I’ve watched Google through its entire “journey” and I have to say it’s revealing how quickly they jettisoned their rhetoric about having, attracting, and retaining what they claimed were the best engineers in the world at the slightest whiff of economic headwinds.

Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is sure notable how quickly they are throwing their employees under the bus.

While I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes a ton of money working two hours a day, I have even less sympathy for executives who created, championed, and perpetuated the thinking that encouraged that to happen and now try to shift blame for their own philosophy onto the people they proactively lured into their firm.

Google execs thought they would continue to make tons of money by treating certain engineers like gods. The second they suspected that might not be the case they demoted these gods to lazy slacker deadweight. Don’t fall for it. The real deadweight is running the company. The real blame lies with the decision makers. They have been blowing hot air about what enlightened managers they are for 20 years and suddenly realize they might be revealed as frauds. Step 1, blame the victims of your incompetence, the people you will soon lay off. Smear them, with no honor or decency, hurting their chances of recovering from the very situation you put them in.

What a company.

Googler, opinions are my own.

The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings).

But I only interact with a tiny fraction of Google's total employee base, so there is a good chance this happens. We have too much work, and it's pretty obvious when there are coasters in our midst.

At a different company, a friend told me (who was a manager at this company) that he liked keeping coasters/slackers on his team, so that when he was told he had to fire someone (due to a company wide RIF (reduction in force)), he would have someone to sacrifice. But I've never heard of Google doing a RIF, so that doesn't apply here.

[0] https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...

Title is excessively editorialized. Here is the ONLY thing said by anyone at Google about the subject, "Pichai revisited Google's plan to find efficiencies wherever it could, citing their plan for a 'simplicity sprint' and even discussing a possible reduction in headcount of up to 20 percent."

Google is a de-facto ad search monopoly that can (and continues to be able to) afford dead weight. The real threat to Google is NOT a bunch of unproductive employees. They could probably run the ad search groups, android, g-mail, docs, and more with 10% of their current headcount if employees were worked to the bone. As a conglomerate, Alphabet can and does burn money in attempts to be innovative in a true sense with Google X, Calico, Verily, DeepMind, and more.

What Google cannot afford is for that incredibly talented dead weight that they have go off an make a COMPETING search engine and associated platform ecosystem (i.e. android, g-mail, chrome). That talent is not just sitting on its ass for no reason.

Google was started from a garage with bare-metal linux servers on hardware that is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi cluster today. Making a search engine using someone else's cloud is vastly easier in 2022 than in 1999. Replacing the platform ecosystem lock-in is significantly harder, but doable with the right talent. Its in Google's interest to keep at least a proportion of that talent inside the company.

Also the term "rest and vest" isn't use correctly here. "Rest and vest" refers to people who were acquired during an acquisition. They were too important to fire as they had vital information how the acquired company worked, but also they couldn't leave due to the golden handcuffs they were given in the form of options.

So they "rest and vest".

This will backfire very hard. Pichai just wants to deflect from his incompetence, by blaming those who made Google into what it once was.

It's his fault, that the "Don't be evil" motto had been erased from Google's culture. And it's his incompetence that made Google spending money in areas which were not only not profitable enough, but rather such money pits that he has to squeeze money out from profitable divisions so hard that it makes Google's users switch to alternatives like Apple or make them degoogle their lives.

He and the likes of his are a cancer that is growing at Google.

Did the CEO say that? The article didn't contain a single direct quote.

The floating advertising and popups on that inc.com url are absolute cancer.

Google has over invested in AI research projects and, while they are pumping out good research, they aren’t exactly pumping out great products. If I were Pichai I’d trim the fat there first. As for rest and vesters, it sounds like it refers to senior people who have climbed the ladder high enough to coast at “meeting expectations” which obviously is not good enough grounds for firing someone.

Why would I ever want to work at Google if the management setup tolerates this sort of organizational flotsam? What a poorly managed place it must be if there’s no chain of accountability for senior employees.

I dunno. I remember seeing quite a contingent of people not doing very much work at Google. You're walking to a meeting, pass by the game room, and it's always the same group of people playing ping pong no matter the time of the day. You try to grab lunch in a 30 minute slot between meetings, and there's a 45 minute long line to get food. Some people appeared to have a lot more free time than others. I certainly didn't have it.

Same. I have never met this proverbial rest and vest guy making 7 figures. Most everyone I know is scrambling to survive the performance reviews and get to the next level.

And if your productivity is very low you will get put on an improve or out plan.

In my experience, these slackers do exists in meaningful numbers (maybe most of PIPed but I know at least a few long timers). That said, an even bigger problem is that the majority of people are incentized to slack in some capacity.

The impact & output of work within Google follows something like a perato distribution and yet the payscale is pretty flat. It creates this weird incentive system that almost encourages some base level of slacking unless you really want that promotion. And the difference in output makes it pretty hard to staff project and superstars often end up overworked which is hardly fair to the people doing the work.

This wasn't always the case, but is probably the norm at larger companies. It does seem to me like the way comp is modeled isn't ideal, but I'm definitely not a comp expert. My guess is that more discretion in pay would open companies up to all kinds of legal liabilities not to mention actual unfairness.

All that is to say that there is likely some extra slack that can be let go with little effect.

(Ex-Googler)

These people aren't on teams you interact with. They have a low enough employee ID and/or a sufficient level that they just mill about on a passion project.

I do not work at Google but that is what I have heard from every friend of mine who does. In fact they have all said that it was almost a shock working there at first just how competitive it was. Then again I am sure there could be whole departments with completely different mentalities.

Are you an employee who worked his/her way up or are you one of those who were acquihired?