[javawizard]

Big companies are soulless.

I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.

In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."

It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.

It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.

Big companies are soulless.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680191

[hyperman1]

I can't agree with this interpretation. A human, somewhere in the bigco, decided laid you off. That specific person decided to take advantage of you, and is responsible for that action. Bigco may have an incentive structure that pushes for this behaviour, but a human looked at incentives and morals and decided. Don't let them off the hook by pointing at the bigco.