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Comment by boshalfoshal | Hacker News Reader

The kneejerk reactions to the Google layoff are quite interesting in comparison to other layoffs. Meta laid off 2x the % and there was less news or general backlash, and several well known startups have laid off 15-20% of their workforce to mostly normal reactions.

I understand that Google is a sort of indicator for the tech sector as a whole and people viewed it as a sort of "safehaven" prior to layoffs, but to me it shows how entitled tech workers are, especially those in insular cultures like Google.

I guess it also shows the immense brand value Google has, though this seems to be eroding slowly among SWEs, at least in my circles.

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1. Like you said, google is sorta an indicator for the industry, and a safe haven. It is a bellwether for the 21st century of Silicon Valley and it defined software engineering and tech for a while. Its buses, food, and perks were famous enough to get movies about its interns.

2. You can't fire Zuck, its not possible without his consent, since he is the majority shareholder. You could fire Sundar. Other tech CEOs that did layoffs (eg. MSFT) have generally well-liked CEOs or already are experiencing leadership changes (salesforce).

3. To build on (2), people don't really seem to like Sundar. He isn't a technical guy, just an MBA from McKinsey (he has an unrelated-to-software engineering degree). There has been a lot of ink spilled on if he has a vision at Google, which I won't take an opinion on, but he was CEO for a lot of the time where people thought Google was getting worse. People complained about quality of search, bureaucracy in the company, inability to diversify income (although they still make a lot of money), etc. The only good thing I've heard anyone say about his was an (Indian) Uber driver who said that he represented the dream for Indian immigrants - going to IIT, moving to America, and getting put in charge of a major global corp.

4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.

5. Cynically, most companies time bad press to news cycles, google didn't do this. Meta did layoffs near the election, which was a much bigger news event.

> 4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.

Meta did lock people out overnight all systems except e-mail. For some reason, some employees had access to workplace until ~10:XXAM EST, which doesn't seem intentional. No one at Meta really uses email.

They didn't explain why people were let go. The Q&As afterwards were brutal. Many high performers or people on high priority projects (e.g. ads) were let go.

Ex-meta employees seem to be overall more demoralized by the company already. Why complain about how you were let go when it seems in line with how the company was treating you anyway?

Exactly. Google laid off like what, 5%? That's less than annual piped from Amazon. It's a tiny dent. In the meantime Amazon is doing massive layoffs on top of pip.

I read that as “piped” rather than “pipped” (long vs short i) and it was even more amusing that way.

Thanks for explaining. They should have spelled it PIPed to avoid the confusion.

There may also be an element of self-selection here.

I follow the tech news loosely and from my experience Meta have received significantly more high-level news coverage, including a lot of doom-sayer pieces.

The Google news tends to be localised to tech-related news sites. There's no talk of doom, but rather that Google may be preparing for a wider downturn across all industry (i.e. recession.)

> Meta laid off 2x the % and there was less news or general backlash

Google has tools that people use to get stuff done.

I doubt many HN readers give a rat's rear end what Meta does.

My mom uses Facebook.

I use Google.

That's the difference.

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