Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer?
Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG.
To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time.
Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place.
They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
The analogy is flawed.
You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed.
Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
And key here IMO is she is laid off without cause.
And here the person in the middle of childcare leave additionally has no time to research job alternatives in job market where thousands are being laid off, so in addition to stress during already stressful time (how much sleep did you get for months after you had a baby?) there is now a hole in the resume that is always a red flag for HR. They are left out in the cold like your nan in AU.
For an employee, it is an arms race to dystopia slowed down by mountains of government regulation. For your business, it will never benefit from any employee’s full potential.
Free market only works if people value good will, good faith, reputation. Embracing a lack of these values puts you on a road that one way or another leads to authoritarianism or oppression.
Layoffs are bad because they are deceptive and cruel to those laid off and further erode trust from those not yet laid off. They are deceptive because being hired as an employee traditionally carries with it implied permanence that being hired as a temp or contractor (like your plumber) does not. You have a job unless and until your performance provides cause to fire you. They are cruel because they take advantage of the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee. The employee may be here on a visa, or just moved their family across the country, or has debts and obligations where he requires employment. He is harmed if the company suddenly and unilaterally ends the relationship. The company on the other hand is not materially harmed if the employee unilaterally decides to leave.
You can argue that a company is legally allowed to act in bad faith, but “barely within the law” is not a high ethical bar.
I see nothing deceptive nor cruel in it, unless Google promised not to fired these people
Now, Visa workers and people who moved should be taken care of separately, I agree. Firing them is not ok, at least not without extra compensation. However, are they a big percentage of those laid-off? Centering discussion about minority like if they are majority isn't helpful.
As for power imbalance.. Those hired at FAANG are one of the smartest people in the population. They should have known all of this and factor in all of this. It's hard to treat seriously people who make $300k/year and say they were cruely harmed because they were fired and now they may need to apply to another job.
I wrote this elsewhere, but I do not support Google. I view them as amoral, they make whatever is necessary to maximize profit.
If there is no obligation for the employee to work forever, then there should not be an obligation for the employer to provide work forever too.
Companies that work on loyalty do not have anything of the above, as their loyal employees won't be persuaded by a bigger TC number. Their TC is not high and they are not public too. It would be bizarre for somebody who went to Google or other such company because of the TC (likely applying to multiple jobs out of school or resigning from the previous job) to expect loyalty from the employer.
Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character.
Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions.
The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees.
I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such.
The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.
Yep, this is what the robber baron capitalists of the USA also used to believe - profit at the expense of human life. You are simply proving the point here that the only way to win is civil dis-obedience. Boycott, blockade, unionize and make these modern robber barons pay. Unless they feel the pinch they will not change.
Believing in profit at the expense of all other considerations only kick-starts a revolution.
It is interesting you haven't responded to the guy who believes in profit at all costs. If you truly believe that, then yes, its best not to hire people.
The guy with a throwaway account who supports Google's policy. You have responded to his objectors several times but not to him which indirectly states where you actually stand.
A civil disobedience movement becomes utterly necessary when employers cross the line of human dignity again and again. It is in everyone's interest to make sure that doesn't degrade to a civil war of-course. It will not just be the bourgeoisie class that is effected here. I will correct my post.
I just don't understand why very intelligent people are surprised by all of this, and why they expect to never be laid-off.
1. You're in the wrong line of work 2. Maybe you aren't treating employees right and realize it
What we as a society can do is educate people that companies are not your friends, that they are amoral, and they exist to maximize their profits. I think we shouldn't allow them to make political donations or support any charity or social movement because this makes them seem "friendly," - which is a net negative for society.
Can you elaborate on why civil disobedience is the only choice? I don't think it is. We haven't tried other solutions. I would love to see a global agreement to cap the wealth of any individual at $1 billion dollars and the total market value of any company at $100bn (those numbers are arbitrary).
> I would love to see a global agreement to cap the wealth of any individual at $1 billion dollars and the total market value of any company at $100bn (those numbers are arbitrary).
One day I hope to be a billionaire and at least try to change the system. I would gladly spend nost of my wealth to see this happen.
How many people in HN do you think have moved out of gmail/google ? The answer is obvious - very few have. So, we have two theories:
* Either, most people don't think what you said is true.
* Alternately, people think what you think is true but don't care enough. This is like workers in china etc. This is just moral high standing. Expecting great character but not making a change oneself.
So, yeah, nothing will change. 100% sure.
The impact won't show up in a quarter, or maybe even 4, but the hollowing out & disenfranchisement of your workforce has real impact, is what makes you a lumbering husk, that might not be in visible decline, but it does make you weak & fragile & with muted senses, makes you less attuned. The cost of being a shit adds up.