Because that in particular will freak everyone else in the company out, and .. most importantly... Google is no longer scared about those people going to their competition, because their competition is also flushing talent away. In the past, Google was willing to dump all sorts of cash into talent as long as it kept people from creating a truly competitive landscape. Now, they don't have to worry as much.

The layoffs had nothing to do with getting rid of low performers, it was a way of putting everyone on notice that it doesn't matter how well you perform... management has the power, not you.

Random layoffs that affect high performers and low performers equally doesn't encourage performing higher. If anything it encourages performing lower because why bother if it's not going to even save your job?

It might not be so much about encouraging performance as encouraging compliance.

That’s my impression of large companies. They value compliance way more than performance.

Because it doesn't matter. The idea that these companies are overflowing with "low performers" is a complete myth, a lie that people use to comfort themselves.

The Big Names are actually filled with so many smart and productive people that it doesn't matter who they lay off.

are you suggesting that they are intentionally scaring their staff in order to increase productivity? What management school is this thesis from?

The management school of stupidity, which in practice is met a lot more than any other management school, even at top tier companies.

The more I read about this stuff, the more I realize that a lot of is out of sheer luck of hitting product market fit. Google monopolized open internet ads 20 years ago and except for protecting their moat they haven't done much else, 90% of their money still comes from there. They're trying to expand with the cloud, but they're a distant 3rd or 4th.

it's not to increase productivity, it's to increase compliance and push down salary bands.

Have you forgotten this is the same company that had a backroom non-poaching pact with Apple (and probably other SV firms) a decade ago? And got caught red handed and got in a shitload of trouble for it?

When I joined Google in 2011 they were still dealing the fallout from that.

> it's not to increase productivity, it's to increase compliance and push down salary bands.

Its as if someone has forgotten that they can increase revenue instead.

Which one is easier for executives, particularly during a recession?

fair point, short-termism is so ick and its such little thinking.

Google doesn't have a revenue problem and hasn't since its IPO. For the past 15 years they've made the stockmarket happy by somehow magically conjuring increases in ad revenues every single quarter. It's a mind boggling firehose of money that just never seemed like it would stop increasing in intensity.

It still hasn't stopped, though it may have slowed a bit in its increase. But there's no danger on the revenue front. Just danger on stock price, because investors really want Number Go Up continually.

So the moves last week were really about making investors think Google is Doing Something and exercising downward pressure on wages.

Its a sector-wide move to put downward pressure on wages and bargaining power, and Google is only a small part of it.

That would put me on notice that it is not worth working for such a company and I'd start sending résumés to various recruiters. No matter how you would explain this, it is nothing short of idiotic.

This reasoning seems plausible to me, but it seems to be having the opposite on employees from what I have seen. Why invest yourself in a company that will fire thousands of people for petty reasons? I think this will cause many employees to shift more focus on how to look good on paper, versus doing actual interesting or useful work that might fly under the radar.

Google makes so much money on ad revenues that their entire workforce could be completely lazy and unproductive and get almost nothing done and they'd still have money to burn.

Ads is a money printing machine. The most important roles there are SRE, data centre, and ops/infra jobs that keep the machine up and running.

Are you sure about that?

"Profits [in Q3 2022] were at $13.9 billion, down from $18.9 billion in Q3 2021"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/google-profits-plumm...

Ok but why work harder when the message was "it doesn't matter how hard you work"?

> These are not coasters.

Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.

This ratio is key. Impact/pay. And from what I gathered working there until 2020, impact was starting to weigh more on how you elevate others around you. Meaning leadership. These “stars” might have personal brand power, but if they are collecting big pay and even working “hard” it might not be enough

IME, having worked with "tech celebrities", the veneer they can work so hard on maintaining isn't exactly reflective of actually working with them. I worked with one particularly famous person, who barely did anything internally, and spent all their time on external conferences and talks to preserve their external reputation - mostly coasting on past accomplishments. Not saying that's what happened here, but public visibility isn't correlated to internal engineering/leadership impact imo, and can even be detrimental.

> IME, having worked with "tech celebrities", the veneer they can work so hard on maintaining...Not saying that's what happened here...

I know both Chris and Jeremy well and I wouldn't imagine either of them trying to "maintain a veneer"

Knowing Jeremy fairly well, I would certainly agree on that.

Not to argue at all, but for some of those hires "Maintain Google's Brand Image in X Category" is their job - They're not there to work hard and drive innovation in those sectors, but to represent that Google hires and does work in that area.

Imagine learning that was your job.

It's not uncommon; There's a title for it - "Brand ambassador" - Though it's often the case that your official job title is something different while you act in that role. I doubt people in that position have illusions about what their role is, and in fact most are probably offered the choice of how much they lean into the branding and how much "Real Work" they do, with expectations set around "You are famous/known for X, we want X people to like us, go off and talk about X to cast us in positive light".

Pretty comparable is "Developer Advocate". The job is to grease the wheels between people using your services and the developers developing them. In that role, they playact as both customer and provider, both to developers and consumers. An awful lot of Developer Advocates are mediocre at both, but you don't need to be good; In fact, in some ways being mediocre is a plus, because the point is to represent each side to the other.

Whereas, the people who have done great things and spend their time on brand instead of "Doing X"; Often they are coasting on reputation, but it's a form of retirement for them. They still like X. They still want to do X, but as a hobby, and getting paid to talk about X and get others excited about X is like having your cake and eating it.

Brand ambassadors are a different thing. Thats like when a famous rapper is the official fan of an NBA club. Employees hired on to positions with technical contributions (developer advocate) which is just a cover for some kind of image building in the market.. dunno

> Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.

Your suspicion is what would need to be substantiated. Contributions made by these people are well known.

> Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters.

The official messaging is that the layoffs were made in areas that are low priority for the company. Open source has been an afterthought at Google for many years. Occam's razor says that these people were laid off because they were working in areas of low priority.