Googlers scramble for answers after layoffs hit long-tenured, recently promoted
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I don’t see how making a large salary as a software engineer makes one an “elite”. Is this just a clunky term for a rich person?
At some point engineers & scientists of various disciplines need to form country-wide unions. Imagine for a moment that CS & software engineers, electrical engineers, MechE's, ChemE, CivE's, etc. formed unions and then maybe collaborated to occasionally act an unified super-union.
Those unions would wield incredible power over national economic policy and the dealings in a lot of company board rooms.
I am completely with you morally, but with the amounts we make, I have a very hard time seeing it ever get any traction.
If the workers ever unite in a real way, we could possibly make something happen in that context, but I have a hard time seeing that too. I can more easily see robot slaves getting here first.
As someone who lives in LA, and is very close with people who work in the industry, the unions should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from
The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families.
There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year.
The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.
Imagine if software engineers could hop from project to project at different companies working on just things they were interested in?
Part of the guilds’ power is that they have rules and agreements with the other unions that disallow using non-union labor if other union labor is involved. Or if certain rules are broken. Bargaining is much more powerful when the actual product cannot be shipped if the unions strike or don’t work on your project. Software does not really have this restriction.
And as someone who also has many friends across various roles in the Industry (and once tried to break in), there is one not-oft talked about downside: it is rather difficult to get into the guilds, with a lot of unpaid internships and nepotism involved. And even with the great union contracts, hours are long, the work sometimes dirty, and the culture on set often times incredibly toxic.
So yes. The guild model probably the one that is more applicable to SWEs. But also don’t copy the model Hollywood has built too closely.
The USA has enterprise bargaining. Sectoral bargaining was proposed. But the corporations (plantation class) nerfed it.
The comparative power of Labor, USA vs EU, speaks the merits of sectoral over enterprise bargaining.
"Sectoral collective bargaining is an aim of trade unions or labor unions to reach a collective agreement that covers all workers in a sector of the economy. It contrasts to enterprise bargaining where agreements cover individual firms. Generally countries with sectoral collective bargaining have higher rates of union organisation and better coverage of collective agreements than countries with enterprise bargaining."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and the banks owns their cars and homes, so it’s much harder to unionize now than it was in the 1800s.
Working-class French know how to strike.
Lawyers have it good. They’re the smart ones. They made it illegal to own a law firm unless you’re a lawyer. Because “shareholders vs clients would be a conflict of interest”. No more so than other industries!
Bridge designer or aerospace engineers vs shareholders seems an even greater conflict of interest than lawyers. Engineers should create the same arrangements for their own work. Instead of trying to be a “staff” engineer at a big tech company you’d try to be a partner at a tech firm…
It might be that outside of Marx's text that were already dubious in the 1800s people know that "surplus value" is a BS one-dimensional concept that totally disregards time-value, risk appetite and a preferrence for stable income vs moon-shots.
What makes you think unionizing and striking was ever easy?
https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/homeste...
https://www.iup.edu/library/departments/archives/coal/unions...
BTW, Layoff is the natural consequence of over hire, but did you feel angry when companies are over hiring? Probably not. It means employees are just as blind as employers.
I am more than happy to continue negotiating on my own as I always have. I don't trust anyone to do that on my behalf.
A union could say something like "if you want any union workers, you can't have more than X% of open jobs be to non-union workers (or non-US workers)". This is pretty standard fare, and I doubt most (US) companies would forgo US software engineers entirely.
Look at yelp, their official hiring policy is almost "anywhere but the bay". (its technically more nuanced, and closer to "distributed across major global metros", but basically the implication is lower cost workers outside of SF.
If that pay attracts someone from the Bay Area, what’s the problem at all? If it doesn’t, what’s the problem vs the current policy?
If you’re an American software engineer, inside or outside the Bay Area, that’s a worrying trend.
A license creates scarcity, and deputizes a few people as “licensed” which grants them some special privileges. But not quality of life privileges, work privileges. My mother is a licensed engineer in another discipline. She has to “stamp” or approve anything before it can be built. A lot of her job is resisting management requests for her to stamp everyone else’s work (cheaper unlicensed engineers). She says the extra job security is more than ruined with extra stress and fighting. If she says someone else’s work is inadequate… it’s a problem for everyone including her to fix. So… we could require that licensed software engineers approve all code reviews that go to production…? But not do anything to mandate quality of life improvements. You couldn’t even prevent outsourcing because you can have one licensed American whose sole job is approving the overseas code reviews. They may not even be team specific. Sounds terrible to me.
The benefit of a union is negotiation. A Union could say “no unpaid oncall”, and “you have to hire x% union workers”. With a license…? How would you enact those protections? How would you slow layoffs, or ensure jobs don’t get outsourced? One thing people always forget: unions don’t have to dictate pay.
There are examples of unions today. Google had a union. It wasn’t very popular because no one thought they needed it, but it was there. Most government jobs in the US have a union. Hollywood actors have a union, and those actors get paid very well. The union uses the actors as bargaining power - if you want the famous actor, you need the union cameraman and sound guy. It prevents a lot of the behind-the-scenes work from being outsourced.
It works for film due to some historical circumstances but don’t known if it will work for software
Movies are done and gone, software can live and need updates forever.
If google wanted to outsource, they could hire people globally, with very little cost or efficiency loss. All else being equal, a dev in Baton Rouge (or Bogota, or Buenas Aires, or Bangalore) is as productive as one in San Jose. And it doesn't cost anything extra to bring one on.
Google Fuchsia OS team affected by layoffs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34473500 - Jan 2023 (77 comments)
They did not.
Should they have? Maybe.
They for sure impacted some groups more than others. I was in Nest (Devices+Services), and I hear we were impacted worse than Search. For example, Fuchsia OS team had heavy cuts. Interestingly, it did impact even AI/Search/Ads, which I didn't expect. Maybe there was a performance component, but it is quite opaque, and there definitely were good/average performers who were impacted. Certainly plenty who weren't in the bottom 6%.
I'm also aware of low performers who were not fired and high performers (both in terms of prior perf ratings and proposed ratings for this year) who were fired.
Performance was probably used as a sorting mechanism but it wasn't the primary one. If your team was chosen to have somebody fired, then get fucked - somebody is getting fired.
In the grander scheme of things, I am sure companies will use this and the other layoffs as an excuse to stifle raises, lower bonuses, and squeeze more out of the workers who are presumably on a spree of unproductivity scratching their hairy balls at home. The article also touches a bit on this.
Google and others IMO are just following a trend that in the long run will hurt them in the long term for for future hires. They'll just have to buy companies to acquire talent like IBM has done. Sucks losing any job, but learn from it and find something better.
From my experience the working culture of India stays in direct opposition to the working culture of the US.
So even the best devs might be often not good enough due to cultural differences unless they’re naturalized or truly exceptional in one way or another (a few out of every 100k?).
Google has spent decades trying to create this image, but you're right.
> Is the expectation that leadership will really provide more clarity on why high performers were laid off?
The company said nothing. If you don't know why someone was impacted, you can't know how to avoid future impact if you survived. Its bad for morale if everyone is looking over their shoulder.
If the company hit low-performers, than its flawed if coworkers perceive a high-performer impacted (which is scary, since you could be the false-positive next).
If its based on team (more important team, less important team), than people in "low priority" teams will want to prep their resume.
> Why?
Morale. If your employees are scared, they may work harder now, but they won't be loyal, and you may have issues long-term. Compare google to amazon.
I know nearby teams that were unaffected that have short-tenure underperformers at multiple seniority levels. I had a solid performer with upward rating trajectory on my team fired.
That is 100% a judgement on the relative importance of my team vs other teams.
I don't know what mechanism was chosen once the teams were chosen, but I'm almost certain that it started with the teams.
team/product: Product X is being deprioritized/sunset, cost centers vs revenue centers
performance: those with worse reviews, those on PIP or otherwise in the process of being fired
pay: often negotiated better upon hire but are otherwise similar to others at your level, sometimes more experienced employees
role: we’re eliminating all testers, we’re reducing the ratio of designers to engineers
location: we are closing this office to save on real estate and compliance costs
tenure: first hired, first fired
That seems like sound advice in general.
Is there any difference now between them?
Give it time and wait to see. Microsoft supposedly got less-toxic as it aged, so there’s room for significant change.
And, that comes with top leadership change like MS. I don’t think Google is toxic, just mismanaged. That can’t be said entirely about Amazon.
In a few years everyone will forget again.
What's the exit pay looking like btw? Hopefully people are getting at least 3 months?
Rest of world is going to be in line with local laws. Not clear if that makes it better or worse than the U.S. package.
Every other company laid off tens of thousands and you didn’t hear anything in the comments sections or twitter.
But Google?
Omg my union! Whiniest people on earth. Seriously! Most entitled. It’s all over twitter and hacker news comment sections. Because it’s a concerted effort.
I know this will be downvoted because union activists are promoting this on every social channel but it has to be said: You are not entitled to your 7 figure income.
This is not even a biased post, it’s just facts. Google has the most entitled culture and you see it come out in these moments. They need to CUT HARDER.
1. I was laid off, but I’m not bitter. 2. My resume is prestigious. 3. Please help me find another role.
So I do believe “entitled” fits. If I were given a 3-month paid vacation, I would take the damn vacation.
So from the perspective of a SWE who makes "only" $140k and has never been the recipient of severance, nevermind 3 months' worth, I think these people have it really, really good.
Follow better people then
So lack of profits might be snapping something back into focus, but I think we can safely say Pichai still has a direct line from his ass to his nose and an ego to match.
The ivory tower sense, of an officially-secure permanent job, is only one of several.
The lens which judgement is made will likely always be debated. Good people will inevitably be caught in the layoffs.
Not everyone is cut out for tech.
Once one tech giant shed their own excess labor, the shared delusion popped, triggering a stampede.
It doesn’t sound very nice but it’s fair.
That being said, I doubt it was mostly targeting people who were tenured too long without enough promos. My guess is these are people without the full backing of their upper mgmnt chain. Since even directors had no input into this layoff round, you needed your VP's support.
Added: maybe the person above is right since the grad changes are already moving G's culture into a more aggressive mode. G will slowly become like the other big tech companies (G will just pay slightly less since people will still have the outdated perception that the culture is better).
L5 is supposed to be a “terminal level” so there isn’t an expectation for employees to want to advance further. But perhaps there are some implicit assumptions on max tenure at that level.
Agree with what you said otherwise.
Large layoffs are typically discussed and orchestrated only at the highest levels of management, so if you're an IC if you want to be protected you need to be on the radar of your boss's boss's boss's boss (or something like that). And I think you're right that someone who sat at L5/L6 for 15+ years wouldn't be a stand out at that level by any stretch.