Hacker News Reader

Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

How is Google avoiding any layoffs? I know their structure is such that stockholders supposedly can’t force any changes, but it’s hard to justify being the only company without any cuts. Their stock is falling and they still have a single cash cow for over 80% of their revenue despite over a decade of attempts to diversify.

View on HN

There is nothing to justify though. Stock prices are external opinions based on market factors, and other companies making staff cuts is their own problem.

If the voting majority of the google board is happy with the revenue/profit/growth/staff then why would they cut

Why would the board be happy? Do they think they know something the market doesn't?

Well, if they understand the concept of "business cycle", then yes, they do.

Surely the market should understand that equally well.

They're going to. The new performance process is clearly teeing people up to get the axe. They'll just say it's part of their new process rather than a layoff.

What's the new performance process?

There is a new system that has annual reviews rather than biannual reviews. It slightly changes the expected rating distributions and introduces a "meets most" rating that is between the old "needs improvement" and "consistently meets expectations" ratings. There is no expected PIP rate. It was developed in 2021 and rolled out early in 2022. The ratings changes were small compared to process changes, which are intended to make the entire system take way less time for everybody. The rollout and tooling was a disaster but it will hopefully improve over time.

People then leap off a reasoning cliff and assume that this means that everybody who is rated "not enough impact" or "meets most" in February will be fired. This would have required some pretty legendary economic foresight by the execs and it would require them to have done a lot of unnecessary work to redo the entire performance review process rather than just changing the ratings system.

I have no idea if Google will do layoffs. But the idea that GRAD was created to facilitate layoffs is fucking stupid.

> There is no expected PIP rate.

Do you say that as at least a senior manager or based on what the company told you as an individual contributor?

I've been managing a team at Google for like six years now. I'm doing GRAD ratings literally today (spending too much time avoiding it on HN). I have not been told of an expected PIP rate either explicitly or through innuendo. In fact, I have never PIPed a single report in my entire time here and I've never even got a whiff of people being concerned about that.

From what I've heard - It's been changed to a yearly (instead of twice a year) and apparently there's been pressure to rate people at a higher standard with a simple 5 level impact score. 'Not enough impact'. 'Moderate impact'. 'Significant impact'. 'Outstanding impact'. 'Transformative impact'. This feels kind of like something akin to a bell curve with the peak in Significant. I assume the culling will be from the 'Not enough' and possibly 'Moderate' bins. For a complete picture we would also need to understand the old performance process. A Googler could fill us in as this change has happened only this year.

Google perf ratings have always been this bizarre thing where "Meets Expectations" was considered a bad review and you better get your act together. (Shame on you for just doing your job.) That curve doesn't sound too different, just new names for same old same old. Like a 1-5 where you'd be disappointed with anything below 4 but the names always had euphemistic cheerful names even when it was a shit review.

Pretty sure we'll see it happen this year. But they may be hoping just to avoid it through attrition, by slowing hiring drastically and turning up the heat in performance reviews and goal setting.

I am not there anymore, but I hear perf process has been drastically reformed there. I always hated it, but one thing it did offer was a thorough paper trail and process and gave low performers many opportunities to improve their game. I understand now a lot of the red tape has been cut and the process is more intimate with the manager and their report. This would have been good for me and people I knew, at times, but I can also see it being a good way to just sort of quietly push people out.

My observation was that in many areas, productivity was super crappy during at least the initial stages of COVID. I think many companies suffered from this. There will be long-term fallout from that.

Anyways that single cash cow continues to be a money printing machine. When ad revenues drop significantly many quarters in a row, then you'll know there's trouble brewing.

I don’t think they’re stretched too wide. I suppose that’s the benefit of constantly shutting down projects.

There may not have been cuts, but they have drastically slowed hiring.

> Their stock is falling

FWIW Google's still beating the S&P 500 since pre-COVID (+19% vs +14%)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com