The only thing that matters in a layoff is "severance package"
Everything else is useless.
If your co-workers liked you and wanted to say goodbye, they will call and throw a party. If I'm fired, there is no reason for me to log on to my workstation. All relevant documents are given to you anyway. Your personal items will be shipped to you.
I think many people would disagree with this assessment. It's akin to saying that the only thing that matters in a job is "compensation", and everything else is useless. While some people hold this view, many others like to be treated nicely in other ways: good working facilities, nice colleagues, fun perks, etc.
Same thing about getting laid off: it's never nice to lose your job, but even if the severance is good it's not nice to have your employer suddenly behave like an asshole, and that they think that your work is so worthless that it isn't necessary for you to wrap anything up.
Was Google really a beloved employer? I feel like that was vapor marketing hype most real people saw through as bs, you'd pretty much see constant stories of overwork and toxic teams run by incompetent "project managers" just like every other overvalued Silicon Valley FAANG shop
I've been at Google for a very long time, in quite a few orgs, and none of those things ring any bells. (Some probably exist in some pockets, though the last one sounds particularly implausible. It's just not how Google job ladders and the management structure work.)
Now, I have to admit to having not read the article, but the headline does resonate. I've spoken to a lot of current Googlers about this, and their attitude towards the company has definitely changed rather dramatically, almost overnight. People in non-US jurisdictions are feeling this particularly acutely, due to how the layoffs have been playing out for them.
At Google, developers were the product, not overhead. As such, they were supported lavishly, with meals and massages, at a level not previously seen, at least not in career available to people who weren't fifth-generation Ivy grads. And the pay, total comp is still trumpeted here at HN as among the highest around.
Sure, a lot of people saw those perks as being aimed a particular demographic: young people without attachments who were willing to spend nearly 168 hours each week on site. And a lot of us saw the selection of perks as those most likely to attract that demographic.
But people who joined Google didn't often leave for reasons related to Google, and I'm not sure there's a better way to describe that than "beloved." Low turnover tells the story.
I was there 2013->2015. It was not viewed as "beloved" in my eyes; more like a benevolent, paternalistic overlord. There were certainly negatives. It was nearly impossible to concentrate at work, due to being in a large open space with many teams, and they would not let me be full-time remote (even as an L6 "staff" SWE), crowded bathrooms, crowded cafes, etc.
However, they put a lot of effort into the endless perks, and the feeling of job security. It really felt like they cared about you, and your career development.
I was shocked by the layoffs. My old group's PM, who was fantastic (and well connected) was let go in the purge.
No, that wasn't always the case, it's the same thing that happenned with MS. Back in the late oughts and early 2010's Google was a fantastic place to work based on the reports I've heard, that was considered work nirvana. They were the ones who introduced things like catered lunchs, and a lot of other amenities that many people consider now standard fare in many tech shops.
Based on what I heard it was a wonderful time, you got to spend all day working on interesting problems, with super smart people that were at the peak of their field, money was coming in hand over fist, and the people running the show had an understanding of engineering.
The problem is that success attracts leeches, you start getting lots of MBA types, PMs, bean counters, etc. Then things went downhill. But it wasn't always this way, it just so happens that once you become successful enough you will attract people that aren't interested in what you do, but in getting a piece of that pie, and those people and that thinking and mindset will ruin any organization.
P.S. It's an interesting line to draw between being overworked by a boss that is forcing you to spend 60 hours a week chained to a desk, and loving what you do so much that you are happy to spend 60 hours a week on it, just because you derive that much satisfaction from it.
As someone who worked at Google for 15 yrs, who also worked at Oracle and IBM, I can confidently say that Google was the least toxic, least overworked place I've ever been. That's not to say there aren't management problems, especially around the erratic way they launch new projects and kill others with no real rhyme or reason, but working environment was never one of the complaints.
At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly be in meetings with shouting matches. People were tear down others. There was excessive territorialism. Googley culture, although it changed over time, did promote cooperation and constructive criticism. Post-Mortems emphasized what went wrong and what could be done better, not who went wrong. Other teams were often, if not always, eager to partner or share their work.
Work location flexibility, the cafes, all of it was very good.
Now, I did perceive a cultural decline, I think it was sometime around the launch of Google Hangouts, I started sensing a more bean-counting approach, I think because the Seattle office brought in a bunch of MS managers in too short a period of time for them to absorb Googley culture. At one point, the initial launch of Hangouts didn't have presence indicators, and when employees brought it up, one response was "You are not the audience". As if presence indicators are something only elite engineers want, and not regular folks. This was totally antithetical to way products like Gmail were built, out of personal desire and need.
I didn't work in Cloud, but I suspect Thomas Kurian brought a more Oracle "Sales Engineer" driven approach, and that too can change culture. Might be bad for culture, but good for external customers.
One of the issues over the years that I feel an acute sense of now that I'm looking for a job again, is that Google invented a lot of technology early internally, from Borg to Map/Reduce/etc. Eventually, the outside world cloned these, and when they became on-par and standardized, at that point I really think Google should have switched their internal stack to the OSS equivalents. For example, Google still builds products on the internal Borg system, rather than using GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform/etc. If GCP/Kube is missing functionality to run say, Maps or Gmail, then perfect, that indicates a good driver for improving the external facing product. Working on some of Google's tech stack feels like an alien world compared to working on stuff outside.
In ML at least, there's synergy, as Tensorflow and JAX are used internally and externally. But in terms of major systems, there needs to be a lot more of this. Blaze was opened as Bazel way too late for example, should have been done years ago.
As a Googler for 10 years, I'd say -- on the whole, yes, well loved. But steadily worsening over that 10 year period. And, no, most people I knew were not overworked. Not at my site, anyways. And certainly not compared to what I saw from people I knew at Apple or Amazon.
I had my beefs with the place always, and I was like a square peg round hole there -- BUT ... Not even talking about the pay -- above average -- benefits were amazing. Culture when I started was very engineering driven. Mostly a very respectful professional environment apart from one asshole TL I had to deal with, but I was able to route around him after a few months. Good mix of age ranges and not biased against middle aged or older like many other workplaces in our industry.
I didn't like the work / projects I had to do there. I didn't like the promo process. I didn't like the way projects were managed. But I liked the company ethic overall (obviously I always had issues) -- but it degraded every year I was there. But not because of overwork etc but because of bureaucratic dysfunction and ethical lapses.
(Disclaimer: I was a software engineering intern at Google during the summers of 2013 and 2014.)
In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, Google felt like the dream place to work. Yes, a lot has been said about the perks and the generous pay, but another thing that made Google appealing was its cutting edge projects. I was a huge fan of Google Inbox (sadly long discontinued). As a graduate student researching storage systems and who enjoyed reading the MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner papers, being able to work on Spanner as an intern was a dream come true. I also loved all of the internal support I received as a developer, from the amazing internal infrastructure to the various internal tutorials. I never felt siloed off from the rest of the company, compared to other employers I've had. It was an amazing place to work and I'd rank it as my second-best work experience (my best being eight months I spent at Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan where I worked in a storage lab on an SSD cache....that was a downright magical experience), though granted as an intern I was shielded from the performance review process and on-calls, so I can't comment about these things.
I would love to work for a team similar to the teams I worked on during my internships at Google, as well as the general feeling of 2013-14 Google. However, I'm under the impression that Google's culture started changing a lot during the Alphabet reorganization and the rise of Sundar Pichai as CEO. I don't know if there's a place in the Valley these days that captures the feel of pre-Alphabet Google; it seems to me that the Valley itself has changed a lot (and for the worse) since roughly 2015, but that's another discussion for another time.
it was definitely a great place to work in it's heyday 10+ years ago, as I believe most of the FAANG companies were. It was so nice back in the day having companies you knew would be great if you could just get into them. Are there any companies like that these days?
I was there roughly about a decade ago. At that time Google was a fantastic place to work. I didn't have toxic teams nor was I asked to overwork. I left the office at 5pm nearly every day. Google at least in the Chicago office deserved it's reputation as the best place to work in tech.
I still know people there and talking to them it does seem like there was a dramatic shift over the last 5+ years or so. I don't think it can claim the same culture that it had when I was there.
As a viewpoint from outside of the fang(whatever), I've always felt (and heard) that google was the best of the bunch in terms of employee opinion of the organization.
I may be a very basic software engineer with neither high YOE or high quality skills but what would I get excited about from a FAANG job nowadays? These companies that I've used everyday for nearing 2 decades from even a user perspective have become stale. Mountains of money and the best talent and even simple issues that have lingered for years are not fixed in favor of big ideas that no one wants.
You get excited for one reason and one reason only - the money. FAANG jobs pay between double and triple of normal software gigs. Some folks want to optimize for interesting work, or groundbreaking products or autonomy. Thats cool - you might not find that at a FAANG. Some folks optimize for the biggest paycheck. For that its basically two options - FAANG (and adjacent) or High Frequency Trading. To each their own!
I’ve worked at a couple, I’ve probably been an outlier but I’ve really enjoyed them as long as you’re ruthless about finding projects that you enjoy. There is a ton of opportunity to work on pretty much anything you want at a large corporation. I’ve mostly focused on r&d hardware and compiler projects.
Not sure what the author expected Google to do. Are they supposed to have individual meetings and a farewell party with 10K (ex) employees? My dad worked for the same company for 35 years then retired. In my 20 year career I have worked for at least half a dozen companies. There's no such thing as job security anymore, as long as you are employed by someone else you are disposable, no matter how hard you work and how loyal you are to your employer. If investors want more dividends they will let people go, doesn't matter if you are sick or just bought a new house. Actually the person making the decision to fire you probably doesn't even know your name. Think about how depressing that is. For that reason I became a consultant. It sounds harder and scarier than it actually is, but once you figure it out you realize how much more enjoyable working for yourself is and there's absolutely no way you will ever work anyone else again. I hope some of these ex Google folks take this opportunity to do something on their own.
I view it more like a corporate version of John Locke's social contract, and that it's not the way they laid off people, but the simple fact that they did.
Some good performers were laid off, so the pre-existing situation-- where one could join Google and focus on work without worrying about downsizing-- no longer exists
I don’t think people were fools for falling in love with their employer. Naive maybe. But Google was really nice to employees and (intentionally) made it easy to forget you were a number in the capitalist machine. They listened and responded to employees, they made work more comfortable and easy with perks, and they regularly changed to stay up to date on what helped employees.
> ...and hopefully no one is naive enough to think Google is "done"...after next earnings I expect an even bigger round
I haven’t seen it talked about anywhere. I’m an ex-googler from layoffs. My old team was massively impacted and some coworkers were put on “delayed exit” to wind down their projects by fall. I don’t know the extent of it company wide but on my old team, the lay offs and delayed exit were 1:1 roughly.
A product of decades long quantitive easing with cheap money and near zero interest rate economic policy with a techno pseudo-utopian world view belief that Google is a forever day care and a "beloved employer".
As soon as competition is around the corner with a scarce and expensive dollar, it is crunch time and layoffs need to happen to remove the deadwood. (Seniors, managers, HR, etc affected.)
Don't worry though, I heard that the circus was hiring...
> techno pseudo-utopian world view belief that Google is a forever day care and a "beloved employer".
The catch is that Google could have made that utopia possible, had all the funds and resources needed to do it, and actually did have that philosophy at the start and publicly so - until the bean counters took over and started minmaxing everything for the sake of absentee shareholders. The 'MBAification' eventually destroyed its mission. Various detailed comments from some long-time Googlers in different threads under TFA tell how that MBAification happened in minute detail.
Its just another case of capitalism destroying things while maximizing profits through 'MBAification'.
This whole saga has been funny to someone in Sweden... Here it is 1-3 month lay off time, eg you need to find out in advance and your employer needs to find out in advance if you leave. For full time hires. There is 6month probation.
Expecting a company to do good when it does not have to is madness.
Feels like a nice dream interrupted for most of the googlers. Probably they felt tenured and even 6 months of severance cannot assuage the hurt feeling. Looking around and doing some reality check might help. Every company is trying to improve the bottom line when the topline is not moving up. The layoff didn't just happen this year, it has been in the corporate world all the time.
If there are true friends in the company then they will find a way to reach out. Others are just lunch/coffee buddies and they might be already enjoying their pastime with someone else. Find a way to put this in the rear-view mirror as soon as possible.
Google is a megacorp. Of course it behaves as a megacorp. And tbh what would you expect - if they fire thousands, there is no way they'd do it with individual attention to every person.
That said, I don't think Google has been "beloved" for years now. It has been just another megacorp that pays reasonably well.
"it laid off thousands by email" I know that the laying off thousands is the worst part but I also saw some people taking exception to the "by email" part (as inhumane or something; what's the alternative? also of course people were not able to log in right away all at the same time, it would be tremendously irresponsible to do otherwise.
Apple was never viewed as an ideal place to work. They don't have the "amenities" that other FAANG companies have (had?), generally pay less, and their employees are forced into secrecy even amongst their coworkers. People work at Apple because they want to work at Apple, not because Apple provides a cushy work environment.
[+] [-] deltree7|3 years ago|reply
Everything else is useless.
If your co-workers liked you and wanted to say goodbye, they will call and throw a party. If I'm fired, there is no reason for me to log on to my workstation. All relevant documents are given to you anyway. Your personal items will be shipped to you.
[+] [-] munificent|3 years ago|reply
It is less true for living breathing members of Homo sapiens.
[+] [-] TremendousJudge|3 years ago|reply
Same thing about getting laid off: it's never nice to lose your job, but even if the severance is good it's not nice to have your employer suddenly behave like an asshole, and that they think that your work is so worthless that it isn't necessary for you to wrap anything up.
[+] [-] mwest217|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] more_corn|3 years ago|reply
How would you feel if your wife left you in the night without having the courage to tell you to your face?
That’s how getting laid off by 2am e-mail feels.
Google crowed for years about how employees are family. Middle of the night firings showed that was a lie.
[+] [-] aseerdbnarng|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SQueeeeeL|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aix1|3 years ago|reply
I've been at Google for a very long time, in quite a few orgs, and none of those things ring any bells. (Some probably exist in some pockets, though the last one sounds particularly implausible. It's just not how Google job ladders and the management structure work.)
Now, I have to admit to having not read the article, but the headline does resonate. I've spoken to a lot of current Googlers about this, and their attitude towards the company has definitely changed rather dramatically, almost overnight. People in non-US jurisdictions are feeling this particularly acutely, due to how the layoffs have been playing out for them.
[+] [-] pwinnski|3 years ago|reply
Sure, a lot of people saw those perks as being aimed a particular demographic: young people without attachments who were willing to spend nearly 168 hours each week on site. And a lot of us saw the selection of perks as those most likely to attract that demographic.
But people who joined Google didn't often leave for reasons related to Google, and I'm not sure there's a better way to describe that than "beloved." Low turnover tells the story.
[+] [-] drewg123|3 years ago|reply
However, they put a lot of effort into the endless perks, and the feeling of job security. It really felt like they cared about you, and your career development.
I was shocked by the layoffs. My old group's PM, who was fantastic (and well connected) was let go in the purge.
[+] [-] mingus88|3 years ago|reply
I feel that perhaps after 2007 a lot of Google's reputation was still held up by what the culture was like in the years surrounding their IPO.
But of course, this is ancient tech history. I haven't entertained a Google recruiter in probably a decade now.
[+] [-] kneebonian|3 years ago|reply
Based on what I heard it was a wonderful time, you got to spend all day working on interesting problems, with super smart people that were at the peak of their field, money was coming in hand over fist, and the people running the show had an understanding of engineering.
The problem is that success attracts leeches, you start getting lots of MBA types, PMs, bean counters, etc. Then things went downhill. But it wasn't always this way, it just so happens that once you become successful enough you will attract people that aren't interested in what you do, but in getting a piece of that pie, and those people and that thinking and mindset will ruin any organization.
P.S. It's an interesting line to draw between being overworked by a boss that is forcing you to spend 60 hours a week chained to a desk, and loving what you do so much that you are happy to spend 60 hours a week on it, just because you derive that much satisfaction from it.
[+] [-] cromwellian|3 years ago|reply
At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly be in meetings with shouting matches. People were tear down others. There was excessive territorialism. Googley culture, although it changed over time, did promote cooperation and constructive criticism. Post-Mortems emphasized what went wrong and what could be done better, not who went wrong. Other teams were often, if not always, eager to partner or share their work.
Work location flexibility, the cafes, all of it was very good.
Now, I did perceive a cultural decline, I think it was sometime around the launch of Google Hangouts, I started sensing a more bean-counting approach, I think because the Seattle office brought in a bunch of MS managers in too short a period of time for them to absorb Googley culture. At one point, the initial launch of Hangouts didn't have presence indicators, and when employees brought it up, one response was "You are not the audience". As if presence indicators are something only elite engineers want, and not regular folks. This was totally antithetical to way products like Gmail were built, out of personal desire and need.
I didn't work in Cloud, but I suspect Thomas Kurian brought a more Oracle "Sales Engineer" driven approach, and that too can change culture. Might be bad for culture, but good for external customers.
One of the issues over the years that I feel an acute sense of now that I'm looking for a job again, is that Google invented a lot of technology early internally, from Borg to Map/Reduce/etc. Eventually, the outside world cloned these, and when they became on-par and standardized, at that point I really think Google should have switched their internal stack to the OSS equivalents. For example, Google still builds products on the internal Borg system, rather than using GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform/etc. If GCP/Kube is missing functionality to run say, Maps or Gmail, then perfect, that indicates a good driver for improving the external facing product. Working on some of Google's tech stack feels like an alien world compared to working on stuff outside.
In ML at least, there's synergy, as Tensorflow and JAX are used internally and externally. But in terms of major systems, there needs to be a lot more of this. Blaze was opened as Bazel way too late for example, should have been done years ago.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|3 years ago|reply
I had my beefs with the place always, and I was like a square peg round hole there -- BUT ... Not even talking about the pay -- above average -- benefits were amazing. Culture when I started was very engineering driven. Mostly a very respectful professional environment apart from one asshole TL I had to deal with, but I was able to route around him after a few months. Good mix of age ranges and not biased against middle aged or older like many other workplaces in our industry.
I didn't like the work / projects I had to do there. I didn't like the promo process. I didn't like the way projects were managed. But I liked the company ethic overall (obviously I always had issues) -- but it degraded every year I was there. But not because of overwork etc but because of bureaucratic dysfunction and ethical lapses.
[+] [-] linguae|3 years ago|reply
In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, Google felt like the dream place to work. Yes, a lot has been said about the perks and the generous pay, but another thing that made Google appealing was its cutting edge projects. I was a huge fan of Google Inbox (sadly long discontinued). As a graduate student researching storage systems and who enjoyed reading the MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner papers, being able to work on Spanner as an intern was a dream come true. I also loved all of the internal support I received as a developer, from the amazing internal infrastructure to the various internal tutorials. I never felt siloed off from the rest of the company, compared to other employers I've had. It was an amazing place to work and I'd rank it as my second-best work experience (my best being eight months I spent at Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan where I worked in a storage lab on an SSD cache....that was a downright magical experience), though granted as an intern I was shielded from the performance review process and on-calls, so I can't comment about these things.
I would love to work for a team similar to the teams I worked on during my internships at Google, as well as the general feeling of 2013-14 Google. However, I'm under the impression that Google's culture started changing a lot during the Alphabet reorganization and the rise of Sundar Pichai as CEO. I don't know if there's a place in the Valley these days that captures the feel of pre-Alphabet Google; it seems to me that the Valley itself has changed a lot (and for the worse) since roughly 2015, but that's another discussion for another time.
[+] [-] tempsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaphar|3 years ago|reply
I still know people there and talking to them it does seem like there was a dramatic shift over the last 5+ years or so. I don't think it can claim the same culture that it had when I was there.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] muzz|3 years ago|reply
Some good performers were laid off, so the pre-existing situation-- where one could join Google and focus on work without worrying about downsizing-- no longer exists
[+] [-] elforce002|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount2023|3 years ago|reply
they should be grateful they were paid so well for so long to do so little...chances are they will never see comp like that for work like that again
...and hopefully no one is naive enough to think Google is "done"...after next earnings I expect an even bigger round
the same thing is happening all over tech - go down to a reduced staff of essential contributors and re-hire later for much lower comp
[+] [-] vineyardmike|3 years ago|reply
> ...and hopefully no one is naive enough to think Google is "done"...after next earnings I expect an even bigger round
I haven’t seen it talked about anywhere. I’m an ex-googler from layoffs. My old team was massively impacted and some coworkers were put on “delayed exit” to wind down their projects by fall. I don’t know the extent of it company wide but on my old team, the lay offs and delayed exit were 1:1 roughly.
[+] [-] drstewart|3 years ago|reply
If supply and demand stay the same, then why do you think the price will change?
[+] [-] paganel|3 years ago|reply
Isn't this illegal to do in the States? If it isn't, why not? That's just cruel.
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
As soon as competition is around the corner with a scarce and expensive dollar, it is crunch time and layoffs need to happen to remove the deadwood. (Seniors, managers, HR, etc affected.)
Don't worry though, I heard that the circus was hiring...
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
The catch is that Google could have made that utopia possible, had all the funds and resources needed to do it, and actually did have that philosophy at the start and publicly so - until the bean counters took over and started minmaxing everything for the sake of absentee shareholders. The 'MBAification' eventually destroyed its mission. Various detailed comments from some long-time Googlers in different threads under TFA tell how that MBAification happened in minute detail.
Its just another case of capitalism destroying things while maximizing profits through 'MBAification'.
[+] [-] rejectfinite|3 years ago|reply
Expecting a company to do good when it does not have to is madness.
[+] [-] rkhacker|3 years ago|reply
If there are true friends in the company then they will find a way to reach out. Others are just lunch/coffee buddies and they might be already enjoying their pastime with someone else. Find a way to put this in the rear-view mirror as soon as possible.
[+] [-] smsm42|3 years ago|reply
That said, I don't think Google has been "beloved" for years now. It has been just another megacorp that pays reasonably well.
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