4 ms·

Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on

Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs. It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings. Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense. On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else. All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.

drblastoff 4y ago
> layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.
- AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."
  - drblastoff 4y ago
    A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays? “Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.” - https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311.html https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311.... “Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation” - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/(rif)selections.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-... “Microsoft Uses Layoffs to Push Underperforming Employees Out” - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-push-underperforming-employees-out-quicker-good-attrition-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-p... “They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-to-lay-off-and-who-to-keep https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...
    - AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
      I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance". Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors. Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit. It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  Big companies typically execute layoffs in a way that minimizes the risk of discrimination litigation. That usually means laying off a mass of people without consideration for their individual attributes. Layoffs are literally never personal… at least in theory.
lunarhustler 4y ago
I was under impression that in America you have at-will employment. Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?
abigail95 4y ago
What law in California provides the difference between a normal firing and a layoff, with employee performance being a distinctive factor?
lumb63 4y ago
I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.
- AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
  People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability. But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
ugh123 4y ago
>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings. Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.

drblastoff 4y ago

> layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.

AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."
- drblastoff 4y ago
  A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays? “Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.” - https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311.html https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311.... “Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation” - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/(rif)selections.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-... “Microsoft Uses Layoffs to Push Underperforming Employees Out” - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-push-underperforming-employees-out-quicker-good-attrition-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-p... “They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-to-lay-off-and-who-to-keep https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...
  - AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
    I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance". Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors. Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit. It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.
berniedurfee 4y ago
Big companies typically execute layoffs in a way that minimizes the risk of discrimination litigation. That usually means laying off a mass of people without consideration for their individual attributes. Layoffs are literally never personal… at least in theory.

lunarhustler 4y ago

I was under impression that in America you have at-will employment. Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?

abigail95 4y ago

What law in California provides the difference between a normal firing and a layoff, with employee performance being a distinctive factor?

lumb63 4y ago

I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.

AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability. But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.

ugh123 4y ago

>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings. Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.