Re:Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai
by Panini_Jones on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @09:02AM
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> 4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.
Meta did lock people out overnight all systems except e-mail. For some reason, some employees had access to workplace until ~10:XXAM EST, which doesn't seem intentional. No one at Meta really uses email.
They didn't explain why people were let go. The Q&As afterwards were brutal. Many high performers or people on high priority projects (e.g. ads) were let go.
Ex-meta employees seem to be overall more demoralized by the company already. Why complain about how you were let go when it seems in line with how the company was treating you anyway?
2. You can't fire Zuck, its not possible without his consent, since he is the majority shareholder. You could fire Sundar. Other tech CEOs that did layoffs (eg. MSFT) have generally well-liked CEOs or already are experiencing leadership changes (salesforce).
3. To build on (2), people don't really seem to like Sundar. He isn't a technical guy, just an MBA from McKinsey (he has an unrelated-to-software engineering degree). There has been a lot of ink spilled on if he has a vision at Google, which I won't take an opinion on, but he was CEO for a lot of the time where people thought Google was getting worse. People complained about quality of search, bureaucracy in the company, inability to diversify income (although they still make a lot of money), etc. The only good thing I've heard anyone say about his was an (Indian) Uber driver who said that he represented the dream for Indian immigrants - going to IIT, moving to America, and getting put in charge of a major global corp.
4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.
5. Cynically, most companies time bad press to news cycles, google didn't do this. Meta did layoffs near the election, which was a much bigger news event.