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Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hour of announcement. The CEO detailed the process of selecting people. The severance was very generous (3-6 months pay) along with health and other benefits. The impacted employees were allowed to keep the laptop and any other assets they took from the company. They even paid the same severance to contractors.

After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.

Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google.

Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually make it worse - so for example, the timing of this (which the person complains about) is because (AFAIK) they now have one day a month where ~all role eliminations that are going to happen that month, happen. Or so i'm told this is the case.

Ostensibly so you don't have random role eliminations every day, which makes some sense, but then you have no way for people on the ground to do anything more compassionate (like move the timing a bit) because they can't get through the bureaucracy.

In the end - it's simple - if you disempower all the people from helping you make it compassionate, it will not be compassionate. The counter argument is usually that those folks don't know how to do it in legally safe/etc ways. But this to me is silly - if you don't trust them to know how to do it, either train them and trust them, or fire them if they simply can't be trusted overall.

Google didn’t used to be quite so bad at this. Back when they closed the Atlanta office, people there got a lot of notice and opportunity to find another role. The complaints were about not being allowed to go full-time remote.

I wonder what changed?

Ruth and Fiona aren't Patrick and Laszlo.

It feels like there was leadership turnover in the late 2010s where "conventional company" people assumed the reins of power and started managing it like one.

The founders are complicit too. People like to think "before Larry and Sergey stepped down…" but the founders still control the board (tacitly or explicitly approving of the company's current behavior). Plus, there's Sergey's "60h/w or GTFO" note from a few months back.

Yeah, this is really common at Big Tech, I saw it happen at FB, and it's only gotten worse since then.

The issue is that if you keep hiring leadership/people from the rest of the corporate world (which is basically unavoidable if you are growing) then you'll end up trending towards the median of corporate behaviour over time.

It's mostly unavoidable, unless you never hire external managers (which would be very very difficult to do).

When these businesses are in their growth phase, they're relatively lenient about spending and generous to employees. When these businesses run out of opportunities for market growth or entering new markets to improve the bottom line, they turn to cost cutting and squeezing more out of employees to improve the bottom line instead. It's a natural progression for every megacorporation as they hit the limits of their growth.

Sundar Pichai. That's what changed. He's one of the most uninspiring tech leaders of today who just wants to run an already established business with more and more ads with some AI sprinkled upon everything. And cost cutting. That's all, that's his entire vision.

It's him and CFO Ruth Porat. Both happened in the same year. The latter is your stereotypical banking type.

IIRC during Google's first few mass layoffs in January 2023 and in January 2024, it gave people lots of notice, including opportunities to find another role. As time went on, it just stopped caring.

Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this.

That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?"

And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was able to have more pointed and more direct conversations with the executives tasked with doing these things. After a year or so, the evidence was pretty conclusive, it was neither that they didn't think they were bad at it, they didn't care.

There have been a lot of conversations on HN about how "managing" at Google was warped by the fact that their search advertising business was a freaking printing press for money. So much that billions of cash was generated every quarter that they just put into the bank because they didn't have anything to spend it on. There have been lots of discussions about how that twists evaluations etc.

What has been less discussed is that tens of thousands of people applied every week to work for Google. It is trivial for a manager to 'add staff' just pull them out of the candidate pipeline of people who have accepted offers. Tell HR^h^h People Operations to keep "n" candidates in the pipeline to support 'attritional effects' of management decisions. And blam! you get new employees with a lower salary than the ones you lose to attrition. It was always better to fill an open slot with a newer, cheaper, employee than to transfer one whose job/project/group had just been deleted. Always. Management explicitly pushed hard on the messaging of putting everything in the wiki because it was helpful that firing someone didn't lose any institutional knowledge because that knowledge was already online in the wiki.

As a result, it was ingrained in the management culture that "you can always replace people so don't feel bad about firing them" and "incremental revenue improvement or incremental cost reductions are not promotable events."

Google leadership spends money to create illusions for their employees to maximize their work effort, much like a dairy spends money to keep their cows milk production up. And like the dairy, they don't get too attached to any one cow, after all there are always more cows.

Argyle, the author, had their belief system completely invalidated. That is traumatic, always will be. Google's leadership doesn't care, Google's belief system is that there is already someone in the 'hired' pipeline who costs less than can do any of the things Argyle might do, or has done, and they are cheaper. So yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

When I was there, someone getting fired was extremely rare, which doesn’t seem to fit well with “you can always replace people” line that you’re talking about?

But Google is a big place and it was long ago, so perhaps it’s a “blind men and the elephant” thing.

Yeah, I probably should have put firing in quotes since there are a zillion ways to get someone to leave. Being "Laid off" is a form of firing, telling someone all of their multipliers are being zeroed out so that they "quit" is a form of firing. Putting someone on a "performance improvement plan" where the requirements to get off that plan is to do really unpleasant work is a form of "firing." Lots of ways to get someone to walk out the door without having to escort them out. And if you went to the managing within the law class they gave it was clearly explained it was so much better if the employee "chose" to quit than Google "firing" them because involuntary termination carried with it the risks of being sued.

Did you ever run percent when you were there? I started at Google in 2006 and one of the 'fun' things people did was run the 'percent' command that would tell you what percentage of Google employees were 'newer' than you, so if it was 10% you knew that 10% of the people were new. I was curious how it worked and found that it just counted rows in a database that had active employee names and start dates. Pretty simple hack.

The amazing thing was how quickly the number grew! And at TGIF there were the Nooglers in their propeller caps and everyone was like wow look at all those newbies. About 6 months in I noticed two things, first there was like 25% of the company was newer than I was, and that the number of employees being reported in the financial reports was about the same as when I joined. One could do the math. Waves of people would be hired, large chunks of them wouldn't survive the first year, and another chunk wouldn't survive 'slotting'. They were just no longer at the company. After a couple of years, as I remember it there were three of us, out of about 30, from the group that joined when I did, still at the company.

When I looked for it, it was pretty clear there was a tremendous amount of 'churn' in employment. I asked Lazlo Bock about it once, he was heading up 'People Operations' at the time and he assured me there were always plenty of candidates in the pipeline and Google wanted only the best and brightest. The people we had? Well they weren't always a good fit "culturally" with the company, after all Google was unlike any company that had ever existed, right?

It was just one of the more egregious times where the 'actions' and the 'words' didn't actually communicate the same message.

Yes, there was lots of turnover and "percent" started looking pretty extreme for me after a few years. But at the time, I assumed that's just how it is with software developers in Silicon Valley. We can and do change jobs frequently. It was well-known that it's the best way to get a raise. But I also knew more old-timers at Google than at other places.

For better or worse, tech has become a cyclical job and we’ve seen big firms printing billions due almost annual layoffs. This started around Covid and will continue likely as the new norm.

Prior to that, I only saw layoffs during market downturns (2001, 2008, 2012) and generally much smaller.

Recruiting is quite expensive, and employees naturally lose to the market rate by staying at one company for a while. I don't think this really matches what you're suggesting.

Remember that bit about billions of dollars every quarter in free cash flow? That's after spending on things like 'recruiting' and 'building another 50MW data center' kinds of expenses. If you're a startup, recruiting costs are an annoyingly big chunk of your burn, if you're Google, not so much.

Another big thing at Google was data science, or "Using data to win arguments" as a prominent Google engineer once wrote. I would not be surprised that someone has code that assesses the cost of replacing people where they figure out "current pay package of existing engineer" - "recruiting costs" + "new pay package" and the manage the list of people who are now 'replacable' because that number has gone in favor of replacement.

I was pitched a project to work on when I was there called "find and expert" or something which was designed to identify individuals who were 'experts' and relied on by the organization. Reasonable thing right? Know who your experts are. But the folks putting this together were also associated with People Operations trying to replace people. It didn't take too much effort to connect the dots on that. Was it evil? Yes? No? Kind of? It was more like "we want a company where everyone is easily replaceable without risk to the company." That certainly plays well with the shareholders. Felt a bit like the Borg trying to integrate ones technical distinctiveness into the collective.

It has always been a career limiter of mine that I care about the people more than I care about the company.

That comes out of a different budget though, so people care less.

Google is bad at a lot of things but has a “we’re number one why try harder?” attitude.

Or rather you can’t benchmark the performance of anyone there against industry peers because they are protected by a two-sided market. Bazel, Kubernetes and other startup killing tools are developed there because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive. It’s even worse when it comes to evaluating top management, somebody like Marissa Meyer might be average at best but has such a powerful flywheel behind them that they might seem to succeed brilliantly even if they were trying to fail with all their might.

Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters.

I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline.

The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."

Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume.

He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions".

I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate.

Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?

One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.

Oh ya this. Also their recruiters aren’t the best but they are the most persistent. Meta seems to be going in the Amazon direction unfortunately, I still think Google is the least bad of the three.

I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that.

Many, many years ago I sat next to HR in an open plan office while on a freelance gig.

They treated almost all candidates like subhumans, both when talking about the candidates within the team and when speaking on the phone to candidates.

They handled everyone from factory worker and janitorial roles, to specialists to director level. I very clearly got the impression that they only treated candidates well if those candidates could turn into people who had any power over them within the org.

I've carried that with me since and I often recognize it in HR staff I interact with now.

Linkein is now full of recruiters looking for work, who never had any network.

The barrier of entry to become a receruiter in general is very, very low.

At Amazon? Yes, very likely.

I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.

I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again."

Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.

I had a similar experience with Facebook, although my email was much more aggressive (this was when their recruiter contacted me right after I got tripped by one of their UX dark patterns in a way that translated to real world harm). I kept getting invites until I put a clear statement expressing my desire to never ever work for Facebook into my LinkedIn profile

FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.

Well the guy was technically in line - your conditional wasn’t satisfied.

I think I wrote an email along those lines, at some point, although it was as much annoyance with the persistence of a particular recruiter as it was a desire not to work at Amazon.

+1, it's been a while since I interviewed with Google, but this brought me back to how annoying it was. I've never had a good interview experience with Google. I only interviewed during college for internship and then a full-time new-grad role and got a consistent "we're doing you a favour by even talking to you" attitude from them— the delays, the impersonality, the delays to the general vibe of the emails, etc.

They became significantly more attentive when I got an internship offer from a competing big-tech company, but as much as my recruiter seemed to try, the process just seem to be deficient beyond their capacity to do anything about it. It had to go through many steps, and be reviewed by many people who seemingly had better things to do.

Eventually they reached to the right people to tell me my decision before my other deadline. I _was_ going to get an offer. They couldn't get me the actual offer letter, or tell me if I had guaranteed host-matching though. I happened to know Google can send intern offers that don't guarantee you'll be matched to a team, and if you're not, the internship just doesn't happen. In my book that's not only as good as no offer really, it's also just disrespectful. I knew people who had this type of offers and didn't get teams.

I took the other offer. "You will get an offer, the details are just taking a while" is not enough to decide on, and the whole process didn't particularly warm me up to Google. For comparison, and to give credit where credit is due, the other company was Meta (then FB). My recruiter was very response, understanding, and personable, which is especially appreciated as an college student— you're nervous, unexperienced and have a lot going on beyond interviewing. They sent me pictures of their dog to lighten the mood. I had told them I'd appreciate quickness, and by the time I was eating dinner after my on-site, I had the offer letter in my inbox.

I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.

It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.

the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.

I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.

They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"

Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.

Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.

This doesn't pass the sniff test.

Why would the candidate be on the hook for the flight change and extra night at a hotel?

When I interviewed with Google ~10 years ago, they booked and paid for my my flights (from China to the US), hotel and car hire. I didn't have to book, pay and then ask for reimbursement, let alone foot the bill myself.

The 'two days' sounds weird to me as well. In my experience (on both sides of the table) face to face interviews were scheduled to be on a single day.

Perhaps things have changed or your friends were interviewing for very specialist roles?

The phrasing “from start to end” got me thinking—tangential, but—they were an extremely cool company when Millenials were in school and looking to join the workforce. Anybody would have jumped at the opportunity to work for them.

Actually, I can’t even think of a similar company nowadays.

Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a really bad hiring pipeline as a result. Why work on the skill of hiring, if people will jump through flaming hoops to work for you.

As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.

As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.

Shocking how real this is.

Just wait for IBM to turn into Red Har Linux or maybe Infosysl

That would be nice, if it turned into Red Hat.

But IBM was first, right?

IBM owns Red Hat, and companies grow to resemble their acquisitions all the time, though I think more people believe Red Hat is already deep in being borgified to be IBM Linux more than the other way around.

I’m aware… it just seems too good to be true, that IBM could be corrected by Red Hat.

Sometimes, good things are worth the wait. The two times that you accepted roles other than Google, did they turn out better than waiting for Google?

    > after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined

Bazel is an incredibly productive tool at the right scale. I could not imagine working on a giant monorepo without it.

If a startup is killed by Bazel, it probably wasn't the right tech choice for their scale, and it would be more accurate to say that the startup was killed by bad technical leadership.

somebody like Marissa Meyer

Marissa Mayer left Google like, 13 years ago...?

"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive"

So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure.

But some of the data here is just very wrong.

Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has:

1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed.

2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well.

...

So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :)

It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think.

As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount.

I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's.

For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it.

(Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured)

Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment.

That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not.

There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process.

The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days.

I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits:

Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits.

Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them?

Them: Yes

Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all?

Them: No.

But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive,

That’s the thing, they might be winning all the productivity battles there are (and I genuinely believe that they do, on top of great tools Google employs good-enough programmers to make use of those tools), but at the same time they’re losing the general war. Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.

The botched Google+ launch broke them in that department, or maybe that was just a symptom of how badly-broken things already were inside the company. They’re still making lots and lots of money, though, so that’s still a good thing for them.

Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.

People repeat this a lot, but it's obviously not true. Google Photos is recent, really good, and had more than a billion users really quickly. Waymo is like a decade away from eating the entire urban taxi market. Gemini is the best LLM for writing code right now. I guess you could call these "rare exceptions" but I don't think that's a useful way to describe them.

Hell, even YouTube improves every year by leaps and bounds from both a revenue/profit standpoint, AND from a creator support standpoint.

Google deserves to be heckled mercilessly for how easy engineers have it there and how eager it is to kill off products, but suggesting that it's a dying company coasting on ad money is just totally wrong.

If Photos is recent then Google search was recent when Photos was released!

It’s a decade old and that’s only if we don’t count what it was before it was spun into its own product, google’s more recent integrations spun as “releases” non withstanding.

YouTube INCREASING creator support? That’s news to me and every other YouTube creator. Creator support peaked around the time Photos released, nearly a decade ago and has only gotten worse since (although if we were to graph it, it would certainly have peaks and valleys).

Photos was brand new in 2015. Search is from 1998. I'm not a mathematician but that means that search is about three times older than it...

If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it, I don't know if there's much of a point to me trying to convince you

If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it

Well I didn’t say anything like this or anything that implied anything close to this so I suppose you’d have to engage with what I actually said.

Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015. Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age. I don’t think even IBM would consider a 10 year old product a recent release.

Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015.

Google has had several previous photos apps! The actually useful one is the most recent.

Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age.

So you swear you aren't demanding proof that services released in the past five years are successes, but you're complaining that pretty much anything older is too old.

Dude, I am engaging with what you said. Almost no product is wildly successful in less than 10 years by Google's standards, because Google measures users in billions.

If you still wanna ignore Photos, then talk about Gemini, Cloud, and Waymo. The Pixel phones are also doing pretty well, considering how dominant Apple has been.

My point here is that you're ignoring numbers that would be INSANE for any startup because the product is from Google. It really seems to me like you're looking for reasons to discredit the company instead of the truth, which is that non-ad revenue is 25% of the total and growing.

That's pretty significant and in absolute terms makes Google a giant even without search.

I am SO confused and have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think you’re talking to someone else?

My post was Thesis: Photos is not new

Supporting evidence: everything else.

I am not OP, I am not saying anything you’re responding to (and when I look at the OP you responded to they didn’t say what you’re responding to either).

I’m not ignoring any numbers they just don’t have anything to do with my post.

Additionally, Photos was a relaunched app that’s why I’m saying the 2015 is a little misleading, I am aware Google had other photo apps before Photos and I’m not talking about that.

I can say “your examples are bad” without espousing “Google doesn’t do anything”

My post was Thesis: Photos is not new

Supporting evidence: everything else.

I am getting my number from Wikipedia, because that's when the actual "good" version of Photos launched. I don't know what the status quo was before the relaunch, because the app wasn't useful to me before it got the ML features that caused it to blow up and become a wild success.

The point I am trying to make is that Photos, on its own, would be a multibillion dollar startup. In the context of billion-user apps, even being 10 years old is still pretty recent.

My complaint with your take is that if you exclude anything younger than that, OBVIOUSLY there will not be as many (or any) wild successes. It takes time for a product to become successful.

That's not what they said.

They said, if Photos is currently recent (aka 2025-2015 = 10 years = recent) then Search was recent when Photos came out (aka 2015-1998 = 12 years = recent).

Which given the overall timeframes, I'd say that's close enough to say 10 years ~= 12 years. And they said they'd actually count the non-Photos time of Photos as Photos, so add some to the 10 years.

2015-1998 = 17, not 12.

Yeah this is what drove me a little crazy about his reply. That's almost a factor of 2.

ROFL, HN needs Cap'n Picard face palm. You are of course correct. slowly walks out backwards while trying to turn less than lobster red

And if you believe that, @DannyBee's productivity isn't real.

Or maybe it's a business problem that Google shares with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

Microsoft has struggled to find any new products that will really move the needle in terms of revenue but they support their old customers with enduring loyalty while making the occasional absurd-but-bold move like Windows 8 and sticking to businesses that seem to make no sense like XBOX.

Facebook is the captain of cringe, not cool, but at least they're investing big in VR as a platform. They subsidize great rigs for Beat Saber because Zuckerberg will never forgive himself if he gives up and somebody else succeeds. [1]

Apple will never find a product as big as the iPhone. To do so they've have to make an iCar or iHouse or skip Starship and go straight to O'Neill Colonies. At least they are indisputably the best at what they do and they can occasionally take a hopeless shot at someone else's turf (Vision Pro) feeling justified that the only rival platform has a trashcan for a logo.

Google has trained us all that anything new from Google has a shelf life less than day old bread. They go at new projects as if they a startup that didn't get into Y Combinator or like the kind of company that Marissa Mayer starts these days [2] -- they don't realize part of the special opportunity of being a huge company like that with an absurd valuation is you can do really big, audacious, and irrational things.

[1] I learned for myself how dangerous this attitude is but all I could do was max out my HELOC.

[2] see https://sunshine.com/ not to put it down, I might be involved in something like that if I wasn't doing what I am doing

Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.

Dude, Marissa Mayer hasn't been at Google for well over a decade. Weird callout.

So? It's not a weird callout, it's an example where the whole arc is well known.

Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this

The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012.

It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door?

Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.

"I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012."

Are you sure about that? Microsoft's 2014 layoffs, which were large enough to be reported in the tech press, let employees keep network and building access until the actual layoff date.

Can confirm as well, was laid off from Microsoft in 2023, and I kept access for about a week and a half (and then was paid for an additional 60 days after that, but no longer had access to anything, this was just the WARN period).

Same thing for people just leaving. I left in 2024, and my login and everything around it kept working until my announced leave date (and I gave more than a month notice).

I do recall stories of people getting escorted out, but this was from 00s.

Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.

Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions. People are moved to different jobs, helped with training etc...

Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.

Having experienced layoffs in both US and EU companies, the difference is massive. In my experience there is very little respect for "the human" being laid off in US companies

People literally would just disappear day to day. I've had several instances where I only found out a colleague had been fired because I tried to write them on Slack only to find that their account had been deactivated

Personally I felt constantly worried working in such an environment and I don't want to work for another US company again if I can help it

There are of course bad cases in the EU, but in my experience it's way less common than in the US

Layoffs in US companies are a BCP event. It's like an earthquake or a tsunami. Weeks of chaos while you figure out who survived, and who's now doing the work previously done by a team that no longer exists.

I watched a layoff take out half the security team during an incident. That was fun.

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company.

I feel like global acronym bankruptcy is overdue.

GAB, you mean?

I'm reminded of the last part of 'TLA' form the Jargon File (I had a hard copy back in college that I read cover to cover).

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html

...

The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.

Now I want to use the dictionary file to figure the actual probability of a letter appearing in a TLA. It's not nearly 1/26.

There's likely a good bit of analysis that could be done on TLAs. Consider TLA itself is {Adjective : Count} {Noun} {Noun}. Meanwhile, DUI is {Gerund} {Preposition} {Noun} with the stop word 'the' removed.

It might be interesting to take a sample of TLAs used and look what words can be used in those spots. If the third position is 90% likely to be a noun, that could change the distribution... guessing not in a significant way itself but it could be interesting to see.

This is the best work I know on the topic (admittedly having done no literature review): https://gwern.net/tla

BCP events. This makes so much sense. At a previous mega corp I was always confused why such emphasis was made on BCPs for war or natural disaster scenarios which are so rare compared to how much time was spent on the plans. Literally months later we had massive layoffs. The layoff was the (un)natural disaster they were preparing for!

If anyone here has only worked in the EU and wants to see what the US layoff process is supposed to be on a good day, just watch the movie Margin Call and the scene where Eric Dale is called into the office by HR to be fired.

There's a scene where they put a folder in front of him with a brightly-coloured sailboat on the cover labelled "LOOKING AHEAD." It's exactly as grim as it sounds.

Another "fun" thing about that movie is you see the HR lady who delivered the news with a bunch of false empathy walking out the building with a box in a later scene.

Watched this movie 3 times and never noticed! This is a fun touch.

That’s very subtle. I have not noticed that.

also, the pacing of:

"I hope, considering your [pause to check personnel file] over nineteen years of service to the firm you will understand that these measures are in no way a reflection of the firm's feelings towards your performance or your character"

Up in the Air was another great depiction of the most cynical mode of doing layoffs. And, of course, Office Space.

I was laid off by a consultant. It was somehow even worse than Up in the Air since they made my manager sit in on the call.

I know they probably made this up for the movie, but I almost went through my file cabinet to look for that exact folder because I have been through several layoffs and it looked so familiar

American companies play mental games and gaslight everyone by calling it “a hard decision” and try to place the empathy back on the executives who get paid 10-100x the employees they just fired without warning. It’s sociopathic behavior.

I don’t think that’s really fair. It can certainly be a hard but necessary decision. And what does it matter that a CEO makes more than his employees? Even if he makes 50 times what they make, that means even if he gave up all of his salary he could only save the jobs of 50 employees.

Could he get a bonus if he fires 50 more?

I don't want to work for another US company again if I can help it

You can work for a US company in the UE. They have to follow the local rules like anybody else.

Having worked in a (now defunct) US co in West-EU I can say it’s a subtle blend of the two. The layoff was announced, shortly after a few people received a call by HR, were escorted to their desk by security and had to turn in all company belongings on the spot. They were not allowed to touch a computer or telephone and were then escorted out of the premises. Afterwards, we learned that they had received a severance package that met local rules.

Most of my colleagues were shocked by the treatment. Moral took a dive after that.

I work for a US company but in western Europe. The layoffs have been much more humane here than in the US. There was a negociation process which lasted several months, and the severance was better and on a voluntary basis. I don't think a company making profit can easily get rid of employees over here, but probably depends on the country. Regarding performance-based layoffs, they did manage to fire people too, but again it was technically a common agreement.

That being said, if they want to get rid of employees, they always find a way. And the European market isn't as dynamic as the US one, so there are pros and cons. Personally, all things considered (risks of layoffs, PTO, cost of living) I'm happier in Europe but it really depends on individual situation.

I wonder about the dynamic tradeoffs. Maybe a better example are labor markets that are even more dynamic than the USA (like China, despite having formal labor contracts). Maybe if jobs are so easy to get losing one won’t feel as painful.

Well US companies now take the cowards way out generally - tell everyone to WFH that day (despite prior RTO mandates) and then just disable peoples access so the first way the laid off find out is when they can't login for the day.

[dead]

There are rules, but one can decide to not follow them.

One thing that I saw (but never experienced myself) happen with North American companies wanted to leave EU is just doing their usual things (thus not following local rules), and then people have to sue and wait many years to be compensated.

A company that has to "follow the rules" is way less desirable to work for then a company that embraces the spirit of the rules. I'm in the US so can't really speak for companies in other countries, but many US companies are doing everything they can to skirt the letter of the law and spending a ton of money to have them rewritten to be less favorable to employees and more favorable to the business. Finding a company that truly cares for employees is a very rare treat!

It's a fundamental problem with large organizations.

In principle, an organization that is built on reciprocal loyalty is more productive than one that treats people as interchangeable cogs, because people are individually happier and go to greater lengths to achieve the shared goals, making them more productive. However, this arrangement can only be built on trust, and trust doesn't scale well past the Dunbar number. Thus, spirit of the rules is replaced by letter of the rules (which can be meaningfully enforced).

Thus, the larger the bureaucracy, the more soulless it is even in individual interactions between people within it, and the more it treats those people as interchangeable cogs that are there solely to serve the overall function of the organization. If the organization is a for-profit corporation, its overall function is profit, and thus megacorps always tend to optimize squeezing their employees.

Short-term this can be reversed somewhat if leadership is concentrated and opinionated. E.g. when the company grows out of a startup dominated by a single founder, and that founder has certain ethical standards or beliefs that they enforce on the org, overriding the natural tendency. This arrangement never lasts long-term, though - either the founder goes away and is replaced by generic management which has neither the desire nor the capacity to go against the current, or the founder becomes corrupt.

That's absolutely happening in US-owned companies in EU that used to be great places to work before they became US-owned. They do pay a premium for their bullshit of course.

Well, sure, but unless the US company is willing to set up an EU subsidiary and employ you via that then you'll be working as an independent contractor. That status gives you zero employment rights, because you're explicitly not an employee.

Many cases where someone is in practice functioning as a full-time employee are legally employment relationships according to both US and EU law even if the contract and payroll procedures say otherwise, and even if the contractual relationship is directly between a US entity and a worker in the EU. This includes whatever employment rights are supposed to exist, for the number of employees (whether or not misclassified as independent contractors) the company has in that country under its national employment laws.

Lots of US tech companies like to pretend otherwise, but a complaint or two from the misclassified employee can create plenty of pain for the employer for lying to both the US and foreign governments about the genuine nature of the relationship. And these penalties generally go not to the employee but to the employer, since the noncompliance is generally around employer tax, payroll, and reporting obligations as well as laws which are meant to protect employee rights.

In practice, US tech companies literally buy their way out. They pay such a premium for those independent contractors that there would be no such complaints in the first place.

No complaints based on the amount of pay, maybe.

But for example, someone who is fired or laid off in a way that wouldn’t comply with local employment protections if the employment relationship were correctly classified might assert their misclassification claim so that they can also get compensation for their wrongful termination.

If that happens, then the company not only has to scramble to catch up on the overdue social contributions for the complaining employee and pay any applicable penalties, but also likely have to undergo an audit of their other workers in that country plus the same consequences for them.

There’s a reason why any US tech company that’s big enough to be a juicy financial target tends to do this correctly, and why companies like Deel, Remote.com, and their less tech-branded competitors (such as Velocity Global) are gaining popularity among people who want to do this correctly at smaller scales than those for which it makes sense to set up foreign subsidiaries.

When smaller companies take this particular shortcut, are risking severe financial consequences for the company if the authorities discover it, and in many cases this also comes with personal liability for some of the executives who are neglecting their legal duties.

That's usually illegal, unless you're a genuine independent contractor that completes work packages for multiple clients.

If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.

I'm only familiar with UK rules on the topic, and of course the UK is no longer in the EU, but here at least the standard for determining employment status is quite complicated. The ability to work for multiple clients is one of the factors, as it speaks to the control and mutuality-of-obligation tests set by IR35, but it would probably not (alone) be enough to determine employment status either way.

If it was legal to work in the office of your only "client" 40 hours a week on a permanent basis, then any EU company could ignore the entire employment legislation of their real country by setting up a shell subsidiary in the US.

That wouldn't work because it would be an obvious sham designed mainly to avoid the EU company's responsibilities under employment law. Courts see through those shams very quickly.

Technical people -- including me -- like to try and reduce the law to a series of digital if/then/else tests, but reality is much more analogue. If you're one of a small number of highly-experienced remote contractors engaged by a US-based client with no local subsidiary, the authorities are likely to accept the arrangement, or at least not to spend significant amounts of time investigating it. If you're one of very many Uber-driver-like "contractors" working for a company that is obviously dodging its local employment law obligations, then they're much more likely to be interested.

This can still happen:

where I only found out a colleague had been fired because I tried to write them on Slack only to find that their account had been deactivated

The colleague will just be one that's based in the US, but that doesn't make it much easier.

From my experience that often just prolongs the process, but doesn't change the management culture.

An employee decided to be laid off is equally written off immediately, it's just delegated to the regional/local HR to "manage the rest".

If you're not escorted off-premise, you get to enjoy some additional days/weeks of colleagues and managers telling you how surprised they were...

[dead]

The EU is not a country. Labor laws vary massively between countries.

In my experience there is very little respect for "the human" being laid off in US companies

its much easier to find another job in US because of this though.

Is it, really? Aren't US tech interview notoriously difficult? Many rounds of interviews, background checks, etc.?

Most purely European companies don't do that. Actually, unfortunately, some of them do, because of American influence. But for sure they didn't use to.

There are 2.8 million developers in the US. Most of them don’t work for “tech” companies. Most of them work for boring enterprise companies without multiple rounds of enterprise companies and many let you just do behavioral questions and techno trivia on the stack they care about.

I personally have interviewed for 7 enterprise dev jobs and I have had 2 coding interviews and those were simple.

IME, this was true four years ago. Few rounds, assessments were mostly take homes or in-person "implement a feature" style, interview questions didn't seem to be built to trip you up.

Now, every job I apply for has 4-5 rounds, leetcode is more common, they do behavioural and system design rounds that you have to prepare for, etc. One job I applied to even asked me two behavioural questions via email before I even talked to someone. Something's truly off.

Wait till you get a self recorded behavioral interview. I truly wonder if there is that much value to be extracted out of 10 minutes of people awkwardly responding to questions while trying their best to fill in the silence.

I think I'm not yet desperate to the point that I would agree to that.

I had to do one of those for some local government lobbyists association in DC. They ended up hiring some undergrad instead.

And just got asked to do another one for an internship

Sorry to hear that. I feel that tech hiring has become full of weird gatekeepers that probably wouldn't even be able to pass their own weird challenges.

Of course. Companies who fire more also hire more.

European companies have very little staff turnover, so new jobs are fewer. Another aspect is that salaries are very even across much of the industry, as it is often negotiated by unions and unless you are also switching roles (e.g. into management) salaries at different companies will be very similar. That is why working for the same company for a long time is much more common in Europe.

Another aspect is that salaries are very even across much of the industry, as it is often negotiated by unions

Can you specify what country you're drawing these facts from? Europe does not have standard employment law, and I definitely haven't experienced salaries being set by unions or being common across the industry.

Germany in this case. The high tax rates at progressive rates mean that salary increases mean that income after taxes is quite flat.

There are also union negotiated rates for pay across much of the industry. Even if you switch employer your pay might remain exactly the same, unless you also get promoted and into a higher level or a different industry. "Flächentarifvertrag" it is called.

Obviously this drastically disincentivizes hoping employers.

Germany in this case. The high tax rates at progressive rates mean that salary increases mean that income after taxes is quite flat.

OK, good to know. I definitely haven't experienced flat income after taxes post salary bump, even though I pay 52% marginal on my income (in Ireland).

Obviously this drastically disincentivizes hoping employers.

I can totally see that. Is it really that common in tech jobs though? I'd have expected this to be much more common in larger, older companies (like the automotive industry).

I can totally see that. Is it really that common in tech jobs

What is a "tech job"? Wouldn't a job where you are designing the electrical/mechanical/software parts of a car be a "tech job"?

Of course this is much more common in older, well established industries. But that is where most of the "tech jobs" are. Germany, especially labor laws, are hostile to start-ups so it is natural that people get employed at these older companies with union negotiated salaries.

Aren't US tech interview notoriously difficult? Many rounds of interviews, background checks, etc.?

Not really, people get hired all the time that can't do a fizzbuzz.

As a counterpoint, I don't think I've worked at a company in 10 years that didn't at least require fizzbuzz.

What he meant is that the whole capitalist culture, less regulations, creates a more thriving economy which creates more jobs and hence more options to go to.

I've heard this type of comment a lot but in my experience there isn't any shortage of tech companies in the EU.

What EU regulations hamper isn't job creation, it's employee and customer exploitation. The distinction between "job creation" and "employee exploitation" is important.

What the former means in practice is that there is a massive contractor market in the UK and EU. So if companies need temporary staff, they'll hire a contractor. If they need permanent staff then they'll hire an employee. And contractors in the UK & EU are paid significantly more than their employee peers. In fact their pay is much more equivalent to US employees. So companies will make constant tradeoffs between more expensive labor for short-lived projects vs cheaper staff and knowledge retention but stricter employment laws. It's a fair trade most of the time.

So a more accurate way of comparing US vs EU businesses in terms of employees would be US employees vs EU contractors. Things then begin to look a lot more equivalent.

I doubt the tech workers making three to four times EU wages in the US feel “exploited”.

My job is purely transactional. I’ve worked for 10 companies in almost 30 years. I gave them labor and they gave me money. Whenever one side decided the arrangement wasn’t working, I moved on to another job.

Tech is always boom/bust. We’re lucky to have had a long boom.

I’m personally well acquainted with many people in tech, especially big tech. Many of them are doing little or nothing, certainly not justifying $300k+ salaries.

What you do has risk but is fundamentally more honest - your skills are around technology and output, not navigating corporate bureaucracy.

I am always skeptical of claims that some workers are just lazy bums skimming money.

I don't think most folks graduate college and think, "You know what sounds amazing? Sitting at a desk doing nothing five days a week!"

I expect most of the time they have good reason to be "unproductive," and would respond positively to those reasons getting addressed, or you're not capturing their contributions accurately with whatever metrics you're using to find "slackers."

It’s not the people, it’s the process. In a big organization you need to be actively managing your career to be in the right places.

And people are doing things, I’m not saying they’re sitting making paper airplanes — just things with no value or that drain their value. I had a high school friend who was brilliant, but his career got nerfed when he stuck with a bad tech/business unit.

If you’re the world’s premier expert in some peculiar process that only exists in one place, that’s no mas. Companies have been rolling in dough for a long time and some have way more people than they used to. One big company I deal with went from an account team of 6 to almost 50.

I haven't seen it on any team I've been on. But also I don't think the implication is people doing literally nothing. Just people doing things that are not worthwhile at all, wasting other people's time, and kinda just puttering around.

Some of it boils down to ineffective management and lack of mentoring, for sure, and could be addressed in a better way. Some of it is people getting in way over their heads.

During the first “bust” in 2000 I had four years of experience and living and working in Atlanta - far away from a tech hub. Boring old enterprise dev jobs at banks, insurance companies, etc weren’t affected and I was easily able to get offers.

I worked at a company where utility companies sent us data files and we created, printed and mailed bills.

In 2008 during the financial crisis the next time I looked for a job (my third), I had two offers relatively quickly - one programming point of sales systems and the other that I accepted programming ruggedized Windows CE devices for field service workers.

Fast forward to 2020 at the height of COVID, I got my one and only BigTech job working at AWS (my 8th job).

Unlike the author of the submitted article, when I got Amazoned 3.5 years later, I shrugged, my $40K severance was deposited in my account and I reached out to my network and targeted outreach to some recruiters in my niche and had four interviews and 3 offers within 3 weeks. Why would I waste time getting emotional about a company knowing that the CEO is 6-7 positions up on the career ladder and I’m just a random number to most of the organization?

A year later in 2024 around 9:00 PM I had a “1-1” with my manager invite for the next morning. I already had my suspicions and told my wife that I am probably going to be laid off in the morning. She said let her know how it goes and we went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning, was notified about my layoff asked when I would get my severance and responded to a recruiter that reached out to me about a week prior.

I started the interview process and three weeks later I had a job making the same as I was making at AWS.

I don’t need to “justify” what I’m making. I have a skillset and experience that are in demand and companies are willing to pay me for it because by employing me they get a positive ROI.

What skillset and expereince do you have which is in demand? Just curious to know.

I’ve found my biggest differentiator over the last decade was soft skills - writing, dealing with stakeholders, knowing how to talk to normies, being comfortable in the room with decision makers, being able to do effective presentations and project management skills.

And knowing how to “deal with ambiguity” and focus on how to add business value. If you look at the leveling guidelines of any tech company, anything above mid level is focused on “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.

Knowing AWS really well is just a tool and it doesn’t hurt that I have a stint at AWS ProServe on my resume

Notice “codez real gud” is not a differentiator.

There is no hard skill you can learn that thousands of of others don’t know that will set you apart.

Well except for some vertical market stuff that will leave you pigeonholed.

Sources:

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

https://dropbox.tech/culture/sharing-our-engineering-career-...

Your post somehow suggests that when a bust comes European companies won't start laying off people. And in the same boom period the US dev will make much more money (and have a biggger safety pillow) than the European one.

Until the US dev has a medical expense, that is.

A cursory amount of research shows that the average premium for an insurance policy on the open market through the ACA is between $400-$2000 a month depending on options - family status, deductibles etc.

There is also COBRA that lets you stay on your employer’s plan. You have to pay the entire premium. I pay $600 a month now and my employer pays $1200 a month. That’s me + family.

I think a lot of you guys from the US don't really get how high the taxes are here that pay for this stuff, especially for people that make more than the average.

If you would work non-contract here in Poland for an equivalent of ~$120k you would pay around $1k USD. If your wife is working she will also pay, of course this also covers all you kids.

So lets say both of you make around $120k here - so you would pay $2k monthly for "free" healthcare and its quality is atrocious. Even for serious stuff you many times need to wait 1-2 years for something, all hospitals are understaffed, the care quality is abysmal.

If you are ambitious and make good money the US is better. Europe in general is better for people that don't aim too high and want the state to enforce some minimum of QoL for them at the expense of the rest.

You're focusing on one word and missing the meat of my comment. The EU equivalent to US employment in terms of employee rights and pay is contracting.

People in IT who take the employment route rather than contracting, do so because they want job security. eg they might have families. And much as you might be happy with your arrangement, there are plenty in the UK and Europe who do prefer longer-term job security over a few extra £££ in their pocket.

In the UK you have worst of both worlds now - insecurity of contracting and employee level wages, thanks to amended IR35 lobbied by big consultancies.

I think the bust of the job market played a bigger part here. When IR35 originally came in, some companies would bump pay inside IR35 to compensate elsewhere risk getting poorer pol of talent. Since the job market crashed there have been fewer jobs all round, which has pushed the contractor market down too.

But you’re right that IR35 really hasn’t helped situations either.

Some of my friends have commented that the last few years has been the worst time in their 20+ years as a contractor.

That take is a bit reductive - it downplays the structural collapse of independent contracting in the UK post-IR35 reform. This wasn't just a "bit of market downturn" or a few companies cutting rates. People lost the ability to operate as businesses, to manage their tax affairs fairly, to invest in their own skills, and to retain profit. What they got in return was, at best, a modest day-rate bump—hardly compensation for losing all autonomy, business deductions (like training, equipment, downtime), and legal protections.

It forced highly specialised professionals into employment in all but name, just without the rights, security, or support. A square peg jammed into a round PAYE hole. And the long-term effect? Exactly what you'd expect: the best talent either left the UK, shifted to servicing overseas clients (where Chapter 10 doesn't apply), or left the field altogether. The real talent pool shrank, not because of market conditions, but because there was no longer a viable way to operate independently.

To make matters worse, the government compounded this by lowering the barriers to import cheaper labour from abroad ("Boriswave"), creating a race to the bottom on wages, with zero incentives for local upskilling or long-term investment in the domestic workforce.

So yes, the job market took a hit - but IR35 didn't just "not help" - it actively accelerated the decline by removing the last flexible, self-directed model for highly skilled work. The damage wasn't cyclical. It was engineered.

You may think I’m being reductive but I think you’re massively overstating things too.

For example:

People lost the ability to operate as businesses, to manage their tax affairs fairly, to invest in their own skills, and to retain profit.

I don’t know a single IT contractor that lost that ability. Maybe in other business sectors, but we are talking about IT here.

What they got in return was, at best, a modest day-rate bump—hardly compensation for losing all autonomy, business deductions (like training, equipment, downtime), and legal protections.

This is also an exaggeration.

And you’re overlooking the point that IR35 only affects contractors working on BAU or who have worked with the same company for more than 2 years.

Firstly 2 years is a long time in contractor terms. And secondly, most occasions for hiring contractors was to work on new developments. So most of the IT contractors were still outside of IR35.

That’s not to mention that many companies would describe the work in ways that are favourable to working inside IR35 (not to the extent of tax fraud, but to the extent where any BAU responsibilities that were required weren’t the primary responsibility in the job specification.

Ironically places hardest hit by IR35 were government departments rather than businesses. Some of who ended up just adding ~40% to the contracted salary so the government still ended up covering the tax rather than the contractors.

And the very few contractors who were inside IR35 and didn’t get a bump in the contract fee would tell me they were still better off contracting rather than being employed (even taking loss of perks into account).

Now I’m not going to say that IR35 made things easier for contractors. Clearly it didn’t. But it wouldn’t have been catastrophic for the contract market had the employment bubble not also pop shortly afterwards.

You also seem to suggest that IR35 prevented contractors from claiming expenses back in tax, and that simply isn’t true either.

Edit: I will concede that it’s been 3 years since I was last given a budget and told “go hire, you decide who” so if there’s been any legal changes to IR35 since then I might have missed it.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you're still underestimating how fundamentally IR35 reforms changed the environment for small business operators in IT, especially since 2021.

I don’t know a single IT contractor that lost that ability.

I do. In fact, I knew dozens of people who ran small, legitimate limited companies - offering high-quality services across IT disciplines - who were forced to shut down or stop trading as businesses once clients tightened their risk assessments. In the early days, yes, some niche contractors were spared because they were too hard to replace. But even that dried up as corporate legal teams standardised engagement models and de-risked by banning sourcing services from small business entirely.

You also seem to suggest that IR35 prevented contractors from claiming expenses back in tax, and that simply isn’t true either.

This is misleading. If you’re inside IR35 or forced into an umbrella, you can only claim expenses on the same terms as an employee of the client. That means you can't offset training, equipment, home office, insurance, downtime, software etc. - because your business isn't recognised as a business anymore. And if you can't make profit, you have nothing to deduct from anyway.

you’re overlooking the point that IR35 only affects contractors working on BAU or who have worked with the same company for more than 2 years.

This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. There is no “2-year” IR35 rule. That might relate to travel expenses. IR35 assessments depend on control, substitution, and mutuality of obligation. Even short, project-based work can be deemed inside. And under Chapter 10, only clients carry the liability - so they default to "inside" for anything remotely borderline, including repeat work.

And that’s exactly the issue: having loyal clients and repeat business — something any serious business would strive for — is now penalised. The system structurally disincentivises hiring genuine small consultancies, because clients now carry legal and tax risk for treating you as "outside." So naturally, they avoid it.

And that quote about companies “describing work in ways favourable to IR35” to avoid falling foul of the rules - you realise you’ve just described a legal minefield that only small businesses are forced to navigate? If an individual or a small consultancy tries to deliver a long-term service or repeat work, they're suddenly in danger of being labelled "too BAU" and dragged into inside IR35 or worse, accused of misrepresentation.

Meanwhile, large consultancies are completely exempt. They can supply entire teams of workers to perform exactly the same repeat, embedded, long-term services - even effectively occupying roles inside the client’s organisation - and no one blinks, because the worker isn't the owner of the delivery company. IR35 doesn't apply.

So what you're pointing out as a "grey area" for independents is actually a core business model for Accenture, Capita, Deloitte, etc. - and it's legally protected. They can pump in as many BAU bodies as they like, make profit to their heart's content, and face none of the scrutiny aimed at smaller suppliers. It's a structural bias against worker-owned businesses and it's about making sure the same work flows through corporate channels, where the big business win - and independent economic actors are locked out.

But it wouldn’t have been catastrophic for the contract market had the employment bubble not also pop shortly afterwards.

That reverses cause and effect. IR35 was the trigger. It removed the incentive to engage skilled local contractors as businesses. Clients - especially in the public sector - stopped hiring small operators entirely to avoid compliance risk. The result wasn’t just tighter budgets - it was the structural removal of independent contracting as a viable model.

And just as IR35 pushed domestic professionals out of the market, post-Brexit immigration reforms ("Boriswave") made it easier for companies to import overseas workers on lower salaries - with sponsorship pathways explicitly designed to undercut local rates. So the market didn't just shrink—it shifted, away from experienced, independent professionals toward cheaper, controllable labour with fewer rights and no negotiation leverage.

The combination was catastrophic. It collapsed the domestic contractor market from both ends—removing the supply of viable independent businesses, and removing the demand for them by creating cheaper alternatives. That wasn't an unfortunate consequence — it was a predictable outcome of policies designed to centralise control and reduce labour costs at all levels whilst maximising corporate profits.

Contracting is still better than being employed.

That may be true for a small segment of high-end day-rate earners, but it ignores how many people used contracting as a sustainable, long-term way to build independent businesses. For them, IR35 removed the very basis of that independence-profit, autonomy, and client trust.

A lot of detail there. Sounds like I was underestimating the effect IR35 had.

Thanks for taking the time to share that.

I also have a family. I’ve managed to support my family across those 10 jobs. I need a job to support my family. But my duty is stay *employable”.

You misunderstand me. My comment wasn't suggesting that people who contract don't have families. Plenty of them do. It's that people who choose employment over contracting do so because they want the additional stability, for example if they have families.

Lots of people, when evaluating the risks of contracting vs employment, find the reward far outweighs the risk. It sounds like you'd be one of them if you were presented with the same choice. And that's a fine decision for you to come to. But that's not going to be the same conclusion for everyone.

What I’m saying is simple math. I would much rather make more than twice the equivalent worker in the EU and take the chance of a layoff. I can afford to have my own emergency fund to survive the gap in employment.

Every employee in the US is “at will”.

this doesn't make sense. so why do usa companies hire contractors then? I worked as a contractor for decades and made 150% what perm employees made.

That I don't know. But the contractor market in the US is very different to the contractor market in the UK and EU. And from hiring in both US and UK, my experiences have been that US employees are more comparable to UK contractors in terms of rights and pay.

US employees are more comparable to UK contractors in terms of rights and pay

did you account for rsu value too or just basepay/hours . now that i am a perm employee a big share of my comp comes from rsu.

I think they suggested that in the US employees are paid better than contractors, but have low job security.

I feel that the opposite is the case.

There are more regulations around employees than contractors here also, which often makes it not worthwhile for short term workers. Those regulations just mostly aren't around when you may terminate employment.

E.g. the entire I-9 thing and other IRS paperwork, who (if anyone) is responsible for various insurances (unemployment insurance, workers comp, liability insurance, etc), minimum wage and overtime for hourly employees, etc. Many things depend on this distinction.

I can't speak to differences from Europe as I am not familiar with that side of the Atlantic.

Yeah I’d argue this is so clearly the case and it’s one reason among many why the US has an enormous amount of successful tech companies and Europe has some amount that basically rounds to zero in comparison.

The ability to hire and fire easily is critical if you want to build successful companies.

There’s a reason ambitious founders move from Europe to the US and why most billion dollar tech companies are American. Europe has made really bad policy decisions around this for decades and their economy reflects it. Europe is poor and to an extent I don’t think Europeans really understand.

There’s a reason ambitious founders move from Europe to the US and why most billion dollar tech companies are American.

Yes, and it's because of larger, more liquid capital markets make it much easier to obtain VC funding.

Europe is poor and to an extent I don’t think Europeans really understand.

Europe is definitely not poor in terms of either wealth or income (particularly Western Europe, which is the appropriate comparator for the US).

Indeed, but that is just ideology, not based on any facts.

low eu salaries implies finding job is hard. fact.

There's a higher monthly salary in the US, sure. However, you're expected to work very long hours (60-80 hours per week) and get basically no time off

In my current position I'm hired for an expected 37 hours per week. This can be more if I'm asked to work overtime, but my weekly hours cannot exceed 45 hours per week on average in a 3 month window without additional compensation

Additionally I have six weeks of paid time off every year plus public holidays

If I calculate my hourly salary it's better than what I was paid by US companies

That's not to mention the security of having a legally mandated termination period of minimum 3 months (in which you're, in most cases, not expected to work)

I worked 80 hours a week in medical school, depending on the rotation. From that experience I can tell you, the majority of people that say they work 80 hours a week, don't even know what that looks like.

This 60-80 hrs/week maybe a startup myth. Since Europe in general has far fewer startups than US people hear these wild numbers in Europe far less. For normal big tech worker, or enterprise workers 40 hrs is really the norm. Now many people specially in contracting, consulting can stretch hours for billing purpose or impressing upon clients thats a different matter.

I have never in 28 years across 10 jobs including one in BigTech been “expected” to work more than 40 hours a week.

It’s a bunch of copium thinking that American tech workers are working 60-80 hour weeks.

And I know it’s not the norm, but right now I have “unlimited PTO” and most people take at least 5 weeks a year.

If the average American tech worker is making 2x - 4x the average EU worker, they should be able to save more than enough to have a three month cushion.

And we are talking about Google. They have a very generous severance package. Even Amazon where I use to work gave me three months severance.

"Unlimited PTO" is discretionary in practice, and there are studies showing that it translates to less PTO on average, which is exactly why companies do it.

And I mentioned on average people take 20-25 days a year and managers are dinged if their reports don’t take at least 15 days a year.

I don’t care what the “average” is. I plan on taking 30 days this year.

Your last sentence reads a bit like "I don't care about statistics, I prefer my anecdote".

Okay.

First link -16 days for unlimited PTO vs 14 days without

https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/ive-been-an-hr-professiona...

I'm genuinely curious if you've actually read the article you linked to, given that the line literally above the numbers you quoted says, in large font and bold caps: "Employees don’t get more time off (and may actually get fewer days away from work)". Did it not make you wonder why?

Now if you look at where those numbers come from, this article quotes another article from WSJ (https://archive.is/MVRur) which is also titled "Why You Should Be Wary of the Unlimited Vacation Perk". Hmm...

And the WSJ article, in turn, takes its number from this report: https://www.empower.com/the-currency/work/pursuit-of-pto-res...

Now when you look at the survey, the problem with comparing those numbers is that they are averages for all workers. That is, 14 days without PTO is the average across all companies, not just those that had adopted UPTO. And the 16 days with UPTO is, of course, only for those companies. So the numbers don't actually tell you anything about the effect of "unlimited" PTO adoption in a given company. Those companies where 14 days is the norm are generally not the ones that decide to switch to UPTO because, well, there's no actual benefit in it for them. Companies that do adopt it, like many Big Tech firms in the past few years, are also the ones that had much more generous paid PTO to begin with - at Microsoft, for example, as a senior engineer, I had four weeks of PTO before the switch.

So, you need to look at comparisons before and after UPTO adoption for the same company to see the trend. Conveniently, that very article you linked to has some sources for that, e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220520-the-smoke-and-...

There are other negative aspects to it, too. For example, when you have guaranteed vacation PTO, it is wholly separate from other things like paid medical leave. But with UPTO, it's that much harder to argue for it to your manager if you have already taken medical leave that year.

None of the BigTech firms have unlimited PTO unless you consider NetFlix “BigTech” and by market cap, they aren’t.

I’m not going to look up the PTO for other BigTech companies. But the one I worked for (Amazon) had 15 days PTO and 5 personal days.

And most people who have defined PTO, also don’t take all of their allocated days off.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/10/more-than...

That’s not evidence of defined vs unlimited PTO as a limiting factor of UPTO.

And because of laws in different states, companies with unlimited PTO also often have a separate bucket for sick time.

Do you consider Microsoft "big tech"? It switched to UPTO back in 2023, just in time for layoffs. And I can tell you that it was a very unpopular move among rank and file.

This is not what we usually hear about employment in the US. The reason many Europeans think American tech workers are working 60-80 hours per week is not copium, but simply because that's what many Americans tell us.

I will just add another +1 to say it's not common to work 60-80 hours per week in the US tech industry. It's not unheard of, and some companies (Amazon) are notorious for expecting that of their employees. But most of the time what you will see is that most people work 40ish hours (some weeks a bit more, some a bit less), and only a handful of colleagues with an unhealthy relationship to the job will work 50+ hours per week. Management doesn't generally expect people to do that, though of course bad managers do exist and can make your life miserable.

The only time I've ever been expected to put in those kinds of long hours was in case of an emergency. Stuff like, a natural disaster hit the company's primary data center so they needed to be all hands on deck to get services restored. But it's definitely not common day to day, and even in case of emergencies the company generally gives you a little something (extra time off, a bonus, whatever) to compensate you for the long hard hours you had to work.

Why would they be complaining about working 40h a week? You will obviously hear more about bad experiences than the norm.

We hear enough about it that it gives the impression of being very common, even if it might not be the norm.

its not common but i know nothing can convince you of that

How can you know that? Please don't assume stuff about others just to make a rhetorical point. If you say it's not that common as it's often made out to be, why wouldn't I believe you?

Though what would also help if you had an explanation for why we tend to hear these stories mostly from the US and not from other countries.

Though what would also help if you had an explanation for why we tend to hear these stories mostly from the US

because internet is dominated by 'stories mostly from US'

I see plenty of stories from Europe, and they too complain about work, but never about having to work 60-80 hours. Even if it's rare in the US, it still seems more common than in Europe. Similarly, I hear stories about working 3 jobs in the US which I don't hear from Europe. I do hear people complain about managers, pay, or office politics in Europe.

yes pbly more common that europe . even i worked two jobs at one point to double my income to like 700k/yr but it was very hard to sustain that beyond 1 yr. i know many ppl who've done it for years.

How much content you consume comes from the US vs other countries? The US has a full cultural supremacy in the west. That's why you speak english and read YC.

The world is larger than just the US, though. Even at HN. Just look around you.

U.S. tech worker here. The only time I’ve ever worked 60-80 hour weeks was at a much smaller company, where for a month or two leading up to a trade show a whole bunch of work that had been put off was attempted to get crammed into the product. At my subsequent BigTech jobs I’ve never been asked/required to work more than 40 hours a week. I mean, nobody was tracking exact hours, but nobody was also pinging me at 8PM or on the weekend and expecting me to be working.

My experience is limited - I work in the UK for a US company and haven't spoken to US developers from a wide variety of companies. However I've not heard any US developers talking about working such long hours. Closest thing I've heard is for devs to sometimes work over the core hours to build up time-in-lieu for extra vacation, over and above the paltry standard 2 week holiday allowance.

fascinating. I thought the meme was that FAANG tech workers were all day and lazy and didn't have to work that hard and were grossly overpaid, but that's as much a stereotype as the next one.

never worked more than 40hr/week (including hellhole amazon). i get 28 days pto now and unlimited sick days.

If I calculate my hourly salary it's better than what I was paid by US companies

prbly not.

What a waste of a comment. Low salaries typically imply finding a job is easier, because more potential employers can afford to pay you. Can you add any kind of evidence, argument, anything? Saying "fact" after an armchair guess does not make it one.

Low salaries typically imply finding a job is easier, because more potential employers can afford to pay you. Can you add any kind of evidence, argument, anything?

sorry i forgot to add "typically" which apparently is a license to spout any BS .

You started the argument!

low eu salaries implies finding job is hard. fact.

Does it? Sounds more like an opinion than a fact to me.

If there was demand the salaries would rise. It's capitalism.

Umm... output. Outside of hyperscalers and probably the tier below them, most EU tech companies aren't making the kind of money per headcount to justify huge salaries.

There is demand for tech workers, but the output of EU tech companies can't afford huge salaries. Lower margins.

In Japan firing an employee is difficult and layoffs are unheard of. I would have few concerns finding something new were that to change overnight here.

Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions.

Europe is vastly diverse and your experience is not representative of all Europe.

That's true. But contracts here usually have a set termination time, with a minimum notice time typically required by law, dependent on how long you've been hired at the company. Tends to be one month for below a year, three months beyond a year.

As in after a termination there's a period during which you're still supposed to work and collect the salary.

Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.

Of course a particular bastard of a company can still immediately cut you off everything but the salary including the doors.

Out of curiosity, why "bastard"? ...if you're being terminated, isn't the best possible outcome that you get your salary but don't have to go to work?

Do you guys not even get the chance to send a goodbye mail to colleagues?

Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.

In the UK big corporations got a loophole where they can get employees without affording them any rights. It's called IR35 that Tory government amended to facilitate this, as Brexit benefit (the regulation would have been illegal otherwise if we were still in the EU).

It's totally legal to fire employee without any notice for any reason or even pay them below minimum wage.

It sounds representative of every part of Europe I’ve experienced.

You have no idea about Switzerland or Northern Europe. In Denmark and Iceland, layoffs are swift.

You probably never worked in Austria.

Austria has unions and Betriebsräte, we even have one in a big american company, so op is correct.

Or southern europe

Shrodinger's Europe. It could be homogeneously like Denmark, Sicily, Monaco, Hungary, London or Belarus or anywhere else. You don't know which until you have an asinine blanket statement you need to back up.

I worked at a company with a US division and a German division.

It was stark, the difference in process between the two countries. Leadership was openly complaining about how they couldn't close out shuttering the company because it was going to take six months to handle legal compliance in Germany.

This was during an all-hands, and one delightfully brave soul who knew it didn't matter much what he said since we were all exiting anyway commented in the public channel "Because of those laws, the American employees also get a six-month heads up instead of a locked door when they drive in in the morning, so today, we're all very grateful to Germany and our German peers."

I worked a at large European company. They announced there would be layoffs. But not who, just the date. On that date, they came round during the day, tapping people on the shoulder, who walked out of the room and were never seen in the office again. Grown men were crying, who weren't even let go.

I never felt good about that company ever again.

What company was that?

Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.

As someone from Europe, I’ve never experienced US salaries. Go figure.

You probably never experienced their working hours either.

As someone who has worked for a string of US companies, 38 hours for me is a busy week.

FWIW in my 15 years of experience working in big tech in US, I never had a job in which there was an expectation of doing more than 40 hours, working weekends etc.

Such things definitely exist, but they are far less common than is often implied here on HN and elsewhere. I think this is largely because people who don't work long hours are much less likely to wax poetic about it, just because, well, it's not at all unusual or interesting.

what about US costs of living?

West Europe is far from cheap. Housing, childcare etc is unaffordable for many in the middle class (and as dev, you are in most cases in Europe not a very high earner). Universal healthcare is the main (last) advantage Europe has over the U.S (and its a big one.)

If you can afford housing and child care in the US you don’t care about healthcare because you are probably on a good employee plan.

Jee sounds like a swell arrangement for 20% of the population ...

More like 80%. Americans are simply richer than Europeans.

80% of Americans are definitely not on what I'd consider a "good healthcare plan".

What is considered a "good healthcare plan"? Can you compare American insurance plans with Europe's ones?

92% of American had health insurance in 2023. Some people may have more than one insurance plans, thus the total number below is greater than 100%.

Of the subtypes of health insurance coverage, employment-based insurance was the most common, covering 53.7 percent of the population for some or all of the calendar year, followed by Medicaid (18.9 percent), Medicare (18.9 percent), direct-purchase coverage (10.2 percent), TRICARE (2.6 percent), and VA and CHAMPVA coverage (1.0 percent).

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...

Dental coverage, for starters. It's surprising how many plans are extremely skimpy on this.

Does anyone actually have good dental insurance? I think mine just does a small copay when i clean but even before I had dental out of pocket for that is only like $70 every 6 months if you bother listening to dentist (most don’t after mom stops taking them up to having a bad tooth issue later in life). Any actual work done on my teeth even with insurance has been out of pocket because in the eyes of the insurance company, having functional teeth is a cosmetic matter. Extraction? Hope you have $2500 to pay an american dentist for that. Or you can get the exact same procedure done from someone with the same training and experience for about $700 if you drive or fly to Tijuana for it.

US Big Tech healthcare plans do. I don't recall last time I had to pay anything out of pocket for dental cleaning, for example, and it's covered 4 times / year. I had root canal and wisdom teeth extraction too, and while those had some copay, it was nowhere near the numbers you quote.

Other countries don't do that either. IIRC the main reason for this is that dentistry was invented very recently and dentists are frequently just scammers who love unnecessary procedures.

Many European cities aren't exactly low cost of living, and those that are have even lower salaries.

In the end someone who was working at Google in the Bay Area for 15-20 years can retire if they didn't have life style creep (which is different than cost of living). Not the case in Europe.

'Someone who worked at one of the best paying companies in the world can retire after 15-20 years'.

This has nothing to do with Europe. This is particular a tech thing

It's a particular tech thing in not Europe, specifically.

Europe has tech companies. They just pay less.

What about European taxes? I', paying 48% + there is 21% VAT on almost everything. Plus taxes for water (taxes, not pay-per-used-m3, and this payment is here too), energy (atop of market energy prices), roads, gasoline, etc.

Slightly tangential question for you- does 48% taxes include healthcare? How about pension? It’s tax week in the US, I think my rate was 22% overall. But another 10% of compensation is health insurance. Another 15% is retirement savings. My municipal water bill last quarter mostly was not for actual water usage (about 40% was for water) rest is system charge and storm water fees. Regarding the VAT thing… we may be effectively getting the equivalent with tariffs on goods and materials supposedly taking effect!

48% doesn't include healthcare (it is another about 170 euro/month per person, and, really, you don't have choice for better or worse conditions, formally there is "market" for this but it is very regulated) or pension. Some industries (but not software/IT one) have industry-wide pension funds, but it is additional payments and if you are in industry without this fund you can go to one of the "open" pension funds and put your money in them.

German here. Me and my employer pay 12 (together) for healthcare. I have no clue where the idea of „free“ healthcare came from, but it’s far from free. 20% of your wages is the general rule for healthcare here.

On paper, my employer pays me 72k per year. I net 36k of this after taxes and social insurances are paid.

Laughs in 150 EUR per month of basis zorgverzekering from the bottom of the sea

How about pension?

Fun fact I learned the last time this topic came up, social security in the US pays more than German government pensions.

There is more than one pension -- one for old age (which the government is paying) and another from the company plan. The usual trick is to also pay out mortgage by this time, sell the house to buy something smaller and enjoy your life somewhere in a sunny place.

You can use numbeo to compare. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Basically, almost all places, particularly in the UK, have worse salary to cost of living ratios.

Ams is same or even worse than some US areas when it comes to costs of living.

weird

* Experience in Central- and Eastern Europe (CEE) may differ.

Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.

Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.

It 100% does. It happened to me in Brno, Czechia, and this February I interviewed someone to whom the same thing happened and who was attempting to sue for unfair dismissal.

It really depends on the people you work for, it's not like Europe is some kind of paradise in this matter. I was working as a contractor for a company in Germany, after a few years working together, they cut me off from one day to the next (the new manager decided to start saving money), even though my contract included a clause about a one-month notice period. They didn’t even bother to pay the invoice for the work I had already done that month (it was the 23rd of the month, so we’re talking about a few thousand euros). And since I wasn't living in Germany, extracting that money from them was almost impossible.

Yes, it may be different for full-time non-contract jobs, but once you're on a contract, nobody cares.

Working as a contractor means you're self-employed and the relations you have with "your boss" are a B2B relationship where you agree to get something done in exchange for money - no different from renting office space or servers. Since you're a business owner, you're expected to be competent in the areas of business (which can be cut-throat) and law. You chose to take on this risk by being a contractor.

Yeah but that's kinda the point of being a contractor, no?

Here in the Netherlands contractors are also 'at will employed' as the Americans say.

But they pay you more so...

Sounds like a case every lawyer in Germany would like to take. 500€ for first letter to send to the manager reminding the contract conditions. It is enough for most companies not to go further with shady activities. As a contractor one should know how to deal with the clients.

I don’t think that’s shady? When I was hiring contractors it was always project based with mutual understanding things could end quickly if the project or collaboration didn’t work out.

Yes, they get paid 1.5-2x, and that also prices in that it’s not always 100% utilization. Only once had a contractor oppose that, but that was in the context of (severe) underperformance.

In his case, the contract had something different, and they did not pay the actual invoice - that's the shady part.

With contractors, you have more freedom of choice when you write the contracts, but whatever contract you agree on, you still have to honor the contract as agreed.

Oh my bad, I thought you referenced contractors in general. In that case I agree: agreements are to be honored.

OP said that they did this for contractors too!

The legal responsiveness for contractor disputes is definitely not as good as employment. Messing up employment relations in Europe ends up really expensive in most jurisdictions because there'll usually be some mix of unions, government agency or charity that'll have the employee's back.

Contractors don't have that kind of support pretty much anywhere (that's sort of the point), and it's just a standard contract dispute that lawyers argue about.

Sure it was possible, just not convenient. Small claims charges in EU court do work. One major benefit of EU.

Oo? It should have been no issue at all for you to get this money.

We are a law and order country.

You got yourself played

So what you're saying is your company had a customer that breached contract and didn't pay. I wouldn't compare that to being fired?

That is obviously criminal though.

It makes sense in the US where they have terms like "going postal" and easy access to guns

That's not universal though. My dad's company was bought up by a foreign investor, shrunk over multiple reorganizations from its peak of ~500 people in the 70's or 80's down to a skeleton crew of ~50. They weren't fired, they were told the company was going bankrupt and needed to be emptied out. People who worked there for 40+ years were basically given a few months' pay if that and a "good luck". There's a formula for severance pay; years worked * month's wage, this would give people a lot of leeway to find a new job or just sit out until their retirement, but of course that's very expensive so they weaseled their way out of it through various constructions. Dozens of people fired a few years before retirement, most never found another job again. And the boss kept the company, which is now a shell company / sales / license holder, which the parent company was always after of course because production is cheaper to do in e.g. Poland.

People who worked there for 40+ years were basically given a few months' pay

Those few months pay thing is the key difference. That is legally mandated.

You also get a few months pay in the US unless the company is truly broke.

That's the convention, but AFAIK it's not enshrined on law.

Some states require payout for unused, earned vacation time.

State-managed unemployment pay is also a thing, assuming the employee wasn't fired for cause. I think some states require employers to pay into this via a payroll tax.

Incorrect. It's at-will employment.

"At-will employment" is a meme here. In reality, the company gives you a few months of pay and you sign a document saying you won't sue them for firing you during a layoff.

If you get fired for fraud or for being incompetent, for example, it's often different.

The idea of being able to keep a laptop sounds absurd to me. Of course many European countries have labor laws which make it near impossible to fire someone on the spot.

Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.

Presumably you are also still employed, just not given any tasks. I do not think that here in Germany there is any way to immediately fire someone, just because he was working on something critical.

Many companies refuse to do layoffs entirely. Which often means that they have difficulties responding to changes in the environment or need to heavily rely on contractors.

Re: Germany - for sure there is. Aufhebungsvertrag if you as employee agree. Kündigung mit sofortiger Freistellung if you don't agree.

Aufhebungsvertrag

That is something both sides have to agree on. So it can not be considered "firing".

Freistellung

You are still employed, just have no tasks assigned to you. Completely different scenario for the employee, who now can look for a new job, while still being paid as if he were employed. Arguably it is even better than being let go, but having to continue working. Definitely anything but a "firing on the spot".

That is mostly in Central and Nothern Europe, unfortunely in the south even with unions, things not always go as they should be.

Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.

Yeah, no. Also European, and have been marched out without notice, cut off that day with no chance to say goodbye, etc.

It would be interesting to know.

1. Which countries are we talking about? Europe is not homogeneous

2. Which type of business? Are workers unionized?

I have experienced this while working as a journalist in Britain and while working as a technical writer in the Czech Republic.

I have seen this in EU too

In which country?

Austria

[flagged]

"Coping about being a europoor" definitely sounds like a fair assessment that isn't politically motivated at all, and is sure to improve the quality of discussion. /s

[flagged]

is quality discussion for you?

If it was, why would I be evaluating whether you're improving it or not? Surely a discussion only needs improvement if it has room for it, right?

edit: you are another coper europoor.

Strong words from someone who recurringly goes into US vs. EU discussions just to post inflammatory garbage. [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43417884

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411189

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43374322

that’s very business hostile tbh. I wouldn’t start a company there.

Treating people with dignity is “business hostile”… welcome to Hacker News comment section.

It's more like "welcome to US mindset" IMHO

This mindset is what moves us forward. Union of soft nations don’t add much these days.

Define "forward".

[flagged]

Plans change, and so they should be communicated and negotiated with the employees going to be affected by the change. It's the dignified way of doing it, people are people, not fungible commodities, treat them as people and unions won't be an issue at all.

unions are just corporate blackmailing.

This is such an absurdly ignorant take that is hard to start educating you, it also depends a lot on what society you live in since your view on unions will be tainted by what you see in it.

In places like the Nordics, unions are one of the cornerstones of a free labour market, look up how Sweden has a freer labour market than the USA to learn something at least :)

I don't even disagree with you, but your way of argumenting is terrible and actively deterring people from your point that union are a core component of a healthy free market.

If your point is to score virtue point, keep at it, but if you actually want to change anyone mind, avoid terms like "is hard to start educating you", it just makes you sound like a douche

I was being very honest, it is hard to start educating someone coming from that position since there is so much bullshit wrapped around a statement like "unions are just corporate blackmailing" which is hard to pull apart without knowing how the person came to that conclusion.

I don't even think it's possible to change someone's mind who already think that way, since it's purely from a point of absolute ignorance and I'm not willing to put enough effort to cite literature that could give them good starting points to understand something they are very likely not even willing to start understanding. They have a lazy position, I reply lazily.

They have an ideological position, based on ignorance, and from a single statement it's pretty clear they aren't curious and willing to change their mind.

Hence why I cite to look into how unions work in the Nordics, at least that is a starting point if they want to learn more about labour movements. It takes someone being curious though.

In the end, it was absolutely honest: it is hard to start educating someone who holds that position a priori and based on pure ignorance, and if not ignorance it's maliciousness, there's not much of a spectrum in this case.

I work for a paycheck. I can’t exchange “dignity” for goods and services. The guy got paid nice compensation for his labor.

Therefore, let's throw everything non-monetary under the bus because work should be purely transactional?

What else should it be? Do you believe that your company is like “your family”? Your coworkers or especially your manager are “your friends”?

Why else do you go to work?

I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.

The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.

Was it indecent for Google to lay someone off, remove all access and give him 16 weeks of severance + two additional weeks for each year of service?

I didn't say anything about Google.

The submitted article was about Google…

You're taking "Human resources" a bit too literally.

We are resources. The one Big Tech company I have worked for has 1.556 million employees. What else was I besides a “resource”?

It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.

In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.

Yes because a small company could deliver a national same day shipping infrastructure and worldwide network of cloud servers including its own undersead cables.

And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…

I'm okay with not having same day shipping if this means that companies don't have to treat their employees like dirt.

But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.

So exactly what “power” does Amazon have over your life?

Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.

Amazon has nothing to do with that.

You can literally just punch "Amazon lobbying" into Google and get pages of results.

Okay? Name one policy that the current administration has done that helps Amazon?

I didn't say anything about "current administration", so I don't know why you think that is relevant.

Okay, name one law that was passed during the pass 20 years as a result of Amazon’s lobbying that was favorable to Amazon?

It's older than 20 years, but not needing to collect sales tax was definitely a big benefit for Amazon (and other ecommerce providers) and presumably involved lobbying to keep it for as long as possible.

That wasn’t based on lobbying, it was the law at first and Amazon took advantage of it.

Amazon didn’t have any significant lobbying 20 years ago and it definitely was the behemoth it is today. That being said, even today it isn’t as large as Walmart and was definitely not a large retailer back then.

It was seriously in doubt 20 years ago whether Amazon would ever survive and definitely wasn’t consistently profitable.

Totally, I completely agree that they didn't lobby for the original exemption.

However, I would be very surprised if they weren't lobbying heavily to keep said exemption for as long as possible.

Pretty sure they wouldn't want someone like you to do so either.

they are doing great!

Thanks.

People are more important than businesses

that’s only what employee handbook says.

You're not starting a business anywhere, so no one cares.

too late

Always someone with a horrible opinion to give in this hellsite

i have had to avoid hiring excellent candidate(s) from EU, just because they would become unflushable if it comes to that.

just because they would become unflushable if it comes to that

Your choice of verb tells a lot about what you think of your employees.

sure i am being dramatic but my point stands. if my company can’t be fluid and can’t react fast to market due to bs unions and backward laws of some land, that place is what i avoid.

This is a genuine question: do you make these views clear during hiring? Because if you believe in them and think that they make sense, there shouldn't be any harm in sharing them with the candidates upfront, right? Especially since these views directly affect their livelihood. And if you don't, why not?

And people in those places will thank you for avoiding hiring them, some folks prefer to not be treated miserably for your own greedy exploitation :)

The fact you refer to people as “unflushable” or “useless” is chilling.

If your business is contingent on the behaviour of one employee then you have failed to hire properly or build a resilient business...

In many cases problematic employees can and are removed from EU companies.

many cases isn’t competitive when i can find equal talent with no such restrictions.

How exactly would they become "unflushable"?

Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?

Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?

Well to be fair excellent candidates are excellent on paper. It sometimes happens (not often, but not once in a blue moon either) that the candidate turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job.

Thats just not true.

You don't sound like a big company ceo. If you have a good reason, even as a small company, and revenue / affordability is one, you can fire people.

You just need to be able to pay them for min. 3 month if thats your contract length and as a business owner you should know how to calculate.

vs. i can hire in canada/ukraine/india/pakistan/china for a more skilled person with no such bs restrictions.

This doesn't make sense. If you hire them to work in local offices in those countries, they often have even more employee protections than Europe does. And if you bring them over to US, then it's the same law regardless of where they are originally from.

why would i establish a local office in say paris if laws are so hostile towards startups.

people are getting quite snippy about this comment, but hating this mindset means you lock yourself away from so much actual wealth. It means you confine and condemn people to significantly worse economic conditions by limiting people's ability to freely associate and disassociate.

just to hammer this point home: Every mandatory employee benefit has a huge cost, and adding enough of them kills your economy. It makes it more expensive to have an employee than X many jobs can justify. That X grows every year, and that's X people who cant do that job and get paid money for it.

exactly, as a startup founder i wouldn’t commit to a yearly reserved ec2 instance for a year let alone an employee.

Wow, that's an interesting perspective.

Meanwhile, Big tech (pre-2022) went to pretty extreme lengths to keep tenured employees around because of all the knowledge they'd built up which made them valuable to the company.

But whatevs, you do you. I'd advise you to only hire contractors if you want people to stay less than a year.

And it's worth noting that you appear to be responding to people who are in German speaking countries, where 3 months notice is standard. Other parts of Europe are not like this, and in Ireland you can fire as per the US for the first 6 months/year, and only need to pay redundancy if they've been there 2+ years.

Please post the name of your company so we can be sure to avoid it.

done

I take it that this was posted in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"?

"had to"

Not even building and exporting widebody aircraft?

outlier.

After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes.

I was at a company that did this. I thought it was very nice at first.

It didn’t take long to see why most companies don’t do this. It became common to have a couple people who turned their last days into a mission to poison the well and go on angry tirades. Those days became tense and messy as people trying to do work felt necessary to move it to private messages to avoid triggering anyone.

It gets really ugly when IT starts checking logs and sees outgoing employees doing things like accessing code they weren’t even working on or downloading files in volume.

This was at a company with generous severance, too, so that wasn’t the cause. A small number of people get irrationally vengeful upon being laid off. At Big Tech scale it’s virtually guaranteed that at least one of the people you lay off is going to make some bad decisions.

My company does this, but they are a very large company that is known to aggressively sue people that try to poison the well, so no one tries.

Wow, the last paragraph is really touching. That comment from the CEO is brilliant: "I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today." That will stay with me for some time!

I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today.

The problem is, before the layoffs, the employee may have felt they had an obligation to do right by the company. Once they're fired, it may no longer be the case. Some may very well become spiteful, act on their vengeance, & seek immediate retribution.

The risk posed by an employee going rouge is what most CEOs are playing for, especially as in GP's case, for a company as large as Google, where they need to plan for all possible failures and scenarios, some of which may or may not have happened before hand.

In France you can't layoff people on the spot, there is a 3 months notice. And I've yet to hear about employees going rogue.

Maybe in US laid off employees can go rogue because they're treated like shit in the process?

Notice doesn't mean they must be allowed to keep working. It just means they need to be paid.

US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits. They just lose access to the building and their work devices immediately. I imagine it's no different in France.

US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits.

Some employers may decide to give a few months of pay and benefits to laid off employees (although 6 months would be unusually large) but it is definitely not required and is not always done. Mass layoffs of 100+ people need to be announced 60 days ahead (but without naming who will be laid off) but there are no requirements for any kind of severance.

There's no legal requirement, but literally every company that is not bankrupt does it because otherwise they will face huge numbers of wrongful termination suits.

That's not true in every sector.

After college I worked for a large regional manufacturer. They laid off about 10% of their employees, I got nothing.

Severance pay is a white collar benefit.

I imagine it's no different in France.

He literally just told you it’s different in France?

He said that with incorrect information about how layoffs in America work.

I think we’re all aware of how layoffs in the US work because there’s so godawfully many of them (that get publicised on HN). It’s very clear to me that 3-6 months of severance is very much not the norm. Being walked out immediately by security very much is.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Usually both happen. You usually get 3+ months of severance on your "don't sue us or badmouth us" paperwork and then security escorts you out.

No I didn't. I know how layoffs works in America because I've been laid off in America.

You know how it worked for you. What you described is not a legal requirement and many other people have had different experiences.

It is a genuinely terrible idea by the CEO though. Yesterday you paid them, today you don't. If you think that doesn't change your relationship, you have to be a fool.

    > It is a genuinely terrible idea by the CEO though.

In my country there are very strong labor protections. You can not fire someone here from one day to another, if they are laid off they have a long time where they are still employed by the company. There are also many companies which will not do layoffs at all, the only way to get fired is for serious misbehavior.

This is the culture where I am from. Nevertheless I absolutely believe that work relationships should be professional relationships, based on the employer paying for the employees time. Mutating that into "trust" will only create problems. The only thing I trust my employer with is him fulfilling his legal obligations towards me and I will fulfill my legal obligations towards him.

As it should be, but emotional people make emotional choices. The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true. Their resulting actions can include anything from theft of IP to hand over to a competitor, to destruction of records or property. Worse, it is impossible to tell when someone will choose to feel they have been wronged, even when the employee could have had chronic absenteeism or underperformance that they justify with personal excuses. (I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be compassion, rather that most people will almost always make mental excuses to justify their behavior regardless of whether that reasoning is sound.)

Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation. It’s not just with layoffs, it can happen with protecting source code, licensing, network security, etc. I concede that a company could replace destroyed property and should be able to recover deleted data, then prosecute/sue to recover damages which could cost tens or hundreds of thousands(or millions depending on the level of access), but the disruption to business can be significant in some cases. Moreover, it is impossible to put an IP cat back in the bag.

For me, it seems easy to understand both sides on this one; compassion vs risk.

The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.

On the flip side, treating them like a crook seems more likely to inspire that kind of revenge instinct. Most people would understand removing privileged access immediately but giving them a dignified exit seems more likely to prevent problems.

It does, but if you've removed the damage they can do, then to the company it's preferable to have more people angry who can't do damage, than less people angry but some of them will do damage.

It's a sad reality. For some people a "dignified exit" won't do a single thing to lessen the rage they feel that they were wronged. It's a sad situation all around.

This kind of arrangement doesn't affect only the employees that were laid off, but also the ones remaining in the company. It's how you get people who will cynically exploit every ability to do as little as they can get away with while climbing as high as possible on the career ladder.

It does, but if you've removed the damage they can do, then to the company it's preferable to have more people angry who can't do damage, than less people angry but some of them will do damage.

Eh. That's a bad way of thinking, but one that I think is tempting to software engineers. It's basically taking software security thinking (appropriate for things) and applying it to people in a context where the consequences are almost certainly not that bad. It's also probably downstream of some other bad ways of thinking, that probably make it appear more reasonable than it is.

It's a sad reality. For some people a "dignified exit" won't do a single thing to lessen the rage they feel that they were wronged. It's a sad situation all around.

You know, you're not required hire those kinds of people in the first place. Hire people who get along with others.

Eh. That's a bad way of thinking, but one that I think is tempting to software engineers.

This has nothing to do with software engineering. It's about business risk management. I'm not justifying it, just explaining the sad reality of it.

You know, you're not required hire those kinds of people in the first place. Hire people who get along with others.

I'm glad you have a crystal ball to perfectly predict how everybody will act in future situations. But sometimes it's the people who seem the most pleasant and helpful who take layoffs the worst, because they feel the most betrayed after everything they gave emotionally in good faith. Humans are complex and they can act unpredictably.

This has nothing to do with software engineering.

You should note I said that way of thinking "is tempting to software engineers," not that is exclusive to them or has anything specifically to do with software engineering.

It's about business risk management. I'm not justifying it, just explaining the sad reality of it.

The actual sad reality that some people chose to treat others unkindly pre-emptively.

I'm glad you have a crystal ball to perfectly predict how everybody will act in future situations.

I don't, but I think you can minimize your risk, if that's what you need to avoid being an asshole. Then you have to practice trusting others.

But sometimes it's the people who seem the most pleasant and helpful who take layoffs the worst, because they feel the most betrayed after everything they gave emotionally in good faith.

Honestly, that seems like an argument for making sure employees have good work-life balance, so they're not giving an unhealthy to the point where they feel betrayed.

But I suspect the people who think "I'll make them angry, but that's OK because I'll make sure they can't any damage," are probably also the kind of people who would knowingly exploit an over-committed employee.

As it should be, but emotional people make emotional choices. The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.

That's pretty cold, un-empathetic logic. If you're rigorously practice that kind of thing, you'll get the same reflected back at you.

My company has layoffs (not massive, but some). In my experience, the affected employees keep their access to everything, and typically finish up their work and participate in transition activities (knowledge transfer, etc) over a couple weeks. Yeah, they're typically also slacking a lot and socializing more, but no one around here wants to be an ass to their coworkers. I think the only people who get their access cut off are those fired for cause.

Companies generally don’t become militant about a subject unless they have experienced the other side of the equation.

There are obvious problems with designing your processes around the literal worst case (e.g. treating everyone like they're a criminal has consequences).

For anyone not from India — India does layoffs in every way. From “cut on zoom in 90 sec” to “please know that you have to resign and serve your two months notice and then go”; to also “if you want you can serve the notice period, or you can just leave today and still get the pay for two months”. I have experienced the first and last and in the case of last for some reason I had chosen to serve the notice.

My immediate reaction is “I probably would too.”

Working is often treated as transactional but it is about so much more. Self-worth, professional reputation, bonds with coworkers, ownership and stewardship of solutions. Even the simple everyday routine that a workplace drives is important.

Another way how India does layoffs is by holding back multiple months' salaries "due to cash flow difficulties", suddenly sending them a mail of "you're fired" overnight and never paying them their dues, ever, leaving them destitute and crippling their employability. A lot of companies have done this, because they know they can, because practical legal recourses for salaried individuals are virtually non-existent in the country and its crippled judicial system.

That’s great, and the polar opposite of how I experienced layoffs (of others, then eventually of me).

But one thing that could be better is transparency around severance, so you know in advance what it will be should you get laid off. (Six months may or may not be “generous” depending on tenure.)

When I was laid off we got what was “customary” in that country, but before the offer was on the table nobody was sure we’d get it. It’s so much nicer when this is a matter of law — I’m all for a ~ free labor market but severance requirements help to balance the risk so the employees can relax and do their best work.

God I love living in a country with employment law that recognises the massive disparity between employers and employees.

A nice addition to this I've seen twice now is a slack channel (via their personal emails) with continuing employees willing to help them practice interviewing and share their professional networks to help them find their next role.

* The Slack is under the company's control, and potential monitoring and retention? Over the life of someone no longer with the company?

* Was there any sour grapes in the Slack channel? Or was it a bummer or distraction for remaining employees?

* Did the Slack actually help the employees readjust and refocus on their new job search?

* Why not encourage people to say goodbyes and exchange contact info, and pay for a job search coaching service (with no reporting back to the company)?

What happens if your company supports billions of dollars in economic output, and a few employees decides to go rogue and sabotage some systems that then causes an international loss of billions of dollars, and possibly property damages and loss of life? If you were the CEO, would you take criminal/financial responsibility for that?

It's not like there aren't disgruntled employees before layoffs. If a single employee could cause billions of dollars in losses, then the company already has a big problem regardless of layoffs.

It's very interesting how so many people in upper management seem to think that they can trust employees not to sabotage and cause billions of dollars in losses by paying them like 100k a year.

The big difference is liability exposure.

If a current employee causes damage, that's one thing. But if a recently laid-off employee who retained full system access causes billions in losses, the CEO and board would face severe consequences legally and reputationally, since it would be perceived as an obvious security lapse.

An employee who is serving their notice period is still an employee. Unless you mean truly ex-employees who still have access, in which case the company has a big problem if it cannot revoke credentials.

This is a strange sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Effectively, your argument says that if there is any step, whether wise or foolish, kind or cruel, that some take, all must take it or risk being found negligent.

That's no way to run an (overly litigious) society.

I don't even agree with the self-proclaimed legal experts in the replies.

Employers generally assume liability for torts (civil liability arising from wrong-doings) vicariously. For example if an employee somehow puts rat poison into a customer's burger, the employer is automatically liable for that, because they are responsible for the employee's actions. (See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability )

But if on the other hand a recently laid-off ex-employee sneaks back to the restaurant and then adds rat poison to the burgers, the liability of the employer isn't automatic (you can claim they should have done better with their security etc., but it is probably a defense to say they did all reasonable steps to secure the facilities).

So yeah, I call bullshit. More likely is that the C-suite just cargo-culted some "layoff best practices" and it just became a thing you did without questioning.

I generally agree with you and the parent on this. It definitely is self-fulfilling. Because some companies cut access to laid off employees immediately, it makes the others look negligent if they don't. I'm not trying to say I think this is correct or the best, just trying to speculate why some employers choose to take this action. Certainly all don't, but it does seem more common the larger a company gets.

I'd be curious if every laid off Google employee experiences this hard cut off, or if it's determined case by case.

There's a difference. An employee going rogue is different from a non employee/ex-employee doing malicious things.

Only one of them would be seen as negligent.

"If a single employee could cause billions of dollars in losses..."

This situation is endemic in smaller companies with the tight budgets.

There are companies that support billions of economic output in countries which require a notice period. If they thought it was a risk that they would be taken down be a rogue employee, they have the option of putting them on 'gardening leave' during the notice period. This is extremely rare; they know the risk is insignificant so they are more keen to get any remaining value from the relationship (work, handover).

In our industry and many others, being a professional and maintaining good relations with your ex -colleagues, who form your professional network, is much more valuable than any emotional satisfaction from screwing them over, even without the risk of going to prison.

they have the option of putting them on 'gardening leave' during the notice period. This is extremely rare

That must depend on the country. In Switzerland it's standard that employees don't work during the notice period when they're laid off.

Must do. I wonder if that's because of the wide access to weapons? Although I thought I'd heard that there still wasn't much gun violence in Switzerland.

I have the impression that (although I did not check for data beforehand to confirm my assumptions) that gun violence is very low in developed countries, with the USA being the outlier.

I believe the overall positive employer-employee relationship in Europe is much more of a product of legislature and cultural norms, than the threat of violence.

It's definitely not related to the population's gun ownership ratio. I would say gun violence is probably comparable with our European neighbours. It's just way lower compared to the US.

Also, from my experience, there is not a clear trend whether companies in Switzerland want employees to keep working or if they just let them go during the notice period. I've seen many examples of both.

Even in US, it's not a strict rule. I gave my notice more than a month in advance and retained access to all employee spaces (both physical and digital) until my last day. Coincidentally, I own enough guns that describing it as an "arsenal" would not even be an embellishment it usually is.

At the end of the day it's more about culture (i.e. people's expectations of what is normal) than any objective factors.

Puzzled by why anyone would downvote a pure question. Wide distribution of guns is an obvious commonality between the US and Switzerland; if that's offensive observation please let me know why!

It's a very common misconception that it's legal to own/keep a gun (after having done military service) but not being able to get/keep ammunition.

According to this video you can't keep preciously-lent ammunition from the military. But you can for sure buy your own.

https://youtu.be/L00Pajw4NoY

As to why people don't use it or aren't scared, I guess they just aren't as wild...

Probably because only the US has the kind of gun violence that you're wondering about. I don't think in Europe, the idea that someone is going to come after you with a gun because you pissed them off generally hits the radar.

Someone may find the question offensive because of that.

Fair enough.

The "garden leave" approach is the standard in the US. 3-6 months of severance pay, but you lose access to company systems immediately.

Does this question also equally apply to the opposite side? If an employee got so angry with how you laid them off and treated them afterwards that they decide to do what they can to damage your company?

Cutting access and having security walk them out is more or less security theater. If an employee really wanted to cause damage the odds are they either already have or will still find a way. In this scenario having generous severance and treating them with respect is likely to better defuse the situation than kicking them out the door.

This hypothetical is about what the CEO/company decides to do, not what the employee decides to do. A lot of liability "theater" is not there to prevent issues, it's to cover your ass.

So no, this question doesn't apply equally to the opposite side. An employee does not take responsibility for what the company does. A lot of people wonder why CEOs are paid so much; part of that is simply to take responsibility.

Ironically, a lot of people complain about useless CEOs, but if you asked them to take that responsibility for the pay, they wouldn't take it (note that that responsibility includes things like sweet talking shareholders and giving public statements on short notice on things that could nuke millions of dollars in value and create very real legal liability).

Ah yes, because CEOs often face consequences for their poor decisions. They definitely don't get golden parachutes and move on to a new company when they run a company into the ground.

This is only a problem if you treat employees in a way that makes them want to go rogue and sabotage some systems.. maybe don't fire them without warning or cause, or clear reasoning? I suppose if someone is actually able to tangibly impact some critical system, limit their access to that, but beyond that, it's just an excuse to make it sound OK to abruptly dump someone from a social and professional context. Maybe it's legal, but is it necessary? No. Is it traumatizing? Yes.

If you were the CEO, would you take criminal/financial responsibility for that?

That is obviously decided by a court.

Ironically exactly this happens at VW, where getting fired is exceedingly difficult. Neither incompetence nor underperformance are enough.

There is a range between kicking them out instantly and allowing them to do whatever they please. Authorizations to important systems should be immediately revoked but you can allow them some time to gather their things, access to internal chat to say their goodbyes etc. Or is that an excuse for poorly designed internal controls?

Right. Because only laid-off employees can cause such a damage of course (/s).

This is a twisted way to look at the risk.

Disgruntled employees have more reason to wreak havoc. All the more reason they should be treated as humanely as possible in a difficult period that in most cases is inflicted by the company itself.

"I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. "

Some companies are just paranoid. My company has now had several rounds of layoffs, people were kept on for a few months, got severance and everything went as harmonious as layoffs can be.

The cruelty the way some companies and now Musk with DOGE are doing it is simply not necessary and reflects a lot on the character of leadership. To me it looks like they are deeply insecure and hate their people.

This is such a huge contrast to the usual cold, corporate layoff horror stories. Honestly, this is how it should be done if layoffs are truly unavoidable - with transparency, respect, and basic human decency.

Good for you but how sad that being treated like a human is remarkable.

Wow, I've never heard of terminated employees being able to keep their corporate laptops before. Did IT at least wipe them first?

Interesting. That's what's happened in the last two companies I've worked for when they did layoffs. I'm typing this message from my ex-corporate laptop right now...

The process was that IT locked the laptop until the severance package was signed, then you got a code that let you reboot and reinstall MacOS.

Quite often it's literally cheaper for them to let employees keep the laptop (sometimes for a token price) after wiping than it is to process it for reuse, just because bureaucracy is that expensive.

the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say goodbyes

This is just so wild for me as an European, because at least in Germany if you get fired (or if you quit) you need to stay 1 - 3 MONTHS at the company still.

Not true. They can remove you from the company grounds and block access to all systems the moment you get fired or you hand in your resignation. But they have to pay you (if there is no "good reason" for firing you) for a varying amount of time (depending on your contract and some minimums by law).

Of course, most of the time, you can / need to stay at the company for that above mentioned varying amount of time.

this happens in the UK (called garden leave) but in my experience you're typically sent home with full pay

its nice to know even people like google are treated like this. even people with management roles.

That's the normal way at least where I live (Switzerland) and I am shocked people are being disposed off like that in the states. Is this even legal there? We usually get 1-3 months notice period, then continue to work for these 3 months to teach the new hire or finish our open tasks. If we won't find another job in time, we would get 70-80% of the previous salary until we find another job.

Is that company in data storage?

No. It's a small company ~400 employees in total, including contractors. The CEO is a very technical guy. The average tenure of the employees let go was ~8 years.

VDX.tv?

I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck.

To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos).

What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?

I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.

Agreed, Adam really is one of the best at what he does. His talks, demos, were always so interesting. My guess is that he'll be at Microsoft shortly.

What Google is saying with this layoff is that they no longer care about web developer relations. Chrome has not been well funded for years.

Firefox did the same thing five years ago, when they fired David Baron, who was one of the top 5 engineers in the world that understood how HTML layout works. He got instantly hired by Chrome.

It is kind of crazy that the core group that moves web standards forward is around 150 people. And most of them did not get rich off it, and have been doing it for decades.

David Baron was a distinguished engineer at Mozilla - not someone you fire at a whim. What makes you think he didn't leave voluntarily?

"The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome" -Wired (March 7, 2025)

Chrome has not been well funded for years.

Hasn't it? It has still been developing quite rapidly; and used to lead in interop scores (reflecting how well a browser conforms to the specs).

What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?

Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer.

I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs.

To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week.

I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.

The user love/passion on the JAX team is super high. Interacting with them is whatever the opposite of Kafkaesque is.

Well, right up until they get suddenly laid off.

Hasn't Google given up on tensorflow for JAX now?

It looks like tensorflow is going down the slow legacy/sunset trajectory at this point.

Have they given up on tensorflow.js for the browser as well? Is there any replacement?

In the instances where I’ve needed to run inference in the browser I have used Onnx runtime web to run weights that were exported from PyTorch training. You have to convert your browser data to onnx tensors, but it’s not that bad.

I don’t do actual training in the browser though, so maybe someone else can answer that part.

Is Transformers.js a replacement?

for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google

This feels like "I installed Chrome before Google went evil".

https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/tesla-owners-elon-crazy-bumpe...

I can't wait for everyone to be shocked, shocked, in five years when the biggest genAI companies get caught engaging in a bunch of sleazy behavior.

Sleazy like when Meta torrented 81TB worth of ebooks to train their AI models? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

You don't have to wait at all, given that OpenAI has been at it for some time now.

Google dropped their "don't be evil" a very long time ago.

Before I even started there, in 2014. Don't be evil ended when Schmidt stopped being CEO.

I could've sworn it was removed from the handbook like 2018/2019

While possibly a traumatic experience for Adam, I fail to see the significance of this beyond anecdotal level. And I find it rather odd to argue that after all Google did and didn't do that this is what is causing disillusionment with Google. By now Chrome is basically just a Trojan Horse with advertisement and surveillance for this purpose hidden in the inside.

I think the OP explained the broader significance very well: If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers. That's bad news for anyone who builds for the web or who relies on it as an open platform for the dissemination of information and software.

I think the position your take re. Google and Chrome is an extreme one. It always surprises me that such black and white opinions about big tech companies are commonplace even on HN. Yes, Google have done things around privacy that I strongly disagree with, but the idea that Chrome is simply a trojan horse for advertising/surveillance is absurdly reductive and ignores the history of Google as a company.

Google was, originally, a web-first company. Their business success relied on the web being an open, competitive platform. And, at a time when Microsoft were still trying to maintain monopoly control of personal computing, Google's development of Chrome did a huge amount of good in maintaining and enhancing the web as an open alternative. And they employed a lot of people who were genuinely believed in that mission, such as Adam.

Make no mistake, the death or spin-off of Chrome will not be a win for privacy or openness. Building a web browser is a hugely expensive and difficult endeavor, and it has to be paid for somehow. Yes, Google has leveraged Chrome in some ways to collect data, but far less than they could have done, and far less than any successor will have to do, just to keep the lights on. Look at what has happened to Mozilla and Firefox if you need proof.

The fact that manifest V3 went through and fundamentally nerfed all extensions that just so happen to block ads and offer privacy means these people failed, regardless of their intentions.

If Google is firing one of the most successful and active web developer relations people they have, it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome, the web, and engagement in human developers.

A layoff is not firing. If Google is doing layoffs, they'll intentionally choose good performers so they can demonstrate it was done for purely economic reasons. Otherwise they get legal issues.

Besides that, Google may not trust its own performance metrics well enough to use them. The VP might assume the director is lying about who's important etc.

it suggests a strategic downgrade of the Chrome

Hadn’t thought of it this way, but if there is (say) a 50% chance of being forced to divest Chrome, then the EV on your investments in the future are substantially lower.

Strategic downgrade sounds right.

The history of Chrome and Google is interesting but not very relevant for assessing their status quo. If anything you'd have to factor in the trajectory (which I did: "by now") and given its direction it certainly wouldn't improve a valuation. Regarding your "reductive" opinion of Firefox and Mozilla, all I can say is I use Firefox and I'm quite satisfied with it. Ironically, the worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions can be traced back to it being funded by ... Google.

The worst part about Mozilla and its business decisions is that making a browser isn't something you can build a business on because you're competing with free.

Anyone who thought Mozilla wasn't going to eventually turn to evil to maintain their liquidity has no stones to throw at Mr. Argyle regarding naïveté. Is Mozilla Corp (not Mozilla Foundation) a non-profit? No? Then they need to turn a profit, and I don't see a price-tag attached to that browser they make.

What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?

It probably says "the DOJ really is gonna force us to sell Chrome."

Unless the prospective buyer's name rhymes with Melon Tusk, I doubt the DOJ will do anything to challenge Google's web monopoly this strongly.

You don't think DOJ will force Google sell chrome? https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...

No, not unless there is a large American buyer already in place. The DOJ did not force Microsoft to sell IE in 2001 either, and back then there was no US software company anywhere near Microsoft's size that would have purchased it. DOJ are not in the business of eliminating a global monopoly if a US company holds said monopoly.

Hear me out: direct listing!

I am listening to a podcast Adam Argyle is talking in, listening to what he is passionate about and then getting axed by Google is painful to hear as now it is clear that Google is not passionate about those things (anymore). It is also painful personally because it is what I am passionate about (and my job). Link: https://dev.to/whiskey-web-and-whatnot/leveraging-css-web-de...

Maybe they're not confident in the case against them: https://www.wired.com/story/the-doj-still-wants-google-to-di...

This round of layoffs wasn't only on the Chrome team but also for Android.

This certainly isn't new. I know someone who worked at Google who mentioned the company culture has been souring since the start of the pandemic. I suspect Google will have a slow death akin to Yahoo in the coming years.

There are very serious talks about forcing google to divest from Chrome/Android, I would bet that's the reason

It says they are getting ready for the future when some govt agency splits them up and they are shedding the load now (the areas they will have to sell).

If you're being forced to sell something, wouldn't you want to maximize its value? Wouldn't you retain the most valuable people?

That's a good question. I don't know about the author's credentials but it seem very high and indeed I'm sure they would find a job anywhere they apply to.

But from the PoV of a higher up making layoff decisions, the sooner they severe the organization from the rest of the company, the less traumatic it will be when the time comes. I think at this point they realize it's better to start treating Chrome et al more like Waymore, which seems to have some isolation from the borg collective.

Not if they might become a competitor, or thrive (proving that the sale was a good idea). Better to keep them weak and likely to fail.

What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?

Everything that's needed saying for at least the last decade.

a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack.

I have trouble relating to the evangelist fervor that some developers develop toward their craft.

It probably just didn't have enough economic value for the company, from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either. The guy probably earned enough money in a few years that would take me 15 years of work, I'm not sure this as a "personal tragedy".

Completely agree. What is a tragedy though, is that if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort. If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails. It's just incentivizing people to treat their job the same way the company treats their employees. A culture of distrust and minimum effort. It's very sad to see.

if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort

This is bizarre to me because my impression from three years ago was that they were trying to correct from that, and it sounds like they overcorrected right back to it. I spoke with a Google engineer I think in 2022, he had heard rumors there were going to be layoffs on his team, and he had sent a message to a more senior team member that he hadn't heard from in months to let her know that she should, to put it delicately, maybe manage her visibility better. And she responded that she had lost interest in the job anyway, hadn't done anything except respond to emails and messages in over a year, and had 99% transitioned to managing a collection of properties she had been accumulating over the years, so if he heard she got laid off, he shouldn't feel bad for her. I'm pretty sure that was in 2022.

To see Google go from tolerating being ghosted by highly compensated senior+ engineers in 2022 to laying off people who were doing excellent and high-profile work in 2025 must be surreal for people inside Google. If this is all accurate, they swung the pendulum from one zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty right through the healthy zone and into another zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty with dizzying speed.

If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails

I guess the half million dollars yearly (I'm assuming he made) and the fact there aren't tons of other places he can get that kind of money and prestige for doing that kind of job. I'm not saying I'm loving any of this, but yeah the system we've built treats all of us like replaceable cogs. During good economic times we don't really feel it, but we are now in a rough patch and we see the capitalist economic reality for what it is.

from your explanation of the role I'm not sure I see the value either

Google has traditionally had a fair number of developer relations engineers. Chrome team alone has several. The current devrels include Una Kravets, Bramus van Damme, Rachel Andrew, possibly Jecelyn Yeen, Oliver Dunk, Matthias Rohmer, probably some others... They help prioritise new browser features through developer feedback, document new features, maintain documentation at web.dev, spec up new features and represent Google at various standardizing bodies, write walkthroughs and tutorials, build demos to showcase new browser features, make explanatory videos, give conference talks, and generally keep us, web developers, up to date with modern browser best practices.

Their value to web developers is immense. Their value to Google is possibly in that good devrels are a living advertisement of web technologies in general, and Chromium-based web browsers in particular. The better developers know browser features, the more attractive and capable UIs they can build for the web, the more consumers will be attracted to the web (including Chrome), and the more money Google will ultimately make via advertisements.

Adam has been so great in this role that it does not make sense to me that Google decided to cut specifically his position.

Google has traditionally had a fair number of developer relations engineers

I wish them all well, but things can change fast depending on how the economy is doing and where the company is headed priority wise.

The reality of one's lack of value to one's own employer is often baffling. It makes you wonder how anyone manages to stay employed at all, since apparently everyone is replicable and unimportant. I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time.

It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.

Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?

Layoffs in particular are like this because they're planned very quickly by very small groups of people. Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale, so the people in charge do everything they can to maintain secrecy and minimize the time between people hearing about layoffs and the layoffs taking effect. This basically always translates to random-seeming decisions - priority 1 is to cut costs by X amount, choosing the right people to cut is secondary. This means that, for example, engineers that have received performance-based raises are punished since, on paper, they do the same job as lower-performing but lower-paid engineers.

Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.

In this particular case the impending layoff was basically obvious to everyone months in advance (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893463).

Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale

Granted, but it seems like the current way of salary-first, performance-blind cutting obliterates it even harder.

Really, all options obliterate morale.

Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.

Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.

Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.

Any style of layoff is going to be bad for morale, but rumors floating around tank morale for as long as those rumors exist, and then moral takes another hit on the actual day. In that way it makes sense to just rip the Band-Aid off.

Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.

Managers don't have the kind of information necessary to plan layoffs that don't seem random. Anything they know is already being used for the usual hiring/promotion/compensation adjustment process.

It seems rather disappointing if typical management would make such impactful decisions so rapidly that their "on paper" analysis couldn't be made clever enough to consider more than a single variable.

This is a lesson that all senior developers know pretty well, that is why companies rather hire naive juniors, instead folks that already mastered how the game gets played, and cannot be sold on company mission, values, or whatever snake oil gets talked about during interview process.

And while I was still employed as a seasoned developer (before recently retiring) I felt it was my role to pass along some of my cynicism to the new hires and younger devs. Some of them seemed a little surprised to see me call bullshit in a group meeting. (Good luck to you boys and girls.)

Meanwhile, they all roll their eyes at the "jaded greybeard" advice. I know, because many years ago I was doing the eye rolling. I guess some lessons really can only be learned through experience.

The important part is that when they see the first thing you warned them about, they remember about all the other things you have also mentioned.

I like to think they'll remember some day.

Not all. You're talking about douchebag companies.

If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.

And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.

(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)

Unfortunately for you you work and live in an environment created by other companies and its likely that if your company succeeds its one acquisition or bad top level management play from invalidating everything you implicitly or even explicitly promised.

I have worked for "good companies" before - and they have a tendency to make money and be targets for bad companies, add enough zeroes and even the good guys sell.

Which are the non douchebag companies?

Start by eliminating all publicy traded companies from the list, and you've increased the percentage of non douchebag company in your list by quite a bit.

Your relationship with your employer is no different than any other business relationship. You can do the bare minimum, just as there are many businesses that do the bare minimum toward their customers, and those businesses often have a low subsistence level of success; if you do the same, you may have the same level of success in your career.

An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.

Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.

"I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time."

Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.

Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know.

This is frequently the case. I've worked at big employers (comparable in level of corporate-ness to Google if not absolute size) where the layoff process, roughly was:

1. Aggregate layoff target gets set and apportioned amongst functional leaders, then targets cascaded down to the line manager level.

2. Managers fill out a stack ranking spreadsheet for their team across a few metrics including a boolean "diversity" field[0]. There were many rumors about the "diversity field", most notably that anyone so flagged would not be fired, but so far as I could tell these were false (see point #4)

3. People to be fired are developed based on these lists (I.e., if a manager has to fire two people, then the two lowest-ranked employees per the spreadsheet are selected.)

4. HR does a meta-analysis of all to-be-fired employees, ensuring that a disproportionate number of employees from protected classes are not impacted. If too many are, then some of the next-lowest-ranked employees are selected to be fired in their stead.

As far as I could tell, the only part of the process where any sort of individual, human consideration was occurring was maybe at the line manager level if they decided to tweak the stack rankings based on who they felt deserved to be protected. And then, to the extent that happens, you have all the problems with bias and favoritism that come into play.

0 - I realize this is probably controversial, but I saw it with my own eyes.

For some perspective, the bulk of this is simply illegal in the Netherlands, likely other countries in the EU as well:

- layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more

- Needs to be negotiated with worker representatives (works council, syndicate if there is one)

- LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible

- Any kind of discrimination is forbidden

- At a minimum, you get 2 months pay + accrued holidays

It's baffling to imagine that you could learn about your job disappearing from one day to the next, and be immediately left out in the cold.

layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more

In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]

- LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible

This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.

Any kind of discrimination is forbidden

In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.

0 - https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings

1 - https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte...

2 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/disparate_impact

In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]

This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:

• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ- ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;

• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin- gle site of employment; or

• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more full-time workers at a single site of employment

I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.

[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...

Most states have a WARN act that covers even more. For example, California - https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...

While federal law has:

    Plant closings involving 50 or more employees during a 30-day period.

    Plant closure affecting any amount of employees. Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. Relocation of at least 100 miles affecting any amount of employees. Relocation of a call center to a foreign country regardless of the percentage of workforce affected.

In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]

I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.

Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).

There's no such thing as a protected group in US law - a protected class means a certain property of someone that employment decisions can't depend on, not a value of that property.

First, I'll say it is pretty common to use the terms interchangeably. I don't think anyone was confused by what I wrote, or that your "clarification" was in any way helpful. See, for example, these legal groups using the term "protected group" in relation to US employment law:

* https://www.osbar.org/public/legalinfo/1095_DiscriminationEm...

* https://pedersenlaw.com/practice-areas/discrimination/

Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:

  On the contrary, the ultimate burden of proving that discrimination against a protected group has been caused by a specific employment practice remains with the plaintiff at all times (Watson v Fort Worth Bank & Trust, 487 US 977 - Supreme Court 1988[0])

Companies in the US have been blatantly discriminating against some classes for years, and now must turn around and blatantly discriminate against other classes now (based on the current ‘anti-DEI’ stance). Racism and sexism in hiring in Europe and Asia has always been a thing, and quite blatant too.

it’s also a bit baffling that someone who’s been at the company longer than myself could have an advantage simply for being born before me, or for applying before me.

Is work performance not a key deciding factor? One could argue that’s absurd.

I don’t think the way it’s done in the U.S. is “right”, but i don’t think what you listed is right either.

Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.

If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.

Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.

The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.

Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.

But since this subthread is discussing LIFO layoffs, the problem is that generally the last in is also the lowest paid - not always of course - but if so it means that to hit your operating cost point you might need to reduce more people than you would if you could pick and choose.

Seniority based systems are ‘I got mine, f u’ or ‘politics in action’ depending on how you look at it.

More senior employees have usually figured out how to get leverage on the employer over time.

Non-seniority are usually ‘cheapest is best’, or ‘do what I say, or else’.

Both have pros and cons for everyone involved. There is always some system though, even if it’s emergent.

LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible

Newer employees often see this as incredibly unfair.

If it’s the rule, everyone knows it. There is no guessing about randomness or hidden variables, and ultimately less favoritism than a line manager coming up with a stack ranking.

Looking at the larger picture, what otherwise tends to happen is that older people get pushed out. Then we have a massive issue of them ending up unemployed because nobody wants to hire them. This is compounded by the retirement age being pushed further and further away.

Because it is unfair. It just tends to benefit people employed today

It's not about being fair to the individual, it's about producing a better outcome for society. In this case, saving money on welfare (that's also in great measured pooled across society, not an individual account).

Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.

The only fair system is a random lottery - which is also the most terrifying for everyone.

Then again, if we did have a random lottery that required all employees (up to and including the CEO) to participate, then perhaps we'd see fewer layoffs...

why would the company want that?

I think you need to look at some of the recent Dutch firing sprees and figure out if that'd actualy respected ;)

Thank you for sharing this important information. What does a company in the Netherlands do when an employee is underperforming? Do they get "PIP'd" like Amazon? Then, eventually let go with some standard severance package?

I can't talk about the Netherlands but if it's like France: the process is very different in the case of layoffs, where you want to reduce the workforce for economical reasons (e.g. shrinking revenues), and firing an individual employee. In the first case employees are not let go on the basis of the performances.

Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.

Yes and no, as it is a difficult process because employer needs to prove it is not their fault that employee is not performing. To begin with you need to collect data over time, so pip is kind of a choice you’d go through to start collecting detailed info, then it might be that a simple course could help solve this if it is a knowledge based issue, then maybe there is another job in the company the employee could switch to, etc. Without any doubt employers do not like the process, it is easier to eliminate positions instead because it is not technically firing.

diversity field

If this was even in the spreadsheet, whether or not it were used, the current administration would love to hear about it.

This was more than a decade ago, so I doubt they care that much, and if you want to accuse me of being a liar, please have the integrity to just say that.

ok, and also "big thieves hate little thieves." Very-well paid executives (stock) remove very well paid employees (salary) and benefit from the actions. This is an old situation in industrial business -- the high tech crowd are filled with self-grandeur and do not believe it, on a large scale IMHO.

Eh, or you could think of it as ‘cut 10 people to move the needle x percent, or cut 1’.

If you need to hit a specific number, guess which one is going to be less paperwork….

The part here too is ‘valuable to whom’. If they can saddle the middle manager or director with the same responsibilities/expectations, while cutting 10% (say) of the costs - guess what they are going to do.

Is it ultimately short sighted? Probably. But good luck connecting point A and point B in these situations when everyone is thinking quarter to quarter.

You spend half your waking hours at work.

Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.

On the contrary, being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live, but it's also not really something most people will ever be able to avoid. I don't at all buy into the idea that somehow pretending the situation isn't shitty is somehow more virtuous or fulfilling; what you call a "shitty attitude" sounds more like "being realistic about how one's work is valued" to me.

being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live

That is literally the only way to live. Disaster stalks us an is only ever one misstep away (sometimes literally). In rare instances people can even just fall over and die.

In the sense that there should be food and shelter for everyone, even poor people; strictly speaking I think most countries have already agreed to that. Although how well that gets implemented is open to a lot of debate. But beyond that everything can always change at a moments notice.

I've spent several decades writing software. Got laid off 1-2 times per decade.

I still tried doing a good job every day, and feel very good about that.

To me, being realistic about the risk of losing my job at any time means having enough money that I can be unemployed for 6-12 months.

The major way good programmers get jobs is by being recommended by people they've worked with at previous companies. That doesn't happen if you deliberately do as little good work as you can get away with.

My "shitty attitude" comment is maybe more a personal philosophy that something universal. But I do not want to spend each work day being bitter and resentful. You may intend to punish your shitty employer, but I think you're mostly poisoning your own mind.

Working hard for a place that will not reward me is no way to live.

And with less dedication, I can spend far less than half my time there ;)

Nor is sticking your head in the sand.

Check out the book called "The Gervais Principle" which develops this kind of cynical approach to a significant depth.

I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last year or so where a company announces a significant layoff, saying it needed to let go of "underperforming employees" or similar wording. I've been in this industry for a long time, experienced several layoffs, but this way to announce a layoff (publicly calling-out "underperforming employees") feels new to me. It also feels shady - like, announcing to the industry, "Don't hire these losers we just got rid of. LOL"

Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause?

No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.

You're right but our current model of society depends on there being people who don't ask the same question.

If you do only the minimum necessary to not get fired, then wouldn’t you be the person that needs to be fired the next time the the budget is cut, since you are the lowest ROI of all, all other things equal?

In theory, you'd think so.

In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.

In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.

People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.

No. It's clear individual level of effort doesn't matter. That's the point.

Cheer up - Sometimes it’s also a convenient cover for reprisals, back stabby office politics, racism/sexism, etc.

But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.

Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.

One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.

Godspeed!

I think their point was that they were told they could look for another internal role, but at the same time had their access revoked, which sends a very mixed message.

It's because the message isn't for OP, it's for the people who are left.

With the way it was written it wasn't clear to me whether the other role was offered as a replacement for the layoff or more of a good luck I'm sure you'll land on your feet. Agreed it's a mixed message if it was the former.

Companies will always remind you it's "just business" when it suits them - so it's healthy to keep that same energy in return

Ah yes. I got to do that once after a layoff. The manager tried to guilt me or something into working after I was layed off. "Because they were given me severance so I should be ok with doing the work"

I told them. No you are wrong. I was given severance to sign an NDA and non-disparagement agreement. That is what the severance bought the company, but I'll be glad to discuss a consultant role on an hourly basis.

Companies love to frame severance as some kind of favor when really it’s a transaction. You handled it exactly how more people should!

yup. embrace being a cog. enjoy your cog work as much as you can, but recognize it for what it is. don't tie your identity to it.

Exactly. There's freedom in that mindset too

I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.

This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.

Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life

Hardly. This type of arrangement was short-lived and anomalous. It was roughly true in rich economies during a few decades of the post-war era. Never before, and not for most people around the world.

Relationships are worth cultivating any time, of course, but one shouldn't mistake a job for a life. The idea that a job is for life and your employer is your family was a mind hack that worked for a short while and is now unraveling.

In the days of yore, didn't a decent chunk of people literally have their name come from a family profession? I.e. John Smith, Jan Schmidt, Carl Maria von Weber.

As in it wouldn't be just your worth tied to the profession, but N generations of your parents, etc.

It used to be sort of true in the Soviet sphere. By sort of, it was more like an employer for life rather than the exact job. Unless rhe company went under which was rare.

Never before, and not for most people around the world.

Please tell me more about the gig economy of medieval peasants.

The english wikipedia is lacking on the historical side, but you can find out more with the French one : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalier

Google trad of a couple paragraphs :

Most of the modest peasants, men or women, very often still small artisans, small weavers or textile workers, peddlers, boatmen or carriers in bad seasons, could become day laborers on nearby farms and estates, if they had the build and stamina, once their own work was done. Some were even regular day laborers, familiar to a domain steward or a village ploughman, present all year round or usually required for a certain number of tasks. Certain harvest tasks were sometimes carried out if possible part of the night, or continuously by successive teams[5].

Day laborers, brewers or laborers, represented a significant part of the population and sometimes lived, in the absence of family support or a solidarity house, on the edge of begging[8]. In rural areas, they subsisted thanks to additional agricultural work with ploughmen or farm merchants but also thanks to wool spinning, crafts or transport. They also served as additional labor in construction, helped the lumberjacks, made bundles, etc. Women did laundry or took children in as wet nurses[9].

Medieval peasants cannot be said to have had a job. They are mostly either tied to the land (and its ownders), or indeed gigging from season to season.

Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life

Just looking at the Western world that breaks down during industrialization and falls apart if you go further back then that, journeymen (i.e. tradesmen who had completed their apprenticeship) would often literally travel from town to town for several years to work under different masters before submitting their work to a guild for evaluation and becoming masters themselves. I guess you could say serfs worked "for the same employer" because their feudal lords owned them as part of the territory but that seems like a stretch.

It's not so much that employees used to "keep working for the same employer for their entire lives", it's more that the people running and operating businesses used to be part of a local community and there used to be an understanding of a shared responsibility beyond private property claims.

This isn't something employees can change, either. Even employers aren't really able to change this because they too have to operate in the same economic system that contributes to this effect. It's probably more extreme in the US (and some places in the US more than others) but the economic system does not care for such sentimentalities and a business that does will put itself at an economic disadvantage, especially where the social fabric has already been sufficiently eroded to avoid bad optics (e.g. WalMart arguably failed in Germany because its attitude to employees felt extremely off-putting both to workers and consumers at the time but that resistance may have been eroded by the behavior of other companies since to the point where it would no longer make them stand out the same way if they tried to re-enter the market now - economic changes making this unfeasible notwithstanding).

For most of human history we were hunter-gatherers. Even assuming you mean post-industrial history this isn't true though.

The person you're replying to is correct in a technical sense I think? The hunter-gatherer phase would be considered prehistory since it pre-dates the development of writing, which is what enabled humans to record history.

"Human history" includes prehistory.

Do people really have to make up stuff like that? If you said large parts of history, maybe.

"For entirety" definitely not. What you describe was a thing in some periods, typically periods where some group got too much power and they tended to end with huge disfunctions and breakdowns.

Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life

This is... not true. It's so not true I don't even know where to start rebutting it. But for a start, most of human history you were either hunting and gathering for yourself, keeping a flock for yourself, or farming land for yourself. "Employment" even as a concept is a pretty new concept on the scale of human history.

Heck even farming is a tiny sliver of time. Vast majority has been pre-agriculture.

I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary.

Agreed, it is necessary to make deprogramming oneself easier — less painful — to the extent that one has come to identify with the work and/or culture and/or employer.

But it is also exhausting to maintain a façade of allegiance to a harshly indifferent power structure.

To me my employer is my customer. We don't require each other's allegiance, just an ongoing mutually beneficial transaction and good will. When either fails for either party it's time to move along. Devotion isn't part of the arrangement.

Similarly:

I got badly burnt in a relationship once.

After that I promised myself not to get hurt again. If you don't love each other any more, accept that, and walk away.

Worked for me, and I stayed friends with almost all my ex-es after that.

I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.

Not just that: separate it from your career. Ensure that you and others would still value yourself even if you weren't receiving top decile income for an easy job. A misanthropic software developer is begrudgingly useful; a plain misanthrope isn't even mediocre.

Good clarification. I know this separation is difficult especially when the career funds the other parts of life and the employer or title you hold is seen as prestigious.

"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"

That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.

Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.

And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?

My comment is not meant to encourage removing kindness and humanity from the relationship. It's meant as a reminder that the other party in the relationship (the company) does not necessarily bring those values to the table.

I would also like to live in a world where humane values are reflected in personal and business relationships to the point where the line between personal and business relationships blurs.

Exactly.. Many see it as some sort of marriage in an age where even marriages are contractual relations

I hope you're not suggesting that you approach your marriage the way you approach your relationship with a corporate partner.

I am subjected to periodic performance reviews, you know.

    I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.

Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly.

They are themselves cogs in the machine.

A machine that goes all the way to the executive class, and they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.

We all participate in this hostile culture, in various ways. Usually using the excuse that we need to pay rent, eat, find the work interesting, or with some other excuse that justify the means.

It seems like it's hard to do the right thing when you have something you want to buy or otherwise spent your whole life getting here, before realizing what here is.

I feel like its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks. I care about each and every person on my team, I care if they are engaged and if they can do their job. I care if they get sick and give them the time to make sure they feel better. I care about their career and try to help them along. Maybe I'm the minority, but I think that lots of managers of ICs should and do feel this way. As you go up the ladder, i can see that going down as the scope increases, but thats why you have managers, to keep attention to those details. Now i've had directors and stuff that do not care about their managers. I've also had managers that aren't great and don't care.

You are 100% correct though, we are all cogs in the machine. In the end, the people at the top don't care about anything below them if it isn't making them an the shareholders more money. If they do, they are a unicorn and i hope everyone gets to work with someone like that.

When I was laid off from RAX, it was a super emotional time. I had a job where I got to hang out with my friends and good people doing good stuff, and we also did some work (the work we were doing was so enjoyable most of the time, it didn't feel like work). I've never been able to capture that since and it has contributed greatly to my desire to get out of leadership roles.

its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks

That's not the claim being made, by my reading. The quote was, "Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you" -- which to me means, it's not clear exactly at what level, but at some point people stop caring about you as an individual. This may be at the direct manager level if you have a shitty manager. Or it may be much higher. But at some point up the chain it will become true if you're at a megacorp.

Former racker here. When RAX laid me off, I was told there was no other place for me to go (which was not true). I loved my time there and the people I learned so much from and loved working with. It hurt. I had fantastic managers who did care, but the company changed and looking back I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cog in the machine. When I was a manager elsewhere I tried to show the same care my previous managers did. I cared even if those at the top didn’t.

I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp. >Yep. One of the most unfortunate realities of modernity.

The crazy thing to me is the lack of awareness of these people. Has hiring at Google fallen off that badly? Was there always such a gap between 'smart enough to work at google' and 'smart enough to realize their corpo-we're one big family-speak is total BS' ?

'smart enough to work at google' and 'smart enough to realize their corpo-we're one big family-speak is total BS

I have noticed that smartness can be highly compartmentalized.

For many Googlers, this is their one-and-only company so they actually have no frame of reference, including no frame of reference to notice the company culture was shifting over the past decade-ish.

There’s a difference between intellectually understanding it, versus actually seeing yourself tossed aside and cast out, while knowing that all the other cogs are already back in motion and pretty much fully adjusted to your absence.

"Smart" and "naive" are not antonyms. Indeed, it is practically a stereotype that the two often go together.

We all participate in this hostile culture

You can try to participate less. It's also work, but for some people, it's better than the corporate environment.

Keep your expenses under control. (That alone can be hard to do if you're relatively successful in tech, so I mention it because it's something to really think about.) Network in real life to find projects that have finite durations. Take some time between those projects and use that to both relax and develop new business. Go to a different city for a few days, maybe for an organized meetup or a conference (even if you don't attend) and try to meet people. You're double dipping here. Go sightseeing or something else entertaining, and then try to work a room.

they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.

Hopefully more the former than the latter. You're not getting married. You shouldn't be out to find a new family, and everyone hates that metaphor anyway. You probably will find people you do like, though. Since you're targeting well defined business, you don't have to live with that relationship if it doesn't pan out. You just need to get to your next cycle.

I've found a lot of people that I really do like. Some, I still do business with, and others I just sometimes get together with for dinner or a cocktail. We know we still like each other because there's no longer any money involved.

This is a defensive play also since you aren't all-in on one engagement. You can't get complacent just because you're on a W-2 and it all feels good, as this post illustrates.

I'm aware that this isn't an out-of-the-gate strategy. If you're gainfully employed now, save up. Even if you hate your job, use it to establish a stable position so that you can get out when you want to. Seriously consider what you think are the luxuries in life and whether you actually enjoy them or if you have been convinced that you do for some other purpose, like pleasing others, peacocking, or keeping up with the Joneses.

I feel like this is a very dramatic view of things. Have you ever been in a management position?

I have and this poster is spot on, he needs to go higher up the chain though. Investors hate employees, even founders. Founders are out to get rich. Executives are out to get rich but don't have what it takes to be founders. All of these people detest labor. They are the enemy you must work with to buy food. Treat them as such.

I feel like this is a very cynical way of looking at things.

I know some excellent people in leadership that have been promoted from lower level management jobs. I’m not sure the career change made them no longer care about people.

This is definitely how the capital class views labor. Don’t be fooled, and ignore at your own peril.

I wouldn’t really consider someone that moved from middle management to upper management/executive leadership to be a part of the “capital class.”

Investors, board members, maybe even some CEOs, sure.

If they’re upper management, they are tasked with doing the dirty work for capital. That’s their job.

That doesn’t mean they don’t care though. Now this could come from spending time at a company where the executives were only ~3 levels of indirection from devs.

They would lay you off in the blink of an eye or be instantly fired. “Caring” doesn’t really come into play.

It's not that the career change makes them not care about people. It's that it's practically impossible to get into upper management without eating others. People who don't embrace their sociopathic tendencies don't make it - they get out-competed by those who do. The very occasional exception just proves the rule, and usually doesn't last in any case because once they get to that point, they still have to compete to remain there.

I think his statement could have benefited from and/or implicitly in the list of titles.

I certainly care very deeply about my people, and letting someone go is a last resort after trying to work things out. My boss cares that I care.. their boss.. we're numbers.

I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.

yep, you always was.

bigtech and corporate make a good illusion that you aren't. brace, if you let yourself believe in that illusion.

So the key thing here is that this didn't used to be how things were at Google.

People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.

If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.

In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.

Engineers, nerds, developers remember this ALWAYS. Do not work hard for ANYONE including your family members unless they reciprocate proportionately.

This reminds me of the demotivator with pictures of cogs.

Just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important.

https://despair.com/cdn/shop/files/worth_6b813282-f9f8-41ab-...

This has being like this when that changed from "Personal" department to "Human Resources"

Do the corp that is what you are!

The lower level of hell is definitely reserved of industrial psychologists and advertisers!

That was painful to read.

I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition.

Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.

It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.

Big companies are soulless.

You should consult a lawyer about this. You might be SOL but if this happened to several people, you might be able to show the company didn't act in good faith because there's a pattern of people about to receive their bonus being laid off. Layoffs aren't meant to work that way.

Generally layoffs involve someone who doesn't know who you are picking names almost at random from a spreadsheet. Management may fight for certain people to stay. Then legal and HR get involved and look through the layoff list to see if the chosen employees are problematic. For example, if the layoffs include too many people from protected classes, which opens them up to being sued. For example, if your company is 20% women but the layoffs are 50% women, that's going to be an issue.

Avoiding paying substantial retention bonuses can work the same way, if a pattern can be shown.

A simple letter from a lawyer probably won't do anything. Large companies are prepared for that.

For anyone who does come across this, here's my best advice: if you are acquired and your new employment contract includes a retention bonus, you want that contract to say that the retention bonus is payable unless:

1. You leave voluntarily within that period; or

2. You are terminated with cause within that period.

Otherwise, you should get it.

Yes as a person who had such a retention bonus before (from Google even) to me this seems rather cut and dry. Usually such bonuses are a mix of cash and RSUs, and set over a 3-4 year period. And are often also based on a perception of what the employees existing options were in the startup that they came from.

IMHO they should absolutely be paid out the whole amount of the remaining retention bonus at layoff. On the principle of things alone. Can't speak to the legality of it.

2. You are terminated with cause within that period.

Are layoffs considered to be with cause?

No

It might be too late now, but I've successfully negotiated (before signing) retention deals like this to be pro-rated in the event of non-voluntary termination. It's perfectly reasonable for exactly this reason, and companies have no legitimate reason to deny it.

Agreed, this is/should always be the deal basically - "here's a bonus so you stay while we transition" is the only reason many folks stay post aquisition. It should not be revokable, especially last minute.

To me its a massive red flag that Google would promise a cash bonus 2 years in the future, they could have given stock with an appropriate vesting schedule for retention. All the retention deals I have seen were done like this, only for the very short term (less than 6 months) a cash bonus makes sense.

Might be worth talking to a lawyer. Sorry to hear that, absolutely maddening

That's awful and the most amazing thing you could do now is get together with those ex-coworkers or similar people and compete with Google in whatever business domain it was that made them acquire your former employer.

Because, having been through the acquisition process at Google myself, my general cynical take is: Google acquires companies to get rid of them, to stop them from competing and not to "add your uniqueness to their collective."

Keeping employees on retention bonuses is a way, in aggregate, of stopping them from going off and inventing something that eats their bottom line.

You should look into legal action. And failing that, compete with them.

You guys should have a consultation with a lawyer. It's a little cheaper if you guys just use one lawyer to go after Google for the retention bonus if there is a case ;)

The only retention bonuses I ever seen were to be paid in immediately, in full on involuntary termination. There was a "for cause" clause where bonuses don't get paid for termination with a cause, but the causes were listed in writing.

Awful experience.

What is interesting is our denial, as (ex-)corporate employees, that the corporation is NOT FAMILY...even though we may feel it is.

Big companies are soulless.

"And God created the C Corporation" -nowhere in the Bible / Koran / Hinduism / Buddhism / Torah

I feel this lesson keeps being re-learned by us people / workers ...

Did you sue? Because that's bullshit. The retention agreement should have included that clause anyway.

Agreed. If companies could do this, then they'd never pay out a retention rider.

I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:

- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.

- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.

- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.

- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.

So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.

Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.

In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.

Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.

job security is an illusion

It really is. Even government and blue chips aren't safe. In fact, those are where you'll find it's the most disconnected from your own agency.

Government jobs are safe because rarely if ever people get fired.

This comment is hilarious. Like someone was placed in a time machine and missed the last few months.

There are a lot of us that live in countries where government jobs are still extremely stable. You’d have to break the law in a very big way to get fired.

Except for like the last 3 months!

Until whole departments get gutted on the whims of a new executive or their political appointee department head.

And I'm not just talking about Trump. Every mayor, governor, what have you. They all appoint their friends to high places.

My job is extra permanent. If they shut us down they'd just have to find me a desk somewhere. Its a rut, but its my rut...

[dead]

decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant

This is fascinating? What was it in absolute terms, or relative to your base salary?

Did you have to have a viable startup idea and it was paid to the incorporated company? Or was it just extra cash in your personal bank account?

Did you do that, or did you just get another job?

job security is an illusion

Depends a bit on your country. My CEO can fire me but there is a longer notice period depending on how long I have been with the company.

- 2 years: 1 month

- 5 years: 2 months

- 8 years: 3 months

...

- 20 years: 7 months

Germany btw.

That's pretty wild. Is that a German employment law or something specific to your company?

It's probably an employment law. My wife's from Tunisia and over there all employment is basically contractual. If your employer lets you go they owe you some kind of fee, and I actually believe the amount might be the remainder of the contact, I'm not sure.

It's employment law.

Germans are so expensive to hire and maintain that companies have offshored German manufacturing to the United States.

(... And God bless Germany for it. Trickle-down theory doesn't work in general in capitalism but it does work in labor negotiations: every right Germans secure for themselves is a right an American company employing Germans and other countries has to abide by when doing business, and it incentivizes the company to minimize their paperwork by treating everyone to the German standard).

[dead]

I have been in a similar situation, on a Saturday morning right after a farewell for a colleague and planning for next big release and timelines, late Friday.

I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).

At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.

No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.

Well not so much I guess.

Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out. But I don't know if I will still see it coming.

I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.

I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.

I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.

I hope people can find hope here.

Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.

Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.

And F execs, I guess. :)

Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.

They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".

It's a question of what kind of business Google is/wants-to-be.

The one it claimed to be, in the past, with a broader holistic mission, claiming to attract the world's brightest to make information accessible? Using its hoard of cash to do a bunch of neat stuff and hire really smart people do it?

Or is it what we always suspected all along, a cynical money printing machine that turns ad impressions into shareholder value and nothing else?

It's always been a mix of both. Those of us who worked there certainly saw in the inside the gradual transition of the internal discourse from "justifying B to support A" to "who cares about A."

They can do whatever they want, they're a private business. But they still trade on a certain reputation, and have the advantage of a quasi-monopoly status in many things.

I would hope that advancing them any kind of good will as any kind of "special" company (which our profession tended to do, before) and muting criticisms is just over now.

They built their money printing machine in part by swallowing competition and exterminating it.

Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".

On some level yes. With the massive disparity in who owns the markets, your argument is basically “Is google doing a good job of making the rich richer?”. Hiring H1Bs and offshoring while firing American labor is not a good look.

Why keep a company like that around?

Now take it one step further. Google and other large megacorps are merely the inevitable outcome of capitalism running to its logical conclusion. So the real argumenmt is, “Is capitalism doing a good job of making the rich richer?”, and the obvious question for the rest of us then is, why keep an economic system like that around?

This is an important point.

Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult."

I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.

Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service.

That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.

"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."

I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.

I don't know anyone who expected this

You can read the HN threads from when this happened. People expected its imminent collapse.

It was done during the 2022 FIFA World Cup and you had people here predicting that it wouldn't last through the weekend due to that.

Twitter generated $5bn in revenue in 2021. Since Musk bought it, it's been on a rapid decline. In 2024 it generated $2.5bn in revenue... 50% of its pre-Musk numbers (46% with inflation)!

Worse, it continues to trend downward.

Most sane tech CEOs would prefer to keep their upward trend and $5+ billion revenue rather than saving $1 billion to lose $2.5 billion and invert their slope.

Remarkably - it’s more profitable now.

Also, most layoffs don’t cause huge cuts to advertising spend on their platform because of personal spite or political reasons. The product for all intents and purposes as an advertiser is the exact same.

That's just objectively not true.

Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had.

My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.

Many if not most engineers are working on things 2-5 years out, not keeping services running.

i think the total reduction was about 2/3 if memory serves? so 1 in 3 is that number you'd be looking at for "actually useful". heavy air quotes on that.

Google's strategy, traditionally, was basically what you're describing (modulo the "until their net income is 0" part). Because their belief about engineering was if you get all the smart people and give them some creative freedom, they invent Gmail. And Tensorflow. And Kubernetes.

This has changed. But it's worth noting it is a change. Larry and Sergey retained controlling stakes in Google's IPO specifically because they intended to build a company that didn't operate like other companies... In essence, they didn't plan to give two shits about shareholder capital, they expected the money would work itself out if they just kept making brilliant products people wanted.

But, the founders have left and Google is now just another company.

What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0?

Take responsibility for the people they hired and have an ounce of human decency and empathy?

Don't need extra people? Fair enough. Then stop hiring! No one is pointing a gun to their head telling them to hire. Layoffs (for reasons unrelated to people's job performance) is such an asshole thing to do because with a competent/non-sociopathic management it's completely unnecessary, as you can just do a hiring freeze, and your headcount will reduce by itself through normal attrition.

The management of a lot of corporations acts this way, prioritizing "shareholder value" over people while giving exuberant bonuses to themselves, and then they make a surprised pikachu face when people hate them and individuals like Luigi Mangione come out of the woodwork and take matters into their own hands.

Remember in 2014 when Nintendo was having huge financial troubles? What did the CEO do? Did he fire half of his people? No, he kept his people, halved his own salary and kept going. And this was when they were losing massive amounts of money, and not breaking revenue records making 100 billion in profit. That is how a CEO and a leader should act, and not like the sociopath CEOs we have nowadays.

Yes, and they're still hiring too, while doing this at the same time.

As a person who worked there for a long time, I never thought it was a good idea how rapidly they hired and never felt they needed that many people.

But the layoff process has been sadistic.

And the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences. In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down. Moving more and more positions to lower cost regions, and hiring younger developers while ditching higher paid senior staff.

Today's Google really sucks.

the people who made the decisions to hire like crazy are not paying the consequences

They should have been first out the door, but Sundar is part of the problem.

This is incorrect thinking. Over-hiring is very easily corrected. You are weighting the 'human' in human resources too much. It's 'resources' that gets the emphasis.

This is a success at Sundar's level.

In fact it feels very much like they're using this as an opportunity to push the median average age and compensation level of their staff down.

They're doing exactly that, veiled in euphemisms like "making our talent pool more reflective of our user base."

While the manner of layoff, role of layoff and person to lay off all seem foolish, profits do not mean that layoffs are a bad idea. You should hire people you need and if you want to good in the world, donate to the most effective charities (in QALYs/£).

Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too.

I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.

Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated. How many of your middle school, high school and even college buddies do you still have a relationship with?

I think there's some stigma with confronting the fact that relationships are just ephemeral. We are social creatures in the sense that we can cooperate with each other on a task laid in front of us, but once that task is done, we mostly tend to drift apart onto the next task with another group of people. And that's okay. We're only weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others. The quality of a relationship is in no way measured by how long it endured.

You are right but I think there's a fundamental issue that many people think that 'as long as I keep showing up and doing good work, the powers that be will look out for me'.

By default work relationships work as you advertised. It needs conscious effort on your (and everyone's) part to reframe these relationships as something that's between you and your friends, on your own terms. Consciously hanging out together, talking to each other, doing projects together outside the context of work. Social relationships need to be built up with effort. The company will do this for you, because they enjoy the benefits of a crew that works well together, but if they put in the effort, the relationship will belong to them. You will think that 'I could get slightly more at this other place, but I like my colleagues here', realizing you'd lose the social net if you changed jobs.

I think a huge problem with nerds (like me and probably you), is that we don't understand the fundamental power dynamics that shape society, because we lack the inherent cunning and weren't forced to face down enough hardship to have our illusions shattered until later in life.

Truth is, if there are rules, somebody needs to enforce them. If something nice happens, it does because somebody makes it happen. These things are mental abstractions designed to make your life predictable, but like every abstractions, sometimes things happen that were supposed to be impossible, because the system doesn't work the way you think it does.

Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context

I think this is very true, and with college buddies it's very different from workmates. Because in college, you are with them at classes, but then you hang out with them between classes, then you meet them in cafeteria, then you meet them at a party or in the student club, then you meet them at dormitory etc. All these contexts are different and that helps to build more diverse relationship, which is not focused on a single place.

At work, in my experience I'll meet them in the office and then maybe wave a hand on the way out of the parking lot, if ever.

And then, it turns out these people actually move, try to raise a family and work, and then you rarely keep in touch.

This is the big thing, work opportunities tend to get people to move whole cities away, and long distance relationships like this tend to not survive.

How many of your middle school, high school and even college buddies do you still have a relationship with?

All the ones that were true friends, and none of the ones that were just friendly acquaintances.

My wife is really good at keeping friends even those she didn't see in years. She has many such friends and she speaks to them over video chat. I have a few long term friends like that but not so close.

relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated.

Very true, but also very unfortunate. The best people (a teeny almost non-existent minority) are not like that.

weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others.

For a large number of people, (say 50 %) I suspect this is not true. Especially when people move from rural to urban areas.

Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context in which they were cultivated.

Just being far away makes maintaining relationships really hard. Introverted people rely on being dragged into socialising, which goes poof not being in the same place.

I see where you're coming from, but relationship need some amount of contact to survive.

Work forces you to be in contact, if the majority of your time is spent elsewhere due to changing job, or city, or gym, or having kids.. it's a blow.

I try to keep in touch with ex co-workers I cared about, but we live in different countries, at different stages in life, with different priorities, and it's hard to say the relationship is well.

That doesn't mean the relationships weren't built as they should, IMHO, they are just different kinds of relationships.

That sentence caught my eye too.

First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.

Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.

In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.

the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime

Good point. I wonder how much in-office work contributes to this. Because if you are trapped inside an office building for 8+ hours with essentially randoms, most people will start getting to know each other at some point, because there is no other choice, and after work and commute there is no time left for anything else.

I feel sad for the author.

8 hours if you're lucky. Make that 10 if you're not because of breaks.

So the 40 hour work week gives rather little time to properly socialize, even less if you have family obligations esp. kids, especially when people move around as much as they do now.

Corporations like Google certainly encourage a focus on in-group relationships between employees to reduce churn (i.e. increase stakes for disgruntled employees who might consider quitting). The entire idea of having scheduled leisure activities, daycare, laundry services, etc all provided either by the company or facilitated through the company encapsulates current employees and gently excludes former employees, which likely helps reduce their ability to spread or air negative sentiments following their departure (which apparently can be fairly rapid, which also means fired employees will be stunned and possibly in shock for the limited duration where they may still have access to other employees directly).

There's a reason the "employee retention" behavior of companies like Google and Facebook during the web 2.0 craze was often compared to actual cults.

I get where you're coming from, but I think it's a little more complicated than that.

ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.

Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.

I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).

It's a fact of life

I will argue the contrary. Companies with US mindset makes us think that.

Countries with social safety net have a better way of handling it. Even in the country where I am now living, Hong Kong, which is very liberal, half of the companies let you have 1 month of notice period.

And even in China the layoff policy for pregnant women is way more humane than in the US.

This is largely a US issue.

My partner here in NL got fired from a regular retail job, but the company still had to pay her 3 months of salary because she had a permanent contract and worked there for 3 years. I mean it's minimum wage, but still. She also had a month of warning, plus she could choose whether she wanted to use her remaining vacation days or have it paid off alongside the 3 months (the holiday pay gets taxed up the ass though).

It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer.

+1.

While there is an imaginable "victim" viewpoint, it is a job for pay with a clear employment contract that was agreed to before employment start, between the Employee and the Corporation, including local and state and federal laws, permitting EXACTLY THIS type of termination.

Further, corporations can't be seen to Favor one Googler vs another. Especially since there is NO GUARANTEE this Ex-Googler isn't one of those AR-15 toting weirdos who condone violence against their now ex-coworkers .. so allowing them futher access to the (huge) universe that Google owns and controls .. its corporate workings .. even for an additional 5 seconds after termination, can be reasonably seen to be Foolish .. so they would cut ties Immediately.

How is posting factual information and his true feelings damaging to his former employer?

They have no right to stop him from expressing his feelings publicly.

It's hardly about a company having a "right" to stop you from saying anything, it's about what your reaction to life events says about you.

If you get fired and your reaction is to go to your blog and whine about losing email access and not being able to deliver a talk that you had prepared for x time I, as a prospective employer, am going to draw some conclusions about your personality that won't help you get the job I'm offering.