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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Larry/Sergey is firmly in control of Google. Even if you buy up all the available GOOGL shares you will be outvoted by them. The company is not owned by Wall Street. Employees and most investors have GOOG stock that has no voting rights.
Usually, those "idiots" are pension funds, mutual funds, and ETFs owned by retail investors. And, this is normal for a mature company to no longer have insiders control the vast majority of voting shares.
Also, Netflix free float stock is no longer controlled by a few people. It is widely held, and it hasn't lost sight of its mission. It continues to optimize employee and customer satisfaction with great success for their stock price. (No, I am not a shill for Netflix.)
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.
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.
> 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).
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.