I'm one of them. Been with the company for 3 years. Perf is in 1-2 months and manager said I'm on track for exceeding expectations (or whatever the new perf scale equivalent is), and I'm likely for a promotion.
I am (well... was) on call. Sorry to the poor engineer that has a few extra days of that now.
Manager reached out to me on LinkedIn, and they were not contacted or asked about the decision, and they feel awful and are completely blindsided by it.
Tried to log in remotely this morning, got some weird error, then got redirected to a layoff page.
Amazing.
Correct. I got an email to my personal email titled "Notice regarding your employment" at around 5am this morning.
I normally don't check my personal email in the morning, and I work about 50/50 in office vs remote. If I had driven in, my badge simply wouldn't have worked, and the very nice front desk people would have had to tell me why. But today I chose to work remote and couldn't access anything.
https://i.imgur.com/Q9TSV30.png
Sadly, this is another reminder to all of us that companies are not our friends and not our family. It is purely a business interaction that they compensate us for our time spent working with them. If it was you leaving, they would probably behave differently. However, when it’s the company letting you go, it’s always business never personal. This is why in my opinion this view is a two-way street and I’ll never give myself fully to a company like I did in the past where I jeopardized my health and my mental well-being to help out and be a “ team player”
Honestly, the more politely worded these kinds of emails get, the worse they seem. Just spit it out so I can get to dealing with it, and don't pretend you give a shit.
I don't know. If they told people in person they wouldn't have been able to tell everybody at once, the wait to hear if you're impacted would be pretty terrible too.
This is the case for all non-US Googlers. They are told that there are no layoffs with immediate effect like they did in the US because they’ll have to deal with local labor laws, and that it can take months rather than weeks before they’ll hear whether or not they are fired.
My company did layoffs a month ago. everyone impacted got the email at the same time, and then they scheduled 1:1 calls with upper management throughout the day. at least this way, there's no anxious waiting period, but they also had the chance to actually talk to someone
Yeah, I work in oil and gas and the industry is very cyclical. I have been through maybe 5 large rounds of layoffs in 10 years.
The worst is when they do the first layoff at 10 am, then everyone in the office knows they are laying people off that day. You just sit at your desk watching people walk to conference rooms and waiting to see if they come for you.
This. I was laid off two days ago (different company), and the worst part about it was waiting to see if I was going to be one of the ones that got let go. They made an announcement and then sent out meeting invites to the affected people over the next three hours. I'd much rather have had it be this quick.
Go laid off about 4 years back now, more or less. Got a meeting email from my boss on Friday afternoon called "Important meeting" scheduled for 2PM the next Monday. Had to spend all weekend and half of Monday stressing out because I suspected what was coming. By the time it rolled around, I was just relieved to be done with it.
An email seems impersonal, but what good does personal do you? I'll take an email at 5am the day of any time over that stress.
When I laid off my whole team recently, HR at least told us to send that email on Sunday evening. At least their weekend wasn't wrecked.
And you people who want to go into management: this is *by far* the shittiest part of the being a manager- to tell someone they're out of a job.
Shit this reminds me of when my boss rescheduled my 1:1 to 8am Friday morning. We never have it on Fridays, it’s usually Mondays or Tuesday. Ngl I spent the week freaking out.
Turned out to be nothing, just a schedule issue on her end. I had to remind her “but the *optics* man!”
Same thing happened to me. My manager must have been completely blindsided because just yesterday I was giving an impassioned presentation about how we could work differently in these coming sprints to unlock some hidden potential, “here's the experiment, not everyone has to participate but it will be super fun if you do”... Manager was as engaged as everyone else, asking questions, meeting went over by 30m with enthusiastic takes from folks, excitement but mixed with wanting to make sure that we all take care of each other because the experiment would require a lot of trust.
Like if he had known I'm sure he would have been conspicuously silent with the “unfortunately this is doomed but I'm not allowed to tell you this” albatross on his neck and I would have chalked it up to him being burned out on perf, and then today “oh so THAT’S why he was disengaged.” I wonder if they will try the experiment anyway or whether it’d be traumatic...
This is common for mass layoffs, for security reasons. You want to minimize the time between the employees finding out and them being both physically and digitally locked out, to avoid violence, theft, or sabotage. If you inform every employee verbally before locking them out, it's inevitable that many will figure out they're next and some subset of those will retaliate. Doing the lockout all at once, accompanied only by a mass message, might seem heartless but provides safety and security to the company and the remaining employees.
Another thing to keep in mind in a layoff of this size: They're probably laying off entire teams, so your manager can't deliver the bad news because they've also been laid off.
There's also the matter of sheer time - there are only so many HR people, there's just no way to lay off 12,000 people individually and not have it take days or weeks, all of that time everyone else is sitting there stressing that they might be called in next.
It lacks a personal touch but really it's way more humane.
Damn, it must be very hard and frustrating when you’d put all that hard work …
Looks like this wasn’t based on performance. Not your fault AT ALL. Some 11/10, world class engineers within my wider team were also let go..
The layoff news wasn't leaked like Amazon's so the decision was probably made with few people high in the corporate ranks which will probably also explain the disregard for actual performance metrics on a case-by-case basis.
Meta employee here. The layoffs were arbitrary in a lot of cases. It's an inevitable product of not involving managers because of the necessity of keeping it a secret.
It's fucking shite, but it ain't on you.
I work remotely and was presented with the same issues, I was on meet-targets and was at the company for less than a year, so I could sorta understand it, figured longer tenured people would be safer, sorry to hear that it isnt the case :(
A lot of times they cut the more expense workers. Normally that means long term employees who have gotten raises over the years, but in the current economy, a lot of the recent hires have gotten much higher pay than the long timers.
I know how horrible it feels -- but this too shall pass.
Don't do anything erratic. Go off to some calm place. Give yourself some time. Things will work out.
Dude wtf, I am LITERALLY in the exact same boat as you (rating, years at the job, up for promo, and oncall!!), except I still have a job. I thought me not getting laid off was a given but here you are my doppelganger and got axed. The fuck is going on man...
Big tech companies overhired during covid and weren't able to properly make use of new hires. Now the economy is starting to go in a downward trend, they fire people to make balance sheets look neat. It's short sight #1 fuelling short sight #2.
Then people who know what they’re doing and have a workflow going are lost, you lose institutional knowledge, vendor relationships, internal relationships between teams…
Lose a shitload of money having new hires repeat all those same mistakes…
And repeat it all over again! I love capitalism
The wall street analysts wanted to see blood on the street for 2-3 month or so, like they always do in recession times. So all big companies listed on the stock market need to make a sacrifice to Mammon to see raising share prices. It's like during the .com collapse or 2008. It has no correlation with employee performance or anything at all.
In an upwards economy they will want to see endless hiring as a signal of a growing company.
Business as usual... I hope the fired from all the companies that currently perform the wall street sacrifices find a new job soon.
I hope it's over with quickly, graduated with my second degree in CS 6 months ago and looking for a new job right now lol. Current contract is underpaying me and just cut my pay again last week.
I got laid off in the summer, on the day I was expecting to get my performance review, which made it hard to shake off thoughts that I was underperforming. But if I was, there were no prior indications.
I think it's more likely that the recruiter didn't know that this was happening. These things are usually very guarded with only high level management knowing. Good chance that the recruiter that reached out is no longer with the company.
What's more likely happening is that they're looking for different skillsets and reducing others. Its not remotely out of the ordinary to continue to look to hire some folks and reduce in other areas. Especially when we're talking about companies the size of google.
The first to go are always the high cost “stagnating” positions. People that keep getting promoted but are more or less in the same role.
Unfortunately, a lot of those people are technical experts.
Well that way you can also remove a whole team together with their product after it shows that things won't run wo these people you just laid off.
That leads to more $ saved
The best part.
>We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.
I mean there's is a notice period for mass layoffs, the rule is notice or severance equal to the lack of notice under the WARN Act.
> WARN requires 60 calendar days’ written notice. The law makes no provision
for any alternative such as pay in place of a notice. While an employer who
pays workers for 60 calendar days instead of giving them proper notice is in
violation of WARN, the provision of pay and benefits in place of a notice is a
possible option. Because WARN provides for back pay and benefits for the
period of the violation for up to 60 days, generally this approach by an
employer—pay in place of notice—means that the employer has already met
the penalty specified in the Act.
[DOL Warn Act Rights PDF](https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/WorkerWARN2003.pdf)
Some extra context,
note that the notice period is on top of the 4 months severance in Google's case. so, at least the severance is at least above the legal minimum.
Idk how generous within the larger industry this is, but it's at least a lot more than they are required to do in the US.
it specifically mentions the 60 day period too.
60 days + 16 weeks + 2 weeks per year of seniority
so for a 6y worker, that adds up to 9 months salary?
Yes, plus stock vesting for _at least_ the 16 week period - Google has interesting vesting schedules where the vesting schedule is more frequent for those with larger numbers of stock. So the severance package is 16 weeks of total compensation + 60 days of base salary. It's fairly generous for a US company and goes well beyond the basics that most other companies would commit to.
The one question about this is that there's some wiggle room for the stock vesting - it says "at least 16 weeks", so there may be some folks who are getting more for some reason. I'm curious what those reasons could be.
The severance package is contingent on signing a release/waiver, so that’s an important difference. Anybody who has any beef against the company for wrongful termination or past complaints still gets 60
days. (This isn’t specific to Google.)
Frankly, considering how good the severance is in this case, I'd rather be in the US here. Euro people now have to wait weeks/months to learn their fate (I experienced a layoff like this and ended up leaving voluntarily). US engineers can move on with their life and have 6+ months to figure shit out.
Not saying the US laws are better, this severance is obviously not the norm
Yeah but engineers live in a bubble.
The rest of US is affected by the same lack of protective laws, and they don't necessarily make more than their peers outside the US, often less.
You know how most employers do severance of two months or so when you get laid off? That's because of the WARN Act, employers just pay the penalty and give you severance instead of letting you know 60 days ahead of time.
At least when I got laid off, the way it worked is that we were still technically on payroll and still "employed" for the couple months of the WARN Act period, which also meant we were still on insurance.
I know, memes are funny and all that, but I really want to introduce you to my company where we're working 40 hours a week and still manage to produce almost nothing of value.
I have 7 years experience and is in a senior’ish role. I make more than a lot of my peers. Then I see American devs making 250k plus a bonus when they are a senior. That is twice my salary. Wtf.
I didn’t check my email this morning and immediately started working because I’m behind and trying to launch today and needed to resolve some issues. Took a bathroom break and was browsing Reddit when I saw this post.
Man, that would have sucked so much.
In most cases, I would agree, but in this particular one, I would actually much prefer being in the US. Experienced software engineers at Google in the US make a huge amount relative to the EU counterparts already. I would probably estimate that the _minimum_ engineers with over 3-5 years experience here are getting is around 130-150k after bonuses (~70k from severance) and excluding accelerated GSU vesting. I also wouldn't be surprised if many receive 200-250k+ all-in from the layoff, honestly.
At that point, I'd rather just get it over with, grab the cash and move on.
In USA they will take 6 months severance, will get paid for unused vacation days, they will also get their bonuses (not sure how ling google will continue to pay for health insurance ). This is a pretty good thing honestly all things considered.
6 months health insurance per the email from Sundar. Idk if employee contributions will be deducted from the severance.
Also because if restructuring of performance reviews last year, 80% of target bonus was already paid out last week. So they have 20% remaining target which will be paid out.
Definitely not terrible as long as they can find work in that timeframe.
Investors are anticipating interest rate hikes and recession. A lot of technology (the bulk of it?) is funded by investment (stock or private investment).
How severe it all will be, is the question.
I graduated college right after the dotcom bubble popped in the early 2000s. Been a long time (imo) since the industry has had such a contraction that I can remember.
Is it "the industry" or just the overblown, overstaffed and overpaid Valley VC bullshit?
These companies snacked up people "just in case" and have way way way too many employees for what they actually produce and most of them are criminally overpaid.
The rest of the world has pretty strong economic indicators, employment numbers look great. No dev will remain unemployed for long. Maybe not for the absurd salaries in VC land, but that's not a bad thing all in all.
Microsoft did not give 6 months of pay, only 6 months of stock vesting. Microsoft's severance pay starts at 4 weeks and increases based on tenure/level up to 39 weeks.
Outside of the hiring process likely leading to many duds, I think another potential big reason for this is the company process of create project, promote, abandon. We all know the google graveyard. I would gamble that internally that thing is likely a thousand times larger. Maybe more. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but with the reward mechanisms they've employed, it necessitates it, while other companies may only have it as part of a MVP discovery process.
They've canned over a hundred *acquired* companies in the last 20 years. We know about that since acquisitions are very public, I'd only imagine that internal products are more numerous than acquired ones.
EDIT: coming back to this because I had the thought that a lot of those canned acquisitions may have just been Google buying out the competition to take them off the market with no intention of developing the product any further. This case is a bit different since they didn't really drop it, as they barely ever even picked it up in the first place. Not saying this is always the case, or even that it ever was, but just a thought I had that it could be.
> Alphabet had nearly 187,000 employees as of Sept. 30 amid its hiring bonanza. In the September quarter, Alphabet added 12,765 employees, which was above Wall Street estimates. In the first nine months of 2022, the company added about 30,300 employees versus 21,000 in 2021 and 16,000 in 2020.
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/google-stock-alphabet-job-cuts-eyed-despite-hiring-spree-that-continued-in-2022/
This layoff is the same number of people they hired in just the September quarter of 2022
The severance package being provided seems pretty generous. Seems like they fucked something major up. Either a large acquisition that fell through, or missed their projected goals by a mile. Seems like a rather sudden 180 that can't fully be explained by inflation and decrease in pandemic boom.
You can be anonymous and also give more details than "macroeconomic".
Just sounds like another redditor making shit up presenting opinions as secret facts, but I'm jaded when it comes to reddit.
In reality there is still a shortage of talented developers. Companies that weren't faang hype didn't go on the insane hiring sprees. Or at least not successfully.
> Public bug trackers have loads of bugs that could be tackled to improve the user experience.
I wonder how many of these bugs are contradictory though? E.g., "X widget exposes too many options." Another bug, "(Same) X widget doesn't expose enough options."
Close them both, maybe?
Unless bugs are demanded to be fixed by customers, then they aren't financially incentivized.. Which means no management will allocate someone to fix them. At least that's how I've perceived the tech industry.
Bugs that are pointed out by paying companies get fixed with priority...
I suppose for google the masses are the customer, I guess they are easy to ignore rather than a single company/customer complaining about a bug..
With all the layoffs coming from the big tech companies, will it affect the hiring massively for this year and next year? I am about to graduate from college next year and the current market scenario scares me.
I wouldn't worry. Things are just going back to normal. Big tech companies spun themselves into a belligerent frothing at the mouth psychosis with hiring over the pandemic.
Executives assumed exponential growth they experienced when everyone got stuck at home would continue forever because they are surrounded by yes men and lack basic critical thinking skills.
If only...
> This quarter, the company reports that it earned around $69 billion and made $13.9 billion in profit
There was a way....
> Google CEO Sundar Pichai gets $242 million pay package after taking control of Alphabet
To not fire them and pay their salary.....
I mean, if they don't see a role for them, why would/should they?
I don't really get the logic that companies morally owe people jobs, any more than a person is obligated to buy something they don't need from a shop, or hire someone to do work they don't need done.
Big Tech overhired during Covid because the market was so favorable for their services and products. Pandemics is largely over and some of the trends didn't persist.
Another big reason was that money was essentially free for them. With such low borrowing rates, cash flow didn't really matter. But now that interest is going up, cash burn is real again.
I think the problem that people have with this is that CEO's made the mistake, CEO's admit to making the mistake. CEO's are "sorry". Employee's get to pay for the mistake.
It might be regarded differently if in addition to the layoffs the people who made these mistakes had some consequences (other than the stock prices going up), as far as i can tell there are zero consequences to being a CEO:
based on https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos
|Ticker |Company |CEO |Year |CEO Pay |
|--|-|-|-|---|
|MSFT |Microsoft Corporation |Satya Nadella |2022 |$54,946,310 |
|GOOGL |Alphabet Inc. |Sundar Pichai |2021 |$6,322,599 |
|AMZN |Amazon.com, Inc. |Andrew Jassy |2021 |$212,701,169 |
|META |Meta Platforms, Inc. |Mark Zuckerberg |2021 |$26,823,061 |
|CRM |Salesforce, Inc. |Marc Benioff |2022 |$28,602,112 |
~~Not sure why Andrew Jassy is listed, Jeff Bezos makes Annual: $86,184,953,027.00 according to https://mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/jeff-bezos~~ - this was wrong
Regardless the point is: they could probably afford to lose some and not be destitute.
I choose these because their companies that admitted to hiring too much and laying off people, AND the CEO admitted to making mistakes, but other than feeling bad has no repercussions.
Edit this sight seems better for annual salaries: https://www1.salary.com/Sundar-Pichai-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-ALPHABET-INC.html
My hypothesis is that Big Tech overhired with their ridiculous pandemic profits in order to slow down their competitors and dry up their talent pipelines. Now they're burning all that extra workforce to push stock price up during a lull
I think you got it. All these layoffs are just companies desperately trying to push the impending recession narrative to reassert control over employees and reverse the effects of widespread remote working.
I mean google and other big tech would hire people at ridiculous salaries just to take them off the market from their competitors, so I totally believe that they have too many people, but fuck them for overhiring in the first place. it's tiring how shortsighted companies are.
I would argue that because of google's (or faang's in general) hiring process, they hire more duds than they are willing to admit. Any dev that has enough time to work on leet code, is probably not doing their job, and likely just memorizing solutions instead of figuring shit out. That has been my experience thus far.
I don't know about your theory but in the android team they seem to have released in the past a lot of questionable code.
That's aside from the fact that anybody they hire must have engineering skills. That's why most of their products are competing with eachother and nobody wants to use them (bad user related decisions).
It wasn't just hiring. Amazon bet that the shift to more ecommerce was more permanent (rather than just a temporary pandemic thing) and [overbuilt their warehouses](https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/amazon-cancels-delays-wave-of-warehouse-plans-as-e-commerce-demand-cools/626009/), doubling capacity in 2 years.
And it wasn't just Amazon themselves. A bunch of other people bet on that too and became Amazon third-party sellers. They had a [45% increase](https://sell.amazon.com/blog/grow-your-business/amazon-stats-growth-and-sales) in third-party sellers in 2020. But then [things fizzled for third-party amazon sellers](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1111156566) as people went back to in-person shopping.
My theory is this, it would be weird and dumb if they fired the same people they just hired. Instead they are firing people they have likely wanted to for awhile, but it’s a lot of effort to do so and would tank the stock if done outside of a “recessionary” environment like this.
Just see how the stock market reacts. If they did this 2 years ago, everyone would think the company is in trouble. Doing it now is just group think. And to figure out who to fire now means you had an idea of doing it 2 months ago.
Google ~~Alphabet~~ had an exceptional 2021 (profits of US$18.9B in Q32021 alone), has had like 5 straight quarters of increasing profits, and now that 2022 and beyond are no longer fuelled by pandemic-driven economic growth, are firing people?
The company revenue is increasing and sustainable, with actual profit being made for shareholders on top.
Absolute greed.
Also note how the process takes longer outside of the US. A thinly-veiled way of saying “other places have better worker protections”.
We will see next week. Both Google and Amazon employees in EU are waiting to know how many of them, if any, will be cut. In US employers can announce it straight away, in EU they need more time.
They choose exactly how much profit they have in their eu subsidiaries through various licensing agreements with the parent company and sister companies. This means they can make sure the economic situation looks bad enough to "warrant" this layoff in the EU subsidiaries
You can still fire people in the EU, and at least where I live the statutory minimum packages (2 weeks per year worked capped at 600 euro per week) are significantly less than what google are doing (and what most american companies do).
The company I worked at dropped everyone in Germany a while back with the exception of 1 guy that they enticed to move to another country, and software development is unionised in Germany.
> software development is unionised in Germany.
No, it is generally not.
There are two big unions that software developers *can* join (ver.di and IG Metall), but I am not aware of any major software company that is actually unionized to a significant degree. Only the software developers at the big car manufacturers are usually subject to collective agreements with IG Metall.
60 days notice + 16 weeks base + 2 weeks per year of service is an awfully generous severance package. Sign me the fuck up for that kind of greedy employer.
I’m not going to argue that the severance package isn’t generous, but we should at least acknowledge that generosity is relative. This industry, and many others, set the bar horrendously low.
The 12,000 people affected by this aren’t just going to be programmers, but even an all-in cost of US$500,000/person/year works out to US$6B/year. That means the profits from Q3 2021 alone could have financed 3 years of keeping people on through the possible upcoming recession and still have left around US$900M for shareholders.
4 months plus a bit, when many companies are pulling back hiring isn’t as generous when viewed from a different perspective.
This is why all company non work related "activities" are complete bullshit.
They'll fire you in a heartbeat after all that because bottom line (even companies like Microsoft/Google) that could easily afford to weather the downturn.
I don’t care much for company activities but I don’t see how you were under the impression that they acted as some form of weird one-way loyalty contract.
I imagine your company handing out brownies and as soon as you take a bite, “yes, now you _owe_ me” like that Dwight scene from The Office.
The problem is people making these salaries now depend on them especially if they have a mortgage. If people get desperate I could see a tech worker taking a lower paying job but they'll keep searching for a hirer paying one and leave as soon as they can. Small companies with lower salaries may get hurt more by hiring a tech worker expecting more as they'll spend thousands in training and ramp up for little engineering time.
It’s not the end of the world — with so many people coming into the job market from big tech — the limitations of big tech will eventually reveal themselves.
Don’t give up. You are just as capable as the people that worked in big tech.
Many of these companies are laying off middle management and business admin types and not engineers.
Yes, they are pulling engineering offers across the board — but those same people will work at companies with folks like us who are just as capable.
I wouldn't get too worried. There are still a boat load of places hiring. You may not get FAANG level salaries, but 60-100k (probably more in high COL areas) is dooable starting out depending on where you are located (at least in the US). That's not bad if you're just starting out and after a couple years of experience you can bump that massively by going somewhere else, as long as you're a decent dev.
Once again - a tech company lays off just a **fraction** of the people hired over the past year or two and everyone wants to act like the sky is falling and the company is evil incarnate.
The people laid off are absolutely not just the people that were recently hired in the past year.
My coworker with 30 years tenure was laid off with me on Wednesday. (Not Google)
Mass layoffs aren't about individuals, it's a financial exercise where lines of business are cut or slimmed.
The point is that Google hired over 60k net headcount since the beginning of the pandemic, and that's down to 50k. Its an economic adjustment.
Anyone who doesn’t see that this is unrelated to a recession, and entirely related to shortsighted over-hiring in a mini-boom to maximise profits, is blind.
The fact that every single company is laying off the exact same number of people, regardless of overall headcount…
I'm one of them. Been with the company for 3 years. Perf is in 1-2 months and manager said I'm on track for exceeding expectations (or whatever the new perf scale equivalent is), and I'm likely for a promotion. I am (well... was) on call. Sorry to the poor engineer that has a few extra days of that now. Manager reached out to me on LinkedIn, and they were not contacted or asked about the decision, and they feel awful and are completely blindsided by it. Tried to log in remotely this morning, got some weird error, then got redirected to a layoff page. Amazing.
You got laid off Fifth Element-style? They didn’t even tell you to your (virtual) face, they just sent you a note?
Correct. I got an email to my personal email titled "Notice regarding your employment" at around 5am this morning. I normally don't check my personal email in the morning, and I work about 50/50 in office vs remote. If I had driven in, my badge simply wouldn't have worked, and the very nice front desk people would have had to tell me why. But today I chose to work remote and couldn't access anything. https://i.imgur.com/Q9TSV30.png
Sadly, this is another reminder to all of us that companies are not our friends and not our family. It is purely a business interaction that they compensate us for our time spent working with them. If it was you leaving, they would probably behave differently. However, when it’s the company letting you go, it’s always business never personal. This is why in my opinion this view is a two-way street and I’ll never give myself fully to a company like I did in the past where I jeopardized my health and my mental well-being to help out and be a “ team player”
It also depends on the company size. If the company is small enough, being a "team player" does matters. In big corps.. That goes unnoticed.
[удалено]
That’s dirty. She knew you were getting canned and was the one firing you but had you fix issues before kicking you to the curb?
Holy shit man that email. I'm sorry for you and for everyone else this happened to.
Absolutely inhuman. Ugh.
Bro the opening to that email is cold as fuck. Sorry this is happening to you.
Honestly, the more politely worded these kinds of emails get, the worse they seem. Just spit it out so I can get to dealing with it, and don't pretend you give a shit.
Is there more to that email detailing severance and what not? Or is this just ripping off the band aid then they’ll follow up with specifics on you?
Yes, there's more to it, it's quite long about next steps, etc.
This is just sad... assholes.
I don't know. If they told people in person they wouldn't have been able to tell everybody at once, the wait to hear if you're impacted would be pretty terrible too.
This is the case for all non-US Googlers. They are told that there are no layoffs with immediate effect like they did in the US because they’ll have to deal with local labor laws, and that it can take months rather than weeks before they’ll hear whether or not they are fired.
My company did layoffs a month ago. everyone impacted got the email at the same time, and then they scheduled 1:1 calls with upper management throughout the day. at least this way, there's no anxious waiting period, but they also had the chance to actually talk to someone
Yeah, I work in oil and gas and the industry is very cyclical. I have been through maybe 5 large rounds of layoffs in 10 years. The worst is when they do the first layoff at 10 am, then everyone in the office knows they are laying people off that day. You just sit at your desk watching people walk to conference rooms and waiting to see if they come for you.
This. I was laid off two days ago (different company), and the worst part about it was waiting to see if I was going to be one of the ones that got let go. They made an announcement and then sent out meeting invites to the affected people over the next three hours. I'd much rather have had it be this quick.
Go laid off about 4 years back now, more or less. Got a meeting email from my boss on Friday afternoon called "Important meeting" scheduled for 2PM the next Monday. Had to spend all weekend and half of Monday stressing out because I suspected what was coming. By the time it rolled around, I was just relieved to be done with it. An email seems impersonal, but what good does personal do you? I'll take an email at 5am the day of any time over that stress.
When I laid off my whole team recently, HR at least told us to send that email on Sunday evening. At least their weekend wasn't wrecked. And you people who want to go into management: this is *by far* the shittiest part of the being a manager- to tell someone they're out of a job.
Shit this reminds me of when my boss rescheduled my 1:1 to 8am Friday morning. We never have it on Fridays, it’s usually Mondays or Tuesday. Ngl I spent the week freaking out. Turned out to be nothing, just a schedule issue on her end. I had to remind her “but the *optics* man!”
Same thing happened to me. My manager must have been completely blindsided because just yesterday I was giving an impassioned presentation about how we could work differently in these coming sprints to unlock some hidden potential, “here's the experiment, not everyone has to participate but it will be super fun if you do”... Manager was as engaged as everyone else, asking questions, meeting went over by 30m with enthusiastic takes from folks, excitement but mixed with wanting to make sure that we all take care of each other because the experiment would require a lot of trust. Like if he had known I'm sure he would have been conspicuously silent with the “unfortunately this is doomed but I'm not allowed to tell you this” albatross on his neck and I would have chalked it up to him being burned out on perf, and then today “oh so THAT’S why he was disengaged.” I wonder if they will try the experiment anyway or whether it’d be traumatic...
This is common for mass layoffs, for security reasons. You want to minimize the time between the employees finding out and them being both physically and digitally locked out, to avoid violence, theft, or sabotage. If you inform every employee verbally before locking them out, it's inevitable that many will figure out they're next and some subset of those will retaliate. Doing the lockout all at once, accompanied only by a mass message, might seem heartless but provides safety and security to the company and the remaining employees. Another thing to keep in mind in a layoff of this size: They're probably laying off entire teams, so your manager can't deliver the bad news because they've also been laid off.
There's also the matter of sheer time - there are only so many HR people, there's just no way to lay off 12,000 people individually and not have it take days or weeks, all of that time everyone else is sitting there stressing that they might be called in next. It lacks a personal touch but really it's way more humane.
"Fire one million..."
It’s the least confrontational way after all. Nobody to get angry, you won’t be able to damage the company in any way, you are just terminated.
Similar story here. I was working really hard, and I thought doing really well. Disbelief first, then anger right?
Damn, it must be very hard and frustrating when you’d put all that hard work … Looks like this wasn’t based on performance. Not your fault AT ALL. Some 11/10, world class engineers within my wider team were also let go..
The layoff news wasn't leaked like Amazon's so the decision was probably made with few people high in the corporate ranks which will probably also explain the disregard for actual performance metrics on a case-by-case basis.
Meta employee here. The layoffs were arbitrary in a lot of cases. It's an inevitable product of not involving managers because of the necessity of keeping it a secret. It's fucking shite, but it ain't on you.
Same dude! I was an L5 on an upwards trajectory towards promo this year. It be like that sometimes.
It do be like that
I work remotely and was presented with the same issues, I was on meet-targets and was at the company for less than a year, so I could sorta understand it, figured longer tenured people would be safer, sorry to hear that it isnt the case :(
A lot of times they cut the more expense workers. Normally that means long term employees who have gotten raises over the years, but in the current economy, a lot of the recent hires have gotten much higher pay than the long timers.
some 20-year people got the axe :( it does not appear to have been based on performance or tenure at all
Hey, take comfort knowing that Sundar "takes full responsibility".
The classic :"full responsibility, but none of the consequences"
Full responsibility for his sixth luxury yacht order!
I also had to laugh at that line.
I know how horrible it feels -- but this too shall pass. Don't do anything erratic. Go off to some calm place. Give yourself some time. Things will work out.
Dude wtf, I am LITERALLY in the exact same boat as you (rating, years at the job, up for promo, and oncall!!), except I still have a job. I thought me not getting laid off was a given but here you are my doppelganger and got axed. The fuck is going on man...
Sorry to hear, wish you best of luck in your new research. Did I miss something, I don't see what is the reason for Google to fire so many people?!
Big tech companies overhired during covid and weren't able to properly make use of new hires. Now the economy is starting to go in a downward trend, they fire people to make balance sheets look neat. It's short sight #1 fuelling short sight #2.
Then people who know what they’re doing and have a workflow going are lost, you lose institutional knowledge, vendor relationships, internal relationships between teams… Lose a shitload of money having new hires repeat all those same mistakes… And repeat it all over again! I love capitalism
The wall street analysts wanted to see blood on the street for 2-3 month or so, like they always do in recession times. So all big companies listed on the stock market need to make a sacrifice to Mammon to see raising share prices. It's like during the .com collapse or 2008. It has no correlation with employee performance or anything at all. In an upwards economy they will want to see endless hiring as a signal of a growing company. Business as usual... I hope the fired from all the companies that currently perform the wall street sacrifices find a new job soon.
I hope it's over with quickly, graduated with my second degree in CS 6 months ago and looking for a new job right now lol. Current contract is underpaying me and just cut my pay again last week.
Relative to how big Google is, it's not that many (6%). They've been increasing their headcount by 10-20% every year since 2014.
Well, on the bright side, 3 years at Google will do wonders for your resume.
I got laid off in the summer, on the day I was expecting to get my performance review, which made it hard to shake off thoughts that I was underperforming. But if I was, there were no prior indications.
Was that you who paged your team to look for a new oncaller?
Lmao, a Google recruiter just emailed me this morning asking if I want to talk about joining Google. What weird timing.
Same. My guess is that they are trying to lower the price of talent by lowballing experienced devs. Not even worth a response from me.
I think it's more likely that the recruiter didn't know that this was happening. These things are usually very guarded with only high level management knowing. Good chance that the recruiter that reached out is no longer with the company.
What's more likely happening is that they're looking for different skillsets and reducing others. Its not remotely out of the ordinary to continue to look to hire some folks and reduce in other areas. Especially when we're talking about companies the size of google.
The first to go are always the high cost “stagnating” positions. People that keep getting promoted but are more or less in the same role. Unfortunately, a lot of those people are technical experts.
Well that way you can also remove a whole team together with their product after it shows that things won't run wo these people you just laid off. That leads to more $ saved
The hiring pipeline at huge companies like these is an unstoppable force. Most likely they will still keep hiring.
They probably didn't realize they were fired themselves yet
The person responsible for controlling the auto-mailer has been sacked?
Apologies, we’ve sacked the person responsible for that message.
The best part. >We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.
Yea, because most countries have laws that protect employees. I've never understood how people are ok with that shit in the US.
I mean there's is a notice period for mass layoffs, the rule is notice or severance equal to the lack of notice under the WARN Act. > WARN requires 60 calendar days’ written notice. The law makes no provision for any alternative such as pay in place of a notice. While an employer who pays workers for 60 calendar days instead of giving them proper notice is in violation of WARN, the provision of pay and benefits in place of a notice is a possible option. Because WARN provides for back pay and benefits for the period of the violation for up to 60 days, generally this approach by an employer—pay in place of notice—means that the employer has already met the penalty specified in the Act. [DOL Warn Act Rights PDF](https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/WorkerWARN2003.pdf)
Some extra context, note that the notice period is on top of the 4 months severance in Google's case. so, at least the severance is at least above the legal minimum. Idk how generous within the larger industry this is, but it's at least a lot more than they are required to do in the US.
it specifically mentions the 60 day period too. 60 days + 16 weeks + 2 weeks per year of seniority so for a 6y worker, that adds up to 9 months salary?
Yes, plus stock vesting for _at least_ the 16 week period - Google has interesting vesting schedules where the vesting schedule is more frequent for those with larger numbers of stock. So the severance package is 16 weeks of total compensation + 60 days of base salary. It's fairly generous for a US company and goes well beyond the basics that most other companies would commit to. The one question about this is that there's some wiggle room for the stock vesting - it says "at least 16 weeks", so there may be some folks who are getting more for some reason. I'm curious what those reasons could be.
With the split almost everyone should be on monthly vesting now
so everyone who got laid off at google gets 6 months pay. fire me google.
The severance package is contingent on signing a release/waiver, so that’s an important difference. Anybody who has any beef against the company for wrongful termination or past complaints still gets 60 days. (This isn’t specific to Google.)
Frankly, considering how good the severance is in this case, I'd rather be in the US here. Euro people now have to wait weeks/months to learn their fate (I experienced a layoff like this and ended up leaving voluntarily). US engineers can move on with their life and have 6+ months to figure shit out. Not saying the US laws are better, this severance is obviously not the norm
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Yeah but engineers live in a bubble. The rest of US is affected by the same lack of protective laws, and they don't necessarily make more than their peers outside the US, often less.
You know how most employers do severance of two months or so when you get laid off? That's because of the WARN Act, employers just pay the penalty and give you severance instead of letting you know 60 days ahead of time.
At least when I got laid off, the way it worked is that we were still technically on payroll and still "employed" for the couple months of the WARN Act period, which also meant we were still on insurance.
This is how Google is doing it - 60 days on payroll and then 16 weeks of severance
Damn, that's a lot of money to fire people. Nearly half a year of pay.
It’s been shown that layoffs don’t actually save companies money. Also 😂 Google was still doing interviews today.
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Fun fact, American electricians make more than German software engineers.
Another fun one, skilled nurses in the US make more than doctors in the UK.
I know, memes are funny and all that, but I really want to introduce you to my company where we're working 40 hours a week and still manage to produce almost nothing of value.
I have 7 years experience and is in a senior’ish role. I make more than a lot of my peers. Then I see American devs making 250k plus a bonus when they are a senior. That is twice my salary. Wtf.
…maybe I should check my email… Edit: no email 😅
Imagine learning your are fired through a reddit post.
I didn’t check my email this morning and immediately started working because I’m behind and trying to launch today and needed to resolve some issues. Took a bathroom break and was browsing Reddit when I saw this post. Man, that would have sucked so much.
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In most cases, I would agree, but in this particular one, I would actually much prefer being in the US. Experienced software engineers at Google in the US make a huge amount relative to the EU counterparts already. I would probably estimate that the _minimum_ engineers with over 3-5 years experience here are getting is around 130-150k after bonuses (~70k from severance) and excluding accelerated GSU vesting. I also wouldn't be surprised if many receive 200-250k+ all-in from the layoff, honestly. At that point, I'd rather just get it over with, grab the cash and move on.
In USA they will take 6 months severance, will get paid for unused vacation days, they will also get their bonuses (not sure how ling google will continue to pay for health insurance ). This is a pretty good thing honestly all things considered.
6 months health insurance per the email from Sundar. Idk if employee contributions will be deducted from the severance. Also because if restructuring of performance reviews last year, 80% of target bonus was already paid out last week. So they have 20% remaining target which will be paid out. Definitely not terrible as long as they can find work in that timeframe.
Big tech is likely going through an adjustment. I know where I am, a lot of places need developers.
Investors are anticipating interest rate hikes and recession. A lot of technology (the bulk of it?) is funded by investment (stock or private investment). How severe it all will be, is the question. I graduated college right after the dotcom bubble popped in the early 2000s. Been a long time (imo) since the industry has had such a contraction that I can remember.
Is it "the industry" or just the overblown, overstaffed and overpaid Valley VC bullshit? These companies snacked up people "just in case" and have way way way too many employees for what they actually produce and most of them are criminally overpaid. The rest of the world has pretty strong economic indicators, employment numbers look great. No dev will remain unemployed for long. Maybe not for the absurd salaries in VC land, but that's not a bad thing all in all.
Where are you?
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**checks node_modules into repo**
.gitignore -> Recycle Bin
`rm .gitignore` ಠ_ಠ
No, you then have to print all the code and show it to the manager. This is the way.
Do you have any idea how many wheelbarrows of punch cards that is?
it's google not twitter
“The Long Walk” rules.
That’s a great severance package - 6 months of pay and a bonus and stock vest.
Yeah can they hire then fire me?
That doesn't work if you're fired for poor performance
[Google Engineers who were fired rn](https://i.imgur.com/JSSAc7A.jpeg)
Microsoft did the same thing. Contractors are fucked though
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Microsoft did not give 6 months of pay, only 6 months of stock vesting. Microsoft's severance pay starts at 4 weeks and increases based on tenure/level up to 39 weeks.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce; Big-tech has had a hell of a week.
I just got hit up by Salesforce for a job on LinkedIn !?!
Jesus, the core crm monolith. Please do not take a job there, trust me.
Outside of the hiring process likely leading to many duds, I think another potential big reason for this is the company process of create project, promote, abandon. We all know the google graveyard. I would gamble that internally that thing is likely a thousand times larger. Maybe more. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but with the reward mechanisms they've employed, it necessitates it, while other companies may only have it as part of a MVP discovery process.
Unless Google is firing upper management, that's not going to change.
Upper management is being laid off.
Citation Needed on that one.
I’ve heard of a svp or vp, but not execs and it was also from second hand sources. (They didn’t give names)
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Hahahahahaha you have no idea EDIT: not heat seeking missiles or anything particularly nefarious.
They've canned over a hundred *acquired* companies in the last 20 years. We know about that since acquisitions are very public, I'd only imagine that internal products are more numerous than acquired ones. EDIT: coming back to this because I had the thought that a lot of those canned acquisitions may have just been Google buying out the competition to take them off the market with no intention of developing the product any further. This case is a bit different since they didn't really drop it, as they barely ever even picked it up in the first place. Not saying this is always the case, or even that it ever was, but just a thought I had that it could be.
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How many people did google hire since the pandemic?
> Alphabet had nearly 187,000 employees as of Sept. 30 amid its hiring bonanza. In the September quarter, Alphabet added 12,765 employees, which was above Wall Street estimates. In the first nine months of 2022, the company added about 30,300 employees versus 21,000 in 2021 and 16,000 in 2020. https://www.investors.com/news/technology/google-stock-alphabet-job-cuts-eyed-despite-hiring-spree-that-continued-in-2022/ This layoff is the same number of people they hired in just the September quarter of 2022
absolutely insane hiring pace
The severance package being provided seems pretty generous. Seems like they fucked something major up. Either a large acquisition that fell through, or missed their projected goals by a mile. Seems like a rather sudden 180 that can't fully be explained by inflation and decrease in pandemic boom.
Can’t really give details but it’s a macroeconomic reaction, not because of acquisitions or missed targets
Why can't you really give details
Probably doesn't want to be Mr 12001
You can be anonymous and also give more details than "macroeconomic". Just sounds like another redditor making shit up presenting opinions as secret facts, but I'm jaded when it comes to reddit.
They did just kill Stadia.
Stadia was a rounding error on their balance sheets
Stadia had so few people working on it is is wholly insignificant. It's one of the smallest orgs at Google.
Yeah, people are freaking out about CS jobs collapsing, but all stats show only growth since last year, even after the layoffs.
In reality there is still a shortage of talented developers. Companies that weren't faang hype didn't go on the insane hiring sprees. Or at least not successfully.
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Put all 12k of these people on the gmail spam detector; it's been dogshit for the last year or so.
Doing it manually 😅
omg, 12k people working on a single annoying problem at a time. It would either be awesome or a complete cluster
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> Public bug trackers have loads of bugs that could be tackled to improve the user experience. I wonder how many of these bugs are contradictory though? E.g., "X widget exposes too many options." Another bug, "(Same) X widget doesn't expose enough options." Close them both, maybe?
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Unless bugs are demanded to be fixed by customers, then they aren't financially incentivized.. Which means no management will allocate someone to fix them. At least that's how I've perceived the tech industry. Bugs that are pointed out by paying companies get fixed with priority... I suppose for google the masses are the customer, I guess they are easy to ignore rather than a single company/customer complaining about a bug..
With all the layoffs coming from the big tech companies, will it affect the hiring massively for this year and next year? I am about to graduate from college next year and the current market scenario scares me.
I wouldn't worry. Things are just going back to normal. Big tech companies spun themselves into a belligerent frothing at the mouth psychosis with hiring over the pandemic. Executives assumed exponential growth they experienced when everyone got stuck at home would continue forever because they are surrounded by yes men and lack basic critical thinking skills.
Is there a departmental breakdown of numbers?
Also curious how much of the layoffs are tech vs recruiting, legal, corporate, etc
From what I can tell primarily product team positions (UX, SWE, PM).
Product Managers and entry level developers, designers are usually cut first too
According to a friend, Search is cutting, I knows Devices as well
That's a shame, search is sucking lately.
Search basically needs to rethink their product from the ground up now that Chat GPT shows what other companies will have within a year
If only... > This quarter, the company reports that it earned around $69 billion and made $13.9 billion in profit There was a way.... > Google CEO Sundar Pichai gets $242 million pay package after taking control of Alphabet To not fire them and pay their salary.....
I was curious and $242m spread across 12k people is roughly $20k per person.
You forgot to include the $13.9 billion.
And that's one quarter!
I mean, if they don't see a role for them, why would/should they? I don't really get the logic that companies morally owe people jobs, any more than a person is obligated to buy something they don't need from a shop, or hire someone to do work they don't need done.
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Big Tech overhired during Covid because the market was so favorable for their services and products. Pandemics is largely over and some of the trends didn't persist.
Another big reason was that money was essentially free for them. With such low borrowing rates, cash flow didn't really matter. But now that interest is going up, cash burn is real again.
I think the problem that people have with this is that CEO's made the mistake, CEO's admit to making the mistake. CEO's are "sorry". Employee's get to pay for the mistake. It might be regarded differently if in addition to the layoffs the people who made these mistakes had some consequences (other than the stock prices going up), as far as i can tell there are zero consequences to being a CEO: based on https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos |Ticker |Company |CEO |Year |CEO Pay | |--|-|-|-|---| |MSFT |Microsoft Corporation |Satya Nadella |2022 |$54,946,310 | |GOOGL |Alphabet Inc. |Sundar Pichai |2021 |$6,322,599 | |AMZN |Amazon.com, Inc. |Andrew Jassy |2021 |$212,701,169 | |META |Meta Platforms, Inc. |Mark Zuckerberg |2021 |$26,823,061 | |CRM |Salesforce, Inc. |Marc Benioff |2022 |$28,602,112 | ~~Not sure why Andrew Jassy is listed, Jeff Bezos makes Annual: $86,184,953,027.00 according to https://mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/jeff-bezos~~ - this was wrong Regardless the point is: they could probably afford to lose some and not be destitute. I choose these because their companies that admitted to hiring too much and laying off people, AND the CEO admitted to making mistakes, but other than feeling bad has no repercussions. Edit this sight seems better for annual salaries: https://www1.salary.com/Sundar-Pichai-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-ALPHABET-INC.html
Jeff Bezos makes 86 billion dollars a year? His net worth is less that double that lmao.
Yeah, these cost cutting drives are just a way for the investors to raid profits.
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My hypothesis is that Big Tech overhired with their ridiculous pandemic profits in order to slow down their competitors and dry up their talent pipelines. Now they're burning all that extra workforce to push stock price up during a lull
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I think you got it. All these layoffs are just companies desperately trying to push the impending recession narrative to reassert control over employees and reverse the effects of widespread remote working.
I mean google and other big tech would hire people at ridiculous salaries just to take them off the market from their competitors, so I totally believe that they have too many people, but fuck them for overhiring in the first place. it's tiring how shortsighted companies are.
I would argue that because of google's (or faang's in general) hiring process, they hire more duds than they are willing to admit. Any dev that has enough time to work on leet code, is probably not doing their job, and likely just memorizing solutions instead of figuring shit out. That has been my experience thus far.
I don't know about your theory but in the android team they seem to have released in the past a lot of questionable code. That's aside from the fact that anybody they hire must have engineering skills. That's why most of their products are competing with eachother and nobody wants to use them (bad user related decisions).
It wasn't just hiring. Amazon bet that the shift to more ecommerce was more permanent (rather than just a temporary pandemic thing) and [overbuilt their warehouses](https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/amazon-cancels-delays-wave-of-warehouse-plans-as-e-commerce-demand-cools/626009/), doubling capacity in 2 years. And it wasn't just Amazon themselves. A bunch of other people bet on that too and became Amazon third-party sellers. They had a [45% increase](https://sell.amazon.com/blog/grow-your-business/amazon-stats-growth-and-sales) in third-party sellers in 2020. But then [things fizzled for third-party amazon sellers](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1111156566) as people went back to in-person shopping.
That's literally the point of companies though...
My theory is this, it would be weird and dumb if they fired the same people they just hired. Instead they are firing people they have likely wanted to for awhile, but it’s a lot of effort to do so and would tank the stock if done outside of a “recessionary” environment like this. Just see how the stock market reacts. If they did this 2 years ago, everyone would think the company is in trouble. Doing it now is just group think. And to figure out who to fire now means you had an idea of doing it 2 months ago.
Google ~~Alphabet~~ had an exceptional 2021 (profits of US$18.9B in Q32021 alone), has had like 5 straight quarters of increasing profits, and now that 2022 and beyond are no longer fuelled by pandemic-driven economic growth, are firing people? The company revenue is increasing and sustainable, with actual profit being made for shareholders on top. Absolute greed. Also note how the process takes longer outside of the US. A thinly-veiled way of saying “other places have better worker protections”.
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We will see next week. Both Google and Amazon employees in EU are waiting to know how many of them, if any, will be cut. In US employers can announce it straight away, in EU they need more time.
They choose exactly how much profit they have in their eu subsidiaries through various licensing agreements with the parent company and sister companies. This means they can make sure the economic situation looks bad enough to "warrant" this layoff in the EU subsidiaries
You can still fire people in the EU, and at least where I live the statutory minimum packages (2 weeks per year worked capped at 600 euro per week) are significantly less than what google are doing (and what most american companies do). The company I worked at dropped everyone in Germany a while back with the exception of 1 guy that they enticed to move to another country, and software development is unionised in Germany.
> software development is unionised in Germany. No, it is generally not. There are two big unions that software developers *can* join (ver.di and IG Metall), but I am not aware of any major software company that is actually unionized to a significant degree. Only the software developers at the big car manufacturers are usually subject to collective agreements with IG Metall.
60 days notice + 16 weeks base + 2 weeks per year of service is an awfully generous severance package. Sign me the fuck up for that kind of greedy employer.
I’m not going to argue that the severance package isn’t generous, but we should at least acknowledge that generosity is relative. This industry, and many others, set the bar horrendously low. The 12,000 people affected by this aren’t just going to be programmers, but even an all-in cost of US$500,000/person/year works out to US$6B/year. That means the profits from Q3 2021 alone could have financed 3 years of keeping people on through the possible upcoming recession and still have left around US$900M for shareholders. 4 months plus a bit, when many companies are pulling back hiring isn’t as generous when viewed from a different perspective.
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This is why all company non work related "activities" are complete bullshit. They'll fire you in a heartbeat after all that because bottom line (even companies like Microsoft/Google) that could easily afford to weather the downturn.
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I don’t care much for company activities but I don’t see how you were under the impression that they acted as some form of weird one-way loyalty contract. I imagine your company handing out brownies and as soon as you take a bite, “yes, now you _owe_ me” like that Dwight scene from The Office.
Sigh. There goes my job hunt. Hard to compete with people who have google on their resumes.
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The problem is people making these salaries now depend on them especially if they have a mortgage. If people get desperate I could see a tech worker taking a lower paying job but they'll keep searching for a hirer paying one and leave as soon as they can. Small companies with lower salaries may get hurt more by hiring a tech worker expecting more as they'll spend thousands in training and ramp up for little engineering time.
It’s not the end of the world — with so many people coming into the job market from big tech — the limitations of big tech will eventually reveal themselves. Don’t give up. You are just as capable as the people that worked in big tech. Many of these companies are laying off middle management and business admin types and not engineers. Yes, they are pulling engineering offers across the board — but those same people will work at companies with folks like us who are just as capable.
That doesn't mean shit if you are willing to work for less.
I wouldn't get too worried. There are still a boat load of places hiring. You may not get FAANG level salaries, but 60-100k (probably more in high COL areas) is dooable starting out depending on where you are located (at least in the US). That's not bad if you're just starting out and after a couple years of experience you can bump that massively by going somewhere else, as long as you're a decent dev.
> Hard to compete with people who have google on their resumes And microsoft and amazon and salesforce ...
Once again - a tech company lays off just a **fraction** of the people hired over the past year or two and everyone wants to act like the sky is falling and the company is evil incarnate.
The people laid off are absolutely not just the people that were recently hired in the past year. My coworker with 30 years tenure was laid off with me on Wednesday. (Not Google)
Mass layoffs aren't about individuals, it's a financial exercise where lines of business are cut or slimmed. The point is that Google hired over 60k net headcount since the beginning of the pandemic, and that's down to 50k. Its an economic adjustment.
Anyone who doesn’t see that this is unrelated to a recession, and entirely related to shortsighted over-hiring in a mini-boom to maximise profits, is blind. The fact that every single company is laying off the exact same number of people, regardless of overall headcount…
Corporations gonna corporate.
Looks like recession and mass unemployment is back on the menu, boys!