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Nothing was callous about the Google firings. Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corpor

Nothing was callous about the Google firings. Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corporate raiders walking off with billions. Not being able to say goodbye on the internal message board is not a violation of your human rights. Enjoy your many months of severance - something almost nobody else in your country enjoys.

starik36 4y ago
Well said. I've been laid off a couple of times in the last 5 years. It sucked when I was notified of it. But thinking back, all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Be careful with any use of "all"—there are large numbers of us who have never seen Silicon Valley, many who live in countries with poor standards of living, and even a number who don't work in tech at all. All of these people are also contributing to these conversations, and it would cause a lot of misunderstanding to assume they're all ex-FAANG.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    This. I am always a bit shocked by the Valley bias to believe you can walk out of a building complex and get a job down the road. Even in the rest of the US it is nowhere that easy, and being in Europe (where many high profile tech companies hire copious amounts of people who can do the same-or better-work than their US counterparts but where the job market is fundamentally different), I sometimes find that worldview borderline insulting. I can only imagine what other countries might be like--I would expect ageism, local laws, market maturity, and even factors like origin and upbringing to still be significant risk factors if people were to be laid off in the casual manner the US seems to take for granted.
    - starik36 4y ago
      I am not in the Valley, but I am in a large US metro. So yes, good point. But the context of this article is a person getting let go from Google, not from a job digging ditches. From that point of view, yes, I think there is definitely privilege, compared to places elsewhere that you mentioned.
- esperent 4y ago
  > all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately. At age 39, I think I've had a traditional salaried job for about 6 months of my life so far and that was around age 23. It didn't suit me and I've always loooked for alternative forms of making money since. I've had a great run as a freelancer for the last twelve years or so. For the last few years in tech, and before that as a performer and dancer. It's important when you're part of an online community not to generalize the other people there. I am not like you, you are not like me. We come from different countries, have different backgrounds and outlooks on life. The thing bringing us together is a shared interest in the topic of this forum. Don't expand on that and assume it means we have similarities in other areas, that's groupthink territory. It's our differences that make this place interesting.
- izacus 4y ago
  "Other people are treating workers like shit so this treatment of workers like shit is fine" is "well said"?
- throwawayso2023 4y ago
  I am here reading comments from my poor country only having had a job for one and a half years in the last 8 years. Not complaining but i believe there is a diversity of people visiting HackerNews - different backgrounds, culture, locations, circumstances, etc.
  - starik36 4y ago
    You are right, but the article is about a person being let go from Google.
game_the0ry 4y ago
Agreed, we tech worker in the US still have it pretty good, so some perspective is in order: - when Enron took over Portland Gas and Electric, they folded in the PG&E employee 401ks into their stock, so many people retired with nothing after years of hard labor [1] - AT&T recently cut life / death insurance benefits promised to retirees for employees retiring after 2022 (but those cuts don't apply to top executives) [2] There are many instances of this, it happens all the time. Don't get me wrong, getting laid off is terrible, but we can bounce back faster than most. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/20/for-enron-families-dreams-and-faith-lost/d1022843-d2b5-413b-9d78-037ec4713901/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/20/f... [2] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/companies-cuts-to-retiree-benefits-provoke-backlash.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...
- mpwoz 4y ago
  Re: [1] - I was interested in how this worked so I read the article, here's a quote: "The 55-year-old electrical troubleshooter ignored his financial planner's advice, keeping 100 percent of his 401(k) money invested in Enron stock. He purchased more Enron shares with his savings and annual bonus" "In addition to contributing the maximum 15 percent to their 401(k) funds, the Stevenses were buying $600 a month in Enron stock. Cathie Stevens, who had been so poor as a teenager that she picked strawberries for clothing money, even flipped her annual bonus money back into the purchase of Enron options." Not sure who you're really blaming for people "retiring with nothing" if they put all their eggs in one basket like that, against experts' advice.
unity1001 4y ago
> Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corporate raiders walking off with billions What's the difference. The same mentality makes both happen. If Google was financially in dire straits, what you said would be exactly what they were doing. In a sense, this is worse - Google is not in financial straits. Its gigantic. Its ginormous revenue only slowed a bit. The entire purpose of this stampede was to appease hedge funds and investors by propping up the stock price. Employees and users be damned.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  I hard disagree that a laid off Google employee would feel better if Google had wanted to keep them on but the company was folding. No severance and all your equity being worthless is a pretty shit trade for knowing your corporation still loves you.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I think its just the regular clickbaity nature of the industry now. Yesterday, we saw the Fortune article saying: "You need to detach and psychologically recover from work, professors say. The solution: commuting." Which was not exactly the summary of the article, but it was clearly framed this way for generating reactions and engagement from RTO and WFH crowd ( and clearly I belong to one of those groups since I noticed ). The author eventually asked the website to change the title to: "You need to detach and ‘psychologically recover’ from work, professors say. Commuting is a ‘liminal space’ where that can happen" As always, there are levels. Callous may be too strong, but I would not say 'nothing was callous'.
gedy 4y ago
I don't disagree that it could be worse, but that's also no excuse for Google (specifically) to have fired people in this impersonal manner.
prewett 4y ago
It absolutely is callous, “showing an insensitive and cruel disregard for others”. It is not financially callous, as you point out, it absolutely is emotionally callous to not have the courtesy to even notify the person that they are ending the employment, and not giving them a chance to say goodbye to their colleagues. Regardless of whether you see work as your primary community, suddenly being suddenly exiled from a community is hard. Its even worse than treating relationships as transactional (which is also callous), it’s switching someone’s status from in-group to out-group unilaterally and not even telling them. Like if you found out your spouse was leaving you because they changed the locks on the door—but, hey, it’s all good because they’re giving you a year’s worth of their salary, right? Sure, it could be worse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t callous.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
adriand 4y ago
Totally agree. These articles are so hyperbolic and ridiculous. One of the quotes from a worker near the beginning of it is: > “This just drives home that work is not your life, and employers—especially big, faceless ones like Google—see you as 100% disposable” It’s unfortunate and rather sad that it takes a firing to cause someone to realize that work is not their life. Work is a transaction. You do work and you get paid. If you want to find meaning in your life, there are better places to look than in some corporation. In terms of being “disposable”, again, it’s not that you’re disposable. It’s transactional. For years the standard advice to tech workers has been to switch jobs frequently to gain pay raises. That was viewed as sensible economics, not a betrayal of one’s employer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jwestbury 4y ago
False dichotomy, here. Google's approach can be callous regardless of whether there are MORE callous approaches out there.

starik36 4y ago

Well said. I've been laid off a couple of times in the last 5 years. It sucked when I was notified of it. But thinking back, all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately.

lolinder 4y ago
Be careful with any use of "all"—there are large numbers of us who have never seen Silicon Valley, many who live in countries with poor standards of living, and even a number who don't work in tech at all. All of these people are also contributing to these conversations, and it would cause a lot of misunderstanding to assume they're all ex-FAANG.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  This. I am always a bit shocked by the Valley bias to believe you can walk out of a building complex and get a job down the road. Even in the rest of the US it is nowhere that easy, and being in Europe (where many high profile tech companies hire copious amounts of people who can do the same-or better-work than their US counterparts but where the job market is fundamentally different), I sometimes find that worldview borderline insulting. I can only imagine what other countries might be like--I would expect ageism, local laws, market maturity, and even factors like origin and upbringing to still be significant risk factors if people were to be laid off in the casual manner the US seems to take for granted.
  - starik36 4y ago
    I am not in the Valley, but I am in a large US metro. So yes, good point. But the context of this article is a person getting let go from Google, not from a job digging ditches. From that point of view, yes, I think there is definitely privilege, compared to places elsewhere that you mentioned.
esperent 4y ago
> all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately. At age 39, I think I've had a traditional salaried job for about 6 months of my life so far and that was around age 23. It didn't suit me and I've always loooked for alternative forms of making money since. I've had a great run as a freelancer for the last twelve years or so. For the last few years in tech, and before that as a performer and dancer. It's important when you're part of an online community not to generalize the other people there. I am not like you, you are not like me. We come from different countries, have different backgrounds and outlooks on life. The thing bringing us together is a shared interest in the topic of this forum. Don't expand on that and assume it means we have similarities in other areas, that's groupthink territory. It's our differences that make this place interesting.
izacus 4y ago
"Other people are treating workers like shit so this treatment of workers like shit is fine" is "well said"?
throwawayso2023 4y ago
I am here reading comments from my poor country only having had a job for one and a half years in the last 8 years. Not complaining but i believe there is a diversity of people visiting HackerNews - different backgrounds, culture, locations, circumstances, etc.
- starik36 4y ago
  You are right, but the article is about a person being let go from Google.

game_the0ry 4y ago

Agreed, we tech worker in the US still have it pretty good, so some perspective is in order: - when Enron took over Portland Gas and Electric, they folded in the PG&E employee 401ks into their stock, so many people retired with nothing after years of hard labor [1] - AT&T recently cut life / death insurance benefits promised to retirees for employees retiring after 2022 (but those cuts don't apply to top executives) [2] There are many instances of this, it happens all the time. Don't get me wrong, getting laid off is terrible, but we can bounce back faster than most. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/20/for-enron-families-dreams-and-faith-lost/d1022843-d2b5-413b-9d78-037ec4713901/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/20/f... [2] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/companies-cuts-to-retiree-benefits-provoke-backlash.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...

mpwoz 4y ago
Re: [1] - I was interested in how this worked so I read the article, here's a quote: "The 55-year-old electrical troubleshooter ignored his financial planner's advice, keeping 100 percent of his 401(k) money invested in Enron stock. He purchased more Enron shares with his savings and annual bonus" "In addition to contributing the maximum 15 percent to their 401(k) funds, the Stevenses were buying $600 a month in Enron stock. Cathie Stevens, who had been so poor as a teenager that she picked strawberries for clothing money, even flipped her annual bonus money back into the purchase of Enron options." Not sure who you're really blaming for people "retiring with nothing" if they put all their eggs in one basket like that, against experts' advice.

unity1001 4y ago

> Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corporate raiders walking off with billions What's the difference. The same mentality makes both happen. If Google was financially in dire straits, what you said would be exactly what they were doing. In a sense, this is worse - Google is not in financial straits. Its gigantic. Its ginormous revenue only slowed a bit. The entire purpose of this stampede was to appease hedge funds and investors by propping up the stock price. Employees and users be damned.

ericmcer 4y ago
I hard disagree that a laid off Google employee would feel better if Google had wanted to keep them on but the company was folding. No severance and all your equity being worthless is a pretty shit trade for knowing your corporation still loves you.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I think its just the regular clickbaity nature of the industry now. Yesterday, we saw the Fortune article saying: "You need to detach and psychologically recover from work, professors say. The solution: commuting." Which was not exactly the summary of the article, but it was clearly framed this way for generating reactions and engagement from RTO and WFH crowd ( and clearly I belong to one of those groups since I noticed ). The author eventually asked the website to change the title to: "You need to detach and ‘psychologically recover’ from work, professors say. Commuting is a ‘liminal space’ where that can happen" As always, there are levels. Callous may be too strong, but I would not say 'nothing was callous'.

gedy 4y ago

I don't disagree that it could be worse, but that's also no excuse for Google (specifically) to have fired people in this impersonal manner.

prewett 4y ago

It absolutely is callous, “showing an insensitive and cruel disregard for others”. It is not financially callous, as you point out, it absolutely is emotionally callous to not have the courtesy to even notify the person that they are ending the employment, and not giving them a chance to say goodbye to their colleagues. Regardless of whether you see work as your primary community, suddenly being suddenly exiled from a community is hard. Its even worse than treating relationships as transactional (which is also callous), it’s switching someone’s status from in-group to out-group unilaterally and not even telling them. Like if you found out your spouse was leaving you because they changed the locks on the door—but, hey, it’s all good because they’re giving you a year’s worth of their salary, right? Sure, it could be worse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t callous.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

adriand 4y ago

Totally agree. These articles are so hyperbolic and ridiculous. One of the quotes from a worker near the beginning of it is: > “This just drives home that work is not your life, and employers—especially big, faceless ones like Google—see you as 100% disposable” It’s unfortunate and rather sad that it takes a firing to cause someone to realize that work is not their life. Work is a transaction. You do work and you get paid. If you want to find meaning in your life, there are better places to look than in some corporation. In terms of being “disposable”, again, it’s not that you’re disposable. It’s transactional. For years the standard advice to tech workers has been to switch jobs frequently to gain pay raises. That was viewed as sensible economics, not a betrayal of one’s employer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jwestbury 4y ago

False dichotomy, here. Google's approach can be callous regardless of whether there are MORE callous approaches out there.