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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

Another multi-billion dollar company making billions of dollars of profit dumps thousands of staff on the streets.

There are two approaches here.

Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave. Given the sheer size of the company, a hiring freeze and attrition would gradually reduce the size of the workforce. I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately get rid of 12,000 people right now.

Second, stop over recruiting in the first place.

I'm sure google, like the others this week have some company mantra about how precious their staff are, and they're all family. Until they're not.

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> Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave

Nobody is retiring - why would you, you get a fat pay cheque and once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is pretty good. Oh and if they fire you rather than you retiring, they have to pay you another stack of cash and keep those options that vest in a few years.

"Seeing people posting about being laid off after 30 years of employment at Microsoft is a great example of corporate loyalty." - is this just a clean out of the expensive old folks after the hiring spree of late? Is it last in first out or first in first out? These are much more interesting discussions.

> Nobody is retiring - why would you

Turnover rates in these companies are pretty high! Surprisingly many employees leave after 1-2 years.

Yeah but are those the good employees?

Probably not, which is why an attrition strategy might work for both downsizing and trimming the fat, as the less motivated/willing to drink the "kool-aid" are filtered out and not replaced.

If you can get offers anywhere you want repeatedly, your most likely pretty good at least at leetcoding or at cheating on leetcode interviews.

I would be surprised if they let go Senior Staff/Principal engineers.

Meta did, I think MSFT and GOOG will do as well. It has to be balanced among all sorts of groups otherwise the company is liable to be sued.

Under what law would you sue for some job roles being affected and others not?

There are protected classes. For example if you want to layoff anyone over age 40 for example you've got to be above board.

Whole departments or groups though, fair game.

Higher-level engineers are evaluated like anybody else, and they need to meet their very high expectations. If they don't, they don't get a free pass.

> Is it last in first out or first in last out?

Aren't they the same?

Corrected!

> Is it last in first out or first in first out?

I have seen almost no one actually talk about who was impacted on these threads.

I was in Nest, and <1yr tenure, and I was let go. i don't know about any co-workers, but most of mine had >7yrs tenure, except me, and many were staff.

Sorry to hear, I hope you find your feet (if you are even a little off balance) again quickly!

Thank you for the kind words, it was certainly an unexpected day!

> once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is pretty good

Life is good, but I don't look back at the Jr levels as a meat grinder. In many aspects, obviously excluding money, life was way better back then.

IBM did this and got in trouble. I imagine Xoogler lawyers will review this. There is always a paper trail.

I think that your best employees are the people who are most likely to leave a company of their own accord, and so if you rely on attrition to reduce headcount you will also reduce the average quality of your workers.

In the tech industry the best employees are going to leave regardless, especially if they're bored.

Also, like banks, the FAANGs pay bonuses. And also like banks, if you want to 'suggest' to someone that ought to leave, regardless of who they are, you pay them a near-zero bonus, and give them a negative annual review as well.

Conversely, if a company wants to keep someone they pay more to encourage that person to stay.

All the gears and levers are in place in Megacorp, to do this kind of thing.

The whole mass-redundancy thing from companies of this size I find distasteful and cowardly, a reflection of the disrepect and arrogance senior management has for it staff, and an indication of mismanagement at a high level that can be afforded because a company is too large to fail.

I'm not saying that it's good to fire people. And yes, companies have levers to retain their strongest staff. I'm not convinced that they tend to be very good at doing that though.

The (non-FAANG) company I work for has an on-going hiring freeze, and I'm actually quite concerned because the only people who are leaving are the people you wouldn't want to leave - and none of the people you would want to leave are doing so.

The best won't leave Microsoft because up until now it was known for "rest and vest" and for being the tech workers retirement home.

Being bored is a perk of many jobs.

That would be the logical approach if their only objective were reducing headcount. In reality, it's both that AND they're trying to get the wage spiral under control. As terrible as it sounds, layoffs send the "stop asking for more money, you should be thankful to even have a job" signal to the workforce.

3, these decisions are made by the financial institutions and even the biggest tech companies are beholden to big money.

Seems like Big Money wants a recession.

Big Money wants the Feds to hear the ship creaking loud and clear.

The employees who can leave on their own are often the "better" ones.

1. The cost saving is much (much) faster with layoffs

2. You don't lose (or get rid of, for that matter) the same people when you do layoffs vs organic attrition

On (2), I don't only mean "good" vs "not good" people, but also distribution per department.

No, but you can give zero bonus, zero payrise, and negative annual review as a clear indication that you're not wanted.

In fact, don't many of the Megacorp companies have a 'cull the bottom 10% annually' policy anyway?

Cull the bottom 10% takes a very long time (and effort) in a big company.

You still have to put the "candidate" on PIP, wait 6 months for the PIP to fail, then run the ejection process (ranging from 0-2 weeks in the US to a few months in EU).

and you have to sacrifice a senior eng to mentor the PIP'ed (else they can sue you for not giving them a fair shot).

The whole thing is much more expensive and slow than a company-wide layoff.

There is a difference between culling low performers and culling high performers in an org or team that's no longer wanted.

Most layoffs don't just fire low performers. They fire people working on products that turn out to have no future.

I find this especially sad. An individual through no fault of their own could be easily laid off just because of being on the wrong team. In contrast an individual performing unsatisfactorily could not easily be fired (i.e. for cause).

>I'd be astonished if a company with a market cap of $1.2 trillion would be likely to collapse if it didn't immediately get rid of 12,000 people right now.

They need to do a layoff to show that they did a layoff, even if they secretly hired a "buffer" of 12k people in the months leading up to it, or will secretly fill back 12k headcounts in the months to come.

Google in particular needs to make intense investments in GCP so that they don't miss the train for capturing the cloud market. It's probably the only credible challenger to the AWS-Azure duopoly. This layoff is probably painful to their business.

> dumps thousands of staff on the streets

> Second, stop over recruiting in the first place.

Following your logic, Google would be a trillion dollar company leaving people on the streets if they froze hiring. And that's somehow better?

At the end of the day, what you're really asking for is a better social safety net. I'm just not sure why you think Google should play this role.

> simply don't replace those that leave.

You need to have control over which roles / projects you're gonna downsize.

Management have control over that already. They can just disband a team and move the team members elsewhere at any time. That is often more than enough for people to voluntarily leave.

Imagine if google disbanded the golang team and moved them to 'maps'. I imagine those team members would quit the company almost immediately.

And that's cheaper as the company doesn't have to pay statutory redundancy pay-offs.

That's illegal in the UK, unless the company actually stops developing the product of the disbanded team.

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