Google to lay off 10k “poor performers”
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Relative would imply they have good skills, but don't meet Google's extreme requirements.
Or because Google is nowhere near being truly "hardcore"?
At Google, or any large company, there are plenty of people who for various reasons just aren’t good performers but don’t get cut. The requirements to stay on there are not “extreme”.
In horizontal layoffs, usually a lot of talented people and even turn-key teams are available on the market.
Sometimes companies try to turn horizontal layoffs vertical by offering internal mobility for high performers from the cut teams, but sometimes they don’t.
Publicly stating that layoffs are purely vertical is very bad for the employees who are laid off as they no longer re-apply with the “benefit of doubt” that they may have been caught as collateral damage in horizontal layoffs.
You can have plenty of people who are very good at a skill you either don’t need or have an oversupply of bus numbers on. At least a third of the people in any group you shut down completely are going to have been good people. More than half if the problem was in management (which is usually is).
You’re dunking on these people and telling the rest of the universe not to hire them. But we already knew Google was shitty so this isn’t exactly news.
Going from 5% to 10% might be leverage in the market, but you were still going to limp along anyway. When I’ve been at startups trying to do things like this, it’s very clear that the investors have in their head some notion of multiplying your profits. Every company I worked for that pulled this ended up cutting to the bone later. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
These days I’m not sure labor is a big enough part of the cost mix for a 10% layoff to actually show up as 5% margin. I pulled that out of my butt and now I’m having second thoughts.
And let's not act like you can actually truly quantify employee performance generally. It's largely guesswork and politics in the hands of the said management-who-screwed-up doing the layoffs.
"With the exception of companies going under or closing divisions or departments what kind of companies shave off “high performers”? "
"With the exception of companies going under or closing divisions or departments what kind of companies shave off “high performers”? "
For what it's worth, I wouldn't look negatively at someone who was fired due to alleged poor performance. Poor performance means different things in different context when rated by different people.
The notion of "poor performers" is a sign of bad management. They bloat the company to where they can no longer get their billion dollar handouts, er, payouts, and then take it out on people who actually care about their jobs and claim they are "poor" at it. While scaring the shit out of everyone else.
I know there are going to be a bunch of bros who think, "Yeah, that's not me, I'm fucking Tony Stark," but in reality, part of their brain will noodle on this gaslighting whether they want it to or not. So it really affects everyone.
It is a sign of toxic rot in a culture when they start branding people this way. But it's Amazon, it's a synonym for toxic.
You realize this article is about Google, right?
Eh. This article was about Google.
you can agree or disagree if it's honest or justified, but materially that's whats happening.
IMO as a Google employee, I don’t see layoffs happening. The company has started hiring again. My coworkers are flooded with interviews. We’re still having holiday parties and other “fun” spending seems to have returned. I have no inside knowledge, that’s just my own personal observation.
Like every other organization, Google isn’t immune to entropy. It seemed they went into organizational decline faster than the others
'We've learned from past acquisitions, and this time we will ensure that the onboarding experience is a good one. We can not and will not end up with a repeat of our former acquisition, where the bulk of the people we were interested in, left...'
I wish I was making this up.
The only thing which made me stay on for a couple more years was that we had a couple of customers which were an absolute delight to work with. They are now customers of my current employer and still a delight to work with.
Thank you. I figured as much, but I will admit if still irks me a bit how what was mostly a good company was run into the ground, so whenever I am given half a chance, I vent. :/
if the colleagues say that you are not doing your job well
+ the managers say you are not doing your job well
+ the people under you say you are not doing your job well.
+ the customers say you are not doing your job well.
Then why an employee would even stay in a company where literally everybody thinks they are not helpful ?
When you are a relatively large customer/partner of Google, you sometimes interact with genuine impostors, who are not helpful, but you still have to go through them because there is no alternative.
So a bit of clean up in the bad elements is actually good for both bottom and top line of the company.
However, yearly performance reviews are a joke. At least in all places I worked at, and in spite of various efforts by the management to rationalize them. And I'm saying this in spite of getting great reviews all the time.
People who ruffle feathers of PMs and EMs are often the best performers but get axed for questioning authority. But are they fired for asking questions? No - they’ll be axed for “performance” when in reality it’s more due to not wanting anyone to undermine their authority/job security.
I’ve worked in SV for a while - it’s extremely political and not based upon meritocracy at all. People who get promoted are most often the biggest boot lickers and average performers.
Most firings I’ve seen are pure bullshit and are only due to someone in an authoritarian position wanting slaves and not engineers.
> + the managers say you are not doing your job well
> + the people under you say you are not doing your job well.
> + the customers say you are not doing your job well.
How often is it actually that 1 employee is exposed to all of these groups simultaneously, and all of them are technically qualified and have visibility and insight to pass the judgment about the parts of performance that were under that employee's control?
My bet is somewhere asymptotically approaching 0.
My follow-up question to this would be - how did this person even pass the interview process to get into a position where there are people under them?
But now that I thought about a little more, I think I understood one more layer to this. Google is telling the other employers: 'You can pay them less you otherwise would have.'
I have to admit that this entire employer vs employee cycle has left me speechless over and over again ( 'we are in this together', 'commute is good for you', 'we will be even better together', 'RTO now!', 'RTO later since some of you ungrateful bastards are not willing to budge', 'Recession would bring those people in line'.. ). It is absolutely stunning and we are actually expecting our CEO to deliver speech in Dec on the economy as a whole, so I am sure we are all somewhat anxious.
I'm not so sure about this. Most companies work in a level of chaos and mess I think most Googlers wouldn't be able to go adapt too very easily.
I find it's very hard to hire people that can work productively through the chaotic and dysfunctional way most companies I work at operate. This is not to say we still don't deliver valuable, even highly profitable things. It's just that we're not often working as a 25 year old mature corporation with decent management would.
I've not worked at Google but from what I've told, it sounds leaving Google for most other companies is like going from first class back to coach and I don't think that is an easy adjustment for many.
Only recently a bunch of news outlets are trying to spin it as a layoff and running away with their own narrative. It’s quite literally fake news
What is happening is that a lot of people want to hate Google so there’s a lot of demand for “Google bad” articles like this and all the inaccurate ones about RTO, truth be damned
This “news” is from back in May when the new performance management system buckets were released.
“Under the new system, managers have been asked to categorize 6% of employees, or roughly 10,000 people, as low performers… In the previous performance review system, managers were expected to put 2% of employees in that [low performing] bucket.”
To “google is laying off 10k people lol trust us”. The first quote isn’t even correct! They added a new “moderate” bucket that covers the 2nd-6th percentiles, which I think is obviously different from expanding the very worst rating to be 3x bigger.
Early on, they set out to keep the “startup” culture internally - to drive ongoing innovation. But it turns out that this requires a tremendous amount of both trust and capital to waste to do at scale. The skills to survive and progress at a large organization don’t resemble running a new, daring business.
There are a lot of companies outside the US that keep their original culture way into their maturity at global scale. Hetzner, for example - started as an upstart hosting provider that prioritized engineering. It became a global entity with DCs in Europe and the US, possibly the biggest datacenter operator and cloud provider in Europe. Their engineering is still top notch. So much that even as a $50/month paying customer, your technical support related ticket gets attended by an engineer every time. Impressive feat considering how they have ~200,000 companies as their customers - in addition to the individuals that use their services. Especially their network quality was praised a lot when they first came out. Their network is still top quality. Their inital culture as it was known has not changed.
What destroys American companies are the American laws that force the board to thrash the company, the employees and the users for the sake of shareholder profit. If you don't sell your soul to the devil and suck every cent as profit for the shareholders every quarter, the shareholders have a right to sue, depose you and put there someone who will.
There is no way in hell US companies can protect their original culture and keep theier missions intact as long as such rapacious laws enable the worst profiteers in the American society to burn down everything for short term profit.
That's not actually true, except insofar as anyone can file a lawsuit for basically anything.
Long discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674 but in brief, Dodge v. Ford is a tough case that gets overinterpreted. More recent ones give enormous latitude to the company's management.
That's the problem with common law - more recent ones set a different 'precedent'. The next case can set a totally different 'precedent' and you as a ceo can be part of that 'precedent'.
Still evaluates to the same.
Around 2015, there was a very noticeable shift in almost all media from liking tech companies to being super anti tech companies.
In the US though employment is "at will" meaning you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. There are various exceptions to this but the burden of proof is generally on the employee to show that they were wrongfully terminated (eg if they were fired because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, etc).
This is same for Switzerland and probably Europe. In Switzerland you have three month's notice for resigning and for being laid off. You can be fired for cause without notice, but this applies only if the cause is severe enough that a continuation of the employment shouldn't be asked of the company or the employee any more. This has consequences for unemployment insurance. Usually the ex-employee needs to wait 4 weeks for unemployment benefits. It's the same if the employee resigned.
I'd prefer more ambiguity about why people were separated, such as varying reductions by team, offers to take a sweet separation package, etc.
One silver lining about the Twitter massacre is that it appears so crazed that it's easy to imagine many of the people most valued by Twitter either getting the axe or fleeing. So less stigma hurting people as they job search.
> The company’s new performance management system could help managers fire thousands of its underperforming employees from early next year
I suppose it could do that, but it could also not do that?
It seems to be based on a report by The Information - no idea whether that had anything more solid.
Google, in part, built credibility with its talent because it's hiring process selected for exceptional talent and Googlers levereaged this into basically a passport to work anywhere. Google is shooting itself in the foot by framing it this way in the sense that it destroys the illusion that they have better hiring practices has the cost of not attracting the exceptional candidates they once could.
they might still be in the 95th quantile in the rest of the world, and be in the bottom 6% in google.
So those two have areas, probably entire departments, they can trim. By comparison, Twitter was all muscle.
Few days passed and the delivery manager reached me to arrange a meeting with some other people who interviewed the same person.
Apparently their assessment was very different and they didn't want him in their project, so they were curious why mine was generally positive. We went back and forth on this and eventually I asked how long he's been in this organisation.
Two years.
He's now in a mostly solo project and I occasionally review his work. It's fine. I've seen much worse around here.
Stack ranking eventually comes for us all.
This is just regurgitating an older article from The Information about the new rating process. The part of layoffs is unsourced & pure conjecture.
If I were an employee, I would be incredibly demotivated. Why build anything new at all? Why work hard at all?
> Why build anything new at all? Why work hard at all?
The money, Lebowski...
but also, they do a lot of interesting FOSS and published research work, which can't get "canceled".
Any Google venture that they want to sell as a setvice is very likely not going to be taken up with much enthusiasm in the market because of this. I’d not be blaming employees for this!
I’d expect a “low performing” ex-google engineer to be in the top 10% of another company.
We can only hope that can happen fast enough
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