Google Employees Petition Pichai for Better Handling of Job Cuts - Slashdot
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/17/1732228/google-employees-petition-pichai-for-better-handling-of-job-cuts
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Google Employees Petition Pichai for Better Handling of Job Cuts
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The workers also called on Alphabet to avoid terminating employees from countries with active conflicts or humanitarian crises, such as Ukraine, and provide extra support to those at risk of losing their visa-linked residency along with their jobs. "The impacts of Alphabet's decision to reduce its workforce are global," the letter said. "Nowhere have workers' voices adequately been considered, and we know that as workers we are stronger together than alone." Further reading: Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees.
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The workers also called on Alphabet to avoid terminating employees from countries with active conflicts or humanitarian crises, such as Ukraine, and provide extra support to those at risk of losing their visa-linked residency along with their jobs. "The impacts of Alphabet's decision to reduce its workforce are global," the letter said. "Nowhere have workers' voices adequately been considered, and we know that as workers we are stronger together than alone."
What the employees are saying is to favor foreign or immigrant visa-holding employees and instead focus on reducing headcount by terminating more US-based workers that are US citizens.
Got it - do they understand what they are asking for? Doubtful - I think they feel their plea will reduce the number of terminations, not simply refocuse the efforts on domestic US citizen workers.
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In 2001 I was laid off as part of a company wide program to cut 1 person from every team, aiming for a 5% reduction in head count. The director that fired me said that he set aside seniority and performance in the decision because the newest employee just had a baby. I was pretty angry about it for a long time, being out of work for 9 months after that.
Looking back, yeah. I was the asshole in that situation. There are consequences to lay offs. And a responsible company tries to minimize the harm that they d
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I was the asshole in that situation.
No you weren't.
But the strange thing I miss hearing from your story is "who did the job the best"...apparently no merit was considered in the termination choice only between seniority and recently popping out a kid?
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They hired a lot of people who are "position fillers" and contribute no value. The merit and seniority does not matter in this case as everyone is equally useless.
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The asshole in that situation was whoever decided to cut 1 person from every team. It wasn't you or the guy with the kid, nor even the director unless it was his plan.
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Get a life.
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Conservatism - Trust individuals to know what they want... unless they ask the thing you don't like and then they must be confused.
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Alternatively, they're saying it's part of the price of admission for hiring foreign workers that you take into account their legal situation in terminating them and give them a longer offramp.
If anything, that would economically encourage hiring fewer foreign workers, because they would then be harder to get rid of. The status quo is, they have a much harder time saying no to bad things because of the threat of losing their visa, and that drives down wages across the board. So this should also help salar
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Yeah...I'm guessing all the folks that were signatories to this petition.....
...Will now be moved up to the top of the termination list.
Makes sense, get the troublemakers out the door first.
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It is little bit more complicated, but essentially yes. You need a union or credible market competition to give workers any kind of negotiating power.
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I have much more power being a top performing employee that stands out (for good reasons) than just being another number to the union. Unions don't protect employees. They protect union dues. They don't care about those that perform. They care about seniority which brings larger paychecks and larger dues payments. They'll protect a worker (to prove they provide value) despite that worker actually creating a worse work environment for all other employees (who are also union members in forced shops).
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No, you don't. You have no power whatsoever without a union, unless you have a contract. Then you might have more power.
Don't you also have seniority?
That's a good reason why we need more legal protections for all workers, but you still have much better bargaining power as a member of a union than without one. It would be much better if we didn't need unions, because they do enable some types of abuse. But if you feel you don't need one, it's only because you've been lucky enough not to conflict with anyone
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Not really. If performance meant something, he'd probably be less easy to axe than the CEO.
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It is hilarious what culture has come down to. Go work somewhere else.
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by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @02:20PM (#63378611)
Their demands are suicidal for the company. First, company needs new blood to do things it can't do with current staff. New hires that can do things better than anyone currently in the company doing other things are critical for expanding into any novel field.
Second when you don't do terminations of the bottom tier employees and instead only voluntary golden parachutes, best employees take them and leave since they'll get employment elsewhere. And the bottom feeders will never leave, because they know that no one else will hire them. So over time, this results in worse and worse employee base that is less and less capable of doing things company needs done. And more capable employees that choose to stay will start leaving at this point, because talented people get really demoralized when they see that there's an employee in next cubicle doing jack shit while talented one is busting his ass and is forced to take on part of the load of the one not capable of doing the job nearly as well. This really demoralizes people. Anyone who's been in this situation can attest to that.
It's also the ultimate reason why "real communism" fails fairly rapidly, and why Communist nations that persisted like USSR and PRC had various versions of Stakhanovite movement to try to address this fundamental problem with systems that can't just fire the bottom tier employees.
And ultimately committing to this sort of policy is how companies die in long term.
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I'm not so sure. While "google killed this new product" is a meme for a reason, there are plenty of new google products that took root and are now things lots of people use enough to justify their existence. Google docs and sheets for example. Google maps. Google drive. Google calendar. Google duo. Google earth. Just to name a few I myself use often.
Those are products completely different from google search many of them were novel at the time of being created (example: google maps street view).
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Microsoft is much better on the "suit" side than on "creator" side. It's better at squeezing the value out of existing products than making new ones. It has been that way for almost entire existence of the company.
Here's an example of creative people at work on what suits in the company ordered for upcoming future:
https://twitter.com/nonmayorpe... [twitter.com]
More iteration on existing product to add value to it for customers AND ask for more value from these customers in return. In this case, if they can make this inte
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Good times!...but how many of your favorite Google products were introduced in the last 10 years? Last 5? Google used to be a company that can do no wrong. It's been a long time since they've introduced anything I thought was excellent and I'm a Google fan. All my favorite Google stuff was introduced in what seems like a bygone era. I am very concerned about Google. GMail and search are dominant products and I do love Android, but they just gave up on tablets. They don't seem to be taking wearables se
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Much fewer. But that's because most markets in IT are now mature more so than anything, and trying to make something new will result in much more failures than it would ten years ago.
Their strategy is mostly in "try to make something new regardless of additional costs, and kill the project quickly is there is no visible path to make it profitable". It's not a bad strategy in a mature market if you can iterate fast enough (i.e. create a lot of new products, and kill them quickly instead of pulling a stadia a
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First of all, I should preface this with the obvious statement that both my previous and this post (and pretty much all my posts) are to be read as reasonable. As in I'm not claiming that this is exactly how 100% of people fired will be fired, or how 100% of people hired will be hired. I'm merely stating the general principle of how things work, that will strongly correlate with observable reality. However real world is a messy affair, so it's obviously never 100% when it comes to large amounts of people.
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A lot of these demands make sense. For example, laying off people on parental or bereavement leave seems like a scummy thing to do. However, these demands are going to be ignored - because they cost money. So the Left will quickly rediscover that all these self-proclaimed 'allies' and 'justice advocates' executives and CEOs are not on their side and will be happy to turn all the tools that were meant to be used only on conservatives on anyone complaining from within.
Told you so.-
Why should someone on family leave have priority over someone not on family leave? What makes someone with a 1 month-old child more equal than someone with a 1 year-old child? Or even someone without a child? Everyone has unique issues in their lives. Everyone has unique financial situations. Laying off anyone has a consequence of some sort on the lives of that person. Everyone laid off is given the same termination package (often based on years of service). The person on family leave likely already
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Because family leave or bereavement leave is a defined benefit in your compensation package, termination during such is ought to be seen as a violation of employer's obligations. In many countries (just not US) this is part of employment law.
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Tech layoffs like this are more commonly called "laying off the deadwood".
And laying off the deadwood doesn't work if you, well, don't lay them off. Google will most certainly ignore or only make a token response to this petition. -
For example, asking for volunteers before making compulsory cuts. If somebody is close to retirement or was already thinking about leaving for a new opportunity, it makes sense to give them a little incentive to accelerate that plan and go.
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That's how you lose your best employees and retain the worst. Those that are most confident in landing a new job will jump ship. Those that don't believe they can easily find a new job (or one with equivalent compensation) will hang around. Layoffs are not just about cutting costs. They're also about clearing out the accumulated dead weight in your workforce. Which also saves costs because the least productive are in the dead weight and your remaining workers will be overall more productive.
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That's typical naive fresh-out-of-school MBA-think. Your best employees typically love the company and everything it stands for and plan to stay there for a long time. The best way to ensure you have fewer good employees is to treat them like dogshit. Them feeling betrayed by the company they love because you threw their best work-friends out of the window in a nasty way to save a couple of bucks is going to get them working less hard for you, make them worse employees, and make them look for jobs at compan
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I'd give anything to be given an early severance package. At 62 I'm just harvesting stock RSUs at this point until I retire - it would be in their best interest to get rid of me as I'm not motivated to climb a career ladder - I just want to do engineering work. There are plenty of young guns that have better, brighter ideas. However life in these United States sucks if you don't have a good retirement plan and I need a couple more years to top things off and wrap up a couple of large purchases.
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How about unionizing... just sayin'
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I'm guessing that the signers of this petition have only known the happy, overstuffed times of a great job market where you post "day in the life" videos about the fun games, sitting around socializing, and free food at the office every day.
We old timers are called cynical if we don't fall for the corporate BS about "family" and "doing good." It's not cynicism, it's just that those of us who've been around the block know that this is how companies always treat employees when it's convenient and cash-positive for them to do so.
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