Hacker News Reader

Comment by sumoboy | Hacker News Reader

There are no answers other than go update your resume and find a new job. Managers find low performers, directors find low performers, vp's find low performers and they all get axed. Your just a name on a list unless someone protects you.

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.

View on HN

Google enjoys a cult like status in people from a certain south asian country which idolizes "prestige" and also produces millions of software engineers a year. I don't think they will have any trouble recruiting people.

But out of those millions how many are Google material or can be decent devs by western standards?

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's "standard" till L4 is just leetcode. Average college students in that country are cramming 1000 leetcode questions. Even if 5% are decent, however you define decent to be, that's 50K engineers.

I agree the cultures are different and I think more Indian people are driven into the field of software who perhaps shouldn't be there based on natural inclinations, but I disagree strongly as to the degree to which this is an issue

When people idolize things, they put that thing on a pedestal, and as soon as that thing slips up, they quickly abandon it. Google's first layoff probably isn't enough to damage its image, but if they don't keep that mystique and aura of prestige, they could find their fanbase drying up.

Unless they’re expecting to repatriate to that certain south asian country, they’re going to need to protect some reputation at home.

RIF’s also involve a random element so that the distribution of people let go is sufficiently equal among age sex etc to avoid lawsuits.

Managers and even directors allegedly did not know who would be laid off until it happened.

Right out of the HR playbook, manager fires resources, directors fires managers, vp's fires directors. Everyone let go is pointing fingers at each other. Company loyalty has been a joke for the past two decades, just something you should expect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com