Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email

Same thing about getting laid off: it's never nice to lose your job, but even if the severance is good it's not nice to have your employer suddenly behave like an asshole, and that they think that your work is so worthless that it isn't necessary for you to wrap anything up.

It is less true for living breathing members of Homo sapiens.

How would you feel if your wife left you in the night without having the courage to tell you to your face?

That’s how getting laid off by 2am e-mail feels.

Google crowed for years about how employees are family. Middle of the night firings showed that was a lie.

Based on what I heard it was a wonderful time, you got to spend all day working on interesting problems, with super smart people that were at the peak of their field, money was coming in hand over fist, and the people running the show had an understanding of engineering.

The problem is that success attracts leeches, you start getting lots of MBA types, PMs, bean counters, etc. Then things went downhill. But it wasn't always this way, it just so happens that once you become successful enough you will attract people that aren't interested in what you do, but in getting a piece of that pie, and those people and that thinking and mindset will ruin any organization.

P.S. It's an interesting line to draw between being overworked by a boss that is forcing you to spend 60 hours a week chained to a desk, and loving what you do so much that you are happy to spend 60 hours a week on it, just because you derive that much satisfaction from it.

I feel that perhaps after 2007 a lot of Google's reputation was still held up by what the culture was like in the years surrounding their IPO.

But of course, this is ancient tech history. I haven't entertained a Google recruiter in probably a decade now.

I've been at Google for a very long time, in quite a few orgs, and none of those things ring any bells. (Some probably exist in some pockets, though the last one sounds particularly implausible. It's just not how Google job ladders and the management structure work.)

Now, I have to admit to having not read the article, but the headline does resonate. I've spoken to a lot of current Googlers about this, and their attitude towards the company has definitely changed rather dramatically, almost overnight. People in non-US jurisdictions are feeling this particularly acutely, due to how the layoffs have been playing out for them.

Sure, a lot of people saw those perks as being aimed a particular demographic: young people without attachments who were willing to spend nearly 168 hours each week on site. And a lot of us saw the selection of perks as those most likely to attract that demographic.

But people who joined Google didn't often leave for reasons related to Google, and I'm not sure there's a better way to describe that than "beloved." Low turnover tells the story.

At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly be in meetings with shouting matches. People were tear down others. There was excessive territorialism. Googley culture, although it changed over time, did promote cooperation and constructive criticism. Post-Mortems emphasized what went wrong and what could be done better, not who went wrong. Other teams were often, if not always, eager to partner or share their work.

Work location flexibility, the cafes, all of it was very good.

Now, I did perceive a cultural decline, I think it was sometime around the launch of Google Hangouts, I started sensing a more bean-counting approach, I think because the Seattle office brought in a bunch of MS managers in too short a period of time for them to absorb Googley culture. At one point, the initial launch of Hangouts didn't have presence indicators, and when employees brought it up, one response was "You are not the audience". As if presence indicators are something only elite engineers want, and not regular folks. This was totally antithetical to way products like Gmail were built, out of personal desire and need.

I didn't work in Cloud, but I suspect Thomas Kurian brought a more Oracle "Sales Engineer" driven approach, and that too can change culture. Might be bad for culture, but good for external customers.

One of the issues over the years that I feel an acute sense of now that I'm looking for a job again, is that Google invented a lot of technology early internally, from Borg to Map/Reduce/etc. Eventually, the outside world cloned these, and when they became on-par and standardized, at that point I really think Google should have switched their internal stack to the OSS equivalents. For example, Google still builds products on the internal Borg system, rather than using GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform/etc. If GCP/Kube is missing functionality to run say, Maps or Gmail, then perfect, that indicates a good driver for improving the external facing product. Working on some of Google's tech stack feels like an alien world compared to working on stuff outside.

In ML at least, there's synergy, as Tensorflow and JAX are used internally and externally. But in terms of major systems, there needs to be a lot more of this. Blaze was opened as Bazel way too late for example, should have been done years ago.

However, they put a lot of effort into the endless perks, and the feeling of job security. It really felt like they cared about you, and your career development.

I was shocked by the layoffs. My old group's PM, who was fantastic (and well connected) was let go in the purge.

In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, Google felt like the dream place to work. Yes, a lot has been said about the perks and the generous pay, but another thing that made Google appealing was its cutting edge projects. I was a huge fan of Google Inbox (sadly long discontinued). As a graduate student researching storage systems and who enjoyed reading the MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner papers, being able to work on Spanner as an intern was a dream come true. I also loved all of the internal support I received as a developer, from the amazing internal infrastructure to the various internal tutorials. I never felt siloed off from the rest of the company, compared to other employers I've had. It was an amazing place to work and I'd rank it as my second-best work experience (my best being eight months I spent at Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan where I worked in a storage lab on an SSD cache....that was a downright magical experience), though granted as an intern I was shielded from the performance review process and on-calls, so I can't comment about these things.

I would love to work for a team similar to the teams I worked on during my internships at Google, as well as the general feeling of 2013-14 Google. However, I'm under the impression that Google's culture started changing a lot during the Alphabet reorganization and the rise of Sundar Pichai as CEO. I don't know if there's a place in the Valley these days that captures the feel of pre-Alphabet Google; it seems to me that the Valley itself has changed a lot (and for the worse) since roughly 2015, but that's another discussion for another time.

I had my beefs with the place always, and I was like a square peg round hole there -- BUT ... Not even talking about the pay -- above average -- benefits were amazing. Culture when I started was very engineering driven. Mostly a very respectful professional environment apart from one asshole TL I had to deal with, but I was able to route around him after a few months. Good mix of age ranges and not biased against middle aged or older like many other workplaces in our industry.

I didn't like the work / projects I had to do there. I didn't like the promo process. I didn't like the way projects were managed. But I liked the company ethic overall (obviously I always had issues) -- but it degraded every year I was there. But not because of overwork etc but because of bureaucratic dysfunction and ethical lapses.

I still know people there and talking to them it does seem like there was a dramatic shift over the last 5+ years or so. I don't think it can claim the same culture that it had when I was there.

Yes?

Surely they have managers proportional to their employees - I certainly don't expect the CEO to have the meetings but having their direct or skip level manager meet with them is the right way to do it.

Don't get that either. The company is not my mother or my wife, it's just a professional relationship; they buy my hours to produce what they want me to. If they don't want my services anymore, of if I don't want to provide my services to them, it's fine, life goes on.

Now, there's this sad article, with a sad lady framed like she has just cried, like if it's the end of world. Yeah, Google was the best company once, Rome was the most powerful nation once, things change and get over it.

Sorry for the rant.

Feels like the execs didn't answer this interview question well. There were better ways to accomplish this.

> ...and hopefully no one is naive enough to think Google is "done"...after next earnings I expect an even bigger round

I haven’t seen it talked about anywhere. I’m an ex-googler from layoffs. My old team was massively impacted and some coworkers were put on “delayed exit” to wind down their projects by fall. I don’t know the extent of it company wide but on my old team, the lay offs and delayed exit were 1:1 roughly.

If supply and demand stay the same, then why do you think the price will change?

The catch is that Google could have made that utopia possible, had all the funds and resources needed to do it, and actually did have that philosophy at the start and publicly so - until the bean counters took over and started minmaxing everything for the sake of absentee shareholders. The 'MBAification' eventually destroyed its mission. Various detailed comments from some long-time Googlers in different threads under TFA tell how that MBAification happened in minute detail.

Its just another case of capitalism destroying things while maximizing profits through 'MBAification'.

They definitely have the capability to do access control at that granularity, as well as ample time as they had clearly been preparing for months. They just chose not to