contract market had the employment bubble not also pop shortly afterwards.
You also seem to suggest that IR35 prevented contractors from claiming expenses back in tax, and that simply isn’t true either.
Edit: I will concede that it’s been 3 years since I was last given a budget and told “go hire, you decide who” so if there’s been any legal changes to IR35 since then I might have missed it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you're still underestimating how fundamentally IR35 reforms changed the environment for small business operators in IT, especially since 2021.
> I don’t know a single IT contractor that lost that ability.
I do. In fact, I knew dozens of people who ran small, legitimate limited companies - offering high-quality services across IT disciplines - who were forced to shut down or stop trading as businesses once clients tightened their risk assessments. In the early days, yes, some niche contractors were spared because they were too hard to replace. But even that dried up as corporate legal teams standardised engagement models and de-risked by banning sourcing services from small business entirely.
> You also seem to suggest that IR35 prevented contractors from claiming expenses back in tax, and that simply isn’t true either.
This is misleading. If you’re inside IR35 or forced into an umbrella, you can only claim expenses on the same terms as an employee of the client. That means you can't offset training, equipment, home office, insurance, downtime, software etc. - because your business isn't recognised as a business anymore. And if you can't make profit, you have nothing to deduct from anyway.
> you’re overlooking the point that IR35 only affects contractors working on BAU or who have worked with the same company for more than 2 years.
This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. There is no “2-year” IR35 rule. That might relate to travel expenses. IR35 assessments depend on control, substitution, and mutuality of obligation. Even short, project-based work can be deemed inside. And under Chapter 10, only clients carry the liability - so they default to "inside" for anything remotely borderline, including repeat work.
And that’s exactly the issue: having loyal clients and repeat business — something any serious business would strive for — is now penalised. The system structurally disincentivises hiring genuine small consultancies, because clients now carry legal and tax risk for treating you as "outside." So naturally, they avoid it.
And that quote about companies “describing work in ways favourable to IR35” to avoid falling foul of the rules - you realise you’ve just described a legal minefield that only small businesses are forced to navigate? If an individual or a small consultancy tries to deliver a long-term service or repeat work, they're suddenly in danger of being labelled "too BAU" and dragged into inside IR35 or worse, accused of misrepresentation.
Meanwhile, large consultancies are completely exempt. They can supply entire teams of workers to perform exactly the same repeat, embedded, long-term services - even effectively occupying roles inside the client’s organisation - and no one blinks, because the worker isn't the owner of the delivery company. IR35 doesn't apply.
So what you're pointing out as a "grey area" for independents is actually a core business model for Accenture, Capita, Deloitte, etc. - and it's legally protected. They can pump in as many BAU bodies as they like, make profit to their heart's content, and face none of the scrutiny aimed at smaller suppliers. It's a structural bias against worker-owned businesses and it's about making sure the same work flows through corporate channels, where the big business win - and independent economic actors are locked out.
> But it wouldn’t have been catastrophic for the contract market had the employment bubble not also pop shortly afterwards.
That reverses cause and effect. IR35 was the trigger. It removed the incentive to engage skilled local contractors as businesses. Clients - especially in the public sector - stopped hiring small operators entirely to avoid compliance risk. The result wasn’t just tighter budgets - it was the structural removal of independent contracting as a viable model.
And just as IR35 pushed domestic professionals out of the market, post-Brexit immigration reforms ("Boriswave") made it easier for companies to import overseas workers on lower salaries - with sponsorship pathways explicitly designed to undercut local rates. So the market didn't just shrink—it shifted, away from experienced, independent professionals toward cheaper, controllable labour with fewer rights and no negotiation leverage.
The combination was catastrophic. It collapsed the domestic contractor market from both ends—removing the supply of viable independent businesses, and removing the demand for them by creating cheaper alternatives. That wasn't an unfortunate consequence — it was a predictable outcome of policies designed to centralise control and reduce labour costs at all levels whilst maximising corporate profits.
> Contracting is still better than being employed.
That may be true for a small segment of high-end day-rate earners, but it ignores how many people used contracting as a sustainable, long-term way to build independent businesses. For them, IR35 removed the very basis of that independence-profit, autonomy, and client trust.
You misunderstand me. My comment wasn't suggesting that people who contract don't have families. Plenty of them do. It's that people who choose employment over contracting do so because they want the additional stability, for example if they have families.
Lots of people, when evaluating the risks of contracting vs employment, find the reward far outweighs the risk. It sounds like you'd be one of them if you were presented with the same choice. And that's a fine decision for you to come to. But that's not going to be the same conclusion for everyone.
What I’m saying is simple math. I would much rather make more than twice the equivalent worker in the EU and take the chance of a layoff. I can afford to have my own emergency fund to survive the gap in employment.
That I don't know. But the contractor market in the US is very different to the contractor market in the UK and EU. And from hiring in both US and UK, my experiences have been that US employees are more comparable to UK contractors in terms of rights and pay.
There are more regulations around employees than contractors here also, which often makes it not worthwhile for short term workers. Those regulations just mostly aren't around when you may terminate employment.
E.g. the entire I-9 thing and other IRS paperwork, who (if anyone) is responsible for various insurances (unemployment insurance, workers comp, liability insurance, etc), minimum wage and overtime for hourly employees, etc. Many things depend on this distinction.
I can't speak to differences from Europe as I am not familiar with that side of the Atlantic.
Yeah I’d argue this is so clearly the case and it’s one reason among many why the US has an enormous amount of successful tech companies and Europe has some amount that basically rounds to zero in comparison.
The ability to hire and fire easily is critical if you want to build successful companies.
There’s a reason ambitious founders move from Europe to the US and why most billion dollar tech companies are American. Europe has made really bad policy decisions around this for decades and their economy reflects it. Europe is poor and to an extent I don’t think Europeans really understand.
There's a higher monthly salary in the US, sure. However, you're expected to work very long hours (60-80 hours per week) and get basically no time off
In my current position I'm hired for an expected 37 hours per week. This can be more if I'm asked to work overtime, but my weekly hours cannot exceed 45 hours per week on average in a 3 month window without additional compensation
Additionally I have six weeks of paid time off every year plus public holidays
If I calculate my hourly salary it's better than what I was paid by US companies
That's not to mention the security of having a legally mandated termination period of minimum 3 months (in which you're, in most cases, not expected to work)
I worked 80 hours a week in medical school, depending on the rotation. From that experience I can tell you, the majority of people that say they work 80 hours a week, don't even know what that looks like.
This 60-80 hrs/week maybe a startup myth. Since Europe in general has far fewer startups than US people hear these wild numbers in Europe far less. For normal big tech worker, or enterprise workers 40 hrs is really the norm. Now many people specially in contracting, consulting can stretch hours for billing purpose or impressing upon clients thats a different matter.
I have never in 28 years across 10 jobs including one in BigTech been “expected” to work more than 40 hours a week.
It’s a bunch of copium thinking that American tech workers are working 60-80 hour weeks.
And I know it’s not the norm, but right now I have “unlimited PTO” and most people take at least 5 weeks a year.
If the average American tech worker is making 2x - 4x the average EU worker, they should be able to save more than enough to have a three month cushion.
And we are talking about Google. They have a very generous severance package. Even Amazon where I use to work gave me three months severance.
"Unlimited PTO" is discretionary in practice, and there are studies showing that it translates to less PTO on average, which is exactly why companies do it.
This is not what we usually hear about employment in the US. The reason many Europeans think American tech workers are working 60-80 hours per week is not copium, but simply because that's what many Americans tell us.
I will just add another +1 to say it's not common to work 60-80 hours per week in the US tech industry. It's not unheard of, and some companies (Amazon) are notorious for expecting that of their employees. But most of the time what you will see is that most people work 40ish hours (some weeks a bit more, some a bit less), and only a handful of colleagues with an unhealthy relationship to the job will work 50+ hours per week. Management doesn't generally expect people to do that, though of course bad managers do exist and can make your life miserable.
The only time I've ever been expected to put in those kinds of long hours was in case of an emergency. Stuff like, a natural disaster hit the company's primary data center so they needed to be all hands on deck to get services restored. But it's definitely not common day to day, and even in case of emergencies the company generally gives you a little something (extra time off, a bonus, whatever) to compensate you for the long hard hours you had to work.
How can you know that? Please don't assume stuff about others just to make a rhetorical point. If you say it's not that common as it's often made out to be, why wouldn't I believe you?
Though what would also help if you had an explanation for why we tend to hear these stories mostly from the US and not from other countries.
How much content you consume comes from the US vs other countries? The US has a full cultural supremacy in the west. That's why you speak english and read YC.
I see plenty of stories from Europe, and they too complain about work, but never about having to work 60-80 hours. Even if it's rare in the US, it still seems more common than in Europe. Similarly, I hear stories about working 3 jobs in the US which I don't hear from Europe. I do hear people complain about managers, pay, or office politics in Europe.
yes pbly more common that europe . even i worked two jobs at one point to double my income to like 700k/yr but it was very hard to sustain that beyond 1 yr. i know many ppl who've done it for years.
U.S. tech worker here. The only time I’ve ever worked 60-80 hour weeks was at a much smaller company, where for a month or two leading up to a trade show a whole bunch of work that had been put off was attempted to get crammed into the product. At my subsequent BigTech jobs I’ve never been asked/required to work more than 40 hours a week. I mean, nobody was tracking exact hours, but nobody was also pinging me at 8PM or on the weekend and expecting me to be working.
My experience is limited - I work in the UK for a US company and haven't spoken to US developers from a wide variety of companies. However I've not heard any US developers talking about working such long hours.
Closest thing I've heard is for devs to sometimes work over the core hours to build up time-in-lieu for extra vacation, over and above the paltry standard 2 week holiday allowance.
fascinating. I thought the meme was that FAANG tech workers were all day and lazy and didn't have to work that hard and were grossly overpaid, but that's as much a stereotype as the next one.
Umm... output. Outside of hyperscalers and probably the tier below them, most EU tech companies aren't making the kind of money per headcount to justify huge salaries.
There is demand for tech workers, but the output of EU tech companies can't afford huge salaries. Lower margins.
What a waste of a comment. Low salaries typically imply finding a job is easier, because more potential employers can afford to pay you. Can you add any kind of evidence, argument, anything? Saying "fact" after an armchair guess does not make it one.
> Low salaries typically imply finding a job is easier, because more potential employers can afford to pay you. Can you add any kind of evidence, argument, anything?
sorry i forgot to add "typically" which apparently is a license to spout any BS .
In Japan firing an employee is difficult and layoffs are unheard of. I would have few concerns finding something new were that to change overnight here.
That's true. But contracts here usually have a set termination time, with a minimum notice time typically required by law, dependent on how long you've been hired at the company.
Tends to be one month for below a year, three months beyond a year.
As in after a termination there's a period during which you're still supposed to work and collect the salary.
Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.
Of course a particular bastard of a company can still immediately cut you off everything but the salary including the doors.
> Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.
In the UK big corporations got a loophole where they can get employees without affording them any rights. It's called IR35 that Tory government amended to facilitate this, as Brexit benefit (the regulation would have been illegal otherwise if we were still in the EU).
It's totally legal to fire employee without any notice for any reason or even pay them below minimum wage.
Shrodinger's Europe. It could be homogeneously like Denmark, Sicily, Monaco, Hungary, London or Belarus or anywhere else. You don't know which until you have an asinine blanket statement you need to back up.
I worked a at large European company.
They announced there would be layoffs.
But not who, just the date.
On that date, they came round during the day, tapping people on the shoulder, who walked out of the room and were never seen in the office again.
Grown men were crying, who weren't even let go.
FWIW in my 15 years of experience working in big tech in US, I never had a job in which there was an expectation of doing more than 40 hours, working weekends etc.
Such things definitely exist, but they are far less common than is often implied here on HN and elsewhere. I think this is largely because people who don't work long hours are much less likely to wax poetic about it, just because, well, it's not at all unusual or interesting.
West Europe is far from cheap. Housing, childcare etc is unaffordable for many in the middle class (and as dev, you are in most cases in Europe not a very high earner).
Universal healthcare is the main (last) advantage Europe has over the U.S (and its a big one.)
What is considered a "good healthcare plan"? Can you compare American insurance plans with Europe's ones?
92% of American had health insurance in 2023. Some people may have more than one insurance plans, thus the total number below is greater than 100%.
Of the subtypes of health insurance coverage, employment-based insurance was the most common, covering 53.7 percent of the population for some or all of the calendar year, followed by Medicaid (18.9 percent), Medicare (18.9 percent), direct-purchase coverage (10.2 percent), TRICARE (2.6 percent), and VA and CHAMPVA coverage (1.0 percent).
Many European cities aren't exactly low cost of living, and those that are have even lower salaries.
In the end someone who was working at Google in the Bay Area for 15-20 years can retire if they didn't have life style creep (which is different than cost of living). Not the case in Europe.
What about European taxes? I', paying 48% + there is 21% VAT on almost everything. Plus taxes for water (taxes, not pay-per-used-m3, and this payment is here too), energy (atop of market energy prices), roads, gasoline, etc.
Slightly tangential question for you- does 48% taxes include healthcare? How about pension? It’s tax week in the US, I think my rate was 22% overall. But another 10% of compensation is health insurance. Another 15% is retirement savings. My municipal water bill last quarter mostly was not for actual water usage (about 40% was for water) rest is system charge and storm water fees. Regarding the VAT thing… we may be effectively getting the equivalent with tariffs on goods and materials supposedly taking effect!
48% doesn't include healthcare (it is another about 170 euro/month per person, and, really, you don't have choice for better or worse conditions, formally there is "market" for this but it is very regulated) or pension. Some industries (but not software/IT one) have industry-wide pension funds, but it is additional payments and if you are in industry without this fund you can go to one of the "open" pension funds and put your money in them.
German here. Me and my employer pay 12 (together) for healthcare. I have no clue where the idea of „free“ healthcare came from, but it’s far from free. 20% of your wages is the general rule for healthcare here.
On paper, my employer pays me 72k per year. I net 36k of this after taxes and social insurances are paid.
There is more than one pension -- one for old age (which the government is paying) and another from the company plan. The usual trick is to also pay out mortgage by this time, sell the house to buy something smaller and enjoy your life somewhere in a sunny place.
> Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.
It 100% does. It happened to me in Brno, Czechia, and this February I interviewed someone to whom the same thing happened and who was attempting to sue for unfair dismissal.
It really depends on the people you work for, it's not like Europe is some kind of paradise in this matter. I was working as a contractor for a company in Germany, after a few years working together, they cut me off from one day to the next (the new manager decided to start saving money), even though my contract included a clause about a one-month notice period. They didn’t even bother to pay the invoice for the work I had already done that month (it was the 23rd of the month, so we’re talking about a few thousand euros). And since I wasn't living in Germany, extracting that money from them was almost impossible.
Yes, it may be different for full-time non-contract jobs, but once you're on a contract, nobody cares.
Sounds like a case every lawyer in Germany would like to take. 500€ for first letter to send to the manager reminding the contract conditions. It is enough for most companies not to go further with shady activities. As a contractor one should know how to deal with the clients.
I don’t think that’s shady? When I was hiring contractors it was always project based with mutual understanding things could end quickly if the project or collaboration didn’t work out.
Yes, they get paid 1.5-2x, and that also prices in that it’s not always 100% utilization. Only once had a contractor oppose that, but that was in the context of (severe) underperformance.
In his case, the contract had something different, and they did not pay the actual invoice - that's the shady part.
With contractors, you have more freedom of choice when you write the contracts, but whatever contract you agree on, you still have to honor the contract as agreed.
The legal responsiveness for contractor disputes is definitely not as good as employment. Messing up employment relations in Europe ends up really expensive in most jurisdictions because there'll usually be some mix of unions, government agency or charity that'll have the employee's back.
Contractors don't have that kind of support pretty much anywhere (that's sort of the point), and it's just a standard contract dispute that lawyers argue about.
Working as a contractor means you're self-employed and the relations you have with "your boss" are a B2B relationship where you agree to get something done in exchange for money - no different from renting office space or servers. Since you're a business owner, you're expected to be competent in the areas of business (which can be cut-throat) and law. You chose to take on this risk by being a contractor.
That's not universal though. My dad's company was bought up by a foreign investor, shrunk over multiple reorganizations from its peak of ~500 people in the 70's or 80's down to a skeleton crew of ~50. They weren't fired, they were told the company was going bankrupt and needed to be emptied out. People who worked there for 40+ years were basically given a few months' pay if that and a "good luck". There's a formula for severance pay; years worked * month's wage, this would give people a lot of leeway to find a new job or just sit out until their retirement, but of course that's very expensive so they weaseled their way out of it through various constructions. Dozens of people fired a few years before retirement, most never found another job again. And the boss kept the company, which is now a shell company / sales / license holder, which the parent company was always after of course because production is cheaper to do in e.g. Poland.
That's the convention, but AFAIK it's not enshrined on law.
Some states require payout for unused, earned vacation time.
State-managed unemployment pay is also a thing, assuming the employee wasn't fired for cause. I think some states require employers to pay into this via a payroll tax.
"At-will employment" is a meme here. In reality, the company gives you a few months of pay and you sign a document saying you won't sue them for firing you during a layoff.
If you get fired for fraud or for being incompetent, for example, it's often different.
I worked at a company with a US division and a German division.
It was stark, the difference in process between the two countries. Leadership was openly complaining about how they couldn't close out shuttering the company because it was going to take six months to handle legal compliance in Germany.
This was during an all-hands, and one delightfully brave soul who knew it didn't matter much what he said since we were all exiting anyway commented in the public channel "Because of those laws, the American employees also get a six-month heads up instead of a locked door when they drive in in the morning, so today, we're all very grateful to Germany and our German peers."
"Coping about being a europoor" definitely sounds like a fair assessment that isn't politically motivated at all, and is sure to improve the quality of discussion. /s
Plans change, and so they should be communicated and negotiated with the employees going to be affected by the change. It's the dignified way of doing it, people are people, not fungible commodities, treat them as people and unions won't be an issue at all.
> unions are just corporate blackmailing.
This is such an absurdly ignorant take that is hard to start educating you, it also depends a lot on what society you live in since your view on unions will be tainted by what you see in it.
In places like the Nordics, unions are one of the cornerstones of a free labour market, look up how Sweden has a freer labour market than the USA to learn something at least :)
I don't even disagree with you, but your way of argumenting is terrible and actively deterring people from your point that union are a core component of a healthy free market.
If your point is to score virtue point, keep at it, but if you actually want to change anyone mind, avoid terms like "is hard to start educating you", it just makes you sound like a douche
I was being very honest, it is hard to start educating someone coming from that position since there is so much bullshit wrapped around a statement like "unions are just corporate blackmailing" which is hard to pull apart without knowing how the person came to that conclusion.
I don't even think it's possible to change someone's mind who already think that way, since it's purely from a point of absolute ignorance and I'm not willing to put enough effort to cite literature that could give them good starting points to understand something they are very likely not even willing to start understanding. They have a lazy position, I reply lazily.
They have an ideological position, based on ignorance, and from a single statement it's pretty clear they aren't curious and willing to change their mind.
Hence why I cite to look into how unions work in the Nordics, at least that is a starting point if they want to learn more about labour movements. It takes someone being curious though.
In the end, it was absolutely honest: it is hard to start educating someone who holds that position a priori and based on pure ignorance, and if not ignorance it's maliciousness, there's not much of a spectrum in this case.
I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.
The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.
It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.
In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.
Yes because a small company could deliver a national same day shipping infrastructure and worldwide network of cloud servers including its own undersead cables.
And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…
I'm okay with not having same day shipping if this means that companies don't have to treat their employees like dirt.
But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.
So exactly what “power” does Amazon have over your life?
Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.
sure i am being dramatic but my point stands. if my company can’t be fluid and can’t react fast to market due to bs unions and backward laws of some land, that place is what i avoid.
> Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?
Well to be fair excellent candidates are excellent on paper. It sometimes happens (not often, but not once in a blue moon either) that the candidate turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job.
This doesn't make sense. If you hire them to work in local offices in those countries, they often have even more employee protections than Europe does. And if you bring them over to US, then it's the same law regardless of where they are originally from.
people are getting quite snippy about this comment, but hating this mindset means you lock yourself away from so much actual wealth. It means you confine and condemn people to significantly worse economic conditions by limiting people's ability to freely associate and disassociate.
just to hammer this point home: Every mandatory employee benefit has a huge cost, and adding enough of them kills your economy. It makes it more expensive to have an employee than X many jobs can justify. That X grows every year, and that's X people who cant do that job and get paid money for it.
> After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes.
I was at a company that did this. I thought it was very nice at first.
It didn’t take long to see why most companies don’t do this. It became common to have a couple people who turned their last days into a mission to poison the well and go on angry tirades. Those days became tense and messy as people trying to do work felt necessary to move it to private messages to avoid triggering anyone.
It gets really ugly when IT starts checking logs and sees outgoing employees doing things like accessing code they weren’t even working on or downloading files in volume.
This was at a company with generous severance, too, so that wasn’t the cause. A small number of people get irrationally vengeful upon being laid off. At Big Tech scale it’s virtually guaranteed that at least one of the people you lay off is going to make some bad decisions.
Wow, the last paragraph is really touching. That comment from the CEO is brilliant: "I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today." That will stay with me for some time!
The problem is, before the layoffs, the employee may have felt they had an obligation to do right by the company. Once they're fired, it may no longer be the case. Some may very well become spiteful, act on their vengeance, & seek immediate retribution.
The risk posed by an employee going rouge is what most CEOs are playing for, especially as in GP's case, for a company as large as Google, where they need to plan for all possible failures and scenarios, some of which may or may not have happened before hand.
US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits. They just lose access to the building and their work devices immediately. I imagine it's no different in France.
> US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits.
Some employers may decide to give a few months of pay and benefits to laid off employees (although 6 months would be unusually large) but it is definitely not required and is not always done. Mass layoffs of 100+ people need to be announced 60 days ahead (but without naming who will be laid off) but there are no requirements for any kind of severance.
There's no legal requirement, but literally every company that is not bankrupt does it because otherwise they will face huge numbers of wrongful termination suits.
I think we’re all aware of how layoffs in the US work because there’s so godawfully many of them (that get publicised on HN). It’s very clear to me that 3-6 months of severance is very much not the norm. Being walked out immediately by security very much is.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Usually both happen. You usually get 3+ months of severance on your "don't sue us or badmouth us" paperwork and then security escorts you out.
As it should be, but emotional people make emotional choices. The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true. Their resulting actions can include anything from theft of IP to hand over to a competitor, to destruction of records or property. Worse, it is impossible to tell when someone will choose to feel they have been wronged, even when the employee could have had chronic absenteeism or underperformance that they justify with personal excuses. (I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be compassion, rather that most people will almost always make mental excuses to justify their behavior regardless of whether that reasoning is sound.)
Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation. It’s not just with layoffs, it can happen with protecting source code, licensing, network security, etc. I concede that a company could replace destroyed property and should be able to recover deleted data, then prosecute/sue to recover damages which could cost tens or hundreds of thousands(or millions depending on the level of access), but the disruption to business can be significant in some cases. Moreover, it is impossible to put an IP cat back in the bag.
For me, it seems easy to understand both sides on this one; compassion vs risk.
> As it should be, but emotional people make emotional choices. The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.
That's pretty cold, un-empathetic logic. If you're rigorously practice that kind of thing, you'll get the same reflected back at you.
My company has layoffs (not massive, but some). In my experience, the affected employees keep their access to everything, and typically finish up their work and participate in transition activities (knowledge transfer, etc) over a couple weeks. Yeah, they're typically also slacking a lot and socializing more, but no one around here wants to be an ass to their coworkers. I think the only people who get their access cut off are those fired for cause.
> Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation.
There are obvious problems with designing your processes around the literal worst case (e.g. treating everyone like they're a criminal has consequences).
> The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.
On the flip side, treating them like a crook seems more likely to inspire that kind of revenge instinct. Most people would understand removing privileged access immediately but giving them a dignified exit seems more likely to prevent problems.
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.
This kind of arrangement doesn't affect only the employees that were laid off, but also the ones remaining in the company. It's how you get people who will cynically exploit every ability to do as little as they can get away with while climbing as high as possible on the career ladder.
> 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 consequences are almost certainly not that bad. It's also probably downstream of some other bad ways of thinking, that probably make it appear more reasonable than it is.
> 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.
You know, you're not required hire those kinds of people in the first place. Hire people who get along with others.
> Eh. That's a bad way of thinking, but one that I think is tempting to software engineers.
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.
> This has nothing to do with software engineering.
You should note I said that way of thinking "is tempting to software engineers," not that is exclusive to them or has anything specifically to do with software engineering.
> It's about business risk management. I'm not justifying it, just explaining the sad reality of it.
The actual sad reality that some people chose to treat others unkindly pre-emptively.
> I'm glad you have a crystal ball to perfectly predict how everybody will act in future situations.
I don't, but I think you can minimize your risk, if that's what you need to avoid being an asshole. Then you have to practice trusting others.
> 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.
Honestly, that seems like an argument for making sure employees have good work-life balance, so they're not giving an unhealthy to the point where they feel betrayed.
But I suspect the people who think "I'll make them angry, but that's OK because I'll make sure they can't any damage," are probably also the kind of people who would knowingly exploit an over-committed employee.
For anyone not from India — India does layoffs in every way. From “cut on zoom in 90 sec” to “please know that you have to resign and serve your two months notice and then go”; to also “if you want you can serve the notice period, or you can just leave today and still get the pay for two months”. I have experienced the first and last and in the case of last for some reason I had chosen to serve the notice.
Working is often treated as transactional but it is about so much more. Self-worth, professional reputation, bonds with coworkers, ownership and stewardship of solutions. Even the simple everyday routine that a workplace drives is important.
That’s great, and the polar opposite of how I experienced layoffs (of others, then eventually of me).
But one thing that could be better is transparency around severance, so you know in advance what it will be should you get laid off. (Six months may or may not be “generous” depending on tenure.)
When I was laid off we got what was “customary” in that country, but before the offer was on the table nobody was sure we’d get it. It’s so much nicer when this is a matter of law — I’m all for a ~ free labor market but severance requirements help to balance the risk so the employees can relax and do their best work.
A nice addition to this I've seen twice now is a slack channel (via their personal emails) with continuing employees willing to help them practice interviewing and share their professional networks to help them find their next role.
* The Slack is under the company's control, and potential monitoring and retention? Over the life of someone no longer with the company?
* Was there any sour grapes in the Slack channel? Or was it a bummer or distraction for remaining employees?
* Did the Slack actually help the employees readjust and refocus on their new job search?
* Why not encourage people to say goodbyes and exchange contact info, and pay for a job search coaching service (with no reporting back to the company)?
What happens if your company supports billions of dollars in economic output, and a few employees decides to go rogue and sabotage some systems that then causes an international loss of billions of dollars, and possibly property damages and loss of life? If you were the CEO, would you take criminal/financial responsibility for that?
It's not like there aren't disgruntled employees before layoffs. If a single employee could cause billions of dollars in losses, then the company already has a big problem regardless of layoffs.
It's very interesting how so many people in upper management seem to think that they can trust employees not to sabotage and cause billions of dollars in losses by paying them like 100k a year.
If a current employee causes damage, that's one thing. But if a recently laid-off employee who retained full system access causes billions in losses, the CEO and board would face severe consequences legally and reputationally, since it would be perceived as an obvious security lapse.
An employee who is serving their notice period is still an employee. Unless you mean truly ex-employees who still have access, in which case the company has a big problem if it cannot revoke credentials.
This is a strange sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Effectively, your argument says that if there is any step, whether wise or foolish, kind or cruel, that some take, all must take it or risk being found negligent.
That's no way to run an (overly litigious) society.
I don't even agree with the self-proclaimed legal experts in the replies.
Employers generally assume liability for torts (civil liability arising from wrong-doings) vicariously. For example if an employee somehow puts rat poison into a customer's burger, the employer is automatically liable for that, because they are responsible for the employee's actions. (See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability )
But if on the other hand a recently laid-off ex-employee sneaks back to the restaurant and then adds rat poison to the burgers, the liability of the employer isn't automatic (you can claim they should have done better with their security etc., but it is probably a defense to say they did all reasonable steps to secure the facilities).
So yeah, I call bullshit. More likely is that the C-suite just cargo-culted some "layoff best practices" and it just became a thing you did without questioning.
I generally agree with you and the parent on this. It definitely is self-fulfilling. Because some companies cut access to laid off employees immediately, it makes the others look negligent if they don't. I'm not trying to say I think this is correct or the best, just trying to speculate why some employers choose to take this action. Certainly all don't, but it does seem more common the larger a company gets.
I'd be curious if every laid off Google employee experiences this hard cut off, or if it's determined case by case.
There are companies that support billions of economic output in countries which require a notice period. If they thought it was a risk that they would be taken down be a rogue employee, they have the option of putting them on 'gardening leave' during the notice period. This is extremely rare; they know the risk is insignificant so they are more keen to get any remaining value from the relationship (work, handover).
In our industry and many others, being a professional and maintaining good relations with your ex -colleagues, who form your professional network, is much more valuable than any emotional satisfaction from screwing them over, even without the risk of going to prison.
Must do. I wonder if that's because of the wide access to weapons? Although I thought I'd heard that there still wasn't much gun violence in Switzerland.
I have the impression that (although I did not check for data beforehand to confirm my assumptions) that gun violence is very low in developed countries, with the USA being the outlier.
I believe the overall positive employer-employee relationship in Europe is much more of a product of legislature and cultural norms, than the threat of violence.
Even in US, it's not a strict rule. I gave my notice more than a month in advance and retained access to all employee spaces (both physical and digital) until my last day. Coincidentally, I own enough guns that describing it as an "arsenal" would not even be an embellishment it usually is.
At the end of the day it's more about culture (i.e. people's expectations of what is normal) than any objective factors.
It's definitely not related to the population's gun ownership ratio. I would say gun violence is probably comparable with our European neighbours. It's just way lower compared to the US.
Also, from my experience, there is not a clear trend whether companies in Switzerland want employees to keep working or if they just let them go during the notice period. I've seen many examples of both.
Puzzled by why anyone would downvote a pure question. Wide distribution of guns is an obvious commonality between the US and Switzerland; if that's offensive observation please let me know why!
Probably because only the US has the kind of gun violence that you're wondering about. I don't think in Europe, the idea that someone is going to come after you with a gun because you pissed them off generally hits the radar.
Someone may find the question offensive because of that.
This is only a problem if you treat employees in a way that makes them want to go rogue and sabotage some systems.. maybe don't fire them without warning or cause, or clear reasoning? I suppose if someone is actually able to tangibly impact some critical system, limit their access to that, but beyond that, it's just an excuse to make it sound OK to abruptly dump someone from a social and professional context. Maybe it's legal, but is it necessary? No. Is it traumatizing? Yes.
Does this question also equally apply to the opposite side? If an employee got so angry with how you laid them off and treated them afterwards that they decide to do what they can to damage your company?
Cutting access and having security walk them out is more or less security theater. If an employee really wanted to cause damage the odds are they either already have or will still find a way. In this scenario having generous severance and treating them with respect is likely to better defuse the situation than kicking them out the door.
This hypothetical is about what the CEO/company decides to do, not what the employee decides to do. A lot of liability "theater" is not there to prevent issues, it's to cover your ass.
So no, this question doesn't apply equally to the opposite side. An employee does not take responsibility for what the company does. A lot of people wonder why CEOs are paid so much; part of that is simply to take responsibility.
Ironically, a lot of people complain about useless CEOs, but if you asked them to take that responsibility for the pay, they wouldn't take it (note that that responsibility includes things like sweet talking shareholders and giving public statements on short notice on things that could nuke millions of dollars in value and create very real legal liability).
Ah yes, because CEOs often face consequences for their poor decisions. They definitely don't get golden parachutes and move on to a new company when they run a company into the ground.
There is a range between kicking them out instantly and allowing them to do whatever they please. Authorizations to important systems should be immediately revoked but you can allow them some time to gather their things, access to internal chat to say their goodbyes etc. Or is that an excuse for poorly designed internal controls?
Right. Because only laid-off employees can cause such a damage of course (/s).
This is a twisted way to look at the risk.
Disgruntled employees have more reason to wreak havoc. All the more reason
they should be treated as humanely as possible in a difficult period that
in most cases is inflicted by the company itself.
"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. "
Some companies are just paranoid. My company has now had several rounds of layoffs, people were kept on for a few months, got severance and everything went as harmonious as layoffs can be.
The cruelty the way some companies and now Musk with DOGE are doing it is simply not necessary and reflects a lot on the character of leadership. To me it looks like they are deeply insecure and hate their people.
This is such a huge contrast to the usual cold, corporate layoff horror stories. Honestly, this is how it should be done if layoffs are truly unavoidable - with transparency, respect, and basic human decency.
Quite often it's literally cheaper for them to let employees keep the laptop (sometimes for a token price) after wiping than it is to process it for reuse, just because bureaucracy is that expensive.
Interesting. That's what's happened in the last two companies I've worked for when they did layoffs. I'm typing this message from my ex-corporate laptop right now...
The process was that IT locked the laptop until the severance package was signed, then you got a code that let you reboot and reinstall MacOS.
> the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say goodbyes
This is just so wild for me as an European, because at least in Germany if you get fired (or if you quit) you need to stay 1 - 3 MONTHS at the company still.
Not true. They can remove you from the company grounds and block access to all systems the moment you get fired or you hand in your resignation. But they have to pay you (if there is no "good reason" for firing you) for a varying amount of time (depending on your contract and some minimums by law).
Of course, most of the time, you can / need to stay at the company for that above mentioned varying amount of time.
No. It's a small company ~400 employees in total, including contractors. The CEO is a very technical guy. The average tenure of the employees let go was ~8 years.
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 on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos).
What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.
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 understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome.
It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.
>What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer.
I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs.
To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week.
I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.
In the instances where I’ve needed to run inference in the browser I have used Onnx runtime web to run weights that were exported from PyTorch training. You have to convert your browser data to onnx tensors, but it’s not that bad.
I don’t do actual training in the browser though, so maybe someone else can answer that part.
While possibly a traumatic experience for Adam, I fail to see the significance of this beyond anecdotal level. And I find it rather odd to argue that after all Google did and didn't do that this is what is causing disillusionment with Google. By now Chrome is basically just a Trojan Horse with advertisement and surveillance for this purpose hidden in the inside.
I think the OP explained the broader significance very well: If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers. That's bad news for anyone who builds for the web or who relies on it as an open platform for the dissemination of information and software.
I think the position your take re. Google and Chrome is an extreme one. It always surprises me that such black and white opinions about big tech companies are commonplace even on HN. Yes, Google have done things around privacy that I strongly disagree with, but the idea that Chrome is simply a trojan horse for advertising/surveillance is absurdly reductive and ignores the history of Google as a company.
Google was, originally, a web-first company. Their business success relied on the web being an open, competitive platform. And, at a time when Microsoft were still trying to maintain monopoly control of personal computing, Google's development of Chrome did a huge amount of good in maintaining and enhancing the web as an open alternative. And they employed a lot of people who were genuinely believed in that mission, such as Adam.
Make no mistake, the death or spin-off of Chrome will not be a win for privacy or openness. Building a web browser is a hugely expensive and difficult endeavor, and it has to be paid for somehow. Yes, Google has leveraged Chrome in some ways to collect data, but far less than they could have done, and far less than any successor will have to do, just to keep the lights on. Look at what has happened to Mozilla and Firefox if you need proof.
The fact that manifest V3 went through and fundamentally nerfed all extensions that just so happen to block ads and offer privacy means these people failed, regardless of their intentions.
> If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers.
A layoff is not firing. If Google is doing layoffs, they'll intentionally choose good performers so they can demonstrate it was done for purely economic reasons. Otherwise they get legal issues.
Besides that, Google may not trust its own performance metrics well enough to use them. The VP might assume the director is lying about who's important etc.
Hadn’t thought of it this way, but if there is (say) a 50% chance of being forced to divest Chrome, then the EV on your investments in the future are substantially lower.
The history of Chrome and Google is interesting but not very relevant for assessing their status quo. If anything you'd have to factor in the trajectory (which I did: "by now") and given its direction it certainly wouldn't improve a valuation.
Regarding your "reductive" opinion of Firefox and Mozilla, all I can say is I use Firefox and I'm quite satisfied with it. Ironically, the worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions can be traced back to it being funded by ... Google.
The worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions is that making a browser isn't something you can build a business on because you're competing with free.
Anyone who thought Mozilla wasn't going to eventually turn to evil to maintain their liquidity has no stones to throw at Mr. Argyle regarding naïveté. Is Mozilla Corp (not Mozilla Foundation) a non-profit? No? Then they need to turn a profit, and I don't see a price-tag attached to that browser they make.
I am listening to a podcast Adam Argyle is talking in, listening to what he is passionate about and then getting axed by Google is painful to hear as now it is clear that Google is not passionate about those things (anymore). It is also painful personally because it is what I am passionate about (and my job).
Link: https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-de...
This certainly isn't new. I know someone who worked at Google who mentioned the company culture has been souring since the start of the pandemic. I suspect Google will have a slow death akin to Yahoo in the coming years.
It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).
It probably just didn't have enough economic value for the company, from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either. The guy probably earned enough money in a few years that would take me 15 years of work, I'm not sure this as a "personal tragedy".
Completely agree. What is a tragedy though, is that if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort. If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails. It's just incentivizing people to treat their job the same way the company treats their employees. A culture of distrust and minimum effort. It's very sad to see.
> if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort
This is bizarre to me because my impression from three years ago was that they were trying to correct from that, and it sounds like they overcorrected right back to it. I spoke with a Google engineer I think in 2022, he had heard rumors there were going to be layoffs on his team, and he had sent a message to a more senior team member that he hadn't heard from in months to let her know that she should, to put it delicately, maybe manage her visibility better. And she responded that she had lost interest in the job anyway, hadn't done anything except respond to emails and messages in over a year, and had 99% transitioned to managing a collection of properties she had been accumulating over the years, so if he heard she got laid off, he shouldn't feel bad for her. I'm pretty sure that was in 2022.
To see Google go from tolerating being ghosted by highly compensated senior+ engineers in 2022 to laying off people who were doing excellent and high-profile work in 2025 must be surreal for people inside Google. If this is all accurate, they swung the pendulum from one zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty right through the healthy zone and into another zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty with dizzying speed.
> If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails
I guess the half million dollars yearly (I'm assuming he made) and the fact there aren't tons of other places he can get that kind of money and prestige for doing that kind of job.
I'm not saying I'm loving any of this, but yeah the system we've built treats all of us like replaceable cogs. During good economic times we don't really feel it, but we are now in a rough patch and we see the capitalist economic reality for what it is.
> from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either
Google has traditionally had a fair number of developer relations engineers. Chrome team alone has several. The current devrels include Una Kravets, Bramus van Damme, Rachel Andrew, possibly Jecelyn Yeen, Oliver Dunk, Matthias Rohmer, probably some others... They help prioritise new browser features through developer feedback, document new features, maintain documentation at web.dev, spec up new features and represent Google at various standardizing bodies, write walkthroughs and tutorials, build demos to showcase new browser features, make explanatory videos, give conference talks, and generally keep us, web developers, up to date with modern browser best practices.
Their value to web developers is immense. Their value to Google is possibly in that good devrels are a living advertisement of web technologies in general, and Chromium-based web browsers in particular. The better developers know browser features, the more attractive and capable UIs they can build for the web, the more consumers will be attracted to the web (including Chrome), and the more money Google will ultimately make via advertisements.
Adam has been so great in this role that it does not make sense to me that Google decided to cut specifically his position.
> But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.
Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.
One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.
I think their point was that they were told they could look for another internal role, but at the same time had their access revoked, which sends a very mixed message.
With the way it was written it wasn't clear to me whether the other role was offered as a replacement for the layoff or more of a good luck I'm sure you'll land on your feet. Agreed it's a mixed message if it was the former.
Ah yes. I got to do that once after a layoff. The manager tried to guilt me or something into working after I was layed off. "Because they were given me severance so I should be ok with doing the work"
I told them. No you are wrong. I was given severance to sign an NDA and non-disparagement agreement. That is what the severance bought the company, but I'll be glad to discuss a consultant role on an hourly basis.
> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary.
Agreed, it is necessary to make deprogramming oneself easier — less painful — to the extent that one has come to identify with the work and/or culture and/or employer.
But it is also exhausting to maintain a façade of allegiance to a harshly indifferent power structure.
To me my employer is my customer. We don't require each other's allegiance, just an ongoing mutually beneficial transaction and good will. When either fails for either party it's time to move along. Devotion isn't part of the arrangement.
>I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.
Not just that: separate it from your career. Ensure that you and others would still value yourself even if you weren't receiving top decile income for an easy job. A misanthropic software developer is begrudgingly useful; a plain misanthrope isn't even mediocre.
Good clarification. I know this separation is difficult especially when the career funds the other parts of life and the employer or title you hold is seen as prestigious.
"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
My comment is not meant to encourage removing kindness and humanity from the relationship. It's meant as a reminder that the other party in the relationship (the company) does not necessarily bring those values to the table.
I would also like to live in a world where humane values are reflected in personal and business relationships to the point where the line between personal and business relationships blurs.
> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.
This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
Hardly. This type of arrangement was short-lived and anomalous. It was roughly true in rich economies during a few decades of the post-war era. Never before, and not for most people around the world.
Relationships are worth cultivating any time, of course, but one shouldn't mistake a job for a life. The idea that a job is for life and your employer is your family was a mind hack that worked for a short while and is now unraveling.
In the days of yore, didn't a decent chunk of people literally have their name come from a family profession? I.e. John Smith, Jan Schmidt, Carl Maria von Weber.
As in it wouldn't be just your worth tied to the profession, but N generations of your parents, etc.
It used to be sort of true in the Soviet sphere. By sort of, it was more like an employer for life rather than the exact job. Unless rhe company went under which was rare.
> Most of the modest peasants, men or women, very often still small artisans, small weavers or textile workers, peddlers, boatmen or carriers in bad seasons, could become day laborers on nearby farms and estates, if they had the build and stamina, once their own work was done. Some were even regular day laborers, familiar to a domain steward or a village ploughman, present all year round or usually required for a certain number of tasks. Certain harvest tasks were sometimes carried out if possible part of the night, or continuously by successive teams[5].
> Day laborers, brewers or laborers, represented a significant part of the population and sometimes lived, in the absence of family support or a solidarity house, on the edge of begging[8]. In rural areas, they subsisted thanks to additional agricultural work with ploughmen or farm merchants but also thanks to wool spinning, crafts or transport. They also served as additional labor in construction, helped the lumberjacks, made bundles, etc. Women did laundry or took children in as wet nurses[9].
Medieval peasants cannot be said to have had a job. They are mostly either tied to the land (and its ownders), or indeed gigging from season to season.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
This is... not true. It's so not true I don't even know where to start rebutting it. But for a start, most of human history you were either hunting and gathering for yourself, keeping a flock for yourself, or farming land for yourself. "Employment" even as a concept is a pretty new concept on the scale of human history.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
Just looking at the Western world that breaks down during industrialization and falls apart if you go further back then that, journeymen (i.e. tradesmen who had completed their apprenticeship) would often literally travel from town to town for several years to work under different masters before submitting their work to a guild for evaluation and becoming masters themselves. I guess you could say serfs worked "for the same employer" because their feudal lords owned them as part of the territory but that seems like a stretch.
It's not so much that employees used to "keep working for the same employer for their entire lives", it's more that the people running and operating businesses used to be part of a local community and there used to be an understanding of a shared responsibility beyond private property claims.
This isn't something employees can change, either. Even employers aren't really able to change this because they too have to operate in the same economic system that contributes to this effect. It's probably more extreme in the US (and some places in the US more than others) but the economic system does not care for such sentimentalities and a business that does will put itself at an economic disadvantage, especially where the social fabric has already been sufficiently eroded to avoid bad optics (e.g. WalMart arguably failed in Germany because its attitude to employees felt extremely off-putting both to workers and consumers at the time but that resistance may have been eroded by the behavior of other companies since to the point where it would no longer make them stand out the same way if they tried to re-enter the market now - economic changes making this unfeasible notwithstanding).
The person you're replying to is correct in a technical sense I think? The hunter-gatherer phase would be considered prehistory since it pre-dates the development of writing, which is what enabled humans to record history.
Do people really have to make up stuff like that? If you said large parts of history, maybe.
"For entirety" definitely not. What you describe was a thing in some periods, typically periods where some group got too much power and they tended to end with huge disfunctions and breakdowns.
Yep.
One of the most unfortunate realities of modernity.
Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly.
They are themselves cogs in the machine.
A machine that goes all the way to the executive class, and they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
We all participate in this hostile culture, in various ways. Usually using the excuse that we need to pay rent, eat, find the work interesting, or with some other excuse that justify the means.
It seems like it's hard to do the right thing when you have something you want to buy or otherwise spent your whole life getting here, before realizing what here is.
I feel like its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks. I care about each and every person on my team, I care if they are engaged and if they can do their job. I care if they get sick and give them the time to make sure they feel better. I care about their career and try to help them along. Maybe I'm the minority, but I think that lots of managers of ICs should and do feel this way. As you go up the ladder, i can see that going down as the scope increases, but thats why you have managers, to keep attention to those details. Now i've had directors and stuff that do not care about their managers. I've also had managers that aren't great and don't care.
You are 100% correct though, we are all cogs in the machine. In the end, the people at the top don't care about anything below them if it isn't making them an the shareholders more money. If they do, they are a unicorn and i hope everyone gets to work with someone like that.
When I was laid off from RAX, it was a super emotional time. I had a job where I got to hang out with my friends and good people doing good stuff, and we also did some work (the work we were doing was so enjoyable most of the time, it didn't feel like work). I've never been able to capture that since and it has contributed greatly to my desire to get out of leadership roles.
> its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks
That's not the claim being made, by my reading. The quote was, "Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you" -- which to me means, it's not clear exactly at what level, but at some point people stop caring about you as an individual. This may be at the direct manager level if you have a shitty manager. Or it may be much higher. But at some point up the chain it will become true if you're at a megacorp.
>I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
>Yep. One of the most unfortunate realities of modernity.
The crazy thing to me is the lack of awareness of these people. Has hiring at Google fallen off that badly? Was there always such a gap between 'smart enough to work at google' and 'smart enough to realize their corpo-we're one big family-speak is total BS' ?
There’s a difference between intellectually understanding it, versus actually seeing yourself tossed aside and cast out, while knowing that all the other cogs are already back in motion and pretty much fully adjusted to your absence.
For many Googlers, this is their one-and-only company so they actually have no frame of reference, including no frame of reference to notice the company culture was shifting over the past decade-ish.
You can try to participate less. It's also work, but for some people, it's better than the corporate environment.
Keep your expenses under control. (That alone can be hard to do if you're relatively successful in tech, so I mention it because it's something to really think about.) Network in real life to find projects that have finite durations. Take some time between those projects and use that to both relax and develop new business. Go to a different city for a few days, maybe for an organized meetup or a conference (even if you don't attend) and try to meet people. You're double dipping here. Go sightseeing or something else entertaining, and then try to work a room.
> they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
Hopefully more the former than the latter. You're not getting married. You shouldn't be out to find a new family, and everyone hates that metaphor anyway. You probably will find people you do like, though. Since you're targeting well defined business, you don't have to live with that relationship if it doesn't pan out. You just need to get to your next cycle.
I've found a lot of people that I really do like. Some, I still do business with, and others I just sometimes get together with for dinner or a cocktail. We know we still like each other because there's no longer any money involved.
This is a defensive play also since you aren't all-in on one engagement. You can't get complacent just because you're on a W-2 and it all feels good, as this post illustrates.
I'm aware that this isn't an out-of-the-gate strategy. If you're gainfully employed now, save up. Even if you hate your job, use it to establish a stable position so that you can get out when you want to. Seriously consider what you think are the luxuries in life and whether you actually enjoy them or if you have been convinced that you do for some other purpose, like pleasing others, peacocking, or keeping up with the Joneses.
I think his statement could have benefited from and/or implicitly in the list of titles.
I certainly care very deeply about my people, and letting someone go is a last resort after trying to work things out. My boss cares that I care.. their boss.. we're numbers.
I have and this poster is spot on, he needs to go higher up the chain though. Investors hate employees, even founders. Founders are out to get rich. Executives are out to get rich but don't have what it takes to be founders. All of these people detest labor. They are the enemy you must work with to buy food. Treat them as such.
I feel like this is a very cynical way of looking at things.
I know some excellent people in leadership that have been promoted from lower level management jobs. I’m not sure the career change made them no longer care about people.
It's not that the career change makes them not care about people. It's that it's practically impossible to get into upper management without eating others. People who don't embrace their sociopathic tendencies don't make it - they get out-competed by those who do. The very occasional exception just proves the rule, and usually doesn't last in any case because once they get to that point, they still have to compete to remain there.
That doesn’t mean they don’t care though. Now this could come from spending time at a company where the executives were only ~3 levels of indirection from devs.
So the key thing here is that this didn't used to be how things were at Google.
People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.
If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.
The reality of one's lack of value to one's own employer is often baffling. It makes you wonder how anyone manages to stay employed at all, since apparently everyone is replicable and unimportant. I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?
Layoffs in particular are like this because they're planned very quickly by very small groups of people. Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale, so the people in charge do everything they can to maintain secrecy and minimize the time between people hearing about layoffs and the layoffs taking effect. This basically always translates to random-seeming decisions - priority 1 is to cut costs by X amount, choosing the right people to cut is secondary. This means that, for example, engineers that have received performance-based raises are punished since, on paper, they do the same job as lower-performing but lower-paid engineers.
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.
Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.
Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.
Any style of layoff is going to be bad for morale, but rumors floating around tank morale for as long as those rumors exist, and then moral takes another hit on the actual day. In that way it makes sense to just rip the Band-Aid off.
Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.
Managers don't have the kind of information necessary to plan layoffs that don't seem random. Anything they know is already being used for the usual hiring/promotion/compensation adjustment process.
It seems rather disappointing if typical management would make such impactful decisions so rapidly that their "on paper" analysis couldn't be made clever enough to consider more than a single variable.
Your relationship with your employer is no different than any other business relationship. You can do the bare minimum, just as there are many businesses that do the bare minimum toward their customers, and those businesses often have a low subsistence level of success; if you do the same, you may have the same level of success in your career.
An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.
Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.
This is a lesson that all senior developers know pretty well, that is why companies rather hire naive juniors, instead folks that already mastered how the game gets played, and cannot be sold on company mission, values, or whatever snake oil gets talked about during interview process.
And while I was still employed as a seasoned developer (before recently retiring) I felt it was my role to pass along some of my cynicism to the new hires and younger devs. Some of them seemed a little surprised to see me call bullshit in a group meeting. (Good luck to you boys and girls.)
Meanwhile, they all roll their eyes at the "jaded greybeard" advice. I know, because many years ago I was doing the eye rolling. I guess some lessons really can only be learned through experience.
Not all. You're talking about douchebag companies.
If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.
And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.
(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)
Unfortunately for you you work and live in an environment created by other companies and its likely that if your company succeeds its one acquisition or bad top level management play from invalidating everything you implicitly or even explicitly promised.
I have worked for "good companies" before - and they have a tendency to make money and be targets for bad companies, add enough zeroes and even the good guys sell.
Start by eliminating all publicy traded companies from the list, and you've increased the percentage of non douchebag company in your list by quite a bit.
"I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time."
Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.
> Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know.
This is frequently the case. I've worked at big employers (comparable in level of corporate-ness to Google if not absolute size) where the layoff process, roughly was:
1. Aggregate layoff target gets set and apportioned amongst functional leaders, then targets cascaded down to the line manager level.
2. Managers fill out a stack ranking spreadsheet for their team across a few metrics including a boolean "diversity" field[0]. There were many rumors about the "diversity field", most notably that anyone so flagged would not be fired, but so far as I could tell these were false (see point #4)
3. People to be fired are developed based on these lists (I.e., if a manager has to fire two people, then the two lowest-ranked employees per the spreadsheet are selected.)
4. HR does a meta-analysis of all to-be-fired employees, ensuring that a disproportionate number of employees from protected classes are not impacted. If too many are, then some of the next-lowest-ranked employees are selected to be fired in their stead.
As far as I could tell, the only part of the process where any sort of individual, human consideration was occurring was maybe at the line manager level if they decided to tweak the stack rankings based on who they felt deserved to be protected. And then, to the extent that happens, you have all the problems with bias and favoritism that come into play.
0 - I realize this is probably controversial, but I saw it with my own eyes.
> layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more
In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
> - LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.
> Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:
• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a
facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ-
ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;
• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either
between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment
and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin-
gle site of employment; or
• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more
full-time workers at a single site of employment
I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.
Plant closings involving 50 or more employees during a 30-day period.
California law has:
Plant closure affecting any amount of employees. Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. Relocation of at least 100 miles affecting any amount of employees. Relocation of a call center to a foreign country regardless of the percentage of workforce affected.
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.
Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).
There's no such thing as a protected group in US law - a protected class means a certain property of someone that employment decisions can't depend on, not a value of that property.
First, I'll say it is pretty common to use the terms interchangeably. I don't think anyone was confused by what I wrote, or that your "clarification" was in any way helpful. See, for example, these legal groups using the term "protected group" in relation to US employment law:
Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:
On the contrary, the ultimate burden of proving that discrimination against a protected group has been caused by a specific employment practice remains with the plaintiff at all times (Watson v Fort Worth Bank & Trust, 487 US 977 - Supreme Court 1988[0])
Companies in the US have been blatantly discriminating against some classes for years, and now must turn around and blatantly discriminate against other classes now (based on the current ‘anti-DEI’ stance). Racism and sexism in hiring in Europe and Asia has always been a thing, and quite blatant too.
it’s also a bit baffling that someone who’s been at the company longer than myself could have an advantage simply for being born before me, or for applying before me.
Is work performance not a key deciding factor? One could argue that’s absurd.
I don’t think the way it’s done in the U.S. is “right”, but i don’t think what you listed is right either.
Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.
If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.
Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.
The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.
>Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.
But since this subthread is discussing LIFO layoffs, the problem is that generally the last in is also the lowest paid - not always of course - but if so it means that to hit your operating cost point you might need to reduce more people than you would if you could pick and choose.
Thank you for sharing this important information. What does a company in the Netherlands do when an employee is underperforming? Do they get "PIP'd" like Amazon? Then, eventually let go with some standard severance package?
I can't talk about the Netherlands but if it's like France: the process is very different in the case of layoffs, where you want to reduce the workforce for economical reasons (e.g. shrinking revenues), and firing an individual employee. In the first case employees are not let go on the basis of the performances.
Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.
Yes and no, as it is a difficult process because employer needs to prove it is not their fault that employee is not performing. To begin with you need to collect data over time, so pip is kind of a choice you’d go through to start collecting detailed info, then it might be that a simple course could help solve this if it is a knowledge based issue, then maybe there is another job in the company the employee could switch to, etc. Without any doubt employers do not like the process, it is easier to eliminate positions instead because it is not technically firing.
If it’s the rule, everyone knows it. There is no guessing about randomness or hidden variables, and ultimately less favoritism than a line manager coming up with a stack ranking.
Looking at the larger picture, what otherwise tends to happen is that older people get pushed out. Then we have a massive issue of them ending up unemployed because nobody wants to hire them. This is compounded by the retirement age being pushed further and further away.
It's not about being fair to the individual, it's about producing a better outcome for society. In this case, saving money on welfare (that's also in great measured pooled across society, not an individual account).
Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.
Then again, if we did have a random lottery that required all employees (up to and including the CEO) to participate, then perhaps we'd see fewer layoffs...
This was more than a decade ago, so I doubt they care that much, and if you want to accuse me of being a liar, please have the integrity to just say that.
ok, and also "big thieves hate little thieves." Very-well paid executives (stock) remove very well paid employees (salary) and benefit from the actions. This is an old situation in industrial business -- the high tech crowd are filled with self-grandeur and do not believe it, on a large scale IMHO.
The part here too is ‘valuable to whom’. If they can saddle the middle manager or director with the same responsibilities/expectations, while cutting 10% (say) of the costs - guess what they are going to do.
Is it ultimately short sighted? Probably. But good luck connecting point A and point B in these situations when everyone is thinking quarter to quarter.
On the contrary, being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live, but it's also not really something most people will ever be able to avoid. I don't at all buy into the idea that somehow pretending the situation isn't shitty is somehow more virtuous or fulfilling; what you call a "shitty attitude" sounds more like "being realistic about how one's work is valued" to me.
> being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live
That is literally the only way to live. Disaster stalks us an is only ever one misstep away (sometimes literally). In rare instances people can even just fall over and die.
In the sense that there should be food and shelter for everyone, even poor people; strictly speaking I think most countries have already agreed to that. Although how well that gets implemented is open to a lot of debate. But beyond that everything can always change at a moments notice.
I've spent several decades writing software. Got laid off 1-2 times per decade.
I still tried doing a good job every day, and feel very good about that.
To me, being realistic about the risk of losing my job at any time means having enough money that I can be unemployed for 6-12 months.
The major way good programmers get jobs is by being recommended by people they've worked with at previous companies. That doesn't happen if you deliberately do as little good work as you can get away with.
My "shitty attitude" comment is maybe more a personal philosophy that something universal. But I do not want to spend each work day being bitter and resentful. You may intend to punish your shitty employer, but I think you're mostly poisoning your own mind.
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last year or so where a company announces a significant layoff, saying it needed to let go of "underperforming employees" or similar wording. I've been in this industry for a long time, experienced several layoffs, but this way to announce a layoff (publicly calling-out "underperforming employees") feels new to me. It also feels shady - like, announcing to the industry, "Don't hire these losers we just got rid of. LOL"
> Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause?
No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.
If you do only the minimum necessary to not get fired, then wouldn’t you be the person that needs to be fired the next time the the budget is cut, since you are the lowest ROI of all, all other things equal?
In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.
In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.
People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
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, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.
It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.
It might be too late now, but I've successfully negotiated (before signing) retention deals like this to be pro-rated in the event of non-voluntary termination. It's perfectly reasonable for exactly this reason, and companies have no legitimate reason to deny it.
Agreed, this is/should always be the deal basically - "here's a bonus so you stay while we transition" is the only reason many folks stay post aquisition. It should not be revokable, especially last minute.
To me its a massive red flag that Google would promise a cash bonus 2 years in the future, they could have given stock with an appropriate vesting schedule for retention. All the retention deals I have seen were done like this, only for the very short term (less than 6 months) a cash bonus makes sense.
You should consult a lawyer about this. You might be SOL but if this happened to several people, you might be able to show the company didn't act in good faith because there's a pattern of people about to receive their bonus being laid off. Layoffs aren't meant to work that way.
Generally layoffs involve someone who doesn't know who you are picking names almost at random from a spreadsheet. Management may fight for certain people to stay. Then legal and HR get involved and look through the layoff list to see if the chosen employees are problematic. For example, if the layoffs include too many people from protected classes, which opens them up to being sued. For example, if your company is 20% women but the layoffs are 50% women, that's going to be an issue.
Avoiding paying substantial retention bonuses can work the same way, if a pattern can be shown.
A simple letter from a lawyer probably won't do anything. Large companies are prepared for that.
For anyone who does come across this, here's my best advice: if you are acquired and your new employment contract includes a retention bonus, you want that contract to say that the retention bonus is payable unless:
1. You leave voluntarily within that period; or
2. You are terminated with cause within that period.
Yes as a person who had such a retention bonus before (from Google even) to me this seems rather cut and dry. Usually such bonuses are a mix of cash and RSUs, and set over a 3-4 year period. And are often also based on a perception of what the employees existing options were in the startup that they came from.
IMHO they should absolutely be paid out the whole amount of the remaining retention bonus at layoff. On the principle of things alone. Can't speak to the legality of it.
That's awful and the most amazing thing you could do now is get together with those ex-coworkers or similar people and compete with Google in whatever business domain it was that made them acquire your former employer.
Because, having been through the acquisition process at Google myself, my general cynical take is: Google acquires companies to get rid of them, to stop them from competing and not to "add your uniqueness to their collective."
Keeping employees on retention bonuses is a way, in aggregate, of stopping them from going off and inventing something that eats their bottom line.
You should look into legal action. And failing that, compete with them.
You guys should have a consultation with a lawyer. It's a little cheaper if you guys just use one lawyer to go after Google for the retention bonus if there is a case ;)
I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:
- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
It's probably an employment law. My wife's from Tunisia and over there all employment is basically contractual. If your employer lets you go they owe you some kind of fee, and I actually believe the amount might be the remainder of the contact, I'm not sure.
Germans are so expensive to hire and maintain that companies have offshored German manufacturing to the United States.
(... And God bless Germany for it. Trickle-down theory doesn't work in general in capitalism but it does work in labor negotiations: every right Germans secure for themselves is a right an American company employing Germans and other countries has to abide by when doing business, and it incentivizes the company to minimize their paperwork by treating everyone to the German standard).
Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.
They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult."
I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service.
That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."
I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.
Twitter generated $5bn in revenue in 2021. Since Musk bought it, it's been on a rapid decline. In 2024 it generated $2.5bn in revenue... 50% of its pre-Musk numbers (46% with inflation)!
Worse, it continues to trend downward.
Most sane tech CEOs would prefer to keep their upward trend and $5+ billion revenue rather than saving $1 billion to lose $2.5 billion and invert their slope.
Also, most layoffs don’t cause huge cuts to advertising spend on their platform because of personal spite or political reasons. The product for all intents and purposes as an advertiser is the exact same.
Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had.
My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.
i think the total reduction was about 2/3 if memory serves? so 1 in 3 is that number you'd be looking at for "actually useful". heavy air quotes on that.
> Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
On some level yes. With the massive disparity in who owns the markets, your argument is basically “Is google doing a good job of making the rich richer?”. Hiring H1Bs and offshoring while firing American labor is not a good look.
Now take it one step further. Google and other large megacorps are merely the inevitable outcome of capitalism running to its logical conclusion. So the real argumenmt is, “Is capitalism doing a good job of making the rich richer?”, and the obvious question for the rest of us then is, why keep an economic system like that around?
It's a question of what kind of business Google is/wants-to-be.
The one it claimed to be, in the past, with a broader holistic mission, claiming to attract the world's brightest to make information accessible? Using its hoard of cash to do a bunch of neat stuff and hire really smart people do it?
Or is it what we always suspected all along, a cynical money printing machine that turns ad impressions into shareholder value and nothing else?
It's always been a mix of both. Those of us who worked there certainly saw in the inside the gradual transition of the internal discourse from "justifying B to support A" to "who cares about A."
They can do whatever they want, they're a private business. But they still trade on a certain reputation, and have the advantage of a quasi-monopoly status in many things.
I would hope that advancing them any kind of good will as any kind of "special" company (which our profession tended to do, before) and muting criticisms is just over now.
They built their money printing machine in part by swallowing competition and exterminating it.
> What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0?
Take responsibility for the people they hired and have an ounce of human decency and empathy?
Don't need extra people? Fair enough. Then stop hiring! No one is pointing a gun to their head telling them to hire. Layoffs (for reasons unrelated to people's job performance) is such an asshole thing to do because with a competent/non-sociopathic management it's completely unnecessary, as you can just do a hiring freeze, and your headcount will reduce by itself through normal attrition.
The management of a lot of corporations acts this way, prioritizing "shareholder value" over people while giving exuberant bonuses to themselves, and then they make a surprised pikachu face when people hate them and individuals like Luigi Mangione come out of the woodwork and take matters into their own hands.
Remember in 2014 when Nintendo was having huge financial troubles? What did the CEO do? Did he fire half of his people? No, he kept his people, halved his own salary and kept going. And this was when they were losing massive amounts of money, and not breaking revenue records making 100 billion in profit. That is how a CEO and a leader should act, and not like the sociopath CEOs we have nowadays.
Google's strategy, traditionally, was basically what you're describing (modulo the "until their net income is 0" part). Because their belief about engineering was if you get all the smart people and give them some creative freedom, they invent Gmail. And Tensorflow. And Kubernetes.
This has changed. But it's worth noting it is a change. Larry and Sergey retained controlling stakes in Google's IPO specifically because they intended to build a company that didn't operate like other companies... In essence, they didn't plan to give two shits about shareholder capital, they expected the money would work itself out if they just kept making brilliant products people wanted.
But, the founders have left and Google is now just another company.
Yes, and they're still hiring too, while doing this at the same time.
As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people.
But the layoff process has been sadistic.
And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff.
This is incorrect thinking. Over-hiring is very easily corrected. You are weighting the 'human' in human resources too much. It's 'resources' that gets the emphasis.
While the manner of layoff, role of layoff and person to lay off all seem foolish, profits do not mean that layoffs are a bad idea. You should hire people you need and if you want to good in the world, donate to the most effective charities (in QALYs/£).
ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.
Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.
I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).
I will argue the contrary. Companies with US mindset makes us think that.
Countries with social safety net have a better way of handling it. Even in the country where I am now living, Hong Kong, which is very liberal, half of the companies let you have 1 month of notice period.
> It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer.
+1.
While there is an imaginable "victim" viewpoint, it is a job for pay with a clear employment contract that was agreed to before employment start, between the Employee and the Corporation, including local and state and federal laws, permitting EXACTLY THIS type of termination.
Further, corporations can't be seen to Favor one Googler vs another. Especially since there is NO GUARANTEE this Ex-Googler isn't one of those AR-15 toting weirdos who condone violence against their now ex-coworkers .. so allowing them futher access to the (huge) universe that Google owns and controls .. its corporate workings .. even for an additional 5 seconds after termination, can be reasonably seen to be Foolish .. so they would cut ties Immediately.
Honestly, the problem is not that there are layoffs, the problem is that the process sucks.
you don't need to fire this person immediately - you can talk to him, wind his operations down and then let him go. I.e. in Germany it's often half a year between announcing a layoff and anything happening (besides other stuff like making sure the layoff applies to the newest people first). Even if you don't want such a long period - talking to him and giving him a few weeks to wind down at your firm and starting to search for a new job seems perfectly reasonable.
What happens if he wreaks havoc on your firm out of revenge? Really? Happens practically never. If it happens, sue him.
ofc this process applies to reasonable layoff - if it's for something egregious (breaking the law) you can and should fire him immediately.
I have been in a similar situation, on a Saturday morning right after a farewell for a colleague and planning for next big release and timelines, late Friday.
I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).
At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.
No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.
Well not so much I guess.
Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out.
But I don't know if I will still see it coming.
I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.
I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.
I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.
I hope people can find hope here.
Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.
Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.
> Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too.
I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.
Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated. How many of your middle school, high school and even college buddies do you still have a relationship with?
I think there's some stigma with confronting the fact that relationships are just ephemeral. We are social creatures in the sense that we can cooperate with each other on a task laid in front of us, but once that task is done, we mostly tend to drift apart onto the next task with another group of people. And that's okay. We're only weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others. The quality of a relationship is in no way measured by how long it endured.
You are right but I think there's a fundamental issue that many people think that 'as long as I keep showing up and doing good work, the powers that be will look out for me'.
By default work relationships work as you advertised. It needs conscious effort on your (and everyone's) part to reframe these relationships as something that's between you and your friends, on your own terms. Consciously hanging out together, talking to each other, doing projects together outside the context of work. Social relationships need to be built up with effort. The company will do this for you, because they enjoy the benefits of a crew that works well together, but if they put in the effort, the relationship will belong to them. You will think that 'I could get slightly more at this other place, but I like my colleagues here', realizing you'd lose the social net if you changed jobs.
I think a huge problem with nerds (like me and probably you), is that we don't understand the fundamental power dynamics that shape society, because we lack the inherent cunning and weren't forced to face down enough hardship to have our illusions shattered until later in life.
Truth is, if there are rules, somebody needs to enforce them. If something nice happens, it does because somebody makes it happen. These things are mental abstractions designed to make your life predictable, but like every abstractions, sometimes things happen that were supposed to be impossible, because the system doesn't work the way you think it does.
> Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context
I think this is very true, and with college buddies it's very different from workmates. Because in college, you are with them at classes, but then you hang out with them between classes, then you meet them in cafeteria, then you meet them at a party or in the student club, then you meet them at dormitory etc. All these contexts are different and that helps to build more diverse relationship, which is not focused on a single place.
At work, in my experience I'll meet them in the office and then maybe wave a hand on the way out of the parking lot, if ever.
> Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated.
Just being far away makes maintaining relationships really hard. Introverted people rely on being dragged into socialising, which goes poof not being in the same place.
My wife is really good at keeping friends even those she didn't see in years. She has many such friends and she speaks to them over video chat. I have a few long term friends like that but not so close.
I see where you're coming from, but relationship need some amount of contact to survive.
Work forces you to be in contact, if the majority of your time is spent elsewhere due to changing job, or city, or gym, or having kids.. it's a blow.
I try to keep in touch with ex co-workers I cared about, but we live in different countries, at different stages in life, with different priorities, and it's hard to say the relationship is well.
That doesn't mean the relationships weren't built as they should, IMHO, they are just different kinds of relationships.
First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.
Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.
In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.
> the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime
Good point. I wonder how much in-office work contributes to this. Because if you are trapped inside an office building for 8+ hours with essentially randoms, most people will start getting to know each other at some point, because there is no other choice, and after work and commute there is no time left for anything else.
8 hours if you're lucky. Make that 10 if you're not because of breaks.
So the 40 hour work week gives rather little time to properly socialize, even less if you have family obligations esp. kids, especially when people move around as much as they do now.
Corporations like Google certainly encourage a focus on in-group relationships between employees to reduce churn (i.e. increase stakes for disgruntled employees who might consider quitting). The entire idea of having scheduled leisure activities, daycare, laundry services, etc all provided either by the company or facilitated through the company encapsulates current employees and gently excludes former employees, which likely helps reduce their ability to spread or air negative sentiments following their departure (which apparently can be fairly rapid, which also means fired employees will be stunned and possibly in shock for the limited duration where they may still have access to other employees directly).
There's a reason the "employee retention" behavior of companies like Google and Facebook during the web 2.0 craze was often compared to actual cults.
This is a wild read for someone that has spent the bulk of their career as a "mercenary" for small to mid-size largely non-tech companies (e.g., their product wasn't purely technical) and no matter what the official company Koolaid line was, you always know you are one "restructuring" away from being made redundant, the company doesn't give a crap about you or your contributions, and you very much are a "cog." I've been blessed to work for a company or two where this was less the case than others, and more or less bought into their own culture hype, but it's still fundamentally this way, the relationship between employer and employee. It's sad and interesting to me to see what sounds like an experienced developer for such a large company coming to this realization all at once. Given what I've read and learned about Google layoffs since ~2022 this seems pretty bog standard large company stuff.
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.
I disagree. This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated. It’s perfectly alright and valid to be sad about losing the ability to express that part of yourself to make a living. The whole point of the post is that yes, the company doesn’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line, but the author did.
> This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated.
I think you can have a great time and build good relationships with teammates while still realizing you are a cog in the machine.
The way author writes the blog, you'd think they were working on the first Moon flight or the Manhattan project, whereas the reality is they were working on some CSS spec at Google, which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now.
Of course you're free to discuss. You're belittling the author's expression of grief because their job was 'routine maintenance' of 'some CSS spec (...) which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now' and I'm saying they're entitled to their grief regardless of how you feel about the job's content.
Yes, they're a cog, as almost all of us are, and it would have been better for their own sake to realise that, but losing something you enjoy still sucks.
You're criticizing people for caring so much because you think the best that employment can be is transactional money in exchange for competent work?
Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
(Not that you'd want them to be upset if it ever had to end, but you'd want the goodness part to happen? Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?)
> Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
From the companies perspective: absolutely! If I can get people who will put in 10x for 1x of pay, nothing like it!
From employees perspective: Care for your work like a good construction worker does. They don't cut corners, speak-up when they spot issues and put in their body and mind. But they don't come back to the site at 11PM to take one more look at it (I do sometimes because solving the programming problem is fun, not because my corporate overlords will pat me on the back). It is indeed important to make sure that the building is strong but remember that you don't own it.
I also work in a big tech company. We had bunch of layoffs, some based on performance (which often was a lie), some random. In all instances, the company made a lot of money and kept hiring at a high pace.
At that stage, I know I'll be laid off eventually for one reason or another, I just don't know when. My partner tells me that I should quit on my own terms so I'm not depressed when it happens. But my salary is very competitive, and I'll get severance too. Still, I fear this moment and it's really hard to feel invested in the company. If it wasn't for my colleagues, I think I'd be slacking, waiting for my time.
It can be shock to discover how little the company as an entity, and its upper management in particular, actually values you (or any other employee.) Employees are indeed cogs in a megacorp, and the relationship is transactional. The company demands loyalty because it can and because it is profitable, not because it will be reciprocated.
When it comes down to it everyone has their own interests as a priority so if a manager is told to let folks go they will gladly do it to keep their own job.
We pay a lot because we need these people who are capable of making tough decisions (copying everyone else by overhiring at a premium during low interest rates), they can't be kept accountable for their own mistakes like the rest of us (fired myopically as a sacrificial lamb during a down-market because investors demand executives copy everyone else (they're invested in everyone else))
> Google laid off hundreds of employees from its platforms and devices unit, the team responsible for the Android operating system, Pixel phones and Chrome browser. The move, first reported by the Information, comes months after Google offered voluntary buyouts to all 20,000 employees in the division, signaling deeper structural changes at the tech giant.
Correction, they did not offer buyouts to the entire division, they offered the ability to apply for a buyout to US-only employees, and application did not guarantee you’d get it.
You’re always a cog. Don’t treat a job with passion unless you’re getting something more than a salary from it - e.g. more professional networking, expanded skill set for your next role, etc. This seems to happen too often. Be invested in your career not the company you work for.
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.
As an ex-Googler I say: blessing in disguise. When working at a $MEGACORP it's easy to think there's barren wasteland out there beyond the walls, so it's scary. But that is very much not so. I get that opportunities to work on browsers are relatively few and far between, but if you can do something else, try working for a smaller company which treats you more like a human being, and less like a replaceable cog.
Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
I want to get enough time at $MEGACORP to have FU money. After that, my fear is a lot of smaller companies are working on thing even more boring, but with less scale. Gluing a domain-specific API to a few LLMs sounds boring. I got into tech because I liked learning it, but a lot of it is getting repetitive.
No such thing as FU money. As you get more you want more, or if you don't then your spouse does. There is such a thing as "I can tolerate a 3-6 month job search no problem and not jump at the first opportunity" money. It makes 90% of the difference, especially in the long run.
Lifestyle inflation is a known phenomenon which you (and your spouse) can choose to avoid if you prioritize it, not some immutable rule of nature.
If the treadmill of accumulation that lets someone believe "there's no such thing as enough" ever stops, I think they would be shocked at how quickly they realize what enough actually means.
Not necessarily. Nobody on HN knows OP’s finances. He might have extended family relying on him. He might have crippling student debt. He might have expensive health problems. Do you know? I don’t.
Also, not all Google employees make great money. People act as though you work there for 5 years and that automatically means you’re off to buy your third house in Monaco.
Point is, he might “manage his finances well” and still be on insecure footing.
Exactly. Plus I think we're forgetting a lot of Google employees are on visas, meaning they might have expenses both in the US and in their home country.
You may be correct in general, but in this particular case I do not see how Adam should have any difficulties in finding a very good paying job at another company.
The finances are important but possibly not the first thing on their mind. The first thing on their mind is likely how their entire world has just changed around them, beyond their control.
People who left voluntarily can prepare for the lifestyle change, and maybe they can objectively look at this and say it's not all bad. For people who are laid off, it hits really hard in a gut wrenching way. The sense of despair about everything else comes first, the money part of it might not come until all the severance is exhausted.
outside of having stupid money what percentage of people (excluding people living paycheck to paycheck) manage their finances well, especially in the first decade of their career? I’d ballpark that at 0.78%
being a realist ... I think in the US no one is (purposely) thought basic financial literacy and it spills over into probably the first decade of working life
First, this is pretty rough what happened to the person. My condolences.
Second, completely tangential to the content of the blog post: Was anyone else surprised by the number of comments/"mentions"/likes/reposts? I haven't seen so much activity on a single blog post in years. Normally, blog posts that accept comments have 10 or less comments. This one has hundreds.
It looks like a Bluesky integration which will get a lot more engagement than a blog post. The author was a "CSS advocate" at Google, which implies a strong emphasis on networking.
Their blog looks like it's integrated with Bluesky, where they have 15K followers, so that's where the activity is coming from. It's not uncommon for high-profile devs to get that much engagement there.
I keep seeing this pop up everywhere. I’m sure he’s a great guy, but the level of attention he’s getting is massively disproportionate. A lot of great people have been laid off recently!
If think the attention is in proportion, people are reacting just like when a body has an inflammation. If a person of _this_ calibre can be fired, and not even fired, disposed as a used-up tissue, it is a sign of times.
It’s always sad to see people lose their jobs, but it’s telling how often it’s ex-Googlers posting about layoffs. Feels like a lot of the shock is just realizing they’re just as replaceable and as much of a "cog in the machine" as everyone else. Google spent years selling the idea that it was special, but this feels like a real coming back down to earth moment for the employees.
The OP strikes me as being quite immature. Like a first breakup or something. I think it's less about Google selling themselves as being special and more that people like OP have been led to believe they are special. A lot of them have been treated like royalty: super privileged lives, only experiencing the nice bits of society, top education, then straight into a 6-figure job where you get to be part of a special club with a prestigious google.com email address etc. It's going to be a shock to anyone to have that taken away abruptly when you're a decade or more into this lifestyle.
Most people have to go through shit like this at some point in their life. Most don't get to reap in internet sympathy by the bucketload, though. For some people it really actually sucks. OP is likely a millionaire already, could just take time off to adjust and reflect, then accept one of the numerous job offers that will be on the table. They might even end up doing something useful with their lives instead of advertising.
I hate to say it...but this is how working for a company works. It's more prevalent at the largest ones and less so at the smallest ones, but it's just the norm.
In the US, it's at-will employment. You can leave, or be fired, at any time - for virtually any reason. (As long as it doesn't break discrimination laws) Investors only care about quarterly returns, and so you have to expect a publicly-traded company may let people go for that reason alone.
They're not your friends. They're not your family. You exchange hours of your life for money. That's all. It sucks, but that's just how it is. Google is no exception, it is one company like literally all others.
Weirdly, Amazon had far more compassion than Google here. When my role got eliminated at Amazon, I got an email at 5am PT to my personal email telling me that my role was eliminated. It also told me what I would still have access to, and how to access them from the outside.
Crucially, it said that I would still have limited corp access until 1pm, and then told me which things I still had access to.
I got on my work machine, and found that all of my previous emails had been erased (or at least blocked from my view), so I couldn't download an email archive or otherwise see anything. I also couldn't send emails externally anymore. Most of my systems access had been cut off where I could have downloaded or exported anything "secret" as per the email.
But they did let me send emails internally. I still had slack access to affinity groups. So I was able to shoot off a bunch of goodbye emails and slack messages.
And true to their word, at 1pm, my laptop rebooted and I was then locked out. But at least I got to say goodbye and share my personal email and linkedin with a bunch of people, and they were able to send me "so sorry to see you go" replies, which was nice.
It is a chrome developer. His claims that he was raising the quality level of the web are particularly hilarious given that he worked at google. Maybe the salary of google blinds people into believing this.
Don't underestimate the efficiency of intra-corporate propaganda directed at its own employees. There's a reason why they maintain those huge HR departments.
Also the content did not fit my Galaxy S24's screen width when used in portrait. The author's previous work in the Chrome team is visible. "The shoemaker's children go barefoot" as they say. :)
exceptionally poor to the point of being unreadable, on safari. in chrome it works perfectly for me. i believe it is due to the bluesky feed, seeing as the author's own content is really short.
i'll have to figure out how to block bluesky. the blockers focus on privacy stealing feeds like facebook etc.
It sucks and especially the abruptness, but I find it hard to muster sympathy. Google employees receive some of the highest renumeration in the industry. Combined with the prestige of Google on his resume he'll land back on his feet in no time.
It's still hard. Maybe he or she has had better luck and opportunities than you, but that doesn't mean they don't suffer just as much when bad things happen.
We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
> We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
> This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
Everyone thinks that when they're angry or upset with someone. Ultimately people are people, and everyone deserves sympathy when bad things happen to them. Note that i don't always accomplish this, but I certainly think it's worth trying.
Sorry, but I simply don't agree. You're overgeneralizing again with "everyone thinks..." but no, you will trivially find folks who believe that someone (as an example) who murders or facilitates the murder of innocent people does not deserve sympathy when they suffer the consequences of their actions.
It is not true that all rational people believe that all people deserve sympathy for all causes of suffering.
If someone much richer and with a better career than me got punched in the face i would still see that as suffering.
I don’t know why someone’s situation being better means they can’t be suffering
If you haven't seen Argyle's gui-challenges series, it's some of the best content I've found for learning how to use a variety of cutting-edge CSS features. I thought he was one of the best voices for the Chrome team.
A company with $350B in annual Revenue, $200B in Gross Profit, $100B in Cash in the bank lays off a few hundred people making a few hundred thousand dollars a year each, the savings amount to rounding errors. It's hard to understand what these Tech companies are trying to accomplish with the never ending rolling layoffs other than to engender fear in the workforce. It's like all that Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting stuff a few years back broke the collective brains of the C-Suite and they decided they just cannot tolerate labor having any sort of bargaining power at all and needed to mete out punishment to put workers back in their place.
self fulfilling prophecy though, because the people who worked at Google but don't tell you about it, won't tell you about it, so you don't know they did so you're only going to hear about it from the ones you hear about it from
To pick a different topic, I know a couple of vegans. Some of them are militant about it, others simply are not. You'd never know that about them unless it really came up.
"You don't need to ask, they'll tell you" - a claim that the people who work there will brag about it.
And while there may be some truth to it, keep in mind that you hear about the ones that will tell you, you don't hear about most of the ones that don't.
I wonder if there is some megacorp regression to the mean going on here. Google holds itself up as somehow special, and I think that it's right to be cynical about that today. I also think there was a golden age of sorts, back when real-world distributed systems were much more fringe, and Google was a legitimate trailblazer. Then, the spreadsheet number crunchers come in, and the elves leave Middle Earth[1].
This article could have been interesting if they talked about why they ever thought they weren't just a cog. Like what cognitive blinders did they have on? Does Google have a unusually effective "we're all a family" type of internal propaganda?
A potentially unique feature of Google (at least pre-pandemic/McKinsey) is that it cultivated communities of people in a particular discipline despite being spread across the world.
When I first met Adam, we were both UX Engineers. We'd all gather in NYC in the spring and in the Bay Area in the fall for internal conferences. Adam lives in Seattle. There are plenty of people who adore him who aren't geographically close enough to meet for the proverbial beer. I suspect that's also true for the connections he made outside of Google.
Probably because most interactions were on company time. Because of course if the relationships were outside of work, then changing jobs would have little effect.
Relationships here might also mean professional relationships.
I think many of those can still survive a job transition, but some of them may rely on the fact that he is on the Chrome team doing Chrome things. Those relationships would now be moot (professionally).
I guess the lesson is: don’t get emotionally attached to your job. Despite all the “we’re like a family” talk, at the end of the day, you’re just an employee. Never forget that.
We all want to be seduced though, we all want to believe we are special, we all want to believe our work has value and we anthropomorphize the company on the other end of the relationship, believing it's a partnership.
Protect yourself, but it's a sad way to spend 40-60 hours of your life, constantly reminding yourself that your job is just a paycheck and not putting yourself into your work.
Not sure how so many can do it and be motivated. My current strategy is compartmentalization, and it all just seems unsustainable long term, cause in the back of my mind it all seems so empty.
Offboarding is when any illusion of your non-cog relationship to a company is belied. You're suddenly a virus that the immune response is trying to destroy. Your presence is a threat to the host that must be eliminated. On the one hand you wish companies would be a little more human about it: it's me, I'm not a criminal! On the other hand, they've got security controls that almost mandate a swift and pitiless execution.
Search helps people find information.
YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created.
Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
I didn't say they were better. Just that without Google Translate, I doubt you would have had a much harder time in your recent trip to Japan because you could have used them, and they aren't particularly worse :-).
It's not just about whether you yourself use Google Translate, it's that - much more than anywhere else I've ever travelled - Japanese people will regularly use Google Translate to communicate with you, usually by typing or speaking into their tablet and then showing you the machine translation.
They are actively enshittifying search and YouTube. So if these things are good for society, and Google is making them worse , it feels like we shouldn't be giving them too much credit.
He did, he worked at Google. What is your contribution to society? Some language reinventing the wheel for the 500th time? Google created a dozen of those alone and they don't even make the footnote of the contributions list.
i am also extremely pissed at his complete lack of self awareness... of course, i am sad for what happened to him. but holly shit. do you think you were saving the world or what? you were working on a glorified spyware.
Ironically you're statistically very likely to be writing this comment in a browser based on chrome.
And Chrome really helped save us from an Internet "embraced and extended" by Microsoft. We were heading for Microsoft succeeding in their (not first) attempt at owning the Internet.
Well, two points to that: 1) If this person doesn't use Google products, then they are going out of their way to avoid Google. They are then very aware that their values are overruling technical benefits. 2) Surely if they are this invested in Firefox then they know who's been funding Firefox for years?
I'm typing this from within Firefox, which I switched to over the adblocking changes. But I'd say that claiming Google has contributed nothing to society is silly.
There's also the AI stuff with transformers, running the deepmind work with alphafold, alphago, alphazero. And GSOC.
And the papers on bigtable, spanner, mapreduce, etc… bootstrapping modern big data, spawning many opensource copycats.
And Android? I used a linux based Nokia N900 before Android, but clearly the world preferred Android.
Hell, Google Search itself was once a paradigm shifting improvement over alternatives.
I definitely think that there's a difference in kind about what Google has done and what Microsoft attempted to do.
Microsoft wanted everyone on MSN instead of the Internet. They bullied their browser to be the only one, and then kept it crippled. They tried to own the scripting language (VBScript) of the Internet.
I'm going to try right now: Oh, looks like I can visit any website I want with Chrome. Or Chromium. Or now IE also using Chromium.
Google is of course still driven by capitalism, not altruism. But when you look at their history they've in the vast majority of cases done the right thing arguably for the wrong reason.
And that's because Google's incentives have been aligned differently. Microsoft earns money from Windows and Windows related services (very broad here, where I include Office). Until Bing, every time someone used the Internet instead of native apps, Microsoft basically lost money. Definitely lost power.
Every time someone spends more time on the Internet, Google earns more money, statistically. So Google, in a complete opposite to Microsoft, has been incentivised to help people get onto the open web.
Yes, after Microsoft's surrender the Chromium market share is too big. And it's a problem. But at least thanks to Apple you cannot make a website that only works on Chrome. Especially since Chrome on iPhone uses WebKit, not Chromium, because of Apple app rules.
Another problem with Google is that some important opensource projects have a large set of maintainers be Google employees. But the alternative is that they… not contribute? Didn't we say that big companies should give back to opensource? But of course they'll work on what they need. Though there will be a large overlap.
It's kind of a first world problem that the open source (apache license) Kubernetes has "too many google employees" as contributors.
During Microsoft's domination, this was not the problem. This was not the problem at all.
What can you not do, or need to special case, with Safari+AWS?
Android, OK there Google asserts control. Not total control (see any Samsung phone), but a lot.
A strong but constant reminder that companies are not your family or friends despite what will say the corporate bullshit.
You should never invest more of your time and energy than what is expected for your position. And keep your side activities and hobbies as personal things using your personal email and accounts.
This is also why you should not owe fidelity to your company and don't hesitate to switch if you have a good opportunity because on its side the company will not hesitate.
Everything might be good and you can generate money, and still the day you are in a redundancy for whatever reason you will be worthing nothing to the company. Like that, just like a replaceable cog. And you will be badly handled because "it is the company policy and we can't do anything than being harsh in such a situation".
The worse is that usually the decision is non-sense but the one deciding is not the one that has to deal with the decision and with you. So you will try to argue, and they will try to invent reasons to rationalize the decision that is imposed on them also, you will try to contest, and they will become angry to have their bullshit called and will double down... And you will feel bad, not understand the situation.
The only thing I can tell you is the that if you are in such a situation is to not worry and go on, except in rare cases, for everyone I saw it happened, the event was finally for the best because the next step in their life was better in the end: better job, better salary, better project, being able to do what you always dreamed to like create a company or evolve your career.
I was laid off (as a founding engineer) nine years ago from a startup. It __still__ burns to this day.
There's a betrayal in there that is hard to let go. It was a catalyst for burnout and an overall vitriol for the entire tech industry that hasn't really let up to this day.
Luckily, I created a product that has given me financial freedom with zero employees. I don't think I'd have made it if I kept working for people.
Have you written anywhere about your product creation? I would like to create a product and it seems like there's a lot of unique things to get past. I'm looking for resources.
I have written about technical things (how I choose technologies, what to avoid, reasons I went from language X to Y, etc).
I never had any interesting social interactions from the blog/writing and the internal pressure to keep it updated eventually wore me out, so I got rid of the blog.
I have considered distilling everything into a book, complete with a working application. I'm more interested in the technical aspects and I am unsure if it would be of much interest/use to people.
Layoffs are one thing, but to be cut off without any notice, that really sucks. I usually know months in advance that when I'll leave, so I'll have time to finish what I'm working on and train the people who will take over my responsibilities. It seems weirdly destructive for a company not to allow for that.
As for email, calendar etc, I think the lesson here is not to depend on anything from your employer. Keep everything under your own control, so you won't lose too much when you get fired.
I do live outside the US, but in another part of this discussion I was just taught not to assume that reports of unhealthy working conditions coming from the US represent the norm.
Got my role terminated when I was taking care of my father in India.
Worked a research institute in Germany, used my vacation days and kept writing code to improve the project. I was the sole developer.
For a month, I worked remotely , then i get 3 notices for not coming to office. In a week, I was terminated for not showing up in office, though i was working remotely.
In a shock, accepted the mutual termination agreement. No severance, access cut to email/chat.
Not related to the layoff (I'm very sad for what author is experiencing), but the blog looking is very great and functional. Looking on the page code I see that is using a CSS framework that I'm never heard off Open Pros (https://open-props.style/), looks like a much better solution than Tailwind and friends. I see that a components collection is the development too Open Props UI (https://open-props-ui.netlify.app/)
I didn’t see one mention of AI related feature or talk they were working on.. that’s the real reason. If you’re not wasting time peddling some AI feature that nobody will ever use or give a second look, you are not onboard the hype train.
None of the people making these decisions care about the long-term best interest of the company. Sundar doesn't give a shit about Google's future, he is laser focused on what really matters to him and the people he reports to: the stock price. A big round of layoffs can juice the stock, and it's a nice way to keep the numbers going up in between industry events where they can show off deceptively edited product demos and knowingly lie about the capabilities of their current and future AI offerings.
To put it another way: Google doesn't want to be a software company anymore. Google does not care about making software, or products, or the people who make or use their products. Google wants to be a growth company where the stock price goes up by two-digit percentages every quarter. That is absolutely the only thing that Google cares about. Google has realized that the best way to make this happen is to commit securities fraud by lying to their investors about their products, and by drip-feeding layoffs to show that they're serious about their underlying financials. It's theater, playing pretend at being business people. The individual products are allowed to go about their business as long as they don't cost too much money, but Google doesn't want to make money by having good products that people love to use, Google wants to make money by being a hyper-growth unicorn again, and they will do anything at all to recapture that kind of growth even if they're slitting the throat of the company to do it.
Whether this attitude is good for Google or its users is left as an exercise to the reader.
It may be a bet that AI will reduce the need for developers. Even if it can only write boilerplate, boilerplate still has to be written and is time consuming, so if it were to remove 20% of time that needs to be sunk into a project, the work of 5 people can now be done by 4 (less if you account for the reduced coordination overhead).
Whether these savings actually play out and whether management has accurate expectations and metrics remains to be seen, given messaging that makes it sound like AI saves huge percentages of time, when it at best saves huge percentages of something that's actually only a small percentage of day to day work.
I’m sorry that this happened to him. There are innumerable ways to let go of people with dignity. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this treatment from Google. It will not be the last. Google is a great company with great people. Google is incompetent at handling layoffs. They could learn from banks on Wall Street. The banks do layoffs routinely and have a process that’s more empathetic than Google, and that’s not a high bar.
Sorry to hear. I have never worked for Google or any corporation of that scale but I got my fair share of a harsh layoff two years ago (at a reasonably small company). The company used to run a hybrid shift, with specific days for remote and onsite. We got a mail (from the higher ups) a day before saying no employee should show up at the office the next day, under the guise of a fumigation exercise. The next day shows up, I am in a meeting with my colleagues (a regular standup), a fraction of my teammates receive an email with an meeting invite link. We join the meeting, our mics and cameras were automatically turned off by the host/organizer, the CEO's face spotlit in the meeting, he then delivered the news in a very cold way, the meeting ended, we were logged out of all company accounts in the next 15 minutes, that was the last team meeting we had :)
Sounds like work colleagues should have a signal chat, or at least whatsapp, to stay in touch when someone suddenly disappears from the company. Not to take revenge or leak company secrets or anything like that, just to stay in touch and meet up for social events occasionally. If someone at work is my friend, that doesn't end when they're fired and I support them as much as I can in difficult times.
having been in your position a year ago, I can definitely sympathise :(
the one thing I can say (again, from experience with having worked for google while engaging with the open source world as part of my job) is that the relationships you have been building up might well survive the loss of your job, especially if your next job ends up being in the same general area. also, i can highly recommend starting a group chat with your ex-team, that was really good for all of us in the time following the layoff.
The author listed the tasks that were coming up for him at Google, and yet Google still let him go. It doesn’t matter what your role is or how important your tasks are, a company can always replace you. Management doesn’t care, because you’re just a cog in the machine.
Yep, it sucks. Speaking from experience - I was laid off a few years ago. I was sad my time ended, but my path forward was to leave SF with money and time to visit countries I'd always wanted to see.
It's a trend away from the post-WW2 "promise of lifetime employment". Over the decades, companies have crept toward "human autoscaling" so slow no one noticed. You're far from alone - every other company is doing it. Go see the numbers at https://layoffs.fyi . When the whole industry is doing something, companies must follow suit to stay alive.
Nurture your network! Keep being present on their feeds. Reach out to the ones on your team that you had personal relationships with. Some will shun you; it's not personal, they're ashamed and fearful. It is human nature, same as the company's behavior toward you is a company's nature.
Spend your 8-20 paid weeks agentic-coding (not vibe-coding) silly projects for your nieces and nephews. You'll come back stronger and more employable than ever.
Don't be sad to be kicked out. The boot that kicked you was attached to a Hills Hoist.
Human autoscaling. That's a good one. I mean it's not good.
We live in weird times. Companies are drowning in earnings. Their stock sky rockets. But they are unable, or not interested, to put people to work to grow their business. Because they are so big it distorts the entire economy. Because they are so big and so entrenched it's also hard to compete with them.
Less people makes the stock goes up?
And then AI too in the mix with many executives apparently believing it can just replace all the people. Who is going to buy the products then?
I have a feeling this is temporary. The wheel will turn and suddenly companies will hire like there's no tomorrow on some new shiny thing. It's gotta - right? Otherwise what?
It's not wasting energy if it genuinely helps you build products much more efficiently. Regardless of our feelings towards it, it is here and it's making a difference. You can either move with the times or be left behind.
I had the same feeling. The underlying message has merit, but the format felt very similar to a lot of the get-rich-quick landing pages. I had to edit some of the CSS to get through the page at all.
It's always really hard to be let go, especially when you were a successful person in the company. Sadly, companies choose the people to fire by some obscure means, mostly the money earned. I've been recently dismissed from work due to "reorganisation", and it really hit me hard in terms of psychological health. Please take care of yourself, do not lose your strength, don’t let your sense of self-worth be harmed by this (I got really vulnerable after this event), and wishing you good luck in finding the next job!
It is a very, very hard thing to wrap your head around, and life doesn't always give you time to process it before your savings run out. I had a hard time finding work this year and I invested in a (tech) career coach, Larry Jacobson, and he was an immense help. He told me things that were very hard to hear, and helped immensely.
Why this site has such abnormally slow scrolling in Safari, but is smooth in Chrome? There's nothing special about this site. It's like going back in time when the internet was optimized only for a single browser. It's kind of like "I'm a Chrome dev and I don't care about other browsers"?
I learned about "cog in the machine" a few years after starting in tech and I became a contractor and have been ever since (20+ years). I get paid a daily rate and as long as there is work I keep earning, no sick/holiday pay, no reviews, bs corporate networking for promotions etc.
I have zero job security and could be let go any time, but that's built into my rate and I realised that's the case for normal employees anyway as the OP has discovered to his horror. The funny thing is I have outlived many a "permanent" employee in some places I've worked.
I'm working through this on a personal level as well because it's not healthy to make one's self worth dependent on a relationship one has no control over.
The inner call to make your work matter is, I think, a good one and something that if we had more of then the world would be in a better place. That being said, I think Ecclesiastes has an important message that has at least saved me quite a lot of trouble.
Nothing we're doing is anything more than variations of things already done and even if we're successful then it's only to the benefit of morons.
So work hard but make sure to take the afternoon off every once and a while to surprise your spouse with flowers and a picnic.
Adam was a very prominent Chrome DevRel and top voices of the web platform. I personally owe to his content (blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.) to stay up-to-date on things.
It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.
DevRel is unfortunately something that’s going the way of the dodo though now that interest rates are up. A position that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line of a company, so it’s easy to justify getting rid of.
A company will often try and avoid letting a candidate know that they are being considered for firing, or that the decision has already been made, until the trigger is pulled.
That's normal. What's uniquely ugly/American is conveying those firing decisions by locking the fired employees out of their email at 6 PM on Friday. In most countries this is illegal.
I suppose organizing departure in an adult manner (Offer some time to finish task, pass on knowledge, etc... AND let the people leave earlier if they prefer - you know, the whole "think about the team" thing) would also violate someone's meritocratic free speech ?
Do you really need to make it a freedom of speech issue? can't it be recognized as a human as a pile of shit to rug pull someone like that and not let them at least cancel their own talk?
yeah I was lagging as well on desktop and no wonder... the site made 2659 requests to what appears to be display pictures of people who commented on the post.
There's definitely something wrong with the scroll performance. I'm seeing bad performance as well on a pixel 8 pro. If I weren't on mobile I'd pop open devtools and check for excessive layout recalculations
was surprised to see this here tbh as its something that was posted to the author's (again, author, not OP) bluesky which made it maybe not _personal_ personal-news but ... I don't know ... way more personal than all up in HN
I dunno ... shrugs ...
You like a company based on the environment, the peers, and the work. But it is not necessarily that someone way out in a different office likes you.
They are cogs in a machine, not you. And you are the worst thing of self reflection that cog has ever dealt with. Challenge the cogs and make them squirm.
You have to understand who you work for - most companies don't really care about their employees - they are means to an end and if they weren't absolutely needed, corps would do the work other ways.
Dammit. I listened to Adam on https://shoptalkshow.com/659/ just last week and really admired his impressive depth of knowledge about CSS and the web and how well spoken he is on the subjects.
"The magic of first love is our ignorance it can ever end".
One of the most difficult realizations you must confront in this industry is that almost everything you build will disappear. It will be ruined, ignored, slandered, and then forgotten. Almost all of your late night epiphanies and bugs conquests will fade anonymously into the anonymous blackbody spectrum entropy demands planet Earth emit.
You must come to peace with this reality. You must accept the transience of glory into your heart. You must prepare yourself, deep down, for any reality of off-sites and planned presentations and electric roadmaps to disappear in an instant. It gets easier after the first few times, trust me. You emerge a sadder and wiser man.
The only thing we can do is create moments of excellence --- occasions on which we can reflect when we are old and gray and take solace, even pride, in knowing we put every bit of ourselves into a task and did it well. There's honor and nobility in excellence even when doomed.
And who knows? You can't predict what will endure. If we're lucky, once in our careers, if we continually apply the best of ourselves, we'll do something that escapes all this destruction and endures.
Getting laid off sucks, but this comment isn't about that. What I noticed when I read the post is that the website isn't very good. It's laggy, as in slow to load, scroll, and for the mouse-hover stuff to respond, and this is on a fancy modern macbook. It seems to focus on pretty modern web aesthetic over presenting content. This is exactly the kind of website that makes me bemoan the tendency to prioritize looking better than a simple website when comparing 2 static images, and not prioritizing the experience of actually using the website.
I find these things have a real "well it works on my machine" about them. Whereas sites that stick to simple tech (ex. HN) are far more likely to work well on all machines.
These statements always catch me a bit off-guard. Is there no such thing as a cancelation period in the US? When my employer wants to kick me out, he needs a good reason for that and I'd still be paid for 3 months. Which is often even longer, depending on how long you belong to a company.
In my experience, it doesn't matter anyway. You can be paid to be sat at home and, while the worry of finances is kicked down the road, the big dark questions come home to roost very quickly.
In Canada in general either employer or employee can terminate without having to give reason. Typically it's either a few weeks of notice for termination but the employer can choose to require the employee to depart immediately and instead payout severance for equivalent time instead. There's nuance province to province though.
In the US it's similar but AFAIK it does vary state to state. To my knowledge there isn't any law that requires what you're describing in North America.
There is a WARN[1] period before the employee is officially laid off, but their access to all the corporate resources are cut off immediately. From the employee perspective, they have lost everything the moment they are being told that they are laid off. It doesn't matter that they are still getting paid.
I have seen quite a few times in my career large US tech corporations specifically choosing not to open a satellite EU sales office or a dev office in DE because of the horrendous labor laws.
Sure, very nice for the workers. But foreign money chooses to skip DE because of this.
If you asked them about it though, they'd say the labor laws were excellent and the American labor law is horrenous. It's about perspective, but let's face it - America is way more set up for innovation than any other Western country.
Any company with more than 100 employees that does the "you were laid off today, but you'll be paid for the next 2 months" thing is following the WARN Act
not quite the same, this only applies to mass firings. the giving two weeks thing is whenever an individual leaves a job. if you're fired as an individual not alongside a bunch of others the company has no requirements under WARN.
For what? He’s probably getting fantastic severance so his time is best spent on the next thing. The employer isn’t going to get more work - it’s not wise or safe to let layed off individuals roam around the office.
it’s not wise or safe to let layed off individuals roam around the office.
I don’t really buy this. I take it you’re worried about vengeful ex-employees abusing their access privileges to break stuff on the way out?
It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Probably some people would feel vengeful if you do shitty things to them like removing all their access and firing them with no notice whatsoever.
Bad employees can already break stuff while they’re employed. They might feel more inclined to do stuff like that if there are chilling effects that build distrust in the work environment, like jump-scare layoffs.
Conversely, if people are getting “fantastic severance” and you treat them with dignity on the way out, aren’t both they and the people who remain more likely to feel more positively inclined?
> I take it you’re worried about vengeful ex-employees abusing their access privileges to break stuff on the way out?
In extreme cases. But also just sowing discontent. Looking to grab value they think they are owed. Generally lots of people who are upset and probably feel mistreated and have very little to lose.
I actually think there is a small but real chance of violence as people like OP feel like their identity and way of life is threatened.
lots of people who are upset and probably feel mistreated [...] people like OP feel like their identity and way of life is threatened
But they feel like that because they're being ghosted by the company! Suddenly cut off, with no way to tie up loose ends and say goodbye to people on the way out. That's the mistreatment. If you don't mistreat them like that, maybe people won't feel mistreated or threatened.
I don't have tons of experience with layoffs. In the case where people in my team were directly affected, the company did not summarily cut off access overnight (they couldn't legally, as this was in the UK). It was completely fine and everybody was friendly and civil. It helps that the severance package was very generous, and admittedly the job market was good at the time so people would have been less worried about finding their next job.
I worked for a well-known SaaS company for 4 years. A few months after we were acquired, I decided it was time to move on. I gave a 3 week notice to ensure everything was properly handled before my departure.
Two days later, I couldn’t log in to my PC. I was, for all intents and purposes, fired from my actual work. Technically, I was still employed and paid for those remaining days, but I was locked out and never got the chance to say goodbye. It was the worst experience I’ve had, and I never had any issues with any manager or anyone before that. Apparently, it was just the new company policy.
In 2023 they offered "a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google". I think Adam was at Google for more than five years, which would make it half a year of severance.
But as I see it he has not been complaining about the financial part of the layoff.
Sadly two management levels above we’re just a line in a spreadsheet. Maybe even one level above.
“Hey look, this one is cog is spinning at a cost $200k/year, why don’t we replace it with a cog from a low cost country and save some money?” Or “remove it and make this one other cog do the work of this obe?” People doing the replacement have to show they did something, as well!
Upper management has targets they need to meet. If they don’t, they’re out the door even faster than your typical junior engineer who is struggling to code.
In other occasions, time seems to pass very slowly for the aging of first-page items. Probably relativistic effects of large amounts of hidden mass ...
I suppose you have to decide for yourself if you're going to spend the rest of your life trying to grovel (okay, a rather pointed word to choose) for future employers.
Can barely read this post because scrolling feels so sluggish and weird on a Chrome-based browser on a Pixel 9 Pro. Hope the playful effects are worth it for the author.
I also found it on the author's homepage, on mobile Firefox - seems to be that I had to scroll mostly past something for my it to highlight and be more readable
Back in the day Convex Computer Corporation was laying off a large fraction of its staff.
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."
If Google realizes they made an oopsie, I hope he respectfully tells them "no, thanks." I could never go back to an employer that did this to me, then said it was just a mistake.
This is the 'anger' stage, where you fantasise that anyone other than your shockingly impotent immedate manager will care about you. Anyone who's been dumped will recognise the feeling.
I had my access hard cut off and laptop locked, a cold reminder that your relationship goes as far as the business will allow.
Always, ALWAYS build your homey network at your job, because that is your door to walking on to the next job.
Be sure to try to get the best severance possible, take time off, explore opportunities. You often won't have that kind of pressure off moment if you're serious about your career so take advantage.
I'm a hired gun for now for academia and a small startup and I've probably never been happier career wise. I work with non-fake employees, and solve problems that make money. No 401k for now, but my sanity is more valuable to me after the circus of the last year at my old place. (Fake employees in VP position, director position, both fired 1y after I left.)
Microsoft has moved on to phase two and pretends you were a performance problem and gives you no severance. Microsoft also pays like shit. Don't work for Microsoft.
The runway they give you is generous, sure. I got two and a half months on payroll and another six of severance and COBRA. I got the same spiel: not about merit, bosses shocked and surprised, free to apply to internal roles…
It still sucks, because the very first thing you do, the thing we’re all trained to do, is to think: “What did I do wrong?” And in the weeks ahead, you’re going to look back at the body of your work, the output you created, and you’re going to realize that you did nothing wrong.
Rather, you were just inconvenient to keep. It was little more than a decision of personal politics, not objective merit. An inconvenient line on a spreadsheet to a leader somewhere who wanted to steal your ideas for themselves, or who couldn’t stand sharing power with an undesirable element within the company. Or maybe they remembered that time you shot down their idea, or have a report showing you were active in the “wrong” chat channels. Maybe you weren’t in the hub they wanted to prioritize, or maybe you were too involved in politics for their liking.
Or maybe they just felt that your premium wages would be better spent on a fleet of underpaid, overworked Indian professionals with tenuous contracts.
It could be any of those. It could be all of those. But you’ll know, deep down, that the decision made wasn’t remotely objective, and therefore had no place in an objective institution like a business. Your leaders gave into vibes, and felt you were an acceptable casualty.
At some point you’re likely to feel rage. Hang onto that, and use it to temper your future. A future where you won’t make such petty decisions. Where you’ll stand up for your workers. Where you’ll build a better working environment that treats humans with dignity and respect, where layoffs are a last resort after a reorg, after everyone whose role actually got eliminated had their skills and output shifted to new, valuable roles instead of shown the door.
The rage is acknowledgement that you deserved better, and by extension your colleagues, peers, family, and friends.
Realizing no current business is any different than the others because they’re all run by MBA bros from consulting firms who lack any original thoughts for themselves is, in a sense, liberating. You finally see that there is no “better” out there, and certainly no objectivity or meritocracy. That everything thus far has been a temporary illusory reprieve from that reality.
But once you see it, once you acknowledge it, you can finally join others in building such a future together.
Honestly this, if these people are so smart, I truly believe they can help shift the ratio of spying/nefarious/addictive tech to productive/helpful/truly world changing tech in a positive direction. We need to distribute talented people across more industries to improve the world and technology for everyone.
These megacorps will have so much fun in the upcoming recession. They turned public opinion against them through sociopathic profiteering and then mass layoffs. When the cows come home it won't be fun and games like before.
That "sociopathic" profiteering funds the 401(k), IRAs, and pension plans of tens of millions of Americans. God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders (including special ed teachers, utility workers, and airline mechanics) and not just the lottery winners who scored the high-paying jobs at these companies.
> mass layoffs
The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.
I just find this very sickening. On one hand, Google laid him off and best excuse I can think of is, "reduce operational expense". On the other hand, they happily paid $32 billion dollar for Wiz where the both fonder net around $3 billion dollar.
I don't know guys but there needs to be some crackdown on this bull that is going on with corporate America. Something feels really off lately with these tech companies on how they make excuse and get away.
Sorry to hear, Adam! Know that this isn't about you — it's them. Unfortunately, we are all cogs in this capitalistic system where replacement isn't a matter of if, but when...
Getting laid off is a unique experience -- I can't find a better word than that. I mean, on one hand we always knew this was a business transaction: I'm providing a service, you're paying me to provide a service. But work, on some level, is a social activity. You often make lasting friendships at jobs, especially a job you enjoy. If you share an office with your team[0], it isn't unusual for that to become your closest "group of friends." And you're friends mostly because you spend 8+ hours a day together five days a week. When the job ends, that daily refueling that your friendships received also ends. It's not unusual for the last day of that job to be one of the last times you communicate with those people and the last time you end up in the same place, together.
It's why a job starts to feel like "a family."
Just for the sake of context: some of the "unique" aspects are unique to the field of Software Development; some may be unique to my particular skill-set/location/circumstances. It's "unique" in that right when it happens, it ... sucks. But the two times it's happened to me -- both cases of "economic realities" or "radical business restructuring" -- it ended up being a few weeks off and into a better job -- in both cases, forms of "dream jobs." I've never gone more than 4 weeks without a paycheck since I was 16. I live near the car capital of the world and don't like cars/have no interest in working for any car/car-related company. I've worked for a global multi-national telecom, a conferencing provider, a maker of IoT devices for huge third-party companies, machine learning for a fraud company and remote medical software with a hint of robotics. The IoT job and the last job happened after being laid off. After about 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth, I had at least two offers in play both times I lost my job. In both cases, the economy and hiring trends were negative. In one case it was so close to Christmas that many people were difficult to reach.
I received a piece of advice way too late in my career from a 50-year-old man who was working for a startup that -- literally anyone who had any familiarity with the space would have given about a 99.99995% chance of cratering in bankruptcy. I was brought in on contract to help them get through some code written off-shore, he was my "project manager." Over lunch he'd offered me a job directly with the company[1]. I mentioned "benefits, salary and job security" and he said: "You won't beat the pay, the benefits are fine, and you're a software developer -- even 2008, unemployment in our sector was low enough to be considered 'full employment'. And if they get bought or succeed, the stock could make you a lot of money." Random advice, even from graybeards, is not often the kind that I take blindly, but having just gone through being unemployed during a -- not terrible, but not great -- economic time and finding more than one offer on the table in about three weeks, I couldn't argue with him. Thinking back to the scores of employees who were laid off when I worked at the telecom, I could name only one (non-manager) guy in IT who didn't end up some place much better a month after they started looking for work, again[2].
While there's never any guarantees and I don't want this to be a "buck up, camper" kind of dismissal of the misery of losing a job, I suspect the ex-Googler will land on their feet and maybe they'll look back on this and say "Yeah, but if I'd stayed there, I'd have missed out on all of the stuff I'm working on, now."
[0] Even if not, though physical proximity encourages it.
[1] This was not only allowed at the company I worked, it often came with an e-mail announcing when it happened in "celebration"-style. We rarely directly contracted to a third-party, so it wasn't a sort of "temporary placement agency" or anything like that. In fact, the reason I was contracted directly was because the owners of the company went to school with the owners of the startup and the 50-year-old guy was a former employee of my employers. They'd worked out an arrangement during a time when business was slow.
[2] Depending on how long that person worked there, they may have received over a year of severance paid at 100% of the employee's salary -- in one case, paid in a single lump sum cheque (due to the company going bankrupt and the court preventing them from paying the outstanding severance checks of employees who were laid off a week prior to the bankruptcy). One guy took a year off and still landed a job in a month.
The problem is often- a idealised view of the world, where merit and accomplishment is the deciding factor, meanwhile its all diplomacy, social networks and backstabbing at court. Then again, these "meritless" systems are parasitic on the meritocratic workers producing the actual value and progress.
The cooperate cruft grazes on blissfully unaware engineers. Which is why they should try to be poisonous to the cruft wherever they go.
Managers often feign cluelessness because what else can they do? Tell you they submitted you for layoffs? Tell you they knew for weeks and said nothing? There's really no upside option here.
I have no doubt that sometimes managers really don't know, but I'd wager that most who say they didn't know probably did.
Lowest person who generally will know will usually be a senior director. Sometimes director. Sometimes VP.
Google is pretty careful about this. While it's true sometimes those people share stuff, it's definitely not en masse, and you can get yourself in significant trouble if you share it when you shouldn't, so it's less times than you think.
Eh - having had to do these myself at Google for large orgs over the past few years, i would not assume it was based on merit.
The cost disparities can be huge between team members and locations, and a lot of time it's being done to hit some EOY or mid-year budget number. They are also slowly trying to clean up location strategy.
So it's entirely possible it was based on cost and location, and not merit.
It would still be merit "under the covers" if everyone was the same cost/location, but they aren't.
Similar thing happened to me, after almost 27 years, but my company was a great deal more respectful, in the way that they did it. I left on the best of terms; which is extremely rare, with layoffs. To this day, I still have a lot of respect for my old company.
Also, the writing had been on the wall, for years. I was quite prepared.
What I wasn't prepared for, however, was my post-layoff treatment by the modern tech industry. That was an eye-opener.
Sorry to hear. Yups you are/were/will be. It happened before. It will happen again. Perhaps not to you, but to me, him (pointing left), her (pointing right).
Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
I don't seem to sound like an asshole. For the past couple of decades "your services are no longer required - please return your laptop" happens on a monthly basis. If you follow the news (and I believe all of us here do), every now and then we read about Company XYZ laying off 3000. Company ABC laying off 5000. So, it's just a roulette and it has to do where the ball will sit. It's not personal (in 99.9% of the cases).
I had the 'pleasure' a few years back to work for a global bank and I was asked on a quarterly basis to give names of who will be gone on the next round(s). Nothing personal. Simple arithmetic.
So.. save, invest, keep emergency fund(s), and you will be ok.
Other commenters are corect: you are a cog in a machine. You are replaceable. Many people in tech have for too long fallen for the delusion that, as an engineer (or just in tech in general), you are somehow immune to this, that the company does care about you.
All of these big tech companies have never not been insanely profitable. These layoffs aren't necessary for the survival of the business. They're simply suppressing labor costs by cutting 5% of the employees, pushing their duties on the remaining 95% (for no additonal pay of course) and the 95% aren't asking for raises if they fear losing their jobs. It's permanent layoff culture.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc all have a ton of inertia, just like IBM did. And that's their future. They are sowing the seeds of their own destruction with short-term profit-seeking. These companies are nothing without the employees that sustain them.
In this neoclassical/neoliberal economy where the only thing that matters is "delivering value for the shareholders" and profits for the billionaire class. I am not surprised. A bit jaded, honestly.
I have only started my career in the past 10 years and have seen this story unfold time and time again across many companies. Big, small, or medium company. It doesn't matter.
You. Are. Expendable.
I will say the problem is much more pronounced when it's a publicly traded American company; or a company that was recently acquired or funded by private equity, "angel investment", or a vulture capitalist firm.
Folks. Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests. We cannot keep relying on billionaire class to "do right by us" because quite frankly. They do not give a shit.
to clarify ... the ignorance behind a statement implying that working at chrome has been anything other than contributing to enshittifying the the quality level of the web in the past years is showing a disconnect from reality that in my terms deserves to be labelled as "stupid".
Pay was not mentioned in the article as a reason why they were sick to their stomach. This person was a part of a community and they were doing a lot of work they found meaningful, and then in an instant it was all ripped away. You can't imagine how that would suck? Even if this author was immediately handed a new job that pays more than Google, I still think it would hurt. They had goals, they had friends, they had purpose, they had fun, they had innovation, and now that's all gone. I think you're just angry at the author because they made a lot of money.
I would actually yes say it to their face and I appreciate when someone says things like these to my face as well. Loss of perspective is a real thing and cause personal infernos with seeming no way out.
This is someone's personal blog, and it seems like it wasn't posted by the person that owns the blog. Have the decency to just ignore and move on next time.
I say it as a person who had to get over it myself at some point. You will never win with colleagues who are all into politics and desperate to hold and advance their position. Let them have it, hopefully they'll tear off each other heads.
In my first reading your original reply sounded rude. After reading this, it sounds you are relating with the author and airing your frustration from a similar experience.
I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN and I honestly don’t get it. If you truly care about workers, focus your energy on the corporations and politicians that are producing the system you are unhappy with. Belittling other, higher paid workers doesn’t advance anyone’s cause.
And FWIW, the jobless rate in tech is higher than most blue collar jobs and the national average. This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Losing a job is hard for everyone, regardless of the type of job it was. Jobs are where most of our social interactions happen, and where many people’s goals and aspirations are kept. Having that ripped away hurts, regardless of the salary the job paid. Hopefully he was good at managing his money (I’ve known high paid workers that weren’t) and will land on his feet, but you don’t know his circumstances and calling him names is just being a dick.
As far as classism goes, this person is closer to a tradesman than they are to a billionaire or the executive class. People really have no sense of scale here and they just end up promoting infighting. It’s not just plumbers/electricians/Amazon warehouse workers and everyone else.
> I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN
It has always been there. It usually gets downvoted away but it takes time. Inflammatory takes like this one are usually more popular when stories are fresh and then get downvoted as the story ages on. My theory is that these shallow, ragebait-ey takes appeal to people who are skimming stories for a chance to rage a bit, but then they get bored and move on to the next thing. It takes a while for people to read the story and come up with good discussion, which gets upvoted later.
It was at the top of the comments when I saw this hit HN, and it pissed me off to see a trollish shitpost in that position, especially when the post is about the community losing an awesome contributor (and a friend).
> This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Maybe this is true, I don't actually know. But I'm quite skeptical that someone who worked at Google for a long time, and has work with their name on it they can point to, who can work remotely, will have a harder time finding gainful employment than a physical laborer.
I'm not trying to pile on the "screw this guy for whining" train, but I think it is important to recognize the privilege of working in tech.
I mean, actually, we're in this world now (for now, esp in the US) where if you work in trades and lose your job you could turn around and get another job pretty easily. It might suck just as much as your previous job, and the pay won't be anywhere close to a SWE salary, but there's just so much work...
But if you're a tech worker, it's really not a gravy train anymore. The number of open positions has dropped, the compensation ranges perhaps as well, and the interview process is more grueling and involved.
People who worked as salaried employees at BigCorps for years making big $$ definitely should have more savings, but they're still on the whole just the same as any other worker: they pay taxes, they don't own enough capital to make them independent of the market, and they are likely some number of months/years away from not being able to pay mortgage/rent/bills/groceries. Just like any other worker.
There are no "jobs" even in tech that give any kind of permanent escape from the need to beg for employment to make ends meet.
The difficult irony here is that you think your attitude is progressive, but it is regressive because it makes solidarity (and therefore the benefits of solidarity: unions, worker power, compression of the income distribution) impossible.
You're not wrong but suffering isn't comparative. Because it's easier for someone to bounce back or have support in the transition doesn't mean it still doesn't suck.
This would be a shocking opinion, if we weren't in unprecedented times.
I wish we had more empathy and be kinder to people going through rough times, regardless of their wealth or position, or the duopoly they work for even, but it's also hard to completely ignore when the effect and impact is so huge.
Now, if you it makes you physically ill, I also wish you either find help or can get out of the situation you're in. Sincerely.
I agree that it's a little hard to care about this author's situation as much as other stories I've heard in the past couple of years. But that said, losing a job like this is never a nice place to be, and I don't hate this person for having those emotions. People are allowed to feel things, shaming them for that is not nice.
But I would caution people against writing public statements like this when they are still in shock, you might regret them later, better to try and regain some balance first.
Hard to tell if you’re a GPT account. Obviously you can care about all people; it’s not a zero-sum emotion. Your time is zero sum though, and you seem to be spending a lot of it just hating on people. And there’s many other loser accounts like you on here, moreso than I remember.
It was written on his personal blog, announcing to the community of people who look up to him (and yes, there's a community) why he won't be in the places they expect.
Adam was a UX Engineer who saw a job that needed doing, but didn't exist, so he willed it into existence. He found a way to use his talents to literally make the world a better place. (I don't care if you think there are more important jobs - the truth is that the internet mediates most of our societal interactions, and he was making it better for everyone.)
He was doing a kickass job at it too. He should be hurt and angry to have that rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him.
He doesn't need to pay lip service to starving kids in $REMOTE_AND_DESTITUTE_PLACE or self-flagellatingly privilege check. His blog isn't here for your entertainment, and he doesn't need your approval.
There aren't many companies that have such a symbiotic relationship with the web platform to be willing to fund people to make the web a better place. For a while, Google was the foremost place that did.
Adam is immensely talented and a wonderful person on top of it. Hopefully a great opportunity will snatch him up quickly. But there aren't many places to do the work he was doing. He deserves to be mad to see the job he worked so hard to build swept away by some antisocial business school bullshit. And as the people who will miss out when he's not there to make the web a better place, we do too.
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're not even rallying against petit bourg, let alone the bourg. You're literally complaining about the lumpenproles complaining of their suffering. Unfortunate news: "Well paid" proles are still proles.
If your intent is to further Marxist thought amongst the people on this site, you're missing the mark greatly. Perhaps more study is required.
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
I agree that his situation doesn't meaningfully threaten his actual personal security. But this isn't the point of his post and like, shit dude, have a heart. It's not the misery olympics.
He has clearly invested a lot of his identity in his work at Google on Chrome etc - essentially his life's work. To have it flushed down the toilet via some opaque corporate process, cost-saving a company that basically prints its own profit has a terrible psychological impact... irrespective of whether investing one's personal dreams in a faceless multinational corporation was a rational idea in the first place.
Honestly, it's not as if the PMC classes have truly transcended the confines of generating someone else's profit, pushing them offside is probably quite unhelpful for solidarity in the labor movement, but whatever.
I think the more salient observation is that the author is completely detached from reality. Him writing:
"shoulder to shoulder with incredible engineers, planning ways to make web developers life's easier while raising the quality level of the web."
when Google is primarily responsible for flooding us with ad capitalism and ruining the web, portrays not only a profound ignorance of how corporations work, but a total dissociation from the -very damaging- effects of his work-seen-holistically on the real world. You don't get a free pass working for Google just because you can rationalize your particular niche as "educating users" and "raising the quality level of the web".
Towards the end, it seems to dawn on him that yeah, he "was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp". Let's hope he carries that understanding forward and distills it into a moral and ethical framework that can make the world better.
You are probably gonna get downvoted for lack of empathy but I completely agree. I feel bad for OP, but simultaneously if you are a technocrat who thinks they are somehow insulated or not part of the larger system, you need a reality check.
> I was supposed to help with the developer keynote, ensuring things matched reality and were beautiful. Gone.
Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
> Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
This is clearly a person who loved their job, and took it seriously. They had worked hard on something and were looking forward to sharing it. That, frankly, seems healthy. It's the only way to give your everyday life worth and meaning as an employee. It's certainly something that Google cultivated and encouraged. And it's shocking to have it vanish so abruptly.
If you take a more cynical, realistic view, you could never seriously engage with your work. You realize the company doesn't care about you, and you return the sentiment. That might be a more realistic way of viewing your situation, but it's empty of meaning or satisfaction. You'd be correct but unhappy all day every day.
I was always kinda jealous of people who could drink the kool-ade. And even if there's a certain satisfaction in seeing them get a reality check, it's also a shame that somebody who thought they had found meaning and purpose in a community suddenly realize they were just a tool the whole time.
I think its possible to hold 2 conflicting views simultaneously. I put on my profit optimization hat and take it off when I leave work.
I take no satisfaction in seeing someone who has drank the kool-ade getting a wakeup call, it's just a shocking realization that there are people out there who still dont get it.
Well as long as they're not a white man, the only 2 privileges that I was afforded on the way up, then they're welcome to try absolutely any punishment they see fit. They're surely welcome to hate me. It is their right.
Therapy isn't so much telling you that your feelings are wrong. Feelings arise from many factors that are beyond your immediate control.
Therapy helps provide better context for, introspection into, and understanding of those feelings, and more importantly, alternative ways of responding to, expressing and acting upon them.
At the very least, expressing them less aggressively while still getting across your point.
Not trying to invalidate your feelings, but stewing in resentment is like drinking poison daily. Therapy can help you acquire the psychological tools and habits needed to help you and those around you live happier lives
Just like you're assuming the OPs feelings are wrong. They are not.
I remember my dad lamenting the bourgeoisie to a family friend who recently immigrated to the US. His answer was, "To us, you are the bourgeoisie"
There's always someone richer than you, you can hate it, but what's the point? You just make yourself miserable and don't enjoy whatever you can carve out of life for yourself
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 hour of announcement. The CEO detailed the process of selecting people. The severance was very generous (3-6 months pay) along with health and other benefits. The impacted employees were allowed to keep the laptop and any other assets they took from the company. They even paid the same severance to contractors.
After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.
Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google.
Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually make it worse - so for example, the timing of this (which the person complains about) is because (AFAIK) they now have one day a month where ~all role eliminations that are going to happen that month, happen. Or so i'm told this is the case.
Ostensibly so you don't have random role eliminations every day, which makes some sense, but then you have no way for people on the ground to do anything more compassionate (like move the timing a bit) because they can't get through the bureaucracy.
In the end - it's simple - if you disempower all the people from helping you make it compassionate, it will not be compassionate. The counter argument is usually that those folks don't know how to do it in legally safe/etc ways. But this to me is silly - if you don't trust them to know how to do it, either train them and trust them, or fire them if they simply can't be trusted overall.
Google didn’t used to be quite so bad at this. Back when they closed the Atlanta office, people there got a lot of notice and opportunity to find another role. The complaints were about not being allowed to go full-time remote.
I wonder what changed?
Ruth and Fiona aren't Patrick and Laszlo.
It feels like there was leadership turnover in the late 2010s where "conventional company" people assumed the reins of power and started managing it like one.
The founders are complicit too. People like to think "before Larry and Sergey stepped down…" but the founders still control the board (tacitly or explicitly approving of the company's current behavior). Plus, there's Sergey's "60h/w or GTFO" note from a few months back.
When these businesses are in their growth phase, they're relatively lenient about spending and generous to employees. When these businesses run out of opportunities for market growth or entering new markets to improve the bottom line, they turn to cost cutting and squeezing more out of employees to improve the bottom line instead. It's a natural progression for every megacorporation as they hit the limits of their growth.
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this.
That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?"
And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care.
There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc.
What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki.
As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events."
Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows.
Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude.
Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.
Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters.
I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline.
The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume.
He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions".
I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate.
Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.
At Amazon? Yes, very likely.
I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again."
Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
I had a similar experience with Facebook, although my email was much more aggressive (this was when their recruiter contacted me right after I got tripped by one of their UX dark patterns in a way that translated to real world harm). I kept getting invites until I put a clear statement expressing my desire to never ever work for Facebook into my LinkedIn profile
FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.
Well the guy was technically in line - your conditional wasn’t satisfied.
I think I wrote an email along those lines, at some point, although it was as much annoyance with the persistence of a particular recruiter as it was a desire not to work at Amazon.
Linkein is now full of recruiters looking for work, who never had any network.
The barrier of entry to become a receruiter in general is very, very low.
> I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that.
Many, many years ago I sat next to HR in an open plan office while on a freelance gig.
They treated almost all candidates like subhumans, both when talking about the candidates within the team and when speaking on the phone to candidates.
They handled everyone from factory worker and janitorial roles, to specialists to director level. I very clearly got the impression that they only treated candidates well if those candidates could turn into people who had any power over them within the org.
I've carried that with me since and I often recognize it in HR staff I interact with now.
+1, it's been a while since I interviewed with Google, but this brought me back to how annoying it was. I've never had a good interview experience with Google. I only interviewed during college for internship and then a full-time new-grad role and got a consistent "we're doing you a favour by even talking to you" attitude from them— the delays, the impersonality, the delays to the general vibe of the emails, etc.
They became significantly more attentive when I got an internship offer from a competing big-tech company, but as much as my recruiter seemed to try, the process just seem to be deficient beyond their capacity to do anything about it. It had to go through many steps, and be reviewed by many people who seemingly had better things to do.
Eventually they reached to the right people to tell me my decision before my other deadline. I _was_ going to get an offer. They couldn't get me the actual offer letter, or tell me if I had guaranteed host-matching though. I happened to know Google can send intern offers that don't guarantee you'll be matched to a team, and if you're not, the internship just doesn't happen. In my book that's not only as good as no offer really, it's also just disrespectful. I knew people who had this type of offers and didn't get teams.
I took the other offer. "You will get an offer, the details are just taking a while" is not enough to decide on, and the whole process didn't particularly warm me up to Google. For comparison, and to give credit where credit is due, the other company was Meta (then FB). My recruiter was very response, understanding, and personable, which is especially appreciated as an college student— you're nervous, unexperienced and have a lot going on beyond interviewing. They sent me pictures of their dog to lighten the mood. I had told them I'd appreciate quickness, and by the time I was eating dinner after my on-site, I had the offer letter in my inbox.
The phrasing “from start to end” got me thinking—tangential, but—they were an extremely cool company when Millenials were in school and looking to join the workforce. Anybody would have jumped at the opportunity to work for them.
Actually, I can’t even think of a similar company nowadays.
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a really bad hiring pipeline as a result. Why work on the skill of hiring, if people will jump through flaming hoops to work for you.
As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
> As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
Shocking how real this is.
Just wait for IBM to turn into Red Har Linux or maybe Infosysl
I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.
It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.
They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"
Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.
Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
Sometimes, good things are worth the wait. The two times that you accepted roles other than Google, did they turn out better than waiting for Google?
I am surprised that you accept. I would never waste my time. If these companies refuse to provide reasonable interview feedback, why would you provide it to them?Bazel is an incredibly productive tool at the right scale. I could not imagine working on a giant monorepo without it.
If a startup is killed by Bazel, it probably wasn't the right tech choice for their scale, and it would be more accurate to say that the startup was killed by bad technical leadership.
> somebody like Marissa Meyer
Marissa Mayer left Google like, 13 years ago...?
"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive"
So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure.
But some of the data here is just very wrong.
Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has:
1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed.
2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well.
...
So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :)
It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think.
As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount.
I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's.
For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it.
(Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured)
Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment.
That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not.
There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process.
The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days.
I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits:
Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits.
Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them?
Them: Yes
Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all?
Them: No.
> But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive,
That’s the thing, they might be winning all the productivity battles there are (and I genuinely believe that they do, on top of great tools Google employs good-enough programmers to make use of those tools), but at the same time they’re losing the general war. Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.
The botched Google+ launch broke them in that department, or maybe that was just a symptom of how badly-broken things already were inside the company. They’re still making lots and lots of money, though, so that’s still a good thing for them.
And if you believe that, @DannyBee's productivity isn't real.
Or maybe it's a business problem that Google shares with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.
Microsoft has struggled to find any new products that will really move the needle in terms of revenue but they support their old customers with enduring loyalty while making the occasional absurd-but-bold move like Windows 8 and sticking to businesses that seem to make no sense like XBOX.
Facebook is the captain of cringe, not cool, but at least they're investing big in VR as a platform. They subsidize great rigs for Beat Saber because Zuckerberg will never forgive himself if he gives up and somebody else succeeds. [1]
Apple will never find a product as big as the iPhone. To do so they've have to make an iCar or iHouse or skip Starship and go straight to O'Neill Colonies. At least they are indisputably the best at what they do and they can occasionally take a hopeless shot at someone else's turf (Vision Pro) feeling justified that the only rival platform has a trashcan for a logo.
Google has trained us all that anything new from Google has a shelf life less than day old bread. They go at new projects as if they a startup that didn't get into Y Combinator or like the kind of company that Marissa Mayer starts these days [2] -- they don't realize part of the special opportunity of being a huge company like that with an absurd valuation is you can do really big, audacious, and irrational things.
[1] I learned for myself how dangerous this attitude is but all I could do was max out my HELOC.
[2] see https://sunshine.com/ not to put it down, I might be involved in something like that if I wasn't doing what I am doing
Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.
> Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.
So? It's not a weird callout, it's an example where the whole arc is well known.
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this
The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012.
It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door?
Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.
> "I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012."
Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.
Can confirm as well, was laid off from Microsoft in 2023, and I kept access for about a week and a half (and then was paid for an additional 60 days after that, but no longer had access to anything, this was just the WARN period).
Same thing for people just leaving. I left in 2024, and my login and everything around it kept working until my announced leave date (and I gave more than a month notice).
I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.
Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.
Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions. People are moved to different jobs, helped with training etc...
Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.
Having experienced layoffs in both US and EU companies, the difference is massive. In my experience there is very little respect for "the human" being laid off in US companies
People literally would just disappear day to day. I've had several instances where I only found out a colleague had been fired because I tried to write them on Slack only to find that their account had been deactivated
Personally I felt constantly worried working in such an environment and I don't want to work for another US company again if I can help it
There are of course bad cases in the EU, but in my experience it's way less common than in the US
Layoffs in US companies are a BCP event. It's like an earthquake or a tsunami. Weeks of chaos while you figure out who survived, and who's now doing the work previously done by a team that no longer exists.
I watched a layoff take out half the security team during an incident. That was fun.
> A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company.
I feel like global acronym bankruptcy is overdue.
GAB, you mean?
I'm reminded of the last part of 'TLA' form the Jargon File (I had a hard copy back in college that I read cover to cover).
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html
...
The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
Now I want to use the dictionary file to figure the actual probability of a letter appearing in a TLA. It's not nearly 1/26.
There's likely a good bit of analysis that could be done on TLAs. Consider TLA itself is {Adjective : Count} {Noun} {Noun}. Meanwhile, DUI is {Gerund} {Preposition} {Noun} with the stop word 'the' removed.
It might be interesting to take a sample of TLAs used and look what words can be used in those spots. If the third position is 90% likely to be a noun, that could change the distribution... guessing not in a significant way itself but it could be interesting to see.
This is the best work I know on the topic (admittedly having done no literature review): https://gwern.net/tla
BCP events. This makes so much sense. At a previous mega corp I was always confused why such emphasis was made on BCPs for war or natural disaster scenarios which are so rare compared to how much time was spent on the plans. Literally months later we had massive layoffs. The layoff was the (un)natural disaster they were preparing for!
If anyone here has only worked in the EU and wants to see what the US layoff process is supposed to be on a good day, just watch the movie Margin Call and the scene where Eric Dale is called into the office by HR to be fired.
There's a scene where they put a folder in front of him with a brightly-coloured sailboat on the cover labelled "LOOKING AHEAD." It's exactly as grim as it sounds.
Another "fun" thing about that movie is you see the HR lady who delivered the news with a bunch of false empathy walking out the building with a box in a later scene.
Watched this movie 3 times and never noticed! This is a fun touch.
That’s very subtle. I have not noticed that.
also, the pacing of:
"I hope, considering your [pause to check personnel file] over nineteen years of service to the firm you will understand that these measures are in no way a reflection of the firm's feelings towards your performance or your character"
Up in the Air was another great depiction of the most cynical mode of doing layoffs. And, of course, Office Space.
I know they probably made this up for the movie, but I almost went through my file cabinet to look for that exact folder because I have been through several layoffs and it looked so familiar
American companies play mental games and gaslight everyone by calling it “a hard decision” and try to place the empathy back on the executives who get paid 10-100x the employees they just fired without warning. It’s sociopathic behavior.
I don’t think that’s really fair. It can certainly be a hard but necessary decision. And what does it matter that a CEO makes more than his employees? Even if he makes 50 times what they make, that means even if he gave up all of his salary he could only save the jobs of 50 employees.
Could he get a bonus if he fires 50 more?
> I don't want to work for another US company again if I can help it
You can work for a US company in the UE. They have to follow the local rules like anybody else.
Having worked in a (now defunct) US co in West-EU I can say it’s a subtle blend of the two. The layoff was announced, shortly after a few people received a call by HR, were escorted to their desk by security and had to turn in all company belongings on the spot. They were not allowed to touch a computer or telephone and were then escorted out of the premises. Afterwards, we learned that they had received a severance package that met local rules.
Most of my colleagues were shocked by the treatment. Moral took a dive after that.
Well US companies now take the cowards way out generally - tell everyone to WFH that day (despite prior RTO mandates) and then just disable peoples access so the first way the laid off find out is when they can't login for the day.
[dead]
I work for a US company but in western Europe. The layoffs have been much more humane here than in the US. There was a negociation process which lasted several months, and the severance was better and on a voluntary basis. I don't think a company making profit can easily get rid of employees over here, but probably depends on the country. Regarding performance-based layoffs, they did manage to fire people too, but again it was technically a common agreement.
That being said, if they want to get rid of employees, they always find a way. And the European market isn't as dynamic as the US one, so there are pros and cons. Personally, all things considered (risks of layoffs, PTO, cost of living) I'm happier in Europe but it really depends on individual situation.
There are rules, but one can decide to not follow them.
One thing that I saw (but never experienced myself) happen with North American companies wanted to leave EU is just doing their usual things (thus not following local rules), and then people have to sue and wait many years to be compensated.
A company that has to "follow the rules" is way less desirable to work for then a company that embraces the spirit of the rules. I'm in the US so can't really speak for companies in other countries, but many US companies are doing everything they can to skirt the letter of the law and spending a ton of money to have them rewritten to be less favorable to employees and more favorable to the business. Finding a company that truly cares for employees is a very rare treat!
It's a fundamental problem with large organizations.
In principle, an organization that is built on reciprocal loyalty is more productive than one that treats people as interchangeable cogs, because people are individually happier and go to greater lengths to achieve the shared goals, making them more productive. However, this arrangement can only be built on trust, and trust doesn't scale well past the Dunbar number. Thus, spirit of the rules is replaced by letter of the rules (which can be meaningfully enforced).
Thus, the larger the bureaucracy, the more soulless it is even in individual interactions between people within it, and the more it treats those people as interchangeable cogs that are there solely to serve the overall function of the organization. If the organization is a for-profit corporation, its overall function is profit, and thus megacorps always tend to optimize squeezing their employees.
Short-term this can be reversed somewhat if leadership is concentrated and opinionated. E.g. when the company grows out of a startup dominated by a single founder, and that founder has certain ethical standards or beliefs that they enforce on the org, overriding the natural tendency. This arrangement never lasts long-term, though - either the founder goes away and is replaced by generic management which has neither the desire nor the capacity to go against the current, or the founder becomes corrupt.
That's absolutely happening in US-owned companies in EU that used to be great places to work before they became US-owned. They do pay a premium for their bullshit of course.
Well, sure, but unless the US company is willing to set up an EU subsidiary and employ you via that then you'll be working as an independent contractor. That status gives you zero employment rights, because you're explicitly not an employee.
Many cases where someone is in practice functioning as a full-time employee are legally employment relationships according to both US and EU law even if the contract and payroll procedures say otherwise, and even if the contractual relationship is directly between a US entity and a worker in the EU. This includes whatever employment rights are supposed to exist, for the number of employees (whether or not misclassified as independent contractors) the company has in that country under its national employment laws.
Lots of US tech companies like to pretend otherwise, but a complaint or two from the misclassified employee can create plenty of pain for the employer for lying to both the US and foreign governments about the genuine nature of the relationship. And these penalties generally go not to the employee but to the employer, since the noncompliance is generally around employer tax, payroll, and reporting obligations as well as laws which are meant to protect employee rights.
In practice, US tech companies literally buy their way out. They pay such a premium for those independent contractors that there would be no such complaints in the first place.
No complaints based on the amount of pay, maybe.
But for example, someone who is fired or laid off in a way that wouldn’t comply with local employment protections if the employment relationship were correctly classified might assert their misclassification claim so that they can also get compensation for their wrongful termination.
If that happens, then the company not only has to scramble to catch up on the overdue social contributions for the complaining employee and pay any applicable penalties, but also likely have to undergo an audit of their other workers in that country plus the same consequences for them.
There’s a reason why any US tech company that’s big enough to be a juicy financial target tends to do this correctly, and why companies like Deel, Remote.com, and their less tech-branded competitors (such as Velocity Global) are gaining popularity among people who want to do this correctly at smaller scales than those for which it makes sense to set up foreign subsidiaries.
When smaller companies take this particular shortcut, are risking severe financial consequences for the company if the authorities discover it, and in many cases this also comes with personal liability for some of the executives who are neglecting their legal duties.
That's usually illegal, unless you're a genuine independent contractor that completes work packages for multiple clients.
If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.
I'm only familiar with UK rules on the topic, and of course the UK is no longer in the EU, but here at least the standard for determining employment status is quite complicated. The ability to work for multiple clients is one of the factors, as it speaks to the control and mutuality-of-obligation tests set by IR35, but it would probably not (alone) be enough to determine employment status either way.
> If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.
That wouldn't work because it would be an obvious sham designed mainly to avoid the EU company's responsibilities under employment law. Courts see through those shams very quickly.
Technical people -- including me -- like to try and reduce the law to a series of digital if/then/else tests, but reality is much more analogue. If you're one of a small number of highly-experienced remote contractors engaged by a US-based client with no local subsidiary, the authorities are likely to accept the arrangement, or at least not to spend significant amounts of time investigating it. If you're one of very many Uber-driver-like "contractors" working for a company that is obviously dodging its local employment law obligations, then they're much more likely to be interested.
This can still happen:
> where I only found out a colleague had been fired because I tried to write them on Slack only to find that their account had been deactivated
The colleague will just be one that's based in the US, but that doesn't make it much easier.
From my experience that often just prolongs the process, but doesn't change the management culture.
An employee decided to be laid off is equally written off immediately, it's just delegated to the regional/local HR to "manage the rest".
If you're not escorted off-premise, you get to enjoy some additional days/weeks of colleagues and managers telling you how surprised they were...
[dead]
The EU is not a country. Labor laws vary massively between countries.
> In my experience there is very little respect for "the human" being laid off in US companies
its much easier to find another job in US because of this though.
Is it, really? Aren't US tech interview notoriously difficult? Many rounds of interviews, background checks, etc.?
Most purely European companies don't do that. Actually, unfortunately, some of them do, because of American influence. But for sure they didn't use to.
> Aren't US tech interview notoriously difficult? Many rounds of interviews, background checks, etc.?
Not really, people get hired all the time that can't do a fizzbuzz.
As a counterpoint, I don't think I've worked at a company in 10 years that didn't at least require fizzbuzz.
There are 2.8 million developers in the US. Most of them don’t work for “tech” companies. Most of them work for boring enterprise companies without multiple rounds of enterprise companies and many let you just do behavioral questions and techno trivia on the stack they care about.
I personally have interviewed for 7 enterprise dev jobs and I have had 2 coding interviews and those were simple.
IME, this was true four years ago. Few rounds, assessments were mostly take homes or in-person "implement a feature" style, interview questions didn't seem to be built to trip you up.
Now, every job I apply for has 4-5 rounds, leetcode is more common, they do behavioural and system design rounds that you have to prepare for, etc. One job I applied to even asked me two behavioural questions via email before I even talked to someone. Something's truly off.
Wait till you get a self recorded behavioral interview. I truly wonder if there is that much value to be extracted out of 10 minutes of people awkwardly responding to questions while trying their best to fill in the silence.
I think I'm not yet desperate to the point that I would agree to that.
I had to do one of those for some local government lobbyists association in DC. They ended up hiring some undergrad instead.
What he meant is that the whole capitalist culture, less regulations, creates a more thriving economy which creates more jobs and hence more options to go to.
I've heard this type of comment a lot but in my experience there isn't any shortage of tech companies in the EU.
What EU regulations hamper isn't job creation, it's employee and customer exploitation. The distinction between "job creation" and "employee exploitation" is important.
What the former means in practice is that there is a massive contractor market in the UK and EU. So if companies need temporary staff, they'll hire a contractor. If they need permanent staff then they'll hire an employee. And contractors in the UK & EU are paid significantly more than their employee peers. In fact their pay is much more equivalent to US employees. So companies will make constant tradeoffs between more expensive labor for short-lived projects vs cheaper staff and knowledge retention but stricter employment laws. It's a fair trade most of the time.
So a more accurate way of comparing US vs EU businesses in terms of employees would be US employees vs EU contractors. Things then begin to look a lot more equivalent.
I doubt the tech workers making three to four times EU wages in the US feel “exploited”.
My job is purely transactional. I’ve worked for 10 companies in almost 30 years. I gave them labor and they gave me money. Whenever one side decided the arrangement wasn’t working, I moved on to another job.
Tech is always boom/bust. We’re lucky to have had a long boom.
I’m personally well acquainted with many people in tech, especially big tech. Many of them are doing little or nothing, certainly not justifying $300k+ salaries.
What you do has risk but is fundamentally more honest - your skills are around technology and output, not navigating corporate bureaucracy.
I am always skeptical of claims that some workers are just lazy bums skimming money.
I don't think most folks graduate college and think, "You know what sounds amazing? Sitting at a desk doing nothing five days a week!"
I expect most of the time they have good reason to be "unproductive," and would respond positively to those reasons getting addressed, or you're not capturing their contributions accurately with whatever metrics you're using to find "slackers."
It’s not the people, it’s the process. In a big organization you need to be actively managing your career to be in the right places.
And people are doing things, I’m not saying they’re sitting making paper airplanes — just things with no value or that drain their value. I had a high school friend who was brilliant, but his career got nerfed when he stuck with a bad tech/business unit.
If you’re the world’s premier expert in some peculiar process that only exists in one place, that’s no mas. Companies have been rolling in dough for a long time and some have way more people than they used to. One big company I deal with went from an account team of 6 to almost 50.
I haven't seen it on any team I've been on. But also I don't think the implication is people doing literally nothing. Just people doing things that are not worthwhile at all, wasting other people's time, and kinda just puttering around.
Some of it boils down to ineffective management and lack of mentoring, for sure, and could be addressed in a better way. Some of it is people getting in way over their heads.
Your post somehow suggests that when a bust comes European companies won't start laying off people. And in the same boom period the US dev will make much more money (and have a biggger safety pillow) than the European one.
Until the US dev has a medical expense, that is.
A cursory amount of research shows that the average premium for an insurance policy on the open market through the ACA is between $400-$2000 a month depending on options - family status, deductibles etc.
There is also COBRA that lets you stay on your employer’s plan. You have to pay the entire premium. I pay $600 a month now and my employer pays $1200 a month. That’s me + family.
During the first “bust” in 2000 I had four years of experience and living and working in Atlanta - far away from a tech hub. Boring old enterprise dev jobs at banks, insurance companies, etc weren’t affected and I was easily able to get offers.
I worked at a company where utility companies sent us data files and we created, printed and mailed bills.
In 2008 during the financial crisis the next time I looked for a job (my third), I had two offers relatively quickly - one programming point of sales systems and the other that I accepted programming ruggedized Windows CE devices for field service workers.
Fast forward to 2020 at the height of COVID, I got my one and only BigTech job working at AWS (my 8th job).
Unlike the author of the submitted article, when I got Amazoned 3.5 years later, I shrugged, my $40K severance was deposited in my account and I reached out to my network and targeted outreach to some recruiters in my niche and had four interviews and 3 offers within 3 weeks. Why would I waste time getting emotional about a company knowing that the CEO is 6-7 positions up on the career ladder and I’m just a random number to most of the organization?
A year later in 2024 around 9:00 PM I had a “1-1” with my manager invite for the next morning. I already had my suspicions and told my wife that I am probably going to be laid off in the morning. She said let her know how it goes and we went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning, was notified about my layoff asked when I would get my severance and responded to a recruiter that reached out to me about a week prior.
I started the interview process and three weeks later I had a job making the same as I was making at AWS.
I don’t need to “justify” what I’m making. I have a skillset and experience that are in demand and companies are willing to pay me for it because by employing me they get a positive ROI.
You're focusing on one word and missing the meat of my comment. The EU equivalent to US employment in terms of employee rights and pay is contracting.
People in IT who take the employment route rather than contracting, do so because they want job security. eg they might have families. And much as you might be happy with your arrangement, there are plenty in the UK and Europe who do prefer longer-term job security over a few extra £££ in their pocket.
In the UK you have worst of both worlds now - insecurity of contracting and employee level wages, thanks to amended IR35 lobbied by big consultancies.
I think the bust of the job market played a bigger part here. When IR35 originally came in, some companies would bump pay inside IR35 to compensate elsewhere risk getting poorer pol of talent. Since the job market crashed there have been fewer jobs all round, which has pushed the contractor market down too.
But you’re right that IR35 really hasn’t helped situations either.
Some of my friends have commented that the last few years has been the worst time in their 20+ years as a contractor.
That take is a bit reductive - it downplays the structural collapse of independent contracting in the UK post-IR35 reform. This wasn't just a "bit of market downturn" or a few companies cutting rates. People lost the ability to operate as businesses, to manage their tax affairs fairly, to invest in their own skills, and to retain profit. What they got in return was, at best, a modest day-rate bump—hardly compensation for losing all autonomy, business deductions (like training, equipment, downtime), and legal protections.
It forced highly specialised professionals into employment in all but name, just without the rights, security, or support. A square peg jammed into a round PAYE hole. And the long-term effect? Exactly what you'd expect: the best talent either left the UK, shifted to servicing overseas clients (where Chapter 10 doesn't apply), or left the field altogether. The real talent pool shrank, not because of market conditions, but because there was no longer a viable way to operate independently.
To make matters worse, the government compounded this by lowering the barriers to import cheaper labour from abroad ("Boriswave"), creating a race to the bottom on wages, with zero incentives for local upskilling or long-term investment in the domestic workforce.
So yes, the job market took a hit - but IR35 didn't just "not help" - it actively accelerated the decline by removing the last flexible, self-directed model for highly skilled work. The damage wasn't cyclical. It was engineered.
You may think I’m being reductive but I think you’re massively overstating things too.
For example:
> People lost the ability to operate as businesses, to manage their tax affairs fairly, to invest in their own skills, and to retain profit.
I don’t know a single IT contractor that lost that ability. Maybe in other business sectors, but we are talking about IT here.
> What they got in return was, at best, a modest day-rate bump—hardly compensation for losing all autonomy, business deductions (like training, equipment, downtime), and legal protections.
This is also an exaggeration.
And you’re overlooking the point that IR35 only affects contractors working on BAU or who have worked with the same company for more than 2 years.
Firstly 2 years is a long time in contractor terms. And secondly, most occasions for hiring contractors was to work on new developments. So most of the IT contractors were still outside of IR35.
That’s not to mention that many companies would describe the work in ways that are favourable to working inside IR35 (not to the extent of tax fraud, but to the extent where any BAU responsibilities that were required weren’t the primary responsibility in the job specification.
Ironically places hardest hit by IR35 were government departments rather than businesses. Some of who ended up just adding ~40% to the contracted salary so the government still ended up covering the tax rather than the contractors.
And the very few contractors who were inside IR35 and didn’t get a bump in the contract fee would tell me they were still better off contracting rather than being employed (even taking loss of perks into account).
Now I’m not going to say that IR35 made things easier for contractors. Clearly it didn’t. But it wouldn’t have been catastrophic for the contract market had the employment bubble not also pop shortly afterwards.
You also seem to suggest that IR35 prevented contractors from claiming expenses back in tax, and that simply isn’t true either.
Edit: I will concede that it’s been 3 years since I was last given a budget and told “go hire, you decide who” so if there’s been any legal changes to IR35 since then I might have missed it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you're still underestimating how fundamentally IR35 reforms changed the environment for small business operators in IT, especially since 2021.
> I don’t know a single IT contractor that lost that ability.
I do. In fact, I knew dozens of people who ran small, legitimate limited companies - offering high-quality services across IT disciplines - who were forced to shut down or stop trading as businesses once clients tightened their risk assessments. In the early days, yes, some niche contractors were spared because they were too hard to replace. But even that dried up as corporate legal teams standardised engagement models and de-risked by banning sourcing services from small business entirely.
> You also seem to suggest that IR35 prevented contractors from claiming expenses back in tax, and that simply isn’t true either.
This is misleading. If you’re inside IR35 or forced into an umbrella, you can only claim expenses on the same terms as an employee of the client. That means you can't offset training, equipment, home office, insurance, downtime, software etc. - because your business isn't recognised as a business anymore. And if you can't make profit, you have nothing to deduct from anyway.
> you’re overlooking the point that IR35 only affects contractors working on BAU or who have worked with the same company for more than 2 years.
This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. There is no “2-year” IR35 rule. That might relate to travel expenses. IR35 assessments depend on control, substitution, and mutuality of obligation. Even short, project-based work can be deemed inside. And under Chapter 10, only clients carry the liability - so they default to "inside" for anything remotely borderline, including repeat work.
And that’s exactly the issue: having loyal clients and repeat business — something any serious business would strive for — is now penalised. The system structurally disincentivises hiring genuine small consultancies, because clients now carry legal and tax risk for treating you as "outside." So naturally, they avoid it.
And that quote about companies “describing work in ways favourable to IR35” to avoid falling foul of the rules - you realise you’ve just described a legal minefield that only small businesses are forced to navigate? If an individual or a small consultancy tries to deliver a long-term service or repeat work, they're suddenly in danger of being labelled "too BAU" and dragged into inside IR35 or worse, accused of misrepresentation.
Meanwhile, large consultancies are completely exempt. They can supply entire teams of workers to perform exactly the same repeat, embedded, long-term services - even effectively occupying roles inside the client’s organisation - and no one blinks, because the worker isn't the owner of the delivery company. IR35 doesn't apply.
So what you're pointing out as a "grey area" for independents is actually a core business model for Accenture, Capita, Deloitte, etc. - and it's legally protected. They can pump in as many BAU bodies as they like, make profit to their heart's content, and face none of the scrutiny aimed at smaller suppliers. It's a structural bias against worker-owned businesses and it's about making sure the same work flows through corporate channels, where the big business win - and independent economic actors are locked out.
> But it wouldn’t have been catastrophic for the contract market had the employment bubble not also pop shortly afterwards.
That reverses cause and effect. IR35 was the trigger. It removed the incentive to engage skilled local contractors as businesses. Clients - especially in the public sector - stopped hiring small operators entirely to avoid compliance risk. The result wasn’t just tighter budgets - it was the structural removal of independent contracting as a viable model.
And just as IR35 pushed domestic professionals out of the market, post-Brexit immigration reforms ("Boriswave") made it easier for companies to import overseas workers on lower salaries - with sponsorship pathways explicitly designed to undercut local rates. So the market didn't just shrink—it shifted, away from experienced, independent professionals toward cheaper, controllable labour with fewer rights and no negotiation leverage.
The combination was catastrophic. It collapsed the domestic contractor market from both ends—removing the supply of viable independent businesses, and removing the demand for them by creating cheaper alternatives. That wasn't an unfortunate consequence — it was a predictable outcome of policies designed to centralise control and reduce labour costs at all levels whilst maximising corporate profits.
> Contracting is still better than being employed.
That may be true for a small segment of high-end day-rate earners, but it ignores how many people used contracting as a sustainable, long-term way to build independent businesses. For them, IR35 removed the very basis of that independence-profit, autonomy, and client trust.
A lot of detail there. Sounds like I was underestimating the effect IR35 had.
Thanks for taking the time to share that.
I also have a family. I’ve managed to support my family across those 10 jobs. I need a job to support my family. But my duty is stay *employable”.
You misunderstand me. My comment wasn't suggesting that people who contract don't have families. Plenty of them do. It's that people who choose employment over contracting do so because they want the additional stability, for example if they have families.
Lots of people, when evaluating the risks of contracting vs employment, find the reward far outweighs the risk. It sounds like you'd be one of them if you were presented with the same choice. And that's a fine decision for you to come to. But that's not going to be the same conclusion for everyone.
What I’m saying is simple math. I would much rather make more than twice the equivalent worker in the EU and take the chance of a layoff. I can afford to have my own emergency fund to survive the gap in employment.
Every employee in the US is “at will”.
this doesn't make sense. so why do usa companies hire contractors then? I worked as a contractor for decades and made 150% what perm employees made.
That I don't know. But the contractor market in the US is very different to the contractor market in the UK and EU. And from hiring in both US and UK, my experiences have been that US employees are more comparable to UK contractors in terms of rights and pay.
> US employees are more comparable to UK contractors in terms of rights and pay
did you account for rsu value too or just basepay/hours . now that i am a perm employee a big share of my comp comes from rsu.
I think they suggested that in the US employees are paid better than contractors, but have low job security.
There are more regulations around employees than contractors here also, which often makes it not worthwhile for short term workers. Those regulations just mostly aren't around when you may terminate employment.
E.g. the entire I-9 thing and other IRS paperwork, who (if anyone) is responsible for various insurances (unemployment insurance, workers comp, liability insurance, etc), minimum wage and overtime for hourly employees, etc. Many things depend on this distinction.
I can't speak to differences from Europe as I am not familiar with that side of the Atlantic.
Yeah I’d argue this is so clearly the case and it’s one reason among many why the US has an enormous amount of successful tech companies and Europe has some amount that basically rounds to zero in comparison.
The ability to hire and fire easily is critical if you want to build successful companies.
There’s a reason ambitious founders move from Europe to the US and why most billion dollar tech companies are American. Europe has made really bad policy decisions around this for decades and their economy reflects it. Europe is poor and to an extent I don’t think Europeans really understand.
Indeed, but that is just ideology, not based on any facts.
low eu salaries implies finding job is hard. fact.
There's a higher monthly salary in the US, sure. However, you're expected to work very long hours (60-80 hours per week) and get basically no time off
In my current position I'm hired for an expected 37 hours per week. This can be more if I'm asked to work overtime, but my weekly hours cannot exceed 45 hours per week on average in a 3 month window without additional compensation
Additionally I have six weeks of paid time off every year plus public holidays
If I calculate my hourly salary it's better than what I was paid by US companies
That's not to mention the security of having a legally mandated termination period of minimum 3 months (in which you're, in most cases, not expected to work)
I worked 80 hours a week in medical school, depending on the rotation. From that experience I can tell you, the majority of people that say they work 80 hours a week, don't even know what that looks like.
This 60-80 hrs/week maybe a startup myth. Since Europe in general has far fewer startups than US people hear these wild numbers in Europe far less. For normal big tech worker, or enterprise workers 40 hrs is really the norm. Now many people specially in contracting, consulting can stretch hours for billing purpose or impressing upon clients thats a different matter.
I have never in 28 years across 10 jobs including one in BigTech been “expected” to work more than 40 hours a week.
It’s a bunch of copium thinking that American tech workers are working 60-80 hour weeks.
And I know it’s not the norm, but right now I have “unlimited PTO” and most people take at least 5 weeks a year.
If the average American tech worker is making 2x - 4x the average EU worker, they should be able to save more than enough to have a three month cushion.
And we are talking about Google. They have a very generous severance package. Even Amazon where I use to work gave me three months severance.
"Unlimited PTO" is discretionary in practice, and there are studies showing that it translates to less PTO on average, which is exactly why companies do it.
And I mentioned on average people take 20-25 days a year and managers are dinged if their reports don’t take at least 15 days a year.
I don’t care what the “average” is. I plan on taking 30 days this year.
Your last sentence reads a bit like "I don't care about statistics, I prefer my anecdote".
This is not what we usually hear about employment in the US. The reason many Europeans think American tech workers are working 60-80 hours per week is not copium, but simply because that's what many Americans tell us.
I will just add another +1 to say it's not common to work 60-80 hours per week in the US tech industry. It's not unheard of, and some companies (Amazon) are notorious for expecting that of their employees. But most of the time what you will see is that most people work 40ish hours (some weeks a bit more, some a bit less), and only a handful of colleagues with an unhealthy relationship to the job will work 50+ hours per week. Management doesn't generally expect people to do that, though of course bad managers do exist and can make your life miserable.
The only time I've ever been expected to put in those kinds of long hours was in case of an emergency. Stuff like, a natural disaster hit the company's primary data center so they needed to be all hands on deck to get services restored. But it's definitely not common day to day, and even in case of emergencies the company generally gives you a little something (extra time off, a bonus, whatever) to compensate you for the long hard hours you had to work.
Why would they be complaining about working 40h a week? You will obviously hear more about bad experiences than the norm.
We hear enough about it that it gives the impression of being very common, even if it might not be the norm.
its not common but i know nothing can convince you of that
How can you know that? Please don't assume stuff about others just to make a rhetorical point. If you say it's not that common as it's often made out to be, why wouldn't I believe you?
Though what would also help if you had an explanation for why we tend to hear these stories mostly from the US and not from other countries.
How much content you consume comes from the US vs other countries? The US has a full cultural supremacy in the west. That's why you speak english and read YC.
The world is larger than just the US, though. Even at HN. Just look around you.
> Though what would also help if you had an explanation for why we tend to hear these stories mostly from the US
because internet is dominated by 'stories mostly from US'
I see plenty of stories from Europe, and they too complain about work, but never about having to work 60-80 hours. Even if it's rare in the US, it still seems more common than in Europe. Similarly, I hear stories about working 3 jobs in the US which I don't hear from Europe. I do hear people complain about managers, pay, or office politics in Europe.
yes pbly more common that europe . even i worked two jobs at one point to double my income to like 700k/yr but it was very hard to sustain that beyond 1 yr. i know many ppl who've done it for years.
U.S. tech worker here. The only time I’ve ever worked 60-80 hour weeks was at a much smaller company, where for a month or two leading up to a trade show a whole bunch of work that had been put off was attempted to get crammed into the product. At my subsequent BigTech jobs I’ve never been asked/required to work more than 40 hours a week. I mean, nobody was tracking exact hours, but nobody was also pinging me at 8PM or on the weekend and expecting me to be working.
My experience is limited - I work in the UK for a US company and haven't spoken to US developers from a wide variety of companies. However I've not heard any US developers talking about working such long hours. Closest thing I've heard is for devs to sometimes work over the core hours to build up time-in-lieu for extra vacation, over and above the paltry standard 2 week holiday allowance.
fascinating. I thought the meme was that FAANG tech workers were all day and lazy and didn't have to work that hard and were grossly overpaid, but that's as much a stereotype as the next one.
never worked more than 40hr/week (including hellhole amazon). i get 28 days pto now and unlimited sick days.
> If I calculate my hourly salary it's better than what I was paid by US companies
prbly not.
> low eu salaries implies finding job is hard. fact.
Does it? Sounds more like an opinion than a fact to me.
If there was demand the salaries would rise. It's capitalism.
Umm... output. Outside of hyperscalers and probably the tier below them, most EU tech companies aren't making the kind of money per headcount to justify huge salaries.
There is demand for tech workers, but the output of EU tech companies can't afford huge salaries. Lower margins.
What a waste of a comment. Low salaries typically imply finding a job is easier, because more potential employers can afford to pay you. Can you add any kind of evidence, argument, anything? Saying "fact" after an armchair guess does not make it one.
> Low salaries typically imply finding a job is easier, because more potential employers can afford to pay you. Can you add any kind of evidence, argument, anything?
sorry i forgot to add "typically" which apparently is a license to spout any BS .
You started the argument!
In Japan firing an employee is difficult and layoffs are unheard of. I would have few concerns finding something new were that to change overnight here.
> Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions.
Europe is vastly diverse and your experience is not representative of all Europe.
That's true. But contracts here usually have a set termination time, with a minimum notice time typically required by law, dependent on how long you've been hired at the company. Tends to be one month for below a year, three months beyond a year.
As in after a termination there's a period during which you're still supposed to work and collect the salary.
Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.
Of course a particular bastard of a company can still immediately cut you off everything but the salary including the doors.
Out of curiosity, why "bastard"? ...if you're being terminated, isn't the best possible outcome that you get your salary but don't have to go to work?
Do you guys not even get the chance to send a goodbye mail to colleagues?
> Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.
In the UK big corporations got a loophole where they can get employees without affording them any rights. It's called IR35 that Tory government amended to facilitate this, as Brexit benefit (the regulation would have been illegal otherwise if we were still in the EU).
It's totally legal to fire employee without any notice for any reason or even pay them below minimum wage.
It sounds representative of every part of Europe I’ve experienced.
You have no idea about Switzerland or Northern Europe. In Denmark and Iceland, layoffs are swift.
You probably never worked in Austria.
Austria has unions and Betriebsräte, we even have one in a big american company, so op is correct.
Or southern europe
Shrodinger's Europe. It could be homogeneously like Denmark, Sicily, Monaco, Hungary, London or Belarus or anywhere else. You don't know which until you have an asinine blanket statement you need to back up.
I worked a at large European company. They announced there would be layoffs. But not who, just the date. On that date, they came round during the day, tapping people on the shoulder, who walked out of the room and were never seen in the office again. Grown men were crying, who weren't even let go.
I never felt good about that company ever again.
> Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.
As someone from Europe, I’ve never experienced US salaries. Go figure.
You probably never experienced their working hours either.
As someone who has worked for a string of US companies, 38 hours for me is a busy week.
FWIW in my 15 years of experience working in big tech in US, I never had a job in which there was an expectation of doing more than 40 hours, working weekends etc.
Such things definitely exist, but they are far less common than is often implied here on HN and elsewhere. I think this is largely because people who don't work long hours are much less likely to wax poetic about it, just because, well, it's not at all unusual or interesting.
what about US costs of living?
West Europe is far from cheap. Housing, childcare etc is unaffordable for many in the middle class (and as dev, you are in most cases in Europe not a very high earner). Universal healthcare is the main (last) advantage Europe has over the U.S (and its a big one.)
If you can afford housing and child care in the US you don’t care about healthcare because you are probably on a good employee plan.
Jee sounds like a swell arrangement for 20% of the population ...
More like 80%. Americans are simply richer than Europeans.
80% of Americans are definitely not on what I'd consider a "good healthcare plan".
What is considered a "good healthcare plan"? Can you compare American insurance plans with Europe's ones?
92% of American had health insurance in 2023. Some people may have more than one insurance plans, thus the total number below is greater than 100%.
Of the subtypes of health insurance coverage, employment-based insurance was the most common, covering 53.7 percent of the population for some or all of the calendar year, followed by Medicaid (18.9 percent), Medicare (18.9 percent), direct-purchase coverage (10.2 percent), TRICARE (2.6 percent), and VA and CHAMPVA coverage (1.0 percent).
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...
Dental coverage, for starters. It's surprising how many plans are extremely skimpy on this.
Many European cities aren't exactly low cost of living, and those that are have even lower salaries.
In the end someone who was working at Google in the Bay Area for 15-20 years can retire if they didn't have life style creep (which is different than cost of living). Not the case in Europe.
'Someone who worked at one of the best paying companies in the world can retire after 15-20 years'.
This has nothing to do with Europe. This is particular a tech thing
It's a particular tech thing in not Europe, specifically.
Europe has tech companies. They just pay less.
What about European taxes? I', paying 48% + there is 21% VAT on almost everything. Plus taxes for water (taxes, not pay-per-used-m3, and this payment is here too), energy (atop of market energy prices), roads, gasoline, etc.
Slightly tangential question for you- does 48% taxes include healthcare? How about pension? It’s tax week in the US, I think my rate was 22% overall. But another 10% of compensation is health insurance. Another 15% is retirement savings. My municipal water bill last quarter mostly was not for actual water usage (about 40% was for water) rest is system charge and storm water fees. Regarding the VAT thing… we may be effectively getting the equivalent with tariffs on goods and materials supposedly taking effect!
48% doesn't include healthcare (it is another about 170 euro/month per person, and, really, you don't have choice for better or worse conditions, formally there is "market" for this but it is very regulated) or pension. Some industries (but not software/IT one) have industry-wide pension funds, but it is additional payments and if you are in industry without this fund you can go to one of the "open" pension funds and put your money in them.
German here. Me and my employer pay 12 (together) for healthcare. I have no clue where the idea of „free“ healthcare came from, but it’s far from free. 20% of your wages is the general rule for healthcare here.
On paper, my employer pays me 72k per year. I net 36k of this after taxes and social insurances are paid.
Laughs in 150 EUR per month of basis zorgverzekering from the bottom of the sea
> How about pension?
Fun fact I learned the last time this topic came up, social security in the US pays more than German government pensions.
There is more than one pension -- one for old age (which the government is paying) and another from the company plan. The usual trick is to also pay out mortgage by this time, sell the house to buy something smaller and enjoy your life somewhere in a sunny place.
Ams is same or even worse than some US areas when it comes to costs of living.
You can use numbeo to compare. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Basically, almost all places, particularly in the UK, have worse salary to cost of living ratios.
weird
* Experience in Central- and Eastern Europe (CEE) may differ.
Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.
> Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.
It 100% does. It happened to me in Brno, Czechia, and this February I interviewed someone to whom the same thing happened and who was attempting to sue for unfair dismissal.
It makes sense in the US where they have terms like "going postal" and easy access to guns
It really depends on the people you work for, it's not like Europe is some kind of paradise in this matter. I was working as a contractor for a company in Germany, after a few years working together, they cut me off from one day to the next (the new manager decided to start saving money), even though my contract included a clause about a one-month notice period. They didn’t even bother to pay the invoice for the work I had already done that month (it was the 23rd of the month, so we’re talking about a few thousand euros). And since I wasn't living in Germany, extracting that money from them was almost impossible.
Yes, it may be different for full-time non-contract jobs, but once you're on a contract, nobody cares.
Yeah but that's kinda the point of being a contractor, no?
Here in the Netherlands contractors are also 'at will employed' as the Americans say.
But they pay you more so...
Sounds like a case every lawyer in Germany would like to take. 500€ for first letter to send to the manager reminding the contract conditions. It is enough for most companies not to go further with shady activities. As a contractor one should know how to deal with the clients.
I don’t think that’s shady? When I was hiring contractors it was always project based with mutual understanding things could end quickly if the project or collaboration didn’t work out.
Yes, they get paid 1.5-2x, and that also prices in that it’s not always 100% utilization. Only once had a contractor oppose that, but that was in the context of (severe) underperformance.
In his case, the contract had something different, and they did not pay the actual invoice - that's the shady part.
With contractors, you have more freedom of choice when you write the contracts, but whatever contract you agree on, you still have to honor the contract as agreed.
Oh my bad, I thought you referenced contractors in general. In that case I agree: agreements are to be honored.
OP said that they did this for contractors too!
The legal responsiveness for contractor disputes is definitely not as good as employment. Messing up employment relations in Europe ends up really expensive in most jurisdictions because there'll usually be some mix of unions, government agency or charity that'll have the employee's back.
Contractors don't have that kind of support pretty much anywhere (that's sort of the point), and it's just a standard contract dispute that lawyers argue about.
Sure it was possible, just not convenient. Small claims charges in EU court do work. One major benefit of EU.
Working as a contractor means you're self-employed and the relations you have with "your boss" are a B2B relationship where you agree to get something done in exchange for money - no different from renting office space or servers. Since you're a business owner, you're expected to be competent in the areas of business (which can be cut-throat) and law. You chose to take on this risk by being a contractor.
So what you're saying is your company had a customer that breached contract and didn't pay. I wouldn't compare that to being fired?
Oo? It should have been no issue at all for you to get this money.
We are a law and order country.
You got yourself played
That's not universal though. My dad's company was bought up by a foreign investor, shrunk over multiple reorganizations from its peak of ~500 people in the 70's or 80's down to a skeleton crew of ~50. They weren't fired, they were told the company was going bankrupt and needed to be emptied out. People who worked there for 40+ years were basically given a few months' pay if that and a "good luck". There's a formula for severance pay; years worked * month's wage, this would give people a lot of leeway to find a new job or just sit out until their retirement, but of course that's very expensive so they weaseled their way out of it through various constructions. Dozens of people fired a few years before retirement, most never found another job again. And the boss kept the company, which is now a shell company / sales / license holder, which the parent company was always after of course because production is cheaper to do in e.g. Poland.
> People who worked there for 40+ years were basically given a few months' pay
Those few months pay thing is the key difference. That is legally mandated.
You also get a few months pay in the US unless the company is truly broke.
That's the convention, but AFAIK it's not enshrined on law.
Some states require payout for unused, earned vacation time.
State-managed unemployment pay is also a thing, assuming the employee wasn't fired for cause. I think some states require employers to pay into this via a payroll tax.
Incorrect. It's at-will employment.
"At-will employment" is a meme here. In reality, the company gives you a few months of pay and you sign a document saying you won't sue them for firing you during a layoff.
If you get fired for fraud or for being incompetent, for example, it's often different.
That is mostly in Central and Nothern Europe, unfortunely in the south even with unions, things not always go as they should be.
> Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.
Yeah, no. Also European, and have been marched out without notice, cut off that day with no chance to say goodbye, etc.
It would be interesting to know.
1. Which countries are we talking about? Europe is not homogeneous
2. Which type of business? Are workers unionized?
I worked at a company with a US division and a German division.
It was stark, the difference in process between the two countries. Leadership was openly complaining about how they couldn't close out shuttering the company because it was going to take six months to handle legal compliance in Germany.
This was during an all-hands, and one delightfully brave soul who knew it didn't matter much what he said since we were all exiting anyway commented in the public channel "Because of those laws, the American employees also get a six-month heads up instead of a locked door when they drive in in the morning, so today, we're all very grateful to Germany and our German peers."
I have seen this in EU too
In which country?
Austria
[flagged]
"Coping about being a europoor" definitely sounds like a fair assessment that isn't politically motivated at all, and is sure to improve the quality of discussion. /s
[flagged]
> is quality discussion for you?
If it was, why would I be evaluating whether you're improving it or not? Surely a discussion only needs improvement if it has room for it, right?
> edit: you are another coper europoor.
Strong words from someone who recurringly goes into US vs. EU discussions just to post inflammatory garbage. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43417884
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411189
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43374322
that’s very business hostile tbh. I wouldn’t start a company there.
Treating people with dignity is “business hostile”… welcome to Hacker News comment section.
It's more like "welcome to US mindset" IMHO
This mindset is what moves us forward. Union of soft nations don’t add much these days.
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Plans change, and so they should be communicated and negotiated with the employees going to be affected by the change. It's the dignified way of doing it, people are people, not fungible commodities, treat them as people and unions won't be an issue at all.
> unions are just corporate blackmailing.
This is such an absurdly ignorant take that is hard to start educating you, it also depends a lot on what society you live in since your view on unions will be tainted by what you see in it.
In places like the Nordics, unions are one of the cornerstones of a free labour market, look up how Sweden has a freer labour market than the USA to learn something at least :)
I don't even disagree with you, but your way of argumenting is terrible and actively deterring people from your point that union are a core component of a healthy free market.
If your point is to score virtue point, keep at it, but if you actually want to change anyone mind, avoid terms like "is hard to start educating you", it just makes you sound like a douche
I was being very honest, it is hard to start educating someone coming from that position since there is so much bullshit wrapped around a statement like "unions are just corporate blackmailing" which is hard to pull apart without knowing how the person came to that conclusion.
I don't even think it's possible to change someone's mind who already think that way, since it's purely from a point of absolute ignorance and I'm not willing to put enough effort to cite literature that could give them good starting points to understand something they are very likely not even willing to start understanding. They have a lazy position, I reply lazily.
They have an ideological position, based on ignorance, and from a single statement it's pretty clear they aren't curious and willing to change their mind.
Hence why I cite to look into how unions work in the Nordics, at least that is a starting point if they want to learn more about labour movements. It takes someone being curious though.
In the end, it was absolutely honest: it is hard to start educating someone who holds that position a priori and based on pure ignorance, and if not ignorance it's maliciousness, there's not much of a spectrum in this case.
I work for a paycheck. I can’t exchange “dignity” for goods and services. The guy got paid nice compensation for his labor.
Therefore, let's throw everything non-monetary under the bus because work should be purely transactional?
What else should it be? Do you believe that your company is like “your family”? Your coworkers or especially your manager are “your friends”?
Why else do you go to work?
I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.
The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.
Was it indecent for Google to lay someone off, remove all access and give him 16 weeks of severance + two additional weeks for each year of service?
I didn't say anything about Google.
The submitted article was about Google…
You're taking "Human resources" a bit too literally.
We are resources. The one Big Tech company I have worked for has 1.556 million employees. What else was I besides a “resource”?
It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.
In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.
Yes because a small company could deliver a national same day shipping infrastructure and worldwide network of cloud servers including its own undersead cables.
And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…
I'm okay with not having same day shipping if this means that companies don't have to treat their employees like dirt.
But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.
So exactly what “power” does Amazon have over your life?
Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.
Amazon has nothing to do with that.
Pretty sure they wouldn't want someone like you to do so either.
they are doing great!
Thanks.
People are more important than businesses
that’s only what employee handbook says.
You're not starting a business anywhere, so no one cares.
too late
Always someone with a horrible opinion to give in this hellsite
i have had to avoid hiring excellent candidate(s) from EU, just because they would become unflushable if it comes to that.
> just because they would become unflushable if it comes to that
Your choice of verb tells a lot about what you think of your employees.
sure i am being dramatic but my point stands. if my company can’t be fluid and can’t react fast to market due to bs unions and backward laws of some land, that place is what i avoid.
If your business is contingent on the behaviour of one employee then you have failed to hire properly or build a resilient business...
In many cases problematic employees can and are removed from EU companies.
many cases isn’t competitive when i can find equal talent with no such restrictions.
The fact you refer to people as “unflushable” or “useless” is chilling.
How exactly would they become "unflushable"?
Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?
> Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?
Well to be fair excellent candidates are excellent on paper. It sometimes happens (not often, but not once in a blue moon either) that the candidate turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job.
Thats just not true.
You don't sound like a big company ceo. If you have a good reason, even as a small company, and revenue / affordability is one, you can fire people.
You just need to be able to pay them for min. 3 month if thats your contract length and as a business owner you should know how to calculate.
vs. i can hire in canada/ukraine/india/pakistan/china for a more skilled person with no such bs restrictions.
This doesn't make sense. If you hire them to work in local offices in those countries, they often have even more employee protections than Europe does. And if you bring them over to US, then it's the same law regardless of where they are originally from.
why would i establish a local office in say paris if laws are so hostile towards startups.
Please post the name of your company so we can be sure to avoid it.
done
people are getting quite snippy about this comment, but hating this mindset means you lock yourself away from so much actual wealth. It means you confine and condemn people to significantly worse economic conditions by limiting people's ability to freely associate and disassociate.
just to hammer this point home: Every mandatory employee benefit has a huge cost, and adding enough of them kills your economy. It makes it more expensive to have an employee than X many jobs can justify. That X grows every year, and that's X people who cant do that job and get paid money for it.
exactly, as a startup founder i wouldn’t commit to a yearly reserved ec2 instance for a year let alone an employee.
"had to"
Not even building and exporting widebody aircraft?
outlier.
> After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes.
I was at a company that did this. I thought it was very nice at first.
It didn’t take long to see why most companies don’t do this. It became common to have a couple people who turned their last days into a mission to poison the well and go on angry tirades. Those days became tense and messy as people trying to do work felt necessary to move it to private messages to avoid triggering anyone.
It gets really ugly when IT starts checking logs and sees outgoing employees doing things like accessing code they weren’t even working on or downloading files in volume.
This was at a company with generous severance, too, so that wasn’t the cause. A small number of people get irrationally vengeful upon being laid off. At Big Tech scale it’s virtually guaranteed that at least one of the people you lay off is going to make some bad decisions.
My company does this, but they are a very large company that is known to aggressively sue people that try to poison the well, so no one tries.
Wow, the last paragraph is really touching. That comment from the CEO is brilliant: "I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today." That will stay with me for some time!
> I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today.
The problem is, before the layoffs, the employee may have felt they had an obligation to do right by the company. Once they're fired, it may no longer be the case. Some may very well become spiteful, act on their vengeance, & seek immediate retribution.
The risk posed by an employee going rouge is what most CEOs are playing for, especially as in GP's case, for a company as large as Google, where they need to plan for all possible failures and scenarios, some of which may or may not have happened before hand.
In France you can't layoff people on the spot, there is a 3 months notice. And I've yet to hear about employees going rogue.
Maybe in US laid off employees can go rogue because they're treated like shit in the process?
Notice doesn't mean they must be allowed to keep working. It just means they need to be paid.
US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits. They just lose access to the building and their work devices immediately. I imagine it's no different in France.
> US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits.
Some employers may decide to give a few months of pay and benefits to laid off employees (although 6 months would be unusually large) but it is definitely not required and is not always done. Mass layoffs of 100+ people need to be announced 60 days ahead (but without naming who will be laid off) but there are no requirements for any kind of severance.
There's no legal requirement, but literally every company that is not bankrupt does it because otherwise they will face huge numbers of wrongful termination suits.
That's not true in every sector.
After college I worked for a large regional manufacturer. They laid off about 10% of their employees, I got nothing.
Severance pay is a white collar benefit.
> I imagine it's no different in France.
He literally just told you it’s different in France?
He said that with incorrect information about how layoffs in America work.
I think we’re all aware of how layoffs in the US work because there’s so godawfully many of them (that get publicised on HN). It’s very clear to me that 3-6 months of severance is very much not the norm. Being walked out immediately by security very much is.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Usually both happen. You usually get 3+ months of severance on your "don't sue us or badmouth us" paperwork and then security escorts you out.
No I didn't. I know how layoffs works in America because I've been laid off in America.
You know how it worked for you. What you described is not a legal requirement and many other people have had different experiences.
As it should be, but emotional people make emotional choices. The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true. Their resulting actions can include anything from theft of IP to hand over to a competitor, to destruction of records or property. Worse, it is impossible to tell when someone will choose to feel they have been wronged, even when the employee could have had chronic absenteeism or underperformance that they justify with personal excuses. (I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be compassion, rather that most people will almost always make mental excuses to justify their behavior regardless of whether that reasoning is sound.)
Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation. It’s not just with layoffs, it can happen with protecting source code, licensing, network security, etc. I concede that a company could replace destroyed property and should be able to recover deleted data, then prosecute/sue to recover damages which could cost tens or hundreds of thousands(or millions depending on the level of access), but the disruption to business can be significant in some cases. Moreover, it is impossible to put an IP cat back in the bag.
For me, it seems easy to understand both sides on this one; compassion vs risk.
> As it should be, but emotional people make emotional choices. The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.
That's pretty cold, un-empathetic logic. If you're rigorously practice that kind of thing, you'll get the same reflected back at you.
My company has layoffs (not massive, but some). In my experience, the affected employees keep their access to everything, and typically finish up their work and participate in transition activities (knowledge transfer, etc) over a couple weeks. Yeah, they're typically also slacking a lot and socializing more, but no one around here wants to be an ass to their coworkers. I think the only people who get their access cut off are those fired for cause.
> Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation.
There are obvious problems with designing your processes around the literal worst case (e.g. treating everyone like they're a criminal has consequences).
> The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.
On the flip side, treating them like a crook seems more likely to inspire that kind of revenge instinct. Most people would understand removing privileged access immediately but giving them a dignified exit seems more likely to prevent problems.
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.
This kind of arrangement doesn't affect only the employees that were laid off, but also the ones remaining in the company. It's how you get people who will cynically exploit every ability to do as little as they can get away with while climbing as high as possible on the career ladder.
> 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 consequences are almost certainly not that bad. It's also probably downstream of some other bad ways of thinking, that probably make it appear more reasonable than it is.
> 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.
You know, you're not required hire those kinds of people in the first place. Hire people who get along with others.
> Eh. That's a bad way of thinking, but one that I think is tempting to software engineers.
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.
> This has nothing to do with software engineering.
You should note I said that way of thinking "is tempting to software engineers," not that is exclusive to them or has anything specifically to do with software engineering.
> It's about business risk management. I'm not justifying it, just explaining the sad reality of it.
The actual sad reality that some people chose to treat others unkindly pre-emptively.
> I'm glad you have a crystal ball to perfectly predict how everybody will act in future situations.
I don't, but I think you can minimize your risk, if that's what you need to avoid being an asshole. Then you have to practice trusting others.
> 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.
Honestly, that seems like an argument for making sure employees have good work-life balance, so they're not giving an unhealthy to the point where they feel betrayed.
But I suspect the people who think "I'll make them angry, but that's OK because I'll make sure they can't any damage," are probably also the kind of people who would knowingly exploit an over-committed employee.
For anyone not from India — India does layoffs in every way. From “cut on zoom in 90 sec” to “please know that you have to resign and serve your two months notice and then go”; to also “if you want you can serve the notice period, or you can just leave today and still get the pay for two months”. I have experienced the first and last and in the case of last for some reason I had chosen to serve the notice.
My immediate reaction is “I probably would too.”
Working is often treated as transactional but it is about so much more. Self-worth, professional reputation, bonds with coworkers, ownership and stewardship of solutions. Even the simple everyday routine that a workplace drives is important.
That’s great, and the polar opposite of how I experienced layoffs (of others, then eventually of me).
But one thing that could be better is transparency around severance, so you know in advance what it will be should you get laid off. (Six months may or may not be “generous” depending on tenure.)
When I was laid off we got what was “customary” in that country, but before the offer was on the table nobody was sure we’d get it. It’s so much nicer when this is a matter of law — I’m all for a ~ free labor market but severance requirements help to balance the risk so the employees can relax and do their best work.
A nice addition to this I've seen twice now is a slack channel (via their personal emails) with continuing employees willing to help them practice interviewing and share their professional networks to help them find their next role.
* The Slack is under the company's control, and potential monitoring and retention? Over the life of someone no longer with the company?
* Was there any sour grapes in the Slack channel? Or was it a bummer or distraction for remaining employees?
* Did the Slack actually help the employees readjust and refocus on their new job search?
* Why not encourage people to say goodbyes and exchange contact info, and pay for a job search coaching service (with no reporting back to the company)?
God I love living in a country with employment law that recognises the massive disparity between employers and employees.
What happens if your company supports billions of dollars in economic output, and a few employees decides to go rogue and sabotage some systems that then causes an international loss of billions of dollars, and possibly property damages and loss of life? If you were the CEO, would you take criminal/financial responsibility for that?
It's not like there aren't disgruntled employees before layoffs. If a single employee could cause billions of dollars in losses, then the company already has a big problem regardless of layoffs.
It's very interesting how so many people in upper management seem to think that they can trust employees not to sabotage and cause billions of dollars in losses by paying them like 100k a year.
The big difference is liability exposure.
If a current employee causes damage, that's one thing. But if a recently laid-off employee who retained full system access causes billions in losses, the CEO and board would face severe consequences legally and reputationally, since it would be perceived as an obvious security lapse.
An employee who is serving their notice period is still an employee. Unless you mean truly ex-employees who still have access, in which case the company has a big problem if it cannot revoke credentials.
This is a strange sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Effectively, your argument says that if there is any step, whether wise or foolish, kind or cruel, that some take, all must take it or risk being found negligent.
That's no way to run an (overly litigious) society.
I don't even agree with the self-proclaimed legal experts in the replies.
Employers generally assume liability for torts (civil liability arising from wrong-doings) vicariously. For example if an employee somehow puts rat poison into a customer's burger, the employer is automatically liable for that, because they are responsible for the employee's actions. (See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability )
But if on the other hand a recently laid-off ex-employee sneaks back to the restaurant and then adds rat poison to the burgers, the liability of the employer isn't automatic (you can claim they should have done better with their security etc., but it is probably a defense to say they did all reasonable steps to secure the facilities).
So yeah, I call bullshit. More likely is that the C-suite just cargo-culted some "layoff best practices" and it just became a thing you did without questioning.
I generally agree with you and the parent on this. It definitely is self-fulfilling. Because some companies cut access to laid off employees immediately, it makes the others look negligent if they don't. I'm not trying to say I think this is correct or the best, just trying to speculate why some employers choose to take this action. Certainly all don't, but it does seem more common the larger a company gets.
I'd be curious if every laid off Google employee experiences this hard cut off, or if it's determined case by case.
There's a difference. An employee going rogue is different from a non employee/ex-employee doing malicious things.
Only one of them would be seen as negligent.
>"If a single employee could cause billions of dollars in losses..."
This situation is endemic in smaller companies with the tight budgets.
There are companies that support billions of economic output in countries which require a notice period. If they thought it was a risk that they would be taken down be a rogue employee, they have the option of putting them on 'gardening leave' during the notice period. This is extremely rare; they know the risk is insignificant so they are more keen to get any remaining value from the relationship (work, handover).
In our industry and many others, being a professional and maintaining good relations with your ex -colleagues, who form your professional network, is much more valuable than any emotional satisfaction from screwing them over, even without the risk of going to prison.
> they have the option of putting them on 'gardening leave' during the notice period. This is extremely rare
That must depend on the country. In Switzerland it's standard that employees don't work during the notice period when they're laid off.
Must do. I wonder if that's because of the wide access to weapons? Although I thought I'd heard that there still wasn't much gun violence in Switzerland.
I have the impression that (although I did not check for data beforehand to confirm my assumptions) that gun violence is very low in developed countries, with the USA being the outlier.
I believe the overall positive employer-employee relationship in Europe is much more of a product of legislature and cultural norms, than the threat of violence.
Even in US, it's not a strict rule. I gave my notice more than a month in advance and retained access to all employee spaces (both physical and digital) until my last day. Coincidentally, I own enough guns that describing it as an "arsenal" would not even be an embellishment it usually is.
At the end of the day it's more about culture (i.e. people's expectations of what is normal) than any objective factors.
It's definitely not related to the population's gun ownership ratio. I would say gun violence is probably comparable with our European neighbours. It's just way lower compared to the US.
Also, from my experience, there is not a clear trend whether companies in Switzerland want employees to keep working or if they just let them go during the notice period. I've seen many examples of both.
Puzzled by why anyone would downvote a pure question. Wide distribution of guns is an obvious commonality between the US and Switzerland; if that's offensive observation please let me know why!
Probably because only the US has the kind of gun violence that you're wondering about. I don't think in Europe, the idea that someone is going to come after you with a gun because you pissed them off generally hits the radar.
Someone may find the question offensive because of that.
The "garden leave" approach is the standard in the US. 3-6 months of severance pay, but you lose access to company systems immediately.
This is only a problem if you treat employees in a way that makes them want to go rogue and sabotage some systems.. maybe don't fire them without warning or cause, or clear reasoning? I suppose if someone is actually able to tangibly impact some critical system, limit their access to that, but beyond that, it's just an excuse to make it sound OK to abruptly dump someone from a social and professional context. Maybe it's legal, but is it necessary? No. Is it traumatizing? Yes.
Does this question also equally apply to the opposite side? If an employee got so angry with how you laid them off and treated them afterwards that they decide to do what they can to damage your company?
Cutting access and having security walk them out is more or less security theater. If an employee really wanted to cause damage the odds are they either already have or will still find a way. In this scenario having generous severance and treating them with respect is likely to better defuse the situation than kicking them out the door.
This hypothetical is about what the CEO/company decides to do, not what the employee decides to do. A lot of liability "theater" is not there to prevent issues, it's to cover your ass.
So no, this question doesn't apply equally to the opposite side. An employee does not take responsibility for what the company does. A lot of people wonder why CEOs are paid so much; part of that is simply to take responsibility.
Ironically, a lot of people complain about useless CEOs, but if you asked them to take that responsibility for the pay, they wouldn't take it (note that that responsibility includes things like sweet talking shareholders and giving public statements on short notice on things that could nuke millions of dollars in value and create very real legal liability).
Ah yes, because CEOs often face consequences for their poor decisions. They definitely don't get golden parachutes and move on to a new company when they run a company into the ground.
There is a range between kicking them out instantly and allowing them to do whatever they please. Authorizations to important systems should be immediately revoked but you can allow them some time to gather their things, access to internal chat to say their goodbyes etc. Or is that an excuse for poorly designed internal controls?
Right. Because only laid-off employees can cause such a damage of course (/s).
This is a twisted way to look at the risk.
Disgruntled employees have more reason to wreak havoc. All the more reason they should be treated as humanely as possible in a difficult period that in most cases is inflicted by the company itself.
"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. "
Some companies are just paranoid. My company has now had several rounds of layoffs, people were kept on for a few months, got severance and everything went as harmonious as layoffs can be.
The cruelty the way some companies and now Musk with DOGE are doing it is simply not necessary and reflects a lot on the character of leadership. To me it looks like they are deeply insecure and hate their people.
Good for you but how sad that being treated like a human is remarkable.
This is such a huge contrast to the usual cold, corporate layoff horror stories. Honestly, this is how it should be done if layoffs are truly unavoidable - with transparency, respect, and basic human decency.
Wow, I've never heard of terminated employees being able to keep their corporate laptops before. Did IT at least wipe them first?
Quite often it's literally cheaper for them to let employees keep the laptop (sometimes for a token price) after wiping than it is to process it for reuse, just because bureaucracy is that expensive.
Interesting. That's what's happened in the last two companies I've worked for when they did layoffs. I'm typing this message from my ex-corporate laptop right now...
The process was that IT locked the laptop until the severance package was signed, then you got a code that let you reboot and reinstall MacOS.
> the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say goodbyes
This is just so wild for me as an European, because at least in Germany if you get fired (or if you quit) you need to stay 1 - 3 MONTHS at the company still.
Not true. They can remove you from the company grounds and block access to all systems the moment you get fired or you hand in your resignation. But they have to pay you (if there is no "good reason" for firing you) for a varying amount of time (depending on your contract and some minimums by law).
Of course, most of the time, you can / need to stay at the company for that above mentioned varying amount of time.
this happens in the UK (called garden leave) but in my experience you're typically sent home with full pay
Is that company in data storage?
No. It's a small company ~400 employees in total, including contractors. The CEO is a very technical guy. The average tenure of the employees let go was ~8 years.
VDX.tv?
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 on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos).
What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.
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 understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome.
It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.
> Chrome has not been well funded for years.
Hasn't it? It has still been developing quite rapidly; and used to lead in interop scores (reflecting how well a browser conforms to the specs).
"The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome" -Wired (March 7, 2025)
>What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer.
I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs.
To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week.
I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.
The user love/passion on the JAX team is super high. Interacting with them is whatever the opposite of Kafkaesque is.
Well, right up until they get suddenly laid off.
Hasn't Google given up on tensorflow for JAX now?
It looks like tensorflow is going down the slow legacy/sunset trajectory at this point.
Have they given up on tensorflow.js for the browser as well? Is there any replacement?
In the instances where I’ve needed to run inference in the browser I have used Onnx runtime web to run weights that were exported from PyTorch training. You have to convert your browser data to onnx tensors, but it’s not that bad.
I don’t do actual training in the browser though, so maybe someone else can answer that part.
> for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google
This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil".
https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...
Google dropped their "don't be evil" a very long time ago.
I can't wait for everyone to be shocked, shocked, in five years when the biggest genAI companies get caught engaging in a bunch of sleazy behavior.
You don't have to wait at all, given that OpenAI has been at it for some time now.
While possibly a traumatic experience for Adam, I fail to see the significance of this beyond anecdotal level. And I find it rather odd to argue that after all Google did and didn't do that this is what is causing disillusionment with Google. By now Chrome is basically just a Trojan Horse with advertisement and surveillance for this purpose hidden in the inside.
I think the OP explained the broader significance very well: If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers. That's bad news for anyone who builds for the web or who relies on it as an open platform for the dissemination of information and software.
I think the position your take re. Google and Chrome is an extreme one. It always surprises me that such black and white opinions about big tech companies are commonplace even on HN. Yes, Google have done things around privacy that I strongly disagree with, but the idea that Chrome is simply a trojan horse for advertising/surveillance is absurdly reductive and ignores the history of Google as a company.
Google was, originally, a web-first company. Their business success relied on the web being an open, competitive platform. And, at a time when Microsoft were still trying to maintain monopoly control of personal computing, Google's development of Chrome did a huge amount of good in maintaining and enhancing the web as an open alternative. And they employed a lot of people who were genuinely believed in that mission, such as Adam.
Make no mistake, the death or spin-off of Chrome will not be a win for privacy or openness. Building a web browser is a hugely expensive and difficult endeavor, and it has to be paid for somehow. Yes, Google has leveraged Chrome in some ways to collect data, but far less than they could have done, and far less than any successor will have to do, just to keep the lights on. Look at what has happened to Mozilla and Firefox if you need proof.
The fact that manifest V3 went through and fundamentally nerfed all extensions that just so happen to block ads and offer privacy means these people failed, regardless of their intentions.
> If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers.
A layoff is not firing. If Google is doing layoffs, they'll intentionally choose good performers so they can demonstrate it was done for purely economic reasons. Otherwise they get legal issues.
Besides that, Google may not trust its own performance metrics well enough to use them. The VP might assume the director is lying about who's important etc.
> it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome
Hadn’t thought of it this way, but if there is (say) a 50% chance of being forced to divest Chrome, then the EV on your investments in the future are substantially lower.
Strategic downgrade sounds right.
The history of Chrome and Google is interesting but not very relevant for assessing their status quo. If anything you'd have to factor in the trajectory (which I did: "by now") and given its direction it certainly wouldn't improve a valuation. Regarding your "reductive" opinion of Firefox and Mozilla, all I can say is I use Firefox and I'm quite satisfied with it. Ironically, the worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions can be traced back to it being funded by ... Google.
The worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions is that making a browser isn't something you can build a business on because you're competing with free.
Anyone who thought Mozilla wasn't going to eventually turn to evil to maintain their liquidity has no stones to throw at Mr. Argyle regarding naïveté. Is Mozilla Corp (not Mozilla Foundation) a non-profit? No? Then they need to turn a profit, and I don't see a price-tag attached to that browser they make.
I am listening to a podcast Adam Argyle is talking in, listening to what he is passionate about and then getting axed by Google is painful to hear as now it is clear that Google is not passionate about those things (anymore). It is also painful personally because it is what I am passionate about (and my job). Link: https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-de...
> What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
It probably says "the DOJ really is gonna force us to sell Chrome."
Unless the prospective buyer's name rhymes with Melon Tusk, I doubt the DOJ will do anything to challenge Google's web monopoly this strongly.
Maybe they're not confident in the case against them: https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...
This round of layoffs wasn't only on the Chrome team but also for Android.
This certainly isn't new. I know someone who worked at Google who mentioned the company culture has been souring since the start of the pandemic. I suspect Google will have a slow death akin to Yahoo in the coming years.
There are very serious talks about forcing google to divest from Chrome/Android, I would bet that's the reason
It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).
If you're being forced to sell something, wouldn't you want to maximize its value? Wouldn't you retain the most valuable people?
> What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
Everything that's needed saying for at least the last decade.
>a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack.
I have trouble relating to the evangelist fervor that some developers develop toward their craft.
It probably just didn't have enough economic value for the company, from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either. The guy probably earned enough money in a few years that would take me 15 years of work, I'm not sure this as a "personal tragedy".
Completely agree. What is a tragedy though, is that if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort. If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails. It's just incentivizing people to treat their job the same way the company treats their employees. A culture of distrust and minimum effort. It's very sad to see.
> if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort
This is bizarre to me because my impression from three years ago was that they were trying to correct from that, and it sounds like they overcorrected right back to it. I spoke with a Google engineer I think in 2022, he had heard rumors there were going to be layoffs on his team, and he had sent a message to a more senior team member that he hadn't heard from in months to let her know that she should, to put it delicately, maybe manage her visibility better. And she responded that she had lost interest in the job anyway, hadn't done anything except respond to emails and messages in over a year, and had 99% transitioned to managing a collection of properties she had been accumulating over the years, so if he heard she got laid off, he shouldn't feel bad for her. I'm pretty sure that was in 2022.
To see Google go from tolerating being ghosted by highly compensated senior+ engineers in 2022 to laying off people who were doing excellent and high-profile work in 2025 must be surreal for people inside Google. If this is all accurate, they swung the pendulum from one zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty right through the healthy zone and into another zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty with dizzying speed.
> If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails
I guess the half million dollars yearly (I'm assuming he made) and the fact there aren't tons of other places he can get that kind of money and prestige for doing that kind of job. I'm not saying I'm loving any of this, but yeah the system we've built treats all of us like replaceable cogs. During good economic times we don't really feel it, but we are now in a rough patch and we see the capitalist economic reality for what it is.
> from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either
Google has traditionally had a fair number of developer relations engineers. Chrome team alone has several. The current devrels include Una Kravets, Bramus van Damme, Rachel Andrew, possibly Jecelyn Yeen, Oliver Dunk, Matthias Rohmer, probably some others... They help prioritise new browser features through developer feedback, document new features, maintain documentation at web.dev, spec up new features and represent Google at various standardizing bodies, write walkthroughs and tutorials, build demos to showcase new browser features, make explanatory videos, give conference talks, and generally keep us, web developers, up to date with modern browser best practices.
Their value to web developers is immense. Their value to Google is possibly in that good devrels are a living advertisement of web technologies in general, and Chromium-based web browsers in particular. The better developers know browser features, the more attractive and capable UIs they can build for the web, the more consumers will be attracted to the web (including Chrome), and the more money Google will ultimately make via advertisements.
Adam has been so great in this role that it does not make sense to me that Google decided to cut specifically his position.
> Google has traditionally had a fair number of developer relations engineers
I wish them all well, but things can change fast depending on how the economy is doing and where the company is headed priority wise.
> But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.
Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.
One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.
Godspeed!
I think their point was that they were told they could look for another internal role, but at the same time had their access revoked, which sends a very mixed message.
It's because the message isn't for OP, it's for the people who are left.
With the way it was written it wasn't clear to me whether the other role was offered as a replacement for the layoff or more of a good luck I'm sure you'll land on your feet. Agreed it's a mixed message if it was the former.
Companies will always remind you it's "just business" when it suits them - so it's healthy to keep that same energy in return
yup. embrace being a cog. enjoy your cog work as much as you can, but recognize it for what it is. don't tie your identity to it.
Ah yes. I got to do that once after a layoff. The manager tried to guilt me or something into working after I was layed off. "Because they were given me severance so I should be ok with doing the work"
I told them. No you are wrong. I was given severance to sign an NDA and non-disparagement agreement. That is what the severance bought the company, but I'll be glad to discuss a consultant role on an hourly basis.
> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary.
Agreed, it is necessary to make deprogramming oneself easier — less painful — to the extent that one has come to identify with the work and/or culture and/or employer.
But it is also exhausting to maintain a façade of allegiance to a harshly indifferent power structure.
To me my employer is my customer. We don't require each other's allegiance, just an ongoing mutually beneficial transaction and good will. When either fails for either party it's time to move along. Devotion isn't part of the arrangement.
Similarly:
I got badly burnt in a relationship once.
After that I promised myself not to get hurt again. If you don't love each other any more, accept that, and walk away.
Worked for me, and I stayed friends with almost all my ex-es after that.
>I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.
Not just that: separate it from your career. Ensure that you and others would still value yourself even if you weren't receiving top decile income for an easy job. A misanthropic software developer is begrudgingly useful; a plain misanthrope isn't even mediocre.
Good clarification. I know this separation is difficult especially when the career funds the other parts of life and the employer or title you hold is seen as prestigious.
"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
My comment is not meant to encourage removing kindness and humanity from the relationship. It's meant as a reminder that the other party in the relationship (the company) does not necessarily bring those values to the table.
I would also like to live in a world where humane values are reflected in personal and business relationships to the point where the line between personal and business relationships blurs.
Exactly.. Many see it as some sort of marriage in an age where even marriages are contractual relations
I hope you're not suggesting that you approach your marriage the way you approach your relationship with a corporate partner.
> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.
This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
Hardly. This type of arrangement was short-lived and anomalous. It was roughly true in rich economies during a few decades of the post-war era. Never before, and not for most people around the world.
Relationships are worth cultivating any time, of course, but one shouldn't mistake a job for a life. The idea that a job is for life and your employer is your family was a mind hack that worked for a short while and is now unraveling.
In the days of yore, didn't a decent chunk of people literally have their name come from a family profession? I.e. John Smith, Jan Schmidt, Carl Maria von Weber.
As in it wouldn't be just your worth tied to the profession, but N generations of your parents, etc.
It used to be sort of true in the Soviet sphere. By sort of, it was more like an employer for life rather than the exact job. Unless rhe company went under which was rare.
> Never before, and not for most people around the world.
Please tell me more about the gig economy of medieval peasants.
The english wikipedia is lacking on the historical side, but you can find out more with the French one : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalier
Google trad of a couple paragraphs :
> Most of the modest peasants, men or women, very often still small artisans, small weavers or textile workers, peddlers, boatmen or carriers in bad seasons, could become day laborers on nearby farms and estates, if they had the build and stamina, once their own work was done. Some were even regular day laborers, familiar to a domain steward or a village ploughman, present all year round or usually required for a certain number of tasks. Certain harvest tasks were sometimes carried out if possible part of the night, or continuously by successive teams[5].
> Day laborers, brewers or laborers, represented a significant part of the population and sometimes lived, in the absence of family support or a solidarity house, on the edge of begging[8]. In rural areas, they subsisted thanks to additional agricultural work with ploughmen or farm merchants but also thanks to wool spinning, crafts or transport. They also served as additional labor in construction, helped the lumberjacks, made bundles, etc. Women did laundry or took children in as wet nurses[9].
Medieval peasants cannot be said to have had a job. They are mostly either tied to the land (and its ownders), or indeed gigging from season to season.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
This is... not true. It's so not true I don't even know where to start rebutting it. But for a start, most of human history you were either hunting and gathering for yourself, keeping a flock for yourself, or farming land for yourself. "Employment" even as a concept is a pretty new concept on the scale of human history.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
Just looking at the Western world that breaks down during industrialization and falls apart if you go further back then that, journeymen (i.e. tradesmen who had completed their apprenticeship) would often literally travel from town to town for several years to work under different masters before submitting their work to a guild for evaluation and becoming masters themselves. I guess you could say serfs worked "for the same employer" because their feudal lords owned them as part of the territory but that seems like a stretch.
It's not so much that employees used to "keep working for the same employer for their entire lives", it's more that the people running and operating businesses used to be part of a local community and there used to be an understanding of a shared responsibility beyond private property claims.
This isn't something employees can change, either. Even employers aren't really able to change this because they too have to operate in the same economic system that contributes to this effect. It's probably more extreme in the US (and some places in the US more than others) but the economic system does not care for such sentimentalities and a business that does will put itself at an economic disadvantage, especially where the social fabric has already been sufficiently eroded to avoid bad optics (e.g. WalMart arguably failed in Germany because its attitude to employees felt extremely off-putting both to workers and consumers at the time but that resistance may have been eroded by the behavior of other companies since to the point where it would no longer make them stand out the same way if they tried to re-enter the market now - economic changes making this unfeasible notwithstanding).
For most of human history we were hunter-gatherers. Even assuming you mean post-industrial history this isn't true though.
The person you're replying to is correct in a technical sense I think? The hunter-gatherer phase would be considered prehistory since it pre-dates the development of writing, which is what enabled humans to record history.
Do people really have to make up stuff like that? If you said large parts of history, maybe.
"For entirety" definitely not. What you describe was a thing in some periods, typically periods where some group got too much power and they tended to end with huge disfunctions and breakdowns.
Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly.
They are themselves cogs in the machine.
A machine that goes all the way to the executive class, and they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
We all participate in this hostile culture, in various ways. Usually using the excuse that we need to pay rent, eat, find the work interesting, or with some other excuse that justify the means.
It seems like it's hard to do the right thing when you have something you want to buy or otherwise spent your whole life getting here, before realizing what here is.
I feel like its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks. I care about each and every person on my team, I care if they are engaged and if they can do their job. I care if they get sick and give them the time to make sure they feel better. I care about their career and try to help them along. Maybe I'm the minority, but I think that lots of managers of ICs should and do feel this way. As you go up the ladder, i can see that going down as the scope increases, but thats why you have managers, to keep attention to those details. Now i've had directors and stuff that do not care about their managers. I've also had managers that aren't great and don't care.
You are 100% correct though, we are all cogs in the machine. In the end, the people at the top don't care about anything below them if it isn't making them an the shareholders more money. If they do, they are a unicorn and i hope everyone gets to work with someone like that.
When I was laid off from RAX, it was a super emotional time. I had a job where I got to hang out with my friends and good people doing good stuff, and we also did some work (the work we were doing was so enjoyable most of the time, it didn't feel like work). I've never been able to capture that since and it has contributed greatly to my desire to get out of leadership roles.
> its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks
That's not the claim being made, by my reading. The quote was, "Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you" -- which to me means, it's not clear exactly at what level, but at some point people stop caring about you as an individual. This may be at the direct manager level if you have a shitty manager. Or it may be much higher. But at some point up the chain it will become true if you're at a megacorp.
>I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp. >Yep. One of the most unfortunate realities of modernity.
The crazy thing to me is the lack of awareness of these people. Has hiring at Google fallen off that badly? Was there always such a gap between 'smart enough to work at google' and 'smart enough to realize their corpo-we're one big family-speak is total BS' ?
> 'smart enough to work at google' and 'smart enough to realize their corpo-we're one big family-speak is total BS
I have noticed that smartness can be highly compartmentalized.
There’s a difference between intellectually understanding it, versus actually seeing yourself tossed aside and cast out, while knowing that all the other cogs are already back in motion and pretty much fully adjusted to your absence.
"Smart" and "naive" are not antonyms. Indeed, it is practically a stereotype that the two often go together.
For many Googlers, this is their one-and-only company so they actually have no frame of reference, including no frame of reference to notice the company culture was shifting over the past decade-ish.
> We all participate in this hostile culture
You can try to participate less. It's also work, but for some people, it's better than the corporate environment.
Keep your expenses under control. (That alone can be hard to do if you're relatively successful in tech, so I mention it because it's something to really think about.) Network in real life to find projects that have finite durations. Take some time between those projects and use that to both relax and develop new business. Go to a different city for a few days, maybe for an organized meetup or a conference (even if you don't attend) and try to meet people. You're double dipping here. Go sightseeing or something else entertaining, and then try to work a room.
> they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
Hopefully more the former than the latter. You're not getting married. You shouldn't be out to find a new family, and everyone hates that metaphor anyway. You probably will find people you do like, though. Since you're targeting well defined business, you don't have to live with that relationship if it doesn't pan out. You just need to get to your next cycle.
I've found a lot of people that I really do like. Some, I still do business with, and others I just sometimes get together with for dinner or a cocktail. We know we still like each other because there's no longer any money involved.
This is a defensive play also since you aren't all-in on one engagement. You can't get complacent just because you're on a W-2 and it all feels good, as this post illustrates.
I'm aware that this isn't an out-of-the-gate strategy. If you're gainfully employed now, save up. Even if you hate your job, use it to establish a stable position so that you can get out when you want to. Seriously consider what you think are the luxuries in life and whether you actually enjoy them or if you have been convinced that you do for some other purpose, like pleasing others, peacocking, or keeping up with the Joneses.
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
yep, you always was.
bigtech and corporate make a good illusion that you aren't. brace, if you let yourself believe in that illusion.
I feel like this is a very dramatic view of things. Have you ever been in a management position?
I think his statement could have benefited from and/or implicitly in the list of titles.
I certainly care very deeply about my people, and letting someone go is a last resort after trying to work things out. My boss cares that I care.. their boss.. we're numbers.
I have and this poster is spot on, he needs to go higher up the chain though. Investors hate employees, even founders. Founders are out to get rich. Executives are out to get rich but don't have what it takes to be founders. All of these people detest labor. They are the enemy you must work with to buy food. Treat them as such.
I feel like this is a very cynical way of looking at things.
I know some excellent people in leadership that have been promoted from lower level management jobs. I’m not sure the career change made them no longer care about people.
It's not that the career change makes them not care about people. It's that it's practically impossible to get into upper management without eating others. People who don't embrace their sociopathic tendencies don't make it - they get out-competed by those who do. The very occasional exception just proves the rule, and usually doesn't last in any case because once they get to that point, they still have to compete to remain there.
This is definitely how the capital class views labor. Don’t be fooled, and ignore at your own peril.
I wouldn’t really consider someone that moved from middle management to upper management/executive leadership to be a part of the “capital class.”
Investors, board members, maybe even some CEOs, sure.
If they’re upper management, they are tasked with doing the dirty work for capital. That’s their job.
That doesn’t mean they don’t care though. Now this could come from spending time at a company where the executives were only ~3 levels of indirection from devs.
They would lay you off in the blink of an eye or be instantly fired. “Caring” doesn’t really come into play.
>In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
Engineers, nerds, developers remember this ALWAYS. Do not work hard for ANYONE including your family members unless they reciprocate proportionately.
This reminds me of the demotivator with pictures of cogs.
> Just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important.
https://despair.com/cdn/shop/files/worth_6b813282-f9f8-41ab-...
This has being like this when that changed from "Personal" department to "Human Resources"
Do the corp that is what you are!
The lower level of hell is definitely reserved of industrial psychologists and advertisers!
So the key thing here is that this didn't used to be how things were at Google.
People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.
If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.
The reality of one's lack of value to one's own employer is often baffling. It makes you wonder how anyone manages to stay employed at all, since apparently everyone is replicable and unimportant. I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?
Layoffs in particular are like this because they're planned very quickly by very small groups of people. Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale, so the people in charge do everything they can to maintain secrecy and minimize the time between people hearing about layoffs and the layoffs taking effect. This basically always translates to random-seeming decisions - priority 1 is to cut costs by X amount, choosing the right people to cut is secondary. This means that, for example, engineers that have received performance-based raises are punished since, on paper, they do the same job as lower-performing but lower-paid engineers.
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
In this particular case the impending layoff was basically obvious to everyone months in advance (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893463).
> Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale
Granted, but it seems like the current way of salary-first, performance-blind cutting obliterates it even harder.
Really, all options obliterate morale.
Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.
Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.
Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.
Any style of layoff is going to be bad for morale, but rumors floating around tank morale for as long as those rumors exist, and then moral takes another hit on the actual day. In that way it makes sense to just rip the Band-Aid off.
Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.
Managers don't have the kind of information necessary to plan layoffs that don't seem random. Anything they know is already being used for the usual hiring/promotion/compensation adjustment process.
It seems rather disappointing if typical management would make such impactful decisions so rapidly that their "on paper" analysis couldn't be made clever enough to consider more than a single variable.
Your relationship with your employer is no different than any other business relationship. You can do the bare minimum, just as there are many businesses that do the bare minimum toward their customers, and those businesses often have a low subsistence level of success; if you do the same, you may have the same level of success in your career.
An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.
Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.
This is a lesson that all senior developers know pretty well, that is why companies rather hire naive juniors, instead folks that already mastered how the game gets played, and cannot be sold on company mission, values, or whatever snake oil gets talked about during interview process.
And while I was still employed as a seasoned developer (before recently retiring) I felt it was my role to pass along some of my cynicism to the new hires and younger devs. Some of them seemed a little surprised to see me call bullshit in a group meeting. (Good luck to you boys and girls.)
Meanwhile, they all roll their eyes at the "jaded greybeard" advice. I know, because many years ago I was doing the eye rolling. I guess some lessons really can only be learned through experience.
The important part is that when they see the first thing you warned them about, they remember about all the other things you have also mentioned.
I like to think they'll remember some day.
Not all. You're talking about douchebag companies.
If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.
And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.
(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)
Unfortunately for you you work and live in an environment created by other companies and its likely that if your company succeeds its one acquisition or bad top level management play from invalidating everything you implicitly or even explicitly promised.
I have worked for "good companies" before - and they have a tendency to make money and be targets for bad companies, add enough zeroes and even the good guys sell.
Which are the non douchebag companies?
Start by eliminating all publicy traded companies from the list, and you've increased the percentage of non douchebag company in your list by quite a bit.
"I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time."
Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.
> Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know.
This is frequently the case. I've worked at big employers (comparable in level of corporate-ness to Google if not absolute size) where the layoff process, roughly was:
1. Aggregate layoff target gets set and apportioned amongst functional leaders, then targets cascaded down to the line manager level.
2. Managers fill out a stack ranking spreadsheet for their team across a few metrics including a boolean "diversity" field[0]. There were many rumors about the "diversity field", most notably that anyone so flagged would not be fired, but so far as I could tell these were false (see point #4)
3. People to be fired are developed based on these lists (I.e., if a manager has to fire two people, then the two lowest-ranked employees per the spreadsheet are selected.)
4. HR does a meta-analysis of all to-be-fired employees, ensuring that a disproportionate number of employees from protected classes are not impacted. If too many are, then some of the next-lowest-ranked employees are selected to be fired in their stead.
As far as I could tell, the only part of the process where any sort of individual, human consideration was occurring was maybe at the line manager level if they decided to tweak the stack rankings based on who they felt deserved to be protected. And then, to the extent that happens, you have all the problems with bias and favoritism that come into play.
0 - I realize this is probably controversial, but I saw it with my own eyes.
For some perspective, the bulk of this is simply illegal in the Netherlands, likely other countries in the EU as well:
- layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more
- Needs to be negotiated with worker representatives (works council, syndicate if there is one)
- LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
- Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
- At a minimum, you get 2 months pay + accrued holidays
It's baffling to imagine that you could learn about your job disappearing from one day to the next, and be immediately left out in the cold.
> layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more
In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
> - LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.
> Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.
0 - https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings
1 - https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte...
2 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/disparate_impact
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:
• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ- ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;
• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin- gle site of employment; or
• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more full-time workers at a single site of employment
I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...
Most states have a WARN act that covers even more. For example, California - https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...
While federal law has:
California law has:> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.
Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).
There's no such thing as a protected group in US law - a protected class means a certain property of someone that employment decisions can't depend on, not a value of that property.
First, I'll say it is pretty common to use the terms interchangeably. I don't think anyone was confused by what I wrote, or that your "clarification" was in any way helpful. See, for example, these legal groups using the term "protected group" in relation to US employment law:
* https://www.osbar.org/public/legalinfo/1095_DiscriminationEm...
* https://pedersenlaw.com/practice-areas/discrimination/
Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:
0 - https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=637945611431669...Companies in the US have been blatantly discriminating against some classes for years, and now must turn around and blatantly discriminate against other classes now (based on the current ‘anti-DEI’ stance). Racism and sexism in hiring in Europe and Asia has always been a thing, and quite blatant too.
it’s also a bit baffling that someone who’s been at the company longer than myself could have an advantage simply for being born before me, or for applying before me.
Is work performance not a key deciding factor? One could argue that’s absurd.
I don’t think the way it’s done in the U.S. is “right”, but i don’t think what you listed is right either.
Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.
If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.
Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.
The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.
>Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.
But since this subthread is discussing LIFO layoffs, the problem is that generally the last in is also the lowest paid - not always of course - but if so it means that to hit your operating cost point you might need to reduce more people than you would if you could pick and choose.
Seniority based systems are ‘I got mine, f u’ or ‘politics in action’ depending on how you look at it.
More senior employees have usually figured out how to get leverage on the employer over time.
Non-seniority are usually ‘cheapest is best’, or ‘do what I say, or else’.
Both have pros and cons for everyone involved. There is always some system though, even if it’s emergent.
I think you need to look at some of the recent Dutch firing sprees and figure out if that'd actualy respected ;)
Thank you for sharing this important information. What does a company in the Netherlands do when an employee is underperforming? Do they get "PIP'd" like Amazon? Then, eventually let go with some standard severance package?
I can't talk about the Netherlands but if it's like France: the process is very different in the case of layoffs, where you want to reduce the workforce for economical reasons (e.g. shrinking revenues), and firing an individual employee. In the first case employees are not let go on the basis of the performances.
Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.
Yes and no, as it is a difficult process because employer needs to prove it is not their fault that employee is not performing. To begin with you need to collect data over time, so pip is kind of a choice you’d go through to start collecting detailed info, then it might be that a simple course could help solve this if it is a knowledge based issue, then maybe there is another job in the company the employee could switch to, etc. Without any doubt employers do not like the process, it is easier to eliminate positions instead because it is not technically firing.
> LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
Newer employees often see this as incredibly unfair.
If it’s the rule, everyone knows it. There is no guessing about randomness or hidden variables, and ultimately less favoritism than a line manager coming up with a stack ranking.
Looking at the larger picture, what otherwise tends to happen is that older people get pushed out. Then we have a massive issue of them ending up unemployed because nobody wants to hire them. This is compounded by the retirement age being pushed further and further away.
Because it is unfair. It just tends to benefit people employed today
It's not about being fair to the individual, it's about producing a better outcome for society. In this case, saving money on welfare (that's also in great measured pooled across society, not an individual account).
Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.
The only fair system is a random lottery - which is also the most terrifying for everyone.
Then again, if we did have a random lottery that required all employees (up to and including the CEO) to participate, then perhaps we'd see fewer layoffs...
> diversity field
If this was even in the spreadsheet, whether or not it were used, the current administration would love to hear about it.
This was more than a decade ago, so I doubt they care that much, and if you want to accuse me of being a liar, please have the integrity to just say that.
ok, and also "big thieves hate little thieves." Very-well paid executives (stock) remove very well paid employees (salary) and benefit from the actions. This is an old situation in industrial business -- the high tech crowd are filled with self-grandeur and do not believe it, on a large scale IMHO.
Eh, or you could think of it as ‘cut 10 people to move the needle x percent, or cut 1’.
If you need to hit a specific number, guess which one is going to be less paperwork….
The part here too is ‘valuable to whom’. If they can saddle the middle manager or director with the same responsibilities/expectations, while cutting 10% (say) of the costs - guess what they are going to do.
Is it ultimately short sighted? Probably. But good luck connecting point A and point B in these situations when everyone is thinking quarter to quarter.
You spend half your waking hours at work.
Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.
On the contrary, being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live, but it's also not really something most people will ever be able to avoid. I don't at all buy into the idea that somehow pretending the situation isn't shitty is somehow more virtuous or fulfilling; what you call a "shitty attitude" sounds more like "being realistic about how one's work is valued" to me.
> being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live
That is literally the only way to live. Disaster stalks us an is only ever one misstep away (sometimes literally). In rare instances people can even just fall over and die.
In the sense that there should be food and shelter for everyone, even poor people; strictly speaking I think most countries have already agreed to that. Although how well that gets implemented is open to a lot of debate. But beyond that everything can always change at a moments notice.
I've spent several decades writing software. Got laid off 1-2 times per decade.
I still tried doing a good job every day, and feel very good about that.
To me, being realistic about the risk of losing my job at any time means having enough money that I can be unemployed for 6-12 months.
The major way good programmers get jobs is by being recommended by people they've worked with at previous companies. That doesn't happen if you deliberately do as little good work as you can get away with.
My "shitty attitude" comment is maybe more a personal philosophy that something universal. But I do not want to spend each work day being bitter and resentful. You may intend to punish your shitty employer, but I think you're mostly poisoning your own mind.
Working hard for a place that will not reward me is no way to live.
And with less dedication, I can spend far less than half my time there ;)
Nor is sticking your head in the sand.
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last year or so where a company announces a significant layoff, saying it needed to let go of "underperforming employees" or similar wording. I've been in this industry for a long time, experienced several layoffs, but this way to announce a layoff (publicly calling-out "underperforming employees") feels new to me. It also feels shady - like, announcing to the industry, "Don't hire these losers we just got rid of. LOL"
Check out the book called "The Gervais Principle" which develops this kind of cynical approach to a significant depth.
You're right but our current model of society depends on there being people who don't ask the same question.
> Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause?
No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.
If you do only the minimum necessary to not get fired, then wouldn’t you be the person that needs to be fired the next time the the budget is cut, since you are the lowest ROI of all, all other things equal?
In theory, you'd think so.
In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.
In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.
People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
No. It's clear individual level of effort doesn't matter. That's the point.
Cheer up - Sometimes it’s also a convenient cover for reprisals, back stabby office politics, racism/sexism, etc.
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, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.
It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.
Big companies are soulless.
It might be too late now, but I've successfully negotiated (before signing) retention deals like this to be pro-rated in the event of non-voluntary termination. It's perfectly reasonable for exactly this reason, and companies have no legitimate reason to deny it.
Agreed, this is/should always be the deal basically - "here's a bonus so you stay while we transition" is the only reason many folks stay post aquisition. It should not be revokable, especially last minute.
To me its a massive red flag that Google would promise a cash bonus 2 years in the future, they could have given stock with an appropriate vesting schedule for retention. All the retention deals I have seen were done like this, only for the very short term (less than 6 months) a cash bonus makes sense.
Might be worth talking to a lawyer. Sorry to hear that, absolutely maddening
You should consult a lawyer about this. You might be SOL but if this happened to several people, you might be able to show the company didn't act in good faith because there's a pattern of people about to receive their bonus being laid off. Layoffs aren't meant to work that way.
Generally layoffs involve someone who doesn't know who you are picking names almost at random from a spreadsheet. Management may fight for certain people to stay. Then legal and HR get involved and look through the layoff list to see if the chosen employees are problematic. For example, if the layoffs include too many people from protected classes, which opens them up to being sued. For example, if your company is 20% women but the layoffs are 50% women, that's going to be an issue.
Avoiding paying substantial retention bonuses can work the same way, if a pattern can be shown.
A simple letter from a lawyer probably won't do anything. Large companies are prepared for that.
For anyone who does come across this, here's my best advice: if you are acquired and your new employment contract includes a retention bonus, you want that contract to say that the retention bonus is payable unless:
1. You leave voluntarily within that period; or
2. You are terminated with cause within that period.
Otherwise, you should get it.
>2. You are terminated with cause within that period.
Are layoffs considered to be with cause?
No
Yes as a person who had such a retention bonus before (from Google even) to me this seems rather cut and dry. Usually such bonuses are a mix of cash and RSUs, and set over a 3-4 year period. And are often also based on a perception of what the employees existing options were in the startup that they came from.
IMHO they should absolutely be paid out the whole amount of the remaining retention bonus at layoff. On the principle of things alone. Can't speak to the legality of it.
Awful experience.
What is interesting is our denial, as (ex-)corporate employees, that the corporation is NOT FAMILY...even though we may feel it is.
> Big companies are soulless.
"And God created the C Corporation" -nowhere in the Bible / Koran / Hinduism / Buddhism / Torah
I feel this lesson keeps being re-learned by us people / workers ...
Did you sue? Because that's bullshit. The retention agreement should have included that clause anyway.
Agreed. If companies could do this, then they'd never pay out a retention rider.
That's awful and the most amazing thing you could do now is get together with those ex-coworkers or similar people and compete with Google in whatever business domain it was that made them acquire your former employer.
Because, having been through the acquisition process at Google myself, my general cynical take is: Google acquires companies to get rid of them, to stop them from competing and not to "add your uniqueness to their collective."
Keeping employees on retention bonuses is a way, in aggregate, of stopping them from going off and inventing something that eats their bottom line.
You should look into legal action. And failing that, compete with them.
You guys should have a consultation with a lawyer. It's a little cheaper if you guys just use one lawyer to go after Google for the retention bonus if there is a case ;)
I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:
- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
> decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant
This is fascinating? What was it in absolute terms, or relative to your base salary?
Did you have to have a viable startup idea and it was paid to the incorporated company? Or was it just extra cash in your personal bank account?
Did you do that, or did you just get another job?
>job security is an illusion
It really is. Even government and blue chips aren't safe. In fact, those are where you'll find it's the most disconnected from your own agency.
Government jobs are safe because rarely if ever people get fired.
This comment is hilarious. Like someone was placed in a time machine and missed the last few months.
Except for like the last 3 months!
Until whole departments get gutted on the whims of a new executive or their political appointee department head.
And I'm not just talking about Trump. Every mayor, governor, what have you. They all appoint their friends to high places.
My job is extra permanent. If they shut us down they'd just have to find me a desk somewhere. Its a rut, but its my rut...
> job security is an illusion
Depends a bit on your country. My CEO can fire me but there is a longer notice period depending on how long I have been with the company.
- 2 years: 1 month
- 5 years: 2 months
- 8 years: 3 months
...
- 20 years: 7 months
Germany btw.
That's pretty wild. Is that a German employment law or something specific to your company?
It's probably an employment law. My wife's from Tunisia and over there all employment is basically contractual. If your employer lets you go they owe you some kind of fee, and I actually believe the amount might be the remainder of the contact, I'm not sure.
It's employment law.
Germans are so expensive to hire and maintain that companies have offshored German manufacturing to the United States.
(... And God bless Germany for it. Trickle-down theory doesn't work in general in capitalism but it does work in labor negotiations: every right Germans secure for themselves is a right an American company employing Germans and other countries has to abide by when doing business, and it incentivizes the company to minimize their paperwork by treating everyone to the German standard).
Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.
They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
This is an important point.
Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult."
I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service.
That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."
I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.
>> I don't know anyone who expected this
You can read the HN threads from when this happened. People expected its imminent collapse.
It was done during the 2022 FIFA World Cup and you had people here predicting that it wouldn't last through the weekend due to that.
Twitter generated $5bn in revenue in 2021. Since Musk bought it, it's been on a rapid decline. In 2024 it generated $2.5bn in revenue... 50% of its pre-Musk numbers (46% with inflation)!
Worse, it continues to trend downward.
Most sane tech CEOs would prefer to keep their upward trend and $5+ billion revenue rather than saving $1 billion to lose $2.5 billion and invert their slope.
Remarkably - it’s more profitable now.
Also, most layoffs don’t cause huge cuts to advertising spend on their platform because of personal spite or political reasons. The product for all intents and purposes as an advertiser is the exact same.
That's just objectively not true.
Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had.
My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.
Many if not most engineers are working on things 2-5 years out, not keeping services running.
i think the total reduction was about 2/3 if memory serves? so 1 in 3 is that number you'd be looking at for "actually useful". heavy air quotes on that.
> Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".
On some level yes. With the massive disparity in who owns the markets, your argument is basically “Is google doing a good job of making the rich richer?”. Hiring H1Bs and offshoring while firing American labor is not a good look.
Why keep a company like that around?
Now take it one step further. Google and other large megacorps are merely the inevitable outcome of capitalism running to its logical conclusion. So the real argumenmt is, “Is capitalism doing a good job of making the rich richer?”, and the obvious question for the rest of us then is, why keep an economic system like that around?
It's a question of what kind of business Google is/wants-to-be.
The one it claimed to be, in the past, with a broader holistic mission, claiming to attract the world's brightest to make information accessible? Using its hoard of cash to do a bunch of neat stuff and hire really smart people do it?
Or is it what we always suspected all along, a cynical money printing machine that turns ad impressions into shareholder value and nothing else?
It's always been a mix of both. Those of us who worked there certainly saw in the inside the gradual transition of the internal discourse from "justifying B to support A" to "who cares about A."
They can do whatever they want, they're a private business. But they still trade on a certain reputation, and have the advantage of a quasi-monopoly status in many things.
I would hope that advancing them any kind of good will as any kind of "special" company (which our profession tended to do, before) and muting criticisms is just over now.
They built their money printing machine in part by swallowing competition and exterminating it.
> What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0?
Take responsibility for the people they hired and have an ounce of human decency and empathy?
Don't need extra people? Fair enough. Then stop hiring! No one is pointing a gun to their head telling them to hire. Layoffs (for reasons unrelated to people's job performance) is such an asshole thing to do because with a competent/non-sociopathic management it's completely unnecessary, as you can just do a hiring freeze, and your headcount will reduce by itself through normal attrition.
The management of a lot of corporations acts this way, prioritizing "shareholder value" over people while giving exuberant bonuses to themselves, and then they make a surprised pikachu face when people hate them and individuals like Luigi Mangione come out of the woodwork and take matters into their own hands.
Remember in 2014 when Nintendo was having huge financial troubles? What did the CEO do? Did he fire half of his people? No, he kept his people, halved his own salary and kept going. And this was when they were losing massive amounts of money, and not breaking revenue records making 100 billion in profit. That is how a CEO and a leader should act, and not like the sociopath CEOs we have nowadays.
Google's strategy, traditionally, was basically what you're describing (modulo the "until their net income is 0" part). Because their belief about engineering was if you get all the smart people and give them some creative freedom, they invent Gmail. And Tensorflow. And Kubernetes.
This has changed. But it's worth noting it is a change. Larry and Sergey retained controlling stakes in Google's IPO specifically because they intended to build a company that didn't operate like other companies... In essence, they didn't plan to give two shits about shareholder capital, they expected the money would work itself out if they just kept making brilliant products people wanted.
But, the founders have left and Google is now just another company.
Yes, and they're still hiring too, while doing this at the same time.
As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people.
But the layoff process has been sadistic.
And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff.
Today's Google really sucks.
>> the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences
They should have been first out the door, but Sundar is part of the problem.
This is incorrect thinking. Over-hiring is very easily corrected. You are weighting the 'human' in human resources too much. It's 'resources' that gets the emphasis.
This is a success at Sundar's level.
While the manner of layoff, role of layoff and person to lay off all seem foolish, profits do not mean that layoffs are a bad idea. You should hire people you need and if you want to good in the world, donate to the most effective charities (in QALYs/£).
ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.
Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.
I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).
> It's a fact of life
I will argue the contrary. Companies with US mindset makes us think that.
Countries with social safety net have a better way of handling it. Even in the country where I am now living, Hong Kong, which is very liberal, half of the companies let you have 1 month of notice period.
And even in China the layoff policy for pregnant women is way more humane than in the US.
> It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer.
+1.
While there is an imaginable "victim" viewpoint, it is a job for pay with a clear employment contract that was agreed to before employment start, between the Employee and the Corporation, including local and state and federal laws, permitting EXACTLY THIS type of termination.
Further, corporations can't be seen to Favor one Googler vs another. Especially since there is NO GUARANTEE this Ex-Googler isn't one of those AR-15 toting weirdos who condone violence against their now ex-coworkers .. so allowing them futher access to the (huge) universe that Google owns and controls .. its corporate workings .. even for an additional 5 seconds after termination, can be reasonably seen to be Foolish .. so they would cut ties Immediately.
Honestly, the problem is not that there are layoffs, the problem is that the process sucks.
you don't need to fire this person immediately - you can talk to him, wind his operations down and then let him go. I.e. in Germany it's often half a year between announcing a layoff and anything happening (besides other stuff like making sure the layoff applies to the newest people first). Even if you don't want such a long period - talking to him and giving him a few weeks to wind down at your firm and starting to search for a new job seems perfectly reasonable. What happens if he wreaks havoc on your firm out of revenge? Really? Happens practically never. If it happens, sue him.
ofc this process applies to reasonable layoff - if it's for something egregious (breaking the law) you can and should fire him immediately.
> ISTM software engineers
Probably not the International Society of Travel Medicine, what's the abbreviation?
https://bulletin.gwu.edu/courses/istm/
Information Systems and Technology Management
I've also never heard anyone say this though, but I'm guessing that's what they meant.
Other reply pointed out "It Seems To Me" which seems reasonable.
It seems to me
Internet Search and Tele Marketing
Internet Technology and Social Media, I would guess.
I have been in a similar situation, on a Saturday morning right after a farewell for a colleague and planning for next big release and timelines, late Friday.
I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).
At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.
No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.
Well not so much I guess.
Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out. But I don't know if I will still see it coming.
I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.
I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.
I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.
I hope people can find hope here.
Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.
Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.
And F execs, I guess. :)
> Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too.
I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.
Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated. How many of your middle school, high school and even college buddies do you still have a relationship with?
I think there's some stigma with confronting the fact that relationships are just ephemeral. We are social creatures in the sense that we can cooperate with each other on a task laid in front of us, but once that task is done, we mostly tend to drift apart onto the next task with another group of people. And that's okay. We're only weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others. The quality of a relationship is in no way measured by how long it endured.
You are right but I think there's a fundamental issue that many people think that 'as long as I keep showing up and doing good work, the powers that be will look out for me'.
By default work relationships work as you advertised. It needs conscious effort on your (and everyone's) part to reframe these relationships as something that's between you and your friends, on your own terms. Consciously hanging out together, talking to each other, doing projects together outside the context of work. Social relationships need to be built up with effort. The company will do this for you, because they enjoy the benefits of a crew that works well together, but if they put in the effort, the relationship will belong to them. You will think that 'I could get slightly more at this other place, but I like my colleagues here', realizing you'd lose the social net if you changed jobs.
I think a huge problem with nerds (like me and probably you), is that we don't understand the fundamental power dynamics that shape society, because we lack the inherent cunning and weren't forced to face down enough hardship to have our illusions shattered until later in life.
Truth is, if there are rules, somebody needs to enforce them. If something nice happens, it does because somebody makes it happen. These things are mental abstractions designed to make your life predictable, but like every abstractions, sometimes things happen that were supposed to be impossible, because the system doesn't work the way you think it does.
>relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated.
Very true, but also very unfortunate. The best people (a teeny almost non-existent minority) are not like that.
>weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others.
For a large number of people, (say 50 %) I suspect this is not true. Especially when people move from rural to urban areas.
> Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context
I think this is very true, and with college buddies it's very different from workmates. Because in college, you are with them at classes, but then you hang out with them between classes, then you meet them in cafeteria, then you meet them at a party or in the student club, then you meet them at dormitory etc. All these contexts are different and that helps to build more diverse relationship, which is not focused on a single place.
At work, in my experience I'll meet them in the office and then maybe wave a hand on the way out of the parking lot, if ever.
And then, it turns out these people actually move, try to raise a family and work, and then you rarely keep in touch.
This is the big thing, work opportunities tend to get people to move whole cities away, and long distance relationships like this tend to not survive.
> Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated.
Just being far away makes maintaining relationships really hard. Introverted people rely on being dragged into socialising, which goes poof not being in the same place.
My wife is really good at keeping friends even those she didn't see in years. She has many such friends and she speaks to them over video chat. I have a few long term friends like that but not so close.
>How many of your middle school, high school and even college buddies do you still have a relationship with?
All the ones that were true friends, and none of the ones that were just friendly acquaintances.
I see where you're coming from, but relationship need some amount of contact to survive.
Work forces you to be in contact, if the majority of your time is spent elsewhere due to changing job, or city, or gym, or having kids.. it's a blow.
I try to keep in touch with ex co-workers I cared about, but we live in different countries, at different stages in life, with different priorities, and it's hard to say the relationship is well.
That doesn't mean the relationships weren't built as they should, IMHO, they are just different kinds of relationships.
That sentence caught my eye too.
First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.
Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.
In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.
> the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime
Good point. I wonder how much in-office work contributes to this. Because if you are trapped inside an office building for 8+ hours with essentially randoms, most people will start getting to know each other at some point, because there is no other choice, and after work and commute there is no time left for anything else.
I feel sad for the author.
8 hours if you're lucky. Make that 10 if you're not because of breaks.
So the 40 hour work week gives rather little time to properly socialize, even less if you have family obligations esp. kids, especially when people move around as much as they do now.
Corporations like Google certainly encourage a focus on in-group relationships between employees to reduce churn (i.e. increase stakes for disgruntled employees who might consider quitting). The entire idea of having scheduled leisure activities, daycare, laundry services, etc all provided either by the company or facilitated through the company encapsulates current employees and gently excludes former employees, which likely helps reduce their ability to spread or air negative sentiments following their departure (which apparently can be fairly rapid, which also means fired employees will be stunned and possibly in shock for the limited duration where they may still have access to other employees directly).
There's a reason the "employee retention" behavior of companies like Google and Facebook during the web 2.0 craze was often compared to actual cults.
I get where you're coming from, but I think it's a little more complicated than that.
This is a wild read for someone that has spent the bulk of their career as a "mercenary" for small to mid-size largely non-tech companies (e.g., their product wasn't purely technical) and no matter what the official company Koolaid line was, you always know you are one "restructuring" away from being made redundant, the company doesn't give a crap about you or your contributions, and you very much are a "cog." I've been blessed to work for a company or two where this was less the case than others, and more or less bought into their own culture hype, but it's still fundamentally this way, the relationship between employer and employee. It's sad and interesting to me to see what sounds like an experienced developer for such a large company coming to this realization all at once. Given what I've read and learned about Google layoffs since ~2022 this seems pretty bog standard large company stuff.
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.
> Googler...
Whole things reads like someone leaving a cult.
It's ok to be sad about leaving a job but your identity shouldn't be so tied up in it that you're crying in a blog post online.
We all lose jobs and we all get on with it. Obviously they're talented and will land fine somewhere.
I'm not trying to be mean but it's bad that a person can get upset to this point around a job. The corp isn't caring.
I disagree. This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated. It’s perfectly alright and valid to be sad about losing the ability to express that part of yourself to make a living. The whole point of the post is that yes, the company doesn’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line, but the author did.
> This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated.
I think you can have a great time and build good relationships with teammates while still realizing you are a cog in the machine.
The way author writes the blog, you'd think they were working on the first Moon flight or the Manhattan project, whereas the reality is they were working on some CSS spec at Google, which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now.
It's routine maintenance work on existing stuff.
Not to disrespect you, but I don't think your opinion on the value of their work is relevant, the author's is.
Sure, and water is wet.
Yet the blog was posted in the public domain, so saying what is and isn't relevant is...irrelevant.
It's in a public forum, up for discussion. End of story.
Of course you're free to discuss. You're belittling the author's expression of grief because their job was 'routine maintenance' of 'some CSS spec (...) which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now' and I'm saying they're entitled to their grief regardless of how you feel about the job's content.
Yes, they're a cog, as almost all of us are, and it would have been better for their own sake to realise that, but losing something you enjoy still sucks.
You're criticizing people for caring so much because you think the best that employment can be is transactional money in exchange for competent work?
Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
(Not that you'd want them to be upset if it ever had to end, but you'd want the goodness part to happen? Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?)
> Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
From the companies perspective: absolutely! If I can get people who will put in 10x for 1x of pay, nothing like it!
From employees perspective: Care for your work like a good construction worker does. They don't cut corners, speak-up when they spot issues and put in their body and mind. But they don't come back to the site at 11PM to take one more look at it (I do sometimes because solving the programming problem is fun, not because my corporate overlords will pat me on the back). It is indeed important to make sure that the building is strong but remember that you don't own it.
>your identity shouldn't be so tied up in it that you're crying in a blog post online
If a personal blog isn't the right place to express distress when being fired, what is a personal blog even for?
I'm fine with "Googler". Google employs 180,000 people. There are cities half that size with their own demonym.
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I also work in a big tech company. We had bunch of layoffs, some based on performance (which often was a lie), some random. In all instances, the company made a lot of money and kept hiring at a high pace.
At that stage, I know I'll be laid off eventually for one reason or another, I just don't know when. My partner tells me that I should quit on my own terms so I'm not depressed when it happens. But my salary is very competitive, and I'll get severance too. Still, I fear this moment and it's really hard to feel invested in the company. If it wasn't for my colleagues, I think I'd be slacking, waiting for my time.
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp"
Yup. Must have been a horrific wake up call :(
... and they haven't even spent all year searching for a new job yet!
It can be shock to discover how little the company as an entity, and its upper management in particular, actually values you (or any other employee.) Employees are indeed cogs in a megacorp, and the relationship is transactional. The company demands loyalty because it can and because it is profitable, not because it will be reciprocated.
When it comes down to it everyone has their own interests as a priority so if a manager is told to let folks go they will gladly do it to keep their own job.
Even those in “upper management” are cogs.
Everybody responds to incentives. Not everyone is competent. And, the higher you go the less accountability there seems to be.
We pay a lot because we need these people who are capable of making tough decisions (copying everyone else by overhiring at a premium during low interest rates), they can't be kept accountable for their own mistakes like the rest of us (fired myopically as a sacrificial lamb during a down-market because investors demand executives copy everyone else (they're invested in everyone else))
https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/google-layoffs-andr...
> Google laid off hundreds of employees from its platforms and devices unit, the team responsible for the Android operating system, Pixel phones and Chrome browser. The move, first reported by the Information, comes months after Google offered voluntary buyouts to all 20,000 employees in the division, signaling deeper structural changes at the tech giant.
Correction, they did not offer buyouts to the entire division, they offered the ability to apply for a buyout to US-only employees, and application did not guarantee you’d get it.
You’re always a cog. Don’t treat a job with passion unless you’re getting something more than a salary from it - e.g. more professional networking, expanded skill set for your next role, etc. This seems to happen too often. Be invested in your career not the company you work for.
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.
As an ex-Googler I say: blessing in disguise. When working at a $MEGACORP it's easy to think there's barren wasteland out there beyond the walls, so it's scary. But that is very much not so. I get that opportunities to work on browsers are relatively few and far between, but if you can do something else, try working for a smaller company which treats you more like a human being, and less like a replaceable cog.
Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
I want to get enough time at $MEGACORP to have FU money. After that, my fear is a lot of smaller companies are working on thing even more boring, but with less scale. Gluing a domain-specific API to a few LLMs sounds boring. I got into tech because I liked learning it, but a lot of it is getting repetitive.
No such thing as FU money. As you get more you want more, or if you don't then your spouse does. There is such a thing as "I can tolerate a 3-6 month job search no problem and not jump at the first opportunity" money. It makes 90% of the difference, especially in the long run.
Of course there is such a thing.
Lifestyle inflation is a known phenomenon which you (and your spouse) can choose to avoid if you prioritize it, not some immutable rule of nature.
If the treadmill of accumulation that lets someone believe "there's no such thing as enough" ever stops, I think they would be shocked at how quickly they realize what enough actually means.
It is much easier to handle when departing is voluntary. Layoffs, especially surprise ones, are the opposite.
For someone young with no dependents, it can be scary but doable. For those with kids? Not so much.
OP spent several years at Google. Kids or no kids, if they managed their finances well, they have a lot of latitude wrt next moves.
Not necessarily. Nobody on HN knows OP’s finances. He might have extended family relying on him. He might have crippling student debt. He might have expensive health problems. Do you know? I don’t.
Also, not all Google employees make great money. People act as though you work there for 5 years and that automatically means you’re off to buy your third house in Monaco.
Point is, he might “manage his finances well” and still be on insecure footing.
Exactly. Plus I think we're forgetting a lot of Google employees are on visas, meaning they might have expenses both in the US and in their home country.
You may be correct in general, but in this particular case I do not see how Adam should have any difficulties in finding a very good paying job at another company.
The finances are important but possibly not the first thing on their mind. The first thing on their mind is likely how their entire world has just changed around them, beyond their control.
People who left voluntarily can prepare for the lifestyle change, and maybe they can objectively look at this and say it's not all bad. For people who are laid off, it hits really hard in a gut wrenching way. The sense of despair about everything else comes first, the money part of it might not come until all the severance is exhausted.
outside of having stupid money what percentage of people (excluding people living paycheck to paycheck) manage their finances well, especially in the first decade of their career? I’d ballpark that at 0.78%
Are you pessimistic or is that a serious estimate? It’s so … low.
being a realist ... I think in the US no one is (purposely) thought basic financial literacy and it spills over into probably the first decade of working life
The most important takeaway is this:
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp."
Remember, if you don't own it this is always the case.
ALWAYS!
First, this is pretty rough what happened to the person. My condolences.
Second, completely tangential to the content of the blog post: Was anyone else surprised by the number of comments/"mentions"/likes/reposts? I haven't seen so much activity on a single blog post in years. Normally, blog posts that accept comments have 10 or less comments. This one has hundreds.
It looks like a Bluesky integration which will get a lot more engagement than a blog post. The author was a "CSS advocate" at Google, which implies a strong emphasis on networking.
I guess this also explains why the site is so fancy that I can't scroll it without my phone lagging horribly lol
I was going to suggest you to use reader mode, but firefox's reader mode doesn't detect the main content here, but rather the comments.
Their blog looks like it's integrated with Bluesky, where they have 15K followers, so that's where the activity is coming from. It's not uncommon for high-profile devs to get that much engagement there.
I keep seeing this pop up everywhere. I’m sure he’s a great guy, but the level of attention he’s getting is massively disproportionate. A lot of great people have been laid off recently!
If think the attention is in proportion, people are reacting just like when a body has an inflammation. If a person of _this_ calibre can be fired, and not even fired, disposed as a used-up tissue, it is a sign of times.
It’s always sad to see people lose their jobs, but it’s telling how often it’s ex-Googlers posting about layoffs. Feels like a lot of the shock is just realizing they’re just as replaceable and as much of a "cog in the machine" as everyone else. Google spent years selling the idea that it was special, but this feels like a real coming back down to earth moment for the employees.
The OP strikes me as being quite immature. Like a first breakup or something. I think it's less about Google selling themselves as being special and more that people like OP have been led to believe they are special. A lot of them have been treated like royalty: super privileged lives, only experiencing the nice bits of society, top education, then straight into a 6-figure job where you get to be part of a special club with a prestigious google.com email address etc. It's going to be a shock to anyone to have that taken away abruptly when you're a decade or more into this lifestyle.
Most people have to go through shit like this at some point in their life. Most don't get to reap in internet sympathy by the bucketload, though. For some people it really actually sucks. OP is likely a millionaire already, could just take time off to adjust and reflect, then accept one of the numerous job offers that will be on the table. They might even end up doing something useful with their lives instead of advertising.
Emphasis on "doing something useful with their lives".
I hate to say it...but this is how working for a company works. It's more prevalent at the largest ones and less so at the smallest ones, but it's just the norm.
In the US, it's at-will employment. You can leave, or be fired, at any time - for virtually any reason. (As long as it doesn't break discrimination laws) Investors only care about quarterly returns, and so you have to expect a publicly-traded company may let people go for that reason alone.
They're not your friends. They're not your family. You exchange hours of your life for money. That's all. It sucks, but that's just how it is. Google is no exception, it is one company like literally all others.
Weirdly, Amazon had far more compassion than Google here. When my role got eliminated at Amazon, I got an email at 5am PT to my personal email telling me that my role was eliminated. It also told me what I would still have access to, and how to access them from the outside.
Crucially, it said that I would still have limited corp access until 1pm, and then told me which things I still had access to.
I got on my work machine, and found that all of my previous emails had been erased (or at least blocked from my view), so I couldn't download an email archive or otherwise see anything. I also couldn't send emails externally anymore. Most of my systems access had been cut off where I could have downloaded or exported anything "secret" as per the email.
But they did let me send emails internally. I still had slack access to affinity groups. So I was able to shoot off a bunch of goodbye emails and slack messages.
And true to their word, at 1pm, my laptop rebooted and I was then locked out. But at least I got to say goodbye and share my personal email and linkedin with a bunch of people, and they were able to send me "so sorry to see you go" replies, which was nice.
Must be a Chrome developer. His blog is frustratingly hard to read on Firefox. I felt like I was going blind in real time.
It is a chrome developer. His claims that he was raising the quality level of the web are particularly hilarious given that he worked at google. Maybe the salary of google blinds people into believing this.
Looks terrible in Safari too
It looks exactly the same in Safari (17.5) as it does in Chrome for me.
for me it just burns a bunch of CPU and is difficult to scroll
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Love sudden realization.
I wonder how many people within companies think “well, they are a cog, but I’m certainly not” just to be left on a road soon after.
the post oozes narcissism. and he even seems to think he contributed to the health of the internet by working at chrome.
Yes I thought that when reading it, if so he may have been a difficult character to work with and that's one of reasons the crosshairs stopped at him.
Don't underestimate the efficiency of intra-corporate propaganda directed at its own employees. There's a reason why they maintain those huge HR departments.
Content aside, does anyone else have poor scrolling performance on his blog? I saw similar issues on both mobile and desktop, what's with that?
Also the content did not fit my Galaxy S24's screen width when used in portrait. The author's previous work in the Chrome team is visible. "The shoemaker's children go barefoot" as they say. :)
exceptionally poor to the point of being unreadable, on safari. in chrome it works perfectly for me. i believe it is due to the bluesky feed, seeing as the author's own content is really short.
i'll have to figure out how to block bluesky. the blockers focus on privacy stealing feeds like facebook etc.
It sucks and especially the abruptness, but I find it hard to muster sympathy. Google employees receive some of the highest renumeration in the industry. Combined with the prestige of Google on his resume he'll land back on his feet in no time.
> Combined with the prestige of Google on his resume he'll land back on his feet in no time.
I wouldn't count on that. The job market is really bad.
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At least for me it’s more like “this guys career is still way better than mine so it’s hard to think of his situation as suffering”.
It's still hard. Maybe he or she has had better luck and opportunities than you, but that doesn't mean they don't suffer just as much when bad things happen.
We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
> We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
> This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
Everyone thinks that when they're angry or upset with someone. Ultimately people are people, and everyone deserves sympathy when bad things happen to them. Note that i don't always accomplish this, but I certainly think it's worth trying.
Sorry, but I simply don't agree. You're overgeneralizing again with "everyone thinks..." but no, you will trivially find folks who believe that someone (as an example) who murders or facilitates the murder of innocent people does not deserve sympathy when they suffer the consequences of their actions.
It is not true that all rational people believe that all people deserve sympathy for all causes of suffering.
> all rational people
As soon as you find me one of these unicorns, I'll concede the point.
Like, ultimately you don't have to show compassion for other humans, but in general, life will be better for all of us if we all do.
If someone much richer and with a better career than me got punched in the face i would still see that as suffering. I don’t know why someone’s situation being better means they can’t be suffering
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If you haven't seen Argyle's gui-challenges series, it's some of the best content I've found for learning how to use a variety of cutting-edge CSS features. I thought he was one of the best voices for the Chrome team.
https://github.com/argyleink/gui-challenges
A company with $350B in annual Revenue, $200B in Gross Profit, $100B in Cash in the bank lays off a few hundred people making a few hundred thousand dollars a year each, the savings amount to rounding errors. It's hard to understand what these Tech companies are trying to accomplish with the never ending rolling layoffs other than to engender fear in the workforce. It's like all that Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting stuff a few years back broke the collective brains of the C-Suite and they decided they just cannot tolerate labor having any sort of bargaining power at all and needed to mete out punishment to put workers back in their place.
Google is one of those places where you never need to ask if someone worked there.
self fulfilling prophecy though, because the people who worked at Google but don't tell you about it, won't tell you about it, so you don't know they did so you're only going to hear about it from the ones you hear about it from
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believing it to be the empty set is on you, man.
I dunno man, I've been making a similar joke for well over a decade, so it seems like a common perspective.
That being said I talk about my former big tech all the time too, so maybe I'm part of the problem?
To pick a different topic, I know a couple of vegans. Some of them are militant about it, others simply are not. You'd never know that about them unless it really came up.
"How do you know if someone is the sort of person to make derogatory jokes about 'the way certain sorts of people are'?"
Can you explain for the uninitiated what that means? Is that like PTSD?
"You don't need to ask, they'll tell you" - a claim that the people who work there will brag about it.
And while there may be some truth to it, keep in mind that you hear about the ones that will tell you, you don't hear about most of the ones that don't.
Everything seems random if you lack information.
My bet would be that the author's compensation was one of the highest among his peers on the same role.
This is to me, btw, is a sign of a well built relationship with a colleague: you know each other's compensation.
I wonder if there is some megacorp regression to the mean going on here. Google holds itself up as somehow special, and I think that it's right to be cynical about that today. I also think there was a golden age of sorts, back when real-world distributed systems were much more fringe, and Google was a legitimate trailblazer. Then, the spreadsheet number crunchers come in, and the elves leave Middle Earth[1].
[1]: In reference to this famous essay: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
>I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
This article could have been interesting if they talked about why they ever thought they weren't just a cog. Like what cognitive blinders did they have on? Does Google have a unusually effective "we're all a family" type of internal propaganda?
corpos are really good at creating a false narrative around shared missions/values/etc
>I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Boy, this whole post sure has a lot of "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" about it.
« Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too »
Why? What prevents you from spending time with your ex-colleagues?
A potentially unique feature of Google (at least pre-pandemic/McKinsey) is that it cultivated communities of people in a particular discipline despite being spread across the world.
When I first met Adam, we were both UX Engineers. We'd all gather in NYC in the spring and in the Bay Area in the fall for internal conferences. Adam lives in Seattle. There are plenty of people who adore him who aren't geographically close enough to meet for the proverbial beer. I suspect that's also true for the connections he made outside of Google.
Probably because most interactions were on company time. Because of course if the relationships were outside of work, then changing jobs would have little effect.
If those ex-colleagues were truly good friends, they ought to find the time to hang out with you outside of work.
This would likely lead to genuine, more interesting conversations.
In my experience, true relationships survive (and sometimes thrive in) a departure.
Relationships don't need to be "true" to be useful.
Relationships here might also mean professional relationships.
I think many of those can still survive a job transition, but some of them may rely on the fact that he is on the Chrome team doing Chrome things. Those relationships would now be moot (professionally).
I guess the lesson is: don’t get emotionally attached to your job. Despite all the “we’re like a family” talk, at the end of the day, you’re just an employee. Never forget that.
We all want to be seduced though, we all want to believe we are special, we all want to believe our work has value and we anthropomorphize the company on the other end of the relationship, believing it's a partnership.
Protect yourself, but it's a sad way to spend 40-60 hours of your life, constantly reminding yourself that your job is just a paycheck and not putting yourself into your work.
Not sure how so many can do it and be motivated. My current strategy is compartmentalization, and it all just seems unsustainable long term, cause in the back of my mind it all seems so empty.
Offboarding is when any illusion of your non-cog relationship to a company is belied. You're suddenly a virus that the immune response is trying to destroy. Your presence is a threat to the host that must be eliminated. On the one hand you wish companies would be a little more human about it: it's me, I'm not a criminal! On the other hand, they've got security controls that almost mandate a swift and pitiless execution.
> Works for massive advertising company on Chrome, the browser widely known for anti-competitive practices and destroying the ecosystem of the Web.
> Surprised when company does nasty, profit-driven thing.
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Yes, you were. Next time, please choose a company that contributes to society rather than shoving ads in everyone's faces.
Google contributes to society.
Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).
> Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
I haven't used Google Translate in years. You do know there are alternatives, don't you?
I do. I try them from time to time, they weren't better.
I didn't say they were better. Just that without Google Translate, I doubt you would have had a much harder time in your recent trip to Japan because you could have used them, and they aren't particularly worse :-).
It's not just about whether you yourself use Google Translate, it's that - much more than anywhere else I've ever travelled - Japanese people will regularly use Google Translate to communicate with you, usually by typing or speaking into their tablet and then showing you the machine translation.
Actually in quite a few places there (mostly in Kyushu) they used a bespoke handheld device or DeepL.
Try out the big LLMs for translating and explaining translation (e.g. ChatGPT). Much better than Google translate in my experience.
I don't think switching to an LLM is exactly in line with what GP was trying to say :)
> YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created.
That's bizarre.
They are actively enshittifying search and YouTube. So if these things are good for society, and Google is making them worse , it feels like we shouldn't be giving them too much credit.
No need to kick someone while they are down.
I worked at Google, and now I work at derivative finance. No sympathy should be expected when you don’t contribute anything valuable to society.
I found this comment rather funny.
I'm aware I don't contribute anything valuable yet. No hard feelings :).
On the contrary, I'm trying to get to the point I can sustain my own small projects and stop worrying about Corporate America once and for all.
To an awful lot of people work is food and roof over their heads, and they're lucky if they can manage even that.
Yeah, probably a poorly executed assault, but I felt it was an intent instead to kick Google with that comment.
He did, he worked at Google. What is your contribution to society? Some language reinventing the wheel for the 500th time? Google created a dozen of those alone and they don't even make the footnote of the contributions list.
i am also extremely pissed at his complete lack of self awareness... of course, i am sad for what happened to him. but holly shit. do you think you were saving the world or what? you were working on a glorified spyware.
Ironically you're statistically very likely to be writing this comment in a browser based on chrome.
And Chrome really helped save us from an Internet "embraced and extended" by Microsoft. We were heading for Microsoft succeeding in their (not first) attempt at owning the Internet.
Someone extremely critical of Google is likely to not just use Firefox? That doesn't sound statistically likely.
I'm not sure, specially as a lot of income for mozilla foundation came from google.
Well, two points to that: 1) If this person doesn't use Google products, then they are going out of their way to avoid Google. They are then very aware that their values are overruling technical benefits. 2) Surely if they are this invested in Firefox then they know who's been funding Firefox for years?
I'm typing this from within Firefox, which I switched to over the adblocking changes. But I'd say that claiming Google has contributed nothing to society is silly.
There's also the AI stuff with transformers, running the deepmind work with alphafold, alphago, alphazero. And GSOC.
And the papers on bigtable, spanner, mapreduce, etc… bootstrapping modern big data, spawning many opensource copycats.
And Android? I used a linux based Nokia N900 before Android, but clearly the world preferred Android.
Hell, Google Search itself was once a paradigm shifting improvement over alternatives.
How is Internet being "embraced and extended" by Google feeling like as society contribution?
It has literally turned into ChromeOS, with exception of Safari, and Firefox meagre 3% hardly matter.
I definitely think that there's a difference in kind about what Google has done and what Microsoft attempted to do.
Microsoft wanted everyone on MSN instead of the Internet. They bullied their browser to be the only one, and then kept it crippled. They tried to own the scripting language (VBScript) of the Internet.
I'm going to try right now: Oh, looks like I can visit any website I want with Chrome. Or Chromium. Or now IE also using Chromium.
Google is of course still driven by capitalism, not altruism. But when you look at their history they've in the vast majority of cases done the right thing arguably for the wrong reason.
And that's because Google's incentives have been aligned differently. Microsoft earns money from Windows and Windows related services (very broad here, where I include Office). Until Bing, every time someone used the Internet instead of native apps, Microsoft basically lost money. Definitely lost power.
Every time someone spends more time on the Internet, Google earns more money, statistically. So Google, in a complete opposite to Microsoft, has been incentivised to help people get onto the open web.
Yes, after Microsoft's surrender the Chromium market share is too big. And it's a problem. But at least thanks to Apple you cannot make a website that only works on Chrome. Especially since Chrome on iPhone uses WebKit, not Chromium, because of Apple app rules.
Another problem with Google is that some important opensource projects have a large set of maintainers be Google employees. But the alternative is that they… not contribute? Didn't we say that big companies should give back to opensource? But of course they'll work on what they need. Though there will be a large overlap.
It's kind of a first world problem that the open source (apache license) Kubernetes has "too many google employees" as contributors.
During Microsoft's domination, this was not the problem. This was not the problem at all.
What can you not do, or need to special case, with Safari+AWS?
Android, OK there Google asserts control. Not total control (see any Samsung phone), but a lot.
A strong but constant reminder that companies are not your family or friends despite what will say the corporate bullshit.
You should never invest more of your time and energy than what is expected for your position. And keep your side activities and hobbies as personal things using your personal email and accounts.
This is also why you should not owe fidelity to your company and don't hesitate to switch if you have a good opportunity because on its side the company will not hesitate.
Everything might be good and you can generate money, and still the day you are in a redundancy for whatever reason you will be worthing nothing to the company. Like that, just like a replaceable cog. And you will be badly handled because "it is the company policy and we can't do anything than being harsh in such a situation".
The worse is that usually the decision is non-sense but the one deciding is not the one that has to deal with the decision and with you. So you will try to argue, and they will try to invent reasons to rationalize the decision that is imposed on them also, you will try to contest, and they will become angry to have their bullshit called and will double down... And you will feel bad, not understand the situation.
The only thing I can tell you is the that if you are in such a situation is to not worry and go on, except in rare cases, for everyone I saw it happened, the event was finally for the best because the next step in their life was better in the end: better job, better salary, better project, being able to do what you always dreamed to like create a company or evolve your career.
I was laid off (as a founding engineer) nine years ago from a startup. It __still__ burns to this day.
There's a betrayal in there that is hard to let go. It was a catalyst for burnout and an overall vitriol for the entire tech industry that hasn't really let up to this day.
Luckily, I created a product that has given me financial freedom with zero employees. I don't think I'd have made it if I kept working for people.
Have you written anywhere about your product creation? I would like to create a product and it seems like there's a lot of unique things to get past. I'm looking for resources.
I have written about technical things (how I choose technologies, what to avoid, reasons I went from language X to Y, etc).
I never had any interesting social interactions from the blog/writing and the internal pressure to keep it updated eventually wore me out, so I got rid of the blog.
I have considered distilling everything into a book, complete with a working application. I'm more interested in the technical aspects and I am unsure if it would be of much interest/use to people.
Layoffs are one thing, but to be cut off without any notice, that really sucks. I usually know months in advance that when I'll leave, so I'll have time to finish what I'm working on and train the people who will take over my responsibilities. It seems weirdly destructive for a company not to allow for that.
As for email, calendar etc, I think the lesson here is not to depend on anything from your employer. Keep everything under your own control, so you won't lose too much when you get fired.
Are you outside the US by chance? Sudden layoffs like this are the norm here.
I do live outside the US, but in another part of this discussion I was just taught not to assume that reports of unhealthy working conditions coming from the US represent the norm.
Got my role terminated when I was taking care of my father in India.
Worked a research institute in Germany, used my vacation days and kept writing code to improve the project. I was the sole developer.
For a month, I worked remotely , then i get 3 notices for not coming to office. In a week, I was terminated for not showing up in office, though i was working remotely.
In a shock, accepted the mutual termination agreement. No severance, access cut to email/chat.
Not related to the layoff (I'm very sad for what author is experiencing), but the blog looking is very great and functional. Looking on the page code I see that is using a CSS framework that I'm never heard off Open Pros (https://open-props.style/), looks like a much better solution than Tailwind and friends. I see that a components collection is the development too Open Props UI (https://open-props-ui.netlify.app/)
I didn’t see one mention of AI related feature or talk they were working on.. that’s the real reason. If you’re not wasting time peddling some AI feature that nobody will ever use or give a second look, you are not onboard the hype train.
Does Google (or whoever is making these decisions) think that layoffs are in the long-term best interest of the company? If so, are they correct?
Or is it related to the possibility that Google may have to divest itself of Chrome due to anti-trust enforcement?
None of the people making these decisions care about the long-term best interest of the company. Sundar doesn't give a shit about Google's future, he is laser focused on what really matters to him and the people he reports to: the stock price. A big round of layoffs can juice the stock, and it's a nice way to keep the numbers going up in between industry events where they can show off deceptively edited product demos and knowingly lie about the capabilities of their current and future AI offerings.
To put it another way: Google doesn't want to be a software company anymore. Google does not care about making software, or products, or the people who make or use their products. Google wants to be a growth company where the stock price goes up by two-digit percentages every quarter. That is absolutely the only thing that Google cares about. Google has realized that the best way to make this happen is to commit securities fraud by lying to their investors about their products, and by drip-feeding layoffs to show that they're serious about their underlying financials. It's theater, playing pretend at being business people. The individual products are allowed to go about their business as long as they don't cost too much money, but Google doesn't want to make money by having good products that people love to use, Google wants to make money by being a hyper-growth unicorn again, and they will do anything at all to recapture that kind of growth even if they're slitting the throat of the company to do it.
Whether this attitude is good for Google or its users is left as an exercise to the reader.
It may be a bet that AI will reduce the need for developers. Even if it can only write boilerplate, boilerplate still has to be written and is time consuming, so if it were to remove 20% of time that needs to be sunk into a project, the work of 5 people can now be done by 4 (less if you account for the reduced coordination overhead).
Whether these savings actually play out and whether management has accurate expectations and metrics remains to be seen, given messaging that makes it sound like AI saves huge percentages of time, when it at best saves huge percentages of something that's actually only a small percentage of day to day work.
Wake up, buddy. This is the neoliberal/neoclassical economy we are living in. They are pumping the books to make their quarterlies look good.
Pump the stock, deliver "shareholder value", and make billionaire class richer is the game. Oh, and also make room for stock buybacks of course!
I’m sorry that this happened to him. There are innumerable ways to let go of people with dignity. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this treatment from Google. It will not be the last. Google is a great company with great people. Google is incompetent at handling layoffs. They could learn from banks on Wall Street. The banks do layoffs routinely and have a process that’s more empathetic than Google, and that’s not a high bar.
Sorry to hear. I have never worked for Google or any corporation of that scale but I got my fair share of a harsh layoff two years ago (at a reasonably small company). The company used to run a hybrid shift, with specific days for remote and onsite. We got a mail (from the higher ups) a day before saying no employee should show up at the office the next day, under the guise of a fumigation exercise. The next day shows up, I am in a meeting with my colleagues (a regular standup), a fraction of my teammates receive an email with an meeting invite link. We join the meeting, our mics and cameras were automatically turned off by the host/organizer, the CEO's face spotlit in the meeting, he then delivered the news in a very cold way, the meeting ended, we were logged out of all company accounts in the next 15 minutes, that was the last team meeting we had :)
Sounds like work colleagues should have a signal chat, or at least whatsapp, to stay in touch when someone suddenly disappears from the company. Not to take revenge or leak company secrets or anything like that, just to stay in touch and meet up for social events occasionally. If someone at work is my friend, that doesn't end when they're fired and I support them as much as I can in difficult times.
My condolences. Both to Adam and Google. Here is a relevant poem I found once. [0]
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54305/the-cloud-corpo...
having been in your position a year ago, I can definitely sympathise :(
the one thing I can say (again, from experience with having worked for google while engaging with the open source world as part of my job) is that the relationships you have been building up might well survive the loss of your job, especially if your next job ends up being in the same general area. also, i can highly recommend starting a group chat with your ex-team, that was really good for all of us in the time following the layoff.
> But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.
Isn't Chromium open-source ? Also, please don't use your corporate calendar for personal stuff...
The author listed the tasks that were coming up for him at Google, and yet Google still let him go. It doesn’t matter what your role is or how important your tasks are, a company can always replace you. Management doesn’t care, because you’re just a cog in the machine.
Yep, it sucks. Speaking from experience - I was laid off a few years ago. I was sad my time ended, but my path forward was to leave SF with money and time to visit countries I'd always wanted to see.
It's a trend away from the post-WW2 "promise of lifetime employment". Over the decades, companies have crept toward "human autoscaling" so slow no one noticed. You're far from alone - every other company is doing it. Go see the numbers at https://layoffs.fyi . When the whole industry is doing something, companies must follow suit to stay alive.
Nurture your network! Keep being present on their feeds. Reach out to the ones on your team that you had personal relationships with. Some will shun you; it's not personal, they're ashamed and fearful. It is human nature, same as the company's behavior toward you is a company's nature.
There was never a better time to take things into your own hands. Go look at @IndyDevDan's content on youtube and test the limits with agentic coding: https://agenticengineer.com/state-of-ai-coding/engineering-w...
Spend your 8-20 paid weeks agentic-coding (not vibe-coding) silly projects for your nieces and nephews. You'll come back stronger and more employable than ever.
Don't be sad to be kicked out. The boot that kicked you was attached to a Hills Hoist.
Human autoscaling. That's a good one. I mean it's not good.
We live in weird times. Companies are drowning in earnings. Their stock sky rockets. But they are unable, or not interested, to put people to work to grow their business. Because they are so big it distorts the entire economy. Because they are so big and so entrenched it's also hard to compete with them.
Less people makes the stock goes up?
And then AI too in the mix with many executives apparently believing it can just replace all the people. Who is going to buy the products then?
I have a feeling this is temporary. The wheel will turn and suddenly companies will hire like there's no tomorrow on some new shiny thing. It's gotta - right? Otherwise what?
recently their stocks have gone down...
and when you're large, it takes much more effort to grow at the same %, and maybe it's not worth it?
I would recommend actually learning something valuable rather than wasting energy on AI and becoming dumber in the process.
It's not wasting energy if it genuinely helps you build products much more efficiently. Regardless of our feelings towards it, it is here and it's making a difference. You can either move with the times or be left behind.
Still waiting for proof; but yeah, so I've heard.
That is potentially the least convincing website I've ever seen. I feel like I'm being sold a timeshare.
I had the same feeling. The underlying message has merit, but the format felt very similar to a lot of the get-rich-quick landing pages. I had to edit some of the CSS to get through the page at all.
It's always really hard to be let go, especially when you were a successful person in the company. Sadly, companies choose the people to fire by some obscure means, mostly the money earned. I've been recently dismissed from work due to "reorganisation", and it really hit me hard in terms of psychological health. Please take care of yourself, do not lose your strength, don’t let your sense of self-worth be harmed by this (I got really vulnerable after this event), and wishing you good luck in finding the next job!
It is a very, very hard thing to wrap your head around, and life doesn't always give you time to process it before your savings run out. I had a hard time finding work this year and I invested in a (tech) career coach, Larry Jacobson, and he was an immense help. He told me things that were very hard to hear, and helped immensely.
Why this site has such abnormally slow scrolling in Safari, but is smooth in Chrome? There's nothing special about this site. It's like going back in time when the internet was optimized only for a single browser. It's kind of like "I'm a Chrome dev and I don't care about other browsers"?
I learned about "cog in the machine" a few years after starting in tech and I became a contractor and have been ever since (20+ years). I get paid a daily rate and as long as there is work I keep earning, no sick/holiday pay, no reviews, bs corporate networking for promotions etc.
I have zero job security and could be let go any time, but that's built into my rate and I realised that's the case for normal employees anyway as the OP has discovered to his horror. The funny thing is I have outlived many a "permanent" employee in some places I've worked.
> argyle@google.com is no more
I'm working through this on a personal level as well because it's not healthy to make one's self worth dependent on a relationship one has no control over.
The inner call to make your work matter is, I think, a good one and something that if we had more of then the world would be in a better place. That being said, I think Ecclesiastes has an important message that has at least saved me quite a lot of trouble.
Nothing we're doing is anything more than variations of things already done and even if we're successful then it's only to the benefit of morons.
So work hard but make sure to take the afternoon off every once and a while to surprise your spouse with flowers and a picnic.
That's just how it is for a lay off, in megacorp and elsewhere.
Not sure how this is HN-worthy.
Adam was a very prominent Chrome DevRel and top voices of the web platform. I personally owe to his content (blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.) to stay up-to-date on things.
It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.
DevRel is unfortunately something that’s going the way of the dodo though now that interest rates are up. A position that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line of a company, so it’s easy to justify getting rid of.
> blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.
In ZIRP every cent is positive ROI
(Not intended to be a comment about OPs individual performance or skill)
And Chrome has an insanely dominant position now. Devs need Chrome, not the other way around
What was specifically ugly about it? It seems ugly like any other layoff except maybe he liked his job more than most.
the obligations listed on the page that he got rug pulled off of seem kinda ugly to me.
Replace/Cancel the talk he had scheduled or forgo the $500k+ in savings and keep him. Not a hard decision.
Is it? $500k is a lot of money to you or me, but I'm not Google and don't make $3000/second, or about $500k in 30 minutes.
Ugly, but not uncommon.
A company will often try and avoid letting a candidate know that they are being considered for firing, or that the decision has already been made, until the trigger is pulled.
That's normal. What's uniquely ugly/American is conveying those firing decisions by locking the fired employees out of their email at 6 PM on Friday. In most countries this is illegal.
I suppose organizing departure in an adult manner (Offer some time to finish task, pass on knowledge, etc... AND let the people leave earlier if they prefer - you know, the whole "think about the team" thing) would also violate someone's meritocratic free speech ?
Do you really need to make it a freedom of speech issue? can't it be recognized as a human as a pile of shit to rug pull someone like that and not let them at least cancel their own talk?
Please test your site on a phone. 2fps while scrolling text is not ok.
Very choppy scrolling, if you delete the whole "mentions" section in dev console, then the page will scroll smoothly again.
This comment would be much more useful it it included the model of phone, OS version, and browser (ideally with version) you're using as context.
All of these variables are highly relevant to performance and any attempt to reproduce/fix the issue you're reporting.
MacBook Pro Late 2013, Core i7, Chrome (128.0). Same problems.
(perhaps it's the fadeout effects while scrolling causing this?)
I noticed this as well on my underpowered MBA. Might be the bluesky integration causing the slow down.
yeah I was lagging as well on desktop and no wonder... the site made 2659 requests to what appears to be display pictures of people who commented on the post.
Hmm. Maybe you should test the site on a different phone. Not seeing an issue with responsiveness here.
There's definitely something wrong with the scroll performance. I'm seeing bad performance as well on a pixel 8 pro. If I weren't on mobile I'd pop open devtools and check for excessive layout recalculations
I'm personally seeing quite terrible things on desktop, here is a snapshot of the homepage: https://i.imgur.com/VfNwqi7.png
Here is a snapshot of the post itself: https://i.imgur.com/61b7ADn.png
To note, I cannot click on any of the buttons in the top-right to control what I could or learn more about this person.
Why is it always a googler writing these articles? Okay, you got laid off, but it's news because the company was google?
FYI ex-Googler/Nerdy.dev !== OP
was surprised to see this here tbh as its something that was posted to the author's (again, author, not OP) bluesky which made it maybe not _personal_ personal-news but ... I don't know ... way more personal than all up in HN I dunno ... shrugs ...
You like a company based on the environment, the peers, and the work. But it is not necessarily that someone way out in a different office likes you.
They are cogs in a machine, not you. And you are the worst thing of self reflection that cog has ever dealt with. Challenge the cogs and make them squirm.
It hurts, but the sooner you realize what you mean to them, the better.
You have to understand who you work for - most companies don't really care about their employees - they are means to an end and if they weren't absolutely needed, corps would do the work other ways.
And Google is way past "Don't be Evil" days...
>And Google is way past "Don't be Evil" days...
Wonder what prompted the change in L&S ...
I suspect over a period of time caring people realized that the people they care for are a shitty lot, so they become less caring.
Dammit. I listened to Adam on https://shoptalkshow.com/659/ just last week and really admired his impressive depth of knowledge about CSS and the web and how well spoken he is on the subjects.
"The magic of first love is our ignorance it can ever end".
One of the most difficult realizations you must confront in this industry is that almost everything you build will disappear. It will be ruined, ignored, slandered, and then forgotten. Almost all of your late night epiphanies and bugs conquests will fade anonymously into the anonymous blackbody spectrum entropy demands planet Earth emit.
You must come to peace with this reality. You must accept the transience of glory into your heart. You must prepare yourself, deep down, for any reality of off-sites and planned presentations and electric roadmaps to disappear in an instant. It gets easier after the first few times, trust me. You emerge a sadder and wiser man.
The only thing we can do is create moments of excellence --- occasions on which we can reflect when we are old and gray and take solace, even pride, in knowing we put every bit of ourselves into a task and did it well. There's honor and nobility in excellence even when doomed.
And who knows? You can't predict what will endure. If we're lucky, once in our careers, if we continually apply the best of ourselves, we'll do something that escapes all this destruction and endures.
“Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it.”
― Ghandi
you looking for someone to mentor? damn.
Getting laid off sucks, but this comment isn't about that. What I noticed when I read the post is that the website isn't very good. It's laggy, as in slow to load, scroll, and for the mouse-hover stuff to respond, and this is on a fancy modern macbook. It seems to focus on pretty modern web aesthetic over presenting content. This is exactly the kind of website that makes me bemoan the tendency to prioritize looking better than a simple website when comparing 2 static images, and not prioritizing the experience of actually using the website.
I find these things have a real "well it works on my machine" about them. Whereas sites that stick to simple tech (ex. HN) are far more likely to work well on all machines.
The website works smoothly on my Pixel 6A. Not sure if it's JavaScript or some other software issues taking up your Mac's hardware resources.
Scroll perf on that site is terrible in Chrome on my S23 Ultra. It's much smoother (but still kinda laggy) in Firefox. Weird.
Browses very smoothly on my iPhone and it looks great.
> Just like that.
These statements always catch me a bit off-guard. Is there no such thing as a cancelation period in the US? When my employer wants to kick me out, he needs a good reason for that and I'd still be paid for 3 months. Which is often even longer, depending on how long you belong to a company.
Edit: I'm in germany
In my experience, it doesn't matter anyway. You can be paid to be sat at home and, while the worry of finances is kicked down the road, the big dark questions come home to roost very quickly.
In Canada in general either employer or employee can terminate without having to give reason. Typically it's either a few weeks of notice for termination but the employer can choose to require the employee to depart immediately and instead payout severance for equivalent time instead. There's nuance province to province though.
In the US it's similar but AFAIK it does vary state to state. To my knowledge there isn't any law that requires what you're describing in North America.
There is a WARN[1] period before the employee is officially laid off, but their access to all the corporate resources are cut off immediately. From the employee perspective, they have lost everything the moment they are being told that they are laid off. It doesn't matter that they are still getting paid.
[1] https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...
The US does not have such a tax
> Edit: I'm in germany
Yeah, Germany is quite (in)famous for this.
I have seen quite a few times in my career large US tech corporations specifically choosing not to open a satellite EU sales office or a dev office in DE because of the horrendous labor laws.
Sure, very nice for the workers. But foreign money chooses to skip DE because of this.
Warm and comfy in a sinking ship, great!
If you asked them about it though, they'd say the labor laws were excellent and the American labor law is horrenous. It's about perspective, but let's face it - America is way more set up for innovation than any other Western country.
Google rips away people via tos with no explanation everyday should have argued for more toil during your tenure
Fellow ex-googler near tax due date, get your tax documents ASAP as losing access to your corp email and laptop will make things slower.
Sorry to hear. Your next opportunity might be around the corner…
my take on this is that "2 week notice" should probably apply to businesses as well?
We have it, it's called the WARN Act [0]
Any company with more than 100 employees that does the "you were laid off today, but you'll be paid for the next 2 months" thing is following the WARN Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
not quite the same, this only applies to mass firings. the giving two weeks thing is whenever an individual leaves a job. if you're fired as an individual not alongside a bunch of others the company has no requirements under WARN.
For what? He’s probably getting fantastic severance so his time is best spent on the next thing. The employer isn’t going to get more work - it’s not wise or safe to let layed off individuals roam around the office.
it’s not wise or safe to let layed off individuals roam around the office.
I don’t really buy this. I take it you’re worried about vengeful ex-employees abusing their access privileges to break stuff on the way out?
It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Probably some people would feel vengeful if you do shitty things to them like removing all their access and firing them with no notice whatsoever.
Bad employees can already break stuff while they’re employed. They might feel more inclined to do stuff like that if there are chilling effects that build distrust in the work environment, like jump-scare layoffs.
Conversely, if people are getting “fantastic severance” and you treat them with dignity on the way out, aren’t both they and the people who remain more likely to feel more positively inclined?
> I take it you’re worried about vengeful ex-employees abusing their access privileges to break stuff on the way out?
In extreme cases. But also just sowing discontent. Looking to grab value they think they are owed. Generally lots of people who are upset and probably feel mistreated and have very little to lose.
I actually think there is a small but real chance of violence as people like OP feel like their identity and way of life is threatened.
Have you been in a situation like this before?
lots of people who are upset and probably feel mistreated [...] people like OP feel like their identity and way of life is threatened
But they feel like that because they're being ghosted by the company! Suddenly cut off, with no way to tie up loose ends and say goodbye to people on the way out. That's the mistreatment. If you don't mistreat them like that, maybe people won't feel mistreated or threatened.
I don't have tons of experience with layoffs. In the case where people in my team were directly affected, the company did not summarily cut off access overnight (they couldn't legally, as this was in the UK). It was completely fine and everybody was friendly and civil. It helps that the severance package was very generous, and admittedly the job market was good at the time so people would have been less worried about finding their next job.
Agreed, the explanation for why this is standard procedure never made much sense to me.
I just know it feels really shitty on the receiving end.
So you’ve heard the risks. What would be the benefit? And why would it outweigh those risks?
I worked for a well-known SaaS company for 4 years. A few months after we were acquired, I decided it was time to move on. I gave a 3 week notice to ensure everything was properly handled before my departure.
Two days later, I couldn’t log in to my PC. I was, for all intents and purposes, fired from my actual work. Technically, I was still employed and paid for those remaining days, but I was locked out and never got the chance to say goodbye. It was the worst experience I’ve had, and I never had any issues with any manager or anyone before that. Apparently, it was just the new company policy.
That's standard practice for tech companies. Once you hand in your notice your access is cut and you'll be escorted off the premises that day.
And yet they would like a 2 weeks notice. Screw that
2 weeks of pay is very little comfort and doesn't stop any of the feeling that you've immediately become a social pariah, banished from the network.
The 2 week notice is not a legal requirement in the US. I've seen a couple employees just do a silent quit and not turn up the next day.
I'm not taking Google's side here AT ALL but it's likely this person was given much more than 2 weeks of pay as severance.
In 2023 they offered "a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google". I think Adam was at Google for more than five years, which would make it half a year of severance.
But as I see it he has not been complaining about the financial part of the layoff.
Sadly two management levels above we’re just a line in a spreadsheet. Maybe even one level above.
“Hey look, this one is cog is spinning at a cost $200k/year, why don’t we replace it with a cog from a low cost country and save some money?” Or “remove it and make this one other cog do the work of this obe?” People doing the replacement have to show they did something, as well!
Upper management has targets they need to meet. If they don’t, they’re out the door even faster than your typical junior engineer who is struggling to code.
The targets often aren’t what you’d think though.
Important… ex-Important
Welcome back dude and don’t screw up your jungian walk through the fire. You got this
The comments on Bluesky are really cool, did you implement it yourself?
I wonder what other things Bluesky has!
This article was actually posted 3 days ago. I saw it back then and read the comments. You can see the old timestamp here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnerdy.dev%2Fex-googl...
I think this is what HN calls the "second chance pool".
I absolutely hate when HN reposts an article and alters/falsifies the timestamps. It's so incredibly misleading.
In other occasions, time seems to pass very slowly for the aging of first-page items. Probably relativistic effects of large amounts of hidden mass ...
Tangentially, I thought the term Xoogler was used to refer to an ex-Googler.
Or has that term fallen into disuse now?
The term still exists, but it's not one you'd expect people outside Google to be familiar with.
Is it pronounced like “shoogler” or like “zoogler?” Or do they buy a vowel and say “exoogler?”
"Zoogler". But it's used more in writing, you'd probably use "ex-Googler" when speaking instead.
Glad I have a chance to peek into his world, but should he have posted this?
I suppose you have to decide for yourself if you're going to spend the rest of your life trying to grovel (okay, a rather pointed word to choose) for future employers.
I hope you use your new free time to beat every expert song on Wacca
This is a pretty dumb redduht level comment. I'd personally probably just remove it.
ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Life goes on after your job, unless you make your job your life
Can barely read this post because scrolling feels so sluggish and weird on a Chrome-based browser on a Pixel 9 Pro. Hope the playful effects are worth it for the author.
it's probably the commenting section at the bottom (which also took forever to load in)
I also found it on the author's homepage, on mobile Firefox - seems to be that I had to scroll mostly past something for my it to highlight and be more readable
True, that's probably it.
google is not like it was in the 2000's, 2010's. Its much more corporate, politicky, and evil.
Don't blame CEOs its the chief counsel or similar.
Back in the day Convex Computer Corporation was laying off a large fraction of its staff.
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."
If Google realizes they made an oopsie, I hope he respectfully tells them "no, thanks." I could never go back to an employer that did this to me, then said it was just a mistake.
This is the 'anger' stage, where you fantasise that anyone other than your shockingly impotent immedate manager will care about you. Anyone who's been dumped will recognise the feeling.
I have a mortgage to pay. I certainly could.
They would sell you for meat if they could.
I had my access hard cut off and laptop locked, a cold reminder that your relationship goes as far as the business will allow.
Always, ALWAYS build your homey network at your job, because that is your door to walking on to the next job.
Be sure to try to get the best severance possible, take time off, explore opportunities. You often won't have that kind of pressure off moment if you're serious about your career so take advantage.
I'm a hired gun for now for academia and a small startup and I've probably never been happier career wise. I work with non-fake employees, and solve problems that make money. No 401k for now, but my sanity is more valuable to me after the circus of the last year at my old place. (Fake employees in VP position, director position, both fired 1y after I left.)
Could be worse, at least you got severance.
Microsoft has moved on to phase two and pretends you were a performance problem and gives you no severance. Microsoft also pays like shit. Don't work for Microsoft.
It sucks.
The runway they give you is generous, sure. I got two and a half months on payroll and another six of severance and COBRA. I got the same spiel: not about merit, bosses shocked and surprised, free to apply to internal roles…
It still sucks, because the very first thing you do, the thing we’re all trained to do, is to think: “What did I do wrong?” And in the weeks ahead, you’re going to look back at the body of your work, the output you created, and you’re going to realize that you did nothing wrong.
Rather, you were just inconvenient to keep. It was little more than a decision of personal politics, not objective merit. An inconvenient line on a spreadsheet to a leader somewhere who wanted to steal your ideas for themselves, or who couldn’t stand sharing power with an undesirable element within the company. Or maybe they remembered that time you shot down their idea, or have a report showing you were active in the “wrong” chat channels. Maybe you weren’t in the hub they wanted to prioritize, or maybe you were too involved in politics for their liking.
Or maybe they just felt that your premium wages would be better spent on a fleet of underpaid, overworked Indian professionals with tenuous contracts.
It could be any of those. It could be all of those. But you’ll know, deep down, that the decision made wasn’t remotely objective, and therefore had no place in an objective institution like a business. Your leaders gave into vibes, and felt you were an acceptable casualty.
At some point you’re likely to feel rage. Hang onto that, and use it to temper your future. A future where you won’t make such petty decisions. Where you’ll stand up for your workers. Where you’ll build a better working environment that treats humans with dignity and respect, where layoffs are a last resort after a reorg, after everyone whose role actually got eliminated had their skills and output shifted to new, valuable roles instead of shown the door.
The rage is acknowledgement that you deserved better, and by extension your colleagues, peers, family, and friends.
Realizing no current business is any different than the others because they’re all run by MBA bros from consulting firms who lack any original thoughts for themselves is, in a sense, liberating. You finally see that there is no “better” out there, and certainly no objectivity or meritocracy. That everything thus far has been a temporary illusory reprieve from that reality.
But once you see it, once you acknowledge it, you can finally join others in building such a future together.
Silver lining: one less person working on the spying machine.
Honestly this, if these people are so smart, I truly believe they can help shift the ratio of spying/nefarious/addictive tech to productive/helpful/truly world changing tech in a positive direction. We need to distribute talented people across more industries to improve the world and technology for everyone.
These megacorps will have so much fun in the upcoming recession. They turned public opinion against them through sociopathic profiteering and then mass layoffs. When the cows come home it won't be fun and games like before.
> sociopathic profiteering
That "sociopathic" profiteering funds the 401(k), IRAs, and pension plans of tens of millions of Americans. God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders (including special ed teachers, utility workers, and airline mechanics) and not just the lottery winners who scored the high-paying jobs at these companies.
> mass layoffs
The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.
Sucks when you first experience the inherent fragility of working for somebody else.
Same thing is happening to me this week at Amazon, I'm just not writing a post about it
No one complains when TComp just 500k+
Only when laid off.
I just find this very sickening. On one hand, Google laid him off and best excuse I can think of is, "reduce operational expense". On the other hand, they happily paid $32 billion dollar for Wiz where the both fonder net around $3 billion dollar.
I don't know guys but there needs to be some crackdown on this bull that is going on with corporate America. Something feels really off lately with these tech companies on how they make excuse and get away.
Sorry to hear, Adam! Know that this isn't about you — it's them. Unfortunately, we are all cogs in this capitalistic system where replacement isn't a matter of if, but when...
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
You had to be fired to realize this?
Getting laid off is a unique experience -- I can't find a better word than that. I mean, on one hand we always knew this was a business transaction: I'm providing a service, you're paying me to provide a service. But work, on some level, is a social activity. You often make lasting friendships at jobs, especially a job you enjoy. If you share an office with your team[0], it isn't unusual for that to become your closest "group of friends." And you're friends mostly because you spend 8+ hours a day together five days a week. When the job ends, that daily refueling that your friendships received also ends. It's not unusual for the last day of that job to be one of the last times you communicate with those people and the last time you end up in the same place, together.
It's why a job starts to feel like "a family."
Just for the sake of context: some of the "unique" aspects are unique to the field of Software Development; some may be unique to my particular skill-set/location/circumstances. It's "unique" in that right when it happens, it ... sucks. But the two times it's happened to me -- both cases of "economic realities" or "radical business restructuring" -- it ended up being a few weeks off and into a better job -- in both cases, forms of "dream jobs." I've never gone more than 4 weeks without a paycheck since I was 16. I live near the car capital of the world and don't like cars/have no interest in working for any car/car-related company. I've worked for a global multi-national telecom, a conferencing provider, a maker of IoT devices for huge third-party companies, machine learning for a fraud company and remote medical software with a hint of robotics. The IoT job and the last job happened after being laid off. After about 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth, I had at least two offers in play both times I lost my job. In both cases, the economy and hiring trends were negative. In one case it was so close to Christmas that many people were difficult to reach.
I received a piece of advice way too late in my career from a 50-year-old man who was working for a startup that -- literally anyone who had any familiarity with the space would have given about a 99.99995% chance of cratering in bankruptcy. I was brought in on contract to help them get through some code written off-shore, he was my "project manager." Over lunch he'd offered me a job directly with the company[1]. I mentioned "benefits, salary and job security" and he said: "You won't beat the pay, the benefits are fine, and you're a software developer -- even 2008, unemployment in our sector was low enough to be considered 'full employment'. And if they get bought or succeed, the stock could make you a lot of money." Random advice, even from graybeards, is not often the kind that I take blindly, but having just gone through being unemployed during a -- not terrible, but not great -- economic time and finding more than one offer on the table in about three weeks, I couldn't argue with him. Thinking back to the scores of employees who were laid off when I worked at the telecom, I could name only one (non-manager) guy in IT who didn't end up some place much better a month after they started looking for work, again[2].
While there's never any guarantees and I don't want this to be a "buck up, camper" kind of dismissal of the misery of losing a job, I suspect the ex-Googler will land on their feet and maybe they'll look back on this and say "Yeah, but if I'd stayed there, I'd have missed out on all of the stuff I'm working on, now."
[0] Even if not, though physical proximity encourages it.
[1] This was not only allowed at the company I worked, it often came with an e-mail announcing when it happened in "celebration"-style. We rarely directly contracted to a third-party, so it wasn't a sort of "temporary placement agency" or anything like that. In fact, the reason I was contracted directly was because the owners of the company went to school with the owners of the startup and the 50-year-old guy was a former employee of my employers. They'd worked out an arrangement during a time when business was slow.
[2] Depending on how long that person worked there, they may have received over a year of severance paid at 100% of the employee's salary -- in one case, paid in a single lump sum cheque (due to the company going bankrupt and the court preventing them from paying the outstanding severance checks of employees who were laid off a week prior to the bankruptcy). One guy took a year off and still landed a job in a month.
The problem is often- a idealised view of the world, where merit and accomplishment is the deciding factor, meanwhile its all diplomacy, social networks and backstabbing at court. Then again, these "meritless" systems are parasitic on the meritocratic workers producing the actual value and progress.
The cooperate cruft grazes on blissfully unaware engineers. Which is why they should try to be poisonous to the cruft wherever they go.
"I'm told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I'm told it's not based on merit"
If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next.
Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic.
But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
Managers often feign cluelessness because what else can they do? Tell you they submitted you for layoffs? Tell you they knew for weeks and said nothing? There's really no upside option here.
I have no doubt that sometimes managers really don't know, but I'd wager that most who say they didn't know probably did.
I'd wager they didn't.
Lowest person who generally will know will usually be a senior director. Sometimes director. Sometimes VP.
Google is pretty careful about this. While it's true sometimes those people share stuff, it's definitely not en masse, and you can get yourself in significant trouble if you share it when you shouldn't, so it's less times than you think.
At most other places i worked it was different.
From my personal experience, front line managers are often not privy to layoffs.
Eh - having had to do these myself at Google for large orgs over the past few years, i would not assume it was based on merit.
The cost disparities can be huge between team members and locations, and a lot of time it's being done to hit some EOY or mid-year budget number. They are also slowly trying to clean up location strategy.
So it's entirely possible it was based on cost and location, and not merit.
It would still be merit "under the covers" if everyone was the same cost/location, but they aren't.
Similar thing happened to me, after almost 27 years, but my company was a great deal more respectful, in the way that they did it. I left on the best of terms; which is extremely rare, with layoffs. To this day, I still have a lot of respect for my old company.
Also, the writing had been on the wall, for years. I was quite prepared.
What I wasn't prepared for, however, was my post-layoff treatment by the modern tech industry. That was an eye-opener.
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> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Sorry to hear. Yups you are/were/will be. It happened before. It will happen again. Perhaps not to you, but to me, him (pointing left), her (pointing right).
Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
I don't seem to sound like an asshole. For the past couple of decades "your services are no longer required - please return your laptop" happens on a monthly basis. If you follow the news (and I believe all of us here do), every now and then we read about Company XYZ laying off 3000. Company ABC laying off 5000. So, it's just a roulette and it has to do where the ball will sit. It's not personal (in 99.9% of the cases).
I had the 'pleasure' a few years back to work for a global bank and I was asked on a quarterly basis to give names of who will be gone on the next round(s). Nothing personal. Simple arithmetic.
So.. save, invest, keep emergency fund(s), and you will be ok.
Great reminder that we are all worth almost nothing to our employers as human beings so exploit your employer to the maximum.
Other commenters are corect: you are a cog in a machine. You are replaceable. Many people in tech have for too long fallen for the delusion that, as an engineer (or just in tech in general), you are somehow immune to this, that the company does care about you.
All of these big tech companies have never not been insanely profitable. These layoffs aren't necessary for the survival of the business. They're simply suppressing labor costs by cutting 5% of the employees, pushing their duties on the remaining 95% (for no additonal pay of course) and the 95% aren't asking for raises if they fear losing their jobs. It's permanent layoff culture.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc all have a ton of inertia, just like IBM did. And that's their future. They are sowing the seeds of their own destruction with short-term profit-seeking. These companies are nothing without the employees that sustain them.
That's a good time to read up on Google's involvement in genocide and tyranny.
Why now and not before? Because some spoiled manbaby lost his cushy job?
In this neoclassical/neoliberal economy where the only thing that matters is "delivering value for the shareholders" and profits for the billionaire class. I am not surprised. A bit jaded, honestly.
I have only started my career in the past 10 years and have seen this story unfold time and time again across many companies. Big, small, or medium company. It doesn't matter.
You. Are. Expendable.
I will say the problem is much more pronounced when it's a publicly traded American company; or a company that was recently acquired or funded by private equity, "angel investment", or a vulture capitalist firm.
Folks. Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests. We cannot keep relying on billionaire class to "do right by us" because quite frankly. They do not give a shit.
>Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests.
Ding dong. There's no grindsetting yourself out of the path of an uncaring locomotive.
Yeah well this comment thread is right at the bottom of the page, so it's not gonna happen anytime soon.
Top of the page indicates they're more interested in infighting (calling him spoiled).
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TL;DR this guy got laid off and is not happy about it.
It scares me that people make a talking point out of it XD what an incredible event, someone got fired!
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> Is he stupid?
to clarify ... the ignorance behind a statement implying that working at chrome has been anything other than contributing to enshittifying the the quality level of the web in the past years is showing a disconnect from reality that in my terms deserves to be labelled as "stupid".
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Pay was not mentioned in the article as a reason why they were sick to their stomach. This person was a part of a community and they were doing a lot of work they found meaningful, and then in an instant it was all ripped away. You can't imagine how that would suck? Even if this author was immediately handed a new job that pays more than Google, I still think it would hurt. They had goals, they had friends, they had purpose, they had fun, they had innovation, and now that's all gone. I think you're just angry at the author because they made a lot of money.
When someone’s life gets turned upside down, feeling sick to the stomach is a normal reaction.
Also keep in mind that the person who wrote this blog might be here on hacker news reading comments.
If you met this person in real life would you say those things to him? If the answer is no then why post those things here?
I would actually yes say it to their face and I appreciate when someone says things like these to my face as well. Loss of perspective is a real thing and cause personal infernos with seeming no way out.
Sounds like you never got fired. I hope you don't have to experience it.
have to agree: but my first thought was "oh shoot they lost health insurance", is /why/ the american's worried.
Lol. Of course I've been fired.
I've never been fired. So I don't see why "of course".
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This is someone's personal blog, and it seems like it wasn't posted by the person that owns the blog. Have the decency to just ignore and move on next time.
I say it as a person who had to get over it myself at some point. You will never win with colleagues who are all into politics and desperate to hold and advance their position. Let them have it, hopefully they'll tear off each other heads.
In my first reading your original reply sounded rude. After reading this, it sounds you are relating with the author and airing your frustration from a similar experience.
I'm off to do some coding with natural language.
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I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN and I honestly don’t get it. If you truly care about workers, focus your energy on the corporations and politicians that are producing the system you are unhappy with. Belittling other, higher paid workers doesn’t advance anyone’s cause.
And FWIW, the jobless rate in tech is higher than most blue collar jobs and the national average. This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Losing a job is hard for everyone, regardless of the type of job it was. Jobs are where most of our social interactions happen, and where many people’s goals and aspirations are kept. Having that ripped away hurts, regardless of the salary the job paid. Hopefully he was good at managing his money (I’ve known high paid workers that weren’t) and will land on his feet, but you don’t know his circumstances and calling him names is just being a dick.
As far as classism goes, this person is closer to a tradesman than they are to a billionaire or the executive class. People really have no sense of scale here and they just end up promoting infighting. It’s not just plumbers/electricians/Amazon warehouse workers and everyone else.
> I’ve been seeing more of this classist rhetoric on HN
It has always been there. It usually gets downvoted away but it takes time. Inflammatory takes like this one are usually more popular when stories are fresh and then get downvoted as the story ages on. My theory is that these shallow, ragebait-ey takes appeal to people who are skimming stories for a chance to rage a bit, but then they get bored and move on to the next thing. It takes a while for people to read the story and come up with good discussion, which gets upvoted later.
I'm glad it's been deservingly downvoted.
It was at the top of the comments when I saw this hit HN, and it pissed me off to see a trollish shitpost in that position, especially when the post is about the community losing an awesome contributor (and a friend).
> This guy seems good, but he faces a worse landscape for finding new employment than your fictional Joe Everyman.
Maybe this is true, I don't actually know. But I'm quite skeptical that someone who worked at Google for a long time, and has work with their name on it they can point to, who can work remotely, will have a harder time finding gainful employment than a physical laborer.
I'm not trying to pile on the "screw this guy for whining" train, but I think it is important to recognize the privilege of working in tech.
I mean, actually, we're in this world now (for now, esp in the US) where if you work in trades and lose your job you could turn around and get another job pretty easily. It might suck just as much as your previous job, and the pay won't be anywhere close to a SWE salary, but there's just so much work...
But if you're a tech worker, it's really not a gravy train anymore. The number of open positions has dropped, the compensation ranges perhaps as well, and the interview process is more grueling and involved.
People who worked as salaried employees at BigCorps for years making big $$ definitely should have more savings, but they're still on the whole just the same as any other worker: they pay taxes, they don't own enough capital to make them independent of the market, and they are likely some number of months/years away from not being able to pay mortgage/rent/bills/groceries. Just like any other worker.
There are no "jobs" even in tech that give any kind of permanent escape from the need to beg for employment to make ends meet.
The difficult irony here is that you think your attitude is progressive, but it is regressive because it makes solidarity (and therefore the benefits of solidarity: unions, worker power, compression of the income distribution) impossible.
You're not wrong but suffering isn't comparative. Because it's easier for someone to bounce back or have support in the transition doesn't mean it still doesn't suck.
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This would be a shocking opinion, if we weren't in unprecedented times.
I wish we had more empathy and be kinder to people going through rough times, regardless of their wealth or position, or the duopoly they work for even, but it's also hard to completely ignore when the effect and impact is so huge.
Now, if you it makes you physically ill, I also wish you either find help or can get out of the situation you're in. Sincerely.
Well fear not for me. It is just hyperbole. Now it's a haiku.
I agree that it's a little hard to care about this author's situation as much as other stories I've heard in the past couple of years. But that said, losing a job like this is never a nice place to be, and I don't hate this person for having those emotions. People are allowed to feel things, shaming them for that is not nice.
But I would caution people against writing public statements like this when they are still in shock, you might regret them later, better to try and regain some balance first.
You let us know when somebody has the right to be sad or angry about loss, thanks
I would love to read some compelling analysis of why online public spaces are increasingly filled by cynical losers with crabs in a bucket mentality.
Caring about spoiled rich people = Intelligent Discourse
Caring about marginalized and needy people = Cynical Loser.
Hard to tell if you’re a GPT account. Obviously you can care about all people; it’s not a zero-sum emotion. Your time is zero sum though, and you seem to be spending a lot of it just hating on people. And there’s many other loser accounts like you on here, moreso than I remember.
Is this the new form of opinion erasure? If you disagree it must be AI?
Actually I’m skeptical because the level of argument you’re producing is comparable to some of the worst Reddit slop. Endless bad faith strawmans.
It’s like you’re mad at the house slaves because they have it so good.
That person is basically you under less dire circumstances.
It is insanely disgusting and tone deaf to equate any of this to slavery.
His post isn't for you.
It was written on his personal blog, announcing to the community of people who look up to him (and yes, there's a community) why he won't be in the places they expect.
Adam was a UX Engineer who saw a job that needed doing, but didn't exist, so he willed it into existence. He found a way to use his talents to literally make the world a better place. (I don't care if you think there are more important jobs - the truth is that the internet mediates most of our societal interactions, and he was making it better for everyone.)
He was doing a kickass job at it too. He should be hurt and angry to have that rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him.
He doesn't need to pay lip service to starving kids in $REMOTE_AND_DESTITUTE_PLACE or self-flagellatingly privilege check. His blog isn't here for your entertainment, and he doesn't need your approval.
There aren't many companies that have such a symbiotic relationship with the web platform to be willing to fund people to make the web a better place. For a while, Google was the foremost place that did.
Adam is immensely talented and a wonderful person on top of it. Hopefully a great opportunity will snatch him up quickly. But there aren't many places to do the work he was doing. He deserves to be mad to see the job he worked so hard to build swept away by some antisocial business school bullshit. And as the people who will miss out when he's not there to make the web a better place, we do too.
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.
>anti-worker
Missed that by a mile.
You're not even rallying against petit bourg, let alone the bourg. You're literally complaining about the lumpenproles complaining of their suffering. Unfortunate news: "Well paid" proles are still proles.
If your intent is to further Marxist thought amongst the people on this site, you're missing the mark greatly. Perhaps more study is required.
> 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
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
No one complains when paid 500k+
Only when laid off.
I agree that his situation doesn't meaningfully threaten his actual personal security. But this isn't the point of his post and like, shit dude, have a heart. It's not the misery olympics.
He has clearly invested a lot of his identity in his work at Google on Chrome etc - essentially his life's work. To have it flushed down the toilet via some opaque corporate process, cost-saving a company that basically prints its own profit has a terrible psychological impact... irrespective of whether investing one's personal dreams in a faceless multinational corporation was a rational idea in the first place.
Honestly, it's not as if the PMC classes have truly transcended the confines of generating someone else's profit, pushing them offside is probably quite unhelpful for solidarity in the labor movement, but whatever.
> Pure, unadulterated, revolting whining from a spoiled tech child.
As opposed to you, the perfect human?
> blue collar jobs would take much longer to recover
So what are you saying? We should treat everyone like shit so everyone is equal? Or that only blue collar people have the right to complain?
How about we focus on raising the quality of living for everyone.
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I think the more salient observation is that the author is completely detached from reality. Him writing:
"shoulder to shoulder with incredible engineers, planning ways to make web developers life's easier while raising the quality level of the web."
when Google is primarily responsible for flooding us with ad capitalism and ruining the web, portrays not only a profound ignorance of how corporations work, but a total dissociation from the -very damaging- effects of his work-seen-holistically on the real world. You don't get a free pass working for Google just because you can rationalize your particular niche as "educating users" and "raising the quality level of the web".
Towards the end, it seems to dawn on him that yeah, he "was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp". Let's hope he carries that understanding forward and distills it into a moral and ethical framework that can make the world better.
I mean, I definitely expected this from someone calling himself "ex-Googler". Just big egos and nothing else.
You are probably gonna get downvoted for lack of empathy but I completely agree. I feel bad for OP, but simultaneously if you are a technocrat who thinks they are somehow insulated or not part of the larger system, you need a reality check.
> I was supposed to help with the developer keynote, ensuring things matched reality and were beautiful. Gone.
Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
> Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.
This is clearly a person who loved their job, and took it seriously. They had worked hard on something and were looking forward to sharing it. That, frankly, seems healthy. It's the only way to give your everyday life worth and meaning as an employee. It's certainly something that Google cultivated and encouraged. And it's shocking to have it vanish so abruptly.
If you take a more cynical, realistic view, you could never seriously engage with your work. You realize the company doesn't care about you, and you return the sentiment. That might be a more realistic way of viewing your situation, but it's empty of meaning or satisfaction. You'd be correct but unhappy all day every day.
I was always kinda jealous of people who could drink the kool-ade. And even if there's a certain satisfaction in seeing them get a reality check, it's also a shame that somebody who thought they had found meaning and purpose in a community suddenly realize they were just a tool the whole time.
I think its possible to hold 2 conflicting views simultaneously. I put on my profit optimization hat and take it off when I leave work.
I take no satisfaction in seeing someone who has drank the kool-ade getting a wakeup call, it's just a shocking realization that there are people out there who still dont get it.
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Out of curiosity, what happens to you when a less privileged person thinks the same thing about you?
Well as long as they're not a white man, the only 2 privileges that I was afforded on the way up, then they're welcome to try absolutely any punishment they see fit. They're surely welcome to hate me. It is their right.
Since when is racism okay on HN?
Consider therapy
On what basis? You're assuming that this feeling is wrong. It is not. There is no need for correction.
Therapy isn't so much telling you that your feelings are wrong. Feelings arise from many factors that are beyond your immediate control.
Therapy helps provide better context for, introspection into, and understanding of those feelings, and more importantly, alternative ways of responding to, expressing and acting upon them.
At the very least, expressing them less aggressively while still getting across your point.
Not trying to invalidate your feelings, but stewing in resentment is like drinking poison daily. Therapy can help you acquire the psychological tools and habits needed to help you and those around you live happier lives
Just like you're assuming the OPs feelings are wrong. They are not.
I remember my dad lamenting the bourgeoisie to a family friend who recently immigrated to the US. His answer was, "To us, you are the bourgeoisie"
There's always someone richer than you, you can hate it, but what's the point? You just make yourself miserable and don't enjoy whatever you can carve out of life for yourself