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Work stuph
I work at Google. As of last night, I appear to still work at Google, but one member of my ten-member team doesn’t.
There has of course been no official announcement of any specific names of people laid off, but somebody posted a way you can tell: using an in-house access management app that many Googlers use every day, look at the list of people who have a particular access, and the recently laid-off show up in red as “excluded”.
The teammate in question was fairly new, having worked for Google for a bit over a year, but we have more recent hires who didn’t get laid off. I have no idea how the company decided whom to fire, and no criteria have been announced. Those in the US have been informed by email, and then immediately lost their work email accounts (I’m not sure how those two facts interact), while those outside the US haven’t been informed yet.
Google says those laid off will continue to get paid for at least two months, will get severance packages of twelve weeks’ pay plus two weeks per year they were at Google, and will have health insurance and immigration assistance for at least six months. But with all the other tech companies laying off too, it won’t be easy for those folks to find new jobs. And getting fired so abruptly, with no warning, is really rough.
There has of course been no official announcement of any specific names of people laid off, but somebody posted a way you can tell: using an in-house access management app that many Googlers use every day, look at the list of people who have a particular access, and the recently laid-off show up in red as “excluded”.
The teammate in question was fairly new, having worked for Google for a bit over a year, but we have more recent hires who didn’t get laid off. I have no idea how the company decided whom to fire, and no criteria have been announced. Those in the US have been informed by email, and then immediately lost their work email accounts (I’m not sure how those two facts interact), while those outside the US haven’t been informed yet.
Google says those laid off will continue to get paid for at least two months, will get severance packages of twelve weeks’ pay plus two weeks per year they were at Google, and will have health insurance and immigration assistance for at least six months. But with all the other tech companies laying off too, it won’t be easy for those folks to find new jobs. And getting fired so abruptly, with no warning, is really rough.
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The way they did this sounds harsh. It stinks when people don't get a chance to say goodbye and try to do orderly transfers and stuff. I assume that Google (and the other large tech companies) have measures in place to protect against damage from the disgruntled; you can, for example, cut access to production systems without also cutting email and chat. A smaller or newer company might not have worked that stuff out, but Google must have. I mean, they have to worry about compromised employee accounts or stolen laptops, and presumably they don't fire people that happens to.
I'm glad you weren't affected directly. I'm sorry your team was hit.
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If you want to know what ordinary rank-and-file Googlers are thinking about current issues, you go to an internal site called "memegen", where people post stock images that they've re-captioned (which, in an abuse of Richard Dawkins's coinage, are called "memes"). Every time there's a companywide announcement, even one less significant than this one, there are immediately dozens or hundreds of memes on the subject (including some "meta" ones like the two-frame cartoon captioned "layoff announcement / memegen load test"). There were some last night about an "activist investor" becoming CEO and saying the company really should trim head-count by not 6%, but more like 20%, to 150K. But I haven't found any matching external news stories: the closest is one from two months ago that investment fund TCI, which holds a bunch of Google stock, wanted it to trim 10,000 headcount.
Anyway, it sounds as though the reason for the layoffs is that some big investors think Google has been growing payroll too quickly, paying employees too much, and could have a 40% operating margin rather than its current 25% if it stopped doing these irresponsible things. Which presumably would mean more returns to stockholders, although such returns are necessarily in the form of appreciation because Google has never paid stock dividends. In other words, we need to lay off 10,000 or more workers and cut compensation so the stock price will go up.
I've never understood why Wall Street is so fond of layoffs. Ultimately, one would hope stock prices reflected a company's long-term viability and profitability, and it's not obvious that layoffs help that, but layoffs almost always boost stock prices. Sure, there's such a thing as a company that's hired too many people too quickly, but there's also such a thing as firing people you actually needed in order to keep the lights on (ask Elon Musk about that).