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Comment by razodactyl | Hacker News Reader

Why lay-off instead of repurpose?

Will we consider smartphones as "Personal Assistants" anytime soon? AI has advanced considerably in terms of what can be processed locally but the restructure seems a bit over the top considering it's still the same concept in a broader sense.

It's like laying off a team of developers simply because you changed branding.

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I seem to recall Google saying that they don't hire for a specific position; they hire good developers and then find the right position for them. This idea is directly countered by the act of firing developers in a specific position because that position is no longer viable.

Right, that doesn't quite make sense. The previous layoff was all across the board and likely trimming lower rated engineers across the whole company. Wiping a specific team, with potentially top tier talent, makes no sense.

Are we sure this is actually general engineers? The headline only says "working on". It could be people doing very specific work, like prompt validation, QA, etc.

I would wager a fair amount that Google took that lens and very likely "saved" much of the talent that they had previously identified as top tier (in some cases months or quarters before this round of layoffs; in others during the layoff prep).

I don't think the previous layoffs took perf/grad stack rankings into account

> The previous layoff was all across the board and likely trimming lower rated engineers across the whole company.

This is simply untrue for the Jan 2023 Alphabet layoffs. Entire orgs (>200 FTE) were let go regardless of individual performance.

That's mostly to reduce their legal liability, rather than anything else. Poor management, nonetheless.

out of good positions

If a company wants to fire some people they believe can cause legal trouble if fired individually, somtimes they will spend a year or two reorganizing in a way that incidentally have many of these people all ending up in the same part of the organization.

Then they can do layoffs there, seemingly without violating any wrongful termination laws.

Somehow the best developers and others who contribute directly to the bottom line tend to be unaffected by such events.

I had on very good word that Bard / Assistant was used as a husk for this.

New managers managers manager moves in with a good chunk of people to Help With Bard.

Then 6 months later you and the older handers are asked to move to an exciting new opportunity in Assistant.

of course it's an opportunity, we're investing in it. Bla bla bla.

8 weeks later your roles have been eliminated, you're locked out of everything except the internal jobs listing site for the next 8 weeks. (Note this was happening _before_ tonight's culling)

Sundar's really done a great job with culture

> 8 weeks later

This sounds like they've been in a rush. Maybe there are bonus deadlines coming up.

This is an excellent point, Xoogler and been struggling to explain concisely why I've been offended / think all this is fundamentally misleading. And that's it right there. We were all special snowflakes who could always help the mothership. Now we're ballast that Sundar and VPs need to take yearly turns Optimizing.

If we accept the premise, then why wouldn't it make sense to fire developers in specific positions? If a position is no longer viable, it won't matter to you if you fire that person, since presumably any person you choose would also be a "good developer."

I'm making the assumption that they're _also_ still hiring, and that the people that were fired could, instead, be transitioned into other roles. I would be amazingly surprised if they were not still hiring.

That's definitely not how Google does hiring anymore. They don't do true generalist interviews, that's for sure. Every Google interview gauntlet I went through was at least 50% specialists asking me specialist questions, and in the end when I got hired it was when I got interviewed by specialists appropriate for my domain, and I was hired for a specific position.

Level 1: "we need to reduce costs; everyone work on that"

Level 2: "we've been told to cut costs, and staff is the lowest hanging fruit; which products should we kill?"

Level 3: "hey, I need to reduce the number of products, and staff is the lowest hanging fruit; which teams should we reduce?"

Level 4: "since I can't ask if anyone is actually doing anything without raising suspicion, we'll just pick the largest cost sinks, and cull a bit; here's a list"

I doubt anyone really cared which products got reduced. In an org with 100k employees, it's just numbers all the way down to level 5-6 somewhere.

> Why lay-off instead of repurpose?

Appease investors probably

Generally to boost numbers for the quarter, it takes a while for the damage to propagate through the system after a mass firing (in terms of new code/features/products) but the profits increase instantly, appeasing investors who think only in terms of weeks and quarters.

I’m continually surprised that this tactic still works. It’s been rinsed and repeated so many times that the inevitable damage (and effect on the company financials) is practically boring.

I have no context on what's happening in this particular case, but Google usually indeed does not layoff straight up: teams get "defragged" and the people working on them have some time to try to find new roles.

It's not like that anymore sadly, so pathetic. Like it kinda is: you can "find a new role". But you're locked out of everything except Grow. Everything. No chat, no email. And everyone has negative headcount anyway, there's no roles on Grow. It's not the cool old school kind where you had opportunities to pick from and legit month(s) to find the right spot, with encouragement to take your time

> But you're locked out of everything except Grow.

A friend who's role has been cut says they were locked out of everything except Grow, Meet, and email and has 60 days to find a new role. Can't even get in the building to access the food onsite.

> Why lay-off instead of repurpose?

Because they are overstaffed already and the cost reduction is more attractive.

maybe the manager(s) corrupted the employees

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