Why were they dicks? Because they don’t care. Remember, this is business, not personal. 
At Intel someone who resigned and foolishly told where he was going (DEC to work on Alpha) got escorted out the door also. I’ve never seen security guards (for most layoffs there aren’t enough of them) but I’ve seen the called into the office, have your access cut off, and get to pack up your belongings thing.
And yes, the Intel policy was stupid, since anyone wishing to harm them or steal information would do so before they announced their resignation. This was during the Andy Grove paranoia regime. We also got our bags checked as we left, though no one objected to our taking out floppy disks. I read and reviewed a book by the Chief Architect of Pentium Pro, who told management this was stupid, because if he thought one of his engineers were so dumb they couldn’t get info out the door if they wanted to he’d fire them.
Now that the pandemic is over, which was very good for tech companies, their projections are down. Plus, they all invested in projects a lot of which are not paying off. This is a good time to dump them. It’s not Google is unique.
Meta however seems to be betting the company on a cracked project.
Anyhow, fewer goodies encouraging people to stay at work forever is a good thing.
Sure, companies have valid business reasons for laying people off. But what is surprising is for a company like Google that has long built a reputation for being one of the “greatest places to work” to act like such dicks in conducting their layoffs.
In my 30 year career I was laid off twice, left twice when I could tell, correctly, that they were going to close down the local office and survived I don’t know how many layoffs but more than ten. The dotcom era and the mortgage crisis era were brutal. I have all kinds of anecdotes about people laid off on vacation or when they were at a parent’s funeral and so on. The worst was when one guy who was out of town at the client’s office. They got to everyone but him and we all knew he was on the list. They went through the whole teleconference with him there and everyone on our side knowing that he was cut.
This is different. Unemployment is near historically low and a bunch of the overprivileged are going to have to leave the trough and face reality.
They probably figured nobody would ever find out about them.
I agree, but I wonder if working remotely has anything to do with them botching this.Are they going to force everyone to come in for layoff day? Only the people getting laid off? Doing it on Zoom might be tough to schedule. Phone calls might not get answered - you don’t want to lay someone off on voicemail either.
This might be something not worked out yet for our new world.
The reality is I’m sure most of them will find equivalent high paying jobs somewhere.
I’ve been working in tech for a bit over 25 years and most of it seems like absurd bullshit to me. There are a lot of really smart technical people, but seeing how many of the companies I’ve worked for are run, I have no idea how they actually stay in business. A lot of stuff gets sold with no idea how it will actually get built or if can even be built. Many of the people who run these companies seem like idiots or lunatics or just some douche with some money to hire some developers to build a crackpot idea. Often it seems less about running a business than some sort of weird cult or fraternity.
That said, I don’t think I’ve seen the sort of situations you’ve described with layoffs. I’ve been laid off from a number of companies and while it sucks, it’s usually been fairly professional and formalized. In most cases I would be given until the end of the day or even told my position was being eliminated in 30 days or something. So no sudden shutoffs or security escorts.
The last company I was laid off from was right at the beginning of COVID. I was there not quite a year, but I really liked working there. Unfortunately COVID impacted a lot of our clients which impacted us, causing a mass layoff. But overall I think they handled it well.
- My first inkling was an invite the next morning to talk to the head of North American Professional Services (my bosses bosses bosses boss, just below the CEO). I thought that was odd, so texted my manager who told me that it was likely the same call he had, meaning I was probably getting laid off.
- After telling each person face to face, they held a number of group online sessions to go over the severance packages, COBRA and whatnot
- Severance was pretty generous for having been there only about a year, including 7 weeks salary, 6 months continued health coverage, plus free access to an outplacement service (which was useless, but whatever)
- They accelerated vesting of my options, which technically wouldn’t have vested for a few more months
IOW, they didn’t treat everyone as if they were persona non grata or try to screw them out of every cent simply because they didn’t have a business use for them anymore.
I never saw a lot that either. There were just a few cases that slipped through the cracks. In large layoffs, there will be a few awkward situations. That was more my critique of the news headlines about those occasional weird things where someone happened to be on vacation when the got it.
In my experience a small few people were walked out because they acted like vindictive asses in the meeting but I was left alone to go to my desk and collect my stuff. Life isn’t fair. It’s just business.
Huh - I guess this helps explain why the company announced the immediate cost of the layoffs as several billion dollars (over a million per cut employee). I’d assumed most of this was a technical write down in the value of the business; now I’m thinking most of it might be direct compensation to those fired.
I confess I don’t grasp what’s at all new about this. Layoffs have always been impersonal. There is nothing whatsoever novel about this event. Try being a factory worker; it’s always been this way.
Individual terminations can sometimes be reasonably soft, but if you have to let go twelve thousand people, it’s gonna be a form letter.
Google didn’t try to screw people out of every penny. They gave pretty decent severance. They were impersonal. That’s not the norm in my industry. Even when my employer has done large layoffs, everyone was told in person by hr. But i gather it is the norm in tech.
I think working at Google or any big tech company is a bit different from a factory job. I feel like tech workers tend to become a bit more emotionally invested in companies like Google. These are high paying jobs in big, growing companies widely regarded as “best places to work”. The people who work for them often put in long hours, to the exclusion of friends, family, and personal interests.
But most of them just go on to some similar job at some other tech company, so whatever.
The local Google office laid off all their massage therapists. They will still be providing on-site massage, but now they will be staffed by contractors, who will be paid a lot less, with shitty benefits. Those laid off massage therapists aren’t going to be finding comparable jobs at other tech companies.
(My son survived the Google layoffs, and was talking about it last night. He codes. But he was friendly with a lot of employees who had other roles.)
I’d think maybe people should learn to be careful about that sort of thing. It’s a business arrangement, not your family.
I’m not trying to be flippant or anything, but having a reasonably clear eyes view of one’s business and personal relationships is just a good life skill, and knowing the difference between them is pretty much the start of that. Your employer isn’t someone you owe loyalty beyond the stated conditions of employment.
(Never, ever trust an employer who says “we’re like family.”)
I think it’s less “loyalty” as it is these companies are prestigious, pay very well, and offer a lot of career opportunities. They tend to put in those hours because they are career driven and believe doing so benefits their career.
Plus I don’t know about you but I don’t really want to work with a bunch of sourpusses who just come in and work heads down at their desk all day without interacting with anyone.
yes, just expanding on this “family” thing …
NO it is not a family … it is just family for as long as it helps the company (long hours, higher commitment, work on weekends, etc…)
… but family doesn’t send out a letter saying you are no longer family and you need to leave your home forever within the next 45 min. to never come back
You may be interested in this book, if you haven’t already read it:
In my limited experience, though, good companies can in fact resemble families, though unfortunately such companies are rare, and most (not all) of them are typically small startups.
I was fortunate to work for two such companies in my career. One was quite small (a little over 100 employees) but the core group that was in from the early days were close-knit and we had very frequent after-work outings and occasional parties – all of which we genuinely enjoyed as close friends and not as any kind of obligatory social activity.
The other was a large multinational that reflected the personality of its founder in promoting a supportive family-like culture. Part of the company ethos was that you were expected to conduct yourself honourably both in your working life and in your private life, so as not to reflect negatively on the company’s valued ethical reputation, and in return you had incredible freedom within the nominal confines of your job description to do whatever you wanted that could be productive to the company. Anyone could propose projects, apply and receive funding for them, and manage them to see how they turned out. It was an extremely motivating environment, to the benefit of both employees and employer. Sadly, in today’s brutal economy such companies are rare or perhaps entirely non-existent.
Google used to be like that. That’s one of the reasons the Google layoffs hit so hard.
No one is asking why Facebook were such dicks in their layoffs, because they’ve always been dicks. Google wasn’t.
That sucks for the people who had these jobs, but at the same time… in-house massage therapists at a tech company is just a LITTLE ridiculous anyways. (Contracted ones are still ridiculous, too).