Googler... ex-Googler
nerdy.dev
nerdy.dev
After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.
Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually make it worse - so for example, the timing of this (which the person complains about) is because (AFAIK) they now have one day a month where ~all role eliminations that are going to happen that month, happen. Or so i'm told this is the case.
Ostensibly so you don't have random role eliminations every day, which makes some sense, but then you have no way for people on the ground to do anything more compassionate (like move the timing a bit) because they can't get through the bureaucracy.
In the end - it's simple - if you disempower all the people from helping you make it compassionate, it will not be compassionate. The counter argument is usually that those folks don't know how to do it in legally safe/etc ways. But this to me is silly - if you don't trust them to know how to do it, either train them and trust them, or fire them if they simply can't be trusted overall.
Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions. People are moved to different jobs, helped with training etc...
Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.
I was at a company that did this. I thought it was very nice at first.
It didn’t take long to see why most companies don’t do this. It became common to have a couple people who turned their last days into a mission to poison the well and go on angry tirades. Those days became tense and messy as people trying to do work felt necessary to move it to private messages to avoid triggering anyone.
It gets really ugly when IT starts checking logs and sees outgoing employees doing things like accessing code they weren’t even working on or downloading files in volume.
This was at a company with generous severance, too, so that wasn’t the cause. A small number of people get irrationally vengeful upon being laid off. At Big Tech scale it’s virtually guaranteed that at least one of the people you lay off is going to make some bad decisions.
Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation. It’s not just with layoffs, it can happen with protecting source code, licensing, network security, etc. I concede that a company could replace destroyed property and should be able to recover deleted data, then prosecute/sue to recover damages which could cost tens or hundreds of thousands(or millions depending on the level of access), but the disruption to business can be significant in some cases. Moreover, it is impossible to put an IP cat back in the bag.
For me, it seems easy to understand both sides on this one; compassion vs risk.
But one thing that could be better is transparency around severance, so you know in advance what it will be should you get laid off. (Six months may or may not be “generous” depending on tenure.)
When I was laid off we got what was “customary” in that country, but before the offer was on the table nobody was sure we’d get it. It’s so much nicer when this is a matter of law — I’m all for a ~ free labor market but severance requirements help to balance the risk so the employees can relax and do their best work.
Some companies are just paranoid. My company has now had several rounds of layoffs, people were kept on for a few months, got severance and everything went as harmonious as layoffs can be.
The cruelty the way some companies and now Musk with DOGE are doing it is simply not necessary and reflects a lot on the character of leadership. To me it looks like they are deeply insecure and hate their people.
This is just so wild for me as an European, because at least in Germany if you get fired (or if you quit) you need to stay 1 - 3 MONTHS at the company still.
To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos).
What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.
What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years.
Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome.
It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.
Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer.
I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs.
To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week.
I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.
This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil".
https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...
It probably says "the DOJ really is gonna force us to sell Chrome."
Everything that's needed saying for at least the last decade.
I have trouble relating to the evangelist fervor that some developers develop toward their craft.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.
Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.
Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.
Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.
No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.
Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.
One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.
Godspeed!
This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.
Agreed, it is necessary to make deprogramming oneself easier — less painful — to the extent that one has come to identify with the work and/or culture and/or employer.
But it is also exhausting to maintain a façade of allegiance to a harshly indifferent power structure.
Not just that: separate it from your career. Ensure that you and others would still value yourself even if you weren't receiving top decile income for an easy job. A misanthropic software developer is begrudgingly useful; a plain misanthrope isn't even mediocre.
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly.
They are themselves cogs in the machine.
A machine that goes all the way to the executive class, and they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
We all participate in this hostile culture, in various ways. Usually using the excuse that we need to pay rent, eat, find the work interesting, or with some other excuse that justify the means.
It seems like it's hard to do the right thing when you have something you want to buy or otherwise spent your whole life getting here, before realizing what here is.
You are 100% correct though, we are all cogs in the machine. In the end, the people at the top don't care about anything below them if it isn't making them an the shareholders more money. If they do, they are a unicorn and i hope everyone gets to work with someone like that.
When I was laid off from RAX, it was a super emotional time. I had a job where I got to hang out with my friends and good people doing good stuff, and we also did some work (the work we were doing was so enjoyable most of the time, it didn't feel like work). I've never been able to capture that since and it has contributed greatly to my desire to get out of leadership roles.
The crazy thing to me is the lack of awareness of these people. Has hiring at Google fallen off that badly? Was there always such a gap between 'smart enough to work at google' and 'smart enough to realize their corpo-we're one big family-speak is total BS' ?
You can try to participate less. It's also work, but for some people, it's better than the corporate environment.
Keep your expenses under control. (That alone can be hard to do if you're relatively successful in tech, so I mention it because it's something to really think about.) Network in real life to find projects that have finite durations. Take some time between those projects and use that to both relax and develop new business. Go to a different city for a few days, maybe for an organized meetup or a conference (even if you don't attend) and try to meet people. You're double dipping here. Go sightseeing or something else entertaining, and then try to work a room.
> they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
Hopefully more the former than the latter. You're not getting married. You shouldn't be out to find a new family, and everyone hates that metaphor anyway. You probably will find people you do like, though. Since you're targeting well defined business, you don't have to live with that relationship if it doesn't pan out. You just need to get to your next cycle.
I've found a lot of people that I really do like. Some, I still do business with, and others I just sometimes get together with for dinner or a cocktail. We know we still like each other because there's no longer any money involved.
This is a defensive play also since you aren't all-in on one engagement. You can't get complacent just because you're on a W-2 and it all feels good, as this post illustrates.
I'm aware that this isn't an out-of-the-gate strategy. If you're gainfully employed now, save up. Even if you hate your job, use it to establish a stable position so that you can get out when you want to. Seriously consider what you think are the luxuries in life and whether you actually enjoy them or if you have been convinced that you do for some other purpose, like pleasing others, peacocking, or keeping up with the Joneses.
yep, you always was.
bigtech and corporate make a good illusion that you aren't. brace, if you let yourself believe in that illusion.
People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.
If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.
Engineers, nerds, developers remember this ALWAYS. Do not work hard for ANYONE including your family members unless they reciprocate proportionately.
> Just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important.
https://despair.com/cdn/shop/files/worth_6b813282-f9f8-41ab-...
Do the corp that is what you are!
The lower level of hell is definitely reserved of industrial psychologists and advertisers!
I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition.
Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.
It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.
Big companies are soulless.
Generally layoffs involve someone who doesn't know who you are picking names almost at random from a spreadsheet. Management may fight for certain people to stay. Then legal and HR get involved and look through the layoff list to see if the chosen employees are problematic. For example, if the layoffs include too many people from protected classes, which opens them up to being sued. For example, if your company is 20% women but the layoffs are 50% women, that's going to be an issue.
Avoiding paying substantial retention bonuses can work the same way, if a pattern can be shown.
A simple letter from a lawyer probably won't do anything. Large companies are prepared for that.
For anyone who does come across this, here's my best advice: if you are acquired and your new employment contract includes a retention bonus, you want that contract to say that the retention bonus is payable unless:
1. You leave voluntarily within that period; or
2. You are terminated with cause within that period.
Otherwise, you should get it.
Because, having been through the acquisition process at Google myself, my general cynical take is: Google acquires companies to get rid of them, to stop them from competing and not to "add your uniqueness to their collective."
Keeping employees on retention bonuses is a way, in aggregate, of stopping them from going off and inventing something that eats their bottom line.
You should look into legal action. And failing that, compete with them.
What is interesting is our denial, as (ex-)corporate employees, that the corporation is NOT FAMILY...even though we may feel it is.
> Big companies are soulless.
"And God created the C Corporation" -nowhere in the Bible / Koran / Hinduism / Buddhism / Torah
I feel this lesson keeps being re-learned by us people / workers ...
- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
It really is. Even government and blue chips aren't safe. In fact, those are where you'll find it's the most disconnected from your own agency.
This is fascinating? What was it in absolute terms, or relative to your base salary?
Did you have to have a viable startup idea and it was paid to the incorporated company? Or was it just extra cash in your personal bank account?
Did you do that, or did you just get another job?
Depends a bit on your country. My CEO can fire me but there is a longer notice period depending on how long I have been with the company.
- 2 years: 1 month
- 5 years: 2 months
- 8 years: 3 months
...
- 20 years: 7 months
Germany btw.
I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).
At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.
No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.
Well not so much I guess.
Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out. But I don't know if I will still see it coming.
I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.
I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.
I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.
I hope people can find hope here.
Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.
Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.
And F execs, I guess. :)
As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people.
But the layoff process has been sadistic.
And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff.
Today's Google really sucks.
I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.
I think there's some stigma with confronting the fact that relationships are just ephemeral. We are social creatures in the sense that we can cooperate with each other on a task laid in front of us, but once that task is done, we mostly tend to drift apart onto the next task with another group of people. And that's okay. We're only weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others. The quality of a relationship is in no way measured by how long it endured.
Work forces you to be in contact, if the majority of your time is spent elsewhere due to changing job, or city, or gym, or having kids.. it's a blow.
I try to keep in touch with ex co-workers I cared about, but we live in different countries, at different stages in life, with different priorities, and it's hard to say the relationship is well.
That doesn't mean the relationships weren't built as they should, IMHO, they are just different kinds of relationships.
First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.
Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.
In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.
Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.
I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).
I will argue the contrary. Companies with US mindset makes us think that.
Countries with social safety net have a better way of handling it. Even in the country where I am now living, Hong Kong, which is very liberal, half of the companies let you have 1 month of notice period.
My partner here in NL got fired from a regular retail job, but the company still had to pay her 3 months of salary because she had a permanent contract and worked there for 3 years. I mean it's minimum wage, but still. She also had a month of warning, plus she could choose whether she wanted to use her remaining vacation days or have it paid off alongside the 3 months (the holiday pay gets taxed up the ass though).
+1.
While there is an imaginable "victim" viewpoint, it is a job for pay with a clear employment contract that was agreed to before employment start, between the Employee and the Corporation, including local and state and federal laws, permitting EXACTLY THIS type of termination.
Further, corporations can't be seen to Favor one Googler vs another. Especially since there is NO GUARANTEE this Ex-Googler isn't one of those AR-15 toting weirdos who condone violence against their now ex-coworkers .. so allowing them futher access to the (huge) universe that Google owns and controls .. its corporate workings .. even for an additional 5 seconds after termination, can be reasonably seen to be Foolish .. so they would cut ties Immediately.
They have no right to stop him from expressing his feelings publicly.
Probably not the International Society of Travel Medicine, what's the abbreviation?
you don't need to fire this person immediately - you can talk to him, wind his operations down and then let him go. I.e. in Germany it's often half a year between announcing a layoff and anything happening (besides other stuff like making sure the layoff applies to the newest people first). Even if you don't want such a long period - talking to him and giving him a few weeks to wind down at your firm and starting to search for a new job seems perfectly reasonable. What happens if he wreaks havoc on your firm out of revenge? Really? Happens practically never. If it happens, sue him.
ofc this process applies to reasonable layoff - if it's for something egregious (breaking the law) you can and should fire him immediately.
Everyone is replaceable/expendable, even if you actually aren't, it doesn't matter. It isn't worth investing so much emotional energy and your personal identity into a company unless you are a major shareholder.
Whole things reads like someone leaving a cult.
It's ok to be sad about leaving a job but your identity shouldn't be so tied up in it that you're crying in a blog post online.
We all lose jobs and we all get on with it. Obviously they're talented and will land fine somewhere.
I'm not trying to be mean but it's bad that a person can get upset to this point around a job. The corp isn't caring.
Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
(Not that you'd want them to be upset if it ever had to end, but you'd want the goodness part to happen? Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?)
If a personal blog isn't the right place to express distress when being fired, what is a personal blog even for?
> Google laid off hundreds of employees from its platforms and devices unit, the team responsible for the Android operating system, Pixel phones and Chrome browser. The move, first reported by the Information, comes months after Google offered voluntary buyouts to all 20,000 employees in the division, signaling deeper structural changes at the tech giant.
One of the most difficult realizations you must confront in this industry is that almost everything you build will disappear. It will be ruined, ignored, slandered, and then forgotten. Almost all of your late night epiphanies and bugs conquests will fade anonymously into the anonymous blackbody spectrum entropy demands planet Earth emit.
You must come to peace with this reality. You must accept the transience of glory into your heart. You must prepare yourself, deep down, for any reality of off-sites and planned presentations and electric roadmaps to disappear in an instant. It gets easier after the first few times, trust me. You emerge a sadder and wiser man.
The only thing we can do is create moments of excellence --- occasions on which we can reflect when we are old and gray and take solace, even pride, in knowing we put every bit of ourselves into a task and did it well. There's honor and nobility in excellence even when doomed.
And who knows? You can't predict what will endure. If we're lucky, once in our careers, if we continually apply the best of ourselves, we'll do something that escapes all this destruction and endures.
― Ghandi
Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
For someone young with no dependents, it can be scary but doable. For those with kids? Not so much.
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp."
Remember, if you don't own it this is always the case.
ALWAYS!
At that stage, I know I'll be laid off eventually for one reason or another, I just don't know when. My partner tells me that I should quit on my own terms so I'm not depressed when it happens. But my salary is very competitive, and I'll get severance too. Still, I fear this moment and it's really hard to feel invested in the company. If it wasn't for my colleagues, I think I'd be slacking, waiting for my time.
Yup. Must have been a horrific wake up call :(
All the talk about doing great things as a team is usually all b.s. It’s just excellent theater. Most of us are side actors in someone else’s script and believe we have the lead role.
I wouldn't count on that. The job market is really bad.
Second, completely tangential to the content of the blog post: Was anyone else surprised by the number of comments/"mentions"/likes/reposts? I haven't seen so much activity on a single blog post in years. Normally, blog posts that accept comments have 10 or less comments. This one has hundreds.
In the US, it's at-will employment. You can leave, or be fired, at any time - for virtually any reason. (As long as it doesn't break discrimination laws) Investors only care about quarterly returns, and so you have to expect a publicly-traded company may let people go for that reason alone.
They're not your friends. They're not your family. You exchange hours of your life for money. That's all. It sucks, but that's just how it is. Google is no exception, it is one company like literally all others.
Most people have to go through shit like this at some point in their life. Most don't get to reap in internet sympathy by the bucketload, though. For some people it really actually sucks. OP is likely a millionaire already, could just take time off to adjust and reflect, then accept one of the numerous job offers that will be on the table. They might even end up doing something useful with their lives instead of advertising.
Love sudden realization.
I wonder how many people within companies think “well, they are a cog, but I’m certainly not” just to be left on a road soon after.
Crucially, it said that I would still have limited corp access until 1pm, and then told me which things I still had access to.
I got on my work machine, and found that all of my previous emails had been erased (or at least blocked from my view), so I couldn't download an email archive or otherwise see anything. I also couldn't send emails externally anymore. Most of my systems access had been cut off where I could have downloaded or exported anything "secret" as per the email.
But they did let me send emails internally. I still had slack access to affinity groups. So I was able to shoot off a bunch of goodbye emails and slack messages.
And true to their word, at 1pm, my laptop rebooted and I was then locked out. But at least I got to say goodbye and share my personal email and linkedin with a bunch of people, and they were able to send me "so sorry to see you go" replies, which was nice.
i'll have to figure out how to block bluesky. the blockers focus on privacy stealing feeds like facebook etc.
My bet would be that the author's compensation was one of the highest among his peers on the same role.
This is to me, btw, is a sign of a well built relationship with a colleague: you know each other's compensation.
Boy, this whole post sure has a lot of "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" about it.
This article could have been interesting if they talked about why they ever thought they weren't just a cog. Like what cognitive blinders did they have on? Does Google have a unusually effective "we're all a family" type of internal propaganda?
You should never invest more of your time and energy than what is expected for your position. And keep your side activities and hobbies as personal things using your personal email and accounts.
This is also why you should not owe fidelity to your company and don't hesitate to switch if you have a good opportunity because on its side the company will not hesitate.
Everything might be good and you can generate money, and still the day you are in a redundancy for whatever reason you will be worthing nothing to the company. Like that, just like a replaceable cog. And you will be badly handled because "it is the company policy and we can't do anything than being harsh in such a situation".
The worse is that usually the decision is non-sense but the one deciding is not the one that has to deal with the decision and with you. So you will try to argue, and they will try to invent reasons to rationalize the decision that is imposed on them also, you will try to contest, and they will become angry to have their bullshit called and will double down... And you will feel bad, not understand the situation.
The only thing I can tell you is the that if you are in such a situation is to not worry and go on, except in rare cases, for everyone I saw it happened, the event was finally for the best because the next step in their life was better in the end: better job, better salary, better project, being able to do what you always dreamed to like create a company or evolve your career.
Why? What prevents you from spending time with your ex-colleagues?
When I first met Adam, we were both UX Engineers. We'd all gather in NYC in the spring and in the Bay Area in the fall for internal conferences. Adam lives in Seattle. There are plenty of people who adore him who aren't geographically close enough to meet for the proverbial beer. I suspect that's also true for the connections he made outside of Google.
I think many of those can still survive a job transition, but some of them may rely on the fact that he is on the Chrome team doing Chrome things. Those relationships would now be moot (professionally).
Yes, you were. Next time, please choose a company that contributes to society rather than shoving ads in everyone's faces.
Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).
And Chrome really helped save us from an Internet "embraced and extended" by Microsoft. We were heading for Microsoft succeeding in their (not first) attempt at owning the Internet.
Or is it related to the possibility that Google may have to divest itself of Chrome due to anti-trust enforcement?
To put it another way: Google doesn't want to be a software company anymore. Google does not care about making software, or products, or the people who make or use their products. Google wants to be a growth company where the stock price goes up by two-digit percentages every quarter. That is absolutely the only thing that Google cares about. Google has realized that the best way to make this happen is to commit securities fraud by lying to their investors about their products, and by drip-feeding layoffs to show that they're serious about their underlying financials. It's theater, playing pretend at being business people. The individual products are allowed to go about their business as long as they don't cost too much money, but Google doesn't want to make money by having good products that people love to use, Google wants to make money by being a hyper-growth unicorn again, and they will do anything at all to recapture that kind of growth even if they're slitting the throat of the company to do it.
Whether this attitude is good for Google or its users is left as an exercise to the reader.
Whether these savings actually play out and whether management has accurate expectations and metrics remains to be seen, given messaging that makes it sound like AI saves huge percentages of time, when it at best saves huge percentages of something that's actually only a small percentage of day to day work.
Pump the stock, deliver "shareholder value", and make billionaire class richer is the game. Oh, and also make room for stock buybacks of course!
Protect yourself, but it's a sad way to spend 40-60 hours of your life, constantly reminding yourself that your job is just a paycheck and not putting yourself into your work.
Not sure how so many can do it and be motivated. My current strategy is compartmentalization, and it all just seems unsustainable long term, cause in the back of my mind it all seems so empty.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54305/the-cloud-corpo...
the one thing I can say (again, from experience with having worked for google while engaging with the open source world as part of my job) is that the relationships you have been building up might well survive the loss of your job, especially if your next job ends up being in the same general area. also, i can highly recommend starting a group chat with your ex-team, that was really good for all of us in the time following the layoff.
The plan was to come into the warroom and just hang out. Your manager would come and get you and take you into a private conference room to discuss your package with an HR specialist. The packages were pretty decent, at least.
In gallows humor I drew some stick figures on a white board for each of my team with their unix logins below them. As people were RIFfed, I would go over and put a universal red circle and slash "no" symbol around the figures who were laid off.
My time came and I marked myself as a "no" and handed the red marker to a co-worker.
I remember being a little ticked off at my manager, but when I came back to say goodbye to everyone I noticed his figure / login name had been exed out. The last thing he did before metaphorically being shot in the head was to metaphorically strangle half his children.
"What was deluxe became debris, I never questioned loyalty. But this dead end demolishes the dream of an open highway."
> Surprised when company does nasty, profit-driven thing.
Not sure how this is HN-worthy.
It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.
I had my access hard cut off and laptop locked, a cold reminder that your relationship goes as far as the business will allow.
Always, ALWAYS build your homey network at your job, because that is your door to walking on to the next job.
Be sure to try to get the best severance possible, take time off, explore opportunities. You often won't have that kind of pressure off moment if you're serious about your career so take advantage.
I'm a hired gun for now for academia and a small startup and I've probably never been happier career wise. I work with non-fake employees, and solve problems that make money. No 401k for now, but my sanity is more valuable to me after the circus of the last year at my old place. (Fake employees in VP position, director position, both fired 1y after I left.)
[1]: In reference to this famous essay: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
As for email, calendar etc, I think the lesson here is not to depend on anything from your employer. Keep everything under your own control, so you won't lose too much when you get fired.
It's a trend away from the post-WW2 "promise of lifetime employment". Over the decades, companies have crept toward "human autoscaling" so slow no one noticed. You're far from alone - every other company is doing it. Go see the numbers at https://layoffs.fyi . When the whole industry is doing something, companies must follow suit to stay alive.
Nurture your network! Keep being present on their feeds. Reach out to the ones on your team that you had personal relationships with. Some will shun you; it's not personal, they're ashamed and fearful. It is human nature, same as the company's behavior toward you is a company's nature.
There was never a better time to take things into your own hands. Go look at @IndyDevDan's content on youtube and test the limits with agentic coding: https://agenticengineer.com/state-of-ai-coding/engineering-w...
Spend your 8-20 paid weeks agentic-coding (not vibe-coding) silly projects for your nieces and nephews. You'll come back stronger and more employable than ever.
Don't be sad to be kicked out. The boot that kicked you was attached to a Hills Hoist.
We live in weird times. Companies are drowning in earnings. Their stock sky rockets. But they are unable, or not interested, to put people to work to grow their business. Because they are so big it distorts the entire economy. Because they are so big and so entrenched it's also hard to compete with them.
Less people makes the stock goes up?
And then AI too in the mix with many executives apparently believing it can just replace all the people. Who is going to buy the products then?
I have a feeling this is temporary. The wheel will turn and suddenly companies will hire like there's no tomorrow on some new shiny thing. It's gotta - right? Otherwise what?
All of these variables are highly relevant to performance and any attempt to reproduce/fix the issue you're reporting.
Isn't Chromium open-source ? Also, please don't use your corporate calendar for personal stuff...
Worked a research institute in Germany, used my vacation days and kept writing code to improve the project. I was the sole developer.
For a month, I worked remotely , then i get 3 notices for not coming to office. In a week, I was terminated for not showing up in office, though i was working remotely.
In a shock, accepted the mutual termination agreement. No severance, access cut to email/chat.
There's a betrayal in there that is hard to let go. It was a catalyst for burnout and an overall vitriol for the entire tech industry that hasn't really let up to this day.
Luckily, I created a product that has given me financial freedom with zero employees. I don't think I'd have made it if I kept working for people.
For me it was not the process (the company I worked for announced their plans early) of being let go - it is the current job market that keeps me from sleeping at night: every day I get rejection emails, every day I'm told I'm not good enough or that other 220 candidates applied for the position. I feel obsolete, depressed. All I want is to find a job where I can be helpful, have a purpose and focus on my work goals.
If you have any work please reach out to me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianskala/
was surprised to see this here tbh as its something that was posted to the author's (again, author, not OP) bluesky which made it maybe not _personal_ personal-news but ... I don't know ... way more personal than all up in HN I dunno ... shrugs ...
Welcome back dude and don’t screw up your jungian walk through the fire. You got this
I have zero job security and could be let go any time, but that's built into my rate and I realised that's the case for normal employees anyway as the OP has discovered to his horror. The funny thing is I have outlived many a "permanent" employee in some places I've worked.
Microsoft has moved on to phase two and pretends you were a performance problem and gives you no severance. Microsoft also pays like shit. Don't work for Microsoft.
Nothing we're doing is anything more than variations of things already done and even if we're successful then it's only to the benefit of morons.
So work hard but make sure to take the afternoon off every once and a while to surprise your spouse with flowers and a picnic.
I'm working through this on a personal level as well because it's not healthy to make one's self worth dependent on a relationship one has no control over.
“Hey look, this one is cog is spinning at a cost $200k/year, why don’t we replace it with a cog from a low cost country and save some money?” Or “remove it and make this one other cog do the work of this obe?” People doing the replacement have to show they did something, as well!
The targets often aren’t what you’d think though.
Sorry to hear. Yups you are/were/will be. It happened before. It will happen again. Perhaps not to you, but to me, him (pointing left), her (pointing right).
Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
I don't seem to sound like an asshole. For the past couple of decades "your services are no longer required - please return your laptop" happens on a monthly basis. If you follow the news (and I believe all of us here do), every now and then we read about Company XYZ laying off 3000. Company ABC laying off 5000. So, it's just a roulette and it has to do where the ball will sit. It's not personal (in 99.9% of the cases).
I had the 'pleasure' a few years back to work for a global bank and I was asked on a quarterly basis to give names of who will be gone on the next round(s). Nothing personal. Simple arithmetic.
So.. save, invest, keep emergency fund(s), and you will be ok.
The cooperate cruft grazes on blissfully unaware engineers. Which is why they should try to be poisonous to the cruft wherever they go.
If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next.
Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic.
But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
I have no doubt that sometimes managers really don't know, but I'd wager that most who say they didn't know probably did.
The cost disparities can be huge between team members and locations, and a lot of time it's being done to hit some EOY or mid-year budget number. They are also slowly trying to clean up location strategy.
So it's entirely possible it was based on cost and location, and not merit.
It would still be merit "under the covers" if everyone was the same cost/location, but they aren't.
These statements always catch me a bit off-guard. Is there no such thing as a cancelation period in the US? When my employer wants to kick me out, he needs a good reason for that and I'd still be paid for 3 months. Which is often even longer, depending on how long you belong to a company.
Edit: I'm in germany
In the US it's similar but AFAIK it does vary state to state. To my knowledge there isn't any law that requires what you're describing in North America.
Yeah, Germany is quite (in)famous for this.
I have seen quite a few times in my career large US tech corporations specifically choosing not to open a satellite EU sales office or a dev office in DE because of the horrendous labor laws.
Sure, very nice for the workers. But foreign money chooses to skip DE because of this.
Warm and comfy in a sinking ship, great!
[1] https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...
They are cogs in a machine, not you. And you are the worst thing of self reflection that cog has ever dealt with. Challenge the cogs and make them squirm.
And Google is way past "Don't be Evil" days...
Wonder what prompted the change in L&S ...
I suspect over a period of time caring people realized that the people they care for are a shitty lot, so they become less caring.
Any company with more than 100 employees that does the "you were laid off today, but you'll be paid for the next 2 months" thing is following the WARN Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
Two days later, I couldn’t log in to my PC. I was, for all intents and purposes, fired from my actual work. Technically, I was still employed and paid for those remaining days, but I was locked out and never got the chance to say goodbye. It was the worst experience I’ve had, and I never had any issues with any manager or anyone before that. Apparently, it was just the new company policy.
Or has that term fallen into disuse now?
I find these things have a real "well it works on my machine" about them. Whereas sites that stick to simple tech (ex. HN) are far more likely to work well on all machines.
I think this is what HN calls the "second chance pool".
I absolutely hate when HN reposts an article and alters/falsifies the timestamps. It's so incredibly misleading.
I wonder what other things Bluesky has!
All of these big tech companies have never not been insanely profitable. These layoffs aren't necessary for the survival of the business. They're simply suppressing labor costs by cutting 5% of the employees, pushing their duties on the remaining 95% (for no additonal pay of course) and the 95% aren't asking for raises if they fear losing their jobs. It's permanent layoff culture.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc all have a ton of inertia, just like IBM did. And that's their future. They are sowing the seeds of their own destruction with short-term profit-seeking. These companies are nothing without the employees that sustain them.
Now the best Google can expect from young pragmatic talent is that they'll have no real loyalty or trust in the brand, well respect is a two way street, this will almost certainly just accelerate enshittification across Google products and services.
The runway they give you is generous, sure. I got two and a half months on payroll and another six of severance and COBRA. I got the same spiel: not about merit, bosses shocked and surprised, free to apply to internal roles…
It still sucks, because the very first thing you do, the thing we’re all trained to do, is to think: “What did I do wrong?” And in the weeks ahead, you’re going to look back at the body of your work, the output you created, and you’re going to realize that you did nothing wrong.
Rather, you were just inconvenient to keep. It was little more than a decision of personal politics, not objective merit. An inconvenient line on a spreadsheet to a leader somewhere who wanted to steal your ideas for themselves, or who couldn’t stand sharing power with an undesirable element within the company. Or maybe they remembered that time you shot down their idea, or have a report showing you were active in the “wrong” chat channels. Maybe you weren’t in the hub they wanted to prioritize, or maybe you were too involved in politics for their liking.
Or maybe they just felt that your premium wages would be better spent on a fleet of underpaid, overworked Indian professionals with tenuous contracts.
It could be any of those. It could be all of those. But you’ll know, deep down, that the decision made wasn’t remotely objective, and therefore had no place in an objective institution like a business. Your leaders gave into vibes, and felt you were an acceptable casualty.
At some point you’re likely to feel rage. Hang onto that, and use it to temper your future. A future where you won’t make such petty decisions. Where you’ll stand up for your workers. Where you’ll build a better working environment that treats humans with dignity and respect, where layoffs are a last resort after a reorg, after everyone whose role actually got eliminated had their skills and output shifted to new, valuable roles instead of shown the door.
The rage is acknowledgement that you deserved better, and by extension your colleagues, peers, family, and friends.
Realizing no current business is any different than the others because they’re all run by MBA bros from consulting firms who lack any original thoughts for themselves is, in a sense, liberating. You finally see that there is no “better” out there, and certainly no objectivity or meritocracy. That everything thus far has been a temporary illusory reprieve from that reality.
But once you see it, once you acknowledge it, you can finally join others in building such a future together.
You had to be fired to realize this?
Only when laid off.
It's why a job starts to feel like "a family."
Just for the sake of context: some of the "unique" aspects are unique to the field of Software Development; some may be unique to my particular skill-set/location/circumstances. It's "unique" in that right when it happens, it ... sucks. But the two times it's happened to me -- both cases of "economic realities" or "radical business restructuring" -- it ended up being a few weeks off and into a better job -- in both cases, forms of "dream jobs." I've never gone more than 4 weeks without a paycheck since I was 16. I live near the car capital of the world and don't like cars/have no interest in working for any car/car-related company. I've worked for a global multi-national telecom, a conferencing provider, a maker of IoT devices for huge third-party companies, machine learning for a fraud company and remote medical software with a hint of robotics. The IoT job and the last job happened after being laid off. After about 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth, I had at least two offers in play both times I lost my job. In both cases, the economy and hiring trends were negative. In one case it was so close to Christmas that many people were difficult to reach.
I received a piece of advice way too late in my career from a 50-year-old man who was working for a startup that -- literally anyone who had any familiarity with the space would have given about a 99.99995% chance of cratering in bankruptcy. I was brought in on contract to help them get through some code written off-shore, he was my "project manager." Over lunch he'd offered me a job directly with the company[1]. I mentioned "benefits, salary and job security" and he said: "You won't beat the pay, the benefits are fine, and you're a software developer -- even 2008, unemployment in our sector was low enough to be considered 'full employment'. And if they get bought or succeed, the stock could make you a lot of money." Random advice, even from graybeards, is not often the kind that I take blindly, but having just gone through being unemployed during a -- not terrible, but not great -- economic time and finding more than one offer on the table in about three weeks, I couldn't argue with him. Thinking back to the scores of employees who were laid off when I worked at the telecom, I could name only one (non-manager) guy in IT who didn't end up some place much better a month after they started looking for work, again[2].
While there's never any guarantees and I don't want this to be a "buck up, camper" kind of dismissal of the misery of losing a job, I suspect the ex-Googler will land on their feet and maybe they'll look back on this and say "Yeah, but if I'd stayed there, I'd have missed out on all of the stuff I'm working on, now."
[0] Even if not, though physical proximity encourages it.
[1] This was not only allowed at the company I worked, it often came with an e-mail announcing when it happened in "celebration"-style. We rarely directly contracted to a third-party, so it wasn't a sort of "temporary placement agency" or anything like that. In fact, the reason I was contracted directly was because the owners of the company went to school with the owners of the startup and the 50-year-old guy was a former employee of my employers. They'd worked out an arrangement during a time when business was slow.
[2] Depending on how long that person worked there, they may have received over a year of severance paid at 100% of the employee's salary -- in one case, paid in a single lump sum cheque (due to the company going bankrupt and the court preventing them from paying the outstanding severance checks of employees who were laid off a week prior to the bankruptcy). One guy took a year off and still landed a job in a month.
I don't know guys but there needs to be some crackdown on this bull that is going on with corporate America. Something feels really off lately with these tech companies on how they make excuse and get away.
Also, the writing had been on the wall, for years. I was quite prepared.
What I wasn't prepared for, however, was my post-layoff treatment by the modern tech industry. That was an eye-opener.
I have only started my career in the past 10 years and have seen this story unfold time and time again across many companies. Big, small, or medium company. It doesn't matter.
You. Are. Expendable.
I will say the problem is much more pronounced when it's a publicly traded American company; or a company that was recently acquired or funded by private equity, "angel investment", or a vulture capitalist firm.
Folks. Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests. We cannot keep relying on billionaire class to "do right by us" because quite frankly. They do not give a shit.