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Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

Here's a couple:

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.

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> Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world

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.

I think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.

Google would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.

That’s completely false. The skills to get through the “famous interview” aren’t related to software engineering practices at all. Let that sink in.

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.

> If you don’t think they have false positives, just look at the poor quality of so many google products.

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.

The thing is, if they bench too many workers, they will also be ridiculed: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2920903/google-really-k...

In fact, this action is probably part of a conscious effort to move away from "benching".

The article is about VPs getting a forced sabbatical after a reorg. No one changes their business tactics due to jokes on a TV show. It's totally normal and nothing anyone is moving a way from.

It has nothing to do with rank and file people getting laid off.

You haven’t heard about Netflix’s policy....

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.

"People who have been stars for us, and hit a bad patch, get a near term pass because we think they are likely to become stars for us again".

Source: your link.

The difference is the timescale. Netflix won’t let you cruise doing nothing for 3 months while you troll an internal job board begging people to take you.

I'm all for this mentality.

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.

It’s not only about incompetence, it’s about letting someone go who did their job very well, but are no longer needed and keeping them around anyway.

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.

My brother-in-law works with various Netflix managers. One of them got a negative mark on her performance review for not firing enough of her team members over the previous 12 months. Netflix pays about 20% over market value, but it's like Lord of the Flies over there.

20% over the top of the market value.

That came from Jim Barksdale: "This isn't a family and I'm not your Daddy".

> It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.

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.

No one got laid off. Mobility within the company is very good, they just need to find a new role.

That's not always trivial, and I'm sure some will leave the company, but none have to if they don't want to.

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