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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here

When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that.

What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war

Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Europe, petrol production going down, supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation going massively up... Don't need an MBA to anticipate the economy was par for a correction.

what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.

what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from happening again? "I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well, and don't learn anything in the process. I bet you that if/when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn't move and we see the same move in another 5/10y. So I guess the answer to this question is "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"

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I love your thinking, but sadly most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes.

Some examples from the tech giant I called home for 5+ years until I recently quit: 1. When the pandemic hit, mangement froze all hiring and emphatically urged us to optimize costs so we wouldn't have to lose anyone. 2. When the pandemic concerned turned into the hype of 2021, we tried to hire at a crazy rate, often competing with insane offers. 3. When the war started, we again went into a hiring freeze, and now a round of layoffs.

In my experience - our management basically did what everyone else did, which meant we couldn't leverage any of our unique advantages and beat the market in some way.

The reason I joined the company I did after the megacorp is that they had a very simple strategy for hiring - hire top talent in strategic areas when you can find it, but ignore anything else, don't lower the quality bars, don't make insane offers, etc. It's almost as if having common sense is such a rare thing now, that it's become a winning strategy...

The fact that even with all that I can't tell which tech giant you're talking about feels like a strong signal of the problem you described.

> hire top talent in strategic... don't make insane offers

How does this work? I left Google after ten years last year, when the market was still competitive, and I had multiple strong offers. I wasn't going to leave...lets call it significant money on the table if I somehow had a "non-insane" offer somewhere else...

It's interesting, because I took a pay cut to join this startup. I had grown tired of not being challenged and not learning as much anymore, and I definitely got tired of the corporate politics and endless bureaucracy. Don't get me wrong - I did cool stuff, and I did have impact, but nearly as much as I thought I could.

At the startup, I was really impressed by the caliber of folks I met, and over the past 2 months I've been here, I've only grown more happy with my decision. It's so thrilling to see what a team of A players can get done when you set clear goals... I think it's worth the pay cut (to me at least), and I am very hopeful for a further exit to make me more than happy financially as well...

That's awesome,.I'm glad it worked out for you. But if you could have had a challenge and a strong team and more comp, why not?

When the pandemic hit I was working at a name SF company that immediately -- day one -- cut all contractors & consultants. They pivoted from working on things that had 2 year delivery timeframes to things that had 30 day delivery time frames. Then everyone who was left got run into the ground because their business boomed (one of those companies that thrived during the pandemic).

So sure, they didn't need all those other people when they were trying to build big things that took years of development, but those same people were cut and left to fend for themselves while the company recorded record revenues and profits.

Now, in the case of the pandemic, these things were hard to predict. Contractors & consultants know they're expendable, they're paid to be (though, not like they used to be).

But now companies are giving at least three orthogonal messages: 1) we're doing fine but productivity requires everyone to please come back into the office, and 2) we're not in a recession but we're going to cull the herd in big numbers anyway, and finally 3) we have to control and minimize corporate spending.

It's hard not to think that the cullings are part of an effort by the big corps to assert greater control over their employees. There's a collective hurt being spread across the workforce, a quelling of employee pushback against RTO policies (the pandemic is still happening, in actuality), and a desire to bring salaries back down by minimizing the opportunism of mobility via strategic attrition.

I do wonder a) how the orgs that are remote-first in hiring are faring in this climate, and b) if this will start a tumble in housing in HCOL areas.

> most large corporates seem to suffer from very slow and very bad deciding making processes

I think that's an accepted fact of life. I don't expect big companies to be fast and make good decisions.

But I do expect people not to be hypocrites.

I think this is just another case of "history repeats itself"

People who went through COVID will now have an experience that will shape how they handle this situation in the future. This generation won't make this same "mistake" again, but a future generation may.

Just like how people who grew up with extreme bank instability (i.e. the Great Depression) stashed large sums of money in closets and dressers but we don't. Our decisions are largely based on the context of our experiences. If we don't have a certain experience, it probably won't be a factor in decision making.

Of course, you go to school to learn about past mistakes, but

(1) There are a billion mistakes that have been made in the past so even if you learn about them, without direct personal experience, you will probably repeat some anyway.

(2) In the end, we sort of want people to repeat mistakes because sometimes the conditions are different and the outcome could be positive. What happens when we get old is that we encounter negative experiences that discourages us from trying the same things in the future, which is great for survival but extremely negative for innovation. In the case of someone who grew up stashing money, they might be disdainful of banks and this could actually turn out to be a pretty bad trait.

So in the end, it is what it is. Cycles will always be a thing.

I suspect there is a strong element of “it depends”. If your company needs to grow rapidly to capitalize on an opportunity, having a process that makes hiring this slow doesn’t work. If on the other hand playing the long game is viable, like maybe with a lifestyle type company, this approach is far better. The problem with the pandemic was that it suggested there was a new and big opportunity that made it hard for companies to distinguish the right approach.

> you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem.

"Despite getting paid millions to be good at my job, I did what every other CEO was doing when the Federal Reserve set interest rates low and hired a bunch of staff. I didn't think "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months". It changed. I am now doing what every other CEO is doing and jumping on the bandwagon and correcting."

Now I don't actually have proof that interest rates directly affect Google (who is probably flush with cash/very profitable/has high margins/has lots of money coming in).

I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it.

I just like to tell myself "these people weren't top performers and if you work for a company like Google (and get paid a lot), you are expected to do a lot/be a top top top performer"

> these people weren't top performers

Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling. Large lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the lower performers.

What I'm hearing from Googlers I know -- the layoffs are not on the whole tied to perf. They're across the board in terms of years of service and seniority and product areas and roles and some people recently promoted have gotten the axe, too.

Doesn't seem to be departmental. When Google does that (axe a PA or department or product) they have a process of giving a chunk of time usually to let people move themselves, or be moved; e.g. when they killed Fiber at my site (Waterloo) they moved everyone (including me) into other roles and brought new projects into the office, and people in Mountain View and other places were given a few months to find something else internal.

It's the same at Microsoft and Amazon, I've seen top-tier people with >10y service getting axed in both instances.

I'm not suggesting there aren't top tier people but I know firsthand that just being there for 10yr (specifically the past 10 years at G) does not in any shape or form imply you're top tier. You could have been literally coasting for a decade.

Yes, will this is in part the Faustian bargain that is often made to work at Google. People often become mediocre working there, and Google is on the whole frankly fine with this because it keeps those people from going & working at potential competitors.

That this is now changing, is interesting.

In any case, like I said above, this round of layoffs doesn't seem to be indexed on performance. At least not completely, from what I've heard.

It should be interesting to see how many new startups get built out in the next year as a result of this.

There are like 46k Xooglers or something.. +12k Xooglers now. That is like startup gold. So much opportunity if these folks self-organize.

> Problem is that this is not how this is unravelling. Large lay-offs like that cull entire departments, not the lower performers.

Companies like Google are overstaffed by the lazy, entitled Prima Donnas. You can see it all over HN in its advice:

"Don't go to a startup! You would need to work. Rather get a job at FAANG, get paid a very large salary, leave on the dot, don't ever be on call. Also, best part, you will get at least a few hours a day to play around on the internet. Also, remember, you have a power of pocket veto! If you do not like something, just don't do it. What are they going to do? Fire you? You will get another job in a jiffy!"

With the zero interest rate environment gone the culling is inevitable.

Advice on HN not to go to a startup is because 99% of startups have bullshit equity options these days.

They're not worth the risk and stress because the VCs and founders are keeping potential payouts to themselves but pushing a huge amount of the financial risk and work stress onto their staff.

Unless you're a cofounder or maybe a founding engineer, payout from a reasonable sale of a startup these days -- if it fluked out and actually happened -- ends up being little more than the annual comp at one of these BigCorps.

TLDR, you don't get a job at a FAANG because you're lazy, you get that job because you're looking out for yourself and your family and you'd prefer not to be someone's plaything.

That said I got sick of Google and went and shopped around last year and now I'm working at a smaller, series B funded company now and love it. But I ain't hoping to get rich, just job satisfaction.

When VCs and founders get their shit together on equity agreements, early stage startups will be more attractive again.

EDIT: Also hate to burst your bubble, but on-call rotation is a part of plenty of Google SWE teams, not just SRE. But they do pay a handsome bonus for the time you're on-call.

My buddy and I were just talking about this. A company we were modeling received $4.2M in VC funding and had 20 employees at time of purchase. The purchase price was never advertised, but we assumed a 7x multiple on last known value and assumed the sale price at $25M. $25M turns out to be a little over $1M per employee after 4 years (company started 2012 and was bought in 2016). I asked out loud "why would you do this when you could just go to Microsoft or Apple, do less work, and make the same money in the same amount of time".

Now this price is skewed towards the investors and very early employees, but the point still stands. You will very clearly make more money working for an established corp than a startup.

I mean, if you explore scenarios in https://www.tldroptions.io/ even your scenario of $1M per employee is super rare. Actual stock option agreements I've seen and heard about recently for Series A early stage startups were small fractions of a percentage point of outstanding shares, and subject to potentially many more rounds of dilution.

The only time in my 20+ career I've gotten anything real out of an employer being acquired was when Google bought my employer (for just under $400m) in 2011. In that case, though, the stock conversion of my options was only part of the generous compensation package from Google. And in that case it certainly wasn't "I'm gonna go retire now" money, either.

Many are happier with a more modest lifestyle if it means pursuing something of deep interest. For example, researchers in industry make substantially more than their academia counterparts.

The lottery ticket is just a bonus.

I am quite happy to be doing more interesting work after 10 years of slinging protobufs, hence why I have gone to work for startups recently.

But what I'm trying to say is in reality there are no lottery tickets being issued. Except maybe to the founders. Trying to frame it that way is a real problem. Actual equity agreements are mostly not much money at all. I had a founder try to make this claim to me quite recently -- it's nonsense, because I know the kind of offers he was writing up, there was no "lottery"-like outcome possible.

And it is this inequity in potential outcomes that makes the startups less attractive and also diminishes anybody's desire to work excessively hard. The potential payout isn't there. Maybe if one is an exceptional negotiator, I dunno.

Sure. The question then, is if Google, with its deep pockets will let you pursue your deep interest, better or worse than a startup dedicated to a niche.

Depends, I left Google about half a year back. One of the roles I was considering was a former employer, a non-profit, which would have been roughly a 50% compensation cut. But I loved the work, and loved the team. Ultimately I went another direction because of some poor choices they made around remote work.

The discussion that led to it was "I'd rather we have less money than you be miserable all time time" from my other half. The culture at Google isn't for everyone. I didn't fit with it (or at least in my org) and it was a constant source of frustration on both sides.

I don’t know why you think working the hours you’ve been hired to do is being a “Prima Donna”. And I don’t see how getting paid a large salary, having better work-life balance and being hirable are negative things.

Seems like you would rather advice people to have bad working conditions and sacrifice their personal life for a shitty salary on a startup.

> I don’t know why you think working the hours you’ve been hired to do is being a “Prima Donna”. And I don’t see how getting paid a large salary, having better work-life balance and being hirable are negative things.

You want to do an average work working average hours, you get paid an average salary. That would be about $70k/year.

I'm super happy that FAANG started to cut the fat. The sanity is returning to the market.

Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their business, not in the day to day operations but in the value of the future cash flows vs. risk free rate.

Super simplifying, if risk free interest rate is 0% then you can value current cash flow the same as future ones. When you have 5% risk free in 14 years that new dollar is worth half of what it is today.

This has big impact on enterprise value for growing businesses.

> Interest rates have a large indirect impact on their business

Can you expand on how please?

Wouldn't this depend on Google (or other companies) actively financing things through debt with loans from banks?

Why would they need to do this if they have tons of cash on hand?

> Alphabet cash on hand for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 was $116.259B

If anything, can't they put that money somewhere and earn interest on it? Higher interest rates means they'll earn more on it.

How do they experience increased costs from interest rates if they aren't financing projects through debt? Or are they?

They are related but different concepts. The value of a company is equal to the discounted value of its future cash flows. If rates go up, that means a higher return can be had for zero risk, which means all cash coming in the future at more than zero risk is now worth less. There is a second term other than risk free rate in the discounting equation which is related to capital structure. So, amount and cost of debt does impact valuation (though there is some debate and theory that makes my statement not quite true), but it is not the only factor.

Are you saying in a perfect world, the perfect CEO would "can" (get rid of) every team/project that isn't projected to 5% ROI yearly (assuming risk free rate has roughly gone from 0.25% -> 5%)?

Obviously there are exceptions where you want to eat losses up from (R&D a big project for a few years hoping it returns a lot down the road)?

WACC = (E/D x Ke) + ((D/E x Kd) x (1 – T))

E = equity value

D = debt value

Ke = cost of equity

Kd = cost of debt

T = tax rate

Ke = Rf + B * ERP

Rf = risk free rate

B = beta of company

ERP = equity risk premium

Kd = Rf + credit spread

In theory, if a project's ROIC is less than WACC, it does not generate economic value.

How does this apply given that we're assuming Google has enough cash on hand from profit of other aspects of their business that they do not finance most projects through new loans (debt) from banks at current interest rates because they don't need to?

Their cash balance doesn't really matter, it impacts their cost of capital in various ways, but you can still compare the ROIC of any given project to the overall company's cost of capital.

Their cash balance can also make higher risk-free returns otherwise

and charlie munger said he never used calculus

That’s all algebra :)

If you can make a 5% return on investment and borrow money at 0% interest than you're going to invest a lot.

As the interest rate approaches 5% your willingness to invest falls.

Tech runs wild on low interest rates because the return potential is so high. It falters on high interest rates because the risk is high.

> As the interest rate approaches 5% your willingness to invest falls.

Do we have proof based on their financial statements quarterly that they are actively investing their cash in risk free assets yielding 5% instead of investing in projects? I find it hard to believe that a team of $200k-$300k/yr earning employees at Google can't find a way to generate more than 5% net margin for the company?

The particulars don't matter. That was just an example.

If a company sees an opportunity that it thinks it can profit on above its costs it will do so, if it has the resources.

> I find it hard to believe that a team of $200k-$300k/yr earning employees at Google can't find a way to generate more than 5% net margin for the company?

But does the decrease of 6% of those employees have a resulting income decrease? Likely most teams will continue to function without the missing employees. Also plenty of the employees are recruiting and HR and other non-income-generating employees.

Also yes they have billions in marketable securities, in debt, and interest income, etc

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20220427_alphabet_10Q.pd...

I think this is more of sliding the levers to keep the earnings good. There was a massive amount of money dumped into the economy over the last couple of years. Companies produced record earnings, and their stock prices correspondingly increased. Now to keep "growing" they need to decrease spending to keep earnings at the same or higher levels.

It is also an opportunity to cut some cruft. A lot of good people get swept up too but most large tech companies have had huge layoffs in the past. They can then cite the necessity to do it as "everyone is having to tighten up"

Google could still be profitable without cutting staff, but their profit would drop and be perceived as not "growing"

I think it's beyond that -- with interest rates rising, companies need to increase earnings or else decrease their expenditures, in order to maintain their valuation.

I'm not sure about this. Here's WHO is asking for this:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...

His first argument is bullshit, because Google is effectively debt-free. So Google can choose what to do with its money. He is quite open about that it's simply HIM wanting money:

"TCI also called on Alphabet to increase its already substantial share repurchase programme to run down its $116bn of cash, given that large-scale mergers and acquisitions are limited owing to regulatory scrutiny. It urged it to copy Apple’s approach and become “cash neutral” over time."

His style described in the article sounds like "corporate raiding" from the 80s. One might point out corporate raiding caused a financial crash ...

> I don't think they were financing 12,000 employee salaries with "cheap debt" and now they can't. Not sure how inflation plays into it.

Think macro-level. It's not that each individual firm says "oh, debt is cheap" and takes on more debt to increase spending. It's that economy-wide a lot of firms are responding to that incentive, and that increased spending is showing up at other firms as increased revenue (and at the macro level, as a general shift in demand).

So your revenue goes up. What do you do with it? Well, if you have projects you could start or increase funding for that look like they'd be profitable, you do that. You might even leverage it a bit; if you think the risk-adjusted ROI of something is way higher than the interest rates you can get, why wouldn't you?

And even if you think there's a good chance that the cheap credit dries up and the economy goes into recession, (a) leaving money on the table for a long-term bet isn't something most CEOs can pull off without shareholders fighting them on it, and (b) you're not actually aiming for zero layoffs -- any company that is innovating and iterating is going to need to lay off some people to match their workforce to their needs sometimes.

Inflation's effects take place at the level of deep incentives. It's not something you can fix by thinking "hmm... this might change in the next 6-12 months."

Hearing a lot about top performers getting laid off too

> Now I don't actually have proof that interest rates directly affect Google (who is probably flush with cash/very profitable/has high margins/has lots of money coming in).

It affects everyone. When interest rates increase, the risk-free rate of return is much higher than when interest rates were 0. That means the ROI of each incremental dollar needs to be higher than it previously was, and when companies have a lot of projects with low risk-adjusted returns, they'll axe those.

From the point of view of a CEO of a public company, no post-mortem is necessary because nothing went wrong.

Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure. Grow when money is cheap, stabilize when it's not. If you don't do that, then you'll get out-competed by the companies that are doing that.

I'd kind of disagree with this sentiment. Sure, that works for Ford at the assembly line, but you have to get tech companies a little bit more credit. They don't scale with the number of heads if they are doing it right ;-)

To me the strategy has seemed so backwards the last few years.

You are the CEO of a giant tech company, and your goal is to achieve maximum well-being of the company in, say, 3 years time. You are confident you can weather the short term ups and downs. You could:

1. Follow trends. Go on a hiring frenzy at the same time as everyone else. You have to compete with absurd compensation packages because everybody already has a job or is getting multiple offers.

2. Buck the trend. Hire when others are in the middle of layoffs. Show strength when others are making their sheepish apologies. Pay discounted labour prices for top talent.

To me choice #2 is a no-brainer but obviously nobody will ever put me in a position to decide, and it's easy to be an arm-chair CEO. Is it really that these companies are so short-sighted, and are more worried about next quarter than next year? Could nobody see the interest rate hikes coming? I just can't imagine how executives/boards would overlook the impact on stock price if a company was publicly known to use foresight in their hiring practices. What if the headline was something like "Google hiring continues at same rate during recession," doesn't that send a strong signal to investors?

You can't necessarily survive #2 if it causes the talent you actually need the most to bail in high times. You can play this game at the margin by starting to freeze hiring before everyone else does, so that you can be there earlier to hire again at discounted rates in the downturn

Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring someone else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging for the diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.

    Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for
    recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring someone
    else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging for the
    diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.

Can we please dispense with this notion that layoffs target "low performers"? There is zero evidence across any of the current round of layoffs that low performers were systematically targeted. There was zero evidence of this in 2008. There was zero evidence of this in 2001. Mass layoffs hit in a number of ways and "performance" is just one of the criteria used to determine who gets the axe. It might not even be the primary one --- there are plenty of stories, even in this specific layoff, of people who were just promoted and are now being let go.

From the perspective of the individual worker, it's far better to model layoffs as a random lottery. Telling yourself, "Oh, I'll work hard, I'll get good performance reviews, that'll save me from the layoff monster," is just cope. Good people get laid off. Bad people get laid off. Mediocre people get laid off. It's just luck.

> and your goal is to achieve maximum well-being of the company in, say, 3 years time

Your fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder profit. Not sure where you got the "well-being" from, but your premise is utterly wrong so your presented choices and how you deal with them are not connected to reality.

There is no fiducary duty to maximise shareholder profit. It doesn't exist, it's basically made up. (There is a duty not to intentionally screw over shareholders, but that's far narrower.) In particular, most US corporations are incorporated in Delaware which has something called the business judgement rule, where so long as executives have reasonable belief that their actions are in the best interests of the business they're protected.

> fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder profit

This keeps coming up and is kind of true, but not really.

To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

> Hiring during a soaring economy and then letting people go as the economy cools is just standard operating procedure.

If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case. From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack")

This is both a wage depression maneuver, and a meager 4$ bump in stock price. I'd bet my money it is a hail mary to prevent the CEO being outed in a few quarters.

> If that was true, it would be a last in first out layoff, which is not the case.

That doesn't follow. What you hire for at one time because you think it's profitable to do so is not necessarily related to who you let go at a later time because you think it's profitable to do so. Market conditions and other factors have changed in the mean time.

> From what I gather it doesn't even match with the performance ratings (i.e not straight out the bottom 6% of the "stack")

And it shouldn't. Who it makes sense to let go of has a number of factors, not just performance. Even software developers are not a homogeneous resource, and ROI on an employee is not just about performance.

> What you hire for at one time because you think it's profitable to do so is not necessarily related to who you let go at a later time because you think it's profitable to do so

Software engineers are one of the most fungible knowledge workers around, save for transition costs.

> ROI on an employee is not just about performance.

Why is it called performance then?

Sure, but Google always billed themselves as a non-traditional company, and prided themselves on social responsibility. That helped in hiring as they became one of the most desirable companies to work for, even when their salaries were outstripped by their peers (e.g. Facebook).

There will be long term effects on their hiring based on this moving further showing they are becoming just another traditional company. What's to differentiate them from IBM or Microsoft now?

They stopped that a while ago, they are just another company now.

> what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.

Nothing could have been done, because nothing needed to be done.

Is there a recession? Probably. Was valuation and market expectation inflated? Obviously. Did Google overhire? looks like it.

But is that the cause for the firing? Of course not. Last quarter revenue was almost 69.1B, 6.1% Y/Y. That is still an offensive amount of money. Management decided to hurt people because other companies are doing it.

Here's your root cause analysis: management is beholden to fads, not facts. Layoffs don't improve performance (https://www.careerusa.org/resources/career-files/158-resourc...), but the market demands it, and nobody in the c-suite has the long term vision and spine to do what is right, rather than to appease short term fads.

Yes, but I would add that we're not in a recession currently. Really. There may be one coming, but it hasn't happened yet.

That's just makes this decision more harmful, both to the people Pichai and Alphabet management just wrecked their lives, and to the long term prospects of Alphabet the company.

Planet Money had an episode this week showing a poll where literally 99% of CEOs responded that they thought a recession was going to happen in 2023.

A story my grandma told me about bleak predictions:

Where she grew up, there used to be a fortune teller that would specialize in predicting the sex at birth.

But there was a catch: he'll seal the prediction in an envelope, to be opened only after the healthy baby is born. And if it'd be, in a few months time, that he was wrong, he'll refund his fee.

His trick was that he always wrote "girl". Because if it was a boy, the family was so happy, they didn't bother opening the envelope.

Doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they open the seal?

> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here

That's a meaningless statement. They never face any consequences. A CEO taking responsibility for layoffs should add their name to the list too.

No shit, this guy took ~$250mm in stock in each of the last few years from what I can find, and even if that is worth half of what it was before this year he could give each outgoing employee about $10k of that stock (to sell maybe) to make their lives easier.

Instead he gave them a few words written by some PR manager.

Taking responsibility must mean something different to a CEO than it does to me, a common dude.

"oooh you mean financial responsibility. yeah I take none of that."

> "[...] he could give each outgoing employee about $10k of that stock (to sell maybe) to make their lives easier."

To be fair, I think the package they are actually offering is way, way more valuable than 10k: "We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting."

Plus healthcare, 2022 bonuses being paid out, and some other items on there.

"It is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure"

Silicon Valley somehow feels even more relevant years after it has wrapped.

Translation: "I support this decision, because I support all my own decisions."

It is ethically meaningless, like "thoughts and prayers".

>I've never seen a company produce one after that.

Almost every company does. They may not make it public, but yes leadership will reflect on this.

>"I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well

This isn't how most large tech companies work. If someone causes an outage that costs the company 7 figures there are no consequences assuming it wasn't done maliciously. It is more about learning and figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future and it is not about punishing people.

Gavin Belson taking full responsibility

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

Just about everyone understands that "full responsibility" is meaningless.

One thing I've come to internalise is in a public (maybe most of private too) company CEO's fiduciary responsibility is to maximise shareholder value. From what I've learnt the switch from "profit" to "share holder value" occurred sometime in the 80s. So they'd do whatever it takes to reduce cost; outsourcing to 3rd world countries, financial engineering, wage suppression, hiring contractors and what not to ensure stock prices keep going up.

>> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

Hindsight is 20/20(pun). Did you sell all your stocks at the top in Jan 2022? No one can predict a recession otherwise they’d be billionaires.

How would you expect other people to predict that there would be a recession? IMO google tried to stave off layoffs for as long as possible.

The bar for onsite got rediculoisly low at on point. It varied quite a bit by org but many new hires were clearly not the same caliber as previous years.

THe BaR wAS HiGHeR WhEN i jOiNeD.

Just kidding(a little bit). So many smart people at google though in general the average caliber IME was always really high compared to other places.

Yeah I think I still better than a lot of places is judging by some of the candidates I interview but I think its still true in general that as CS has become more of a established profession and path to high income job the types of person persuing it has changed and the demand for CS degrees has caused colleges to dilute their CS programs quite a bit - especially in terms of number and choice of electives.

Imagine you are running a restaurant and normally you get 100 people a night and you service that with 10 staff, and you know for the next year you will get 200 people a night and can support that business with 20 staff and then after it will go back down to 100 people.

So you can choose to:

1. Refuse to hire the extra staff for a year and lose out on the profits of 100 customers a night for a year.

2. Go with the flow, expanding when demand increases and contracting when demand decreases.

Most people will go with option 2 as that is what gets you more money and also allows the economy to respond to price signals in a rational way. This is particularly true of growth companies like Google. The idea of a growth company is not to maintain constant revenues and employment over time. People who go to work for Google should understand that Google will hire more staff when demand goes up. But then they should also understand that Google will cut staff when demand falls.

That it's predictable that demand goes up and down does nothing to change this calculus. It's like people blaming the home builders in 2010 for expanding home building. I mean, when there is an increased demand for new housing, why wouldn't they expand home building?

Yup, the "I take full responsibility" reminds me of people I know who cause me grief and say "Sorry" with no intent of making any changes. How sorry can you be if you don't intend on avoiding it in the future?

Wouldn't full responsibility be paying for these people's salaries over the last 2 years and finding new work for all 12,000 people yourself?

Exactly. "Full responsibility" with no particular consequences is meaningless.

Or perhaps he could take a paycut as a proportion of people fired. It's not the same, but it's a step in the right direction.

Whenever I see CEO taking "full responsibility" and staying put I am reminded of Gavin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

Full responsibility that does not involve massive shakeup at the top is not full responsibility.

> and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people

I'll stop you right there. Why would they do a post-mortem for this? They're not accountable to the employees. This should be a reminder for everyone as to who SLT actually works for.

Corporations should be accountable to their employees. The system we have today is harmful.

The employees who stay get paid more than if everyone stayed. Same idea as with unions, you're splitting the pie into less slices so each is bigger.

It isn't the same sized pie in both situations. There's shit that won't get done by my team anymore. I just sent an email to a stakeholder group telling them that I have to kill a valuable project.

It isn't like if Google fired 95% of people that comp for the remainder would hit $10m a person.

> The employees who stay get paid more than if everyone stayed

As someone who survived numerous rounds of layoffs, that's not true. The employees who stay get to work more (under more job security pressure) but that's about it. It's not like the wages of the workers who get laid off are reallocated as bonuses for the remaining employees.

Google pays a large amount of stock based comp, so at least that part of their wages will likely go up, at least in the short term.

Why? Employees are paid to do a job. Unless they're actual owners, why should a company be accountable to the employees? I'm not sure where a corporation owes anything to employees beyond payment for agreed-upon services. If the company goes out of business, should employees also share in the debt and obligations?

> When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you’d expect at the very least a post-mortem.

Yeah, this isn’t an “incident”, this is capitalism working as designed. The pro-forma taking of responsibility is just part of the ritual that labor, management, and capital all know is fake of pretending otherwise. If you don’t want to work at a firm that overhires when the winds are even vaguely positive and overfires when the winds blow the other way, form a labor coop; otherwise, you are a resource to which “cattle, not pets” applies just as much as to one-of-many VM in the cloud.

"I take full responsibility" indicates that, at least on the PR side, that there is responsibility to take, ergo that's an incident.

He might be expecting a fat compensation bonus, by being responsible for a profit increase

> "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"

Yup, I know someone who had been there since 2006 that was laid off. Not even high scores on Perf will save you.

I have no idea what methodology went into it. That's a whole postmortem on its own.

> Focus business

People simply have different incentives during booming years. Companies want growth in marketshare, so they throw initiatives on the wall to see which ones stick. So, more hiring. Managers want more scope, and size of their teams is a good indicator. So, they hire more. Of course, I don't doubt their motives. They may genuinely believe the causes of their teams and diligently come up with initiatives. It's just that their initiatives may not get the same level of scrutiny when almost-free investment dries up. Again, more hiring.

Meanwhile, here is an actual quote from the figurehead that led the quantitative dumping that put us where we are today: "I don't take responsibility at all"

Remember how a few short years ago, it was widely recognized that Wall Street and Main Street were completely out of sync? That was due to trillions of dollars in helicopter money meant to make the financial markets look good despite the pandemic. These layoffs are part of the bill that's coming due.

> I bet you that if/when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn't move and we see the same move in another 5/10y

Of course

I agree. It’s my mantra in the workplace now. My place of work is not my friend or family. I’m there to offer my skills and service for a certain time and then I’m out.

This isn't a service outage; it was investment that no longer make sense in the new fiscal environment. Google's revenue went from $38.3b (Q2FY20) to $69b (Q3FY22), are you suggesting they should not have hired during that kind of growth?

But then youn cannot just do the same things again next time without admitting that you consciously repeated mistakes.

Since Google is no longer restricted by "don't be evil", overhiring to keep the best employees is a valid business plan. It is easier to overhire than to attract , interview and offer to better candidates and most companies are doing it. Quantity leads to quality, eventually.

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