12 ms·

I don't get it. Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? I'm thinking they used

by pcurve 7y ago

I don't get it. Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? I'm thinking they used the good old "your position is being eliminated due to business reasons" excuse to get rid of people they didn't want to keep. It's a common HR tactic.

vtail 7y ago
I hate to be that guy, but I want to point out that more people not always equate to more output. E.g. if you create a "controller" role, they would try to justify their existence and create more work/overhead for others. And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  I like the analogy: You don’t get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month.
  - moandcompany 7y ago
    This is often attributed to Fred Brooks in his seminal book "The Mythical Man Month" * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
    - hoorayimhelping 7y ago
      I first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.
  - basementcat 7y ago
    If you assemble a 9+ stage pipeline, you may reach a point where you produce approximately one baby each month.
    - wwweston 7y ago
      Sweet. The baby-in-a-month problem is reduced to assembling and priming a nine-stage pipeline in a month!
    - phkahler 7y ago
      Even then they are "working" independently. It's not a pipeline that passes the baby from one to the next. That's just plain parallelism. Either way it would do nothing to latency and so would not get the current one done any sooner.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - znpy 7y ago
      That's throughput, not latency.
      - majormajor 7y ago
        Most companies have more things they want to do then they can do in the next 6 months. So if you increase throughput without latency, you can still get more of those projects done. Even if you're still doing them all inefficiently. It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.
      - blattimwind 7y ago
        Yes, that's exactly the point of pipelining.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      That's not a 9 stage pipeline, it's 9 separate single stage pipelines.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- namelosw 7y ago
  It's good to point it out. In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong. In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports. It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.
  - kunglao 7y ago
    This is so true man! I've seen this first hand both ways.
  - smt88 7y ago
    > In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports. This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization. People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.
    - balladeer 7y ago
      Interesting. There are two contradicting unsubstantiated observations, or let's just say blatant generalisations, one gets downvoted another flourishes.
      - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
        smt88's post was downvoted because it completely misunderstood the point of namelosw's post. smt88 wrote "A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all." Well, in my reading of it, that was exactly namelosw's point. That is, the social pressure in first world countries, and the fact that so many have their identity tied up in their job, demands everyone looks 'busy' even when they are not really doing anything of value.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
In "defrags" like this, Google does not lay off people outright, it just tells them their job is going away and they have X months to find a new one within Google -- and they usually do.
- danans 7y ago
  I've personally been through this twice at Google. The company definitely provides a very attentive set of resources to help you find a new position within the company, but I've always been able to find a new project on my own. That said, the more flexibility you have the easier it is to find a new position. This naturally favors some people over others. In my most recent case, it ended up being a bit more challenging due to having to balance the constraints of family life versus the opportunities availed by an extremely arduous commute, but I ended up finding a project I enjoy that works with my commute constraints.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    So... Like... What do you do in the interim? Not work, look for teams, and still get paid a shit ton of money? Do you do some training on the side? Work on a side project? How long does it take to find the new team?
    - sdenton4 7y ago
      From the couple people I know who have done this, I think it's pretty choose-your-own-adventure... Get paid to look for your new job, with very few actual responsibilities. It's worthwhile to compare this relative downtime to ramp-up time for new hires... who also generally spend a couple-few months being fairly useless (though working hard at it). And googlers being googlers, there's a decent chance that the 'down' time turns into interesting learning or side project time.
      - wyclif 7y ago
        So...it's kind of like being Big Head working at Hooli? Hanging out on the roof, or building potato guns and piezoelectric sensors?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pm90 7y ago
Why would they publicize it this way though. It seems like it would be easy enough to reallocate these folks in a staged manner without creating a news story out of it.
- aaomidi 7y ago
  Legal requirement
goatherders 7y ago
It's a for profit company with a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. There is zero reason to find jobs for people regardless of the cash position.
- downerending 7y ago
  Here's a couple: 1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon. 2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    > Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      I think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.
      - ALittleLight 7y ago
        Google would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.
Niten 7y ago
> Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? The third sentence in the article: "Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company."
vonmoltke 7y ago
Why do they need an excuse?

by pcurve 7y ago

vtail 7y ago

I hate to be that guy, but I want to point out that more people not always equate to more output. E.g. if you create a "controller" role, they would try to justify their existence and create more work/overhead for others. And you would be surprised how many roles in big bureaucracies are "controller" roles by nature.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
godzillabrennus 7y ago
I like the analogy: You don’t get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month.
- moandcompany 7y ago
  This is often attributed to Fred Brooks in his seminal book "The Mythical Man Month" * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks It also appears to originate from Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
  - hoorayimhelping 7y ago
    I first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.
- basementcat 7y ago
  If you assemble a 9+ stage pipeline, you may reach a point where you produce approximately one baby each month.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    Sweet. The baby-in-a-month problem is reduced to assembling and priming a nine-stage pipeline in a month!
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Even then they are "working" independently. It's not a pipeline that passes the baby from one to the next. That's just plain parallelism. Either way it would do nothing to latency and so would not get the current one done any sooner.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - znpy 7y ago
    That's throughput, not latency.
    - majormajor 7y ago
      Most companies have more things they want to do then they can do in the next 6 months. So if you increase throughput without latency, you can still get more of those projects done. Even if you're still doing them all inefficiently. It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      Yes, that's exactly the point of pipelining.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    That's not a 9 stage pipeline, it's 9 separate single stage pipelines.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
namelosw 7y ago
It's good to point it out. In the third world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up doing nothing but their own things. It's bad but it's obvious that something is going wrong. In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports. It's hard for a person to believe a 100-man busy project actually only needs 5 men.
- kunglao 7y ago
  This is so true man! I've seen this first hand both ways.
- smt88 7y ago
  > In the first world, if you hire 100 people for a 5-man project, people end up to invent and justify 100-man's job. Everyone's role would become their identity, everyone is busy and hardworking. The output is high, they would also have fancy analytics and reports. This is such utter nonsense that it's hard to believe you've worked in any human organization. People in the first and third world are not different species. A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all.
  - balladeer 7y ago
    Interesting. There are two contradicting unsubstantiated observations, or let's just say blatant generalisations, one gets downvoted another flourishes.
    - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
      smt88's post was downvoted because it completely misunderstood the point of namelosw's post. smt88 wrote "A lot of white-collar first-world workers provide no value to their company at all." Well, in my reading of it, that was exactly namelosw's point. That is, the social pressure in first world countries, and the fact that so many have their identity tied up in their job, demands everyone looks 'busy' even when they are not really doing anything of value.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

In "defrags" like this, Google does not lay off people outright, it just tells them their job is going away and they have X months to find a new one within Google -- and they usually do.

danans 7y ago
I've personally been through this twice at Google. The company definitely provides a very attentive set of resources to help you find a new position within the company, but I've always been able to find a new project on my own. That said, the more flexibility you have the easier it is to find a new position. This naturally favors some people over others. In my most recent case, it ended up being a bit more challenging due to having to balance the constraints of family life versus the opportunities availed by an extremely arduous commute, but I ended up finding a project I enjoy that works with my commute constraints.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  So... Like... What do you do in the interim? Not work, look for teams, and still get paid a shit ton of money? Do you do some training on the side? Work on a side project? How long does it take to find the new team?
  - sdenton4 7y ago
    From the couple people I know who have done this, I think it's pretty choose-your-own-adventure... Get paid to look for your new job, with very few actual responsibilities. It's worthwhile to compare this relative downtime to ramp-up time for new hires... who also generally spend a couple-few months being fairly useless (though working hard at it). And googlers being googlers, there's a decent chance that the 'down' time turns into interesting learning or side project time.
    - wyclif 7y ago
      So...it's kind of like being Big Head working at Hooli? Hanging out on the roof, or building potato guns and piezoelectric sensors?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pm90 7y ago

Why would they publicize it this way though. It seems like it would be easy enough to reallocate these folks in a staged manner without creating a news story out of it.

aaomidi 7y ago
Legal requirement

goatherders 7y ago

It's a for profit company with a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. There is zero reason to find jobs for people regardless of the cash position.

downerending 7y ago
Here's a couple: 1. Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world, and Google spends a considerable amount of resources hiring them. It seems foolish not to keep them on the bench a bit, unless Google foresees that it will be shrinking soon. 2. The people not laid off will very much notice their colleagues being zapped the moment they're not needed. They will rationally tilt towards leaving as well, if they get any whiff that they might be next. It's far better to leave first than to be laid off, if you're sharp.
- kortilla 7y ago
  > Google's tech staffers are supposed to be some of the top people in the world That ended about 7 years ago when Google decided to expand as rapidly as possible. Alphabet employees over 100k people now. It’s just a younger IBM at this point. There will be thousands of people that will suck and should be laid off rather than kept.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I think you still need to be at the very top of your field to get past that famous interview. It’s completely out of reach for all but the most elite engineers even if they’re already doing brilliantly somewhere else.
    - ALittleLight 7y ago
      Google would like their engineers to believe that, I'm sure, but I doubt it. A large company is just incompatible with the idea of being elite. "Regression to the mean" says that as Google adds engineers they will more closely resemble the general population of engineers.

Niten 7y ago

> Company that is flush with that much cash couldn't find new roles for the 'small number' of people that were impacted? The third sentence in the article: "Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company."

vonmoltke 7y ago

Why do they need an excuse?