So reading about the round of layoffs at Google, et al. The fact there were big layoffs is not particularly surprising to me, how they were was a little:
This seems unnecessarily harsh, and not in line with what I’d expect from a big public company that’s not run by a complete sociopath. I’ve been through a lot of these at various companies, ranging from big multinationals to small startups. And the minimum I’d expect when there is a big round of lay-offs is:
An “all hands” meeting ahead of time where senior management says whats about to go down, along with some meaningless platitudes.
Those that are being laid of have a one-on-one with a HR person (or HR+manager) where they are told in-person they are being let go and why.
Has some higher up or legal folk decided that’s not needed or desirable anymore? (I get “in-person” is a bit fuzzy in these remote times but a phone/zoom call seems like a bare minimum)
Yeah I’ve never been remotely of the opinion that any company, let alone a big publicly own multinational has my best interests at heart as an employee, whatever slogans they might come up with. But there is a certain minimum standard for professional behavior in this kind of thing I’d been led to expect, and this seems below that standard IMO.
This isn’t unusual from my experience. The billion dollar multinational I used to work for severed a quarter of their work force, about 2,000 people, around 2001. Typically, people were approached by a security guard, escorted to HR, told they were severed, reminded of their non-competes, escorted to their desks to collect their possessions, and then hustled out the door.
It was hard to watch co-workers and friends disappear and stressful to wonder if and when your time would come.
When I was laid off as a Cisco contractor employee, they didn’t reach me on that Friday. When my on-paper employer called my cell, I didn’t answer because it was an unknown number. They couldn’t come to me because they were off-site. They also didn’t leave a message.
So some asshole called me the following Sunday while I was at an Octoberfest street fair, desperate to prevent me from going into work the next day. I was lucky to too get anything off my tiny desk kiosk, but I avoided the security escort of shame.
Big, public companies don’t have to be run by compete sociopaths to act as complete sociopaths in their “corporate personhood.”
(At least I had the decency to call the guy I knew would have to cover my upcoming jobs to let him know what was going on. Everyone in our department would eventually get canned within a month or two. Ah, 2008-09.)
I’ve been through three layoffs at different companies. One I was laid off; startup with a product failure. Another I was given a termination date, later rescinded; $5 billion dollar company. The last I was not part of the layoffs; fortune 50 company you’ve heard of.
In all three cases there were meetings intended to make everyone feel better, and in all three cases each person laid off was brought into a conference room and told the news either by an HR person or their boss.
Layoffs of computer engineers can be dangerous, because they have a lot of power to do harm or steal IP if they feel they’ve been wronged. At Microsoft, at least a couple of decades ago when I knew people who were layed off there, you found out about your termination when a manager showed up at your desk with a security guard. You were escorted off the property immediately after you collected your things under the eyes of a security guard.
Many still happen that way. I’ve been laid off similarly, twice. And once was remote. Mind you, I couldn’t have done much to the system but they were also laying off programmers, and software security folks.
None of this is remotely surprising to me. Not one tiny bit.
It’s kinda like how President Trump reset the bar on how politicians are able to behave. “Oh, so we can just be openly dishonest now? We don’t have to pretend?”
Musk set the new bar in how he handled the terminations at Twitter. “Oh, so we don’t have to be nice, now? We don’t have to pretend?” Behind the scenes other CEO’s absolutely loved what Elon Musk did to Twitter. And they are all jumping on the bandwagon.
They only did things the “nice way” because they thought that they had too. Not because they were good people.
FWIW, I’ve been let go as part of a mass layoff twice. Both times were major electronics companies. There was the predictable all hands meeting, then individual envelopes as notice. Then…we went back to our desks. I had access to the office and my accounts for about a month.
At the next company, it was much more the “security taps you on your shoulder and walks you out immediately.” I survived those days, and quit on my own.
My current company had a big layoff at the beginning of the pandemic. We had an all hands Zoom meeting and were told we would get an e-mail with our status before lunch. Those who were let go had access for the rest of the day, if I recall correctly.
Once we had an all hands meeting called, then everyone who was staying on was given a personal phone call and told not to go to the meeting. I was away on vacation and came home to some interesting voice messages (I was kept on).
The second time (same company) we were called into an all hands and all we were all handed the same list of the full staff with conference rooms to go to next to each name. (I was kept on again)
This is outrage over the how of the layoffs. Have you seen the why of the layoffs?
A hedge fund, that is an Alphabet share holder, sent a letter to the CEO saying that Alphabet has too many employees, and some need to go. Alphabet is not denying it, just saying basically “we make our own management decisions,” while doing what the letter orders.
Scuttle on Mastodon is that the hedge fund is not meeting its return expectations, and they’re just grubbing for a short term stock bump that will come from the layoffs.
Agreed. Companies definitely don’t GAF about employees they’re RIFfing OR optics for those who remain. The first one, OK, we can argue that there’s no reason (beyond basic humanity, hah) that they should; but the latter is something they ignore at their peril.
All too often it’s your basic race to the bottom. A 10% across-the-board cut gives a 10% smaller company with 10% less revenue, 10% less profit, etc. Except for one detail: when executive compensation doesn’t go down by 10% (and it never does), everything else has to go down by a little more, and then you go into the circle-the-drain phase, better known as “death spiral”.
My favorite two stories about layoffs:
Large company has offsite, with transportation provided via two buses, with assigned seating (“Bus 1” or “Bus 2”). Buses go to different places, one group are told they’re the survivors, others not so much.
At a company I was at which shall remain nameless, all the engineers lived on IRC ( this was 20 years ago, when that wasn’t normal). Around 10AM someone asks, “What’s this surprise all-hands at noon about?” and several people (after a long enough period for them to have checked their email) respond, “What all-hands?” and everyone goes “Oh”.
Best part (if there is one) about that second layoff is that they asked everyone on the call to state their name (yeah, this was before Zoom et al., was just voice). One of the people on the layoff list was the VP of Marketing. He got invited by mistake, and attended knowing he was being RIFfed. OK, that’s not so strange, especially given that it was just voice–I would have at least been tempted. But when they asked for folks to call out, he did so–followed by an uncomfortable silence from the CEO. (We figured out why that silence had happened later, when we realized he’d been RIFfed.)
The layoffs in tech are not because of some venture capitalist making demands. I’ve seen the demand, but it was just stating the obvious. The layoffs are more about excessive hiring during the bubble from zero interest rates, plus the huge amount of hiring in tech during Covid because everyone thought work from home was going to transform everything and they over-hired.
Costs are skyrocketing for tech firms. Salaries are insane (median salary at Google: $300,000. Average salary much higher), debt service costs are going up, venture capital is drying up, energy costs are skyrocketing, and the cost of living in Silicon Valley is going up and the quality of life is going down.
Add to that a looming recession and a massive disruption coming due to AI, and companies are pulling back. At the very least, the rise of AI is going to change the mix of skills needed in the workforce, so some of the layoffs are to make way for new hires with new skills. For those laid off, I’d start working hard on getting up to speed with AI tech or prompt engineering for office workers.
The excessive hiring has been out of control. For example, Google’s big layoff returned their workforce to a size still slightly larger than it was way back in the ancient days of 2021. Compare the layoffs to the growth in headcount. The 12,000 workers were 6% of Google’s staff. Yet this is how many people Google hired in the past four years:
Alphabet total number of employees in 2021 was 156,500, a 15.67% increase from 2020.
Alphabet total number of employees in 2020 was 135,301, a 13.79% increase from 2019.
Alphabet total number of employees in 2019 was 118,899, a 20.38% increase from 2018.
Alphabet total number of employees in 2018 was 98,771, a 23.29% increase from 2017.
The layoffs don’t even amount to half of the headcount growth per year in the past four years.
Alphabet net income for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $13.910B, a 26.54% decline year-over-year.
Alphabet net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2022 was $66.990B, a 5.14% decline year-over-year.
Alphabet annual net income for 2021 was $76.033B, a 88.81% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual net income for 2020 was $40.269B, a 17.26% increase from 2019.
Alphabet annual net income for 2019 was $34.343B, a 11.74% increase from 2018.
Still, unless Google is forecasting massive losses, a drop to mere $13.9 billion in net income wouldn’t seem to justify suddenly and callously cutting 6% of the workforce.
Now billionaire Christopher Hohn (who sent the letter) owns about $6 billion of Googles over $1 trillion market cap. So as such a small player (compared to Blackrock’s or Vanguard’s holdings), I don’t know that anyone is doing anything on his say-so. But these decisions are very much driven collectively by Wall Street (institutional investors like hedge funds, investment banks, and asset management firms).
I see this shit every day with my own company (a mid-sized publicly traded management consulting firm that’s a subsidiary of giant offshoring company. We are constantly pressured to meet growth targets and forecasts set by the parent company and Wall Street. So it creates this sense of impending doom and/or gloom if we aren’t constantly hitting 20% growth or selling projects with a 50%+ margin, even though each quarter seems better than the last.
So the “why” is basically Google employees are only “family”, deserving of ping pong tables and 5 types of fancy tea so long as the company shows double digit profitability growth every year. If they don’t, they’re a bunch of fucking overpriced nerds eating up profits (at least that’s how business people seem to see them).
