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Comment by sjg007 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone with an MBA or a business understanding explain why they would even make this announcement if it is a small number of roles in the company? Why not just reorganize? I don’t get it unless it’s a signal to the market that the execs are looking at cloud compute.

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It's not an announcement as much as a legal obligation to disclose, and news sources just pick up on it.

This is correct. In many jurisdictions, when a certain number of employees are laid off in a given amount of time, they are required to disclose this to the government.

For example, California has the WARN act: https://www.shouselaw.com/employment/warn-act.html

So this is a WARN act announcement?

If it is you can expect it to show here in a few days: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WAR...

IIRC, WARN announcements are triggered if at least 50 people are being laid off at the same time.

Note there's also a federal WARN act (link above mentions California's WARN is modeled after federal, with additional protections for workers):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I don’t believe that. I’ve been at public companies that reorg mid level with no announcement.

It doesn’t have to do with public or private. It’s based on the number of employees affected as well as some other factors. Check out the WARN Act.

I know what the WARN Act is.

no, you've been at companies that had reorgs that didn't get picked up by the press. They still had to disclose them to the labor department if they were large enough in states that have reporting requirements for those events.

None of this makes sense for Google to do.

Why? It probably has to do with the two most recent acquisitions, Looker and Appsheet. They both go into GCP and I bet there's a bunch of folks there working on Data Studio and whatever equivalent of Appsheet they had before that need to find themselves a new job. I don't understand the negativity about this non-news.

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