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There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I’ll lay out the reasons below: 1. Let’s say we pas

There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I’ll lay out the reasons below: 1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected. 2. Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete since they likely won’t have prestigious firms on their resume already compared to FAANG that American Employees would have. Open to policy suggestions but I don’t see any good methods that prevents new candidates from being unfairly disadvantaged and stops months of preparation being put to waste due to offers being revoked

twawaaay 4y ago
I fail to see the reason for why ban on revoking offers would cause 2x more interview rounds.
- malfist 4y ago
  It's a strawman. If a company decided they were going to hire someone, they wouldn't suddenly decide to spend twice as much hiring that person, just in case they have a layoff in the future. It just doesn't follow
mschild 4y ago
On a general level sure maybe, but for this particular case, there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs. They're swimming in money and are highly profitable. Pulling the rug out underneath a new employee who is days away from starting and moving his whole life to a new country is simply shitty behaviour.
- crdrost 4y ago
  Per The Goal, these sorts of broad untargeted cost-cutting measures usually hit revenue as hard as they do costs, I do wonder if Sundar’s “we're heading for a different economic reality” doom mindset will become a self-fulfilling prophecy... At Google that looks like "oh we lost our gov't contacts because we couldn't meet the new software build-chain rules in time because we were understaffed and trying to bet more people on Bard... now we have to lay off more people" and so on. But they are definitely so flush with cash that any prediction of a doom spiral of every increasing cost-cutting measures would be way way premature.
  - octacat 4y ago
    They at least lost some money from ads from new possible products, if everything is doom and gloom. But these cost-cutting measures are just to be in the news and protect the price of their stocks (look, we are decreasing our costs). Because otherwise in the news it would be "look, people don't care about online products like it was 2020, so stocks should go down a bit".
- dheera 4y ago
  > there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs The trouble is, public companies like Google aren't owned by their execs anymore. They've lost control to a bunch of idiots on Wall Street. They optimize for stock price, not employee satisfaction, not customer satisfaction.
  - ssharp 4y ago
    What about Meta? Zuckerberg can't be axed and controls 50+% of the voting shares. They are still doing big layoffs and cuts. They have also always been very aggressive about growth and hiring. They are positioning it as more of a flattening, which may actually be what's happening but I'm guessing plenty of IC's are still losing their jobs there.
    - equalsione 4y ago
      You only need to control about 10% to 15% of the stock to force through the kinds of layoffs and money saving activity that is happening. You don't even have to own that much, just band together with similar minded shareholders to form a voting block.
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      Zuckerberg is culturally very different to Larry and Sergey. VR was definitely an unusual choice, but if you look at the other choices he has made, he responds to the market. The point with dual-share class is not that the person will automatically do things that are financially terrible, it is that you are beholden to that person's choices. Larry and, to a lesser extent, Sergey are known largely for making bad choices that benefit their employees/friends. I think this is also due to the nature of their business: Google's search business is the most profitable business in the history of capitalism, you need to deploy almost no capital, you need almost no employees, and you can produce hundreds of billions in revenue...there is no business like it. Zuck is clearly aware that their core business is in decline and has been for a number of years so has been forced to make strategic choices. Google have had to do nothing, their execs are comical, the founders are clearly not up to it...but it doesn't matter. The result they get is nothing to do with the inputs going in.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  > there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs There is. These large tech companies were growing headcount at 20-30%/year, maybe even more at peak. And their revenue is now flat. If you are growing headcount 20% year and revenue isn't going up, what does that indicate? The purpose of a company is to sell things that people want, not provide welfare for the well-educated (Google is one of the worst for this, they are still massively, massively, massively overstaffed but the dual share class has insulated them...they are basically a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly...btw, almost every monopoly I have seen in the wild ends up this way, execs always go native).
- BowBun 4y ago
  I get that the HN crowd is sensitive to FAANG layoffs. That being said, it's hard to take seriously an anonymous comment claiming they know better than Google's executive board about whether or not they needed layoffs. Unless you were in those discussions, your ideas probably come from the same blog posts posted to HN in the last 6 months. I don't stand to gain anything from defending them, but can we drop the hubris that almost any of us knows how these decisions are made at that level? I'm sure there's a C-suite or two skimming HN every once in a while, but most of us are regular old tech employees slinging code and talking to customers. That doesn't make it any less awful for the people involved, and I feel for their situations.
  - zb1plus 4y ago
    I feel the opposite way, when you look at blunders like the Metaverse or Google's complete failure to capitalize on its work with LLMs, you really have to question whether the executive boards of FAANGs really know how to do anything but make themselves more money these days. I can't help but wonder if Google and other FAANGs would making more money and producing better products if the people slinging code and talking to customers were running the company.
  - mschild 4y ago
    I have no input on HN in general, but personally I don't work for FAANG nor do I want/intend to. I don't take issue with layoffs in general. I take issue with HOW they're done. It's clear from all the news and HN coverage that whoever is responsible for the layoffs put in absolutely zero thought about compassion and empathy. For some well-paid engineers those layoffs probably didn't have a large effect on their financial situation. For a lot of other people, they probably did. Take Google for example. Instead of notifying people about their layoff, a lot had to find out that they don't have a job anymore by trying to swipe their badge at the office entrance. They couldn't even bother to send an email. That said, you're right. I don't know what's going on inside Google. But I don't need to know all the internal details to see that hiring thousands of people and then letting them go just 2-3 years later is simply stupid planning. From OPs story it also looks pretty apparent that there is not enough internal communication. They've had a hiring freeze for months, then apparently lifted it, then let people go. What exactly is the logical reason behind that? What business reason could there possibly be to do that?
- hikawaii 4y ago
  Money needs to have a return, even internally. Saying "we can afford it" buys you goodwill, but the same way employer goodwill towards employees shifts with the wind, so does consumer and employee sentiment. People do not generally pick their grocery cart or smartphone based on how the brand makes them "feel". Upper middle class professionals with six figure plus salaries might, but they are far in the minority.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I will only respond to the last paragraph: Google could have done themselves a huge (reputational) favour by offering 5-10K USD compensation to these people. It was already budgeted -- usually 5K+ for single person to move country. And, they should have gone on a PR blitz about "making things right". Whether or not you agree with these PR campaigns, they work for many people. It's hard to resist feel good propaganda spread by marketing pros. Another trick they could have used to avoid this problem: Replace each signed new hire with another layoff. Sure, in the very short term, it is harmful to the org, but how many people are we talking about? Maybe 500 signed offer letters? Also: Try offering money first. If candidate refuses, layoff another person internally.
dralley 4y ago
>There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesn't happen. Google is making 25% profit on massive revenues, they're easily in the 10 best performing companies in the US. There's not a good economic reason for them to do something like this.
Havoc 4y ago
>There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen Blaming firing people before their start date on economy and company seems like one hell of a stretch, especially a profitable one like google.
dooglius 4y ago
What's wrong with a termination fee, as already exists in many contracts?
- duxup 4y ago
  Even that would just be another debate about how much the fee “should” be.
  - xooglechoogle 4y ago
    I doubt it. I expect most people could agree that it should be some small number of months of salary.
bcrosby95 4y ago
> 1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected. The problem isn't quality of candidate, the problem is unknown business changes. Sitting on your hands for 10 rounds vs 5 won't fix those unknowns. Certainly companies might respond this way, but it makes no sense and won't actually prevent them from giving an offer to someone in the face of unknown layoffs.
- champagnepapi 4y ago
  Agreed, I don't think there would be any benefit to increase the number of rounds. Guessing there would be no extra signal with the marginal rounds, but candidate frustration would be through the roof. I'm already frustrated with 5 ha.
zulban 4y ago
Random thought... maybe international offers have relocation costs up to just several thousand dollars if the offer is canceled like this. The cost scales with revenue of the company and salary offered, so it's almost nothing for small business. I don't think it would be too onerous on Google to take a hit of a few thousand dollars for cases like this. Not nearly enough to ignore international talent. Unfortunately it will likely never happen because it's a USA law to protect foreigners against USA companies.
stbenjam 4y ago
Why do you think rounds would be higher if an offer is unrevokable? That makes no sense to me. At the very least, companies rescinding offers should make a payment equal to a few months of pay. This trend of companies revoking offers and saying "too bad, sorry you quit your job, sold your house and most of your belongings for us."
- code_runner 4y ago
  i'm not saying that the company has no responsibility... any company (even one as massive as google) can do better than an email and "so bad so sad". However, regardless of economic factors, the process of quitting your job, selling your house, and most of your belongings is inherently risky! In this case its VERY high risk VERY high reward (at least in my estimation). This definitely disadvantages people needing to relocate for that dream job, but we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision.
  - stbenjam 4y ago
    > we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision Lol we literally can, or at least mitigate. It’s easy to pass a law (if the particular legislature works for its people and not the corporate interests) that makes job offers binding and getting out of them requires making the other party at least partially whole.
    - lannisterstark 4y ago
      Promissory estoppel already exists.
champagnepapi 4y ago
>This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 Not sure if I agree with this... Is hiring in European countries with stronger labor laws harder? AFAIK the number of rounds is the same. In European countries they have the concept of probation period to protect against an employee who isn't the right fit. We do as well in America, it's just called "at-will employment", so it's pretty much your entire tenure.
- mschild 4y ago
  Different on a country-by-country basis but generally not really. For example, it's pretty common to have a 6 month probation period in Germany where both the employee and employer can quit/let go at any time with a 2 week notice period.
  - ResearchCode 4y ago
    You can negotiate that clause away. An employer that wants at-will employment periods should pay US wages or at least contractor rates for those periods.
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  It's not. You can always fire someone who doesn't do their job. It's slightly harder to fire someone for having the wrong haircut. You can always try constructive dismissal, the penalties are peanuts. Or buy out their permanent contract, it's pretty cheap like an American sign-on bonus.
trentnix 4y ago
> There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I'm absolutely not interesting in arguing for any great solution but I do think people would serve their own interests better applying for jobs that fill needs and not that fill seats. I recognize it's easier said than done, but I really despise the livestock-based personnel management approach that infests most of big corporate.
stdbrouw 4y ago
> Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected. I don't see what one has to do with the other. You only extend an offer after you've vetted the candidate, and afterwards there is no more screening, so sudden revocation doesn't have anything to do with candidate quality and everything to do with economic conditions. One might imagine that strict laws against early termination of a contract would lead to less hiring when the company fears that they might be affected by a downturn... but that would then pretty much be the intended purpose, to think twice before you can afford someone before hiring them?
- cowl 4y ago
  The Effect of that kind of policy was already tried in Italy to a certain extent. The result was that For every new "Temporary Investment" (meaning a project that needed 1-3 years of pushing) Noone was hiring and everyone, no exceptions was "renting" bodies from "consultancy firms". The result was distatrous for the companies that needed to pay Consultancy prices because they could not afford to hire without being able to downsize after 1-3 years and the employees who ended up in the consultancy sweat shops because they were pratically the only ones who would offer to hire. The salaries stagnated because the market stagnated (and still Italian Salaries in Tech are among the lowest in all EU). The only ones who profited from this were the middle men. Many still see this kind of a policy as something to be admired but I would rather have a vibrating market and change jobs every 2-3 years rather than "settling for life" like the proponents of this system predicate at a sweat shop.
  - stdbrouw 4y ago
    That's a completely different topic. We're talking about revoking someone's contract before they even started, not 1-3 years after they came on board.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > I don't see what one has to do with the other. It is incredibly connected. There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. If companies feel they need 4 or 5 rounds of interviews today before making an offer and you all of a sudden mandate that there's more of a risk for making an offer, they might decide on an extra round or two of interviews to try and be even more certain about their decision. Personally I think a lot of the issues around hiring could be solved by making firing much more trivial and less risky for businesses: this would make a lot of the process around hiring and the many extra rounds of interviews less important. Companies would be a lot more incentivized to give people they like a shot and see if they can hack it in a role or not. This would IMO be a big improvement for say self-taught developers or those with non-traditional backgrounds who can get easily dismissed because they present more of a risk than somebody who went to X good school and worked at big corporation for Y years.
cowl 4y ago
Or companies will simply use the trial period to terminate. Painful as it is it's much better to get a revocation of offer than for the company to go through the motions just to arrive at the "clear" moment of trial period and terminate you position after 1 month.
dataflow 4y ago
Is there really no solution? What if laws required companies with > N employees to pay M months of severance + any relocation reimbursements they promised if they terminate the employment agreement for reasons other than employee misconduct?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
l33t233372 4y ago
> Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete Laws are generally created to benefit people who are not described as “overseas”
- tough 4y ago
  Well fuck your laws if they will discriminate me based on whereever seas I come from or whatever. So much for the land of the free, supposing these people have their visas and shit in order, I don't see why the law shouldn't protect them too
  - l33t233372 4y ago
    I’m not sure why you are referring to the “land of the free,” as I was referring to laws of countries in general. Laws are nearly always created to benefit the country creating them.
    - tough 4y ago
      Sorry in HN I default to US centrism. Anyways I'm assuming you can be legally imigrating to a country at which points laws should be make to protect you too. I don't see how is there any morality in laws that disregard a human being due to their passport or lack of thereof. I understand it is what it is, still madness.
      - l33t233372 4y ago
        It was my understanding we were talking about laws making companies want to hire from within at the expense of hiring people from “overseas”. That is, I was under the impression we were discussing things that happened before the legal immigration process had began.
asveikau 4y ago
Please see: https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layoffs-caused-by-social-contagion-companies-imitating-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layo... I felt the same way about the big tech layoffs and hiring freezes in 2008-2009. (Followed by huge, across the board, non-merit based salary boosts in 2010 and a hot job market to follow.) For the startups maybe it's a different calculus, but for the big guys they're mostly doing fine and it's not really about cutting costs. It's that some group of consensus-makers decided that laying off is the appropriate, responsible, even inevitable trend in business. Relatedly, when the socially acceptable thing was to over-hire blindly, few people called them out.
blagie 4y ago
Those are extreme solutions. You don't want to make it impossible to revoke offers or to fire people, but companies should be liable for actual costs. In this case, Google should pay for: 1) The costs of replacing discarded items 2) Move-related costs (e.g. plane tickets, etc.) 3) Some reasonable period of unemployment Those should not be offloaded onto candidate employees.
freeopinion 4y ago
I'm a big believer in automation. To me, it's kinda the point of being a programmer. But it intrigues me how eager some are to eliminate all human aspects from everything. Hiring, firing, building, shrinking. Let's just automate it all with a recursive algorithm. It's just business. Nothing personal. I'm a human. I want to be personal. Yes, there are billions of us and I'm pretty interchangeable. But... I get interested in silly things like when somebody gets a pay raise because they got married. What kind of business sense does that make? It's debatable. But it makes obvious people sense. I rather enjoy living in a people world, even while I work every day to automate it. [Edited for clarity]
wongarsu 4y ago
Here in Germany nobody would move based on an offer, only based on a signed employment contract. Of course you can terminate the contract, but there commonly is a clause that you can't terminate the contract before it starts (to protect both parties from the other party backing out). And even if that clause doesn't exist, by law there is at a minimum a two week notice period, so this example of a company walking back on it a week before isn't possible. And while relocation reimbursements typically would contain a clause that effectively vests it over X years (meaning you have to pay part of it back if you quit) this clause legally can't apply in a case like this where there's no fault of the employee (he wasn't even there to potentially do something wrong). Despite these basic protections, we still manage to hire people around here.
scythe 4y ago
In this case, you could probably just impose a severance if an offer is terminated before X days (say 40) on the job without employee malfeasance; the problem with banning revoking offers is that the downside is very large. If companies had to pay out a few thousand bucks every time they screwed up like this, they'd have to be more cautious, but I don't think it would tip the scales towards not hiring at all or depending on consultants, etc. To avoid excessive moral hazard, the severance value should be calculated based on (X - Y)/2, where X is the minimum days worked and Y is the actual days worked.
ouid 4y ago
This simply isnt true. The idea that every cost of regulation is born entirely by the non-corporate party is corporate PR. Unionizing does not result in worse outcomes for employees or new hires. Lawsuits don't raise the prices of McDonald's coffee. And stronger labor laws won't stop companies from needing personnel. It might move the needle a little, but these things are subject to more forces than you are imagining here, and most of them are much stronger than the offchance that you would need to pay to relocate someone you are immediately terminating.
ivalm 4y ago
You can do something softer, like mandate 3 mo severance for not for cause revocation of offer. The problem is that they can still fire you on day 1.
bambax 4y ago
3. Any offer revoked before the agreed start date implies mandatory payment of 6 months of salary, automatically, without exception.
- gorbachev 4y ago
  So they'll just "revoke" the offer the day you start. For an international relocation that would be much, much worse than what happened here.
  - bambax 4y ago
    We could make it so that making an offer implies the immediate payment of 3 to 6 months of salary, against the fiture actual salary. If the offer is later rescinded the candidate doesn't have to pay it back.
noelherrick 4y ago
Google is profitable. They are not losing money, and they are in no danger of becoming unprofitable because of payroll. If we lived in world where folks measured things in a normal light, Google would not have frozen hiring, rescinded offers, and laid-off thousands. We live in the upside down world. We have to stop accepting the crazy, upside-down values of the modern world. The world would be better if Google just wanted to be an awesome search engine that made money by being great, instead of trying to grow quarter after quarter (unsustainable in the long run).
- bagacrap 4y ago
  eh... Google, more than your average publicly traded company, does rely on external investment by way of the stock in order to conduct its operations. In particular, a very large percent of compensation, especially for the most valued employees, is equity-based. Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Hence, profits were down. The C-suite's insight into the future seems to be that future revenues are not going to make up for the current cost structure. The stock price is roughly correlated with profits (let's ignore NVDA for a moment). So to keep the stock price afloat, profits must be propped up. If the stock price drops, all employees are suddenly paid less, especially the ones you value most. So not doing layoffs is equivalent to giving everyone a pay cut. Pay cuts are even worse for morale and long-term company performance than layoffs. The choice seems clear to me. On top of that, when you're a publicly traded company, your obligation to your shareholders is at least as great as your obligation to employees. If you don't like that agreement, don't go public (as a worker, don't agree to work for a for-profit company). Google is a for-profit, not a cooperative.
  - abdabab 4y ago
    > Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Wrong. Google made 181.69 billion in 2020, 256.74B in 2021 [1] and 283B in 2022 [2]. A 10% YoY increase [2] is better than most of the years they have been public. They possibly made more money in last 2.5 years than all the years they have been public combined. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423000013/googexhibit991q42022.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...
SassyGrapefruit 4y ago
The issue is these businesses are hiring without strategy, consideration to risk, or proper forecasting. There should never be a situation within a fortune 100 business where the forecasting is so poor that offers are rescinded. I began making household budget accommodations for the macro economic situation in the first half of 2022. What was google doing at this point? How does a business spend $20-30K on the search process, send out an offer, then all the sudden realize they don't want to hire that person? What cascade of management failures is required for that to even be a possibility? How is it that these businesses don't consider the human cost of these decisions? This sort of action is unprofessional, questionably moral, and unforgivable. I think the FANG companies were/are overrated. Why would you want to work for a business displaying this level of incompetence?
- gorbachev 4y ago
  The reason is that they are deadly afraid of mass layoffs being leaked beforehand and causing the stock price to slide or a bunch of negative press about it, so the people who know aren't telling anyone but the VIPs in the company about it until the last possible minute.
  - SassyGrapefruit 4y ago
    They are getting a bunch of negative press for rescinding job offers. This doesn't seem any better. Better would be just not hiring people you don't need and not chasing growth like an unmonitored heroin addict.

twawaaay 4y ago

I fail to see the reason for why ban on revoking offers would cause 2x more interview rounds.

malfist 4y ago
It's a strawman. If a company decided they were going to hire someone, they wouldn't suddenly decide to spend twice as much hiring that person, just in case they have a layoff in the future. It just doesn't follow

mschild 4y ago

On a general level sure maybe, but for this particular case, there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs. They're swimming in money and are highly profitable. Pulling the rug out underneath a new employee who is days away from starting and moving his whole life to a new country is simply shitty behaviour.

crdrost 4y ago
Per The Goal, these sorts of broad untargeted cost-cutting measures usually hit revenue as hard as they do costs, I do wonder if Sundar’s “we're heading for a different economic reality” doom mindset will become a self-fulfilling prophecy... At Google that looks like "oh we lost our gov't contacts because we couldn't meet the new software build-chain rules in time because we were understaffed and trying to bet more people on Bard... now we have to lay off more people" and so on. But they are definitely so flush with cash that any prediction of a doom spiral of every increasing cost-cutting measures would be way way premature.
- octacat 4y ago
  They at least lost some money from ads from new possible products, if everything is doom and gloom. But these cost-cutting measures are just to be in the news and protect the price of their stocks (look, we are decreasing our costs). Because otherwise in the news it would be "look, people don't care about online products like it was 2020, so stocks should go down a bit".
dheera 4y ago
> there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs The trouble is, public companies like Google aren't owned by their execs anymore. They've lost control to a bunch of idiots on Wall Street. They optimize for stock price, not employee satisfaction, not customer satisfaction.
- ssharp 4y ago
  What about Meta? Zuckerberg can't be axed and controls 50+% of the voting shares. They are still doing big layoffs and cuts. They have also always been very aggressive about growth and hiring. They are positioning it as more of a flattening, which may actually be what's happening but I'm guessing plenty of IC's are still losing their jobs there.
  - equalsione 4y ago
    You only need to control about 10% to 15% of the stock to force through the kinds of layoffs and money saving activity that is happening. You don't even have to own that much, just band together with similar minded shareholders to form a voting block.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    Zuckerberg is culturally very different to Larry and Sergey. VR was definitely an unusual choice, but if you look at the other choices he has made, he responds to the market. The point with dual-share class is not that the person will automatically do things that are financially terrible, it is that you are beholden to that person's choices. Larry and, to a lesser extent, Sergey are known largely for making bad choices that benefit their employees/friends. I think this is also due to the nature of their business: Google's search business is the most profitable business in the history of capitalism, you need to deploy almost no capital, you need almost no employees, and you can produce hundreds of billions in revenue...there is no business like it. Zuck is clearly aware that their core business is in decline and has been for a number of years so has been forced to make strategic choices. Google have had to do nothing, their execs are comical, the founders are clearly not up to it...but it doesn't matter. The result they get is nothing to do with the inputs going in.
skippyboxedhero 4y ago
> there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs There is. These large tech companies were growing headcount at 20-30%/year, maybe even more at peak. And their revenue is now flat. If you are growing headcount 20% year and revenue isn't going up, what does that indicate? The purpose of a company is to sell things that people want, not provide welfare for the well-educated (Google is one of the worst for this, they are still massively, massively, massively overstaffed but the dual share class has insulated them...they are basically a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly...btw, almost every monopoly I have seen in the wild ends up this way, execs always go native).
BowBun 4y ago
I get that the HN crowd is sensitive to FAANG layoffs. That being said, it's hard to take seriously an anonymous comment claiming they know better than Google's executive board about whether or not they needed layoffs. Unless you were in those discussions, your ideas probably come from the same blog posts posted to HN in the last 6 months. I don't stand to gain anything from defending them, but can we drop the hubris that almost any of us knows how these decisions are made at that level? I'm sure there's a C-suite or two skimming HN every once in a while, but most of us are regular old tech employees slinging code and talking to customers. That doesn't make it any less awful for the people involved, and I feel for their situations.
- zb1plus 4y ago
  I feel the opposite way, when you look at blunders like the Metaverse or Google's complete failure to capitalize on its work with LLMs, you really have to question whether the executive boards of FAANGs really know how to do anything but make themselves more money these days. I can't help but wonder if Google and other FAANGs would making more money and producing better products if the people slinging code and talking to customers were running the company.
- mschild 4y ago
  I have no input on HN in general, but personally I don't work for FAANG nor do I want/intend to. I don't take issue with layoffs in general. I take issue with HOW they're done. It's clear from all the news and HN coverage that whoever is responsible for the layoffs put in absolutely zero thought about compassion and empathy. For some well-paid engineers those layoffs probably didn't have a large effect on their financial situation. For a lot of other people, they probably did. Take Google for example. Instead of notifying people about their layoff, a lot had to find out that they don't have a job anymore by trying to swipe their badge at the office entrance. They couldn't even bother to send an email. That said, you're right. I don't know what's going on inside Google. But I don't need to know all the internal details to see that hiring thousands of people and then letting them go just 2-3 years later is simply stupid planning. From OPs story it also looks pretty apparent that there is not enough internal communication. They've had a hiring freeze for months, then apparently lifted it, then let people go. What exactly is the logical reason behind that? What business reason could there possibly be to do that?
hikawaii 4y ago
Money needs to have a return, even internally. Saying "we can afford it" buys you goodwill, but the same way employer goodwill towards employees shifts with the wind, so does consumer and employee sentiment. People do not generally pick their grocery cart or smartphone based on how the brand makes them "feel". Upper middle class professionals with six figure plus salaries might, but they are far in the minority.
throwaway2037 4y ago
I will only respond to the last paragraph: Google could have done themselves a huge (reputational) favour by offering 5-10K USD compensation to these people. It was already budgeted -- usually 5K+ for single person to move country. And, they should have gone on a PR blitz about "making things right". Whether or not you agree with these PR campaigns, they work for many people. It's hard to resist feel good propaganda spread by marketing pros. Another trick they could have used to avoid this problem: Replace each signed new hire with another layoff. Sure, in the very short term, it is harmful to the org, but how many people are we talking about? Maybe 500 signed offer letters? Also: Try offering money first. If candidate refuses, layoff another person internally.

dralley 4y ago

>There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesn't happen. Google is making 25% profit on massive revenues, they're easily in the 10 best performing companies in the US. There's not a good economic reason for them to do something like this.

Havoc 4y ago

>There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen Blaming firing people before their start date on economy and company seems like one hell of a stretch, especially a profitable one like google.

dooglius 4y ago

What's wrong with a termination fee, as already exists in many contracts?

duxup 4y ago
Even that would just be another debate about how much the fee “should” be.
- xooglechoogle 4y ago
  I doubt it. I expect most people could agree that it should be some small number of months of salary.

bcrosby95 4y ago

> 1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected. The problem isn't quality of candidate, the problem is unknown business changes. Sitting on your hands for 10 rounds vs 5 won't fix those unknowns. Certainly companies might respond this way, but it makes no sense and won't actually prevent them from giving an offer to someone in the face of unknown layoffs.

champagnepapi 4y ago
Agreed, I don't think there would be any benefit to increase the number of rounds. Guessing there would be no extra signal with the marginal rounds, but candidate frustration would be through the roof. I'm already frustrated with 5 ha.

zulban 4y ago

Random thought... maybe international offers have relocation costs up to just several thousand dollars if the offer is canceled like this. The cost scales with revenue of the company and salary offered, so it's almost nothing for small business. I don't think it would be too onerous on Google to take a hit of a few thousand dollars for cases like this. Not nearly enough to ignore international talent. Unfortunately it will likely never happen because it's a USA law to protect foreigners against USA companies.

stbenjam 4y ago

Why do you think rounds would be higher if an offer is unrevokable? That makes no sense to me. At the very least, companies rescinding offers should make a payment equal to a few months of pay. This trend of companies revoking offers and saying "too bad, sorry you quit your job, sold your house and most of your belongings for us."

code_runner 4y ago
i'm not saying that the company has no responsibility... any company (even one as massive as google) can do better than an email and "so bad so sad". However, regardless of economic factors, the process of quitting your job, selling your house, and most of your belongings is inherently risky! In this case its VERY high risk VERY high reward (at least in my estimation). This definitely disadvantages people needing to relocate for that dream job, but we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision.
- stbenjam 4y ago
  > we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision Lol we literally can, or at least mitigate. It’s easy to pass a law (if the particular legislature works for its people and not the corporate interests) that makes job offers binding and getting out of them requires making the other party at least partially whole.
  - lannisterstark 4y ago
    Promissory estoppel already exists.

champagnepapi 4y ago

>This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 Not sure if I agree with this... Is hiring in European countries with stronger labor laws harder? AFAIK the number of rounds is the same. In European countries they have the concept of probation period to protect against an employee who isn't the right fit. We do as well in America, it's just called "at-will employment", so it's pretty much your entire tenure.

mschild 4y ago
Different on a country-by-country basis but generally not really. For example, it's pretty common to have a 6 month probation period in Germany where both the employee and employer can quit/let go at any time with a 2 week notice period.
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  You can negotiate that clause away. An employer that wants at-will employment periods should pay US wages or at least contractor rates for those periods.
ResearchCode 4y ago
It's not. You can always fire someone who doesn't do their job. It's slightly harder to fire someone for having the wrong haircut. You can always try constructive dismissal, the penalties are peanuts. Or buy out their permanent contract, it's pretty cheap like an American sign-on bonus.

trentnix 4y ago

> There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I'm absolutely not interesting in arguing for any great solution but I do think people would serve their own interests better applying for jobs that fill needs and not that fill seats. I recognize it's easier said than done, but I really despise the livestock-based personnel management approach that infests most of big corporate.

stdbrouw 4y ago

> Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected. I don't see what one has to do with the other. You only extend an offer after you've vetted the candidate, and afterwards there is no more screening, so sudden revocation doesn't have anything to do with candidate quality and everything to do with economic conditions. One might imagine that strict laws against early termination of a contract would lead to less hiring when the company fears that they might be affected by a downturn... but that would then pretty much be the intended purpose, to think twice before you can afford someone before hiring them?

cowl 4y ago
The Effect of that kind of policy was already tried in Italy to a certain extent. The result was that For every new "Temporary Investment" (meaning a project that needed 1-3 years of pushing) Noone was hiring and everyone, no exceptions was "renting" bodies from "consultancy firms". The result was distatrous for the companies that needed to pay Consultancy prices because they could not afford to hire without being able to downsize after 1-3 years and the employees who ended up in the consultancy sweat shops because they were pratically the only ones who would offer to hire. The salaries stagnated because the market stagnated (and still Italian Salaries in Tech are among the lowest in all EU). The only ones who profited from this were the middle men. Many still see this kind of a policy as something to be admired but I would rather have a vibrating market and change jobs every 2-3 years rather than "settling for life" like the proponents of this system predicate at a sweat shop.
- stdbrouw 4y ago
  That's a completely different topic. We're talking about revoking someone's contract before they even started, not 1-3 years after they came on board.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> I don't see what one has to do with the other. It is incredibly connected. There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. If companies feel they need 4 or 5 rounds of interviews today before making an offer and you all of a sudden mandate that there's more of a risk for making an offer, they might decide on an extra round or two of interviews to try and be even more certain about their decision. Personally I think a lot of the issues around hiring could be solved by making firing much more trivial and less risky for businesses: this would make a lot of the process around hiring and the many extra rounds of interviews less important. Companies would be a lot more incentivized to give people they like a shot and see if they can hack it in a role or not. This would IMO be a big improvement for say self-taught developers or those with non-traditional backgrounds who can get easily dismissed because they present more of a risk than somebody who went to X good school and worked at big corporation for Y years.

cowl 4y ago

Or companies will simply use the trial period to terminate. Painful as it is it's much better to get a revocation of offer than for the company to go through the motions just to arrive at the "clear" moment of trial period and terminate you position after 1 month.

dataflow 4y ago

Is there really no solution? What if laws required companies with > N employees to pay M months of severance + any relocation reimbursements they promised if they terminate the employment agreement for reasons other than employee misconduct?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

l33t233372 4y ago

> Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete Laws are generally created to benefit people who are not described as “overseas”

tough 4y ago
Well fuck your laws if they will discriminate me based on whereever seas I come from or whatever. So much for the land of the free, supposing these people have their visas and shit in order, I don't see why the law shouldn't protect them too
- l33t233372 4y ago
  I’m not sure why you are referring to the “land of the free,” as I was referring to laws of countries in general. Laws are nearly always created to benefit the country creating them.
  - tough 4y ago
    Sorry in HN I default to US centrism. Anyways I'm assuming you can be legally imigrating to a country at which points laws should be make to protect you too. I don't see how is there any morality in laws that disregard a human being due to their passport or lack of thereof. I understand it is what it is, still madness.
    - l33t233372 4y ago
      It was my understanding we were talking about laws making companies want to hire from within at the expense of hiring people from “overseas”. That is, I was under the impression we were discussing things that happened before the legal immigration process had began.

asveikau 4y ago

Please see: https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layoffs-caused-by-social-contagion-companies-imitating-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layo... I felt the same way about the big tech layoffs and hiring freezes in 2008-2009. (Followed by huge, across the board, non-merit based salary boosts in 2010 and a hot job market to follow.) For the startups maybe it's a different calculus, but for the big guys they're mostly doing fine and it's not really about cutting costs. It's that some group of consensus-makers decided that laying off is the appropriate, responsible, even inevitable trend in business. Relatedly, when the socially acceptable thing was to over-hire blindly, few people called them out.

blagie 4y ago

Those are extreme solutions. You don't want to make it impossible to revoke offers or to fire people, but companies should be liable for actual costs. In this case, Google should pay for: 1) The costs of replacing discarded items 2) Move-related costs (e.g. plane tickets, etc.) 3) Some reasonable period of unemployment Those should not be offloaded onto candidate employees.

freeopinion 4y ago

I'm a big believer in automation. To me, it's kinda the point of being a programmer. But it intrigues me how eager some are to eliminate all human aspects from everything. Hiring, firing, building, shrinking. Let's just automate it all with a recursive algorithm. It's just business. Nothing personal. I'm a human. I want to be personal. Yes, there are billions of us and I'm pretty interchangeable. But... I get interested in silly things like when somebody gets a pay raise because they got married. What kind of business sense does that make? It's debatable. But it makes obvious people sense. I rather enjoy living in a people world, even while I work every day to automate it. [Edited for clarity]

wongarsu 4y ago

Here in Germany nobody would move based on an offer, only based on a signed employment contract. Of course you can terminate the contract, but there commonly is a clause that you can't terminate the contract before it starts (to protect both parties from the other party backing out). And even if that clause doesn't exist, by law there is at a minimum a two week notice period, so this example of a company walking back on it a week before isn't possible. And while relocation reimbursements typically would contain a clause that effectively vests it over X years (meaning you have to pay part of it back if you quit) this clause legally can't apply in a case like this where there's no fault of the employee (he wasn't even there to potentially do something wrong). Despite these basic protections, we still manage to hire people around here.

scythe 4y ago

In this case, you could probably just impose a severance if an offer is terminated before X days (say 40) on the job without employee malfeasance; the problem with banning revoking offers is that the downside is very large. If companies had to pay out a few thousand bucks every time they screwed up like this, they'd have to be more cautious, but I don't think it would tip the scales towards not hiring at all or depending on consultants, etc. To avoid excessive moral hazard, the severance value should be calculated based on (X - Y)/2, where X is the minimum days worked and Y is the actual days worked.

ouid 4y ago

This simply isnt true. The idea that every cost of regulation is born entirely by the non-corporate party is corporate PR. Unionizing does not result in worse outcomes for employees or new hires. Lawsuits don't raise the prices of McDonald's coffee. And stronger labor laws won't stop companies from needing personnel. It might move the needle a little, but these things are subject to more forces than you are imagining here, and most of them are much stronger than the offchance that you would need to pay to relocate someone you are immediately terminating.

ivalm 4y ago

You can do something softer, like mandate 3 mo severance for not for cause revocation of offer. The problem is that they can still fire you on day 1.

bambax 4y ago

3. Any offer revoked before the agreed start date implies mandatory payment of 6 months of salary, automatically, without exception.

gorbachev 4y ago
So they'll just "revoke" the offer the day you start. For an international relocation that would be much, much worse than what happened here.
- bambax 4y ago
  We could make it so that making an offer implies the immediate payment of 3 to 6 months of salary, against the fiture actual salary. If the offer is later rescinded the candidate doesn't have to pay it back.

noelherrick 4y ago

Google is profitable. They are not losing money, and they are in no danger of becoming unprofitable because of payroll. If we lived in world where folks measured things in a normal light, Google would not have frozen hiring, rescinded offers, and laid-off thousands. We live in the upside down world. We have to stop accepting the crazy, upside-down values of the modern world. The world would be better if Google just wanted to be an awesome search engine that made money by being great, instead of trying to grow quarter after quarter (unsustainable in the long run).

bagacrap 4y ago
eh... Google, more than your average publicly traded company, does rely on external investment by way of the stock in order to conduct its operations. In particular, a very large percent of compensation, especially for the most valued employees, is equity-based. Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Hence, profits were down. The C-suite's insight into the future seems to be that future revenues are not going to make up for the current cost structure. The stock price is roughly correlated with profits (let's ignore NVDA for a moment). So to keep the stock price afloat, profits must be propped up. If the stock price drops, all employees are suddenly paid less, especially the ones you value most. So not doing layoffs is equivalent to giving everyone a pay cut. Pay cuts are even worse for morale and long-term company performance than layoffs. The choice seems clear to me. On top of that, when you're a publicly traded company, your obligation to your shareholders is at least as great as your obligation to employees. If you don't like that agreement, don't go public (as a worker, don't agree to work for a for-profit company). Google is a for-profit, not a cooperative.
- abdabab 4y ago
  > Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Wrong. Google made 181.69 billion in 2020, 256.74B in 2021 [1] and 283B in 2022 [2]. A 10% YoY increase [2] is better than most of the years they have been public. They possibly made more money in last 2.5 years than all the years they have been public combined. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423000013/googexhibit991q42022.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...

SassyGrapefruit 4y ago

The issue is these businesses are hiring without strategy, consideration to risk, or proper forecasting. There should never be a situation within a fortune 100 business where the forecasting is so poor that offers are rescinded. I began making household budget accommodations for the macro economic situation in the first half of 2022. What was google doing at this point? How does a business spend $20-30K on the search process, send out an offer, then all the sudden realize they don't want to hire that person? What cascade of management failures is required for that to even be a possibility? How is it that these businesses don't consider the human cost of these decisions? This sort of action is unprofessional, questionably moral, and unforgivable. I think the FANG companies were/are overrated. Why would you want to work for a business displaying this level of incompetence?

gorbachev 4y ago
The reason is that they are deadly afraid of mass layoffs being leaked beforehand and causing the stock price to slide or a bunch of negative press about it, so the people who know aren't telling anyone but the VIPs in the company about it until the last possible minute.
- SassyGrapefruit 4y ago
  They are getting a bunch of negative press for rescinding job offers. This doesn't seem any better. Better would be just not hiring people you don't need and not chasing growth like an unmonitored heroin addict.