It's a for profit company with a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. There is zero reason to find jobs for people regardless of the cash position.
1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon.
2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
Their interview process is loaded with false negative and false positive rates, despite what they claim. If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.
An interview process that an algorithms/data structure obsessed senior in college can easily pass is clearly not related to elite engineers. It’s sad that people have been tricked into thinking otherwise.
I don't disagree with the point you're making, but that's a bad argument. Good engineers are capable of building a bad product if the conditions are right.
In fact, this action is probably part of a conscious effort to move away from "benching".
It has nothing to do with rank and file people getting laid off.
https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
“We’re a team, not a family.”
They “hire, develop, and cut smartly”. It doesn’t seem to have hurt their recruitment.
It's extremely rare, but there's nothing that makes my job satisfaction drop more than having someone incompetent (in no way related to experience) on the team, or being lead by someone incompetent.
I come to work to get cool stuff done, and sometimes people just don't fit with that goal.
These thoughts are in no way related to the topic.
The story is legendary about all of the infrastructure guys that were let go at Netflix whose job was to migrate them to AWS.
Is that a bad thing? Can you imagine the opportunities you could have if you said that you were instrumental in the largest cloud migration in history?
I can’t remember her name but there was a top ranking official at Netflix hired by Hastings personally. She was instrumental in helping Netflix in the DVD era. But she knew she was going to be laid off when they started focusing on streaming because that wasn’t her area of expertise. She went in and got “quit fired”. She said there were no hard feelings.
I first heard about this with an interview she did on the Internet History Podcast.
Source: your link.
I think it's better to have a good exit strategy, such as another job offer, then get laid off. If you get laid off at a big company, there is usually a severance package.
That's not always trivial, and I'm sure some will leave the company, but none have to if they don't want to.
Someone who was hired 2 years ago with 500k of stock vesting over 4 years could have enough unvested stock leftover to fund two employees RSU grants...
Hiring google employees is still cheaper than keeping the senior ones.
If these employees are transitioning to wildly different roles within the company maybe the math changes a bit, but I'm not sure how much.
Edit: not to mention the trust erosion aspect. If I see people getting laid off cause their stock has appreciated, am I going to stay? Basically means stock appreciation is capped. People wouldn't take kindly to that.
I did. Google is so large the vast majority of engineers contain domain knowledge that is mainly just useful to their group. And if their group is undergoing layoffs, their domain knowledge isn’t too useful.
About the only useful things that a long-time googler will know when joining a new group over a noogler is the test infra and code review process.