Haha what a colossal fuck up from the HR or whatever clown. Imagine losing a top engineer over a bureaucratic error.
Well, a win for Figma at least.
Well, a win for Figma at least.
Doesn't sound like an error to me.
Getting rid of "legacy employees" is always a huge pain in the ass, sounds like his management found a solution. (Even though, frankly, a cowardly one.)
They don’t usually care. I know a couple of people who do very little every day.
But really there's all kinds, from "we don't want this guy who insists on keeping the old C++ codebase alive" to straight-up people who engage in fraud because they think the company owes them.
That said, my personal view is that you should keep "legacy employees" unless they explicitly refuse to work.
Surely even Google won't let a top engineer leave due to purely administrative issues.
I think it's _more_ likely to happen at a company the scale of Google, frankly.
"Even XX won't" means while XX is more likely to do YY, it shouldn't get to this degree.
There is some sort of team reshuffle, someone moving to a new project and so on. Another team agrees to take on a high level IC (I assume this guy was at least L8-9). At that level, this move is approved by a VP. Person moves, headcount is filled/removed at his old team. Then new VP decides he is not ok with some part of the working arrangement (e.g. remote, scope). Person is now given a few weeks to find a few project/team, but most teams cannot accommodate senior ICs at that level easily.
Boom, out of a job. Basically VP backroom dealings. It's just 'bureaucracy', and seniority almost does not matter. The only way to stop it at that point would be calling other VPs or SVPs for favours.
In fact, seniority works against you here, because it becomes more political, while nobody cares about a low level IC switching around, and almost any org can absorb a solid L5 contributor.
...my move away from California led to the end of my career there.
Effectively highest-level employees at Google don’t have a choice to what to work on at all. I.e. top-level directors are told what projects to lead.
In an ideal world, this all gets settled out somewhere up the line but of course we're not in an ideal world.
I've never worked in the Valley but I do know someone fairly well known in the industry who worked remotely at Google--which seemed to be OK, until it wasn't. And they ended up leaving.
Anyway, here probably HR got a sniff of employee relocating, and while they emailed back-and-forth arguing, it pissed him enough that he decided to bug out. Or maybe some manager used this as opportunity to skillfully kick him out presenting it on the outside as “error”.
It certainly sounds as if OP moving to Portland was the proximate issue which he either couldn't resolve or he just decided that he couldn't be bothered to seriously try to resolve it. There are times when you're half ready to move on and a bump in the road can be all it takes.
Perhaps this person actually wanted to leave, and so decided it was like a sign that it was a good time to go.
OP decides to move (which he did)
Is promised full WFH remote work or a position in Portland office
OP moves and is happy with it
VP level issues come about that actually full remote isn't possible, or the project is reshuffled/canned, and there ends up being nothing equivalent in Portland.
Oh, there are many ways this could be non-trivial to fix. For example, at Google, there is a section of review that employees don’t see. It’s visible only to managers and committees. So there could be something negative in this section. Now HR looks at remote work arrangement, to this review section and says “we can’t allow remote work with such feedback”. Employee non-the-wiser is befuddled about sudden change of heart while bureaucracy is working as intended.
Or maybe they figured out that he moved but didn’t report it in time. Now, they can sweep it under the rag, or raise issue of tax and benefit fraud and “start investigation”.
And so on.