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Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layo

Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google. Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually make it worse - so for example, the timing of this (which the person complains about) is because (AFAIK) they now have one day a month where ~all role eliminations that are going to happen that month, happen. Or so i'm told this is the case. Ostensibly so you don't have random role eliminations every day, which makes some sense, but then you have no way for people on the ground to do anything more compassionate (like move the timing a bit) because they can't get through the bureaucracy. In the end - it's simple - if you disempower all the people from helping you make it compassionate, it will not be compassionate. The counter argument is usually that those folks don't know how to do it in legally safe/etc ways. But this to me is silly - if you don't trust them to know how to do it, either train them and trust them, or fire them if they simply can't be trusted overall.

PaulHoule 1y ago
Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude. Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.
- _huayra_ 1y ago
  Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters. I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline. The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
  - SteveNuts 1y ago
    Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume. He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions". I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate. Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
    - dsr_ 1y ago
      At Amazon? Yes, very likely.
      - PaulHoule 1y ago
        I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
        entropicdrifter 1y ago
        I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again." Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  "because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive" So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure. But some of the data here is just very wrong. Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has: 1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed. 2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well. ... So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :) It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think. As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount. I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's. For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it. (Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured) Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment. That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not. There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process. The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days. I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits: Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits. Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them? Them: Yes Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all? Them: No.
- santoshalper 1y ago
  Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout. So? It's not a weird callout, it's an example where the whole arc is well known.
- acoustics 1y ago
  Bazel is an incredibly productive tool at the right scale. I could not imagine working on a giant monorepo without it. If a startup is killed by Bazel, it probably wasn't the right tech choice for their scale, and it would be more accurate to say that the startup was killed by bad technical leadership.
- 1024core 1y ago
  > somebody like Marissa Meyer Marissa Mayer left Google like, 13 years ago...?
swiftcoder 1y ago
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012. It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door? Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.
- ThrowawayB7 1y ago
  > "I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012." Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.
  - sgerenser 1y ago
    Can confirm as well, was laid off from Microsoft in 2023, and I kept access for about a week and a half (and then was paid for an additional 60 days after that, but no longer had access to anything, this was just the WARN period).
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Same thing for people just leaving. I left in 2024, and my login and everything around it kept working until my announced leave date (and I gave more than a month notice). I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.
skybrian 1y ago
Google didn’t used to be quite so bad at this. Back when they closed the Atlanta office, people there got a lot of notice and opportunity to find another role. The complaints were about not being allowed to go full-time remote. I wonder what changed?
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  When these businesses are in their growth phase, they're relatively lenient about spending and generous to employees. When these businesses run out of opportunities for market growth or entering new markets to improve the bottom line, they turn to cost cutting and squeezing more out of employees to improve the bottom line instead. It's a natural progression for every megacorporation as they hit the limits of their growth.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bsimpson 1y ago
  Ruth and Fiona aren't Patrick and Laszlo. It feels like there was leadership turnover in the late 2010s where "conventional company" people assumed the reins of power and started managing it like one. The founders are complicit too. People like to think "before Larry and Sergey stepped down…" but the founders still control the board (tacitly or explicitly approving of the company's current behavior). Plus, there's Sergey's "60h/w or GTFO" note from a few months back.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    Yeah, this is really common at Big Tech, I saw it happen at FB, and it's only gotten worse since then. The issue is that if you keep hiring leadership/people from the rest of the corporate world (which is basically unavoidable if you are growing) then you'll end up trending towards the median of corporate behaviour over time. It's mostly unavoidable, unless you never hire external managers (which would be very very difficult to do).
- kccqzy 1y ago
ChuckMcM 1y ago
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?" And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care. There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc. What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki. As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events." Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows. Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
- skybrian 1y ago

PaulHoule 1y ago

Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude. Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.

_huayra_ 1y ago
Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters. I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline. The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
- SteveNuts 1y ago
  Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume. He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions". I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate. Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    At Amazon? Yes, very likely.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
      - entropicdrifter 1y ago
        I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again." Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
DannyBee 1y ago
"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive" So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure. But some of the data here is just very wrong. Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has: 1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed. 2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well. ... So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :) It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think. As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount. I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's. For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it. (Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured) Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment. That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not. There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process. The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days. I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits: Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits. Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them? Them: Yes Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all? Them: No.
santoshalper 1y ago
Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout. So? It's not a weird callout, it's an example where the whole arc is well known.
acoustics 1y ago
Bazel is an incredibly productive tool at the right scale. I could not imagine working on a giant monorepo without it. If a startup is killed by Bazel, it probably wasn't the right tech choice for their scale, and it would be more accurate to say that the startup was killed by bad technical leadership.
1024core 1y ago
> somebody like Marissa Meyer Marissa Mayer left Google like, 13 years ago...?

swiftcoder 1y ago

> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012. It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door? Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.

ThrowawayB7 1y ago
> "I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012." Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.
- sgerenser 1y ago
  Can confirm as well, was laid off from Microsoft in 2023, and I kept access for about a week and a half (and then was paid for an additional 60 days after that, but no longer had access to anything, this was just the WARN period).
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Same thing for people just leaving. I left in 2024, and my login and everything around it kept working until my announced leave date (and I gave more than a month notice). I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.

skybrian 1y ago

Google didn’t used to be quite so bad at this. Back when they closed the Atlanta office, people there got a lot of notice and opportunity to find another role. The complaints were about not being allowed to go full-time remote. I wonder what changed?

ThrowawayR2 1y ago
When these businesses are in their growth phase, they're relatively lenient about spending and generous to employees. When these businesses run out of opportunities for market growth or entering new markets to improve the bottom line, they turn to cost cutting and squeezing more out of employees to improve the bottom line instead. It's a natural progression for every megacorporation as they hit the limits of their growth.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bsimpson 1y ago
Ruth and Fiona aren't Patrick and Laszlo. It feels like there was leadership turnover in the late 2010s where "conventional company" people assumed the reins of power and started managing it like one. The founders are complicit too. People like to think "before Larry and Sergey stepped down…" but the founders still control the board (tacitly or explicitly approving of the company's current behavior). Plus, there's Sergey's "60h/w or GTFO" note from a few months back.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Yeah, this is really common at Big Tech, I saw it happen at FB, and it's only gotten worse since then. The issue is that if you keep hiring leadership/people from the rest of the corporate world (which is basically unavoidable if you are growing) then you'll end up trending towards the median of corporate behaviour over time. It's mostly unavoidable, unless you never hire external managers (which would be very very difficult to do).
kccqzy 1y ago

ChuckMcM 1y ago

> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?" And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care. There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc. What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki. As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events." Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows. Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

skybrian 1y ago