18 ms·

The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

189 points by ahiknsr 4y ago

kebos 4y ago
The Google employee experiment, in my eyes was one to support. Try treating employees pretty well, encourage a lot of new grass root projects in a supported environment. No one in Google will be doing anything grassroots now. The end of this experiment is a shame. For a while it dragged other companies up with it e.g. for top talent you had to go half way towards Google perks.
vsskanth 4y ago
> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law. Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.
- jurassic 4y ago
  Whether it's law or not, the board will fire them if they don't make shareholders the top priority.
  - tschellenbach 4y ago
    happened to a friend of mine. he didn't want to fire people fast enough and was sacked.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      I'd say good for him.
  - astrange 4y ago
    https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef... https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservative-think-tank-2014-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservati... How many of these people have been fired?
- zaphar 4y ago
  Law in the sense that there is legal precedence from court cases, yes. Law in the sense that there are literal statutes saying so, no. Sadly, both matter.
  - astrange 4y ago
    There is not such precedence. There sort of is precedence that you have to say you're doing it, but you can implement that by basically doing anything you want. It is true that you can sue a company for securities fraud if they do essentially anything that you can claim made the share value go down, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders. Well... that's a slightly complicated question. It's definitely not quite as simple as "companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all other concerns". But while directors and executives are given wide latitude to run the company according to their judgment, they don't have carte blanche to do "whatever they want" either. More to the point, while a company as a whole can do more than simply "maximize profit to the exclusion of all else", the caveat seems to be that they can do so if the owners (eg the shareholders) agree. From the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case: While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well. The question I see then, is how much influence a single shareholder can truly yield based on this principle. That is, of course, assuming they don't single-handedly hold a controlling share of the company to the point that they can simply replace the board with whoever they want and enforce any arbitrary edict. Given a publicly traded company, it seems clear that some shareholders are going to want the "maximize my stock value at any expense" while others are going to go for more of a "do the humanitarian thing and treat (employees|the environment|whatever) well" or such-like. See: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what... https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/6/18%20corporate%20stout/stout_corporate%20issues.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brook... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
- fsckboy 4y ago
  civil law, you've heard that you can sue anybody for anything? You can... ...but the thing that makes such a "tort" lawsuit matter is damages, what damage did I do to you that you are now suing me. Like, if you're a pedestrian and I hit you with my car, your lawsuit against me depends on showing a monetary value for how I damaged you, for example, days of lost work. If you weren't injured, and went on about your day, week, month and life, you weren't damaged and there's no grounds for the lawsuit, even though my gross negligence could have damaged you 9 times out of 10. (This is an example to make a different point, we are going to ignore "emotional distress", etc.) if you're a shareholder and I am the CEO and I have the company pursue goals that don't maximize the value of your shares, that cost resources and don't have a chance of maximizing shareholder value, when I could have, I have monetarily damaged you.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  The linked wikipedia article directly contradicts the medium article on this. With respect to the Dodge decision, could other Ford shareholders have sued the Dodge brothers for forcing Ford to yield dividends once the Dodge brothers then used those dividends to undercut the value of Ford stock by creating a competitor? Or do minority shareholders not have a duty to other minority shareholders the way majority shareholders do?
berkle4455 4y ago
https://archive.is/hMgba https://archive.is/hMgba
- imtemplain 4y ago
  [dead]
fatih-erikli 4y ago
Who wants to work in Google anyway?
- berkle4455 4y ago
  Over the past decade, Google paid massive salaries to people building one failed bet after another, while Search and Youtube Ad revenue continued to grow and literally nothing else matters.
  - nxm 4y ago
    + Google Maps
    - berkle4455 4y ago
      Fair, it’s close or higher than YouTube revenues right? I’ve always mentally included it as part of “Search”.
      - riku_iki 4y ago
        yes, we don't know, they don't separate maps and search in earning call.
  - gautamdivgi 4y ago
    Maps, android and its ecosystem (play store, etc.), cloud, nest, gmail & google docs. All those have a significant market.
    - berkle4455 4y ago
      Cloud has a significant market yes and is losing money. The Uber strategy of pay $1 to earn $0.90 is not sustainable.
    - riku_iki 4y ago
      chrome/chromeos/chromebooks
bradleyjg 4y ago
This ruling [Dodge vs Ford Motor Company (1919)] stands at the heart of the current situations being faced by companies like Google today. —- It really doesn’t. First, that’s a Michigan case interpreting Michigan law. Almost every non trivial US company is incorporated in Delaware and subject to Delaware law. Delaware law does have somewhat similar cases, eBay v. Newmark is a good one to read but … Second, in both the Ford and Craigslist cases what was happening was really blatant. Courts are not in the business of deciding this or that corporate policy isn’t instantly maximizing shareholder value. What they won’t necessarily let you do is announce that you, being a controlling shareholder, never ever intend to make money and it sucks to be a minority shareholder.
- Scubabear68 4y ago
  Yep. The article is just flat wrong here. Companies have wide discretion on how they are run. Investors who want to change that have to get enough members on the board or attempt some variety of takeover or buy out.
- pydry 4y ago
  Yeah, this is bullshit. Shareholders aren't compelling this to happen. At most theyre cheering it on. This has more of a flavor of Google's 2011 "caught fixing wages and forced to pay a $300 million fine" scandal. Of course some believe that the idea that they might have done something that they have already been found guilty of in the past to be nothing more than a implausible harebrained conspiracy theory.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Not to split hares, but thank you for spelling "hairbrained" correctly.
    - stuart78 4y ago
      Don’t you mean split hairs?
logicalmonster 4y ago
Is there any publicly available commentary on what kinds of roles these big tech companies such as Google were chopping, and in what percentages? Were these layoffs mostly recruiting/HR types, various managers, marketers, etc, or programmers? Did they chop 70% of their recruiting/HR types, but closer to 1% of their techies, or vice versa? Analyzing these layoffs IMO might be best done through the lens of what kind of roles were cut. If they didn't truly hit the real talent (the best programmers) there's a much different analysis that could be made.
- bbor 4y ago
  It’s top secret, for some reason. What that could even be hiding I have no idea - if the goal is increasing investor confidence then you’d think they’d release at least some vague data
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  Pay attention to the upcoming earnings call on Feb 2. I bet they'll talk about some of these details. Until then, saying anything would be, I suspect, materially significant non-public information.
  - riknos314 4y ago
    The company can make an official statement making it public at any time. Releasing information to the public is not restricted to earnings calls, but they generally don't have incentive to do otherwise.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Regardless, the lawyers will never sign off on it.
      - CydeWeys 4y ago
        Yes, this is what I was getting at. You see this information released once per quarter in a very regimented and tightly controlled way, with lawyers triple-checking everything first. You're just not gonna materially significant numbers released off-cycle. You would simply wait for the end of the quarter.
fnfjfk 4y ago
I understand that layoffs are a blunt instrument and it is unlikely that all of the “right” people were affected, but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and vest. No Facebook PSC, no Amazon stack ranking, no Netflix “sports team”. Obviously it is team dependent, but it really has that reputation. The well-known tradeoff is that getting a promo to a post-senior level is borderline impossible. I dunno, something had to give at some point? Leadership sent the message last year but it wasn’t well received: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-ceo-faced-intense-pushback-from-employees-at-a-town-hall-his-2-sentence-response-was-smart-leadership.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-ceo-faced-intense-push... Like, blame definitely falls on leadership here, ICs didn’t come up with the ten chat apps or streaming gaming failure, but the chilling couldn’t last forever.
- themitigating 4y ago
  "but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and ves" Is that a fact or just your perception?
  - mr_00ff00 4y ago
    Certainly is public opinion. I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google. The Blind app is an interesting place.
    - tayo42 4y ago
      Idk if I would call blind public opinion
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - personjerry 4y ago
      > I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google. That's from Silicon Valley, the parody show
tschellenbach 4y ago
The market for talent is quite competitive. Companies need to pay market rates and have a staff that's large enough to compete. In a market where capital is cheap they will bid up rates and hire more people. If you don't do this you give your competitors a chance to beat you. Companies might be able to slow it down a little bit, but not entirely. Similarly in a market where capital is expensive they need to reduce the spend and team size. Google is a public company. If part of the team is costing them more than the value they create for shareholders, there will be immense pressure to down size. This is actually healthy in a way since talent frees up for other companies. The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up
- menzoic 4y ago
  > The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up True but COBRA coverage lets you pay to stay on your job-based health insurance (cheaper) for a limited time after your job ends (usually 18 months). https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/faqs/cobra-continuation-health-coverage-consumer.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    In my experience, COBRA is not cheaper, because you end up paying the company's part, as well as your own, and you suddenly realize how much of the load they carried. I live in a state with a pretty damn good Obamacare implementation, and I'm quite grateful.
  - buffington 4y ago
    In my experience, COBRA ends up costing about 2.5x for employees who've left a company that subsidizes their insurance premiums. Perhaps it's more reasonable if it's for a single young person with a high deductible. The last time I was on COBRA, the cost was unbelievable. For a family of 4, it was over $3k per month, and that was 5 years ago.
- wilg 4y ago
kerblang 4y ago
You work for google because you make insane money and have cachet you can take anywhere and get hired instantly. Hell, you can pull in 10 million funding for your startup idea if you like. Or just retire, get a boat, go sailing. Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already. I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no, I don't sit around wringing my hands and thinking, but what will become of our beloved and sacred google? I could not possibly give a shit about google. But maybe someday I'll get a fucking boat.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Never say always
- hsn915 4y ago
  Observing super priviliged people whining about how unfair it is to get laid off is really something.
  - paxys 4y ago
    There's nothing "privileged" about working at Google. It's a job, like anything else in tech.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mediaman 4y ago
      Given median comp at Google, working at Google is quite privileged. Going to Stanford is likewise privileged. Being privileged isn't an insult, just a recognition of fact.
      - paxys 4y ago
        By that logic everyone in the world is privileged compared to those earning 5% less than them, including every person here complaining about a Google employee's privilege. So what does that word mean exactly?
devwastaken 4y ago
>Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders. Not in that context. They have a duty to their shareholders, not absolute maximum profits. Plenty of further unethical methods that could be used if that was the goal. Iron law of organizations states that any org over time will put the perpetuation of the org first, not the orgs mission that it was founded with. Those with that vision leave for better places, leaving voids filled by those whom cannot genuinely replace it. Purpose is lost, things slow down, and every solution is a myriad of bandaids and placebos to keep it afloat. A cow to milk. This was obvious when all these projects were born to fail and hiring practices started filtering hiring for binary search trees. Same story across the board. They've lived past their expiration date, and rely upon the law and vertical integration to prevent anyone else from competing.
yehNaw 4y ago
My two cents; by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success. A general social trend to value tech in our lives seems lost on the genius CEOs. They really seem to think billions care they specifically exist, when really if they did not someone else would have been CEO. Some other company that came before Google would be Google big if not Google quality in search (which has gone to shit under the management of their current genius CEO). Hubris, lack of social awareness, lack of career experience outside the Google RDF created a hyper-normalized world view. Paraphrasing PG, who wrote somewhere, I forget where, don’t underestimate the power of money to motivate. We’re not picking good companies, just playing simple arithmetic games with fiat money.
- tmathmeyer 4y ago
  Sundar had some extensive history prior to google, including mckinsey
  - yehNaw 4y ago
    [dead]
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success. That would be Marissa Mayer.
  - yehNaw 4y ago
    [dead]
Havoc 4y ago
> It’s like Game of Thrones played out through email and calendar and over video call. That seems true for a lot of corporations. At senior levels it’s all very hunger games
civilized 4y ago
> Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders. This is a myth. Lynn Stout argued against the relevance of Dodge v. Ford (1919) in this article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744 This misstep kind of undermines the rest of the piece, which now reads like a superficial just-so story in the same way.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  Myth or not - mass terminations don't maximize profits anyway. In fact it is impossible to predict what will maximize or reduce profits beyond some trivial scenarios. Imagine if you could - every company would be nearly infinitely profitable. So they can do anything under the guise of "maximizing profits" and nobody can challenge it because there is no objective measure for it.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Stout's article and follow-up book The Shareholder Value Myth both make much the same argument. She thinks people want to have a simple picture of the "purpose" of a corporation, and lean on this idea of shareholder value maximization as a crutch. In reality, a corporation is just another chaotic political body with different voting rules.
abadger9 4y ago
I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and not mess it up and maybe grow it by x%. Most engineering leadership above the staff level is usually better at "aligning" with upper management and that's why they're kept around. The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > most leadership/upper management is poor Most everyone who is not in leadership/upper management has endless complaints about what idiots they are.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Well, maybe they are right.
  - tw98521358 4y ago
    It’s because they are using the wrong metrics. The technical ability is not a strong contributor to success in leadership roles.
  - pas 4y ago
    I am doing management and I'm an idiot at it. Because it's like child rearing, or teaching, or vim vs emacs but there are more choices and many more dimensions, oh and there's almost no data, big cargo cults (from Toyota Improvement System, Deming, Agile manifesto to endless books by those who made it in the last decade), uncertainty is high, general intelligence is low, the interpersonal skills deficit is mind-boggling, burnout/disillusionment/fanaticism are rampant, perverted/misaligned incentives too, and of course all of that is driven by fundamental business constraints and various other sources of path-dependence.
revskill 4y ago
As people get more intelligent and smarter, the Ad business will die. I'm sure about it. In my whole life, there's no single ad that makes sense for me to see and click, because it's annoying. I love smart search results, not smart ad results.
- code_lettuce 4y ago
  I wonder if the world is trending in this direction. If anything, the moat between the two is growing larger, highlighting the differences. Everyone in your bubble may seem to be growing and learning, but you're also the type who spends their off time browsing highly technical message boards.
  - revskill 4y ago
    No, all of those kinds failed eventually. There's no successful ones as i see. And also the successful business as i know run no Ad campaign. You're just making assumptions.
- idlewords 4y ago
  There's a good HL Mencken quote about the likelihood of people getting collectively smarter: "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
  - revskill 4y ago
    That's why i said "as people get smarter", it's for the great mass of plain people.
  - komali2 4y ago
    I feel quite strongly about this. Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons). Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hierarchy of "intelligence" should flatten, imo towards people being more knowledgeable. Not like you need to take away people's Harvard PHDs to make sure every American has what they need to at least graduate highschool, or, you know, be able to read. I don't necessarily agree that greater education leads to greater invulnerability to ads and the modern poisons in our society: most of my friends are smarter than me by many measures, and yet as far as I know I'm the only one not at least mildly addicted to Instagram and co., despite all of us often having conversations where we all seem to agree that that shits bad for you. Nah it takes something other than knowledge / educational privilege, i don't know what specifically, but something else.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"Members only". Subscriptions and paywalls proliferate because Google as middleman takes a cut and makes online ads too expensive.^1 Yet Google gets a "free subscription" and in this case publishes a copy in its cache. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://andzwa.medium.com/why-the-google-layoffs-are-about-personal-ambition-and-poor-leadership-817236947368 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... 1. Argument of US government and state AGs in latest suit against Google for Sherman Act violations. See paras 9 and 267.
throwawayuio 4y ago
Good thing is these laid off people start companies and never fire a single employee.
komali2 4y ago
> My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business. > The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law. > At its heart this is a problem about unrestrained capitalism. I was making this argument yesterday on the post about blizzard firing the employee critical of the stack ranking policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473 These companies are having record profits, and doing layoffs anyway. I think they can get away with this because everyone's talking about recession and inflation. Thus they can increase pressure on current employees to work harder for the same or less money, and add further "proof" of their fears by doing layoffs and saying recession forced them. That's the wind around explanation I have but the article says it as simply as I think leadership is thinking about it: they probably aren't doing holistic class analysis and nefariously thinking about new and exciting ways to extract more labor for less money, they probably straight up are just trying to increase profit by reducing cost overhead. But I agree with the article that this is in the end just then problem with unfettered capitalism. Incredibly, I had no idea the Ford story about the origins of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." Is that an oversimplification? Is that truly the first step down the stairs away from intelligently leveraged capitalism? I assumed the usa was the way it is because of a natural result of what happens when capital accumulates and is allowed to function as a analogue for political power: corporations will accumulate and then wield political power towards the goal of further accumulation. I had no idea the progress made on this front was already enshrined in law in Ford's time. To me this seems inevitable. Corporations are like little AIs with a "never stop growing" directive. When society lets them get away with extracting more labor for less money by framing against recession, what means of protection do employees have, especially in the usa with comparatively minor unemployment benefits and layoff protections. It seems to me the only path forward, if we want then situation to improve for ourselves, is unionization. If we try to change the company from within by working with leadership, we're "activist employees" and a threat to shareholder profit, and get fired. If we wait, we get laid off when they can get away with it. This is all predicated on the idea that the layoffs aren't necessary. The company won't die if the layoffs don't happen. It won't go bankrupt. It will simply be less profitable. And? So what? Does the value of the product change? Does the fact that google.com route basically all internet traffic change? In fact, if they leaned into reducing profit to share among employees, they'd be looking at being a co-op, which are provably more stable than traditional corporations and by some studies, more profitable... Just not for shareholders that don't actually do anything to contribute to that profitability. Edit: reading more into it, the Ford thing doesn't necessarily make it federal law to seek shareholder profit above all other concerns. I don't believe that changes much about my comment: they're still doing this for the shareholders, not the employees.
propter_hoc 4y ago
> You chase after vanity metrics about you looking good like active users rather than how useful your product is. In what conceivable world is "active users" a vanity metric??
- Panini_Jones 4y ago
  It doesn't encapsulate the abstract goal you're trying to achieve, which might be value to the user. Heroin has many active users, but some might argue that heroin doesn't maximize value/usefulness for the user over the long run.
Invictus0 4y ago
Everyone keeps complaining about being locked out of systems with just an email. Seriously, why do you care about this? You don't work there anymore: say goodbye to your friends over text message or email. The reason from the employer's side is obvious: knowledgeable, angry people with access to sensitive systems can wreak a lot of havoc. So take your severance and get out! Locking people out of systems is not a new practice and the outraged indignation I'm seeing on LinkedIn--Xooglers calling the practice "inhuman" and "abusive"--are just incredibly entitled and naive. No one in any other profession is getting the level of severance that these people are getting in a layoff; you are a highly paid professional with Google on your resume and you're going to be just fine.
- fsociety 4y ago
  Imagine working at a company for 16 years only to discover you were laid off when your badge no longer works on your way to work. You can say "duh, told you so" and "well you got severance so suck it up", but it does not take away from the emotional impact of losing a major part of your identity. There are many lessons for us to take away from the layoffs this year, and it helps no one to trivialize it into cold facts. It has a real impact on people. By the way, these large companies have more than capable LDAP systems to lockdown access without nuking everything from orbit. The damage the companies fear when cutting access immediately is, in reality, probably the damage that is happening as employees create internal lists of who was laid off. The damage are companies burning good will during record profits.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    Don't make the company part of your identity! You are a disposable hired gun. People need to get real, no one ever promised these people lifelong job security and they had no business expecting it. 16 years is long enough to have survived 2008/9: if you went through that and still thought the company cared about it's employees, I have no sympathy.
    - fsociety 4y ago
      You are totally right! My point is that the industry’s culture encourages you to make your work your identity though, and no one wins for ridiculing people who were laid off (not saying you are, but other comments here are). This is a great opportunity to change the industry and how workers view their job.
throwawayuio 4y ago
[flagged]
jacknews 4y ago
Actually they're about the financial class trying to protect the value of their wealth by pressuring the companies they own to contain salaries, in order to curb inflation.
- astrange 4y ago
  You get a better understanding of the US if you keep in mind that "the financial class" means retired homeowners who own Vanguard funds, not people who look like the Penguin. But Google isn't owned by them, it's owned by Page and Brin.
  - jacknews 4y ago
    True to some extent, but pensioners don't make the decisions, or take a huge cut of the short term windfalls/commissions/etc that they can generate; the financial class are really those pulling the levers.
2sk21 4y ago
This article could have been written about IBM in the 1970s and 1980s! When I joined IBM in 1991, the old timers used to talk nostalgically about the old days when they could do anything they wanted and the internal politics were vicious.
justinzollars 4y ago
Was it bad Google leadership? Or capitalist excesses? I don't believe we even live in capitalism. We live in Creditism. It is obvious tech was the beneficiary of easy money, zero interest rates and expanded monetary supply. Its no coincidence as the Fed, raises rates and tries to simultaneously drain liquidity there will be less investment in tech, and pressure on income. If you are looking for someone to blame - blame the Fed. But as we see easy money is at the expense of causing inflation. To turn this around a bit, Maybe you are being greedy? Perhaps you really want easy money - on the backs of the poor and middle class - to subsidize our industry?
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"Another reason that Google is wasteful is that it's too easy. The people inside it don't see it as a business as they don't have to struggle against the market forces everyone else has to deal with. Why would you when ads is so profitable?" When the people oustide it stop seeing it as a business, then Google's goose is cooked.
fdsfasdfasdf 4y ago
I think there are a couple of threads here... First the layoff were a fairly obvious hamfisted way to simply appease investors. Profit margins are in-line with historical norms, 2021 was an outlier and it is insane to expect profit growth not to slow from that - the company is still wildly profitable. It really just demonstrates that the vision of being a 'unconventional' company is gone, and the vision of the executive team is just to react to whatever perceived threat is in-front of them that week (activist investors, now 'generative AI') and, of course, maximize their stock compensation. Google 'bloat'. This is a bit undeniable but it's also unavoidable for companies Google's size. There are like eight layers of management between people who do things and people who talk about doing things. That number is probably too high but I'm not sure people have figured out a great alternative other than 'hierarchy' for directing an army of people. Honestly the best thing management can do is 'rest-and-vest' and rewrite the same vision/roadmap document/deck ten times under different names least they try to demonstrate their value by constantly re-orging and shuffling around priorities (millionaire children moving the food around their plate to make it seem eaten). Total comp and lavish 'perks'. Google's talent is, on average, better than most other companies and it hires in very expensive areas so it's going to be more expensive. It is very clear they are moving hiring to cheaper 'discount' areas so this will likely stall/decrease. The 'perks' are heavily overstated. This is a fun fake narrative. The micro-kitichens are like bulk processed gains and cereals or faux-healthy products that manage to both be not particularly appetizing, not actually healthy (a chickpea fried in vegetable oil is still bad for you), and not expensive - so they are mostly just for show and sit there untouched. The cafe food is served in troughs again with an emphasis on the cheaper vegetable or grains upfront or the infamous kale -with a single trough with any protein at the end that they still try to partially submerge in quinoa. There are long tables where employees eat quickly and alone. It's an overtly cynical exercise to make you work longer and just like 'unlimited vacation' the dealer is clearly winning here. Same goes with travel or 'fun' budgets, all cut and now the same as any other company.
ripvanwinkle 4y ago
This article could apply to any of the large companies that recently had layoffs - Meta, MSFT, AMZN
lamontcg 4y ago
The psychosocial naval gazing over these layoffs is crazy. "first time?"
djha-skin 4y ago
> All to make some rich people happy. But also those who represent the rank and file's 401(k)'s/IRA's, lest we forget.
hintymad 4y ago
> I’ve seen people promoted to VP based on a set or vague promises they haven’t delivered, mass hiring and vanity metrics So basically Google has become like any big company. If this were true, then it was the a failure of the leadership chain. At some level some leader should be able to call bullshit of this. After all, Pichai should not care about vanity metrics but how Google really grows, right? It's just sad that at certain point that a leader high above simply can't understand every aspect of a business and therefore won't be able to tell if his reports are doing real jobs or chasing vanity metrics.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
imtemplain 4y ago
[dead]

189 points by ahiknsr 4y ago

The Google employee experiment, in my eyes was one to support. Try treating employees pretty well, encourage a lot of new grass root projects in a supported environment. No one in Google will be doing anything grassroots now. The end of this experiment is a shame. For a while it dragged other companies up with it e.g. for top talent you had to go half way towards Google perks.

vsskanth 4y ago

> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law. Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.

jurassic 4y ago
Whether it's law or not, the board will fire them if they don't make shareholders the top priority.
- tschellenbach 4y ago
  happened to a friend of mine. he didn't want to fire people fast enough and was sacked.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I'd say good for him.
- astrange 4y ago
  https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef... https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservative-think-tank-2014-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservati... How many of these people have been fired?
zaphar 4y ago
Law in the sense that there is legal precedence from court cases, yes. Law in the sense that there are literal statutes saying so, no. Sadly, both matter.
- astrange 4y ago
  There is not such precedence. There sort of is precedence that you have to say you're doing it, but you can implement that by basically doing anything you want. It is true that you can sue a company for securities fraud if they do essentially anything that you can claim made the share value go down, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
mindcrime 4y ago
Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders. Well... that's a slightly complicated question. It's definitely not quite as simple as "companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all other concerns". But while directors and executives are given wide latitude to run the company according to their judgment, they don't have carte blanche to do "whatever they want" either. More to the point, while a company as a whole can do more than simply "maximize profit to the exclusion of all else", the caveat seems to be that they can do so if the owners (eg the shareholders) agree. From the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case: While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well. The question I see then, is how much influence a single shareholder can truly yield based on this principle. That is, of course, assuming they don't single-handedly hold a controlling share of the company to the point that they can simply replace the board with whoever they want and enforce any arbitrary edict. Given a publicly traded company, it seems clear that some shareholders are going to want the "maximize my stock value at any expense" while others are going to go for more of a "do the humanitarian thing and treat (employees|the environment|whatever) well" or such-like. See: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what... https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/6/18%20corporate%20stout/stout_corporate%20issues.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brook... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
fsckboy 4y ago
civil law, you've heard that you can sue anybody for anything? You can... ...but the thing that makes such a "tort" lawsuit matter is damages, what damage did I do to you that you are now suing me. Like, if you're a pedestrian and I hit you with my car, your lawsuit against me depends on showing a monetary value for how I damaged you, for example, days of lost work. If you weren't injured, and went on about your day, week, month and life, you weren't damaged and there's no grounds for the lawsuit, even though my gross negligence could have damaged you 9 times out of 10. (This is an example to make a different point, we are going to ignore "emotional distress", etc.) if you're a shareholder and I am the CEO and I have the company pursue goals that don't maximize the value of your shares, that cost resources and don't have a chance of maximizing shareholder value, when I could have, I have monetarily damaged you.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
The linked wikipedia article directly contradicts the medium article on this. With respect to the Dodge decision, could other Ford shareholders have sued the Dodge brothers for forcing Ford to yield dividends once the Dodge brothers then used those dividends to undercut the value of Ford stock by creating a competitor? Or do minority shareholders not have a duty to other minority shareholders the way majority shareholders do?

berkle4455 4y ago

https://archive.is/hMgba https://archive.is/hMgba

imtemplain 4y ago
[dead]

fatih-erikli 4y ago

Who wants to work in Google anyway?

berkle4455 4y ago
Over the past decade, Google paid massive salaries to people building one failed bet after another, while Search and Youtube Ad revenue continued to grow and literally nothing else matters.
- nxm 4y ago
  + Google Maps
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    Fair, it’s close or higher than YouTube revenues right? I’ve always mentally included it as part of “Search”.
    - riku_iki 4y ago
      yes, we don't know, they don't separate maps and search in earning call.
- gautamdivgi 4y ago
  Maps, android and its ecosystem (play store, etc.), cloud, nest, gmail & google docs. All those have a significant market.
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    Cloud has a significant market yes and is losing money. The Uber strategy of pay $1 to earn $0.90 is not sustainable.
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    chrome/chromeos/chromebooks

bradleyjg 4y ago

This ruling [Dodge vs Ford Motor Company (1919)] stands at the heart of the current situations being faced by companies like Google today. —- It really doesn’t. First, that’s a Michigan case interpreting Michigan law. Almost every non trivial US company is incorporated in Delaware and subject to Delaware law. Delaware law does have somewhat similar cases, eBay v. Newmark is a good one to read but … Second, in both the Ford and Craigslist cases what was happening was really blatant. Courts are not in the business of deciding this or that corporate policy isn’t instantly maximizing shareholder value. What they won’t necessarily let you do is announce that you, being a controlling shareholder, never ever intend to make money and it sucks to be a minority shareholder.

Scubabear68 4y ago
Yep. The article is just flat wrong here. Companies have wide discretion on how they are run. Investors who want to change that have to get enough members on the board or attempt some variety of takeover or buy out.
pydry 4y ago
Yeah, this is bullshit. Shareholders aren't compelling this to happen. At most theyre cheering it on. This has more of a flavor of Google's 2011 "caught fixing wages and forced to pay a $300 million fine" scandal. Of course some believe that the idea that they might have done something that they have already been found guilty of in the past to be nothing more than a implausible harebrained conspiracy theory.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Not to split hares, but thank you for spelling "hairbrained" correctly.
  - stuart78 4y ago
    Don’t you mean split hairs?

logicalmonster 4y ago

Is there any publicly available commentary on what kinds of roles these big tech companies such as Google were chopping, and in what percentages? Were these layoffs mostly recruiting/HR types, various managers, marketers, etc, or programmers? Did they chop 70% of their recruiting/HR types, but closer to 1% of their techies, or vice versa? Analyzing these layoffs IMO might be best done through the lens of what kind of roles were cut. If they didn't truly hit the real talent (the best programmers) there's a much different analysis that could be made.

bbor 4y ago
It’s top secret, for some reason. What that could even be hiding I have no idea - if the goal is increasing investor confidence then you’d think they’d release at least some vague data
CydeWeys 4y ago
Pay attention to the upcoming earnings call on Feb 2. I bet they'll talk about some of these details. Until then, saying anything would be, I suspect, materially significant non-public information.
- riknos314 4y ago
  The company can make an official statement making it public at any time. Releasing information to the public is not restricted to earnings calls, but they generally don't have incentive to do otherwise.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Regardless, the lawyers will never sign off on it.
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      Yes, this is what I was getting at. You see this information released once per quarter in a very regimented and tightly controlled way, with lawyers triple-checking everything first. You're just not gonna materially significant numbers released off-cycle. You would simply wait for the end of the quarter.

fnfjfk 4y ago

I understand that layoffs are a blunt instrument and it is unlikely that all of the “right” people were affected, but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and vest. No Facebook PSC, no Amazon stack ranking, no Netflix “sports team”. Obviously it is team dependent, but it really has that reputation. The well-known tradeoff is that getting a promo to a post-senior level is borderline impossible. I dunno, something had to give at some point? Leadership sent the message last year but it wasn’t well received: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-ceo-faced-intense-pushback-from-employees-at-a-town-hall-his-2-sentence-response-was-smart-leadership.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-ceo-faced-intense-push... Like, blame definitely falls on leadership here, ICs didn’t come up with the ten chat apps or streaming gaming failure, but the chilling couldn’t last forever.

themitigating 4y ago
"but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and ves" Is that a fact or just your perception?
- mr_00ff00 4y ago
  Certainly is public opinion. I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google. The Blind app is an interesting place.
  - tayo42 4y ago
    Idk if I would call blind public opinion
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - personjerry 4y ago
    > I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google. That's from Silicon Valley, the parody show

tschellenbach 4y ago

The market for talent is quite competitive. Companies need to pay market rates and have a staff that's large enough to compete. In a market where capital is cheap they will bid up rates and hire more people. If you don't do this you give your competitors a chance to beat you. Companies might be able to slow it down a little bit, but not entirely. Similarly in a market where capital is expensive they need to reduce the spend and team size. Google is a public company. If part of the team is costing them more than the value they create for shareholders, there will be immense pressure to down size. This is actually healthy in a way since talent frees up for other companies. The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up

menzoic 4y ago
> The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up True but COBRA coverage lets you pay to stay on your job-based health insurance (cheaper) for a limited time after your job ends (usually 18 months). https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/faqs/cobra-continuation-health-coverage-consumer.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  In my experience, COBRA is not cheaper, because you end up paying the company's part, as well as your own, and you suddenly realize how much of the load they carried. I live in a state with a pretty damn good Obamacare implementation, and I'm quite grateful.
- buffington 4y ago
  In my experience, COBRA ends up costing about 2.5x for employees who've left a company that subsidizes their insurance premiums. Perhaps it's more reasonable if it's for a single young person with a high deductible. The last time I was on COBRA, the cost was unbelievable. For a family of 4, it was over $3k per month, and that was 5 years ago.
wilg 4y ago

kerblang 4y ago

You work for google because you make insane money and have cachet you can take anywhere and get hired instantly. Hell, you can pull in 10 million funding for your startup idea if you like. Or just retire, get a boat, go sailing. Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already. I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no, I don't sit around wringing my hands and thinking, but what will become of our beloved and sacred google? I could not possibly give a shit about google. But maybe someday I'll get a fucking boat.

brailsafe 4y ago
Never say always
hsn915 4y ago
Observing super priviliged people whining about how unfair it is to get laid off is really something.
- paxys 4y ago
  There's nothing "privileged" about working at Google. It's a job, like anything else in tech.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mediaman 4y ago
    Given median comp at Google, working at Google is quite privileged. Going to Stanford is likewise privileged. Being privileged isn't an insult, just a recognition of fact.
    - paxys 4y ago
      By that logic everyone in the world is privileged compared to those earning 5% less than them, including every person here complaining about a Google employee's privilege. So what does that word mean exactly?

devwastaken 4y ago

>Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders. Not in that context. They have a duty to their shareholders, not absolute maximum profits. Plenty of further unethical methods that could be used if that was the goal. Iron law of organizations states that any org over time will put the perpetuation of the org first, not the orgs mission that it was founded with. Those with that vision leave for better places, leaving voids filled by those whom cannot genuinely replace it. Purpose is lost, things slow down, and every solution is a myriad of bandaids and placebos to keep it afloat. A cow to milk. This was obvious when all these projects were born to fail and hiring practices started filtering hiring for binary search trees. Same story across the board. They've lived past their expiration date, and rely upon the law and vertical integration to prevent anyone else from competing.

yehNaw 4y ago

My two cents; by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success. A general social trend to value tech in our lives seems lost on the genius CEOs. They really seem to think billions care they specifically exist, when really if they did not someone else would have been CEO. Some other company that came before Google would be Google big if not Google quality in search (which has gone to shit under the management of their current genius CEO). Hubris, lack of social awareness, lack of career experience outside the Google RDF created a hyper-normalized world view. Paraphrasing PG, who wrote somewhere, I forget where, don’t underestimate the power of money to motivate. We’re not picking good companies, just playing simple arithmetic games with fiat money.

tmathmeyer 4y ago
Sundar had some extensive history prior to google, including mckinsey
- yehNaw 4y ago
  [dead]
dehrmann 4y ago
> by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success. That would be Marissa Mayer.
- yehNaw 4y ago
  [dead]

Havoc 4y ago

> It’s like Game of Thrones played out through email and calendar and over video call. That seems true for a lot of corporations. At senior levels it’s all very hunger games

civilized 4y ago

> Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders. This is a myth. Lynn Stout argued against the relevance of Dodge v. Ford (1919) in this article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744 This misstep kind of undermines the rest of the piece, which now reads like a superficial just-so story in the same way.

jacobsenscott 4y ago
Myth or not - mass terminations don't maximize profits anyway. In fact it is impossible to predict what will maximize or reduce profits beyond some trivial scenarios. Imagine if you could - every company would be nearly infinitely profitable. So they can do anything under the guise of "maximizing profits" and nobody can challenge it because there is no objective measure for it.
- civilized 4y ago
  Stout's article and follow-up book The Shareholder Value Myth both make much the same argument. She thinks people want to have a simple picture of the "purpose" of a corporation, and lean on this idea of shareholder value maximization as a crutch. In reality, a corporation is just another chaotic political body with different voting rules.

abadger9 4y ago

I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and not mess it up and maybe grow it by x%. Most engineering leadership above the staff level is usually better at "aligning" with upper management and that's why they're kept around. The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.

WalterBright 4y ago
> most leadership/upper management is poor Most everyone who is not in leadership/upper management has endless complaints about what idiots they are.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Well, maybe they are right.
- tw98521358 4y ago
  It’s because they are using the wrong metrics. The technical ability is not a strong contributor to success in leadership roles.
- pas 4y ago
  I am doing management and I'm an idiot at it. Because it's like child rearing, or teaching, or vim vs emacs but there are more choices and many more dimensions, oh and there's almost no data, big cargo cults (from Toyota Improvement System, Deming, Agile manifesto to endless books by those who made it in the last decade), uncertainty is high, general intelligence is low, the interpersonal skills deficit is mind-boggling, burnout/disillusionment/fanaticism are rampant, perverted/misaligned incentives too, and of course all of that is driven by fundamental business constraints and various other sources of path-dependence.

revskill 4y ago

As people get more intelligent and smarter, the Ad business will die. I'm sure about it. In my whole life, there's no single ad that makes sense for me to see and click, because it's annoying. I love smart search results, not smart ad results.

code_lettuce 4y ago
I wonder if the world is trending in this direction. If anything, the moat between the two is growing larger, highlighting the differences. Everyone in your bubble may seem to be growing and learning, but you're also the type who spends their off time browsing highly technical message boards.
- revskill 4y ago
  No, all of those kinds failed eventually. There's no successful ones as i see. And also the successful business as i know run no Ad campaign. You're just making assumptions.
idlewords 4y ago
There's a good HL Mencken quote about the likelihood of people getting collectively smarter: "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
- revskill 4y ago
  That's why i said "as people get smarter", it's for the great mass of plain people.
- komali2 4y ago
  I feel quite strongly about this. Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons). Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hierarchy of "intelligence" should flatten, imo towards people being more knowledgeable. Not like you need to take away people's Harvard PHDs to make sure every American has what they need to at least graduate highschool, or, you know, be able to read. I don't necessarily agree that greater education leads to greater invulnerability to ads and the modern poisons in our society: most of my friends are smarter than me by many measures, and yet as far as I know I'm the only one not at least mildly addicted to Instagram and co., despite all of us often having conversations where we all seem to agree that that shits bad for you. Nah it takes something other than knowledge / educational privilege, i don't know what specifically, but something else.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"Members only". Subscriptions and paywalls proliferate because Google as middleman takes a cut and makes online ads too expensive.^1 Yet Google gets a "free subscription" and in this case publishes a copy in its cache. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://andzwa.medium.com/why-the-google-layoffs-are-about-personal-ambition-and-poor-leadership-817236947368 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... 1. Argument of US government and state AGs in latest suit against Google for Sherman Act violations. See paras 9 and 267.

throwawayuio 4y ago

Good thing is these laid off people start companies and never fire a single employee.

komali2 4y ago

> My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business. > The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law. > At its heart this is a problem about unrestrained capitalism. I was making this argument yesterday on the post about blizzard firing the employee critical of the stack ranking policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473 These companies are having record profits, and doing layoffs anyway. I think they can get away with this because everyone's talking about recession and inflation. Thus they can increase pressure on current employees to work harder for the same or less money, and add further "proof" of their fears by doing layoffs and saying recession forced them. That's the wind around explanation I have but the article says it as simply as I think leadership is thinking about it: they probably aren't doing holistic class analysis and nefariously thinking about new and exciting ways to extract more labor for less money, they probably straight up are just trying to increase profit by reducing cost overhead. But I agree with the article that this is in the end just then problem with unfettered capitalism. Incredibly, I had no idea the Ford story about the origins of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." Is that an oversimplification? Is that truly the first step down the stairs away from intelligently leveraged capitalism? I assumed the usa was the way it is because of a natural result of what happens when capital accumulates and is allowed to function as a analogue for political power: corporations will accumulate and then wield political power towards the goal of further accumulation. I had no idea the progress made on this front was already enshrined in law in Ford's time. To me this seems inevitable. Corporations are like little AIs with a "never stop growing" directive. When society lets them get away with extracting more labor for less money by framing against recession, what means of protection do employees have, especially in the usa with comparatively minor unemployment benefits and layoff protections. It seems to me the only path forward, if we want then situation to improve for ourselves, is unionization. If we try to change the company from within by working with leadership, we're "activist employees" and a threat to shareholder profit, and get fired. If we wait, we get laid off when they can get away with it. This is all predicated on the idea that the layoffs aren't necessary. The company won't die if the layoffs don't happen. It won't go bankrupt. It will simply be less profitable. And? So what? Does the value of the product change? Does the fact that google.com route basically all internet traffic change? In fact, if they leaned into reducing profit to share among employees, they'd be looking at being a co-op, which are provably more stable than traditional corporations and by some studies, more profitable... Just not for shareholders that don't actually do anything to contribute to that profitability. Edit: reading more into it, the Ford thing doesn't necessarily make it federal law to seek shareholder profit above all other concerns. I don't believe that changes much about my comment: they're still doing this for the shareholders, not the employees.

propter_hoc 4y ago

> You chase after vanity metrics about you looking good like active users rather than how useful your product is. In what conceivable world is "active users" a vanity metric??

Panini_Jones 4y ago
It doesn't encapsulate the abstract goal you're trying to achieve, which might be value to the user. Heroin has many active users, but some might argue that heroin doesn't maximize value/usefulness for the user over the long run.

Invictus0 4y ago

Everyone keeps complaining about being locked out of systems with just an email. Seriously, why do you care about this? You don't work there anymore: say goodbye to your friends over text message or email. The reason from the employer's side is obvious: knowledgeable, angry people with access to sensitive systems can wreak a lot of havoc. So take your severance and get out! Locking people out of systems is not a new practice and the outraged indignation I'm seeing on LinkedIn--Xooglers calling the practice "inhuman" and "abusive"--are just incredibly entitled and naive. No one in any other profession is getting the level of severance that these people are getting in a layoff; you are a highly paid professional with Google on your resume and you're going to be just fine.

fsociety 4y ago
Imagine working at a company for 16 years only to discover you were laid off when your badge no longer works on your way to work. You can say "duh, told you so" and "well you got severance so suck it up", but it does not take away from the emotional impact of losing a major part of your identity. There are many lessons for us to take away from the layoffs this year, and it helps no one to trivialize it into cold facts. It has a real impact on people. By the way, these large companies have more than capable LDAP systems to lockdown access without nuking everything from orbit. The damage the companies fear when cutting access immediately is, in reality, probably the damage that is happening as employees create internal lists of who was laid off. The damage are companies burning good will during record profits.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Don't make the company part of your identity! You are a disposable hired gun. People need to get real, no one ever promised these people lifelong job security and they had no business expecting it. 16 years is long enough to have survived 2008/9: if you went through that and still thought the company cared about it's employees, I have no sympathy.
  - fsociety 4y ago
    You are totally right! My point is that the industry’s culture encourages you to make your work your identity though, and no one wins for ridiculing people who were laid off (not saying you are, but other comments here are). This is a great opportunity to change the industry and how workers view their job.

throwawayuio 4y ago

[flagged]

jacknews 4y ago

Actually they're about the financial class trying to protect the value of their wealth by pressuring the companies they own to contain salaries, in order to curb inflation.

astrange 4y ago
You get a better understanding of the US if you keep in mind that "the financial class" means retired homeowners who own Vanguard funds, not people who look like the Penguin. But Google isn't owned by them, it's owned by Page and Brin.
- jacknews 4y ago
  True to some extent, but pensioners don't make the decisions, or take a huge cut of the short term windfalls/commissions/etc that they can generate; the financial class are really those pulling the levers.

2sk21 4y ago

This article could have been written about IBM in the 1970s and 1980s! When I joined IBM in 1991, the old timers used to talk nostalgically about the old days when they could do anything they wanted and the internal politics were vicious.

justinzollars 4y ago

Was it bad Google leadership? Or capitalist excesses? I don't believe we even live in capitalism. We live in Creditism. It is obvious tech was the beneficiary of easy money, zero interest rates and expanded monetary supply. Its no coincidence as the Fed, raises rates and tries to simultaneously drain liquidity there will be less investment in tech, and pressure on income. If you are looking for someone to blame - blame the Fed. But as we see easy money is at the expense of causing inflation. To turn this around a bit, Maybe you are being greedy? Perhaps you really want easy money - on the backs of the poor and middle class - to subsidize our industry?

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"Another reason that Google is wasteful is that it's too easy. The people inside it don't see it as a business as they don't have to struggle against the market forces everyone else has to deal with. Why would you when ads is so profitable?" When the people oustide it stop seeing it as a business, then Google's goose is cooked.

fdsfasdfasdf 4y ago

I think there are a couple of threads here... First the layoff were a fairly obvious hamfisted way to simply appease investors. Profit margins are in-line with historical norms, 2021 was an outlier and it is insane to expect profit growth not to slow from that - the company is still wildly profitable. It really just demonstrates that the vision of being a 'unconventional' company is gone, and the vision of the executive team is just to react to whatever perceived threat is in-front of them that week (activist investors, now 'generative AI') and, of course, maximize their stock compensation. Google 'bloat'. This is a bit undeniable but it's also unavoidable for companies Google's size. There are like eight layers of management between people who do things and people who talk about doing things. That number is probably too high but I'm not sure people have figured out a great alternative other than 'hierarchy' for directing an army of people. Honestly the best thing management can do is 'rest-and-vest' and rewrite the same vision/roadmap document/deck ten times under different names least they try to demonstrate their value by constantly re-orging and shuffling around priorities (millionaire children moving the food around their plate to make it seem eaten). Total comp and lavish 'perks'. Google's talent is, on average, better than most other companies and it hires in very expensive areas so it's going to be more expensive. It is very clear they are moving hiring to cheaper 'discount' areas so this will likely stall/decrease. The 'perks' are heavily overstated. This is a fun fake narrative. The micro-kitichens are like bulk processed gains and cereals or faux-healthy products that manage to both be not particularly appetizing, not actually healthy (a chickpea fried in vegetable oil is still bad for you), and not expensive - so they are mostly just for show and sit there untouched. The cafe food is served in troughs again with an emphasis on the cheaper vegetable or grains upfront or the infamous kale -with a single trough with any protein at the end that they still try to partially submerge in quinoa. There are long tables where employees eat quickly and alone. It's an overtly cynical exercise to make you work longer and just like 'unlimited vacation' the dealer is clearly winning here. Same goes with travel or 'fun' budgets, all cut and now the same as any other company.

ripvanwinkle 4y ago

This article could apply to any of the large companies that recently had layoffs - Meta, MSFT, AMZN

lamontcg 4y ago

The psychosocial naval gazing over these layoffs is crazy. "first time?"

djha-skin 4y ago

> All to make some rich people happy. But also those who represent the rank and file's 401(k)'s/IRA's, lest we forget.

hintymad 4y ago

> I’ve seen people promoted to VP based on a set or vague promises they haven’t delivered, mass hiring and vanity metrics So basically Google has become like any big company. If this were true, then it was the a failure of the leadership chain. At some level some leader should be able to call bullshit of this. After all, Pichai should not care about vanity metrics but how Google really grows, right? It's just sad that at certain point that a leader high above simply can't understand every aspect of a business and therefore won't be able to tell if his reports are doing real jobs or chasing vanity metrics.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

imtemplain 4y ago

[dead]