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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

> I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up.

My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"

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> This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"

The conspiracy theory that's making the rounds is that these rounds of layoffs from tech firms have zero to do with financial reports or economy downturns, and are instead a coordinated effort, along with RTO policies, to wrestle negotiation power from tech workers and put downward pressure on tech salaries. Hence the apparent lack of criteria and indiscriminate layoffs complemented with hiring rounds.

I recall that a FANG ordered managers to decimate their teams while ramping up hiring on teams located in the same building, and HR openly rejected the idea of even having employees in the chopping block interview for those positions.

I've also heard it positioned as an age discrimination loophole to fire your seniors and replace them with juniors, while calling the whole thing a macroeconomic-driven layoff.

Is there no law in the US that requires an employer to find a job for somebody before firing? And that includes being allowed to apply for open roles...

Barring an agreement to the contrary, employers and employees can terminate employment any time they want, except in Montana, as long as the termination is not due to the employee being in a protected class.

So apart from the protected class thing, there's no concept of wrongful dismissal in the US?

And what's different in Montana?

Montana has a state law requiring “good cause”:

https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/title_0390/chapter_0020/part_00...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Nope, not unless you're let go due to slander/libel. Even then I'm not sure if that means you guarantee your job back.

Some states have stronger protections in terms of how much warning an employee gets or severerance. But it's not widespread.

I'd say the simpler answer is likely the right one. Rates being higher means it's more expensive for the business to maintain it's cash flow. Shouldn't be an issue for a company like Google but here's the rub, an exec at one public company sees a peer at another (that's probably doing worse financially) drop headcount and a rise in stock, if that exec doesn't do the same they get perceived as not doing enough and see a dip in stock. So they drop headcount too.

While it sucks for those who get the boot, this has the benefit of raising salaries overall. Because the company that does this usually cuts too much and has to later rehire at market rates which rise over time.

We had this, but HR moved so slowly that the (good) guy that was fired was still there when the new guy arrived.

> I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now

The average total compensation for an engineer is $250k-$350k/yr+

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Sa...

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Citrix,UKG,American%2...

that is supposed make you not feel sorry, $250k-$350k…? feel sorry for you for posting this…

It's hard to describe the pure absolute hell that can be working there, you'd be surprised how quickly the money becomes not worth it.

This feels excessive... ? It's Google, not a coal mine.

coal mines are only hellish while you're down. yeah there is the black lung, but you can wear filters.

the goog tracks you (and everyone) 24-7, and depending on teams and egos, could be ugly. you spend your whole life tryin to get to FAANG tier, and now it's miserable.

this comment is really something

I suggest checking if you sense self-deprecating humor, then either:

A) Choose to reject the premise entirely because $ is all that matters

B) Faced with a contradiction, check your premises, and interrogate your interlocutors

this comment is really nothing, and provides no real point, nor refutation of anything above.

Is this sarcasm?

It all depends on the team, of course, but hell really isn't a good way to describe Google employment. Of the half dozen companies I've worked for, Google consistently offered better life quality than the others, even ignoring the money. (I'd go so far as to say that Google is almost too lax in how it treats employees.)

Right, honestly I shouldn't have posted the 2 sentence version, and we'd need to have a beer and an hour to even begin understanding now that I started from there.

But, what I'd say in another flippant sentence, since I'm tempted again: exactly, and that's the problem.

I had a great time, will be forever proud and grateful, and there's more to life than work. But, it left me with a permanently jaundiced view of a lot of things I used to admire, and I saw the worst, most careless, self-centered, behavior I've seen in my life there.

I went through a progression, where I was first accepted to Google (genuinely one of the most exciting moments of my life), and I gradually fell into a deeper and deeper cynicism as I saw all my fantasies about how the world should work evaporate. Maybe it was just growing up. Even the "best company in the world that does no evil" is really just a bunch of profit-mongering assholes.

That said, so is the rest of the world, at least in my experience. So long as you go into it with open eyes about what it really is, Google is a pretty solid experience. You should never identify with it or sympathize with it, but if you approach it as a parasite hoping to extract as much value from you as it can, it offers a pretty great personal opportunity. You've just got to keep in mind that it is not your friend, it is not looking out for your best interests, and it is definitely not not evil.

> You should never identify with it or sympathize with it, but if you approach it as a parasite hoping to extract as much value from you as it can, it offers a pretty great personal opportunity.

I like you. This is my general perspective, however I try to be a greedy symbiote.

That can make it more acutely painful in a specific situation: you're aware of its limitations, you end up getting the opportunity to do exactly what you've always wanted to, you deliver, but yadda yadda yadda, so you have increasingly full knowledge you'll be roadkill eventually and they'll blame it on you even if you act perfect. Sisyphus.

I work at Google, fuck em. The whole place is toxic. I hope it is at peak larping lord of the flies. But if anything about modern history has taught me anything is that there is always lower.

Those 12k people they fucked over for zero real benefit, represented due to how Google hires, 240K interviews (5% accept rate). Let’s say they only did the screen. Still minimum 2 hrs, interview plus write up. 500k hours. 250 years of FTE time just in interviews flushed down the fucking toilet. And they are blowing the doors off the place hiring in LATAM.

And the bs just keeps coming by the dump truck full.

Bless. People don't grasp how it's gotten much worse than even bad workplaces. So complicated to explain.

I got pushed out, by an overworking bootlicker hiring their friend with 0 domain experience. Ultimate event was them and shiftless PM lying and said design VP had 0 interest in a project they had been asking for three years. They got away with it completely because SWE management closed ranks and pretended that was normal because fuck design, right? And I was very evil for not just being like "oh that totally makes sense that they don't care at all" (i.e. the PM got nuclear pissed because his boss' boss' boss got called in for a 2nd meeting with the design VP)

All that to say, your comment about LATAM reminded me how much it fucking. sucked. having management pull that in December 2022, and realize there wasn't any escape hatch to an anonymous org elsewhere, because all the roles are in Poland / India / etc.

Flashbacks to my 45 year old dad bitterly complaining about mass off-shoring in tech when I was 10. Now I get it. It's not that it doesn't make sense, we all know the $. What's evil is the lying and games.

Is it possible they did this on purpose to expand their team size?

Not uncommon. Take out the old guard and hire new people for empire building.

No that's absolutely bonkers and an edge case. 5 women don't have a baby in 1.8 months, and headcount has been frozen-ish since late 2021 unless you're Bard, so we're looking at someone dangerously stupid sticking their neck out to over-compensate, for no good reason, and inexperienced with basic tech shibboleths.

Also, the large firing decisions in January 2023 and January 2024 were made up several steps up the ladder. There's been probably just as much firings done informally inbetween, and to your point, some were very purposeful: multiple people in Assistant org. reported independently that new directors and their couterie were grafted onto the org, they were shuffled onto "Still Very Important" Assistant teams, then the not-so-important Assistant teams were let go en masse.

> 5 women don't have a baby in 1.8 months

They have 5 (or more) babies in 9 months, which is precisely the point of empire building: being able to handle more than one priority.

Sure, except, it was 1 employee replaced by 5, and there isn't headcount backfill.

I don't find that story believable, you don't layoff then open backfill or let alone multiple roles on the team. The handful of Googlers I spoke to are now in smaller teams handling the same workload. If true it must've been some AI related team

Good for you, i guess? It was absolutely as stupid as they describe. There were multiple teams that were literally interviewing people to join and then laid people off in the middle of it. My own team was trying to fill multiple positions and then they fired one of us (long tenure, good perf) and told us we could hire backfill as long as it wasn't the experienced, useful person we just let go. We explicitly asked and the answer we got was that this stupid shit was somehow protecting alphabet.

no.

If you think managers everywhere dont employ this tactic i have a bridge to sell you

Absolutely. There was a leaked memo iirc from Microsoft that prohibited "exceeds expectations".

And then there's the antipoaching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipoaching

Absolutely, and tick more boxes on things other than merit and 'gets the job done'.

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