That's just how it is for a lay off, in megacorp and elsewhere.
Not sure how this is HN-worthy.
replies(2):
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.
Or is it related to the possibility that Google may have to divest itself of Chrome due to anti-trust enforcement?
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?
“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!
> 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.
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.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54305/the-cloud-corpo...
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.
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.
We're all on this rock together, and either nobody's pain is worthy or everyone's is.
That being said I talk about my former big tech all the time too, so maybe I'm part of the problem?
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.
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.
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.
Or has that term fallen into disuse now?
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.
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.
Welcome back dude and don’t screw up your jungian walk through the fire. You got this
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.
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...
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.
If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next.
Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic.
But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
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.
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.
Any company with more than 100 employees that does the "you were laid off today, but you'll be paid for the next 2 months" thing is following the WARN Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
If this was even in the spreadsheet, whether or not it were used, the current administration would love to hear about it.
I have only started my career in the past 10 years and have seen this story unfold time and time again across many companies. Big, small, or medium company. It doesn't matter.
You. Are. Expendable.
I will say the problem is much more pronounced when it's a publicly traded American company; or a company that was recently acquired or funded by private equity, "angel investment", or a vulture capitalist firm.
Folks. Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests. We cannot keep relying on billionaire class to "do right by us" because quite frankly. They do not give a shit.
I have no doubt that sometimes managers really don't know, but I'd wager that most who say they didn't know probably did.
In ZIRP every cent is positive ROI
(Not intended to be a comment about OPs individual performance or skill)
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.
Also keep in mind that the person who wrote this blog might be here on hacker news reading comments.
If you met this person in real life would you say those things to him? If the answer is no then why post those things here?
was surprised to see this here tbh as its something that was posted to the author's (again, author, not OP) bluesky which made it maybe not _personal_ personal-news but ... I don't know ... way more personal than all up in HN I dunno ... shrugs ...
Pump the stock, deliver "shareholder value", and make billionaire class richer is the game. Oh, and also make room for stock buybacks of course!
After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.
Having a shitty attitude for that much of your life is no way to live.
Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.
One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.
Godspeed!
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 a trend away from the post-WW2 "promise of lifetime employment". Over the decades, companies have crept toward "human autoscaling" so slow no one noticed. You're far from alone - every other company is doing it. Go see the numbers at https://layoffs.fyi . When the whole industry is doing something, companies must follow suit to stay alive.
Nurture your network! Keep being present on their feeds. Reach out to the ones on your team that you had personal relationships with. Some will shun you; it's not personal, they're ashamed and fearful. It is human nature, same as the company's behavior toward you is a company's nature.
There was never a better time to take things into your own hands. Go look at @IndyDevDan's content on youtube and test the limits with agentic coding: https://agenticengineer.com/state-of-ai-coding/engineering-w...
Spend your 8-20 paid weeks agentic-coding (not vibe-coding) silly projects for your nieces and nephews. You'll come back stronger and more employable than ever.
Don't be sad to be kicked out. The boot that kicked you was attached to a Hills Hoist.
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...
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.)
Yes, you were. Next time, please choose a company that contributes to society rather than shoving ads in everyone's faces.
But one thing that could be better is transparency around severance, so you know in advance what it will be should you get laid off. (Six months may or may not be “generous” depending on tenure.)
When I was laid off we got what was “customary” in that country, but before the offer was on the table nobody was sure we’d get it. It’s so much nicer when this is a matter of law — I’m all for a ~ free labor market but severance requirements help to balance the risk so the employees can relax and do their best work.
I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.
Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).
* Was there any sour grapes in the Slack channel? Or was it a bummer or distraction for remaining employees?
* Did the Slack actually help the employees readjust and refocus on their new job search?
* Why not encourage people to say goodbyes and exchange contact info, and pay for a job search coaching service (with no reporting back to the company)?
First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.
Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.
In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.
My bet would be that the author's compensation was one of the highest among his peers on the same role.
This is to me, btw, is a sign of a well built relationship with a colleague: you know each other's compensation.
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.
All of these variables are highly relevant to performance and any attempt to reproduce/fix the issue you're reporting.
- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions. People are moved to different jobs, helped with training etc...
Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.
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.
One of the most difficult realizations you must confront in this industry is that almost everything you build will disappear. It will be ruined, ignored, slandered, and then forgotten. Almost all of your late night epiphanies and bugs conquests will fade anonymously into the anonymous blackbody spectrum entropy demands planet Earth emit.
You must come to peace with this reality. You must accept the transience of glory into your heart. You must prepare yourself, deep down, for any reality of off-sites and planned presentations and electric roadmaps to disappear in an instant. It gets easier after the first few times, trust me. You emerge a sadder and wiser man.
The only thing we can do is create moments of excellence --- occasions on which we can reflect when we are old and gray and take solace, even pride, in knowing we put every bit of ourselves into a task and did it well. There's honor and nobility in excellence even when doomed.
And who knows? You can't predict what will endure. If we're lucky, once in our careers, if we continually apply the best of ourselves, we'll do something that escapes all this destruction and endures.
This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.
We live in weird times. Companies are drowning in earnings. Their stock sky rockets. But they are unable, or not interested, to put people to work to grow their business. Because they are so big it distorts the entire economy. Because they are so big and so entrenched it's also hard to compete with them.
Less people makes the stock goes up?
And then AI too in the mix with many executives apparently believing it can just replace all the people. Who is going to buy the products then?
I have a feeling this is temporary. The wheel will turn and suddenly companies will hire like there's no tomorrow on some new shiny thing. It's gotta - right? Otherwise what?
I don’t really buy this. I take it you’re worried about vengeful ex-employees abusing their access privileges to break stuff on the way out?
It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Probably some people would feel vengeful if you do shitty things to them like removing all their access and firing them with no notice whatsoever.
Bad employees can already break stuff while they’re employed. They might feel more inclined to do stuff like that if there are chilling effects that build distrust in the work environment, like jump-scare layoffs.
Conversely, if people are getting “fantastic severance” and you treat them with dignity on the way out, aren’t both they and the people who remain more likely to feel more positively inclined?
Second, completely tangential to the content of the blog post: Was anyone else surprised by the number of comments/"mentions"/likes/reposts? I haven't seen so much activity on a single blog post in years. Normally, blog posts that accept comments have 10 or less comments. This one has hundreds.
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?)
Good point. I wonder how much in-office work contributes to this. Because if you are trapped inside an office building for 8+ hours with essentially randoms, most people will start getting to know each other at some point, because there is no other choice, and after work and commute there is no time left for anything else.
I feel sad for the author.
I think there's some stigma with confronting the fact that relationships are just ephemeral. We are social creatures in the sense that we can cooperate with each other on a task laid in front of us, but once that task is done, we mostly tend to drift apart onto the next task with another group of people. And that's okay. We're only weakly social with everyone except our direct family and significant others. The quality of a relationship is in no way measured by how long it endured.
Work forces you to be in contact, if the majority of your time is spent elsewhere due to changing job, or city, or gym, or having kids.. it's a blow.
I try to keep in touch with ex co-workers I cared about, but we live in different countries, at different stages in life, with different priorities, and it's hard to say the relationship is well.
That doesn't mean the relationships weren't built as they should, IMHO, they are just different kinds of relationships.
Yes, it may be different for full-time non-contract jobs, but once you're on a contract, nobody cares.
Well, getting escorted out definitely doesn't happen here either at least.
Hardly. This type of arrangement was short-lived and anomalous. It was roughly true in rich economies during a few decades of the post-war era. Never before, and not for most people around the world.
Relationships are worth cultivating any time, of course, but one shouldn't mistake a job for a life. The idea that a job is for life and your employer is your family was a mind hack that worked for a short while and is now unraveling.
Why? What prevents you from spending time with your ex-colleagues?
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.
By default work relationships work as you advertised. It needs conscious effort on your (and everyone's) part to reframe these relationships as something that's between you and your friends, on your own terms. Consciously hanging out together, talking to each other, doing projects together. Social relationships need to be built up with effort. The company will do this for you, because they enjoy the benefits of a crew that works well together, but if they put in the effort, the relationship will belong to them. You will think that 'I could get slightly more at this other place, but I like my colleagues here', realizing you'd lose the social net if you changed jobs.
I think a huge problem with nerds (like me and probably you), is that we don't understand the fundamental power dynamics that shape society, because we lack the inherent cunning and weren't forced to face down enough hardship to have our illusions shattered until later in life.
Truth is, if there are rules, somebody needs to enforce them. If something nice happens, it does because somebody makes it happen. These things are mental abstractions designed to make your life predictable, but like every abstractions, sometimes things happen that were supposed to be impossible, because the system doesn't work the way you think it does.
Cutting access and having security walk them out is more or less security theater. If an employee really wanted to cause damage the odds are they either already have or will still find a way. In this scenario having generous severance and treating them with respect is likely to better defuse the situation than kicking them out the door.
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.
In extreme cases. But also just sowing discontent. Looking to grab value they think they are owed. Generally lots of people who are upset and probably feel mistreated and have very little to lose.
I actually think there is a small but real chance of violence as people like OP feel like their identity and way of life is threatened.
Have you been in a situation like this before?
So no, this question doesn't apply equally to the opposite side. An employee does not take responsibility for what the company does. A lot of people wonder why CEOs are paid so much; part of that is simply to take responsibility.
Ironically, a lot of people complain about useless CEOs, but if you asked them to take that responsibility for the pay, they wouldn't take it (note that that responsibility includes things like sweet talking shareholders and giving public statements on short notice on things that could nuke millions of dollars in value and create very real legal liability).
> unions are just corporate blackmailing.
This is such an absurdly ignorant take that is hard to start educating you, it also depends a lot on what society you live in since your view on unions will be tainted by what you see in it.
In places like the Nordics, unions are one of the cornerstones of a free labour market, look up how Sweden has a freer labour market than the USA to learn something at least :)
"For entirety" definitely not. What you describe was a thing in some periods, typically periods where some group got too much power and they tended to end with huge disfunctions and breakdowns.
It's very interesting how so many people in upper management seem to think that they can trust employees not to sabotage and cause billions of dollars in losses by paying them like 100k a year.
And Chrome really helped save us from an Internet "embraced and extended" by Microsoft. We were heading for Microsoft succeeding in their (not first) attempt at owning the Internet.
This is a twisted way to look at the risk.
Disgruntled employees have more reason to wreak havoc. All the more reason they should be treated as humanely as possible in a difficult period that in most cases is inflicted by the company itself.
If a current employee causes damage, that's one thing. But if a recently laid-off employee who retained full system access causes billions in losses, the CEO and board would face severe consequences legally and reputationally, since it would be perceived as an obvious security lapse.
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.
Firing him was really a stupid move IMO. I think the person who made the decision should be held accountable, and Google should track down that person and fire him/her/them.
Having said that, Adam should have no problems at all finding a new exciting job.
If your point is to score virtue point, keep at it, but if you actually want to change anyone mind, avoid terms like "is hard to start educating you", it just makes you sound like a douche
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.
