3 ms·

Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these p

Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these people that they will be hired forever? Google hired them and paid them very cushy salaries. What am I missing? I really don't understand the discussion around those recent layoffs.

foepys 4y ago
And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments. Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.
- throwaway45501 4y ago
  Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary. The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer? Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG. To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time. Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
  - lenkite 4y ago
    > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place. They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? The analogy is flawed. You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed. Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    A better analogy is you pay your nanny to fly to Australia with you. You lay her off in Australia and get a refund on her return flight since she no longer works for you — she can find her own way back to the US. And key here IMO is she is laid off without cause.
    - throwaway45501 4y ago
      That would be true, if majority of those fired were visa workers, or people who moved across country. Is this the case?
      - throwaway290 4y ago
        No, it is still a good analogy. Going full time has a huge opportunity cost. Have you seen a typical employment contract? You assign all rights for anything you make during the employment to the employer. You cannot do open source stuff under your name unless you give up ownership. You are not free to build your business or gig on the side, at a sufficiently big company lawyers can always claim it is something that the company considered doing so you are competing with your employer and can be sued. Once you are fired, all you have is a name on the resume and hopefully savings. And here the person in the middle of childcare leave additionally has no time to research job alternatives in job market where thousands are being laid off, so in addition to stress during already stressful time (how much sleep did you get for months after you had a baby?) there is now a hole in the resume that is always a red flag for HR. They are left out in the cold like your nan in AU.
- pandaman 4y ago
  People by and large do not exercise loyalty to their employers. This is why companies pay "sign up" bonus, so people could switch jobs over a relatively small bump (otherwise you'd lose a month or two of salary, which would push you into a net negative for almost two years over a 10% bump), and why the bonuses/RSU grants vest on a schedule (so you always have some money to lose when you resign). Companies that work on loyalty do not have anything of the above, as their loyal employees won't be persuaded by a bigger TC number. Their TC is not high and they are not public too. It would be bizarre for somebody who went to Google or other such company because of the TC (likely applying to multiple jobs out of school or resigning from the previous job) to expect loyalty from the employer.
rektide 4y ago
A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous. Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character. Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions. The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.
- throwaway45501 4y ago
  Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it. At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees. I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such. The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
  - rektide 4y ago
    If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions. Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.

foepys 4y ago

And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments. Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.

throwaway45501 4y ago
Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary. The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer? Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG. To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time. Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.
- lenkite 4y ago
  > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place. They layed off female employees on maternity leave just as they gave birth to children. No payout for the remainder of their maternity leave. That also contradicts your assertion of whether FAANG employees were making children btw. Google was horrendously cruel here.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? The analogy is flawed. You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed. Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.
- kenjackson 4y ago
  A better analogy is you pay your nanny to fly to Australia with you. You lay her off in Australia and get a refund on her return flight since she no longer works for you — she can find her own way back to the US. And key here IMO is she is laid off without cause.
  - throwaway45501 4y ago
    That would be true, if majority of those fired were visa workers, or people who moved across country. Is this the case?
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      No, it is still a good analogy. Going full time has a huge opportunity cost. Have you seen a typical employment contract? You assign all rights for anything you make during the employment to the employer. You cannot do open source stuff under your name unless you give up ownership. You are not free to build your business or gig on the side, at a sufficiently big company lawyers can always claim it is something that the company considered doing so you are competing with your employer and can be sued. Once you are fired, all you have is a name on the resume and hopefully savings. And here the person in the middle of childcare leave additionally has no time to research job alternatives in job market where thousands are being laid off, so in addition to stress during already stressful time (how much sleep did you get for months after you had a baby?) there is now a hole in the resume that is always a red flag for HR. They are left out in the cold like your nan in AU.
pandaman 4y ago
People by and large do not exercise loyalty to their employers. This is why companies pay "sign up" bonus, so people could switch jobs over a relatively small bump (otherwise you'd lose a month or two of salary, which would push you into a net negative for almost two years over a 10% bump), and why the bonuses/RSU grants vest on a schedule (so you always have some money to lose when you resign). Companies that work on loyalty do not have anything of the above, as their loyal employees won't be persuaded by a bigger TC number. Their TC is not high and they are not public too. It would be bizarre for somebody who went to Google or other such company because of the TC (likely applying to multiple jobs out of school or resigning from the previous job) to expect loyalty from the employer.

rektide 4y ago

A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous. Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character. Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions. The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.

throwaway45501 4y ago
Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it. At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees. I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such. The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.
- rektide 4y ago
  If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions. Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.