Googler... ex-Googler(nerdy.dev) |
Googler... ex-Googler(nerdy.dev) |
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.
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?
and when you're large, it takes much more effort to grow at the same %, and maybe it's not worth it?
All of these variables are highly relevant to performance and any attempt to reproduce/fix the issue you're reporting.
(perhaps it's the fadeout effects while scrolling causing this?)
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.
Isn't Chromium open-source ? Also, please don't use your corporate calendar for personal stuff...
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.
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.
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.
For me it was not the process (the company I worked for announced their plans early) of being let go - it is the current job market that keeps me from sleeping at night: every day I get rejection emails, every day I'm told I'm not good enough or that other 220 candidates applied for the position. I feel obsolete, depressed. All I want is to find a job where I can be helpful, have a purpose and focus on my work goals.
If you have any work please reach out to me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianskala/
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 ...
Welcome back dude and don’t screw up your jungian walk through the fire. You got this
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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!
The targets often aren’t what you’d think though.
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.
I wonder what other things Bluesky has!
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 "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.
At the cost of the destruction of the entire rest of the economy, which is coming home to roost right now. People's retirement should never have been loaded onto the stock market. That was a 'mistake' from the start. A 'mistake' that was designed to bloat the stock investors' coffers.
> God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders
No; First, if you are profiting at the detriment of entire rest of the society by consolidating the economy in your hand by bankrupting everyone else, it doesnt matter if you run it 'for the collective benefit of the shareholders'. And even cheating, scamming at that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719246
Second, let's get real - it's not the employees who benefit from the stock prices the most. Even proposing they do is just self-deceit.
> 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.
The layoffs involve much more than those 6-figure job holders.
Now the best Google can expect from young pragmatic talent is that they'll have no real loyalty or trust in the brand, well respect is a two way street, this will almost certainly just accelerate enshittification across Google products and services.
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.
You had to be fired to realize this?
Only when laid off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ding dong. There's no grindsetting yourself out of the path of an uncaring locomotive.
Top of the page indicates they're more interested in infighting (calling him spoiled).
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.
The cooperate cruft grazes on blissfully unaware engineers. Which is why they should try to be poisonous to the cruft wherever they go.
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.
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.
At most other places i worked it was different.
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.
If I got paid 5x someone else, shouldn't I be producing 5x?
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 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.
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!
[1] https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...
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.
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.
Or has that term fallen into disuse now?
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.
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...
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?
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.
But as I see it he has not been complaining about the financial part of the layoff.
the whole post is about "company shut off access with no notice"
and 2 weeks notice is "must warn before stopping working somewhere"
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?
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 just know it feels really shitty on the receiving end.
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.
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.
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.
i'll have to figure out how to block bluesky. the blockers focus on privacy stealing feeds like facebook etc.
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.
Boy, this whole post sure has a lot of "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" about it.
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?
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.
Why? What prevents you from spending time with your ex-colleagues?
This would likely lead to genuine, more interesting conversations.
In my experience, true relationships survive (and sometimes thrive in) a departure.
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.
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).
Yes, you were. Next time, please choose a company that contributes to society rather than shoving ads in everyone's faces.
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).
I haven't used Google Translate in years. You do know there are alternatives, don't you?
That's bizarre.
Or is it related to the possibility that Google may have to divest itself of Chrome due to anti-trust enforcement?
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.
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.
Pump the stock, deliver "shareholder value", and make billionaire class richer is the game. Oh, and also make room for stock buybacks of course!
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.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54305/the-cloud-corpo...
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 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."
> Surprised when company does nasty, profit-driven thing.
Not sure how this is HN-worthy.
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.
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.)
[1]: In reference to this famous essay: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
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.
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.
It has literally turned into ChromeOS, with exception of Safari, and Firefox meagre 3% hardly matter.
In ZIRP every cent is positive ROI
(Not intended to be a comment about OPs individual performance or skill)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder what changed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Europe is vastly diverse and your experience is not representative of all Europe.
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 never felt good about that company ever again.
As someone from Europe, I’ve never experienced US salaries. Go figure.
Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.
Yes, it may be different for full-time non-contract jobs, but once you're on a contract, nobody cares.
>Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.
Presumably you are also still employed, just not given any tasks. I do not think that here in Germany there is any way to immediately fire someone, just because he was working on something critical.
Many companies refuse to do layoffs entirely. Which often means that they have difficulties responding to changes in the environment or need to heavily rely on contractors.
Yeah, no. Also European, and have been marched out without notice, cut off that day with no chance to say goodbye, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
* 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)?
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.
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.
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.
That is obviously decided by a court.
Ironically exactly this happens at VW, where getting fired is exceedingly difficult. Neither incompetence nor underperformance are enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, most of the time, you can / need to stay at the company for that above mentioned varying amount of time.
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.
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 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 really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
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 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.
- 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.
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. :)
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
For someone young with no dependents, it can be scary but doable. For those with kids? Not so much.
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp."
Remember, if you don't own it this is always the case.
ALWAYS!
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.
Yup. Must have been a horrific wake up call :(
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.
I wouldn't count on that. The job market is really bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It looks like tensorflow is going down the slow legacy/sunset trajectory at this point.
This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil".
https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...
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.
It probably says "the DOJ really is gonna force us to sell Chrome."
Everything that's needed saying for at least the last decade.
I have trouble relating to the evangelist fervor that some developers develop toward their craft.
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.
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.
Granted, but it seems like the current way of salary-first, performance-blind cutting obliterates it even harder.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.
And with less dedication, I can spend far less than half my time there ;)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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' ?
I have noticed that smartness can be highly compartmentalized.
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 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.
yep, you always was.
bigtech and corporate make a good illusion that you aren't. brace, if you let yourself believe in that illusion.
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.
Engineers, nerds, developers remember this ALWAYS. Do not work hard for ANYONE including your family members unless they reciprocate proportionately.
> Just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important.
https://despair.com/cdn/shop/files/worth_6b813282-f9f8-41ab-...
Do the corp that is what you are!
The lower level of hell is definitely reserved of industrial psychologists and advertisers!
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.
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.
Are layoffs considered to be with cause?
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.
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 ...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should have been first out the door, but Sundar is part of the problem.
They're doing exactly that, veiled in euphemisms like "making our talent pool more reflective of our user base."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the ones that were true friends, and none of the ones that were just friendly acquaintances.
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.
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.
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 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.
My partner here in NL got fired from a regular retail job, but the company still had to pay her 3 months of salary because she had a permanent contract and worked there for 3 years. I mean it's minimum wage, but still. She also had a month of warning, plus she could choose whether she wanted to use her remaining vacation days or have it paid off alongside the 3 months (the holiday pay gets taxed up the ass though).
+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.
They have no right to stop him from expressing his feelings publicly.
If you get fired and your reaction is to go to your blog and whine about losing email access and not being able to deliver a talk that you had prepared for x time I, as a prospective employer, am going to draw some conclusions about your personality that won't help you get the job I'm offering.
Probably not the International Society of Travel Medicine, what's the abbreviation?
Information Systems and Technology Management
I've also never heard anyone say this though, but I'm guessing that's what they meant.
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 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.
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?)
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.
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.
1. Which countries are we talking about? Europe is not homogeneous
2. Which type of business? Are workers unionized?
That is something both sides have to agree on. So it can not be considered "firing".
>Freistellung
You are still employed, just have no tasks assigned to you. Completely different scenario for the employee, who now can look for a new job, while still being paid as if he were employed. Arguably it is even better than being let go, but having to continue working. Definitely anything but a "firing on the spot".
> It is a genuinely terrible idea by the CEO though.
This is the culture where I am from. Nevertheless I absolutely believe that work relationships should be professional relationships, based on the employer paying for the employees time. Mutating that into "trust" will only create problems. The only thing I trust my employer with is him fulfilling his legal obligations towards me and I will fulfill my legal obligations towards him.
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.
I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.
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.
The issue is that if you keep hiring leadership/people from the rest of the corporate world (which is basically unavoidable if you are growing) then you'll end up trending towards the median of corporate behaviour over time.
It's mostly unavoidable, unless you never hire external managers (which would be very very difficult to do).
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.
If you need to hit a specific number, guess which one is going to be less paperwork….
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.
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.
But from the PoV of a higher up making layoff decisions, the sooner they severe the organization from the rest of the company, the less traumatic it will be when the time comes. I think at this point they realize it's better to start treating Chrome et al more like Waymore, which seems to have some isolation from the borg collective.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
But Google is a big place and it was long ago, so perhaps it’s a “blind men and the elephant” thing.
Did you ever run percent when you were there? I started at Google in 2006 and one of the 'fun' things people did was run the 'percent' command that would tell you what percentage of Google employees were 'newer' than you, so if it was 10% you knew that 10% of the people were new. I was curious how it worked and found that it just counted rows in a database that had active employee names and start dates. Pretty simple hack.
The amazing thing was how quickly the number grew! And at TGIF there were the Nooglers in their propeller caps and everyone was like wow look at all those newbies. About 6 months in I noticed two things, first there was like 25% of the company was newer than I was, and that the number of employees being reported in the financial reports was about the same as when I joined. One could do the math. Waves of people would be hired, large chunks of them wouldn't survive the first year, and another chunk wouldn't survive 'slotting'. They were just no longer at the company. After a couple of years, as I remember it there were three of us, out of about 30, from the group that joined when I did, still at the company.
When I looked for it, it was pretty clear there was a tremendous amount of 'churn' in employment. I asked Lazlo Bock about it once, he was heading up 'People Operations' at the time and he assured me there were always plenty of candidates in the pipeline and Google wanted only the best and brightest. The people we had? Well they weren't always a good fit "culturally" with the company, after all Google was unlike any company that had ever existed, right?
It was just one of the more egregious times where the 'actions' and the 'words' didn't actually communicate the same message.
Prior to that, I only saw layoffs during market downturns (2001, 2008, 2012) and generally much smaller.
Another big thing at Google was data science, or "Using data to win arguments" as a prominent Google engineer once wrote. I would not be surprised that someone has code that assesses the cost of replacing people where they figure out "current pay package of existing engineer" - "recruiting costs" + "new pay package" and the manage the list of people who are now 'replacable' because that number has gone in favor of replacement.
I was pitched a project to work on when I was there called "find and expert" or something which was designed to identify individuals who were 'experts' and relied on by the organization. Reasonable thing right? Know who your experts are. But the folks putting this together were also associated with People Operations trying to replace people. It didn't take too much effort to connect the dots on that. Was it evil? Yes? No? Kind of? It was more like "we want a company where everyone is easily replaceable without risk to the company." That certainly plays well with the shareholders. Felt a bit like the Borg trying to integrate ones technical distinctiveness into the collective.
It has always been a career limiter of mine that I care about the people more than I care about the company.
This is a success at Sundar's level.
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).
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.
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.
Strategic downgrade sounds right.
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 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.
I don’t do actual training in the browser though, so maybe someone else can answer that part.
As in it wouldn't be just your worth tied to the profession, but N generations of your parents, etc.
Please tell me more about the gig economy of medieval peasants.
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].
Here in the Netherlands contractors are also 'at will employed' as the Americans say.
But they pay you more so...
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.
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.
We are a law and order country.
You got yourself played
Those few months pay thing is the key difference. That is legally mandated.
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.
Maybe in US laid off employees can go rogue because they're treated like shit in the process?
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.
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.
He literally just told you it’s different in France?
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the end of the day it's more about culture (i.e. people's expectations of what is normal) than any objective factors.
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.
That's no way to run an (overly litigious) society.
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.
Only one of them would be seen as negligent.
This situation is endemic in smaller companies with the tight budgets.
If you get fired for fraud or for being incompetent, for example, it's often different.
And I'm not just talking about Trump. Every mayor, governor, what have you. They all appoint their friends to high places.
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.
Investors, board members, maybe even some CEOs, sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be curious if every laid off Google employee experiences this hard cut off, or if it's determined case by case.
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.
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.
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.
This has nothing to do with Europe. This is particular a tech thing
Basically, almost all places, particularly in the UK, have worse salary to cost of living ratios.
Someone may find the question offensive because of that.
According to this video you can't keep preciously-lent ammunition from the military. But you can for sure buy your own.
As to why people don't use it or aren't scared, I guess they just aren't as wild...
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..."
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?
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.
The barrier of entry to become a receruiter in general is very, very low.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shocking how real this is.
> after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined
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.
Marissa Mayer left Google like, 13 years ago...?
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.
So? It's not a weird callout, it's an example where the whole arc is well known.
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.
People repeat this a lot, but it's obviously not true. Google Photos is recent, really good, and had more than a billion users really quickly. Waymo is like a decade away from eating the entire urban taxi market. Gemini is the best LLM for writing code right now. I guess you could call these "rare exceptions" but I don't think that's a useful way to describe them.
Hell, even YouTube improves every year by leaps and bounds from both a revenue/profit standpoint, AND from a creator support standpoint.
Google deserves to be heckled mercilessly for how easy engineers have it there and how eager it is to kill off products, but suggesting that it's a dying company coasting on ad money is just totally wrong.
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
That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would the candidate be on the hook for the flight change and extra night at a hotel?
When I interviewed with Google ~10 years ago, they booked and paid for my my flights (from China to the US), hotel and car hire. I didn't have to book, pay and then ask for reimbursement, let alone foot the bill myself.
The 'two days' sounds weird to me as well. In my experience (on both sides of the table) face to face interviews were scheduled to be on a single day.
Perhaps things have changed or your friends were interviewing for very specialist roles?
- 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.
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...
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
Newer employees often see this as incredibly unfair.
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.
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.
If this was even in the spreadsheet, whether or not it were used, the current administration would love to hear about it.
On paper, my employer pays me 72k per year. I net 36k of this after taxes and social insurances are paid.
Fun fact I learned the last time this topic came up, social security in the US pays more than German government pensions.
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.
FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.
* 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:
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])
But IBM was first, right?
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.
While federal law has:
Plant closings involving 50 or more employees during a 30-day period.
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.It’s a decade old and that’s only if we don’t count what it was before it was spun into its own product, google’s more recent integrations spun as “releases” non withstanding.
YouTube INCREASING creator support? That’s news to me and every other YouTube creator. Creator support peaked around the time Photos released, nearly a decade ago and has only gotten worse since (although if we were to graph it, it would certainly have peaks and valleys).
If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it, I don't know if there's much of a point to me trying to convince you
Well I didn’t say anything like this or anything that implied anything close to this so I suppose you’d have to engage with what I actually said.
Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015. Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age. I don’t think even IBM would consider a 10 year old product a recent release.
They said, if Photos is currently recent (aka 2025-2015 = 10 years = recent) then Search was recent when Photos came out (aka 2015-1998 = 12 years = recent).
Which given the overall timeframes, I'd say that's close enough to say 10 years ~= 12 years. And they said they'd actually count the non-Photos time of Photos as Photos, so add some to the 10 years.
Your choice of verb tells a lot about what you think of your employees.
In many cases problematic employees can and are removed from EU companies.
Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Meanwhile, Big tech (pre-2022) went to pretty extreme lengths to keep tenured employees around because of all the knowledge they'd built up which made them valuable to the company.
But whatevs, you do you. I'd advise you to only hire contractors if you want people to stay less than a year.
And it's worth noting that you appear to be responding to people who are in German speaking countries, where 3 months notice is standard. Other parts of Europe are not like this, and in Ireland you can fire as per the US for the first 6 months/year, and only need to pay redundancy if they've been there 2+ years.
I watched a layoff take out half the security team during an incident. That was fun.
I feel like global acronym bankruptcy is overdue.
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.
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.
"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"
You can work for a US company in the UE. They have to follow the local rules like anybody else.
its much easier to find another job in US because of this though.
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.
I personally have interviewed for 7 enterprise dev jobs and I have had 2 coding interviews and those were simple.
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.
European companies have very little staff turnover, so new jobs are fewer. Another aspect is that salaries are very even across much of the industry, as it is often negotiated by unions and unless you are also switching roles (e.g. into management) salaries at different companies will be very similar. That is why working for the same company for a long time is much more common in Europe.
Not really, people get hired all the time that can't do a fizzbuzz.
Most of my colleagues were shocked by the treatment. Moral took a dive after that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
Google has had several previous photos apps! The actually useful one is the most recent.
> Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age.
So you swear you aren't demanding proof that services released in the past five years are successes, but you're complaining that pretty much anything older is too old.
Dude, I am engaging with what you said. Almost no product is wildly successful in less than 10 years by Google's standards, because Google measures users in billions.
If you still wanna ignore Photos, then talk about Gemini, Cloud, and Waymo. The Pixel phones are also doing pretty well, considering how dominant Apple has been.
My point here is that you're ignoring numbers that would be INSANE for any startup because the product is from Google. It really seems to me like you're looking for reasons to discredit the company instead of the truth, which is that non-ad revenue is 25% of the total and growing.
That's pretty significant and in absolute terms makes Google a giant even without search.
My post was Thesis: Photos is not new
Supporting evidence: everything else.
I am not OP, I am not saying anything you’re responding to (and when I look at the OP you responded to they didn’t say what you’re responding to either).
I’m not ignoring any numbers they just don’t have anything to do with my post.
Additionally, Photos was a relaunched app that’s why I’m saying the 2015 is a little misleading, I am aware Google had other photo apps before Photos and I’m not talking about that.
I can say “your examples are bad” without espousing “Google doesn’t do anything”
> Supporting evidence: everything else.
I am getting my number from Wikipedia, because that's when the actual "good" version of Photos launched. I don't know what the status quo was before the relaunch, because the app wasn't useful to me before it got the ML features that caused it to blow up and become a wild success.
The point I am trying to make is that Photos, on its own, would be a multibillion dollar startup. In the context of billion-user apps, even being 10 years old is still pretty recent.
My complaint with your take is that if you exclude anything younger than that, OBVIOUSLY there will not be as many (or any) wild successes. It takes time for a product to become successful.
> 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.
Why else do you go to work?
The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.
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.
Can you specify what country you're drawing these facts from? Europe does not have standard employment law, and I definitely haven't experienced salaries being set by unions or being common across the industry.
There are also union negotiated rates for pay across much of the industry. Even if you switch employer your pay might remain exactly the same, unless you also get promoted and into a higher level or a different industry. "Flächentarifvertrag" it is called.
Obviously this drastically disincentivizes hoping employers.
OK, good to know. I definitely haven't experienced flat income after taxes post salary bump, even though I pay 52% marginal on my income (in Ireland).
> Obviously this drastically disincentivizes hoping employers.
I can totally see that. Is it really that common in tech jobs though? I'd have expected this to be much more common in larger, older companies (like the automotive industry).
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.
What is a "tech job"? Wouldn't a job where you are designing the electrical/mechanical/software parts of a car be a "tech job"?
Of course this is much more common in older, well established industries. But that is where most of the "tech jobs" are. Germany, especially labor laws, are hostile to start-ups so it is natural that people get employed at these older companies with union negotiated salaries.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and it's because of larger, more liquid capital markets make it much easier to obtain VC funding.
> Europe is poor and to an extent I don’t think Europeans really understand.
Europe is definitely not poor in terms of either wealth or income (particularly Western Europe, which is the appropriate comparator for the US).
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)
Does it? Sounds more like an opinion than a fact to me.
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.
sorry i forgot to add "typically" which apparently is a license to spout any BS .
There is demand for tech workers, but the output of EU tech companies can't afford huge salaries. Lower margins.
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.
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.
I don’t care what the “average” is. I plan on taking 30 days this year.
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.
> If I calculate my hourly salary it's better than what I was paid by US companies
prbly not.
Amazon didn’t have any significant lobbying 20 years ago and it definitely was the behemoth it is today. That being said, even today it isn’t as large as Walmart and was definitely not a large retailer back then.
It was seriously in doubt 20 years ago whether Amazon would ever survive and definitely wasn’t consistently profitable.
However, I would be very surprised if they weren't lobbying heavily to keep said exemption for as long as possible.
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.
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.
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.
Every employee in the US is “at will”.
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."
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.
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.
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.
And knowing how to “deal with ambiguity” and focus on how to add business value. If you look at the leveling guidelines of any tech company, anything above mid level is focused on “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.
Knowing AWS really well is just a tool and it doesn’t hurt that I have a stint at AWS ProServe on my resume
Notice “codez real gud” is not a differentiator.
There is no hard skill you can learn that thousands of of others don’t know that will set you apart.
Well except for some vertical market stuff that will leave you pigeonholed.
Sources:
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
https://dropbox.tech/culture/sharing-our-engineering-career-...
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.
If you would work non-contract here in Poland for an equivalent of ~$120k you would pay around $1k USD. If your wife is working she will also pay, of course this also covers all you kids.
So lets say both of you make around $120k here - so you would pay $2k monthly for "free" healthcare and its quality is atrocious. Even for serious stuff you many times need to wait 1-2 years for something, all hospitals are understaffed, the care quality is abysmal.
If you are ambitious and make good money the US is better. Europe in general is better for people that don't aim too high and want the state to enforce some minimum of QoL for them at the expense of the rest.
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.
First link -16 days for unlimited PTO vs 14 days without
https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/ive-been-an-hr-professiona...
Now if you look at where those numbers come from, this article quotes another article from WSJ (https://archive.is/MVRur) which is also titled "Why You Should Be Wary of the Unlimited Vacation Perk". Hmm...
And the WSJ article, in turn, takes its number from this report: https://www.empower.com/the-currency/work/pursuit-of-pto-res...
Now when you look at the survey, the problem with comparing those numbers is that they are averages for all workers. That is, 14 days without PTO is the average across all companies, not just those that had adopted UPTO. And the 16 days with UPTO is, of course, only for those companies. So the numbers don't actually tell you anything about the effect of "unlimited" PTO adoption in a given company. Those companies where 14 days is the norm are generally not the ones that decide to switch to UPTO because, well, there's no actual benefit in it for them. Companies that do adopt it, like many Big Tech firms in the past few years, are also the ones that had much more generous paid PTO to begin with - at Microsoft, for example, as a senior engineer, I had four weeks of PTO before the switch.
So, you need to look at comparisons before and after UPTO adoption for the same company to see the trend. Conveniently, that very article you linked to has some sources for that, e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220520-the-smoke-and-...
There are other negative aspects to it, too. For example, when you have guaranteed vacation PTO, it is wholly separate from other things like paid medical leave. But with UPTO, it's that much harder to argue for it to your manager if you have already taken medical leave that year.
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.
> 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.
Thanks for taking the time to share that.
I’m not going to look up the PTO for other BigTech companies. But the one I worked for (Amazon) had 15 days PTO and 5 personal days.
And most people who have defined PTO, also don’t take all of their allocated days off.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/10/more-than...
That’s not evidence of defined vs unlimited PTO as a limiting factor of UPTO.
And because of laws in different states, companies with unlimited PTO also often have a separate bucket for sick time.
because internet is dominated by 'stories mostly from US'