> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.
He has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders of capital.
> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups
I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”.
Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
Plus many took advantage of this "chaos" to get rid of products they don't want to do anymore - my company did the same. It had very little to do with the global recession etc.
I don't get the panic mode some folks here seem to fall into pretty quickly, probably young/junior ones. Numbers alone do seem scary, but then you 1) put it into global count perspective, we never so far go above few % which ie in banking is simply a no-story, usual yearly culls, every effin' year, sometimes more than once. And 2) all of these greedy companies over-hired massively during covid (and we talk about tens of thousands of hires per giant), so now are shockingly trimming that swing that ended up differently than they wrongly predicted (thank god for that).
Once we will see trims going into 30% territory we can have a story. Now of course its pretty crappy if you are one of those affected, ie those 5%. If we are going to see serious employment issues in IT this is not yet it (and I see few reasons for that personally, but what do I know...)
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
Large publicly traded companies don't really prepare for large recessions. They are fickle beasts. They mostly react to the market feelings and are in a lot of way quaterly focused. What we are seeing now is the combination of WallStreet feeling gloomy after the rate hikes and tech companies 2022 results being under target. They are taking actions to try to protect their stock price.
From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
If you look at the economy as a whole, signs of a major recession are not there yet. SMEs are still the heart of the economy and the bankruptcies rate remains historically low. Unemployement is also really low. Manufacturing is doing great. Energy prices are far from bad in the USA. Inflation is high but rate hikes seem to be working.
I'm not an oracle. I can't predict the future. I won't tell you there won't be a recession especially in a particularly volatile international context. What I can tell you is that currently the signs don't point to us being doomed.
> From my point of view, the issue tech companies are facing right now is not so much the possibility of an upcoming recession than them having finally reached the point where their impressive growth is slowing down with little chance of ever coming back to the insane rate of the 2000s and 2010s. It means their P/E ratio which has always been extremely high might slowly come back down to the economy average. That would be a very significant share price drop.
I'd also add that all of the bets made to expand their TAM's haven't paid off.....
Amazon - Brick and Mortar Retail
Google - Everything other than search
Tesla - Self Driving
Facebook - VR/Metaverse
At some point, investor expectations will tell you to stop investing in future ideas
The PMI is not a manufacturing indicator. It’s a diffusion index on the value of stocks. What you are saying is that the stock market is contracting after seeing a rise at the beginning of the year (also zerohedge, come on, I thought we were having a serious discussion here).
So, if the big companies hire 40-50k new employees each over the past 2 years, and then fire 10-20k, leaving a net 30-40k employee gain for the past 2 years... that means recession?
People have no context for these layoffs. This is not a "recession layoff". This has nothing in common with 2009, which I suppose many of you are too young to remember.
In 2009, we lost a million jobs to layoffs in one month. You'd turn on the news and see 200k jobs disappear in front of your face, so you'd turn it off.
The big tech companies laying off 1/5 of the pandemic boom hires is not a recession to me.
People over here say there's no recession. But believing HN's assertions on global economy makes as much sense as believing it's opinions on Medical or Science threads.
Global growth is projected to decelerate sharply this year, to its third weakest pace in nearly three decades,
overshadowed only by the 2009 and 2020 global recessions. This reflects synchronous policy tightening aimed
at containing very high inflation, worsening financial conditions, and continued disruptions from the Russian
Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. Investment growth in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs)
is expected to remain below its average rate of the past two decades. Further adverse shocks could push the
global economy into yet another recession. Small states are especially vulnerable to such shocks because of their
reliance on external trade and financing, limited economic diversification, elevated debt, and susceptibility to
natural disasters. Urgent global action is needed to mitigate the risks of global recession and debt distress in
EMDEs. Given limited policy space, it is critical that national policy makers ensure that any fiscal support is
focused on vulnerable groups, that inflation expectations remain well anchored, and that financial systems
continue to be resilient
The difference between the average random asshole on the street and the World Bank is there’s at least a chance that the asshole on the street won’t have a 20+ year history of being wrong about literally everything.
The World Bank is and has always been a tool of the power structure to protect the interests of multinational capital. It’s advice is always the same: don’t spend too much money helping people so we can make sure you can always pay back first world banks and governments and don’t seize any of our friends villas or mines.
You realize that’s literally what the last sentence of the quote you posted says right? The World Bank has exactly one job.
What if most companies have no long term vision and just follow the trend, like when they all hired hundred/thousands of employees during covid for seemingly no reasons
During covid the demand for online services went way up, media consumption, remote work and study. They had to try to increase their share of it and now they scale back.
Companies are made of individuals whose interest isn't necessarily aligned with that of its shareholders. For example, Google and Microsoft are run by executives who only own a tiny percentage of their respective company's stock, so they have little to lose by gambling their company's money on over hiring. If these new hires are useful, they get even bigger bonuses, but if they don't they won't be punished too harshly because basically every other executive made the same "mistake".
On the other hand, Zuckerberg would rather create the metaverse rather than cash out on Facebook, so he decided to throw unlimited money at it until he received severe pressure from shareholders.
I’m with you, though with a fraction less pessimism.
I’m not buying into the collusion to compress wages or unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories. These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do. Why don’t we assume they’re a leading indicator of things to come? Why do these moves apparently only make sense when everyone else has finally come to the same conclusion?
The silver linings for me so far has been that a) for many of the bigger companies the reduction is only bringing them back to their pre-pandemic levels of still very huge companies and b) the open lists of laid off people some of these companies have produced at first glance seem to skew very heavy towards recruiters/HR and marketing. Which makes sense if you’re not expecting much growth over the next year.
Even if you don't know the economy will slow down, the uncertainty alone will still make companies extra careful.
Where a lot of IT budgets were only guidelines, they are becoming rules now. Layoffs send a message internally and externally about it. Any reasonably sized company will have people who aren't really contributing anything, this is just an opportune moment to cut some of them and avoid the backlash since "everyone else is doing it".
> These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do.
If that were true, I'd expect them to have hugely profitable proprietary trading desks, which does not seem to be the case?
> However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.
The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment; layoffs in one section of one sector are not a particularly good signal for recession one way or another.
>>The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment;
Where?
Every chart I have seen shows total number of positions below pre pandemic levels, work force participation is down
Sure unemployment U3 numbers are still low on a national aggregate in the US, but regionally (including Silicon Valley) they are spiking heavily, and that is after they heavily manipulate the U3 to make unemployment look good by not counting HUGE numbers of people that are unemployed.
So I disagree that employment end of the economy looks good unless you cherry pick data
(It is true that the _percentage employed_ hasn't recovered after covid; given the US's aging population it's possible that that figure will _never_ rise to where it was again. As they say, you can prove anything with statistics....)
This can't be used as an indicator for a variety of reasons. In short, a decline in the the labor force participation rate can be good or bad, depending on the reason people are dropping out of the workforce. If a dual-income family now has the option to earn enough to support the family on one income, then having one person drop out is a sign of economic health. Basically, we don't want the entire nation to be forced to look for work.
Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
>>Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
Or they cant find jobs that pay what they need/want or have working conditions they need/want while using government programs, gig economy, under the table employment, etc to cover their costs.
I have been in more than one meeting where people are discussion why they can not find people... No Exec ever talks about not paying enough, or not providing the correct benefits, etc.
They also look at superficial things, not "hey maybe we do not pay enough"
How many places that pay peanuts that you’ve been to in the last couple years don’t have “help wanted” on their front door? Or a sign on the street? Or a billboard?
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.
The tech industry famously over inflated once before in the original dotcom boom. This just seems like another correction.
I don't think the tech industry is big enough to trigger a global recession on its own, but then again, the financial industry have a herd and panic mentality, so perhaps it could trigger a sell-off for no real economic reason.
The recession would be triggered by the end of cheap money we've had since around 2010. The absurd spike in the tech industry's P/E ratios would just be one of the first indicators that situation was getting wonky.
I keep getting reminded of that scene from the movie Margin Call about the 2008 financial crisis (great movie by the way):
There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don't cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.
The recession might not be here yet, but it’s a lot easier to reduce costs before it hits.
Okay, but why would these companies secretly know something that the rest of us doesn‘t? Maybe they are preparing, but it doesn’t tell us more about whether that‘s justified or not.
Tech companies have seen compensation skyrocket with no end in sight. Everybody laying off a bunch of people at the same time to flood the market means they all need to compete far less for people. Suddenly "hey I've got another offer, can you beat it?" becomes less feasible.
This is an industry-wide emergent strategy to limit compensation.
Notice how these companies are still hiring after the layoffs.
I’m sure. All of these companies use the same criteria and went on a hiring binge, partially to deny employees to competitors. It’s a like a gas station pump war.
End of the day, when growth slows, it’s hard to justify some of these salaries, becuase you can’t raise prices forever. I lost an employee who is getting paid $450k by AWS to do customer engineer type work. It’s just not worth that to me, and we hired a replacement recent graduate who went to a school that FANG companies will bin him for. The replacement makes $125k, is great, and will probably be with us for 3-4 years.
They were printing money and dealing with chaos. A friend of mine in sales booked multiple deals with a phone call (ie. Give me X widgets by Y date) for >$10M in April-June 2020. Exceeded his yearly goal before end of April.
The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools alone bought almost a million iPads.
Agreed, I don’t think it is productive to have conspiratorial mindset where there is a group of insiders who have access to a key piece of information and then engage in Kremlinology to decipher their macroeconomic views.
To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
The biggest companies have some very strong analysis departments which warn them about these kinds of possible scenarios (recession, etc.), and the companies act with this information.
There were already signs of a global economic recession elsewhere (Asia, Europe to a lesser extent), with different signs (food and energy prices, even before the war). So the companies started to take defensive action before the downturn became visible on their side of the pond.
Now it's looming at the horizon, not like the dotcom bubble or the previous recession(s). I guess it'll be slower, hence it'll be longer and will cut slow and deep.
"recession" talk provides cloud cover for many a company to pare back and prune products, processes, and people in a way that would normally cause more out cry. It's not that such changes aren't needed, but they can pile up until a forcing function triggers a hard look and it's acceptable to do them.
>>I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession
What if left to convince you, most of them have publically stated that is one of the reasons, and the economic indicators are all there.. I am not sure why people keep denying this reality, it is just faith in government that keeps denying it?
> I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.
I don't how this 'indication of a recession' could not have been more clearer since November 2021 as predicted a year ago. [0] We were already in a recession [1] and it just took time for the indicators to take effect.
I guess now the people denying about a looming recession are now 'preparing for a recession' which is a bit too late for that.
I'd still bet we avoid a recession in the US, even if certain industries (like tech) contract sharply.
It's easy to forget tech is not the economy at large. What I think most people would classify as tech jobs — working in “internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals” — are less than 0.3% of total payrolls employment.
But tech makes up ~26% of the S&P 500 market cap, so tech gets a lot more media attention because the companies are so valuable.
Layoffs are terrible for anyone involved. But even with the roughly 200K layoffs at public and startup tech firms in 2022 and 2023 so far, that's .001% of total US payroll employment.
I'm convinced industry captains are given stronger indicators from the government that a recession is happening. Yes, they have amazing advisors that could feel this out naturally. I also think senators and representatives tell them directly to prepare before the average consumer gives this forethought.
It's in the government's best interest to support those with capital. All the rest of us be damned.
Maybe. But it's important to bear in mind that when a CEO tells the public something, their goal is to manipulate the public in a way that is beneficial to their company. They might happen to be telling the truth, but that's incidental.
So when Jeff Bezos says, "Batten down the hatches," he's not actually saying it to prepare us for recession.
I was in the “global recession” camp all last year but I’ve started to doubt that.
I don’t see any real economic impact to companies except Meta but that was them losing market share. Otherwise all these layoffs feel like hangover recovery from over hiring the last 3 years.
I think we will be fine. Hiring won’t be like the last 3 years but I also don’t think we are going to go through the Bust 2.0.
"Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially, it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street. "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"
Hadn't looked at it this way. I usually interpret it as a meaningless phrase that everyone expects to be made. How often does "taking the full responsibility" have a real consequence for the top-level management? I would expect several of them to resign and the salaries to be used to pay 5x the number of employees that are way more productive than management anyway.
Yeah, like firing 12k folks isn't the full responsibility of the CEO in the first place?
Like a surgeon, telling you after the surgery that he takes "a full 100% responsibility for the results.". And you will be like: "eeeh, yeah, thought so?"
I think calling them cockups is a stretch. A few points:
- Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down.
- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
- It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone else is doing it.
>- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.
More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.
How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.
Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.
The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6 months, I don't think it's a stretch.
Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton from your fridge a cockup.
From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think cock up is probably a euphemism.
"Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down."
I believe that this is a huge competitive advantage for the USA over most of the world. It's not pleasant, but many of us benefit, on net.
I agree with others here pointing that firing people isn't necessary a sign of having mismanaged the company.
However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging your company is going through rough times would be things like postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would be classy.
Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits. Lead through example.
Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
That would still ultimately be spun as greed and proof they were getting pay increases when everyone else was suffering - at least, that's what happened in the UK when a bunch of CEOs didn't get their normal bonuses during Covid. This substantially decreased the total pay of the average FTSE 100 CEO that year, and once it returned to normal every news outlet ran articles about how their pay had increased by a massive amount in the last year alone whilst ordinary workers' pay had decreased over the last decade. Of course, it was really only their pay returning to normal after dropping substantially over the last year or two in a way that normal workers' pay had not, and the actual numbers in the report this way all based on put their pay at lower than it was a decade ago.
Still, the press managed to turn them taking a temporary cut in pay that ordinary workers didn't suffer from into them getting an increase in pay that ordinary workers didn't get.
What if you could run an ad empire without employees? The human component of marginal cost in that business is zero. From capital's perspective, the final stage of perfection would be just a CEO serving the legal requirement of one existing. Surely that person wouldn't have to fret about their bonus...
The "FAANGs" or "MAFANGs" of today are the Standard Oil / US Steel / Westinghouse / etc of yesterday. Bezos, Musk, Pichai, and all would fit in really well with Rockefeller, Astor, Carnegie of yesterday. With one big exception: at least Carnegie and Astor and Rockefeller created enduring arts, sciences, and public spaces of good. The billionaires of today are primarily takers, with perhaps Gates as a notable exception.
Over-hiring and then firing in big rounds once a decade can sometimes be better... It can be a good way to get the low performers out without fostering a culture of 'must make the metrics look good or I'll be fired'.
>It can be a good way to get the low performers out
It can if individual performance is considered in who gets the axe in mass layoffs. From my understanding, individual performance usually isn't a huge factor in who's laid off.
In my experience it depends on how much of a general share price vs technical pivot is involved in the announcement.
Typically some business functions will be shut down and merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let go.
Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected lists that go up through various meetings where the exact numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists - at least in a well managed company - are based on operational need and regular, standardised, legally defensible, performance appraisals [0].
[0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal systems.
This wasn't that. This was a case of 1) over-hiring during covid, and 2) Google has expanded amoeba-like for the past decade (outside of Ads) and the result is that there are thousands of people, hundreds of projects and dozens of product areas that are staffed with people who A) were excellent hires at the time, but B) due to organizational drift over time, are no longer in roles that play to their strengths or allow them & Google to bring expansive new features & products to the market. I'm sure there are some low performers, but the vast majority of affected employees here (including a lot of the ones who are/were low performers) are that way because of management decisions over time, not because they are individually "bad" employees. Fwiw, getting into this state is partly due to over-exuberant hiring and investment in new things over the past several years, where free money and huge profits made it relatively low risk to do so.
I know but in general when you admit something like that, people also do expect like some preventive actions for the future.
All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location.
They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself.
Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?
It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
He said "I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here"
You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility" means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my bad". Nothing more nothing less.
If you look at the dictionary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the other one.
Taking full responsibility here should have involved firing himself along the 12K. This is the norm in many cultures, resigning (or even killing yourself, sadly) when being responsible for a major failure.
He said responsibility, not consequences. I am still not sure what people expect CEOs to do in these situations to "punish" themselves. Google is not going bankrupt, they are still wildly profitable, they overhired and are adjusting headcount by a few percent.
It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to the leader in these situations.
He could resign. That would be "taking responsibility." Just saying you take responsibility isn't actually taking responsibility. Not in a way that matters to anyone anyway.
If he wasn't planning on resigning, he should have just left that bit out of the statement. It comes off as empty and tone def.
Forcing a leader to resign over a bad bet that is not permanently damaging to the company will only make things worse. That leader still has value to the company, and is probably one of the best persons to learn from and fix their mistakes. If you fire a CEO, you throw the stock market into chaos and all of your other leaders become focused on trying to get the CEO job instead of doing their own jobs. You went from one problem to multiple problems.
Donate 90% (or everything above $2M, whichever amount is higher) of their wealth to the people dismissed, and never take on a leadership position again.
If there were ever a shortage of CEOs because they felt they were being treated unfairly, let me be the first to volunteer. I'd be happy to suffer as they do.
If you ever have to lay people off, you can no longer hold a leadership position? If you hire someone, it's permanent with the exception of their wrongdoing?
> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It's a company, and it is publicly traded. Thinkable consequences are plentiful and unspecific. Everything that can be imagined will be reflected in how well it is doing.
What I imagine you are actually asking for are not "consequences" but "punishment". Which is understandable: People are hurt in this and where is the justice. But if we start to think it only be fair to personally hurt people who (to the best of our knowledge) inflict pain while acting legally and only as a side effect (while trying to do what is best in terms of their job description) we are on a somewhat weird path, where the more responsibility you have, the more okay it is to have you personally suffer.
For that, I am not willing to "punish" a CEO who is exercising their legal power, because they did something other people dislike. The responsibility is theirs, which, apparently, as a general concept, we are also okay with as long as it goes smoothly.
If we (as a society) think that what we have right now what we want, we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.
People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than a few years at most.
> People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with
What is your evidence for that?
> The concept of being a lifer is very rare.
This was the norm up until the neoliberal era. The trend of everyone becoming a gig worker only to be made obsolete by technology is a choice not destiny.
unionization normalizes pay across workers. you trade upside for being a “superstar” for job security. it’s not a controversial opinion.
tech compensation is not normalized. there’s pay bands but it’s historically been wide and “superstar” candidates are enticed with highly variable equity comp.
Both my parents worked for unions and they would be paid based on seniority and established credentials all negotiated by the union. They had a pension, retirement medical benefits, things most people would kill for right now. They also had bargaining power which only the "superstar" employees have today. The majority are exploited all the way down to the gig worker.
The union system seems more transparent than random hot shot new graduates making triple the salary of a productive senior worker that has dedicated many years to the firm. Nobody really knows how much these people are compensated or why. Every day there is a new "it" thing (microservices last month, crypto last week, generative predictive transformers this week). It is only okay, because the silicon valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tells us so.
All I hear about on this forum is how there is a lack of transparency with hiring, firing, and promotion. Complaints about diversity hires, nepotism, old and young workers, interview requirements, credentials, mass layoffs, etc., etc. The system we have now is completely broken.
These comments show up on every one of these layoff letters, but what do people actually want to see?
The CEO resigning would only send the company further into turmoil and tank the stock (which is a significant portion of employee salary) even further down.
Taking accountability doesn’t mean someone needs to suffer drastic consequences.
I think it's there just so no one infers the opposite. It's not unheard for executives to blame everyone else. Pichai is just affirming that he's not blaming anyone else.
This is good management now, but poor management before now. To paraphrase "Manager Tools": Layoffs are the consequence of management's failing to accurately judge market conditions.
Wow, that's salty! Mismanagement compared to what? An omniscient entity that understood exactly what global advertisement demand and capital costs would look like in advance? The real world is messy and runs on estimates for everything. If Google is 6% off on their estimate for human resources, it should not be labelled 'mismanagement'.
Management goes beyond C-suite. Upper management makes predictions of their needs, their productivity, what they achieve and don't all the time, it's literally a job req. My org has consistently less than 2 percent error in predictions while growing.
Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
In the 90s I worked in software development company. We constantly struggled with not having enough people for all the work we were getting so there was overtime involved. On plus side it paid good bonuses to employees on minus side it resulted with people being overstressed. So at one point I asked the owner/CEO why the fuck are we doing this? He said something like "when the other companies fire people because of downturns we don't".
No, all companies underhire or overhire, sometimes both in different departments. There are companies where firing 20% would not result in any efficiency loss, and ones where hiring another 20% would result in 100% efficiency gain.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
He doesn't say it's going to be a punishment or a reward :). I'd bet on the latter. Lower operational cost! Increased stock value! Beefy bonus! Sundar takes all...
I mean, they are fully responsible for those decisions that led to the layoffs. Being responsible for something doesn't imply that there are consequences.
They overhired during the pandemic with the hopes that it was a permanent shift in the e-commerce space, and are now laying off employees when that didn't happen. Nobody else is responsible for that decision but the leadership.
I was also under the impression that working for FAANGs was done because they paid best, had the best perks, had interesting work, and were the most prestigious. I don't think that "job security" was even in the top 5 reasons for taking a FAANG job for most employees.
Probably not - Apple laid off internal recruiter contrators in August 2022 as part of a plan to reduce hiring which was already much lower than the other big tech companies. For example in 2020 and 2021, Alphabet increased their workforce by 13% and 15%. Meta increased their workforce by 30% and 22%. Apple on the other hand only increased by 7% and 4% in those same years.
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here
As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.
It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately. I wonder if it will affect their longterm attraction as employers.