Adam was a very prominent Chrome DevRel and top voices of the web platform. I personally owe to his content (blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.) to stay up-to-date on things.
It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.
A company will often try and avoid letting a candidate know that they are being considered for firing, or that the decision has already been made, until the trigger is pulled.
That's normal. What's uniquely ugly/American is conveying those firing decisions by locking the fired employees out of their email at 6 PM on Friday. In most countries this is illegal.
I suppose organizing departure in an adult manner (Offer some time to finish task, pass on knowledge, etc... AND let the people leave earlier if they prefer - you know, the whole "think about the team" thing) would also violate someone's meritocratic free speech ?
Do you really need to make it a freedom of speech issue? can't it be recognized as a human as a pile of shit to rug pull someone like that and not let them at least cancel their own talk?
DevRel is unfortunately something that’s going the way of the dodo though now that interest rates are up. A position that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line of a company, so it’s easy to justify getting rid of.
None of the people making these decisions care about the long-term best interest of the company. Sundar doesn't give a shit about Google's future, he is laser focused on what really matters to him and the people he reports to: the stock price. A big round of layoffs can juice the stock, and it's a nice way to keep the numbers going up in between industry events where they can show off deceptively edited product demos and knowingly lie about the capabilities of their current and future AI offerings.
To put it another way: Google doesn't want to be a software company anymore. Google does not care about making software, or products, or the people who make or use their products. Google wants to be a growth company where the stock price goes up by two-digit percentages every quarter. That is absolutely the only thing that Google cares about. Google has realized that the best way to make this happen is to commit securities fraud by lying to their investors about their products, and by drip-feeding layoffs to show that they're serious about their underlying financials. It's theater, playing pretend at being business people. The individual products are allowed to go about their business as long as they don't cost too much money, but Google doesn't want to make money by having good products that people love to use, Google wants to make money by being a hyper-growth unicorn again, and they will do anything at all to recapture that kind of growth even if they're slitting the throat of the company to do it.
Whether this attitude is good for Google or its users is left as an exercise to the reader.
It may be a bet that AI will reduce the need for developers. Even if it can only write boilerplate, boilerplate still has to be written and is time consuming, so if it were to remove 20% of time that needs to be sunk into a project, the work of 5 people can now be done by 4 (less if you account for the reduced coordination overhead).
Whether these savings actually play out and whether management has accurate expectations and metrics remains to be seen, given messaging that makes it sound like AI saves huge percentages of time, when it at best saves huge percentages of something that's actually only a small percentage of day to day work.
It can be shock to discover how little the company as an entity, and its upper management in particular, actually values you (or any other employee.) Employees are indeed cogs in a megacorp, and the relationship is transactional. The company demands loyalty because it can and because it is profitable, not because it will be reciprocated.
We pay a lot because we need these people who are capable of making tough decisions (copying everyone else by overhiring at a premium during low interest rates), they can't be kept accountable for their own mistakes like the rest of us (fired myopically as a sacrificial lamb during a down-market because investors demand executives copy everyone else (they're invested in everyone else))
When it comes down to it everyone has their own interests as a priority so if a manager is told to let folks go they will gladly do it to keep their own job.
It sucks and especially the abruptness, but I find it hard to muster sympathy. Google employees receive some of the highest renumeration in the industry. Combined with the prestige of Google on his resume he'll land back on his feet in no time.
It's still hard. Maybe he or she has had better luck and opportunities than you, but that doesn't mean they don't suffer just as much when bad things happen.
We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
> We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
> This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
Everyone thinks that when they're angry or upset with someone. Ultimately people are people, and everyone deserves sympathy when bad things happen to them. Note that i don't always accomplish this, but I certainly think it's worth trying.
Sorry, but I simply don't agree. You're overgeneralizing again with "everyone thinks..." but no, you will trivially find folks who believe that someone (as an example) who murders or facilitates the murder of innocent people does not deserve sympathy when they suffer the consequences of their actions.
It is not true that all rational people believe that all people deserve sympathy for all causes of suffering.
What are you referring to by unicorn? I claimed that not all rational people believe such in all cases. There's trivially at least one such person in the world (as evidenced by this discussion).
If someone much richer and with a better career than me got punched in the face i would still see that as suffering.
I don’t know why someone’s situation being better means they can’t be suffering
The reality of one's lack of value to one's own employer is often baffling. It makes you wonder how anyone manages to stay employed at all, since apparently everyone is replicable and unimportant. I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?
If you do only the minimum necessary to not get fired, then wouldn’t you be the person that needs to be fired the next time the the budget is cut, since you are the lowest ROI of all, all other things equal?
In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.
In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.
People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
"I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time."
Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.
The part here too is ‘valuable to whom’. If they can saddle the middle manager or director with the same responsibilities/expectations, while cutting 10% (say) of the costs - guess what they are going to do.
Is it ultimately short sighted? Probably. But good luck connecting point A and point B in these situations when everyone is thinking quarter to quarter.
ok, and also "big thieves hate little thieves." Very-well paid executives (stock) remove very well paid employees (salary) and benefit from the actions. This is an old situation in industrial business -- the high tech crowd are filled with self-grandeur and do not believe it, on a large scale IMHO.
> Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know.
This is frequently the case. I've worked at big employers (comparable in level of corporate-ness to Google if not absolute size) where the layoff process, roughly was:
1. Aggregate layoff target gets set and apportioned amongst functional leaders, then targets cascaded down to the line manager level.
2. Managers fill out a stack ranking spreadsheet for their team across a few metrics including a boolean "diversity" field[0]. There were many rumors about the "diversity field", most notably that anyone so flagged would not be fired, but so far as I could tell these were false (see point #4)
3. People to be fired are developed based on these lists (I.e., if a manager has to fire two people, then the two lowest-ranked employees per the spreadsheet are selected.)
4. HR does a meta-analysis of all to-be-fired employees, ensuring that a disproportionate number of employees from protected classes are not impacted. If too many are, then some of the next-lowest-ranked employees are selected to be fired in their stead.
As far as I could tell, the only part of the process where any sort of individual, human consideration was occurring was maybe at the line manager level if they decided to tweak the stack rankings based on who they felt deserved to be protected. And then, to the extent that happens, you have all the problems with bias and favoritism that come into play.
0 - I realize this is probably controversial, but I saw it with my own eyes.
Then again, if we did have a random lottery that required all employees (up to and including the CEO) to participate, then perhaps we'd see fewer layoffs...
It's not about being fair to the individual, it's about producing a better outcome for society. In this case, saving money on welfare (that's also in great measured pooled across society, not an individual account).
Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.
If it’s the rule, everyone knows it. There is no guessing about randomness or hidden variables, and ultimately less favoritism than a line manager coming up with a stack ranking.
Looking at the larger picture, what otherwise tends to happen is that older people get pushed out. Then we have a massive issue of them ending up unemployed because nobody wants to hire them. This is compounded by the retirement age being pushed further and further away.
it’s also a bit baffling that someone who’s been at the company longer than myself could have an advantage simply for being born before me, or for applying before me.
Is work performance not a key deciding factor? One could argue that’s absurd.
I don’t think the way it’s done in the U.S. is “right”, but i don’t think what you listed is right either.
Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.
If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.
Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.
The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.
>Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.
But since this subthread is discussing LIFO layoffs, the problem is that generally the last in is also the lowest paid - not always of course - but if so it means that to hit your operating cost point you might need to reduce more people than you would if you could pick and choose.
> layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more
In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
> - LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.
> Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.
There's no such thing as a protected group in US law - a protected class means a certain property of someone that employment decisions can't depend on, not a value of that property.
First, I'll say it is pretty common to use the terms interchangeably. I don't think anyone was confused by what I wrote, or that your "clarification" was in any way helpful. See, for example, these legal groups using the term "protected group" in relation to US employment law:
Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:
On the contrary, the ultimate burden of proving that discrimination against a protected group has been caused by a specific employment practice remains with the plaintiff at all times (Watson v Fort Worth Bank & Trust, 487 US 977 - Supreme Court 1988[0])
Companies in the US have been blatantly discriminating against some classes for years, and now must turn around and blatantly discriminate against other classes now (based on the current ‘anti-DEI’ stance). Racism and sexism in hiring in Europe and Asia has always been a thing, and quite blatant too.
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:
• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a
facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ-
ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;
• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either
between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment
and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin-
gle site of employment; or
• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more
full-time workers at a single site of employment
I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.
Plant closings involving 50 or more employees during a 30-day period.
California law has:
Plant closure affecting any amount of employees. Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. Relocation of at least 100 miles affecting any amount of employees. Relocation of a call center to a foreign country regardless of the percentage of workforce affected.
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.
Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).
Thank you for sharing this important information. What does a company in the Netherlands do when an employee is underperforming? Do they get "PIP'd" like Amazon? Then, eventually let go with some standard severance package?
I can't talk about the Netherlands but if it's like France: the process is very different in the case of layoffs, where you want to reduce the workforce for economical reasons (e.g. shrinking revenues), and firing an individual employee. In the first case employees are not let go on the basis of the performances.
Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.
Yes and no, as it is a difficult process because employer needs to prove it is not their fault that employee is not performing. To begin with you need to collect data over time, so pip is kind of a choice you’d go through to start collecting detailed info, then it might be that a simple course could help solve this if it is a knowledge based issue, then maybe there is another job in the company the employee could switch to, etc. Without any doubt employers do not like the process, it is easier to eliminate positions instead because it is not technically firing.
This was more than a decade ago, so I doubt they care that much, and if you want to accuse me of being a liar, please have the integrity to just say that.
Layoffs in particular are like this because they're planned very quickly by very small groups of people. Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale, so the people in charge do everything they can to maintain secrecy and minimize the time between people hearing about layoffs and the layoffs taking effect. This basically always translates to random-seeming decisions - priority 1 is to cut costs by X amount, choosing the right people to cut is secondary. This means that, for example, engineers that have received performance-based raises are punished since, on paper, they do the same job as lower-performing but lower-paid engineers.
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.
Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.
Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.
Any style of layoff is going to be bad for morale, but rumors floating around tank morale for as long as those rumors exist, and then moral takes another hit on the actual day. In that way it makes sense to just rip the Band-Aid off.
Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.
It seems rather disappointing if typical management would make such impactful decisions so rapidly that their "on paper" analysis couldn't be made clever enough to consider more than a single variable.
Managers don't have the kind of information necessary to plan layoffs that don't seem random. Anything they know is already being used for the usual hiring/promotion/compensation adjustment process.
This is a lesson that all senior developers know pretty well, that is why companies rather hire naive juniors, instead folks that already mastered how the game gets played, and cannot be sold on company mission, values, or whatever snake oil gets talked about during interview process.
Not all. You're talking about douchebag companies.
If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.
And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.
(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)
Start by eliminating all publicy traded companies from the list, and you've increased the percentage of non douchebag company in your list by quite a bit.
Unfortunately for you you work and live in an environment created by other companies and its likely that if your company succeeds its one acquisition or bad top level management play from invalidating everything you implicitly or even explicitly promised.
I have worked for "good companies" before - and they have a tendency to make money and be targets for bad companies, add enough zeroes and even the good guys sell.
And while I was still employed as a seasoned developer (before recently retiring) I felt it was my role to pass along some of my cynicism to the new hires and younger devs. Some of them seemed a little surprised to see me call bullshit in a group meeting. (Good luck to you boys and girls.)
Meanwhile, they all roll their eyes at the "jaded greybeard" advice. I know, because many years ago I was doing the eye rolling. I guess some lessons really can only be learned through experience.
On the contrary, being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live, but it's also not really something most people will ever be able to avoid. I don't at all buy into the idea that somehow pretending the situation isn't shitty is somehow more virtuous or fulfilling; what you call a "shitty attitude" sounds more like "being realistic about how one's work is valued" to me.
> being stuck in a situation where your livelihood can disappear at a moment's notice due to factors beyond your control is no way to live
That is literally the only way to live. Disaster stalks us an is only ever one misstep away (sometimes literally). In rare instances people can even just fall over and die.
In the sense that there should be food and shelter for everyone, even poor people; strictly speaking I think most countries have already agreed to that. Although how well that gets implemented is open to a lot of debate. But beyond that everything can always change at a moments notice.
I've spent several decades writing software. Got laid off 1-2 times per decade.
I still tried doing a good job every day, and feel very good about that.
To me, being realistic about the risk of losing my job at any time means having enough money that I can be unemployed for 6-12 months.
The major way good programmers get jobs is by being recommended by people they've worked with at previous companies. That doesn't happen if you deliberately do as little good work as you can get away with.
My "shitty attitude" comment is maybe more a personal philosophy that something universal. But I do not want to spend each work day being bitter and resentful. You may intend to punish your shitty employer, but I think you're mostly poisoning your own mind.
> Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause?
No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.
Your relationship with your employer is no different than any other business relationship. You can do the bare minimum, just as there are many businesses that do the bare minimum toward their customers, and those businesses often have a low subsistence level of success; if you do the same, you may have the same level of success in your career.
An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.
Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last year or so where a company announces a significant layoff, saying it needed to let go of "underperforming employees" or similar wording. I've been in this industry for a long time, experienced several layoffs, but this way to announce a layoff (publicly calling-out "underperforming employees") feels new to me. It also feels shady - like, announcing to the industry, "Don't hire these losers we just got rid of. LOL"
These megacorps will have so much fun in the upcoming recession. They turned public opinion against them through sociopathic profiteering and then mass layoffs. When the cows come home it won't be fun and games like before.
That "sociopathic" profiteering funds the 401(k), IRAs, and pension plans of tens of millions of Americans. God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders (including special ed teachers, utility workers, and airline mechanics) and not just the lottery winners who scored the high-paying jobs at these companies.
> mass layoffs
The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.
> That "sociopathic" profiteering funds the 401(k), IRAs, and pension plans of tens of millions of Americans
At the cost of the destruction of the entire rest of the economy, which is coming home to roost right now. People's retirement should never have been loaded onto the stock market. That was a 'mistake' from the start. A 'mistake' that was designed to bloat the stock investors' coffers.
> God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders
No; First, if you are profiting at the detriment of entire rest of the society by consolidating the economy in your hand by bankrupting everyone else, it doesnt matter if you run it 'for the collective benefit of the shareholders'. And even cheating, scamming at that:
Second, let's get real - it's not the employees who benefit from the stock prices the most. Even proposing they do is just self-deceit.
> The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.
The layoffs involve much more than those 6-figure job holders.
Sadly two management levels above we’re just a line in a spreadsheet. Maybe even one level above.
“Hey look, this one is cog is spinning at a cost $200k/year, why don’t we replace it with a cog from a low cost country and save some money?” Or “remove it and make this one other cog do the work of this obe?” People doing the replacement have to show they did something, as well!
Upper management has targets they need to meet. If they don’t, they’re out the door even faster than your typical junior engineer who is struggling to code.
self fulfilling prophecy though, because the people who worked at Google but don't tell you about it, won't tell you about it, so you don't know they did so you're only going to hear about it from the ones you hear about it from
To pick a different topic, I know a couple of vegans. Some of them are militant about it, others simply are not. You'd never know that about them unless it really came up.
"You don't need to ask, they'll tell you" - a claim that the people who work there will brag about it.
And while there may be some truth to it, keep in mind that you hear about the ones that will tell you, you don't hear about most of the ones that don't.
> Google laid off hundreds of employees from its platforms and devices unit, the team responsible for the Android operating system, Pixel phones and Chrome browser. The move, first reported by the Information, comes months after Google offered voluntary buyouts to all 20,000 employees in the division, signaling deeper structural changes at the tech giant.
Correction, they did not offer buyouts to the entire division, they offered the ability to apply for a buyout to US-only employees, and application did not guarantee you’d get it.
having been in your position a year ago, I can definitely sympathise :(
the one thing I can say (again, from experience with having worked for google while engaging with the open source world as part of my job) is that the relationships you have been building up might well survive the loss of your job, especially if your next job ends up being in the same general area. also, i can highly recommend starting a group chat with your ex-team, that was really good for all of us in the time following the layoff.
So you were fired? Big deal, no one cares, move on. No one is impressed by your office job, even by office job in that company. Every demography, industry, and country has that company.
This is someone's personal blog, and it seems like it wasn't posted by the person that owns the blog. Have the decency to just ignore and move on next time.
I say it as a person who had to get over it myself at some point. You will never win with colleagues who are all into politics and desperate to hold and advance their position. Let them have it, hopefully they'll tear off each other heads.
In my first reading your original reply sounded rude. After reading this, it sounds you are relating with the author and airing your frustration from a similar experience.
I disagree. This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated. It’s perfectly alright and valid to be sad about losing the ability to express that part of yourself to make a living. The whole point of the post is that yes, the company doesn’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line, but the author did.
> This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated.
I think you can have a great time and build good relationships with teammates while still realizing you are a cog in the machine.
The way author writes the blog, you'd think they were working on the first Moon flight or the Manhattan project, whereas the reality is they were working on some CSS spec at Google, which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now.
Of course you're free to discuss. You're belittling the author's expression of grief because their job was 'routine maintenance' of 'some CSS spec (...) which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now' and I'm saying they're entitled to their grief regardless of how you feel about the job's content.
Yes, they're a cog, as almost all of us are, and it would have been better for their own sake to realise that, but losing something you enjoy still sucks.
You're criticizing people for caring so much because you think the best that employment can be is transactional money in exchange for competent work?
Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
(Not that you'd want them to be upset if it ever had to end, but you'd want the goodness part to happen? Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?)
> Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
From the companies perspective: absolutely! If I can get people who will put in 10x for 1x of pay, nothing like it!
From employees perspective: Care for your work like a good construction worker does. They don't cut corners, speak-up when they spot issues and put in their body and mind. But they don't come back to the site at 11PM to take one more look at it (I do sometimes because solving the programming problem is fun, not because my corporate overlords will pat me on the back). It is indeed important to make sure that the building is strong but remember that you don't own it.
A strong but constant reminder that companies are not your family or friends despite what will say the corporate bullshit.
You should never invest more of your time and energy than what is expected for your position. And keep your side activities and hobbies as personal things using your personal email and accounts.
This is also why you should not owe fidelity to your company and don't hesitate to switch if you have a good opportunity because on its side the company will not hesitate.
Everything might be good and you can generate money, and still the day you are in a redundancy for whatever reason you will be worthing nothing to the company. Like that, just like a replaceable cog. And you will be badly handled because "it is the company policy and we can't do anything than being harsh in such a situation".
The worse is that usually the decision is non-sense but the one deciding is not the one that has to deal with the decision and with you. So you will try to argue, and they will try to invent reasons to rationalize the decision that is imposed on them also, you will try to contest, and they will become angry to have their bullshit called and will double down... And you will feel bad, not understand the situation.
The only thing I can tell you is the that if you are in such a situation is to not worry and go on, except in rare cases, for everyone I saw it happened, the event was finally for the best because the next step in their life was better in the end: better job, better salary, better project, being able to do what you always dreamed to like create a company or evolve your career.
I have been in a similar situation, on a Saturday morning right after a farewell for a colleague and planning for next big release and timelines, late Friday.
I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).
At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.
No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.
Well not so much I guess.
Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out.
But I don't know if I will still see it coming.
I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.
I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.
I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.
I hope people can find hope here.
Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.
Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.
As an ex-Googler I say: blessing in disguise. When working at a $MEGACORP it's easy to think there's barren wasteland out there beyond the walls, so it's scary. But that is very much not so. I get that opportunities to work on browsers are relatively few and far between, but if you can do something else, try working for a smaller company which treats you more like a human being, and less like a replaceable cog.
Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
outside of having stupid money what percentage of people (excluding people living paycheck to paycheck) manage their finances well, especially in the first decade of their career? I’d ballpark that at 0.78%
being a realist ... I think in the US no one is (purposely) thought basic financial literacy and it spills over into probably the first decade of working life
Not necessarily. Nobody on HN knows OP’s finances. He might have extended family relying on him. He might have crippling student debt. He might have expensive health problems. Do you know? I don’t.
Also, not all Google employees make great money. People act as though you work there for 5 years and that automatically means you’re off to buy your third house in Monaco.
Point is, he might “manage his finances well” and still be on insecure footing.
Exactly. Plus I think we're forgetting a lot of Google employees are on visas, meaning they might have expenses both in the US and in their home country.
You may be correct in general, but in this particular case I do not see how Adam should have any difficulties in finding a very good paying job at another company.
The finances are important but possibly not the first thing on their mind. The first thing on their mind is likely how their entire world has just changed around them, beyond their control.
People who left voluntarily can prepare for the lifestyle change, and maybe they can objectively look at this and say it's not all bad. For people who are laid off, it hits really hard in a gut wrenching way. The sense of despair about everything else comes first, the money part of it might not come until all the severance is exhausted.
I want to get enough time at $MEGACORP to have FU money. After that, my fear is a lot of smaller companies are working on thing even more boring, but with less scale. Gluing a domain-specific API to a few LLMs sounds boring. I got into tech because I liked learning it, but a lot of it is getting repetitive.
No such thing as FU money. As you get more you want more, or if you don't then your spouse does. There is such a thing as "I can tolerate a 3-6 month job search no problem and not jump at the first opportunity" money. It makes 90% of the difference, especially in the long run.
Lifestyle inflation is a known phenomenon which you (and your spouse) can choose to avoid if you prioritize it, not some immutable rule of nature.
If the treadmill of accumulation that lets someone believe "there's no such thing as enough" ever stops, I think they would be shocked at how quickly they realize what enough actually means.
There's definitely something wrong with the scroll performance. I'm seeing bad performance as well on a pixel 8 pro. If I weren't on mobile I'd pop open devtools and check for excessive layout recalculations
yeah I was lagging as well on desktop and no wonder... the site made 2659 requests to what appears to be display pictures of people who commented on the post.
1,041 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 414 ms ] threadNot sure how this is HN-worthy.
It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.
A company will often try and avoid letting a candidate know that they are being considered for firing, or that the decision has already been made, until the trigger is pulled.
In ZIRP every cent is positive ROI
(Not intended to be a comment about OPs individual performance or skill)
Or is it related to the possibility that Google may have to divest itself of Chrome due to anti-trust enforcement?
To put it another way: Google doesn't want to be a software company anymore. Google does not care about making software, or products, or the people who make or use their products. Google wants to be a growth company where the stock price goes up by two-digit percentages every quarter. That is absolutely the only thing that Google cares about. Google has realized that the best way to make this happen is to commit securities fraud by lying to their investors about their products, and by drip-feeding layoffs to show that they're serious about their underlying financials. It's theater, playing pretend at being business people. The individual products are allowed to go about their business as long as they don't cost too much money, but Google doesn't want to make money by having good products that people love to use, Google wants to make money by being a hyper-growth unicorn again, and they will do anything at all to recapture that kind of growth even if they're slitting the throat of the company to do it.
Whether this attitude is good for Google or its users is left as an exercise to the reader.
Whether these savings actually play out and whether management has accurate expectations and metrics remains to be seen, given messaging that makes it sound like AI saves huge percentages of time, when it at best saves huge percentages of something that's actually only a small percentage of day to day work.
Pump the stock, deliver "shareholder value", and make billionaire class richer is the game. Oh, and also make room for stock buybacks of course!
We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
This overgeneralizes IMHO. While the pain of being laid off due to something other than your own actions is fine, there are certainly folks out there who cause a lot of pain to others and aren't worthy of universal sympathy when their own pain comes along.
Everyone thinks that when they're angry or upset with someone. Ultimately people are people, and everyone deserves sympathy when bad things happen to them. Note that i don't always accomplish this, but I certainly think it's worth trying.
It is not true that all rational people believe that all people deserve sympathy for all causes of suffering.
As soon as you find me one of these unicorns, I'll concede the point.
Like, ultimately you don't have to show compassion for other humans, but in general, life will be better for all of us if we all do.
I wouldn't count on that. The job market is really bad.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?
In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.
In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.
People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
Usually there is a hidden variable that you don't know. It is your salary. That is why it sometimes looks surprising when senior roles are cut that look extremely valuable to the company from the outset. Maybe they were that valuable but still deemed to expensive.
Is it ultimately short sighted? Probably. But good luck connecting point A and point B in these situations when everyone is thinking quarter to quarter.
If you need to hit a specific number, guess which one is going to be less paperwork….
This is frequently the case. I've worked at big employers (comparable in level of corporate-ness to Google if not absolute size) where the layoff process, roughly was:
1. Aggregate layoff target gets set and apportioned amongst functional leaders, then targets cascaded down to the line manager level.
2. Managers fill out a stack ranking spreadsheet for their team across a few metrics including a boolean "diversity" field[0]. There were many rumors about the "diversity field", most notably that anyone so flagged would not be fired, but so far as I could tell these were false (see point #4)
3. People to be fired are developed based on these lists (I.e., if a manager has to fire two people, then the two lowest-ranked employees per the spreadsheet are selected.)
4. HR does a meta-analysis of all to-be-fired employees, ensuring that a disproportionate number of employees from protected classes are not impacted. If too many are, then some of the next-lowest-ranked employees are selected to be fired in their stead.
As far as I could tell, the only part of the process where any sort of individual, human consideration was occurring was maybe at the line manager level if they decided to tweak the stack rankings based on who they felt deserved to be protected. And then, to the extent that happens, you have all the problems with bias and favoritism that come into play.
0 - I realize this is probably controversial, but I saw it with my own eyes.
- layoff plans must be communicated ahead of time. Minimum 30 days notice, usually much more
- Needs to be negotiated with worker representatives (works council, syndicate if there is one)
- LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
- Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
- At a minimum, you get 2 months pay + accrued holidays
It's baffling to imagine that you could learn about your job disappearing from one day to the next, and be immediately left out in the cold.
Newer employees often see this as incredibly unfair.
Parents being able to take sick days to care for their kids, or 50yo being able to take leaves to take care of their dying 80yo parents are also unfair to kids in their 20s just starting out.
Looking at the larger picture, what otherwise tends to happen is that older people get pushed out. Then we have a massive issue of them ending up unemployed because nobody wants to hire them. This is compounded by the retirement age being pushed further and further away.
Is work performance not a key deciding factor? One could argue that’s absurd.
I don’t think the way it’s done in the U.S. is “right”, but i don’t think what you listed is right either.
More senior employees have usually figured out how to get leverage on the employer over time.
Non-seniority are usually ‘cheapest is best’, or ‘do what I say, or else’.
Both have pros and cons for everyone involved. There is always some system though, even if it’s emergent.
If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.
Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.
The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.
But since this subthread is discussing LIFO layoffs, the problem is that generally the last in is also the lowest paid - not always of course - but if so it means that to hit your operating cost point you might need to reduce more people than you would if you could pick and choose.
In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]
> - LIFO principle for layoffs, newest employees are let go first. Stack ranking not possible
This is functionally equivalent to a stack ranking in that it is a forced-distribution scheme. It is just based on a single factor that is outside of the employee's control. Say what you want about stack ranking, but people do have a large degree of control over their job performance.
> Any kind of discrimination is forbidden
In the United States any kind of job discrimination against members of protected classes[1] in illegal. Even inadvertently disparately impacting[2] members of a protected group is illegal.
0 - https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings
1 - https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte...
2 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/disparate_impact
* https://www.osbar.org/public/legalinfo/1095_DiscriminationEm...
* https://pedersenlaw.com/practice-areas/discrimination/
Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:
0 - https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=637945611431669...This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:
• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ- ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;
• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin- gle site of employment; or
• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more full-time workers at a single site of employment
I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...
While federal law has:
California law has:I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.
Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).
Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.
If this was even in the spreadsheet, whether or not it were used, the current administration would love to hear about it.
Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
Granted, but it seems like the current way of salary-first, performance-blind cutting obliterates it even harder.
Laying off people who you rank as "low end" on the acceptable performance scale, might mean you kill structurally important bricks that were not optimizing for being higher than "high enough" on that scale, and cannibalizes people working on anything valuable long-term but hard to justify to management short-term.
Laying off high performers means people don't want their head to be poking up, so they sabotage their own visibility to try being "good enough", while also killing people's motivations.
Laying off randomly kills people's morale directly worst of all, because that implies there's nothing they can do to change the outcome, and impotence is worse, arguably, than anything else for many people.
Of course, if you ask me, a more sensible plan to keep morale and lower costs would be getting rid of a few executives, but what do I know? I'm just a number on a spreadsheet.
If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.
And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.
(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)
I have worked for "good companies" before - and they have a tendency to make money and be targets for bad companies, add enough zeroes and even the good guys sell.
Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.
That is literally the only way to live. Disaster stalks us an is only ever one misstep away (sometimes literally). In rare instances people can even just fall over and die.
In the sense that there should be food and shelter for everyone, even poor people; strictly speaking I think most countries have already agreed to that. Although how well that gets implemented is open to a lot of debate. But beyond that everything can always change at a moments notice.
I still tried doing a good job every day, and feel very good about that.
To me, being realistic about the risk of losing my job at any time means having enough money that I can be unemployed for 6-12 months.
The major way good programmers get jobs is by being recommended by people they've worked with at previous companies. That doesn't happen if you deliberately do as little good work as you can get away with.
My "shitty attitude" comment is maybe more a personal philosophy that something universal. But I do not want to spend each work day being bitter and resentful. You may intend to punish your shitty employer, but I think you're mostly poisoning your own mind.
And with less dedication, I can spend far less than half my time there ;)
No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.
An employment relationship can offer a lot of things for both sides. For the employer, your labor of course. For the employee, a salary of course. But it can also offer experience, access to other talented and intelligent individuals and access to capital to learn and try things, networking, relationships, opportunities for promotion and perhaps opportunities to find better employment elsewhere, or the skills and/or connections to start your own business.
Your attitude toward work should be the same as the attitude you take towards the rest of your life. You can "rot" or you can make the most of every opportunity.
That "sociopathic" profiteering funds the 401(k), IRAs, and pension plans of tens of millions of Americans. God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders (including special ed teachers, utility workers, and airline mechanics) and not just the lottery winners who scored the high-paying jobs at these companies.
> mass layoffs
The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.
At the cost of the destruction of the entire rest of the economy, which is coming home to roost right now. People's retirement should never have been loaded onto the stock market. That was a 'mistake' from the start. A 'mistake' that was designed to bloat the stock investors' coffers.
> God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders
No; First, if you are profiting at the detriment of entire rest of the society by consolidating the economy in your hand by bankrupting everyone else, it doesnt matter if you run it 'for the collective benefit of the shareholders'. And even cheating, scamming at that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719246
Second, let's get real - it's not the employees who benefit from the stock prices the most. Even proposing they do is just self-deceit.
> The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.
The layoffs involve much more than those 6-figure job holders.
“Hey look, this one is cog is spinning at a cost $200k/year, why don’t we replace it with a cog from a low cost country and save some money?” Or “remove it and make this one other cog do the work of this obe?” People doing the replacement have to show they did something, as well!
The targets often aren’t what you’d think though.
That’s the empty set
Anyways here come all the gewgler to downvote me
That being said I talk about my former big tech all the time too, so maybe I'm part of the problem?
And while there may be some truth to it, keep in mind that you hear about the ones that will tell you, you don't hear about most of the ones that don't.
> Google laid off hundreds of employees from its platforms and devices unit, the team responsible for the Android operating system, Pixel phones and Chrome browser. The move, first reported by the Information, comes months after Google offered voluntary buyouts to all 20,000 employees in the division, signaling deeper structural changes at the tech giant.
the one thing I can say (again, from experience with having worked for google while engaging with the open source world as part of my job) is that the relationships you have been building up might well survive the loss of your job, especially if your next job ends up being in the same general area. also, i can highly recommend starting a group chat with your ex-team, that was really good for all of us in the time following the layoff.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54305/the-cloud-corpo...
I'm off to do some coding with natural language.
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp."
Remember, if you don't own it this is always the case.
ALWAYS!
Whole things reads like someone leaving a cult.
It's ok to be sad about leaving a job but your identity shouldn't be so tied up in it that you're crying in a blog post online.
We all lose jobs and we all get on with it. Obviously they're talented and will land fine somewhere.
I'm not trying to be mean but it's bad that a person can get upset to this point around a job. The corp isn't caring.
I think you can have a great time and build good relationships with teammates while still realizing you are a cog in the machine.
The way author writes the blog, you'd think they were working on the first Moon flight or the Manhattan project, whereas the reality is they were working on some CSS spec at Google, which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now.
It's routine maintenance work on existing stuff.
Yet the blog was posted in the public domain, so saying what is and isn't relevant is...irrelevant.
It's in a public forum, up for discussion. End of story.
Yes, they're a cog, as almost all of us are, and it would have been better for their own sake to realise that, but losing something you enjoy still sucks.
Wouldn't you want to hire and nurture people who cared so much about what they were working on and who they worked with, as the author seemed to be?
(Not that you'd want them to be upset if it ever had to end, but you'd want the goodness part to happen? Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?)
From the companies perspective: absolutely! If I can get people who will put in 10x for 1x of pay, nothing like it!
From employees perspective: Care for your work like a good construction worker does. They don't cut corners, speak-up when they spot issues and put in their body and mind. But they don't come back to the site at 11PM to take one more look at it (I do sometimes because solving the programming problem is fun, not because my corporate overlords will pat me on the back). It is indeed important to make sure that the building is strong but remember that you don't own it.
If a personal blog isn't the right place to express distress when being fired, what is a personal blog even for?
You should never invest more of your time and energy than what is expected for your position. And keep your side activities and hobbies as personal things using your personal email and accounts.
This is also why you should not owe fidelity to your company and don't hesitate to switch if you have a good opportunity because on its side the company will not hesitate.
Everything might be good and you can generate money, and still the day you are in a redundancy for whatever reason you will be worthing nothing to the company. Like that, just like a replaceable cog. And you will be badly handled because "it is the company policy and we can't do anything than being harsh in such a situation".
The worse is that usually the decision is non-sense but the one deciding is not the one that has to deal with the decision and with you. So you will try to argue, and they will try to invent reasons to rationalize the decision that is imposed on them also, you will try to contest, and they will become angry to have their bullshit called and will double down... And you will feel bad, not understand the situation.
The only thing I can tell you is the that if you are in such a situation is to not worry and go on, except in rare cases, for everyone I saw it happened, the event was finally for the best because the next step in their life was better in the end: better job, better salary, better project, being able to do what you always dreamed to like create a company or evolve your career.
I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).
At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.
No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.
Well not so much I guess.
Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out. But I don't know if I will still see it coming.
I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.
I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.
I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.
I hope people can find hope here.
Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.
Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.
And F execs, I guess. :)
Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
For someone young with no dependents, it can be scary but doable. For those with kids? Not so much.
Also, not all Google employees make great money. People act as though you work there for 5 years and that automatically means you’re off to buy your third house in Monaco.
Point is, he might “manage his finances well” and still be on insecure footing.
People who left voluntarily can prepare for the lifestyle change, and maybe they can objectively look at this and say it's not all bad. For people who are laid off, it hits really hard in a gut wrenching way. The sense of despair about everything else comes first, the money part of it might not come until all the severance is exhausted.
Lifestyle inflation is a known phenomenon which you (and your spouse) can choose to avoid if you prioritize it, not some immutable rule of nature.
If the treadmill of accumulation that lets someone believe "there's no such thing as enough" ever stops, I think they would be shocked at how quickly they realize what enough actually means.
Or has that term fallen into disuse now?
Here is a snapshot of the post itself: https://i.imgur.com/61b7ADn.png
To note, I cannot click on any of the buttons in the top-right to control what I could or learn more about this person.
All of these variables are highly relevant to performance and any attempt to reproduce/fix the issue you're reporting.
(perhaps it's the fadeout effects while scrolling causing this?)
Welcome back dude and don’t screw up your jungian walk through the fire. You got this
Yup. Must have been a horrific wake up call :(