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.

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.

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.

Larry -- his personal wealth is still determined by shareholders, not employees or customers.

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.

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.

Are you suggesting that CEO's don't have exactly the same motivations and incentives?

Of course, understanding the reality of this situation and acting accordingly would be good for stock price.

What you're talking about is optimizing for short term stock prices or the perception of what's good for them.

    a bunch of idiots on Wall Street

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.)

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

Google is making 25% profit on massive revenues, they're easily in the 10 best performing companies in the US. There's not a good economic reason for them to do something like this.

However, regardless of economic factors, the process of quitting your job, selling your house, and most of your belongings is inherently risky! In this case its VERY high risk VERY high reward (at least in my estimation).

This definitely disadvantages people needing to relocate for that dream job, but we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision.

Lol we literally can, or at least mitigate. It’s easy to pass a law (if the particular legislature works for its people and not the corporate interests) that makes job offers binding and getting out of them requires making the other party at least partially whole.

What if laws required companies with > N employees to pay M months of severance + any relocation reimbursements they promised if they terminate the employment agreement for reasons other than employee misconduct?

Blaming firing people before their start date on economy and company seems like one hell of a stretch, especially a profitable one like google.

I don't see what one has to do with the other. You only extend an offer after you've vetted the candidate, and afterwards there is no more screening, so sudden revocation doesn't have anything to do with candidate quality and everything to do with economic conditions. One might imagine that strict laws against early termination of a contract would lead to less hiring when the company fears that they might be affected by a downturn... but that would then pretty much be the intended purpose, to think twice before you can afford someone before hiring them?

It is incredibly connected. There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. If companies feel they need 4 or 5 rounds of interviews today before making an offer and you all of a sudden mandate that there's more of a risk for making an offer, they might decide on an extra round or two of interviews to try and be even more certain about their decision.

Personally I think a lot of the issues around hiring could be solved by making firing much more trivial and less risky for businesses: this would make a lot of the process around hiring and the many extra rounds of interviews less important. Companies would be a lot more incentivized to give people they like a shot and see if they can hack it in a role or not. This would IMO be a big improvement for say self-taught developers or those with non-traditional backgrounds who can get easily dismissed because they present more of a risk than somebody who went to X good school and worked at big corporation for Y years.

Why does it increase the risk? Are they regularly screwing over hires like this? If so, it's good to force the behavior change. If they only screw over hires like this in economic downturns, then "more rounds" wouldn't affect that so they wouldn't add more rounds.

What's the solution to improving job-seekers lives though? I think this is a case where the incentives are really counterintuitive and solutions that sound good are the wrong ones to make peoples' lives overall better.

On the surface, it sounds great to focus on a goal oriented outcome and give employees better protections and make firing harder. Giving Americans European style workers rights sounds great. But in practice, I think that just makes the hiring process a nightmare and makes it a risk for businesses to try and add anybody because there's always a chance that things don't work out for some reason. This is why there's so many stupid rounds of interviews and hoops to jump through for every position now.

I think we'd go a long way to making hiring much better by doing the counterintuitive thing: making firing much easier and reduce business risk as much as possible. Make the risk for businesses nearly zero for hiring anybody because it's so easy to reverse things if they don't work out, and all of a sudden the incentive for multiple round interview processes goes away because you'd want to rush and snatch up anybody you like and want to give a shot without risking losing them in a 6 week multi-round interview process.

Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.

Feel free to hate me for saying all of that. I know it sounds bad on the surface and I can't really articulate this theory in a way that's perfectly convincing. But this is one of those things that for some reason makes perfect sense to me and is a strong gut feeling as the correct thing. Also note that I'm a job seeker at the moment, and I'm saying all of the above through a self-interested lens of wanting to make the hiring process as simple as possible.

I'm not disagreeing with that, but I want an explanation of where the additional risk would come from in this situation. And why, because of that risk, companies would do something like add more hiring rounds.

If the additional risk is just getting stuck with an employee during a downturn, more hiring rounds wouldn't affect that, so there would be no reason to add them.

Also it seems like it's currently pretty easy to fire people. I'm not at all confident you could reduce the hiring process by making firing even easier. And how do you propose handling the people that already have jobs and need a commitment before quitting them?

I'm absolutely not interesting in arguing for any great solution but I do think people would serve their own interests better applying for jobs that fill needs and not that fill seats. I recognize it's easier said than done, but I really despise the livestock-based personnel management approach that infests most of big corporate.

Not sure if I agree with this... Is hiring in European countries with stronger labor laws harder? AFAIK the number of rounds is the same. In European countries they have the concept of probation period to protect against an employee who isn't the right fit. We do as well in America, it's just called "at-will employment", so it's pretty much your entire tenure.

The problem isn't quality of candidate, the problem is unknown business changes. Sitting on your hands for 10 rounds vs 5 won't fix those unknowns.

Certainly companies might respond this way, but it makes no sense and won't actually prevent them from giving an offer to someone in the face of unknown layoffs.

Laws are generally created to benefit people who are not described as “overseas”

So much for the land of the free, supposing these people have their visas and shit in order, I don't see why the law shouldn't protect them too

Anyways I'm assuming you can be legally imigrating to a country at which points laws should be make to protect you too.

I don't see how is there any morality in laws that disregard a human being due to their passport or lack of thereof.

I understand it is what it is, still madness.

That is, I was under the impression we were discussing things that happened before the legal immigration process had began.

I felt the same way about the big tech layoffs and hiring freezes in 2008-2009. (Followed by huge, across the board, non-merit based salary boosts in 2010 and a hot job market to follow.)

For the startups maybe it's a different calculus, but for the big guys they're mostly doing fine and it's not really about cutting costs. It's that some group of consensus-makers decided that laying off is the appropriate, responsible, even inevitable trend in business.

Relatedly, when the socially acceptable thing was to over-hire blindly, few people called them out.

In this case, Google should pay for:

1) The costs of replacing discarded items

2) Move-related costs (e.g. plane tickets, etc.)

3) Some reasonable period of unemployment

Those should not be offloaded onto candidate employees.

I'm a human. I want to be personal.

Yes, there are billions of us and I'm pretty interchangeable. But...

I get interested in silly things like when somebody gets a pay raise because they got married. What kind of business sense does that make? It's debatable. But it makes obvious people sense.

I rather enjoy living in a people world, even while I work every day to automate it.

[Edited for clarity]

Despite these basic protections, we still manage to hire people around here.

Unionizing does not result in worse outcomes for employees or new hires. Lawsuits don't raise the prices of McDonald's coffee. And stronger labor laws won't stop companies from needing personnel. It might move the needle a little, but these things are subject to more forces than you are imagining here, and most of them are much stronger than the offchance that you would need to pay to relocate someone you are immediately terminating.

For an international relocation that would be much, much worse than what happened here.

If the offer is later rescinded the candidate doesn't have to pay it back.

Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Hence, profits were down. The C-suite's insight into the future seems to be that future revenues are not going to make up for the current cost structure. The stock price is roughly correlated with profits (let's ignore NVDA for a moment). So to keep the stock price afloat, profits must be propped up. If the stock price drops, all employees are suddenly paid less, especially the ones you value most. So not doing layoffs is equivalent to giving everyone a pay cut. Pay cuts are even worse for morale and long-term company performance than layoffs. The choice seems clear to me.

On top of that, when you're a publicly traded company, your obligation to your shareholders is at least as great as your obligation to employees. If you don't like that agreement, don't go public (as a worker, don't agree to work for a for-profit company). Google is a for-profit, not a cooperative.

Wrong. Google made 181.69 billion in 2020, 256.74B in 2021 and 279.8B in 2022. [1] If you ignore 2021, a 23B/9% YoY increase is better than most of the years they have been public. They possibly made more money in last 2.5 years than all the years they have been public combined.

> Pay cuts are even worse for morale and long-term company performance than layoffs. The choice seems clear to me.

Are you saying most employees would prefer losing their job or living without job security over a pay cut with job security?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

Pay cuts don’t come with job security. You can get laid off after a pay cut as easily as without one.

Employees prefer not having their pay cut. The ones that are dismissed aren’t employees any more, so from the narrow perspective of the organization dismissing them, their morale doesn’t matter. Pay cuts impact the morale of the people still working more than lay offs do.

Now, where pay cuts – especially explicitly and enforceably temporary ones – come with some real measure of job security as a way of avoiding layoffs, that can be different, but that usually only happens where there is a specific contractual arrangement, usually via a preexisting union and labor-management negotiation (and even there its tricky, especially in the private sector, because firm guarantees are hard.)

The fact that revenues were actually up while profits were down reinforces that Google has let costs spiral out of control.

This sort of action is unprofessional, questionably moral, and unforgivable. I think the FANG companies were/are overrated. Why would you want to work for a business displaying this level of incompetence?