Meanwhile a lot of big non tech companies here in Italy have been slowly started incorporating full fledged tech departments, realising hiring neograds (not even tech, mostly unemployed people with non professionalising degrees) and training them is proving more cost effective than their history of offloading technological efforts to offshore (mostly Indian) big contracting firms.
I believe the reason is that Indian contracting houses rotate out their contractors over time, putting the best on at the beginning and then shifting to their worst over time. The cultural expectation is also different, contractor in India is doing the bare minimum to get the work done to bill the hours. Full time employee who has been given a purpose and is grown and nurtured by a business will be deeply loyal.
Hiring neograds/unemployed people is also gaining a lot of traction because Italy’s become victim to an uncontrolled metamorphosis of universities into degree factories, generating an absurd number of people who end up unemployed until their late 30s, also polluting stats and making it look like there’s no way people with PhDs can find a decent job staying in the country. This has brought the government to create countless incentives to hire the unemployed graduates that are flooding the job market without success, making it very fiscally appealing to big corps who often prefer just hire to increase body counts rather than to bring in technical expertise.
It's weird that they can't find anyone in Mexico who wants to be the CFO. Even if you just cloned Ruth Porat in another country, with a private helicopter and the works, it would cost way less.
The first observation I had during a contract at Google was "wow, Thanos could snap away 25% of the people here and it wouldn't impact the actual business(es) at all." If Google is getting serious about this, their stock is bypassing the Moon and going straight to Mars.
Have mass layoffs ever wound up working out well for a tech company?
I was at Google from 2013 -> 2015 as an FTE. My impression was that there was a mix of dead wood and high performers. I knew people that basically did nothing but come in late, find the best cafe for lunch, and leave early. While others worked 12 hour days.
But the problem with laying off the deadwood, rather than firing them for cause, is that it causes the high performers to look at other opportunities and leave.
> But the problem with laying off the deadwood, rather than firing them for cause, is that it causes the high performers to look at other opportunities and leave.
Can you explain the difference? Is being "deadwood" not cause for firing? I'm probably an average performer, but I find working with "deadwood" extremely demoralizing.
A layoff generally means "business is slow, so we don't need you anymore" (its not you, its us), where firing for cause generally means "you're not performing up to minimum standards" (its not us, its you). In most places in the US, a layoff comes with state unemployment benefits, where as being fired does not.
Most importantly, a layoff leaves other people with the feeling "that could have happened to me, I'd better start looking for new opportunities", where as a firing for cause generally allows one to think "that person was such a slacker, how did it take so long"...
> A layoff generally means "business is slow, so we don't need you anymore" (its not you, its us), where firing for cause generally means "you're not performing up to minimum standards" (its not us, its you). In most places in the US, a layoff comes with state unemployment benefits, where as being fired does not.
Workers terminated for performance can collect unemployment benefits usually. The terms and meanings differ state to state and person to person.
Trouble is, even if that's true, knowing what 25% aren't needed isn't always obvious. Research and development of new areas is just table stakes for a company of Google's size (unless it just wants to milk search for as much cash as possible before it dies).
25% of staff's wages are a lot, but the risk of going out of business because all the talented people are left continually fighting fires is worth a lot more.
I think the point was that Google is so overstaffed that they wouldn’t be negatively impacted even if they picked the “wrong 25%” to lay off. All the xooglers I have talked to basically agree.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3088174 :
"Results show that layoff announcements trigger negative returns for both U.S. and Japanese firms. Specifically, layoff announcements of U.S. firms are associated with a negative 1.78 percent abnormal return ..."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1748-8583.12532 : "They find that investors do not react if a layoff announcement signals proactive management (e.g., cost cutting) but penalize the firm if the layoff indicates reactive management (e.g., decline in demand). The penalty is also positively associated with layoff size but unrelated to firm size. Further, investors have become less punitive over time, or if its stock is traded on an exchange in civil law (vs. common law) country. "
> On what planet have you been living on? There absolutely is.
First, you could have phrased this differently and been less aggressive. Edit: I see you edited your comment after the fact. Good job.
But more importantly, has their been a study on layoffs like this and long-term health of companies? By the metric of the stock price, Boeing is doing better than it was 20, 30, 40+ years ago. Yes, they've have some problems, but the modern Boeing is, according to the share prices, more valuable and therefore a better company.
So, I'm also genuinely curious about if research has been done on this outside of immediate stock price and more about general strength of companies.
Is it? You need to normalize the price vs the market or industry. How has Boeing done compared to Airbus over the last 20 years? How about vs the market at large?
I'd be eager to know if these layoffs are cover for firing "inconvenient" employees. Google's fired Timnit Gebru, labor organizers, and recently folks who protested a contract with the Israeli Defense Forces. It's kind of their thing at this point.
> folks who protested a contract with the Israeli Defense Forces
I encourage anyone who believes this was somehow unjust or an overreaction to pick a pet cause and go disrupt executive offices at their own company to see if your company would act differently.
True, It is not unjust. It is justified. Unlike the occupation and genocide assisted by Google, that they were protesting. I mean if you could getaway with working and aiding a genocidal apartheid regime, you could getaway with a lot of things.
I think you could make a case that if any of these fired employees were employed at google prior to project Nimbus contracts they were already complicit by their silence and unwillingness to perform a terminate-able protest stunt against quite a few other shady google deals with problematic governments.
It’s a murky world out there and Google is a global company that gave up the “Don’t be evil” motto nearly a decade ago. If you expect to work for an altruistic org—go work for one. That ain't Google and your fat TC package you enjoy is going to come with some taint and stink.
For sure it is a murky world. It becomes less murky by not doing business with genocidal regimes, who are actively committing crimes against humanity now. I think we both agree that a less murky world is better?
Altruistic org, nah, these people just wanted less blood on their paychecks, maybe. Or just that the organisation they work is not complicit in these heinous crimes.
> these people just wanted less blood on their paychecks, maybe. Or just that the organisation they work is not complicit in these heinous crimes
They succeeded in their mission then. They have the option of having both of those things which Google provided to them vis-á-viv their termination. Google made the decision they couldn’t make on their own.
I understand the unwillingness for Google employees to engage is unpleasant discussion, but it's been mentioned that Google is grossly over-staffed by people that simply "rest and vest" rather than do anything of value.
I could never get any reasonable answer as to why these people think their role is justified. Instead the discussion would always get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. I always found it peculiar for the need of censorship brigading rather than having a reason.
I guess management has started asking the same question, and short of a convincing answer, are cutting the dead weight.
During my recent second stint there I have not seen anyone who was resting and vesting in engineering. I’ve seen a lot of people under tremendous stress working really hard on bullshit that’s not even remotely necessary, but resting and vesting was not something I saw. It could be happening among managers, directors and execs, of whom Google has a tremendous number, but not among ICs, who are impacted by this layoff
I think the problem is not "rest and vest" but an immense amount of red tape and performative work that just eats time from anything productive.
When you have so manye levels and each level needs to demonstrate impact by creating meetings, documents, reviews etc - everything is roadblocked.
Not to say we don't need reviews but people get discouraged when management doesn't actively try to make lives easier. This shows up as "rest and vest" aka no one is going to care about roadblocks if the people above won't care about it.
Who "rests and vests" more than a VP or SVP, in other words the people making these layoff decisions? The whole upper part of the org does no useful work and vests at rates hundreds of times higher than the people being fired.
> I could never get any reasonable answer as to why these people think their role is justified. Instead the discussion would always get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. I always found it peculiar for the need of censorship brigading rather than having a reason.
Everyone always thinks their coworkers aren't doing anything. It's tired and evidence-free so what's to discuss?
I believe you have mischaracterized my point in the least charitable way possible and foolishly tried to just dismiss it rather than simply engage in the point.
Your low quality response is a shining example of my quote because you haven't justified anything.
Steering the conversation frame to something else might trick the stupid, but you're not pulling a fast one on anyone with an IQ over 100.
This is true, and always has been, though would you say that the competition will be ever more cutthroat going forward? Not everyone can be a genius programmer, and even those who could may be unlucky in terms of opportunities for advancement, so people who don't live and breathe code (or whatever career in general) may be finding that their place in society is shrinking.
Not true. As technology goes forward and big companies get bigger, the role of individual contributors becomes less and less impactful on the overall performance of the business. At the end of the day all these processes, or at least most of them, are there for a reason: avoiding a collapse if Mr. 200IQ leaves and an average competent employee is hired in their position.
IMHO the trend is going in the opposite direction: people with extraordinary talents find that their place in society is shrinking, as workplaces become more and more like average salary factories.
Next stop is Cisco.