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I guess someone has to write this comment: > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here As usual, he says nothing more what the consequence
by eCa 4y ago
I guess someone has to write this comment:
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.
- mrazomor 4y agoHe doesn't say it's going to be a punishment or a reward :). I'd bet on the latter. Lower operational cost! Increased stock value! Beefy bonus! Sundar takes all...
- bawolff 4y agoI always find these comments a bit silly. Saying something is "my fault" is not the same as saying they intend to die on their own sword.
- parasight 4y agoHe did not say, "It is my fault." He said, "I take full responsibility." The question stands: what does that mean?
- xiphias2 4y agoThe same, that it was a miatake on his part, even though he was getting signals from different people that Google is overhiring.
- fs111 4y agoNothing. It means nothing. It is in the current CEO firing template, that is why it's there.
- baloki 4y agoWasn’t there a whole scene in Silicon Valley with Gavin Belson that basically mocks this kind of language?
- TchoBeer 4y agoYeah, it was a great bit.
- jonkho 4y agoIt means he will pay severance, benefits for months even after the people are gone. It’s just that people are so used to this entitlement that they overlook it by default.
- danielrpa 4y agoTaking full responsibility here should have involved firing himself along the 12K. This is the norm in many cultures, resigning (or even killing yourself, sadly) when being responsible for a major failure.
- bawolff 4y agoHe said "I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here" You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility" means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my bad". Nothing more nothing less. If you look at the dictionary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the other one.
- Existenceblinks 4y agoIt means "I take the blame and some consequences thrown at me" .. that means yes I will do nothing just absorb the hit which is probably nothing.
- refurb 4y agoI interpret it as “a decision was made, it was wrong and I take responsibility for that decision”. The other option is he blames some external force or some other leader in the company.
- mk89 4y agoI know but in general when you admit something like that, people also do expect like some preventive actions for the future. All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location. Look at that: https://careers.google.com/ https://careers.google.com/ They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself. Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect? It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
- hardware2win 4y ago>Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? How do you know they didnt?
- mk89 4y agoFair question. I know in my company they didn't and from what i have seen in other comapnies they didn't do it either (Ok I don't work at a FAANG.)
- hardware2win 4y agoThe corpo I work for did something like that - you have some time to find a new team, but I didnt have an opportunity to check that (yet? :))
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gswdh 4y ago[dead]
- jaggirs 4y agoIf everyone's doing it then you might as well do it too.
- concinds 4y agoCEOs are fired for mismanagement. This is good management.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoIsn't over-hiring an indication of mismanagement? Lots of salty people with poor reading comprehension… An “indication” is just that, a possible hint at an underlying issue, not an accusation. I did not claim it’s entirely a C-suite fault either. “Management” goes beyond the C-suite.
- agilob 4y ago1. Stocks go up 2. Company has more money to hire more developers and invest in itself 3. Code stays in the company and potentially produces profit all the time 4. Developers are fired, but the code stays and produces value
- daviddever23box 4y ago^ this.
- ksaxena 4y agoWow, that's salty! Mismanagement compared to what? An omniscient entity that understood exactly what global advertisement demand and capital costs would look like in advance? The real world is messy and runs on estimates for everything. If Google is 6% off on their estimate for human resources, it should not be labelled 'mismanagement'.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoManagement goes beyond C-suite. Upper management makes predictions of their needs, their productivity, what they achieve and don't all the time, it's literally a job req. My org has consistently less than 2 percent error in predictions while growing. Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession. I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession. However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker. We shall survive.
- DrBazza 4y ago> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession. The tech industry famously over inflated once before in the original dotcom boom. This just seems like another correction. I don't think the tech industry is big enough to trigger a global recession on its own, but then again, the financial industry have a herd and panic mentality, so perhaps it could trigger a sell-off for no real economic reason.
- SuoDuanDao 4y agoThe recession would be triggered by the end of cheap money we've had since around 2010. The absurd spike in the tech industry's P/E ratios would just be one of the first indicators that situation was getting wonky.
- csa 4y ago> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession. I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”. Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
- shapefrog 4y ago> Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2021/2022 numbers or higher.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoAs rest of them besides Facebook, this looks like opportunistic firing rather than any world economy based action.
- bsaul 4y agoI agree with others here pointing that firing people isn't necessary a sign of having mismanaged the company. However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging your company is going through rough times would be things like postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would be classy. Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits. Lead through example. Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
- coredog64 4y agoTim Cook did this explicitly, while Jassy’s comp (99.999% RSU) had it managed for him by Wall Street.
- makomk 4y agoThat would still ultimately be spun as greed and proof they were getting pay increases when everyone else was suffering - at least, that's what happened in the UK when a bunch of CEOs didn't get their normal bonuses during Covid. This substantially decreased the total pay of the average FTSE 100 CEO that year, and once it returned to normal every news outlet ran articles about how their pay had increased by a massive amount in the last year alone whilst ordinary workers' pay had decreased over the last decade. Of course, it was really only their pay returning to normal after dropping substantially over the last year or two in a way that normal workers' pay had not, and the actual numbers in the report this way all based on put their pay at lower than it was a decade ago. Still, the press managed to turn them taking a temporary cut in pay that ordinary workers didn't suffer from into them getting an increase in pay that ordinary workers didn't get.
- drowsspa 4y agoMaybe because their pay should remain "low". At the very least according to their conception of "low".
- usrusr 4y agoWhat if you could run an ad empire without employees? The human component of marginal cost in that business is zero. From capital's perspective, the final stage of perfection would be just a CEO serving the legal requirement of one existing. Surely that person wouldn't have to fret about their bonus...
- taurath 4y ago> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. My understanding is it is simply firing season because markets will not punish companies for layoffs right now. Being in the job market right now myself it’ll be interesting to see how competitive things get.
- londons_explore 4y agoOver-hiring and then firing in big rounds once a decade can sometimes be better... It can be a good way to get the low performers out without fostering a culture of 'must make the metrics look good or I'll be fired'.
- jrs235 4y ago>It can be a good way to get the low performers out It can if individual performance is considered in who gets the axe in mass layoffs. From my understanding, individual performance usually isn't a huge factor in who's laid off.
- lonelyasacloud 4y agoIn my experience it depends on how much of a general share price vs technical pivot is involved in the announcement. Typically some business functions will be shut down and merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let go. Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected lists that go up through various meetings where the exact numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists - at least in a well managed company - are based on operational need and regular, standardised, legally defensible, performance appraisals [0]. [0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal systems.
- l2silver 4y agoUh, if by get rid of the low performers you mean get rid of a lot of people, some of which happen to be low performers...
- fipar 4y agoI guess it also means the often-copied interview process isn’t that good at predicting worker performance.
- eitally 4y agoThis wasn't that. This was a case of 1) over-hiring during covid, and 2) Google has expanded amoeba-like for the past decade (outside of Ads) and the result is that there are thousands of people, hundreds of projects and dozens of product areas that are staffed with people who A) were excellent hires at the time, but B) due to organizational drift over time, are no longer in roles that play to their strengths or allow them & Google to bring expansive new features & products to the market. I'm sure there are some low performers, but the vast majority of affected employees here (including a lot of the ones who are/were low performers) are that way because of management decisions over time, not because they are individually "bad" employees. Fwiw, getting into this state is partly due to over-exuberant hiring and investment in new things over the past several years, where free money and huge profits made it relatively low risk to do so.
- dom96 4y agoGuess that means Apple layoffs are next
- spuz 4y agoProbably not - Apple laid off internal recruiter contrators in August 2022 as part of a plan to reduce hiring which was already much lower than the other big tech companies. For example in 2020 and 2021, Alphabet increased their workforce by 13% and 15%. Meta increased their workforce by 30% and 22%. Apple on the other hand only increased by 7% and 4% in those same years. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-growth-than-tech-peers-no-layoffs-yet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
- yodsanklai 4y ago> I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers. As long as they pay well, I don't think it will. And it's not like alternatives are safer.
- wheels 4y agoI think calling them cockups is a stretch. A few points: - Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down. - Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life. - It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone else is doing it.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago>- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life. More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money. How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.
- cwingrav 4y ago> It’s an easy time to fire a bunch of people.. Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.
- charles_f 4y ago> calling them cockups is a stretch The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6 months, I don't think it's a stretch. Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton from your fridge a cockup. From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think cock up is probably a euphemism.
- mring33621 4y ago
- rco8786 4y agoHe said responsibility, not consequences. I am still not sure what people expect CEOs to do in these situations to "punish" themselves. Google is not going bankrupt, they are still wildly profitable, they overhired and are adjusting headcount by a few percent. It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to the leader in these situations.
- LaGrange 4y agoDonate 90% (or everything above $2M, whichever amount is higher) of their wealth to the people dismissed, and never take on a leadership position again. No, I'm not joking.
- rco8786 4y agoIf you ever have to lay people off, you can no longer hold a leadership position? If you hire someone, it's permanent with the exception of their wrongdoing?
- warkdarrior 4y agoIf we applied this rule to each CEO that laid off people, there wouldn't be any CEOs going forward.
- lurker616 4y ago
- LaGrange 4y ago> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups cockups? > As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are. ...and that's why I don't think those are cockups.
- tempsy 4y agoPeople really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than a few years at most.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago[dead]
- spicymaki 4y ago> People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with What is your evidence for that? > The concept of being a lifer is very rare. This was the norm up until the neoliberal era. The trend of everyone becoming a gig worker only to be made obsolete by technology is a choice not destiny.
- tempsy 4y agowhat evidence do you need? unionization normalizes pay across workers. you trade upside for being a “superstar” for job security. it’s not a controversial opinion. tech compensation is not normalized. there’s pay bands but it’s historically been wide and “superstar” candidates are enticed with highly variable equity comp.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dwighttk 4y ago> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. Fwiw Cook took a pay cut and Apple seems to have only slowed hiring. (So far as I’ve heard)
- jstummbillig 4y ago> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are. It's a company, and it is publicly traded. Thinkable consequences are plentiful and unspecific. Everything that can be imagined will be reflected in how well it is doing. What I imagine you are actually asking for are not "consequences" but "punishment". Which is understandable: People are hurt in this and where is the justice. But if we start to think it only be fair to personally hurt people who (to the best of our knowledge) inflict pain while acting legally and only as a side effect (while trying to do what is best in terms of their job description) we are on a somewhat weird path, where the more responsibility you have, the more okay it is to have you personally suffer. For that, I am not willing to "punish" a CEO who is exercising their legal power, because they did something other people dislike. The responsibility is theirs, which, apparently, as a general concept, we are also okay with as long as it goes smoothly. If we (as a society) think that what we have right now what we want, we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
- TomSwirly 4y ago> we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do. What a shame that "we" won't get a look in.
- dimva 4y agoHe has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders of capital.
- UncleMeat 4y agoOh no. A billionaire's unimaginably massive compensation is now just somewhat less unimaginable.
- thanatropism 4y ago[flagged]
- gcr 4y agoI understood like maybe half of the words in this poem… Here’s a summary, if anyone else needs one! https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/canto-45/summary https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/canto-45/summary
- htrp 4y agoIt would be except he will get makeup grants in the next year or two to bring him back to where he needs to be.
- tasuki 4y agoWhat do you mean? Where does he need to be and why does he need to be there?
- antasvara 4y agoI mean, they are fully responsible for those decisions that led to the layoffs. Being responsible for something doesn't imply that there are consequences. They overhired during the pandemic with the hopes that it was a permanent shift in the e-commerce space, and are now laying off employees when that didn't happen. Nobody else is responsible for that decision but the leadership. I was also under the impression that working for FAANGs was done because they paid best, had the best perks, had interesting work, and were the most prestigious. I don't think that "job security" was even in the top 5 reasons for taking a FAANG job for most employees.
- rexreed 4y agoThe "FAANGs" or "MAFANGs" of today are the Standard Oil / US Steel / Westinghouse / etc of yesterday. Bezos, Musk, Pichai, and all would fit in really well with Rockefeller, Astor, Carnegie of yesterday. With one big exception: at least Carnegie and Astor and Rockefeller created enduring arts, sciences, and public spaces of good. The billionaires of today are primarily takers, with perhaps Gates as a notable exception.
- bradhe 4y agoThe consequences are his bonus is paid out 5% higher :(
- havnagiggle 4y ago> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are Ah, the heavy cost of a troubled mind /s.
- civilized 4y ago"Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially, it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street. "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"
- Simran-B 4y agoHadn't looked at it this way. I usually interpret it as a meaningless phrase that everyone expects to be made. How often does "taking the full responsibility" have a real consequence for the top-level management? I would expect several of them to resign and the salaries to be used to pay 5x the number of employees that are way more productive than management anyway.
- jossclimb 4y agoTaking full responsibility is resigning surely?
- unglaublich 4y agoYeah, like firing 12k folks isn't the full responsibility of the CEO in the first place? Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"
- tasuki 4y ago> > I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here > As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are. Taking responsibility is the opposite of assigning blame. Taking responsibility doesn't mean there are or should be consequences for him.
- radu_floricica 4y agoNot defending him per se, but the phrase does have a meaning: "I'm not blaming anybody under me for this". As for what are the consequences for himself, that's definitely not for him to say or chose. It's up to those who hired him.
- serial_dev 4y agoHe takes full responsibility for the decisions. And the workers will face the consequences of these decisions.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoThese comments show up on every one of these layoff letters, but what do people actually want to see? The CEO resigning would only send the company further into turmoil and tank the stock (which is a significant portion of employee salary) even further down. Taking accountability doesn’t mean someone needs to suffer drastic consequences.
- tootie 4y agoI think it's there just so no one infers the opposite. It's not unheard for executives to blame everyone else. Pichai is just affirming that he's not blaming anyone else.
- BurningFrog 4y agoIt's a way to say you're not blaming anyone else, and the people getting laid off did nothing wrong.
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- muzz 4y agoSomeone has to? Tons of people have pointed that out. It's pretty much the most popular bandwagon right now.