My take is in general you are right. No human is irreplaceable. However, what I really translate this to be is you should consider the business viability of the org/department/team you work in. The things that don't add value, the things that cost money, the long risky bets will be first to get scrutinized.
If you are making money and not a cost center for your company, you are likely safe during times of economic turmoil. Being on profitable and important to core business teams is great during any time. I remember a team I was on which was responsible for a large amount of yearly revenue. You can imagine we never got questioned about team lunches or miscellaneous snack and drink reimbursements even though there was a company policy to instill frugality. When times are good, times are good. When times are tough, you want to be a money maker.
If you're laying off an entire division, sure, your comment applies. However, from anecdotal experience at Meta, the layoffs seemed entirely random that hit both ICs and Managers. People internally tried to reverse engineer the formula used, but it wasn't always clear why. It also seemed unrelated to several projects getting killed. Those employees were simply asked to change teams if they wanted to stay.
It's weird to me that these companies, all of them, still very much flush with cash, have now engineered this an environment of FUD in everyone's mind. For creativity to thrive and ideas to launch during the next boom, you need an environment of safety. Tech had always been been synonymous with optimism.
> If you're laying off an entire division, sure, your comment applies. However, from anecdotal experience at Meta, the layoffs seemed entirely random that hit both ICs and Managers. People internally tried to reverse engineer the formula used, but it wasn't always clear why.
It feels exactly the same at Google. It's certainly true that some job functions were hit harder than others, and some orgs were hit harder than others, but certainly no one was guaranteed to be safe merely from working on an "important" product.
funnily, I was whispered that exact same thing when I was doing internal interview rounds for a big tech company before the 2008 recession. The group of newly hired heard pitches from a bunch of different groups that needed people and we were able to have some say into which group we joined. I took the advice to heart and went with the group that was considered by most employees to be the most sure thing and, by far, the most solid financially. 2 years later, that group's position in the market cratered and the layoff axe fell on a large percentage of people. I still don't disagree with your advice, but it is often hard to predict what will still be a business viable group in the future.
Cost center / profit center paradigm shouldn't be applied to companies like Google who hire engineers just to possess them. The whole company except for ads is basically a highly-paid cost center.
Many things go into the ads infrastructure that make it actually able to run in a profitable way, spanner, borg, and much more. So this doesn't really narrow things down.
it does if you know enough about the business. where can you squeeze more money out in the short term -- infra cost savings or building a better mouse trap? as a non googler i have no idea but i would imagine leadership does and that will drive layoff decisions.
I guess they decided they didn't need to possess as many? Even Google isn't hiring just because. They hire because someone leader wrote a doc and justified a line item to staff something and pay for the infra to make it go. What I said doesn't change at Google. Look at the areas of these big tech layoffs, they align with my premise.
And you just have people who have been there for a long time, have made a ton of money, don't have a great fit any longer, etc. They're not even "resting and vesting" necessarily but they were in some valuable role at one point and now they're someone expensive who just doesn't have anything especially important or matched to their skills to do.
Excess perks, I don't care about. I can buy my own drinks and coffee. But a company that isn't taking bigger and bigger risks is a company that is at risk and just ignoring it.
Surely this only applies to a limited set of companies where the products cannot have meaningfully negative impacts on people. You would for instance not say this about a company producing (software for) elevators, or airplanes, or pharmaceuticals.
An interesting question then follows: are those companies where you can take larger and larger risks without adversely affecting people, actually adding anything of real value? Or is it all broken window fallacy?
This is not to say that e.g. Google is a useless company. Surely its products have provided a lot of benefit from people. But it is also clear that taking risks as Google can cause clear negative consequences for people. So the question is more for a hypothetical company that can take arbitrarily large risks.
I don't think releasing shoddy things is taking risks. That is being reckless.
Taking risks is working on new products to expand the company. Possibly refined versions of existing products, possibly explorations of related offerings. Could be green field recreation of what you have to see if you can make it better. Could be isolated improvements.
Such that, if you think it is only risky to possibly harm someone... I don't think we are talking about the same things.
Soul sucking is a bit extreme, this is at-will employment after all. 99.9% of readers are not working on sexy change the world problems. Call it soul sucking but I call that perspective jaded.
I've been lucky to work in consumer facing engineering that isn't soul sucking. In fact, it's market segments that I find interesting as a consumer too. I still optimize this way because I'm in a place in life where I want stability when my head hits then pillow in my home that I have a mortgage on. I have a family and stability yields solace and solace yields clarity of mind which allows me to be a better employee. It really is a virtuous cycle.
At some level, that's probably true. Boring and soul sucking is very fungible but, so long as you're reasonably good at it, why swap you out for someone else? Whereas for someone more specialized, roles change or expire and there may not be an obvious fit for someone anymore without essentially applying to a new job. And, at many of these companies, there isn't a lot of new hiring going on.
Not if more is more. There is opportunity cost, perhaps, but not if you have the cash and the need. If an employee nets you a dollar, it's still better than nothing.
One positive is that all these high-level laid off engineers are now going disperse into all kinds of smaller companies and inject life back into the startup world.
For the last decade Google, Meta, et.al. have been sucking the power out of innovative ideas and mostly killing them off if they didn't deliver at the scale they operated at.
Remains to be seen if those people haven't been "transformed" too much during their FAANG stay. You can't build a successful startup while expecting to have Google's infrastructure and best-work practices from the very beginning.
Part of the reason for this is to avoid any possibility that they can be sued for age discrimination. I was part of a 10% of a 600 person company layoff (based in California, but with offices in Europe and Asia). We all got a list of the people laid off (without names) with job title, and age. This was apparently a legal cover-your-ass requirement. They made sure to spread the pain across the young and old.
If they just got rid of the very high level (read: expensive) employees, they would likely be older - which can lead to age discrimination suits. If they just got rid of really junior people because they're so junior that they aren't that valuable yet, that's also a potential age discrimination suit. So they spread out the seniority (and ages).
I’ve been through 4 layoffs over 22+ years. In my experience, it is the managers who are the most vulnerable and the individual contributors who are the least vulnerable.
My experience is the opposite, oddly. Middle management is at risk, sure. But upper management is not. Upper level contributors, though? Same risk as lower level contributors.
Directors are middle managers. VP and above are upper management. They don't get laid off just like that, unless the entire org chart below the VP is being dissolved.
Anecdotes, but... A former BigTechCo employer (I quit early 2022) had (~10% of staff) layoffs the other week. At least 3 different engineering VPs and 1 SVP were let go that I know of, including my former manager. None of the orgs or teams under them were dissolved. The team I left behind remained completely intact otherwise, though they obviously have a new reporting structure.
Lots of other Director-level and below were let go, as well. Impacts to IC-level employees was minimal in the engineering organization but common in other departments, e.g. product and marketing.
I saw some VPs and Directors let go as well. Frankly, the org chart still makes sense without them being present (all of their previous reports simply report now to who their manager used to be). Consider how deep the org chart has grown in a company like Google, and how it's probably not really necessary to have such depth. It's easy to rejigger the org chart by increasing the branch factor and decreasing the depth -- communication will be more efficient this way, and you cut costs as you have fewer total nodes to achieve the same number of actual people doing the work (vs people managing the people doing the work).
At least these higher-ups are gonna be OK, as they were making obscene amounts of money ($1M+/yr) and have all been in the industry for awhile, thus are well-situated financially. Every single one of them I know owns at least one home and routinely does all sorts of expensive traveling. Contrast that with laying off someone earlier in their career for whom a layoff might actually impose real financial hardships.
I sympathize with them to some degree. I'd like to think that when I'm their age, I'll be able to walk out of the front door on my own terms.
That said, as you correctly point out, obscene is the word of the day. I worked with these people for nearly 10 years, I know entirely too much about their personal histories and lives. They're each multi-millionaires, they're each fully capable of retirement today... Or, hell, many years ago, for that matter. They're going to be just fine once their bruised egos heal.
> They're each multi-millionaires, they're each fully capable of retirement today... Or, hell, many years ago, for that matter.
That's the funny thing. I was talking to one of them who I know for a fact is very well off, and he was saying he kind of wished that he had been laid off, as it would've been a huge payout (because of tenure) that would've allowed him to not need to find another job for almost a full year, which he'd do at a leisurely pace.
In my mind I'm thinking, you'd still want to work?! Dude, you're loaded, you're over 50, why not just retire if that happened?? But maybe he wouldn't know what to do with himself. I'm not nearly at conventional retirement age yet, but despite having enough money to be financially independent already, I'm not considering retirement, as I too wouldn't know what to do with myself.
In a union (and possibly in a sane non-union) environment, in that situation you get demoted and can bump someone below you, who can then bump someone below them, until the lowest rank gets eliminated (or a vacant position just becomes un-vacant).
Makes sense when managers are hired from within and retain the ability to do the job of the people they were managing. And 10000000% makes sense from a peter principle point of view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Definitely does not work when managers are parachuted in from elsewhere or in a fungible "a manager is a manager and can manage any team". That happens in government a lot.
Business unit performance is much more important than individual performance. Who cares if you do amazing work in some nerdy obscure niche that doesn't make money and never will?
That's what many companies do, but if you're cutting whole business units, and lots of them, you probably don't have as many openings elsewhere. It's a good incentive to generally gravitate towards projects/teams that are contributing to profits if you're an engineer though, and not just look for another position when your is being axed.
Maybe it'll finally kill off some peoples' just world fallacy interpretation of layoffs? We can hope anyway, for the future of everyone's employability everywhere.
