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Comment by high_derivative | Hacker News Reader

As a FAANG employee, the way this typically happens is this:

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.

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This is even a problem (for many people surprisingly) at L6: you have your specialization, and very few directors will agree to get L6 with unmatching specialization. But there could be only so many Android projects, or iPhone projects, or ML at any given site. So if you try to change teams, you quickly learn that there are just couple potential positions for you.

Is this due to how budgets are allocated to teams? Or something else?

Taking a high-level employee which may turn out not to be a good fit is a huge risk for any manager. So unless your specialization is a good fit and on top of that you have stellar feedback (or they just can’t find any people at all) they are very reluctant to agree to your transfer. Naturally this limits options for high-level employees (L6+) at any given work site.

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.

Yep. The issue is that high-level employee may be a big net positive for the company in the abstract, but they may simultaneously be burning a few hundred $K hole in your group's budget without really producing much in furtherance of what you're being measured on.

In an ideal world, this all gets settled out somewhere up the line but of course we're not in an ideal world.

I have certainly been in situations during my career where there have been organizational changes and my skill set/preferences haven't really aligned with whatever the mission of the new group is. Things have generally worked out--I did once have to call in a favor from an exec, although that was more a manager issue. But I've certainly been in situations where I've had sort of a "minister without portfolio" role where I was mostly helping out various groups within the company. It would be pretty easy if headcount got tight for that sort of senior position to be seen as unnecessary.

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.

Thanks, that makes sense. I never worked in software engineering industry or in a big enough company that has internal "teams" organized this way.

OP alludes to it coinciding with leaving California. And since OP's leaving California post is in February, while indicating he left Google last month, it's possible it was some sort of remote-work snafu.

He essentially says as much:

...my move away from California led to the end of my career there.

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