Cynically, because the cost of paying out what they promised these workers is less than the goodwill they'll lose.

Optimistically, because it's the right thing to do.

The blame of the recent layoffs lay not with the employees but with the managers who had miscalculated their prospects in the midst of the covidic plague.

Why is it the company's responsibility to keep employees that are no longer necessary? I don't understand that. Did Google or any other company promised these people that they will be hired forever? Google hired them and paid them very cushy salaries. What am I missing? I really don't understand the discussion around those recent layoffs.

And people wonder why birth rates are falling and people are afraid to make long term commitments.

Corporations like this don't deserve any loyalty. If I worked there and anybody offered to pay me even a few percent more, I'd leave in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't even work hard, only the bare minimum to not get fired, because why should I? In conservative media this this is being spun as "nobody wants to work anymore because millennials and gen Z are lazy" but the real reason is very obvious for anybody under 30: as a corporate employee hard work doesn't pay off most of the time, instead you will be fired when shareholders are in danger of losing a few dollars.

Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job? As employee I enter into mutually beneficial (and in case of IT and FAANG - extremely beneficial) contract knowing that I can be fired once the company deems my services no longer necessary.

The backlash comes from highest educated, best skilled people who received high salaries and who have great prospects of being hired again quickly. Why they suffer?

Should these companies not hire those employees in the first place? The employees would be jobless then, our would be hired by companies witch they previously rejected in favor of FAANG.

To me it all seems like reality check for people who for years were bit out of touch with, well, reality. This is what regular people deal with all the time.

Regarding your argument about falling birth rates - education, career, job stability etc. are all negatively correlated with birth rates. I'm pretty sure that FAANG employees have one of the lowest birth rates in society - I admit, I have no data to back this up.

> Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job?

The analogy is flawed.

You pay him until he completes his job. Or he will be pissed.

Google is telling the plumber to leave before the agreed upon work is done.

The plumber analogy is flawed but yours is not much better. When is the agreed work done for an employee? Employees are not hired to complete a specific job like a plumber is.

> Do you keep paying a plumber once they complete their job?

What an utterly stupid analogy. You never hired the Plumber as an Employee in the first place.

A better analogy is you pay your nanny to fly to Australia with you. You lay her off in Australia and get a refund on her return flight since she no longer works for you — she can find her own way back to the US.

And key here IMO is she is laid off without cause.

That would be true, if majority of those fired were visa workers, or people who moved across country. Is this the case?

No, it is still a good analogy. Going full time has a huge opportunity cost. Have you seen a typical employment contract? You assign all rights for anything you make during the employment to the employer. You cannot do open source stuff under your name unless you give up ownership. You are not free to build your business or gig on the side, at a sufficiently big company lawyers can always claim it is something that the company considered doing so you are competing with your employer and can be sued. Once you are fired, all you have is a name on the resume and hopefully savings.

And here the person in the middle of childcare leave additionally has no time to research job alternatives in job market where thousands are being laid off, so in addition to stress during already stressful time (how much sleep did you get for months after you had a baby?) there is now a hole in the resume that is always a red flag for HR. They are left out in the cold like your nan in AU.

If you hire people as disposable automatons and show no goodwill or loyalty, they will naturally do the minimum necessary not to get fired. So you need to add managers on top to make sure automatons don’t slack. But managers also cost you, and they will try to game the system all the same. So you add cameras and build butt detectors into chairs to see how much time people spend away.

For an employee, it is an arms race to dystopia slowed down by mountains of government regulation. For your business, it will never benefit from any employee’s full potential.

Free market only works if people value good will, good faith, reputation. Embracing a lack of these values puts you on a road that one way or another leads to authoritarianism or oppression.

[EDIT to remove the pot shot on the first paragraph but I still think OP has got to be trolling. But in case you really aren’t…]

Layoffs are bad because they are deceptive and cruel to those laid off and further erode trust from those not yet laid off. They are deceptive because being hired as an employee traditionally carries with it implied permanence that being hired as a temp or contractor (like your plumber) does not. You have a job unless and until your performance provides cause to fire you. They are cruel because they take advantage of the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee. The employee may be here on a visa, or just moved their family across the country, or has debts and obligations where he requires employment. He is harmed if the company suddenly and unilaterally ends the relationship. The company on the other hand is not materially harmed if the employee unilaterally decides to leave.

You can argue that a company is legally allowed to act in bad faith, but “barely within the law” is not a high ethical bar.

Unnecessary first paragraph on an otherwise great comment.

Who told you that you'll have a job until your performance drops? Was that the contract? You'll have a job for as long as you're needed to the company. Once your services are no longer required you'll be laid off. Why should anyone pay you if they no longer need your services? Is this the social contract in USA?

I see nothing deceptive nor cruel in it, unless Google promised not to fired these people

Now, Visa workers and people who moved should be taken care of separately, I agree. Firing them is not ok, at least not without extra compensation. However, are they a big percentage of those laid-off? Centering discussion about minority like if they are majority isn't helpful.

As for power imbalance.. Those hired at FAANG are one of the smartest people in the population. They should have known all of this and factor in all of this. It's hard to treat seriously people who make $300k/year and say they were cruely harmed because they were fired and now they may need to apply to another job.

I wrote this elsewhere, but I do not support Google. I view them as amoral, they make whatever is necessary to maximize profit.

People do make plans based on continued employment. Like, people move across the country and sign a year long lease for a job. There’s no avoiding that.

"Full time perm" means that the employer does not know for how long the job is needed, not that the job will be needed forever.

If there is no obligation for the employee to work forever, then there should not be an obligation for the employer to provide work forever too.

The idea that the laid off people “completed their job” is just false.

People by and large do not exercise loyalty to their employers. This is why companies pay "sign up" bonus, so people could switch jobs over a relatively small bump (otherwise you'd lose a month or two of salary, which would push you into a net negative for almost two years over a 10% bump), and why the bonuses/RSU grants vest on a schedule (so you always have some money to lose when you resign).

Companies that work on loyalty do not have anything of the above, as their loyal employees won't be persuaded by a bigger TC number. Their TC is not high and they are not public too. It would be bizarre for somebody who went to Google or other such company because of the TC (likely applying to multiple jobs out of school or resigning from the previous job) to expect loyalty from the employer.

A company has a basic obligation to only do what makes sense, not what is superfluous.

Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character.

Maybe in some cases companies honestly fuck up, but most of the time it just looks like the idiotic cancer of growth at all costs attitude, a delusional nature. The infinite quintupling down that seems to be the one & only move business-types so often seem to have, a pattern of relentless self-promotion in all conditions.

The genuineness of a company that can tap a wider base, to make calibrated decisions upon, is rare. And instances like this just show how much disdain there is from the top to everyone below. Utter disrespect, no acknowledgement that the org was being false, no try to do right., just letting trust in the org fail.

Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it.

At this scale it seems very hard to make good decisions. It looks like a lot of companies overestimated their long term needs. Also, they might have hired those employees to prevent competition from hiring them,and it might have been a good business decision. What people fail to understand is that corporations goal is not to maximize well-being of their employees.

I wonder if this is a result of liberal movement that allowed those companies to leech to various causes (LGBTQ rights,gender equality, etc) and allowed them to spread image of friendly, responsible, good, family-like image. I 100% support those movements myself, but I also have seen this coming for years. As soon as it no longer pays off to be friendly, corporations stop be such.

The best way to fight this is to educate people that corporations are not your friend, family, they don't care much about you.

If businesses did try to align to & respect their workforces these dont-trust-anyone sentiments wouldn't be necessary. And I contend, the business would likely behave much smarter, make less f-ups, make better products and decisions.

Accepting merely a fait-accompli that there is misalignment & operating in negative prisoners-dilemna non-cooperative modes forever is just a shit play. Both sides need to show up & power-share to actually make anything work.

> Business is not your friend, it's not your family. The only goal of business is to make profit. If they can make something good along the way - great, but don't expect them to do it.

Yep, this is what the robber baron capitalists of the USA also used to believe - profit at the expense of human life. You are simply proving the point here that the only way to win is civil dis-obedience. Boycott, blockade, unionize and make these modern robber barons pay. Unless they feel the pinch they will not change.

Believing in profit at the expense of all other considerations only kick-starts a revolution.

Comments like yours is why I'm afraid to hire anyone to begin with. The moment I do I'm automatically an enemy.

Once an employer has explicitly approved an employee's maternity leave, then the notice period of termination should begin from when the leave has expired. This is basic, common sense and is also law in many European nations.

It's regulated by law in my country so yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. Once your revolution kicks off the mob won't care a single bit that I'm a "good" employer. No, I rather keep working on my own even though I could and should employ someone.

And that is your free choice. I am sure they were many employers in the days after the union movement who decided not to hire because they believed in making employees work 20 hours a day and they were afraid of retribution if they pushed the line. And that is fine - these folks would have lost out business to other employers who appeased the "mob" as you call it. There is only so much a single person can scale out to, after all. Other employers will fill the vacuum.

It is interesting you haven't responded to the guy who believes in profit at all costs. If you truly believe that, then yes, its best not to hire people.

Responded to who? I don't believe that and I also don't plan to treat any employee badly. My point is that it doesn't matter. Once your proposed civil war happens I will automatically be the bourgeoisie class that needs to be crushed, tortured and killed.

> Responded to who?

The guy with a throwaway account who supports Google's policy. You have responded to his objectors several times but not to him which indirectly states where you actually stand.

A civil disobedience movement becomes utterly necessary when employers cross the line of human dignity again and again. It is in everyone's interest to make sure that doesn't degrade to a civil war of-course. It will not just be the bourgeoisie class that is effected here. I will correct my post.

I do not support Google's policy. I view USA's labor laws as barbaric. In EU paid leave and paid maternity leave is standard, nobody even view them as extra benefits.

I just don't understand why very intelligent people are surprised by all of this, and why they expect to never be laid-off.

Perhaps both you and the strawman you are lugging around in this comment chain deserve to go then? If you're really at fear for this I think it indicates that

1. You're in the wrong line of work 2. Maybe you aren't treating employees right and realize it

I view this behavior as an emerging property, and I don't think you can get rid of it.

What we as a society can do is educate people that companies are not your friends, that they are amoral, and they exist to maximize their profits. I think we shouldn't allow them to make political donations or support any charity or social movement because this makes them seem "friendly," - which is a net negative for society.

Can you elaborate on why civil disobedience is the only choice? I don't think it is. We haven't tried other solutions. I would love to see a global agreement to cap the wealth of any individual at $1 billion dollars and the total market value of any company at $100bn (those numbers are arbitrary).

  > I would love to see a global agreement to cap the wealth of any individual at $1 billion dollars and the total market value of any company at $100bn (those numbers are arbitrary).

how would you get any country to agree to such a thing?

I'm terribly sorry, I can't describe my idea and expect to stay anonymous. If I would ever describe it again I could be linked to the account, which defeats purpose of creating the throwaway account.

One day I hope to be a billionaire and at least try to change the system. I would gladly spend nost of my wealth to see this happen.

> Mis-hiring a ton of people to only let lots of people go shows a untrustworthy dishonest shallow character.

How many people in HN do you think have moved out of gmail/google ? The answer is obvious - very few have. So, we have two theories:

* Either, most people don't think what you said is true.

* Alternately, people think what you think is true but don't care enough. This is like workers in china etc. This is just moral high standing. Expecting great character but not making a change oneself.

So, yeah, nothing will change. 100% sure.

Absurd & bizarre connection you draw. Companies that wish to continue forever face rot. Sometimes it's from over-retaining. But usually IMO it's from under-valuing & under-attending to the people making the meat.

The impact won't show up in a quarter, or maybe even 4, but the hollowing out & disenfranchisement of your workforce has real impact, is what makes you a lumbering husk, that might not be in visible decline, but it does make you weak & fragile & with muted senses, makes you less attuned. The cost of being a shit adds up.

It's more than just Covid. When interest rates are 0 it makes sense to spend a lot on R&D that will pay off in 10 years. When interest rates are 7% suddenly that might not make as much sense.

It's true Google management didn't foresee this issue but it's not like Google was an outlier. Everyone in the economy thought the same thing.

They deserve the whole of the product of their labor.

This is your brain on america

This is one of the reasons why maternity leave compensation is paid by the government in Germany. But to American ears that's socialism or something, I guess.

- Laying off somebody on maternity leave and then not paying them for that leave is exactly what you would expect from a company laying somebody off _because_ they're on maternity leave, which would be strikingly illegal (IMO not immoral per se -- that burden should be averaged across all of society rather than localized to each employer -- definitely illegal though). At a minimum they'd want their ducks in a row to ensure those layoffs were legitimate.

- Promising a person a particular thing (approving maternity leave, for example) goes above and beyond the ordinary employment contract, and cutting the duration of that promise short doesn't sit well.

- Google offers (offered?) a variety of specialized healthcare plans that you can choose _instead of_ a standard PPO or whatever, and those require you to move to doctors in a very small network. Cutting off those services and saying "LOL, have fun with finding new doctors on top of figuring out Cobra" with less than a day of warning is a bigger inconvenience than you'd expect from comparable layoffs elsewhere.

Isn’t the entire point of Cobra that you can keep your previous healthcare plan?

Yep. That didn't stop Google from denying that coverage to the people laid off in the article though, and the fact that it's some sort of custom/in-house thing means they probably have the power to cause that sort of disruption regardless of any eventual legal outcomes.

Because while you are on a medical leave or a maternity leave it’s especially difficult for you to sort out things, or to find another job? “I laid you off while you’re lactating, please find another job in 60 days or leave US”.

In most places in EU it would be illegal to layoff people in those situations, that’s not a US thing of course, but just asking the already-approved deal to be honored seems just obvious.

Aren't they getting 16 weeks of severance + 2 weeks per year. Say an average of 2 years of work. Most people at Google are making at least 150k. That's almost 60k. That's more than the median U.S. worker makes in a year. And more than the median household income in almost every EU country.

Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage.

> Not to mention no one Google lays off is going to have any trouble finding a job paying at least the median wage.

While feeding a newborn or dealing with serious illness?

That’s the point. You’re on a leave for a reason. You don’t expect the leave to be unilaterally canceled.

Not to mention that, if you’re an immigrant, you have visa problems as well.

Most Google employees do not have median expenses or a clear path to getting there without drastically upending their lives.

It's even illegal in China...

G attracted workers by offering this baby bonding leave and increased it recently from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. Even amazon is letting people on leave finish it before their severance starts according to the article. This whole layoff round at G looks extremely rushed and someone probably didn't think through all the edge cases, such as people already on leave. For 20 years, G's main advantage was top of market perks and culture (comp was good, but not the top). These layoff rounds have permanently hurt Google's reputation IMO. When the tech hiring market gets competitive again, they will either have to raise comp significantly once everyone realizes the culture has changed or they won't be competitive to attract the top talent.

I see a recurring pattern of chief people officers and their minions totally destroying company brands and internal morale. This isn't traditional HR nonsense but pure Peter Principle. It really must be too much run plans and messaging through a comms or marketing team first. As a manager, this stuff pisses me off to no end because it seeds worry in the minds of team members that are in no way at risk.

Yep. I know so many people that joined google from other places because of the culture and perks. I certainly chose not to leave because of those things. That calculus is clearly changing.

Yes, if the worker was on maternity leave when laid off. What I have noticed about American culture, despite having money they are extreme penny pitches in the oddest of places.

I am the parent of this thread and been heavily downvoted for my initial comment. I agree with you. If the worker was already on maternity leave they should get stay on maternity leave for the duration of the leave regardless of layoffs. What I was referring to an employee that had been already laid off by google, and at some point after needs to go on maternity leave. I'm not sure google should be obligated to support maternity leave in that case as the employee is no longer subject to company benefits (with the exception of access to COBRA/health insurance)

This comment is probably the best explanation of how American capitalism is effective at self-propagate its tenets through the confidence of those it screws over the most.

because people plan their family around things like maternity leave and rely on these actually being honored. what should they do now, get un-pregnant?