It's weird how impersonal layoffs are. you are escorted out of office in some cases, and keys and other stuff stop working. You have to turn everything in, and possessions shipped to you at later date.
While I really appreciate your effort, son, your performance at the recital just isn't up to our standards here, so we're sorry to say we'll have to let you go. Can we grab a quick moment for an exit interview before we hand you off to a social worker?
This is only possible because of the extreme anti-worker legal situation in the US. In many many (most?) countries doing this is illegal and will land you a court decision against your breach of the employee's rights (in addition to you owing that employee severance + lack-of-advanced-notice fine, by law and before any legal procedure).
Technically they're still "employed" a bit longer but prevented from going into offices or doing anything else in their final 2 weeks or whatever it is. And they get severance after.
Most people who need to work for health insurance, shelter, food, etc have to treat their employers as if they're golden tissues. If they tear them, their life turns upside down, often for the worst.
Even the most deranged employees likely won’t have weapons on them. Most of the workplace violence seems to happen when a disgruntled (ex)employee returns to their place of work some time after the fact.
Because these employees are in California, Google is required to give 60 days notice of termination. Typically in big tech layoffs this is done as paid garden leave.
> In many many (most?) countries doing this is illegal and will land you a court decision against your breach of the employee's rights
What rights do you mean other than the notice period (and the ones surrounding whether the contract can be terminated at all)?
Because notice period can be solved by continuing to pay the salary and to be fair, Google and the other tech giants have usually done that to a pretty high level during layoffs. E.g. Discord is now paying out 5 months of salaries to the laid off people.
(I find the escorting out of building, etc. super weird.)
This is mostly a US thing and I can't really fathom it. In central Europe you get a notice and you are usually expected to continue to work during the notice period. Even at banks, etc.
From what I hear, it sounds like in US you are immediately considered an enemy spy or saboteur and need to be escorted by security. I can't imagine how chaotic it must be to take over work from someone who was fired like that.
2 weeks notice is typical in the US. You may be asked to work the final 2 weeks to hand over the job. But I guess Google doesn't want that, which kinda makes sense given what broad ACLs most employees have. Technically they're still employed for at least 2 more weeks, just locked out.
2 weeks is typical if the employee quits. Never have I seen a layoff happen (personally) where the employee gets any sort of notice beyond “come with me” as they’re walked to HR and then out the door.
Worst one I saw was, at the end of the day, they fired the guy who walked out 400 people, poor soul was just the very last one.
In the UK, the company I was working for laid off about half the dev team but made them work their six(!) months notice.
It’s not uncommon in finance to have ludicrously long notice periods, but conventionally you are just put on gardening leave as the purpose of it is for your knowledge to go out of date.
However, the company was in such dire straits that they couldn’t afford to just pay people to do nothing for six months and thought it would be a good idea to have them work out their notice. It wasn’t. Those people did sweet FA during their notice and were actively harmful to the company culture for obvious reasons.
I don’t think making it completely impersonal is great either, but it’s best for everyone to end things quickly rather than hanging around.
> In the UK, the company I was working for laid off about half the dev team but made them work their six(!) months notice.
Yeah, that's a completely different situation. Those employees had employment contracts requiring six months' notice. So they're gonna be paid for six months at the end, and they might as well be producing value for the company the whole time.
Meanwhile in the US we mostly don't have employment contracts. Anyone can be fired/laid off at any time for almost any reason, and that takes effect immediately. The one caveat is that WARN notifications might required 60-90 days notice depending on the state and size of the layoff. But for whatever reason, employers here don't want their employees working for those last months like they would in the UK.
> it’s best for everyone to end things quickly rather than hanging around
Definitely, but not by escorting people out of a building or sending an email and cutting their Slack access without notice... which is what we see all the time.
Just give the person at least a day to say their goodbyes?
From my experience, the people who are fired (or leaving) usually still provide value. Yes, they are not going to put in their best effort, but they can finish their in-progress tasks, hand over work to other people, etc. Even if they put less effort into it, it's much easier for them than for the new person who would have to pick it up with no context.
However, I understand that with a massive layoff and a timescale of 6 months it could have turned out far worse than the situation I describe.
Whenever I've seen teammates leave, they still get the remaining 2 weeks to hand things off. But it doesn't help very much other than for saying goodbye. I can see why for layoffs, the risk of letting them stay outweighs the benefit. No way is a laid off employee going to actually help in the last 2 weeks.
> No way is a laid off employee going to actually help in the last 2 weeks.
To add a data point: Not only have my laid-off colleagues helped to finish and smoothly hand over tasks, but we are now actively rehiring some of them back.
To be fair, the company didn't pull any BS like e.g. Cloudflare telling laid-off employees that they are underperformers. In our case, it was crystal clear that we've lost clients and don't have enough work and money for salaries to keep everyone and that that's the only single reason they are being laid off.
No I don't, because the procedures make very little sense to me. I'm not going to suddenly turn into a criminal when a company terminates my contract.
If I'm not trustworthy after they fire me, then I couldn't have been trustworthy before either imo. Afterall, as I said we don't have those procedures around here and it's no problem. We would find them weird (culturally).
You'd be amazed at the number of people that do not take measures in anticipation of this day ever happening. If you give someone with access to critical information no notice about their dismissal, they might not have actually backed up their emails, contacts, or any other work product.
If you are the leadership and don't take this action and that "rare" small number of people that might do something untoward does do something, then you are left holding the bag. So, as they say, better safe than sorry. I've even be present when actual criminal activity has been committed, but no charges have been brought but the company is still offered the use of actual police during the dismissal/escorting off premise without making an arrest.
So, I guess I'm happy for you that you've never had to experience the darker side of things, but, it's part and parcel around here now of the process.
What? I'm not talking about your personal emails. I'm talking about your emails through your company email domain. What has all reasoning just gone out the window in this thread?
> If you give someone with access to critical information no notice about their dismissal, they might not have actually backed up their emails, contacts, or any other work product.
That would be terrible IT if users had to explicitly back up any of their work. Hardware fails, or gets lost or stolen. Any even semi-competent company should have source control, regular IT-managed backups, etc., such that work isn't lost for any reason.
Also ... why would you need to back up your emails? I can't even imagine a circumstance in which being let go would cause all of your emails to be deleted? They'll just give someone else access to your inbox on the email server if necessary.
Here is what I have observed. The use of various procedures (like asking someone to immediately leave the office) is actually mainly driven by managers' and HRs' fear and/or inexperience with layoffs. Basically, these people get together, it's a tough situation for them and not one they have any personal experience handling, and they sort of convince themselves that it's safer to do things in a very cold and impersonal way. By the time the next recession hits, all of these people will have moved up to higher management rolls where they aren't doing the laying off themselves, so the next "generation" starts from scratch and again convinces itself that it's safer if we do everything in a cold and impersonal way. I think this is how you end up with all these silly procedures.
I've seen people react unpredictably and emotionally in the workplace, but the layoffs I've seen have actually been entirely smooth. The typical laid off employee is either thinking about the vacation they're going to take (Silicon Valley good times thinking) or how they're going to find a new job (any other industry at any time). The last thing such a person wants to do is trash their own reputation by behaving unprofessionally, and they certainly aren't going to sabotage the employer. But since the managers doing the laying off typically have never done it before, you end up with the kind of weird outcomes described here.
Most of my onsite work has been in Canada. One time I was laid off - and spent the next day polishing up what I was working on to set up the person who had to take it over. Then I grabbed a beer with my coworkers!
Being escorted off site would seem really bizarre. You were trusted to the utmost a second ago, now you're Bill Cosby all the sudden.
This is actually quite common. I've seen a variety of situations where a person was fired or laid off, but allowed to stay on for some time - usually a week or two, although the most extreme one I personally saw was a guy who stayed for more than 6 months. (Nobody could figure out how to get him to leave and he was known and respected in the industry so they were reluctant to force him out.)
I think the "escorted out by security" might be something that happens more in the movies and maybe some very large and impersonal companies. Haven't seen a lot of layoffs up close, but I kind of doubt it's the norm.
Thanks for the data point, because most of my knowledge is from hn/reddit/movies, so I don't know how prevalent this "you are fired, leave the premises immediately" procedure is.
It's a pretty socially deranged situation. The whole dynamic is weird, half the time your manager is telling you who just gave you a great performance review a week ago, but now has cut off emotions to deliver a list of bad news they probably got that morning, and everyone has survivors guilt for a few weeks before convincing themselves maybe it's ok because now they're safe only to be caught in another round a few months later.
Where I work people get “unpersoned”, they are removed from slack immediately, no time to say goodbye, email is ransacked and they’re removed from GitHub.
This happens to people who had been loyal employees for 10 years.
America is weird like this.
Obviously you can go find them on LinkedIn and talk that way, but it seems unnecessarily hostile.
Knowing this can happen to me at any time, I make sure that I'm already connected outside of work with anyone I care to know beyond our time with our temporarily-mutual employment.
It just seems so unnecessary though? Why is it done this way? One minute you're there working your ass off, next minute you're digitally frog marched out of the office?
The sense that you are a valuable part of a team is an intentional illusion, meant to safeguard your productivity and sanity. The "impersonality" of layoffs is the reality of your relationship with the company all along.
Wow the child care thing must really hurt. I could absolutely imagine people making career decisions - not to mention decisions about where to live - based on the reasonable assumption that the child care provided by Google wasn't going to be arbitrarily turned off.
I can't imagine part of the Google hiring process was a note that said "do remember that we might change our mind about providing child care, so don't make any crucial decisions based on the ongoing existence of that benefit".
Honestly it seems a lot more like a soft layoff for more senior staff who may have kids due to the stage of life they're in, and the path they've chosen.
Could you explain why? When I joined Google I was a "Senior Software Enginner" had 1 young child who went into daycare and when my second child left, I was a "Senior Staff Software Engineer". Some of the other parents were similar levels, and the rest were directors/VPs. Like many people in tech/academia, I had kids "late" (starting at 33)
The role of "Senior Engineer" at Google is mostly 28+ year olds, which is the age range that has daycare aged kids. It's also the range that they tend to want to try to keep, compared to the lower levels which are easier to fill with random new grads.
So... Any reason I'm not aware of that "tech seniors" would have a higher disposition to using the day care? Btw, I'm not being sarcastic. I know nothing of Google's benefits operations or demographic composition, let alone varying dispositions to use said benefits.
People usually become Senior Engineers in their late 20s, if not mid 20s. It's the fakest job title in the industry. The majority of Senior Engineers are probably age 28-40 - common ages to have young children.
"Senior" really just means "this person is not straight out of college." It doesn't actually mean senior in the same way that Intel and AMD's "2nm process" technology does not actually correspond to any physical dimension on the die. It just means you have some type of experience.
Is that a thing Americans still grapple with? “I need to keep this job to keep health insurance for my kids”? I thought the ACA helped eliminate that in some way?
There are around 5 million uninsured people in my state, and the Republicans are talking about cancelling the ACA again because apparently that isn’t enough.
Yes, it's still a thing. Unemployed or self-employed people can now purchase insurance plans through state exchanges and there are subsidies available to low income families. But the insurance subsidies that you get from large employers are generally still much better.
Thus we still have about 8% uninsured. Some just can't afford the premiums at all. Others could afford it but choose to take the risk of going without.
As an American, corporate health plans are excellent, even covering things like IVF. Pretty sure the bare-bones plans are not as comfortable, so yes, “I need to keep this job to have this excellent health insurance for my family”.
> I can't imagine part of the Google hiring process was a note that said "do remember that we might change our mind about providing child care, so don't make any crucial decisions based on the ongoing existence of that benefit".
This note is implicit in any exchange with a party vastly more powerful than you.
There's no way anyone made a decision based on that because the waiting list for admission was infinitely long and many parents I knew there were going backwards in the priority queue.
Maybe employees who had made it through that waiting list ignored potential employment opportunities elsewhere because they didn't want to lose that benefit.
I'm raising my hand here. I'd have suggested that my wife quit her job to do childcare, but her job is much more interesting than mine and, with the way things are shaping up - software is "correcting" and "robotics" at an even sharper decline - I'll end up doing the kid stuff.
Not that I wouldn't adore spending time with my kids, but I'd have to deal with the ego death career-wise.
Back in the day (early 80's), my dad spent 2 or 3? years staying at home with my sister and I. My mom was working while he was re-training and switching careers at 40. Training to be a programmer on payroll systems. All mainframe HP Cobol stuff. I think I was around 10. It was great, he was going to class during the day but was there when we came home from school and he taught me to play chess and D&D and we always had computers around so that's how I learned to code because he was learning too. I remember watching him coding a lunar lander program on the C64, which he gave me as a hand me down but it had a modem so I could connect to a local BBS (at 300 baud and typing AT commands by hand lol). Later in life he said that was one of the happiest times of his life. Maybe it's harder to pull off that kind of gap now because we are all so focused on overachievement and never being human but he didn't even start working as a programmer until he was in his 40's and had steady work until retirement.
Anyway, in my experience my dad took a few years to do that kid stuff and it really had a positive effect on our relationship.
Closing the day care is a big deal. I don't know how they justified that; most company daycares cost as much, if not more than regular daycares and are run either at break-even, or at a very small profit.
And it's a huge, huge perk. Taking your kids with you to work allows you to not make a second trip every morning and every evening to go to their daycare (which is never exactly on the way) it's good for morale, it's GREAT for work/life balance, it's good for the environment, and the kids spend more time with their parents.
PG&E closed their daycare at 77 beale (Downtown SF) when they moved their headquarters to the ghost-town building in Oakland and very explicitly announced they had no plans to re-open a daycare. If you're reading this and in a position where you can affect change, definitely consider a daycare on site, it's a very effective way to dramatically increase retention of senior employees.
Not to sound like I know better, but wouldn't that imply it to be hugely successful? When the demand exceeds supply, my first assumption is that an increase in supply, if possible, would reap high marginal benefits. Again, I know nothing of Google's inner workings.
No inside knowledge but: day care everywhere in the Bay Area is in high demand but is so very expensive and needs to be _more_ expensive. Caretaker ratios are fixed by law, so your main expense is labor, of a relatively low skill variety. And that is where workers have seen impressive gains in wages lately, putting a real squeeze on daycare businesses. It's a real "losing money but making up for it in volume" squeeze.
What's hard to grok? Its capacity was 300 children, so fewer than 300 families at a location where there could have been thousands of families that could have benefited. It served an insignificant fraction of the employees at Google who could have used it.
You mean the self-propelled code production units that cost more than the other self-propelled code production units? Why would we want to retain those?
either you've never had kids, or you had the incrediblly good fortune to have found them a daycare that required little or no departure from your normal work commute. Or you had a stay-at-home nanny or similar arrangement, which I would put up there in the incredibly good fortune category.
So you spent a total of 90 minutes extra each day going to/from daycare. It sounds like the daycare should've been closer. At your pay rate, how much money was that time worth monthly?
I didn't understand the point of OP's own goal either. seems pretty unlikely that someone who lived that experience as described would not notice the obviously bad tradeoff they are making, and that this would hardly be something to be (apparently) proud of. But he got a chance to portray himself as a Senior Somebody making Important Decisions, so there's that.
All the people I know, whose circumstances I don't share except by second-order family relations, and who are indeed well paid senior engineers, actually do have live-in nannies or au pairs. Which is why I mentioned that possibility.
>I didn’t understand the point of OP’s own goal
>circumstances I don’t share
You got my viewpoint and I can clarify if you would like. My goal was to ensure the best upraising of my child. This includes social interaction, so a nanny was a nonstarter. So the 20 minute commute was considered an acceptable trade off (just as others may consider the lack of social interaction in selecting a nanny). When we purchased a new home we factored in the additional 50 minute loss in time and once again put our childrens consideration over our own.
When you are in a leadership position and have to consider the real fact of working over 40 hours a week, those benefits or lack thereof become a factor you (and thus the company) must consider.
I hope this helps you understand, especially one day in the future when you are in this position!
I don't share their circumstances because they're in finance whereas I'm the owner of a consulting business specializing in the facilitation of remote work for other companies (including some of theirs). So although my calendar is marked busy for months out I'm pretty free to determine what 'busy' means, and can spend time with my kids under terms I thus see fit. Still, daycare is indeed important for social development, commuting is not, and dead time in the car is a waste of both time and money.
On that note, per the other comment, the family I'm referring to all live in midtown manhattan where nannies and au pairs are the norm, and socialization amongst such families comes with the ecosystem. I assume people who have nannies in other built-up regions operate the same way, but maybe your mileage does vary.
Sounds like I should have been closer, but sometimes you don’t find a learning program that is close by. Turns out the high school we should put our daughter in will be an hour long commute. This decision is not purely monetary and does not involve the company I work(ed) for. There will be a time in everyone’s career when they must make a decision that will remove them from their personal time and is not the fault of the company.
Sure losing daycare benefit is a fault. Deciding to put your child in a lesser program because it won’t impact your commute has nothing to do with your job and entirely everything to do with you being a parent..
In my case I will pay to ensure the best upbringing for my children. And this means financially (paying for the best education) and temporally (waiting in traffic to pick them up from said learning institute).
You know this saying that all money in the world is worth less than your own time? On-prem daycare gives you more of your time back(and ultimately - more time with your kids). Being paid even some crazy salary does not make up for the fact that with almost any other childcare option you have to walk/drive the kids there before work and then pick them up later.
It's not a matter of affording daycare is my point.
It's a bigger issue in the South Bay because these tech offices are in huge office-only zones that take a long time to get in or out of. Back when I worked there, I was so glad lunch was on-prem for the same reason, and would've been glad even if I had to pay for it.
Kinda creepy how they're like company towns, though.
My daycare cost $1300 at 6 months and $800 at 4 years. A two bedroom apartment around here starts at $2200 (less if you live in different parts of town, but the daycare costs go down accordingly).
In our story, we were not able to get into the "elite" daycare that all the who's who of my city went to. That daycare cost $1500 - $1100 respectively. We ended up going to our daycare out of necessity which just turned out to be a really really good daycare, so we got lucky. But the point is the extra $2200/mo, as you noted, was part of my salary
The term did come back a bit in 2014 with the great television series "Halt and Catch Fire."
The metonymy of "Big Blue" was regularly used in the series (especially in the pilot) to describe IBM as a huge entity that a forcefully-made new division of a smaller company was competing against, to develop a personal computer in the 1980s.
This scene in the pilot about a salesman trying to convince another company's executives to choose his products over IBM's describes the feeling behind the term very well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc&t=65
I believe that Bill Joy famously once refered to it as the Big Blue Dinosaur (ala Barney). I think the more general term "Big Blue" came before "Dinosaur" was appended.
All it means is the individual has any amount of experience. It's OK if you didn't know that, but go ahead and absorb it now. It is not weird or unique to software. People on other engineering career paths, like mechanical engineers, will also be called "senior engineer" after a few years on the job, to distinguish them from inexperienced ones.
A person with at-most 3-4 years experience, but much more likely a lot less is not senior or experienced. I entirely disagree with your assessment.
Someone has to have actual experience to be considered senior. Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
> All it means is the individual has any amount of experience.
By this logic - what would we call someone with 15 years of experience? What about 25 years? Super Supreme Senior Engineer, Level 9000?
The field needs to stop inflating titles. It's bad enough having people willy-nilly call themselves "engineers", let alone tack-on qualifiers like "senior".
Words are meant to communicate things through shared meaning and this is what seniority means to ~everybody else except you, so although nobody will stop you from adopting your private definition that nobody else uses, I think persistence in doing so will make you look a little silly.
The thing you're glossing over is Senior at Company A != Senior at Company B.
If your company wants to grossly inflate titles, fair enough - but your next job will then look like a demotion.
Counting someone as senior purely by a clock is also absurd. It's about knowledge, depth and breadth. A person with 3ish years of experience does not have either... we used to just call that "engineer".
I do suspect that if I saw you do that, that I’d think that you were being an asshole, regardless of how much I agree with your views about title inflation. Taking out your displeasure on one a cog in the machine with little agency reeks of the exact lack of life experience that you otherwise appear to be speaking out against. Though maybe in your organisations an utter lack of interpersonal skill can be overlooked if someone is REALLY good at C or something.
When you openly laugh at someone, who isn't being intentionally funny, it is widely regarded as a sign that you don't respect them. Those sorts of things are commonly apprehended as something called an "insult" in modern society.
> That would still not be taking out one's displeasure on someone.
You have made this statement before, but not taken the time to explain why you believe that. Perhaps if you explain your position others will be more sympathetic to it.
I think it partially reflects the accessibility of the field.
You can start hacking on things as a kid with little more than a computer and an internet connection. You can literally have junior engineer knowledge when graduating high school. Add in a bit of formal education and a few years of experience, you can be a legitimate senior engineer at 24.
In fact, one of the best engineers I ever worked with was 21 and working at staff level. Things just clicked with him, so it didn't take long in the professional world for him to round out his knowledge.
By contrast, most other fields require expensive equipment or advanced techniques to gain actual, real experience. A high schooler might be able to weld a track car together, but it's a lot harder for them to do FEA (finite element analysis) or load testing without serious equipment.
The main issue is how hard it is to stick other qualifiers to titles.
You can't have a "makes decent estimations engineer", or "wasn't quit by the team lead engineer", or "gets paid twice as much data scientist". Some company go with "ninja" or "rockstar", or stick level numbers straight in the title but meh...so we settle for "senior" for most of these demarcations.
L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)
L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)
L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)
L7 shapes a product
L8 shapes a division
L9 shapes an industry
It's very possible that a 24 year old could become an L5 with a typical path: college 18-21, straight to Google for 3 years on the same team and becoming one of the main contributors on the team.
Considering that Google grew its headcount by over 50% between 2020 and 2022, there could be plenty of mid level engineers joining the 24 year old's team who they are able to lead now since they have an extra 3 years worth of experience + context in the specific area.
Google makes so much money that the attention on it is probably more expensive than what it makes. They could have sold it. But maybe it is worth more for the stripped assets.
Random site[0] claims that Alphabet has ~$120 billion cash in hand. Methinks the incremental extra cash of a daycare closure is not going to make a new business opportunity materialize.
Google Domains was canceled even though it too was profitable. At some point if a line of business isn't making literally billions of dollars it might be on the chopping block to yield a leaner overall company.
And sometimes your numbers can look better if your profit margin goes up even if your absolute profit goes down. A daycare is never going to have the marginal profit margin of, say, selling more ads.
Google's daycare wasn't particularly on-site. When I was there I had lots of coworkers with small kids and I can't recall any of them using the company daycare rather than normal daycare. I think TFA says there were like 300 kids in it? For a company with....what is it, over >100k? workers in the area?
Neither way really impacts fertility rate if that's the goal. Many countries, esp in west and north Europe, have already found out that you can't pay people to have kids.
Individual parents aren’t generally in a position to open a daycare and make a meaningful difference in the supply of childcare. Employers may be able to do so.
BLS data[0] indicate over 30% of married couples with children have a stay-at-home parent, and census data[1] indicate over 20% of childcare is provided by a non-parent relative. So family providing care is quite normal and close to the majority of the supply of childcare.
A tax break only helps people who are paying enough in taxes for it to matter and when it’s well calibrated to match what daycare costs. It would generally be better for the government to provide daycare because they have much better scale and consistency on funding, employment – daycare employees are notoriously underpaid because it’s such a high overhead business – and especially real estate. Using state buildings and getting the workers on healthcare plans which have better economies of scale would be a lot more sustainable economically than having a bunch of small businesses with far less leverage trying to do it on a smaller scale.
> A tax break only helps people who are paying enough in taxes for it to matter
No, tax deductions help higher rate taxpayers more, but "tax breaks" is a more broad/relaxed term that includes tax credits. Tax credits benefit everyone who files taxes and meets the criteria for the credit.
> It would generally be better for the government to provide daycare
Eh, that is kind of a wholly different argument. In some ways the credit is obviously better (maybe it frees up one partner who wants to to stay-at-home parent), and it can be used more flexibly than a government-provided care program, even if you assume arguendo that the government program would be good and/or good value.
If you’re going to be that pedantic, be sure to specify that you mean refundable tax credits – and then perhaps acknowledge the second half of the compound statement you’re replying to.
Only for people scared of degrowth. It's not that scary if you actually have some kind of consensus mechanism or conflict resolution, which is the thing we actually lack as a country that's scary as shit.
Anyway, politicians could always loosen immigration. More people = bigger economy, higher wages for the rest of us, and generally immigrants have higher fertility rates. Somehow neither party wants to acknowledge this.
(yes, the above would come with inflation too—this can be reclaimed pretty easily from the top of the wealth pyramid with taxes.)
> and generally immigrants have higher fertility rates
Not by much, it's only higher in the origin country afaik.
> yes, the above would come with inflation too
Growing the economy isn't inflationary.
> this can be reclaimed pretty easily from the top of the wealth pyramid with taxes
Rich people don't contribute to inflation as much because they have lower marginal propensity to consume. You need to combat demand-side inflation by taking money away from everyone else, and supply-side inflation by increasing production.
It is if you provide a route to citizenship for ~16M americans, many of which are not making minimum wage.
> Rich people don't contribute to inflation as much because they have lower marginal propensity to consume. You need to combat demand-side inflation by taking money away from everyone else, and supply-side inflation by increasing production.
The goal is to use the inflation to drive a reduction in wealth inequality. If the rich person finds it unfair, I'm sure they can find something to mop their tears with.
> It is if you provide a route to citizenship for ~16M americans, many of which are not making minimum wage.
Hmmm, I think it more counters a deflationary trend of older local people retiring. It is true that people earning more is likely inflationary (but that's better than all alternatives).
> The goal is to use the inflation to drive a reduction in wealth inequality.
Causation would go the other way round. Wealth taxes are inflationary, insofar as taxes are paid in USD and so you have to sell your assets to get the USD, causing extra transactions. That's a problem since most other kinds of tax are deflationary.
Consensus viewpoint is that population stability or (modest) growth is probably ideal from a long-term economics perspective. If fertility rates were sky high, you wouldn't need to incentivize parenting as much to achieve that outcome.
Yeah, but who cares about long-term economics? If you're a public corporation, the only thing that matters to you is short-term profits and stock price, and doing things in the society's long-term interest is usually against your short-term interest. Normally, we have governments and regulations to serve as a check here and worry about the long-term interests of society, but that requires a citizenry that votes for such policies. America's voters don't care much about this, as seen by their voting patterns, so it's wrong to worry about long-term economics there.
Funnily enough, the CHIPS Act has provisions that require recipients of grants of a certain amount to provide childcare to employees. That might be the way of the future if we explicitly subsidize more and more industries directly...
Working remotely with such salaries one can afford to search for places where a house near a daycare is a viable solution and move to another place once daycare is no longer needed
Yes, it sounds ridiculous to rely on one particular employer for daycare. But it's not just that. Even if your spouse is totally staying home to take care of the kids, Bay Area (be it SF, East, or South) ain't a good place for families.
Agreed. The employer managed Healthcare concept is so weird to me. It's just the government outsourcing administrative work to companies as a "ticket to ride" the economy. Public servants have been high fiving each other since 1935.
In an action that was a blow to union control of health plans and a stimulus to employer-controlled programs, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned union control of welfare funds based on employer contributions. On the positive side, an attempt to explicitly exclude employee benefits from the requirement for collective bargaining failed, and the law retained the vague language of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that required management to bargain on "wages and conditions of employment." The law also established regulations for joint employer-union control of plans involving multiple employers. [1]
that seems like a pretty bad sign that American tech engineers are losing their value. part of the reason that exists is for valuable employee retention.
That was true before WFH became popular with the lockdown; I'm not convinced these are related phenomena. For one thing, an employee in the office generally isn't any more valuable than one working from home.
No, it is not "what happens." As somebody who has been doing WFH since well before COVID, I'm getting tired of the trope that says avoiding old management frameworks like having asses in seats in an office in the US is driving offshoring. It's just not true—it was always cheaper to hire in other parts of the world.
There will never be a single factor that drives outsourcing. That being said, I kinda agree that if everybody is remote, adding one more remote employee is a lot easier since your company is already setup as a remote-first org.
Yes, my company had two large childcare centers with plans to build a third. Then the pandemic happened and during the pandemic they decided that not only were they not going to build the third center, but they would close down the other two centers. Now the other two centers are just used for storage, but there are still all these children toys just laying around forlornly in the outside fenced play areas where the last kids left them years ago. Very sad.
> Now the other two centers are just used for storage, but there are still all these children toys just laying around forlornly in the outside fenced play areas where the last kids left them years ago.
I think the image of this, as small as it is to the actual scenario of failing to provide care, paints a bleak picture.
We don't even care enough to cleanup the reminders of the pandemic.
Daycare was an anti-perk for Google, practically speaking.
It was a huge waiting list to have a chance, and a small fraction got to use it, so most parents just got to be somewhat frustrated by it.
Lots of perks aren't widely used, but mostly by choice; a perk I could potentially use is still a perk, and it feels good to have that option.
Pushing toward remote work or asking someone to work on a different campus also makes the on-prem daycare a bit weird.
But yeah, a company day care that has enough spots to serve most interested parents would be a pretty nice perk. But, I think for most parents, a daycare near home is much better, especially those not working from office every day.
＞ Taking your kids with you to work allows you to not make a second trip every morning and every evening to go to their daycare (which is never exactly on the way) it's good for morale, it's GREAT for work/life balance, it's good for the environment, and the kids spend more time with their parents.
Caveat: only if you absolutely need to go to work in the first place, or you couldn't remote for critical reasons (granted, someone being unremediably miserable at home would be one)
Otherwise dealing with kids is one of the primary factor in choosing remote work, and it's life changing.
A local, close to your home daycare means you have options on who brings the kids and who takes them. It's a few minutes away, so yes you get more time with your kids, it fits into a standard work break, you're there quick enough when puke hits the fan, you get access to your local doctors and hospitals who have your kids' records, etc. All of these "perks" persist if you change job, your kids go to school, etc.
Google's daycare wasn't like that in so many ways, though.
* You don't just take your kids in to work with you. The Google daycares were not any closer to whatever office you happen to work in than some third-party daycare. [edit: they weren't particularly close a long time ago when Google was concentrated in North Bayshore, and then became even less so as Google's offices were spread out more and people bounced around more often, and then became even less so with wfh...]
* You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time (because sibling priority), then later a lottery system where you pay money to play but never win.
* From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in. The typical tenure for a teacher was like a month, which is shockingly bad. Like how do you screw up pay/work environment so badly that's possible? And their understanding of children's needs wasn't great either. For example, they organized the kids into rooms by age (which is common but not universal) and...had no transition period at all or hint to the kids that these transitions were coming. They were just in one room one day with one set of teachers, then unexpectedly in another room with another set of teachers the next, which was super confusing and alarming to them.
* It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive. [edit to add: when I first heard about it, this was explained to me as a consequence of it having very high-quality staff who are paid well, but this doesn't match up with the bullet above. Maybe what I heard from the daycare provider was wrong. Maybe quality has gone downhill. Maybe it was never good. I think there are a variety of factors that would have allowed it to continue existing until now without ever having been good. An absolutely tiny proportion of interested people actually were able to try it. Those who did probably felt very lucky to get in and disinclined to complain/give up their exclusive spot, and folks on the waitlist disinclined to listen to their complaints... additionally, many of the parents who went there had never had kids in another daycare to compare against...]
> You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time
This changed after covid. My understanding is that they struggled to fill classrooms due to people moving away from MTV / Palo Alto. We tried to convince friends to enroll their kids for fear of something like this happening. The closure was way worse than we expected (we thought they'd at least do a phased closure) and we kinda regret the advice we gave to friends since they're scrambling to find replacement care now.
> From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in
Daycare turnover has been bad industry wide, and our classroom had bad turnover in 2021 but it stablized since then. We've super loved our experience. Really great sanitary procedures, high quality learning objectives and measurement, healthy food, etc.
> It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive.
Yes it's still shockingly expensive. Maybe this was self inflicted at first: I heard that when one of the Wojicki sisters had her kids there they changed out all classroom furniture every year, looked for way overqualified people to do the childcare (like Ph.Ds) and all that. It's not that over the top anymore today, but today they still pay the childcare workers very well by that industry's standards (they also get all the same days off as other alphabet workers) and the facilities are way bigger than others that you'd find on the peninsula, with a playground / yard for every N classrooms.
My personal feeling is: I understand why they'd cut this benefit. I _don't_ understand why they had to cut it in this fashion. Having another daycare company buy it out and handing over operations, or raising prices so it's not subsidized, or phasing out classrooms over N years to give parents plenty of time to find alternative care -- there are just better ways they could have ended this longstanding benefit.
> This changed after covid. My understanding is that they struggled to fill classrooms due to people moving away from MTV / Palo Alto.
Ahh, that explains how my across-the-street neighbor has a kid there.
> Daycare turnover has been bad industry wide, and our classroom had bad turnover in 2021 but it stablized since then. We've super loved our experience. Really great sanitary procedures, high quality learning objectives and measurement, healthy food, etc.
From what this provider told me, the Google daycares' turnover was bad even by industry standards.
Anyway, glad to hear you had a good experience there, and my sympathy as you try to find a replacement!
FWIW not Google but have my child at a Kiddie Academy, and turnover is abysmal..monthly sounds right. And yeah they do class transfers by age and abrubtly so. And they’re in one room all day, though when it’s over 50 degrees they’ll go outside (I’m in Maryland and ya know..winter).
Edit: oh and $2500/mo for 0-2 yr olds..curious how that stacks up compared to Google day care!
My kids were at a Kiddie Academy for a while that was coincidentally down the street from a Google daycare. It was a pretty good experience at the time. Each room had at least one long time teacher (years). They eased them into the next room. But then management changed, they pushed those teachers out, we reported a couple ratio violations to the state, and we left. We tried to get the owners more involved (Kiddie Academy is a franchise), then we met the owners and thought maybe less involvement would be better...they got a decent director in the end but the damage was already done from our perspective.
Then my kids went to a Montessori style preschool. Small, run by the owner of 20+ years and a couple of long time staff members. That was great for us. The owner has since retired though and the school changed hands. Nothing lasts forever, I guess...
Kiddie Academy struck me as ~3rd/4th tier when I was looking at daycares - it was way down my list.
My kids went to a small local chain where some of the teachers have been with it since it was founded in the 90s, almost 30 years ago. Average tenure was like 10-15 years. Unfortunately they got bought by Bright Horizons last year, and have lost 4 teachers since the school year began (although luckily it's that 4 teachers have rotated into the 2 spots vacated, not that they lost 4 veteran teachers).
This feels like a good average globally, right? You have multiple staff per room (hopefully!) + admin staff + cook who need to pay their own rent+spending, then add the costs+mintenance of the daycare itself. Unless government-subsidised, I'd expect the daycare costs to be in the same ballpark as the local rent.
In this world where rent is your dominant monthly cost, totally agree. The teacher student ratio for infants here is 1:3, honestly it should maybe be more.
Would be nice if rents were a smaller total of our living expenses though. Everyone would have more breathing room.
Wow. Might as well rent a place for the grandparents and have them take care of the kid. And if you have two kids, it would be a huge savings. Something seems broken about the economics here.
I looked into it pre-covid and was basically told that it's for the upper level executives. We went with an au pair for our 2 kids, and it cost less than having one kid in GCC.
I mean, when was the last time you saw Google bother to continue running a service that was merely "profitable" and failed to achieve even a paltry billion users? This daycare was doomed to be shut down before it even got started.
I’m not convinced that any modern tech company is actually interested in keeping people around for too long.
I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong, but my own experience has me a bit cynical.
Childcare is good for folks in their mid-to-late twenties, and early thirties. Not even that “senior.” People older than that, often don’t need childcare as much.
So it seems as if they want to have a workforce of extremely young, unmarried people, or maybe a few older, “empty nesters.”
It doesn't make sense to me.
Is google turning into a pure cash cow with no ambition?
You have this resource, developers, that you invest a lot into; why would you get rid of your core asset? Is there no NPV-positive way to allocate this asset? Is there 0 ambition to pursue new projects?
If it were any other team I would have understood. but devs? makes no sense.
Slide started when they acquired DoubleClick and the two cultures blurred together (or worse, at the higher levels of the company...) and they were beyond saving when they fully committed to ads-inline-with-search-results rather than just "experimenting" with it.
This is type of stuff make me not like big corp, the culture and company value eventually corrupts. And if you are like Apple, after the charismatic founder dies, pretty much it goes to shit as well.
What makes you think that's happened to Apple yet. Their product ecosystem still feels cohesively designed to me, and the new Macbooks have been a fantastic bit of category leading work.
I can't name a single software feature that they've come out with in the last few years—that's certainly a notable change from their old release cycle.
Log Video recording on the iPhone was pretty cool for me. But also coming up this year probably are two huge things, an actually good interface for Apple Vision which is a pretty impressive accomplishment, and I would bet a lot that we see a huge revamp of the iPhone this year with on device LLM features.
That's certainly how they may see themselves, but the hardware isn't what I buy Apple products to access. It's just a nice perk that the hardware is so well-manufactured, frankly—it's the software that I actually interact with day in and out. I'd be ecstatic running macOS on a thinkpad.
Weird, I have exactly the opposite view. I love the Mac laptop hardware (it's clearly the best in class, with by far the best battery life), but I don't like MacOS. I would much prefer to run Linux (with proper battery performance tuning) on a nice Macbook Pro.
I just can't match the productivity of macOS. Particularly the keybindings of linux are a non-starter for me. I always end up gravitating back towards just using emacs, and then just using emacs on a mac, and then just going back to vscode or sublime text (which tbf, both of these work excellently on linux) on mac.
If I had to go back to a Linux desktop full-time—compelled by a witch's curse or something, I dunno, doesn't matter why—and it were an option (it's not) I'd pay quite a bit of money just to get supported version of Apple's productivity and utility programs for Linux. Preview, Safari, Numbers, Pages, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Notes, probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. Hell, I even like Terminal at least as well as any of the options on Linux.
I don't enjoy using any of the "big" equivalents of those things on Linux (like Libreoffice or Firefox), don't like any of the options in some cases (any kind of Preview replacement—all contenders are much worse), and the ones I find tolerable are all way on the low end as far as developer attention and user-share, so tend to be even jankier than the platform median for desktop software, and certainly aren't as well-integrated with one another (Abiword, Numeric, Gnome Web / Epiphany or Surf)
To be fair to Linux, the same would be true if the same thing happened except with Windows. Though Paint.net and Notepad++ are really nice. [EDIT] Yeah, I know, those aren't first-party programs, just trying to give any credit I can.
The software—not even the fancy stuff, just the same sorts of programs we've had on desktops for decades—is a big part of why Apple's ecosystem is sticky for me, and it's hard to justify leaving even when they're not bringing their A-game. Being on their platform gets me access to my favorite well-supported programs in several crucial program categories.
> Particularly the keybindings of linux are a non-starter for me.
I spent my first 18 or so computing-years on Windows and Linux, barely touched a Mac. When I finally switched (was issued one at a new job) I decided within a year that Macs had simply the most-correct default English keyboard layout and shortcut-set, and it's not a close contest. It's really, really good. Replicating it on Linux is weirdly difficult to achieve, fully and without issues, considering being able to customize everything is one of its core draws.
Excellent, quick, automatic, transparent-to-the-user OCR on basically all images that use native toolkit controls on both iOS and macOS was the kind of thing that instantly felt like a feature an OS needs to not feel incomplete. One of those "didn't know I needed this, would now feel horrible to not have it" sorts of things.
I remember a search engine that they built and now forget things that happened in the past and Bing or ChatGPT are more reliable to quickly search for information. It seems like a new Altavista moment [1].
They were caught in the innovation dilemma [2] where improving the search engine will diminish their revenue. I now see several row of ads after a search. More than a year ago, and a year before that.
It makes no sense to you because you're seeing it from the inside as a developer.
Step outside the echo chamber and realize macro-economic trends have replaced the need to innovate with a basic instinct to just survive the coming storm caused by a decade of free money.
I mean it's not even about innovation per se—we've run out of new frontiers to exploit. First it was a literal frontier, then it was an economic frontier, and finally a computer and internet frontier. Maybe VR is the next thing, but I think we may have hit peak technological usefulness (to consumers) and it's all enshittification from here on out.
Profound observation. Further technology from here onwards is only the science fiction level.
Computers that can display information on back of your eye lids maybe (with gadgets no more than an earphone while lasting several days on a charge) so that you don't even have to hold your phone.
But that's really far far into future and even probably downright forbidden by the physics.
Feels like nobody wants to sit down and work on those “frontiers” anymore. Because working on fundamental ideas don’t get you paid in dollars, maybe just a pat in the back.
What is all this about survival? Most of the giant companies and many of the other ones, all doing layoffs, are making money hand over fist and will likely be wildly profitable for years to come.
This is not about survival. Google and Meta and all these other companies are clearly not struggling to survive like some startup running out of runway.
I'm not sure if it's survival exactly, but it's comparatively bad outlook. They are making money now, but the profit rates are trending downward in some old reliable cash cows. If you look at say amazon, AWS is still very profitable but it's decreasing.
The part that is divorced from reality is when they manically over hire (because pandemic investment and consumption is permanent I guess?) then try to layoff their way back to the way it was which incredibly costly both in money and culture.
Oh god please don't exaggerate with 'survive the coming storm' when it comes to Google. They make like 60 B in profit each year. Survival is so far away from the right word to describe their situation. It's just about profit maximization. How about we step outside the cult of capitalism for its own sake.
How much (less) in profit each year would Google have to make for you to consider them in survival mode? And also, what qualifies you to be the expert on their financial status and needs?
Google has no ability to execute. So instead of making leadership changes, they are just tightening their belt. They are going to be like IBM and just milk their legacy revenue. Waiting for them to sell off Google Cloud to Oracle or Salesforce.
> Is google turning into a pure cash cow with no ambition?
I'm an outsider, but Sundar is a man who knows how to make the money machine print money. I'm sure he would claim that he is all for innovation and research, but if you're at google but not a part of the immediate money machinery, I doubt if he thinks about you at all.
So I actually predicted that "probably next year this time there will be more layoffs" when I was laid off about this same time last year by Google. I'm just surprised that it's in the ballpark of ~1000 and not say ~5000.
The basic mindset is summed up by a bunch of Eli Goldratt books, which, y'know, don't make them into a new Bible for business or anything, but they raise better questions than the ones you started with. You, oh corporate leader, look out upon the business and reason, "Well, I'm supposed to increase profits. Profits are revenues minus costs. As for revenues, money is coming in through these pipelines, and that's governed by these deals and those contracts and that's fine, there's not much I can do about that. I've got my sales staff, they are paid on commission, that's humming along just fine. So the main thing to increase my profits must be to cut my costs. So let us engage in broad-spectrum cost-cutting to reduce headcount, reduce benefits where we think we can, tighten belts, and then we'll be running a lean, mean, production machine."
This happens especially but not exclusively when companies are either experiencing or worried about hard times and money is getting tight.
The problem is, the broad spectrum. The easiest way for me to communicate this is pure numbers. You want to think that your company has an 80/20 rule, so 20% of your employees ultimately drive 80% of your performance. You shrink headcount by 10% and you try really hard to use some objective measurements to target that on the 80% of less-performant employees, but you don't succeed fully. Maybe that 20% becomes 19.5% while the 80% becomes 70.5%, to get your 19.5% + 70.5% = 90% and you have cut 10% of headcount. Great, you did so much better than chance! And in theory your performance is only 96% of what it was, so you take that 6% and pocket it as extra profit, right? Except, wrong. The people who were fired were doing something and even if you can work out ways to cancel half of it, you still have 90% of the people doing 95% of what the company did, and this 5% inefficiency is spread across the whole company with no regard for high or low performers.
So you actually basically break even, maybe make 1% more profit but it's hard to tell. And the next cycle you have the exact same calculation. It again seems like you'll make 6% more profit by removing the 10% lowest performers, so you do it again, and you don't make the extra profit again.
My team got laid off in fall 2023. I knew it would be a long road ahead, but it still feels like we’re just in the beginning of the tech layoffs. Extremely depressing. Hoping I can ride this out.
Oh. Both my kids went there. I had constant disagreements with the staff- it was really far too expensive, and some of the teachers were just lazy, others were overqualified.
weird my family has 6 children and we've never had many issues, we also don't have company provided daycare or parents that come to act as a daycare. What is exactly the problem? why is it always the "developed world" that is responsible for peoples choices?
I worked at Google when the daycare was introduced. At the time, it was so expensive that very few employees could afford to use it. Was that still the case recently?
I knew someone who worked at the child care center. Things got really bad after the pandemic. I heard that people were promoted for very sketchy reasons. The result was a bureaucracy-heavy mess of incompetence and political infighting. It apparently was unbearable, and it is not a surprise to me that this happened. All the corner-cutting and nickel-and-diming made it clear that the higher-ups were trying to kill this perk. It is kind of sad, since this single perk was specifically called out when Google used to get the ‘Best Place to Work’ awards.
Most of my friends who have kids complain that they spend like 3-4k per kid per month only to have the carer not even pay attention to their kid or worse totally ignore them or make them feel bad. That sounds horrible.
What do you guys look for in a day care? Just curious as I don't have kids.
Going rates for a nanny are around $25/hour, which comes to $50K/year for a standard 2000-hour work-year.
And yes, nanny-shares are considered a "budget" option in the Bay Area, for when you can't afford a good preschool or can't get off the waitlist. Unfortunately the quality tends to be more variable...I've heard some horror stories about irresponsible nannies. There isn't a vetting & licensing process the way that there is for institutional childcare.
> For the past several years, four Google Children’s Centers have operated in the San Francisco Bay Area. These Google-run day-care centers will be closing next year, but the company is expanding its parental benefits so that more employees, especially those around the world, can partake.
> At the moment, 300 parents in the Bay Area use this particular benefit, which was introduced in 2008 when Google had 20,000 employees. Annual entry is determined by a lottery system and those selected pay a tuition with only some subsidy from the company. This school year, which ends August 2024, will be the last one for these Google facilities.
> The company is helping those existing families find new day-care centers, while those working at the four Google Children’s Centers will receive an exit package that includes outplacement services.
Serious question, why don't Googlers unionize? They bring in far, far, far more revenue than they cost in salary. You'd be foolish not to leverage this collectively....
My guess is it's the same reason so many HN people are against unions: Everyone imagines they are the One Special Talented "Captain Of Industry"-Like Skilled Negotiator Person who would not benefit from the union and/or make less money in a union. "Unions are fine for those lower-level workers, the little people who aren't in as high demand as I am, and who can't negotiate like I can. I'd surely be worse off with one!" -- and when everyone thinks this about themselves, the whole lot of them fails to unionize.
For tech (and finance) there are a great many people who make an extreme comp demand and the company just shrugs and says "ok, we'll pay it." Before you put your fate in the hands of some union boss, you should consider trying it for yourself.
A guild / professional association, perhaps; but forming a run-of-the-mill labor union would almost certainly lower SWE salaries and benefits across the sector in the end. (Not talking about just Google here.)
> but forming a run-of-the-mill labor union would almost certainly lower SWE salaries and benefits across the sector in the end.
How would that work? Wouldn't reasoning about incentives here point in exactly the opposite direction? Not to toot our own horn too deeply, but while a SWE might be fungible, we're in a line of work that's difficult to scab through. Google really doesn't have much leverage over their employees compared to other labor conflicts I've read about throughout history....
SWEs are overcompensated, and offering big companies a single lever (the leadership of a sector-wide labor union) to push against all of us would be only too handy for them; negotiations would have nowhere to go but down.
SWEs are overcompensated? How do you figure? The revenue figures per-engineer tell the exact opposite story.
> the leadership of a sector-wide labor union) to push against all of us would be only too handy for them; negotiations would have nowhere to go but down.
I literally cannot follow this train of thought—surely, having a single collective negotiator is the only way to prevent this exact scenario.
Regardless, you seem to be conflating regular unions with trade unions. They're different, they serve different roles—arguably, I think we need trade unions far more than regular ones if we want to do anything useful as a country in the next few decades—but in all situations having a single-negotiator is the only way to stop engineers from being pitted against each other.
Wasn’t it around this time last year that Google had their big layoff? I suppose the rumor that Google implemented stack ranking might be true after all.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadWork is absolutely not a family.
immediately escorting somebody off the premises seems more likely to trigger such gun violence than avoid it.
in any case, gun violence remains a very unlikely event wrt to the headlines it receives (divide the statistics by "out of 335 million people")
What rights do you mean other than the notice period (and the ones surrounding whether the contract can be terminated at all)?
Because notice period can be solved by continuing to pay the salary and to be fair, Google and the other tech giants have usually done that to a pretty high level during layoffs. E.g. Discord is now paying out 5 months of salaries to the laid off people.
(I find the escorting out of building, etc. super weird.)
From what I hear, it sounds like in US you are immediately considered an enemy spy or saboteur and need to be escorted by security. I can't imagine how chaotic it must be to take over work from someone who was fired like that.
Worst one I saw was, at the end of the day, they fired the guy who walked out 400 people, poor soul was just the very last one.
It’s not uncommon in finance to have ludicrously long notice periods, but conventionally you are just put on gardening leave as the purpose of it is for your knowledge to go out of date.
However, the company was in such dire straits that they couldn’t afford to just pay people to do nothing for six months and thought it would be a good idea to have them work out their notice. It wasn’t. Those people did sweet FA during their notice and were actively harmful to the company culture for obvious reasons.
I don’t think making it completely impersonal is great either, but it’s best for everyone to end things quickly rather than hanging around.
Yeah, that's a completely different situation. Those employees had employment contracts requiring six months' notice. So they're gonna be paid for six months at the end, and they might as well be producing value for the company the whole time.
Meanwhile in the US we mostly don't have employment contracts. Anyone can be fired/laid off at any time for almost any reason, and that takes effect immediately. The one caveat is that WARN notifications might required 60-90 days notice depending on the state and size of the layoff. But for whatever reason, employers here don't want their employees working for those last months like they would in the UK.
Definitely, but not by escorting people out of a building or sending an email and cutting their Slack access without notice... which is what we see all the time.
Just give the person at least a day to say their goodbyes?
However, I understand that with a massive layoff and a timescale of 6 months it could have turned out far worse than the situation I describe.
To add a data point: Not only have my laid-off colleagues helped to finish and smoothly hand over tasks, but we are now actively rehiring some of them back.
To be fair, the company didn't pull any BS like e.g. Cloudflare telling laid-off employees that they are underperformers. In our case, it was crystal clear that we've lost clients and don't have enough work and money for salaries to keep everyone and that that's the only single reason they are being laid off.
I've never even once seen an employee in engineering go rogue after getting fired.
I've been exposed to this US reality since early 00's and never quite understood where it's coming from. It doesn't seem based on evidence.
If I'm not trustworthy after they fire me, then I couldn't have been trustworthy before either imo. Afterall, as I said we don't have those procedures around here and it's no problem. We would find them weird (culturally).
If you are the leadership and don't take this action and that "rare" small number of people that might do something untoward does do something, then you are left holding the bag. So, as they say, better safe than sorry. I've even be present when actual criminal activity has been committed, but no charges have been brought but the company is still offered the use of actual police during the dismissal/escorting off premise without making an arrest.
So, I guess I'm happy for you that you've never had to experience the darker side of things, but, it's part and parcel around here now of the process.
Are you saying you typically take your company email domain emails (IE, "me@work.com") away after you leave a company?
I worked at Google for over a decade, I'm pretty familiar with their policies and throughout silicon valley.
That would be terrible IT if users had to explicitly back up any of their work. Hardware fails, or gets lost or stolen. Any even semi-competent company should have source control, regular IT-managed backups, etc., such that work isn't lost for any reason.
Also ... why would you need to back up your emails? I can't even imagine a circumstance in which being let go would cause all of your emails to be deleted? They'll just give someone else access to your inbox on the email server if necessary.
I've seen people react unpredictably and emotionally in the workplace, but the layoffs I've seen have actually been entirely smooth. The typical laid off employee is either thinking about the vacation they're going to take (Silicon Valley good times thinking) or how they're going to find a new job (any other industry at any time). The last thing such a person wants to do is trash their own reputation by behaving unprofessionally, and they certainly aren't going to sabotage the employer. But since the managers doing the laying off typically have never done it before, you end up with the kind of weird outcomes described here.
Being escorted off site would seem really bizarre. You were trusted to the utmost a second ago, now you're Bill Cosby all the sudden.
I think the "escorted out by security" might be something that happens more in the movies and maybe some very large and impersonal companies. Haven't seen a lot of layoffs up close, but I kind of doubt it's the norm.
Thanks for the data point, because most of my knowledge is from hn/reddit/movies, so I don't know how prevalent this "you are fired, leave the premises immediately" procedure is.
This happens to people who had been loyal employees for 10 years.
America is weird like this.
Obviously you can go find them on LinkedIn and talk that way, but it seems unnecessarily hostile.
Knowing this can happen to me at any time, I make sure that I'm already connected outside of work with anyone I care to know beyond our time with our temporarily-mutual employment.
It's odd.
I think usual way is to send you email at night: you don't go to the office tomorrow.
I can't imagine part of the Google hiring process was a note that said "do remember that we might change our mind about providing child care, so don't make any crucial decisions based on the ongoing existence of that benefit".
Thus we still have about 8% uninsured. Some just can't afford the premiums at all. Others could afford it but choose to take the risk of going without.
This note is implicit in any exchange with a party vastly more powerful than you.
Not that I wouldn't adore spending time with my kids, but I'd have to deal with the ego death career-wise.
Anyway, in my experience my dad took a few years to do that kid stuff and it really had a positive effect on our relationship.
And it's a huge, huge perk. Taking your kids with you to work allows you to not make a second trip every morning and every evening to go to their daycare (which is never exactly on the way) it's good for morale, it's GREAT for work/life balance, it's good for the environment, and the kids spend more time with their parents.
PG&E closed their daycare at 77 beale (Downtown SF) when they moved their headquarters to the ghost-town building in Oakland and very explicitly announced they had no plans to re-open a daycare. If you're reading this and in a position where you can affect change, definitely consider a daycare on site, it's a very effective way to dramatically increase retention of senior employees.
genuine question as a bay area resident: which laws are you referring to? do you have a link to something?
So very few people will miss it.
It would be a totally different situation if this were a perk where there had been plenty of supply, so that it actually met employee demand.
You mean the self-propelled code production units that cost more than the other self-propelled code production units? Why would we want to retain those?
However I was a senior leader that was paid the salary to lead high stakes projects. YMMV
All the people I know, whose circumstances I don't share except by second-order family relations, and who are indeed well paid senior engineers, actually do have live-in nannies or au pairs. Which is why I mentioned that possibility.
You got my viewpoint and I can clarify if you would like. My goal was to ensure the best upraising of my child. This includes social interaction, so a nanny was a nonstarter. So the 20 minute commute was considered an acceptable trade off (just as others may consider the lack of social interaction in selecting a nanny). When we purchased a new home we factored in the additional 50 minute loss in time and once again put our childrens consideration over our own.
When you are in a leadership position and have to consider the real fact of working over 40 hours a week, those benefits or lack thereof become a factor you (and thus the company) must consider.
I hope this helps you understand, especially one day in the future when you are in this position!
On that note, per the other comment, the family I'm referring to all live in midtown manhattan where nannies and au pairs are the norm, and socialization amongst such families comes with the ecosystem. I assume people who have nannies in other built-up regions operate the same way, but maybe your mileage does vary.
Sure losing daycare benefit is a fault. Deciding to put your child in a lesser program because it won’t impact your commute has nothing to do with your job and entirely everything to do with you being a parent..
In my case I will pay to ensure the best upbringing for my children. And this means financially (paying for the best education) and temporally (waiting in traffic to pick them up from said learning institute).
It's not a matter of affording daycare is my point.
Kinda creepy how they're like company towns, though.
In our story, we were not able to get into the "elite" daycare that all the who's who of my city went to. That daycare cost $1500 - $1100 respectively. We ended up going to our daycare out of necessity which just turned out to be a really really good daycare, so we got lucky. But the point is the extra $2200/mo, as you noted, was part of my salary
Foster City Odyssey Preschool for toddlers is $2100 for school day, plus $500 extended day until 6pm.
https://www.odysseypreschool.com/foster-city-admissions
Pennisula Jewish is $3125 for toddlers until 5:30pm
https://pjcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PJCC-Preschool-R...
I was hoping for flying cars, but as far as signs I am living in the future go, this will have to do
The metonymy of "Big Blue" was regularly used in the series (especially in the pilot) to describe IBM as a huge entity that a forcefully-made new division of a smaller company was competing against, to develop a personal computer in the 1980s.
This scene in the pilot about a salesman trying to convince another company's executives to choose his products over IBM's describes the feeling behind the term very well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc&t=65
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(slogan)
The very concept of this is so absurd as to be entirely ridiculous. Title inflation at it's finest.
To think a person can have enough real-world experience to become "senior" in any field within 3-4 years is absolute insanity.
I do suspect if I ran into a 24 year old that called themself a "senior engineer" with a straight face, I'd likely burst out laughing...
Someone has to have actual experience to be considered senior. Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
> All it means is the individual has any amount of experience.
By this logic - what would we call someone with 15 years of experience? What about 25 years? Super Supreme Senior Engineer, Level 9000?
The field needs to stop inflating titles. It's bad enough having people willy-nilly call themselves "engineers", let alone tack-on qualifiers like "senior".
If your company wants to grossly inflate titles, fair enough - but your next job will then look like a demotion.
Counting someone as senior purely by a clock is also absurd. It's about knowledge, depth and breadth. A person with 3ish years of experience does not have either... we used to just call that "engineer".
But... go ahead, keep assigning recent graduates absurd titles. Inflating people's egos helps keep salaries low.
> Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
Apparently you need one more counterexample? I certainly do not think one can be considered senior after 3-4 years as well.
But I would also be curious, how you would then call someone with 15 years, or oh my, 25 years of experience?
Laughing is not taking out one's displeasure on someone.
You have made this statement before, but not taken the time to explain why you believe that. Perhaps if you explain your position others will be more sympathetic to it.
You can start hacking on things as a kid with little more than a computer and an internet connection. You can literally have junior engineer knowledge when graduating high school. Add in a bit of formal education and a few years of experience, you can be a legitimate senior engineer at 24.
In fact, one of the best engineers I ever worked with was 21 and working at staff level. Things just clicked with him, so it didn't take long in the professional world for him to round out his knowledge.
By contrast, most other fields require expensive equipment or advanced techniques to gain actual, real experience. A high schooler might be able to weld a track car together, but it's a lot harder for them to do FEA (finite element analysis) or load testing without serious equipment.
Life doesn't start at age 21.
You can't have a "makes decent estimations engineer", or "wasn't quit by the team lead engineer", or "gets paid twice as much data scientist". Some company go with "ninja" or "rockstar", or stick level numbers straight in the title but meh...so we settle for "senior" for most of these demarcations.
L3 is a new graduate
L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)
L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)
L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)
L7 shapes a product
L8 shapes a division
L9 shapes an industry
It's very possible that a 24 year old could become an L5 with a typical path: college 18-21, straight to Google for 3 years on the same team and becoming one of the main contributors on the team.
Considering that Google grew its headcount by over 50% between 2020 and 2022, there could be plenty of mid level engineers joining the 24 year old's team who they are able to lead now since they have an extra 3 years worth of experience + context in the specific area.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/cas...
And sometimes your numbers can look better if your profit margin goes up even if your absolute profit goes down. A daycare is never going to have the marginal profit margin of, say, selling more ads.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.t04.htm
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/child-care.ht...
No, tax deductions help higher rate taxpayers more, but "tax breaks" is a more broad/relaxed term that includes tax credits. Tax credits benefit everyone who files taxes and meets the criteria for the credit.
> It would generally be better for the government to provide daycare
Eh, that is kind of a wholly different argument. In some ways the credit is obviously better (maybe it frees up one partner who wants to to stay-at-home parent), and it can be used more flexibly than a government-provided care program, even if you assume arguendo that the government program would be good and/or good value.
I don't want to post spoilers here, but the inverted population pyramid is going to result in some interesting times.
Anyway, politicians could always loosen immigration. More people = bigger economy, higher wages for the rest of us, and generally immigrants have higher fertility rates. Somehow neither party wants to acknowledge this.
(yes, the above would come with inflation too—this can be reclaimed pretty easily from the top of the wealth pyramid with taxes.)
Not by much, it's only higher in the origin country afaik.
> yes, the above would come with inflation too
Growing the economy isn't inflationary.
> this can be reclaimed pretty easily from the top of the wealth pyramid with taxes
Rich people don't contribute to inflation as much because they have lower marginal propensity to consume. You need to combat demand-side inflation by taking money away from everyone else, and supply-side inflation by increasing production.
It is if you provide a route to citizenship for ~16M americans, many of which are not making minimum wage.
> Rich people don't contribute to inflation as much because they have lower marginal propensity to consume. You need to combat demand-side inflation by taking money away from everyone else, and supply-side inflation by increasing production.
The goal is to use the inflation to drive a reduction in wealth inequality. If the rich person finds it unfair, I'm sure they can find something to mop their tears with.
Hmmm, I think it more counters a deflationary trend of older local people retiring. It is true that people earning more is likely inflationary (but that's better than all alternatives).
> The goal is to use the inflation to drive a reduction in wealth inequality.
Causation would go the other way round. Wealth taxes are inflationary, insofar as taxes are paid in USD and so you have to sell your assets to get the USD, causing extra transactions. That's a problem since most other kinds of tax are deflationary.
About as ridiculous as relying on one particular employer for health care coverage
A lot easier and cheaper to hire in South America right now.
> I'm getting tired of the trope that says avoiding old management frameworks like having asses in seats in an office in the US is driving offshoring
Your words, not mine.
It's easier to plug in remote employees than it was pre-pandemic, this cannot be denied.
I think the image of this, as small as it is to the actual scenario of failing to provide care, paints a bleak picture.
We don't even care enough to cleanup the reminders of the pandemic.
Lots of perks aren't widely used, but mostly by choice; a perk I could potentially use is still a perk, and it feels good to have that option.
Pushing toward remote work or asking someone to work on a different campus also makes the on-prem daycare a bit weird.
But yeah, a company day care that has enough spots to serve most interested parents would be a pretty nice perk. But, I think for most parents, a daycare near home is much better, especially those not working from office every day.
Caveat: only if you absolutely need to go to work in the first place, or you couldn't remote for critical reasons (granted, someone being unremediably miserable at home would be one)
Otherwise dealing with kids is one of the primary factor in choosing remote work, and it's life changing.
A local, close to your home daycare means you have options on who brings the kids and who takes them. It's a few minutes away, so yes you get more time with your kids, it fits into a standard work break, you're there quick enough when puke hits the fan, you get access to your local doctors and hospitals who have your kids' records, etc. All of these "perks" persist if you change job, your kids go to school, etc.
* You don't just take your kids in to work with you. The Google daycares were not any closer to whatever office you happen to work in than some third-party daycare. [edit: they weren't particularly close a long time ago when Google was concentrated in North Bayshore, and then became even less so as Google's offices were spread out more and people bounced around more often, and then became even less so with wfh...]
* You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time (because sibling priority), then later a lottery system where you pay money to play but never win.
* From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in. The typical tenure for a teacher was like a month, which is shockingly bad. Like how do you screw up pay/work environment so badly that's possible? And their understanding of children's needs wasn't great either. For example, they organized the kids into rooms by age (which is common but not universal) and...had no transition period at all or hint to the kids that these transitions were coming. They were just in one room one day with one set of teachers, then unexpectedly in another room with another set of teachers the next, which was super confusing and alarming to them.
* It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive. [edit to add: when I first heard about it, this was explained to me as a consequence of it having very high-quality staff who are paid well, but this doesn't match up with the bullet above. Maybe what I heard from the daycare provider was wrong. Maybe quality has gone downhill. Maybe it was never good. I think there are a variety of factors that would have allowed it to continue existing until now without ever having been good. An absolutely tiny proportion of interested people actually were able to try it. Those who did probably felt very lucky to get in and disinclined to complain/give up their exclusive spot, and folks on the waitlist disinclined to listen to their complaints... additionally, many of the parents who went there had never had kids in another daycare to compare against...]
> You can't actually get in. There was a waitlist and your position on it actually got worse over time
This changed after covid. My understanding is that they struggled to fill classrooms due to people moving away from MTV / Palo Alto. We tried to convince friends to enroll their kids for fear of something like this happening. The closure was way worse than we expected (we thought they'd at least do a phased closure) and we kinda regret the advice we gave to friends since they're scrambling to find replacement care now.
> From what I heard recently from a daycare provider (I can't directly verify), it wasn't very good if you did get in
Daycare turnover has been bad industry wide, and our classroom had bad turnover in 2021 but it stablized since then. We've super loved our experience. Really great sanitary procedures, high quality learning objectives and measurement, healthy food, etc.
> It was supposedly subsidized but still strangely expensive.
Yes it's still shockingly expensive. Maybe this was self inflicted at first: I heard that when one of the Wojicki sisters had her kids there they changed out all classroom furniture every year, looked for way overqualified people to do the childcare (like Ph.Ds) and all that. It's not that over the top anymore today, but today they still pay the childcare workers very well by that industry's standards (they also get all the same days off as other alphabet workers) and the facilities are way bigger than others that you'd find on the peninsula, with a playground / yard for every N classrooms.
My personal feeling is: I understand why they'd cut this benefit. I _don't_ understand why they had to cut it in this fashion. Having another daycare company buy it out and handing over operations, or raising prices so it's not subsidized, or phasing out classrooms over N years to give parents plenty of time to find alternative care -- there are just better ways they could have ended this longstanding benefit.
> This changed after covid. My understanding is that they struggled to fill classrooms due to people moving away from MTV / Palo Alto.
Ahh, that explains how my across-the-street neighbor has a kid there.
> Daycare turnover has been bad industry wide, and our classroom had bad turnover in 2021 but it stablized since then. We've super loved our experience. Really great sanitary procedures, high quality learning objectives and measurement, healthy food, etc.
From what this provider told me, the Google daycares' turnover was bad even by industry standards.
Anyway, glad to hear you had a good experience there, and my sympathy as you try to find a replacement!
Edit: oh and $2500/mo for 0-2 yr olds..curious how that stacks up compared to Google day care!
Then my kids went to a Montessori style preschool. Small, run by the owner of 20+ years and a couple of long time staff members. That was great for us. The owner has since retired though and the school changed hands. Nothing lasts forever, I guess...
My kids went to a small local chain where some of the teachers have been with it since it was founded in the 90s, almost 30 years ago. Average tenure was like 10-15 years. Unfortunately they got bought by Bright Horizons last year, and have lost 4 teachers since the school year began (although luckily it's that 4 teachers have rotated into the 2 spots vacated, not that they lost 4 veteran teachers).
https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
Would be nice if rents were a smaller total of our living expenses though. Everyone would have more breathing room.
Labor aside, a 2 bedroom in Mountain View is quite expensive and doesn't come with learning materials, toys, classmates, etc.
I’m not convinced that any modern tech company is actually interested in keeping people around for too long.
I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong, but my own experience has me a bit cynical.
Childcare is good for folks in their mid-to-late twenties, and early thirties. Not even that “senior.” People older than that, often don’t need childcare as much.
So it seems as if they want to have a workforce of extremely young, unmarried people, or maybe a few older, “empty nesters.”
Some would prefer early 20-something’s with no life outside work.
If it were any other team I would have understood. but devs? makes no sense.
Weird, I have exactly the opposite view. I love the Mac laptop hardware (it's clearly the best in class, with by far the best battery life), but I don't like MacOS. I would much prefer to run Linux (with proper battery performance tuning) on a nice Macbook Pro.
I don't enjoy using any of the "big" equivalents of those things on Linux (like Libreoffice or Firefox), don't like any of the options in some cases (any kind of Preview replacement—all contenders are much worse), and the ones I find tolerable are all way on the low end as far as developer attention and user-share, so tend to be even jankier than the platform median for desktop software, and certainly aren't as well-integrated with one another (Abiword, Numeric, Gnome Web / Epiphany or Surf)
To be fair to Linux, the same would be true if the same thing happened except with Windows. Though Paint.net and Notepad++ are really nice. [EDIT] Yeah, I know, those aren't first-party programs, just trying to give any credit I can.
The software—not even the fancy stuff, just the same sorts of programs we've had on desktops for decades—is a big part of why Apple's ecosystem is sticky for me, and it's hard to justify leaving even when they're not bringing their A-game. Being on their platform gets me access to my favorite well-supported programs in several crucial program categories.
> Particularly the keybindings of linux are a non-starter for me.
I spent my first 18 or so computing-years on Windows and Linux, barely touched a Mac. When I finally switched (was issued one at a new job) I decided within a year that Macs had simply the most-correct default English keyboard layout and shortcut-set, and it's not a close contest. It's really, really good. Replicating it on Linux is weirdly difficult to achieve, fully and without issues, considering being able to customize everything is one of its core draws.
I bought a pair thinking my Macbook would let me configure all the settings that you can on an iOS device.
Other roles in the company also bring in value, and can be considered a "core asset"
They were caught in the innovation dilemma [2] where improving the search engine will diminish their revenue. I now see several row of ads after a search. More than a year ago, and a year before that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25477535
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
lmao
Step outside the echo chamber and realize macro-economic trends have replaced the need to innovate with a basic instinct to just survive the coming storm caused by a decade of free money.
Computers that can display information on back of your eye lids maybe (with gadgets no more than an earphone while lasting several days on a charge) so that you don't even have to hold your phone.
But that's really far far into future and even probably downright forbidden by the physics.
This is not about survival. Google and Meta and all these other companies are clearly not struggling to survive like some startup running out of runway.
The part that is divorced from reality is when they manically over hire (because pandemic investment and consumption is permanent I guess?) then try to layoff their way back to the way it was which incredibly costly both in money and culture.
I'm an outsider, but Sundar is a man who knows how to make the money machine print money. I'm sure he would claim that he is all for innovation and research, but if you're at google but not a part of the immediate money machinery, I doubt if he thinks about you at all.
But on the other hand... the money machine keeps printing money. https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/earnings/
The basic mindset is summed up by a bunch of Eli Goldratt books, which, y'know, don't make them into a new Bible for business or anything, but they raise better questions than the ones you started with. You, oh corporate leader, look out upon the business and reason, "Well, I'm supposed to increase profits. Profits are revenues minus costs. As for revenues, money is coming in through these pipelines, and that's governed by these deals and those contracts and that's fine, there's not much I can do about that. I've got my sales staff, they are paid on commission, that's humming along just fine. So the main thing to increase my profits must be to cut my costs. So let us engage in broad-spectrum cost-cutting to reduce headcount, reduce benefits where we think we can, tighten belts, and then we'll be running a lean, mean, production machine."
This happens especially but not exclusively when companies are either experiencing or worried about hard times and money is getting tight.
The problem is, the broad spectrum. The easiest way for me to communicate this is pure numbers. You want to think that your company has an 80/20 rule, so 20% of your employees ultimately drive 80% of your performance. You shrink headcount by 10% and you try really hard to use some objective measurements to target that on the 80% of less-performant employees, but you don't succeed fully. Maybe that 20% becomes 19.5% while the 80% becomes 70.5%, to get your 19.5% + 70.5% = 90% and you have cut 10% of headcount. Great, you did so much better than chance! And in theory your performance is only 96% of what it was, so you take that 6% and pocket it as extra profit, right? Except, wrong. The people who were fired were doing something and even if you can work out ways to cancel half of it, you still have 90% of the people doing 95% of what the company did, and this 5% inefficiency is spread across the whole company with no regard for high or low performers.
So you actually basically break even, maybe make 1% more profit but it's hard to tell. And the next cycle you have the exact same calculation. It again seems like you'll make 6% more profit by removing the 10% lowest performers, so you do it again, and you don't make the extra profit again.
What the hell? Remind me to never work for Google.
https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/join
What do you guys look for in a day care? Just curious as I don't have kids.
And yes, nanny-shares are considered a "budget" option in the Bay Area, for when you can't afford a good preschool or can't get off the waitlist. Unfortunately the quality tends to be more variable...I've heard some horror stories about irresponsible nannies. There isn't a vetting & licensing process the way that there is for institutional childcare.
From a December 2023 article (https://9to5google.com/2023/12/07/google-day-care-centers/):
> For the past several years, four Google Children’s Centers have operated in the San Francisco Bay Area. These Google-run day-care centers will be closing next year, but the company is expanding its parental benefits so that more employees, especially those around the world, can partake.
> At the moment, 300 parents in the Bay Area use this particular benefit, which was introduced in 2008 when Google had 20,000 employees. Annual entry is determined by a lottery system and those selected pay a tuition with only some subsidy from the company. This school year, which ends August 2024, will be the last one for these Google facilities.
> The company is helping those existing families find new day-care centers, while those working at the four Google Children’s Centers will receive an exit package that includes outplacement services.
How would that work? Wouldn't reasoning about incentives here point in exactly the opposite direction? Not to toot our own horn too deeply, but while a SWE might be fungible, we're in a line of work that's difficult to scab through. Google really doesn't have much leverage over their employees compared to other labor conflicts I've read about throughout history....
> the leadership of a sector-wide labor union) to push against all of us would be only too handy for them; negotiations would have nowhere to go but down.
I literally cannot follow this train of thought—surely, having a single collective negotiator is the only way to prevent this exact scenario.
Regardless, you seem to be conflating regular unions with trade unions. They're different, they serve different roles—arguably, I think we need trade unions far more than regular ones if we want to do anything useful as a country in the next few decades—but in all situations having a single-negotiator is the only way to stop engineers from being pitted against each other.
Can you point to a single union that operates this way for highly compensated professionals?
Unions discourage performance based compensation and measurement in favor of credentials and seniority.