The post suggests their jobs were offshored. Is this a common practice versus just closing the roles? I feel like US legislators should do more to protect domestic jobs from domestic companies, or else they’ll face the same eventual collapse as in manufacturing.
When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India. They had another tranche of layoffs that were “delayed exit” to train those Indian employees.
You can call me bigoted or racist, I don't care. The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets. But I can totally see how in some beancounter's narrow mind this makes perfect sense.
In this case its Munich I think based on previous comments. Also, in India things depend on who you hire and how much you're willing to pay (like everywhere else). If you pay a salary you expect in rural Alabama in the Bay Area for a tech job you'll attract shitty devs as well.
You comment isn't wrong. I've observed the same thing but only when things get outsourced to low cost consulting shops. If Google pays decently in India (which I think they do), they'll get much better devs. There's a pretty strong start-up ecosystem and dev culture but as with everything you need to pay good $$ - as in not 10% of bay area pay but closer to 60-70% of it to attract top talent.
General formula that majority of big tech MAG7 companies apply when it comes to India is "3 times HC than Bay area". If you see pay data for these companies, that seems to be correct with salaries in Bangalore to be 1/3 of salaries in Bay area.
Every company thinks that they're going to hack the system. They think that they'll be the first American company to ever outsource and get the best developers. But all of the best developers are happily working for local companies, and they don't want to have to deal with an American boss.
That's not bigoted or racist. There are two forces when it comes to pricing labor:
1. The forces that dictate the lowest price.
2. The forces that dictate the highest price.
These are completely orthogonal to each other.
Lowest price is based on cost of living, you can hire the cheapest person as long as you pay them enough for them to keep on eating. That's it. Notably this lower-end is going to have a lot of variance based on location.
Highest price is based on how much value a worker creates for a business, the highest price that you can pay that worker is somewhere that leaves the business with a margin profit. Of course it is in the businesses best interest to increase the margin for themselves, but as talent becomes harder to find, fat margins become less of a necessity and more of a nice-to-have. The job needs to get done or their golden-egg machine will die.
So!
You go to the lowest price at a another country, that's what you get in quality. Execs think that people are replaceable so they believe that the average X is the same here as it is anywhere else, the only difference to them is cost.
So yeah. You are not racist for pointing out that quality suffers due to cost cutting through offshoring. The lower cost-of-living countries (such as India) still have top tier talent, but that talent is priced similarly across the world, they are smart and they price themselves according to the value they bring.
very nice reply. Along these lines, one problem many founders face is when professional management (new investors, board members) focus mono-maniacally on repeatability, unit economics, and generally ultimate fungible staffing. One way this is achieved (sometimes even deliberately) is to buy the cheapest, most easily replaceable inputs and do anything necessary to make the new configuration work. Staffing is a key tactic come hell or high water. This can cause obvious cultural issues.
This might be my prejudice but when someone talks about offshoring a role, moving it to Munich isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
(and this article goes into the rationale too. Basically the idea is you're paying more than you would in a developing economy, but you can trust the team with more autonomy and fewer cultural misunderstandings, so it's an option for offshoring higher-value work)
It's funny that you think that being located in Europe the positions will be stuffed with Europeans...
I'm in this exact situation: work for American company, while living in the EU. Am not a EU citizen (Eastern Europe / Middle East). More than half of those working with me are foreigners too. Eastern Europe, Middle East, Latin America and India would be the most common origin countries. Europe immigrates tech workers by a truckload.
To reflect on the original issue. I'd guess that some manager either hated some other manager, or was looking for a promotion or was just dumb and executed some instruction in the stupidest way possible... there doesn't seem to be any apparent reason to move a team like that. Even if the team was entirely rehired in the poorest place on Earth, we are still talking about ten people. Whatever difference Google makes from the move is not even peanuts. If there's a manager being rewarded for this stupid idea, their bonus will probably be more than whatever savings this move can possibly generate.
I don't believe there's any actual rational justification for this move. Just middle management being middle management.
There are many layers to "being familiar with anglo culture"... being able to understand technical documentation to a degree won't cut it in many cases.
I went through several stages of learning retroactively (i.e. not appropriate to my age) through dating or having otherwise good relationships with someone from the US. So, for example, I've learned about TV shows like Daria or Dr. Who many years after they came out. (And yes, I've learned about Dr. Who from an American friend, and before that I didn't know there's a thing for more educated Americans where they think that Brits are more... refined, not sure if that's the right word).
I'm married to someone born in the US, so, through her and the need of dealing with the kid who grows up primarily speaking English I've learned nursery rhymes, lullabies and a bunch of kids folklore that I would've never come in touch with in my line of work.
More than that, you can perfectly well live in another country and never really know the side of life of the locals if you are never invited to visit, or don't develop very good relationships with the locals. You might never know what home-cooked food looks like because you'd only have access to store-bought or restaurant meals. (Eg. I didn't know that mac-and-cheese was such a common food in the US until I was invited to visit someone in an informal setting). And there's plenty more of it. It'd take a book to try to enumerate all of these.
This both affects the less formal communication one may have with their peers as well as contributes to cultural mixups especially when it comes to customer-facing interfaces.
You know, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to use this divide to actually move to the EU and get residency. Then again, with so many countries having to beef up military spending and facing economic headwinds you really have to question whether all the social / quality of life programs that make europe more livable than the US would be sustainable long term either.
Who knows maybe in 30 years Americans ultimately have a higher quality of life just due to our stronger economic position making it easier to sustainably fund M4A or whatever.
If you work a white-collar job the US standard of living is substantially higher. If you're a laborer the opposite is true but you also probably have a harder time getting in to Europe in the first place.
I really do wonder if our material standard of living really contributes to happiness though? I don't want more 'stuff' I want guaranteed access to healthcare. I want worker and consumer rights. I want a country that recognizes climate change is a real problem and is doing something about it. I want a more fair and representative government actually beholden to the will of the people. I don't need a McMansion, a luxury car, I want a better society. I feel like Europe, or at least the Nordics, have that, and if my parents were not here in the US, I think I'd happily move.
I'm not in a position to tell anyone what to value in life, but I don't personally feel that insecure about my access to healthcare or workplace conditions, and I also feel that a lot of Americans have an unrealistic idea of what life in other countries is like or how their political situation is. For instance, does Norway take climate change more seriously than the US? In some sense they may, but on the other hand they're the world's third-largest exporter of natural gas in the world, after Russia and Qatar. Europe has its own spate of nationalistic far-right politicians, anti-immigrant politics, austerity, and other social ills we don't much think about when using them as a counterpoint to ourselves. We're all participants in a global system, after all.
Norway is kinda caught between a fortunate rock and a hard place. Their gas reserves are absolutely crucial and strategic for security in Europe as a whole. You'll note the country itself went absolutely whole hog on electrifying transport and infrastructure (powered via hydro) so they could export their gas to the rest of europe. This really paid off when Russia cut off oil and natural gas as Europe would have been crippled otherwise.
I suppose healthcare is a major issue for me due to my disability. When I had to get insurance on the private market prior to the ACA I had to go in the high risk pool, which was stupidly expensive even as a SWE. I hear it's better now but every year some Republican gets the bright idea to try to repeal it. I fear with enough of a majority they will.
Everybody tough with their job-dependent healthcare until they are let go because a chronic illness is too debilitating for the demands of the job and they are left with nothing but monthly medical costs of a few tens of thousands of dollars.
Just curious, have you ever lived or spent a significant amount of time in Nordics (or anywhere in Europe)? Generally speaking, I find that people who haven't lived outside the their birth-country often romanticize life in other countries.
I immigrated from the US to another country a while back, and it's not unusual for me to meet newcomers with unrealistic expectations about life in their new home. Often, they go back to their birth-country after a few years, disappointed with the mundane reality of living in a foreign country.
I'm not trying to say that your wrong, necessarily. For some people, life can be better in other countries, but I caution against unrealistic expectations.
I'm grew up in India and went to grad school in the US and worked there. Eventually, I transferred to the UK cause I didn't get through the US work visa lottery.
I'm much happier here because of the reasons you mentioned. I feel like my friends in America have are basically amassing wealth to insulate their liberal bubble in a conservative land. However, they might not be able to outweath the recent success of right wing policies that the American supreme Court has managed to impose.
For me personally, even the "low" tech salaries in Europe (think something like 150k an year total) is more than enough for the lifestyle I desire. If amassing wealth isn't your primary motivator, it absolutely makes sense to move to a society which better aligns with your values. That would probably be the EU for someone like you and me, but UK is EU lite.
I love that everybody here has the same access to healthcare and the fact that my high taxes help that. I like that the population responds to the actions of the elected officials - like how the current UK govt is doing absolutely terribly in current polls. In the US, it seems like it's always a tight race regardless of what the government does. I love being able to use public Transit to get to most places. I'd rather my potential kids grow up in a kinder society, where their wellbeing wouldn't be at risk if something were to happen to me or my job.
Oh, and also, if I choose to permanently live in the UK, or EU, the path to citizenship is deterministic with a known timeline.
In the US, the time from Green card to citizenship is unbounded. people from India and China are pretty much never going to become citizens till they exploit some loophole like having an American baby.
Apologies, you are correct. I haven't considered emigrating to the US for years and forgot the specific details. Most of my recent knowledge just comes from my friends who live there.
Iirc you can indefinitely keep getting renewals on your h1b while waiting on the green card queue - and this queue is many decades long for people from certain countries like India and China.
I don't feel like the UK is in an especially strong position to look down at the US for being too conservative or doing too little for its poorer citizens but I'm glad you've found a place that suits you regardless.
I agree that UK isn't as left wing as I'd like, but there is really a huge difference between what's considered right wing between the UK and the US. For instance, the NHS. Poor or unemployed people get the same access to healthcare as I do.
In my personal experience, there is also less stratification and less overt racism or bigotry. However, they're pioneering new and clever bigotry against trans people now and that concerns me.
> For instance, the NHS. Poor or unemployed people get the same access to healthcare as I do.
Sure, and the Conservative Party, who has enjoyed a very long period of uninterrupted rule, has been gradually sabotaging it with the obvious hope that is falls apart and market reforms can be implemented. Most of these differences have more to do with the legacy of the post-War period than anything about the current political situation.
The UK is also significantly whiter than the US is, which is something of a counterpoint to the idea that they're less bigoted, in my view.
See what you did there? You conclude that because UK is "whiter", it means they are not "less bigoted". That's weird and I hope you understand what your brain did there.
Military spending is a good point. If the middle class all moves to Germany, the US tax base will suffer, and probably Germany will have to raise taxes for their military to compensate. But that would take decades.
> It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
extremely wrong. what are you basing your assumption on?
the cost of a Munich employee is less than half of the cost of a California one, when you take into account salary, stock, office costs, whinging, etc.
It's extremely hard to lay off in Germany, so existing Google employees in Germany are, on the margin, nearly free, and so can be reassigned (with something else being done with their current project).
As in, they would have to prove, potentially in court, that the layoff was absolutely necessary to actually be about to do it, plus pay an undefined fair severance amount (that people mostly seem to accept as 0.5 * monthly salary * years of tenure at the company), on top of the on-average 3 month notice period, which most companies will give as garden leave in order to not reduce morale even further.
If you can't prove that you need to cut the person for "operational" reasons (e.g. because you're not really getting rid of python tooling engineers), then your best bet is to dangle large cash offers to people in order to entice them to quit.
If they do manage to prove they need to do layoffs, for example when the company is literally running out of money, then they're not allowed to just lay off employees as they like (and definitely not in relation to performance). Instead they have to follow the "Sozialauswahl" which means that factors like whether the employee is supporting a family, is older, etc need to be taken into account.
Then on top of all that, they won't be able to hire people even for completely unrelated roles, for some amount of time afterwards.
So all in all there's a few disincentives for layoffs to be considered as a first action (it's not stopped it from happening at a bunch of companies lately though, Bosch, SoundCloud, Ableton, Native Instruments, Personio, Pitch etc).
I'm sure this comes with some drawbacks, perhaps more cautious hiring, but I like the sound of these regulations. Anything to give employees a ballast against wild swings in the share price. If layoffs had a more delayed effect on the business (and could be reversed in court) there would be less incentive for CEOs to pull that lever.
Aside from the mandatory negotiation with the employee co-determination (works council), the layoffs "must be determined according to the principles of social selection [...] (t)his is often perceived as a major obstacle [...] it would be disastrous to have to dismiss top performers simply because they are younger than other employees or have been recently hired."
You are on the spot, it's almost impossible to lay somebody off who is like 50 y/o and has kids + has been with the company for quite a while.
Generally, workers rights here in Germany are quite good so as an employee life tends to be quite comfortable since you don't have to fear termination the moment the company isn't doing exceptionally well.
You might be surprised - the absolute difference in salary between Munich and a trendy US tech hub is more than $100k. The difference between getting a decent dev in Poland vs Munich is $30-50k max.
I believe the replacements were already Google employees. Just not python-team employees. So it's sort of offshoring but not exactly.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. When I was there python was a pretty big part of the google internal ecosystem. Each major language there had a team supporting it. Not sure why you would be gutting those teams.
I get what you're saying about them already being Google employees, but this feels like a loophole and not a material difference. I could see this being exploited if there ever were offshoring rules. Just hire your offshores a month or two ahead of time.
That said, I find that most sensitive managerial decisions aren't fully explained right away, if ever. I don't expect someone in this position, especially upset by the change, to know the full story. There's possible extenuating circumstances, such as team performance (even the manager was RIF'd).
This isn't the greatest submission and lacks any semblance of context. The poster is in Netherlands apparently and the new team in Germany? I have no idea what to make of this.
Google pays people by region. As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
Yesterday's layoffs seem to have been framed as reorgs. Some teams have been wholly dismissed. Some have been consolidated (two teams -> one team).
There does seem to be a pattern that favors people in lower cost regions. For instance, two teams get combined and the higher cost manager is laid off. Or a whole team is laid off, but those duties are being restaffed by people in a lower wage office.
> As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
Seattle is actually in the tier below SF and NYC, which makes its pay around 10% less. However, it's mostly a wash when you consider that Seattle doesn't have state income tax, so your net is roughly the same in both places.
Interesting, didn’t know that. I remember older threads of people fawning his accomplishments, but nothing about him being a cheap b*stard when it came to his colleagues salaries. We should do more of this name and shaming in our industry, it’s one of the few levers we still have at our disposition.
The issue is that now they're hiding. Those who do the decision no longer send emails, no longer show up in townhalls (if they organized).
There was a townhall for the past wave of layoffs where the exec in charge preferred to take the meeting via video call from a huddle in the same building as the auditorium where the townhall was taking place. Just to not be seen with the employees.
Wages by geo is just “pay the lowest price you can for the requisite quality of product/service you need”, which is what effectively every person does day in and day out.
for many many yearsr it's been a SVP-level project to move people and teams out of the expensive US parts to cheaper regions - Munich was a particular target for some reason (maybe it was the cheapest medium eng office in that timezone). there used to be a lot more carrot, though.
Looks like the new roles in Munich, if I’m reading the thread right? Could be more than just offshoring? Why not do India or some other cheaper place instead of Munich which isn’t cheap and has relatively strong labor protections?
Just for this specific team. They are “defragging their global footprint” and moving roles to Mexico City, Bangalore, and Germany (probably to to go after gov contracts).
Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.
It's not that simple, long-term. Companies will just be founded elsewhere, because a hard-to-fire worker is worse than no worker. However, you could add additional layers like "if you do business in the US you must have x% of your employees here". But it's getting messy.
Or will they, I mean, are you really going to found your business in... where, Singapore?... if you live in the US and your whole network is there? Maybe not. And tariffs are certainly an approach that could work to advantage native companies or those that employ a large number of US developers.
Either way, I think this gets away from the premise and starts getting into reasons not to do it (theoretically, you're losing some new jobs that would otherwise be created) more than reasons it's impossible
The cost of living of an Indian developer is way less than that of a US one, especially if the US one is in a high cost of living area such as SF or NYC. How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?
Offshoring like this is allowing dumping of below-cost labor into US markets. Great for US C-suite folk and their profit-based bonuses, and for lobbyists getting paid big bucks to let this happen, but not so great for US citizens trying to make a living as software developers, which one might have thought would be a thing the US would strategically want to encourage, rather than strengthening a foreign country.
> How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?
In my experience, US workers, even with much higher wages, are simply better than Indian workers being paid much lower wages. Note that Indians being paid US wages, in the US, are fine - you just can't expect much if you're paying peanuts.
I have had experiences where entire offshore teams have contributed significant negative value. This false economy is as false as they come.
I think a bigger danger to US wages is European offshoring.
The problem is that companies will simply change the countries they incorporate in. Will SAP be tariffed for hiring Germans (where the company is based) rather than Americans? If not, you are giving SAP an unfair advantage over its American competitor.
The USA has trouble targeting foreign businesses who do most of their business outside of the USA. Its like, they can't tell SAP they should be using Americans to address an account in Taiwan, WTF? Google has plenty of offices around the world, but it is pretty proportional to the amount of business it does around the world also! So telling Google they need to serve everyone around the planet with American workers while SAP gets to use whatever because it isn't American, Google would quickly become a German company instead of an American company. You can't have American companies playing by overly restrictive rules if you can't force the rest of the world to play by those same rules, and America's influence to do that...unless it conquers even its allies, is limited.
Look up "protectionism", the USA has historically frowned upon other less-developed countries when they implement protectionist policies, they go as far as censoring them from the international market. So it would be very incongruent if they suddenly did that for their own workforce.
Not that incongruent; look at Chinese EVs. Or TikTok.
Historically protectionism was a major part of how the US developed its economy but typically countries become less protectionist once they have highly developed economies (because free trade tends to benefit them more).
