Google execs threaten workers with layoffs: ‘There will be blood on the streets’ | Hacker News Reader

Google execs threaten workers with layoffs: ‘There will be blood on the streets’

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43 pointsorionion70 comments

Can someone explain how burning out your employees, freezing hirings, possibly laying off a large number of your employees, in a market where people are actively quitting en masse... is supposed to increase productivity? Or are company execs just under the impression that "the beatings will continue until morale improves" was seriously good leadership advice?

Yes,

Team of 5 and 1 person is coasting. Get rid of the 1 and you just reduced burn by 20%.

You lose the output of the coasting team member, but that's small to begin with by the scenario's setup.

If you believe coasting is contagious (why am I working so hard when clearly I don't have to like this other person), you could potentially see a boost in output.

Of course, this needs to be weighed against the risk of everyone being upset and leaving after such a decision, but in this market, that risk may be mitigated.

PS. It's really hard to make specific statements about vague hypothetical scenarios :)

All of this requires the coasting person to be identified correctly every single time.

Some of the team leaders will fire a non-coasting person because that person looked like coasting, while the real coaster looked busy.

And then morale crashes even more, and you start looking over your shoulder, especially if you have a boss that does not understand who really carries the load.

So much management theory supposes all managers are super competent. In reality they are the people version of bad php developers.

> All of this requires the coasting person to be identified correctly every single time.

Isn't there a famous story about Bell Labs, where there was this guy who made others signficantly more productive because he asked good questions?

Obvious coaster who should be terminated forthwith!

I remember the time I really hoped Google would be the Bell Labs of our time. This era seems so distant now...

You're right, but to reason about a hypothetical scenario, we've got to make assumptions. Identifying under-performers with perfect precision is my assumption of a spherical cow! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

You don't lose the output of the coasting team member (even if you get rid of the right person); that workload just gets transferred to the other 4 people. So let's say you have 5 people, 4 of which each are doing 22% of the work, leaving the one "coaster" to be doing only 12%. You fire the coaster, and now you've got 4 people doing 25% of the work each. An already burned-out team is now filled with people who have a larger workload.

And this of course is a simplification that assumes workload is a continuous rather than discrete measure. If the fired guy had two or three Jira tickets he wasn't making progress on, now you've got two or three of the remaining workers getting another entire feature dumped on their pile of work. The burn-out is higher than 3%. Until they quit, of course, transferring their workload to the remaining 3 people, increasing their burn-out, etc... it's a dangerous chain reaction.

Yeah generally even a coasting employee is doing some minimum amount of work. If burnout is a concern it's actually better to hire someone with the intention of PIPing and kicking out the coaster after. Since the coaster has been there as long as they have, a bit of extra time won't really change the situation.

[Note: This is WILDLY different if the coaster is actively generating more work for peers. I'm talking producing mediocre code that needs extra code review or not completing assigned tickets forcing peers to pick up that slack to finish the sprint. Get the team's opinions on the situation in 1:1 and boot ASAP if folks find this is a source of friction for them.]

> Of course, this needs to be weighed against the risk of everyone being upset and leaving after such a decision, but in this market, that risk may be mitigated.

The market where people are already quitting?

The market is really hot right now, and yes, a lot of people may be quitting. There are also a lot of hiring freezes and layoffs happening at the same time.

If a lot of people continue to quit while available jobs continue to decline, the result is fewer people feeling comfortable quitting.

So... people are quitting, and in response, companies are enacting hiring freezes, effectively refusing to compete with each other, to make people more afraid of quitting?

Does... does that not sound very collision-y to anyone else?

It could be :)

Another possible explanation is: A bad economy lead to a lot of layoffs: https://layoffs.fyi/. These layoffs resulted in employees being upset and quitting in addition to layoffs. Now there are a lot of job seekers and fewer jobs making it a bad time to quit.

IDK :shrug:

When the Great Resignation meets a great recession

If people are quitting then people are quitting. Whether or not that is a bad idea doesn't seem to matter right now. Maybe it will matter in the future but that's not today.

Employee: I quit.

Employer: That's a bad idea!

Employee: Thanks for the advice. Bye.

Related recent anecdote: while the higher-ups at my company have been pushing terrible, burnout-inducing policies on us, my immediate manager is extremely supportive to the extent he's able to be (and always has been). When I recently told him how burned out I am and how I want to quit and find a better job, but the job I'm looking for would require skills that I'd need to learn first, his response was, "Don't quit... until you have those skills... which by the way, you have access to educational resources from the company via Udemy... the access is meant to be to advance your current job, but you have access to everything if you... wanted to check it out... just sayin'. And also apply to the jobs you think you're not qualified for yet, you may be surprised."

In other words, rather than saying "don't quit, it's a bad idea", he said, "it's a bad idea to just quit, here's some resources and advice on a better way to quit; I'll miss you" :D

The unproductive employees aren’t the ones quitting.

...I mean, all I have to go on is my own experience and what I've seen from the workers around me, but your claim doesn't line up with that data at all. For instance, my team just lost three (out of 8) of its most talented and most productive developers (including our lead developer) who quit over corporate policy changes, including WFH changes. Obviously, to reiterate, this is a small sample size and sampling bias, but... it certainly doesn't support your claim.

EDIT Sorry, I misread your comment. I fail to see how "only the productive people are quitting" supports "therefore, fire as many unproductive people as you can". Doesn't that just leave you with... zero people?

Your claim supports your parent's claim -- that the productive employees are the ones quitting, and the unproductive ones are those who are not quitting.

Yep, I misread; my bad. I edited my reply.

I can see how it's a scare tactic in general.

You try and scare the unproductive people into being more productive.

And you try and scare the productive people into staying by implying that the market may not be all that hot outside. Or whatever. Scare tactics don't exactly rely on rational thinking.

Also, you are reclaiming the work being done by the fired. That work can be reassigned to the people not fired. And hopefully, those people will be too busy to quit.

> And hopefully, those people will be too busy to quit.

Too busy to quit vs too overworked to stay... talk about a hell of a gamble.

High performers will never have an issue finding work and they know this.

the denominator is afraid

The attitude of high-pressure tactics is deeply baked into American sales culture. It's conventional wisdom that you need high commissions, and high commissions necessarily entail high stress; you can't have "I can make $20,000 from the right deal" without "I could lose $20,000 if anything goes wrong". So sales organizations will often be brutally honest (and frankly mean) in ways that, you're right, would be a very bad idea in any other context.

I know guys who've gone from job to job basically doing nothing, just collecting a fat check. It's incredible how much dead weight there is in these companies.

And... how is that relevant?

Your grandparent comment insinuates that executive measures to increase productivity are broad and actually hurt productivity.

I agree for what its worth.

But what these executives and their supporters think is that productive employees will stay the same productive employees with the changes, and that only the unproductive employees will face consequences.

Of course this is ass backwards and we all know it, the innocent are always somehow the biggest victims in war ("blood in the streets" as this executive cheerily calls it).

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, from various discussions with the VP of my department, it's become clear to me that execs and other higher-ups have very... fantastical ideas, to put it lightly, about what actually happens in their employees' daily lives, and how their policies will affect those workers.

I've had my own fantasies recently about telling the execs to spend two weeks sitting in the office between us devs and taking notes about what actually happens, to use as reference material when discussing policy changes. But then I realize that the very idea of requiring evidence to support one's decisions is what separates the lowly devs like me from the big-shot execs with name plaques on their office desk and a few extra zeroes on their paycheck deposits. Which is... quite depressing when you consider we're a STEM field, so evidence and logic should matter throughout our hierarchy, but then again, capitalism and corporatocracy have perverse incentives, I guess.

Getting rid of those types will increase productivity. You'll get the same work done with less people. Well, probably more, because you won't have guys pretending to do their work and then not actually producing anything.

You'll also get more burnout on the remaining people, which will reduce productivity. It's a balancing act that really shouldn't be dismissed as "just fire anyone who's not productive enough; I'm sure that won't be a problem for the rest of the team".

I'm talking about firing the people who are basically doing nothing. They're likely a drain on everyone else already. You get rid of the dead weight, I personally feel morale will improve. Do you like knowing people are making the same salary as you, basically doing nothing? I know of cases where people were doing like 2 hours of work... a week.

On the one hand, the visceral reaction is "no, that sucks". On the other hand, that's 2 hours less work I need to worry about every week, which is better than nothing. So it entirely depends on how much work there is, and how much they're actually doing, since it's almost never actually zero. Someone doing 2 hours of work a week is not a drain, they are literally making other people have less work. A drain would create more work (which is certainly possible, but that's a different scenario).

My morale is determined by how much work I have to do, how supported I am by my bosses, and how much input I have on the work I'm doing. That's... really it. Unless someone else is causing me to have more work by being here, or making my job harder, or blocking my input, then I don't really care whether they're doing "as much work as me" or how much they're getting paid. And in that regard, firing them -- which would leave me with more work, as I'd have to pick up the work they were doing -- would lower my morale, not improve it.

In my experience the unproductive employees bitch and moan the most, taking valuable time from those who do wish to work and contribute to the company.

That may be true in some cases, but have you ever considered you may be attributing cause and effect to a correlation with another explanation? For instance, perhaps it's not "unproductive employees bitch and moan because they're unproductive and not willing to work", but "employees who are burned out bitch and moan because they're burned out, and also become unproductive because they're burned out"? I.E. not a fundamental attribute of their characters, but an environmental cause, leads to both correlating?

Because that's kind of where I'm at with my job now. For 3.5 years I've been one of the most productive members of my team, but with recent policy changes over the last 8 months, I've burned out entirely. I'm now one of the least productive on the team (self-admittedly) and also have much to complain about. I haven't suddenly changed who I am or how much I'm willing to work, the environment has changed and caused both effects simultaneously. And I'm sure I'm not the only one with this experience.

It's a complex situation, with no universal driver, but I have put thought into it and your suggestions aren't entirely novel.

I'll use a recent situation as an example. Before I do though I wanted to say I am sorry that you're burning out. Knowing this is the first step, and I hope you make a change or find a coping mechanism that helps you. I have been through the same situation a few times now. I'm never quite the same afterwards but I have been able return to being a productive worker without radically rethinking my life.

I worked with someone who in my opinion was extremely entitled, prioritizing activism and social issues above getting work done. This company tolerated a lot of it (California company), however, the reality is that work had to get done. If only this person put as much effort into their workload as they did their complaints it would have been a non-issue.

It killed morale and this person eventually had a negative reputation, and was let go. It was bad. A bunch of meetings, talking with folks, but after about 3 months of work there was a hello world, a readme, and a "demo" app in the wrong language that didn't even showcase the crux of the problem that was targeted.

In my opinion there is a time and place for stuff like this, and we must never forget we get paid to produce work.

Why are you staying there? If you are capable of being a high performer, go somewhere and do that. It's much more rewarding personally and professionally, even if the money is less.

I'm a tech worker and I have found the market to be as friendly as ever; I expect to get multiple offers as per usual.

Oh, I'm sure. Because with tech workers quitting at high rates, companies are giving many offers to try and replace them. It's definitely a candidate's market, not an employer's market, right now in tech.

> actively quitting en masse

won't happen in a downturn/recession. Employers will have all the leverage.

I don't actually know if we're in a downturn proper. At most people salaries offered might be less aggressive... but someone leaving for a more fulfilling job and are a high performer from Google probably don't need to worry about being paid their worth even in a weak job market.

It is currently happening shrug

People aren't quitting en masse.

If you Google "tech industry quitting", all the results seem to paint a different picture. Some articles even call it "The Great Resignation".

Yep, those articles have been discredited.

The labor market has been tight! There was a wave of job changes back a year ago -- but to be clear, those were not people who were leaving the labor force, they were people who got new, better jobs.

That wave is definitively over in tech, and has been for about four to six months. The labor market in tech is slacker than it has been in a decade: it's harder now to get a new job in tech than it has been in the duration of many people's careers. And since people are not leaving the labor force, the quitting (to take another job) stuff is now much diminished.

This does not mean, of course, that there are not still people getting hired or people changing jobs -- just much less than before.

That's weird, then, given my personal experience of several major team members quitting basically one after another in the past few months, and my managers' inability to find any suitable replacements. Shrug Guess my company just extra sucks then.

These are interesting claims, can you provide sources and references I can investigate rather than just personal assertions?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a tool for beating your employees... or something.

If your company truly has a bloated unproductive staff that lacks direction the problem is at the top of the organization. It sounds like what really needs to happen is the board step in and change senior leadership.

Exactly. Of course, none of this is going to come down on the heads of the people in the C-suite who are pulling down the hundreds of millions in comp to prevent, at least in theory, _precisely this scenario_. We've built a system where once you're above a certain point in the hierarchy, it doesn't matter how bad you fuck up; Pichai and Zuckerberg and Hastings et al. can just feed their own employees into the woodchipper and keep making stern noises about how everyone else needs to shape up.

This is the only right answer

I remember this royally backfired with Microsoft in '08 and '09. They did some rounds of layoffs, froze raises, etc. whereas all the other major tech companies held off on doing the same. There was _massive_ attrition and Balmer had to do multiple emergency pay bumps to the entire company's engineering roles to keep people from jumping ship in the following years.

It's so very sad watching this all play out again, having tried to warn people but they insisted programming was recession proof, there was no bubble, no recession, etc.

This is why we keep repeating the same mistakes. Those in power do it knowingly and the younger generation of workers knows no better.

Just a few weeks ago I warned of this in the uber hiring freeze post, and there were staunch deniers.

As an outside observer, I'll note that Microsoft's share price left its decade long nothingness in ~2010-11. Whether causal or not, perhaps it was worth it for them.

The fact that Google's execs only care about this now that the economy is turning indicates that the execs have been coasting too. This isn't a problem you want to solve once it hits the breaking point due to external factors. You want to constantly solving it at a cultural level.

This is the absolute truth. The company has rotted from the top down, as is always the way.

This threat seems to be specifically about sales not meeting quota, and therefore the Google Cloud org not meeting its revenue goals. I suppose one interpretation is that the sales compensation structure is flawed, and not incentivizing sellers to do their best work. If so, sales leadership should be held partly accountable. However, I suspect sales is likely the scapegoat here for deeper issues with the product and how it compares with alternatives.

Or possibly deeper cultural issues within the company and the lack of faith that consumers have that their products will be supported without sunsetting or major API changes. Seriously, Google engineering is excellent for the most part, but the company does not have a support culture.

Whenever I have to choose a technology for a new product and the leading candidate is Google stuff, I think very long and hard about how likely they are to continue to support it - open source tools like Angular are one thing, but with GCP you are really tightly integrated with the vendor and if they decide to do something wild, you could be absolutely hooped.

The quote from the article specifically mentions the Google Cloud sales org:

> Employees who work in the Google Cloud sales department said that senior leadership told them that there will be an “overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general.”

Not a surprise. When I was at G, Cloud was the fastest-growing org by far. You can't grow an org that fast without an inevitable decline in hiring standards, as many discussed at the time. That's not to say the regular Google hiring process is fair or even usually makes sense.

Alphabet has $170 billion in total current assets and they are threatening their employees with possible dismissal. Why don’t they spend some of that money to help the employees improve their productivity, if that is truly an issue.

Examples like this make me snicker when people talk about a corporate job being secure. Those days are long gone.

Obviously the end result of years of being evil - not answering the phone, lousy customer service, ruining people’s lives with no explanation or recourse, damaging privacy, disobeying world governments. Payment due.

Maybe they should go back to not being evil, it seemed to work better for them.

It’s very interesting that Google, Facebook (refuse to use the other name), and Twitter are all notorious for this and all being hit at the same time. I suspect Apple is under stress also but they won’t feel it for a while due to their massive cash hoard. Which unfortunately means Britain will have a king before I can buy another iPhone with Touch ID.

It should be emphasized that this was an exec in the sales division, talking to cloud sales people. My experience has been that this sort of Glengarry Glen Ross macho talk is much more expected in that universe. By contrast, the Google devs I know say that there has been vague talk of belt-tightening and sharpening focus but no one has been making these kinds of dire threats.

Executives of large corporations must really have a good understanding of the monetary system and the flow of money through the economy given how quickly and decisively they respond to changes in monetary policy.

Sometimes it seems like macroeconomics are a separate parallel universe and you need to be above a certain size to have access.

misleading title - this is specific to Google Cloud sales

Isn't sales a leading indicator?

But GCP, specifically? Isn't it a perpetual also-ran to AWS and Azure?

Maybe the 2023 deadline to overtake MS or shutdown is real.

What're you referring to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

Is the real story that Google & Facebook have decided that their prior starve-off-possible-competition strategy - of paying "all" the top tech. talent sky-high salaries to mostly twiddle their thumbs - is not looking so smart anymore?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com