Incredible, Google laid off a L9 Distinguished Software Engineer.
I wonder what the calculus there was. I didn't even think it was possible to layoff anyone of that caliber.
Who decides that a L9 is going to be cut. Some VP who joined after the L9? The Board? The founders? Did the CEO make enough contributions to decide this cut?
Manager at a different FAANG here. I had a very senior (not L9) engineer laid off on my team. The thing about super senior ICs is that they have super high expectations, ones that are easy to miss. It’s almost silly every performance review season, we sit down and go “what did this person do to redefine the industry this cycle?”. Unfortunately, when the answer is “not much” or they simply wrote great code, they get a low rating. At places where curves for ratings exist, these folks frequently fill in the lower portions of those curves - despite appearing to crush it from the outside, they’re just not hitting all expectations.
The end result of all of this is that when senior leaders set filters for who is laid off, these folks get hit. Multiple cycles of subpar ratings, it’s an easy decision looking at the numbers. Maybe not a good decision, but that’s where these systems have led.
This makes basically no sense. Unless you are going to admit that you fucked up and peter principled the employee, "raising the bar" for them is silly.
This would be the equivalent for a pro baseball team laying off their entire roster because nobody on the team showed the growth that those in the feeder teams showed. A bold bet, to be sure. Not one that is likely to keep a winning team.
That is to say, if you have people that you promoted up the ranks to high level contributor, and then find that you can't use them, that is on you. And shows a sad state of management.
I see parent's point as how you'd evaluate the performance of an international superstar in your team.
You'd do reviews where they'd have top performance, but not 3x or 4x more than the guy right below them. And if their presence didn't push your team to be #1 in that season, you could have an argument to replace them for someone cheaper and 90% as good.
Of course, their sheer presence could be a booster for marketing for instance, and there's a lot more going on, so usually you'd keep them around even if on paper it doesn't make sense, but it would look like a complex balancing act.
That's basically in the job description for the highest levels though. They're expected to literally lead the industry in their field. If they're merely now a solid and productive programmer/uber tech lead then they don't remotely merit such a high position. Since demotion doesn't exist for various reasons, the only solution is separation.
a lifetime ago back at Microsoft, Peter Spiro described these folks job expectation as "walk on water". if you wanted to exceed expectations, you had to "leave no wake"...
A L9 manager has a very different job. That's a VP and they've probably got 500 people under them. Very high level ICs are also somewhat often directly managed by lower level managers (who are also paid much less). It isn't terribly uncommon to see an L8 managed by a L7.
Managing 500 people is a far lower responsibility than "redefine the entire industry". The entire industry is probably a hundred thousand workers and dozens of companies making hundreds of billions of dollars and you have to completely change the game for all of them. Why should someone who only manages a mere 500 people get more than one thousandth of the compensation? They probably only have a dozen direct reports anyway.
That's just a reflection of the fact that it's much easier to have a big impact if you direct an entire org to make it happen rather than trying to be a hero and doing it all individually.
> Since demotion doesn't exist for various reasons
maybe not in faangs, but I've seen CTOs and directors downshift to ICs in multiple startups and public tech companies. Honestly kicking them out instead sounds like a huge waste, if the person can make solid contributions in a different, maybe less intense, role, why not let them?
At Google it is actually common to have directors or VPs who don't have reports for a while, but we are talking about people who are ICs already. For each management position there is an equivalent IC position at Google with similar pay. I believe L9 would be a senior director.
From what I've seen these senior people with no reports at the moment (or those with org sizes too small) were hardest hit in the layoffs, simply because of the misfortune of bad timing.
The very best engineer I've ever worked with at any company (Anna B.) just got promoted to Distinguished last year. She accomplished one or two industry-leading things before that :-)
Well it dilutes a conversation when someone implies a senior Google employee is surely to be expected to be at the tier of disrupting entire markets in order to get and keep their job.
If that is what really defines an L9 job at Google I think we'd all have been praising the typical L9 Google employees on HN long ago. And we'd all be justified in being angry Google decided to fire such a person.
Or maybe Google should pay their salary indefinitely because they were capable of disrupting a market at some point in their career? Or maybe yes, such a person needs to work at Google type company so all of us can benefit from the optimal situation from which to maximize their talent, even though such a company would let them go. Otherwise we'd all lose out on such a person being capable of contributing to the world if Google lays them off.
What else could they do then without a company who doesn't appreciate keeping them on?
The ones that don't probably would if it was public about how much of a significant contribution they've made to some foundational AWS services everyone knows. I think they don't mind.
I’m not sure what exactly is a L9 at Google, but this looks a lot like research positions in many huge companies.
For instance there was researchers on voice recognition at Yahoo! way before the voice assistants became a product, and if I could imagine one of them bring up a well working model 6 months before the competition, and have a voice assistant hit the market.
It would disrupt an entire market.
But they’re not alone of course, and I don’t know how many other researchers are on the payroll trying to breakthrough other fields. All of them have a “disrupt the entire market” expectation I think, and of course their employer is also expected to give them enough time and leeway to make progress. They probably bring small improvement on existing things, and the number of papers published every year could be another measure as a temporizing strategy. But their actual stated goal is probably very ambitious and they’d be failing at it for a very long time.
From your ranking, L9 seems to not depend on the company anymore, looks more research. You cannot expect to shape/redefine industry every year, that's absurd. By this model every math/physics/chemistry research teacher should be fired every year.
And to be honest I don't think google has these expectations. Most probably he was was fired for different reasons, not performance
Research is theoretical. These roles are very much practical. These are the kind of people who drive partnerships across companies, lead important industry standards, and come up with ideas for entire new markets and products.
This is not a job everyone wants or is capable of doing. There are a very limited number of such positions, and those who want them must justify the position's existence.
Yeah, but if you have to lead a standard, it may take years and it sucks a lot of time. So can you, while trying to direct 15 other possibly clueless people, disrupt the industry in another way?
I try to imagine the standups these people have: "Which industry have you redefined yesterday? Which industry are you redefining today? Do you have any blockers?"
I somewhat get that, but if you are promoting people for amazing hits, then you are doing it wrong. You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project, but for being a solid addition to the team that provides steady progress.
> You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project,
At Google you are explicitly rewarded at L5 and up for picking the right project to work on. It's wisdom of the crowds. You pick what project you're working on and you should be picking a good high-impact one that actually brings value to the company, for which you might be promoted. This ensures that incentives are aligned.
Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it. You need to be proactive about ensuring that you're working on something valuable.
>Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it.
It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful. If a project turns out to be a dead-end, that's either management's fault, or just the way the market worked out and no one's fault (you can't always predict what's going to be popular or successful). And if a project is clearly a dead-end, then why is management wasting money on it instead of canceling it and moving the talent to better places? Basically, Google's system just rewards people for being lucky.
Engineers: "We want an engineering-led organization!"
Google: "OK, here's some real responsibility over company direction."
Engineers: "No, not like that."
I mean, I work at a normal-ass medium-sized company and at our top level of IC technical staff even we're expected to help management choose between different strategic options and point out places we can improve the product based on technical synergies or easy wins they may not be aware of. If we do a bad job at this, we will also get laid off on way or another, at latest when the company runs out of money.
Especially at Google's size, you can just throw up your hands and say "oh well, the market is hard to guess." You are the market!
> Engineers: "And we get rewarded for making good products that work well, yes?"
This is not what engineers say (nor what the company needs unless you take vapid definitions of "good" and "well"). The MBAs aren't the ones asking for a dozen messaging apps!
> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful
If you just do what management tells you at Google you will never be promoted past L4. You need to come up with new ideas and projects to sell to management. The key is to align your project ideas with what management says they want.
sounds really exhausting... if that's the constant expectation and you're actually good at it, why work for Google at all and not fundraise for yourself? cuz you're doing all the same legwork but your ideas go to the man.
I think it is exciting actually. Google a bit of a mess internally so there are lots of problems to solve. Everyone knows that these problems exist but people either aren't brave enough to defy management spend to the time to solve the problems or don't know how to promote their proposals to whom
If you are happy being handed pre-scoped work, you can just stay at L4, which many people do.
It's not "really exhausting", it's just doing your job?? Personally I enjoy more coming up with my own stuff and fighting to launch it than just following orders (my favorite career accomplishments are making .app and .dev happen).
good for you, i can't imagine myself being under the gun to come up with a new funded project every year (or however often), would rather just work on some real product with revenue even if it's not very original
Based on this comment it seems like you have a highly distorted view of what it's actually like. You're arguing against a strawman.
It's not like that at all. Possibly it's like that for a high level PM, but for a SWE, it's more about putting yourself on the right project. You certainly don't have to constantly be coming up with new products on your own.
Also like, projects can last more than a year. There's something finishing up now that started work in like 2019 and planning in idk, 2016. And I know people who have gotten multiple promotions over growing their contributions to that particular endeavor.
Quite a lot of L9s did start companies, which were then acquired by Google. Others are working on things that already require a large amount of capital or influence, or just otherwise want to keep working on projects rather than administration.
If you can make 600k a year, a few years in a row (let's say three). How does 1.8M in hand stack up against starting your own business, with maybe a bigger potential number, but a lower statistical chance of making it there.
> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful.
That's simply not how it works at Google. Everyone has skin in the game. Who are you to say how it's "supposed" to work there? I'm telling you how it actually is.
And that's probably part of what's happening at Apple as well ? We've seen important, but not quite groundbreaking products get left for dead, and eventually killed when at Apple's size it probably wasn't that problematic to keep them alive. I'm thinking about their network router lineup for instance. Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.
> Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.
Supposedly Steve Jobs hated every iteration of the calculator on the first iPad, so they just didn't ship it at all. Might just be tradition at Apple to not touch that topic.
Google pays over $300k a year for many of their engineers, and Apple pays quite well too. Regardless of how easy that calculator app is, it'll take a team of people to build, and that team is expensive, like millions of dollars expensive, and it'll never be worth it.
It's tough to distinguish between luck and skill. A lot of cognitive biases come into play in performance evaluation, and managers have to make decisions based on very little data.
You get paid for being a solid addition on a team providing steady progress. If you continue to do the same thing and make the same valuable but incremental progress, why should your job role change?
This is one of the advantages of having reasonably wide pay bands at Google. Doing a great job within your level will earn you raises. You don't need promotion for that (to a limit). Why should promotion just be something earned after doing the same thing for a long time?
It seems the right solution would be bonus-based compensation. If they redefine an industry, massive bonus, if they’re just a really good engineer, then get normal really good engineer salary.
Or a demotion. Is that ever an option in companies, or do they have to go straight to firing?
>This would be the equivalent for a pro baseball team laying off their entire roster because nobody on the team showed the growth that those in the feeder teams showed.
This does happen in baseball, not literally the entire team, but Google also isn't laying off everyone. Teams regularly decide to let better performers leave just to replace them with worse players. The reason for this is that the worse players are always cheaper. Many teams are happy to pay a replacement player for half the production at a quarter of the cost. That L9 could have still been productive while not living up to the expectations for someone making that salary.
On sports teams (who plays baseball anyway?) you have a limit of people who can play at the same time. This does not really happen in a company.
If the expectation are easy to miss, maybe the salary of higher ups should be more strongly tied to meeting them. You can keep that half L9 at half of the price, while still making that worse guy that might improve over time.
> This would be the equivalent for a pro baseball team laying off their entire roster because nobody on the team showed the growth that those in the feeder teams showed
It's been a while but as I recall this kinda thing is roughly the plot of "Moneyball". I don't think.they cut expensive players but they definitely didn't sign new ones who were expensive - instead they focused on players "who get on base".
The Peter Principle is too simplistic. Some people do well and become incompetent over time. Or they stay competent but the company and industry change around them. It's possible that this person was laid off due in response to a brief period of subpar work unfortunately timed with a layoff mandate, and that would be terribly unfair, but I have no way of knowing that.
I took the anecdote to be about why these people would be let go even outside of layoffs. Layoffs, I'm willing to say, can and should be somewhat random. At best, they are controlled burns of a forest that you can't see. It will destabilize the ones that remain and you don't know how many of them you will now lose.
To the rest, certainly possible. My sports metaphor certainly implies a pipeline of workers that will replace each other in a somewhat predictable order. But that feels like a different thing than "they may be producing great code, but are not reinventing the world."
You can choose not to go for promo (at least at Google). A L7 is still making 600k+. If you've gone for L9 you are very aware of the ratchet and made a deliberate choice.
No one said these systems are smart. It's just the way it is and no one wants to change it for being the person that broke faang hiring. The alternative is a fundamentally different IC performance review process (and interview process) above a certain level, and HR and others are unwilling to take that step for obvious reasons.
L9 is conservatively making $2 million / year so the price of getting perf wrong is high.
> The alternative is a fundamentally different IC performance review process (and interview process) above a certain level
What would that process look like?
Perf reviews these days are basically, "Did you do some important/useful things? Did you tell other people at the company about those things so they'd benefit, too?"
And interviewing (other than the inane hoop-jumping of getting through the recruiters, and the subset of interview loops that focus on LeetCode) is largely, "Can you write a bit of decent-looking code? Can you design a globally distributed self-healing system without being a total buffoon? Can you demonstrate some semblance of introspection?"
There's some bureaucratic fluff surrounding it all at the larger FAANGs, but it does seem largely reasonable overall — especially if you (or your manager) are willing to cut through the red tape.
I could see a fair number of improvements and tweaks to be made, but... fundamentally different? You want to throw everything out and do it all differently?
> The alternative is a fundamentally different IC performance review process (and interview process) above a certain level, and HR and others are unwilling to take that step for obvious reasons.
Having different review processes adapted to different job roles that exist at different levels is the easiest thing to defend. Heck, given disparate impact considerations and the fact most systems will have incidental unequal impacts, failing to do so could have you fall out of the business necessity criteria into unlawful discrimination at the levels the process isn't adapted to.
Are the “obvious reasons” that, despite the practical and legal benefits, someone would have to expend effort designing the appropriate system?
Well, those are the expectations. Low ratings don’t mean being managed out in typical years, but that’s not where we find ourselves. I don’t think the system is perfect, but it is fair. An L5 that missed their expectations is laid off the same as an L9 - there’s no thought of “but they would’ve hit expectations as an L7” just as an L5 doesn’t get credit for being a high performing L3.
Yeah, from what I can surmise, I wouldn't be surprised if an L9 was earning salary equivalent to a top pro athlete (easily 7 figures). You better be writing some historic, market bending shit to get paid like that. Figure 10 years of a $2M salary, you've paid for everything money can buy, in cash, up to the private jet level.
> Figure 10 years of a $2M salary, you've paid for everything money can buy, in cash, up to the private jet level.
God, no. You're not even close to the limits of what money can buy. You may not even have enough money to be able to buy a private jet; it depends on the jet. You certainly haven't earned enough money that it would make any sense for you to buy a jet.
Assume that's $1m/year after taxes. With 3 kids in college and a nice house and a nice vacation a year, you're surely still comfortable but you're not buying a plane.
That's not really how it works. L6+ is considered a "terminal" level. As long as you aren't underperforming it's perfectly fine to stay at that level indefinitely. It's not an "up or out" position like L5 and down.
> It's not an "up or out" position like L5 and down.
As an outsider to this all FAANG thing that feels wrong to me, it has always felt so.
What happens, or at least what I think happens because of this strategy, is that lots of institutional knowledge gets lots pretty fast and in an irremediable way, because many of those L4s and L5s that ended up not making it to L6, and so got the boot, knew of some parts of the "system" that no-one else did.
Unless a FAANG company only relies on L6s and higher to get a hold over that institutional knowledge over the long term, which I pretty much doubt it can happen.
As the median tenure at silly high wage places like Google is one year I am pretty sure most that quit are "managed out" with an implied threat of being fired.
L4 is terminal. There is no requirement to ever be promoted to L5 (though there is some language about continued expansion of skills at L4). Most engineers will never make L6 in their entire career at Google and nobody is concerned about people chilling at lower levels.
They keep raising it every time I hear about it…it used to be L4, now people say it’s L5/senior. And you’re saying it’s L6? I can’t keep up with this :/
I don't know where jedberg pulled that from, but I seriously doubt that the L6-equivalent is the terminal level at any FAANG. At Google it definitely used to be L5, but apparently was dropped to L4 a few years ago
If it were my company doing layoffs, I’d hold on tight to the best and most senior engineers and lay off the entry level ones if I had to. Knowing what you have to do and why is much more important than the details of how you get there
It's a case by case basis and thinking you can apply a general rule across the organisation is completely misguided. I don't want to rehash the same arguments so just read the rest of the comments.
I had a friend of mine that was let go from MS after 25 years. I was under the same impression. Thinking the dude was probably not doing anything productive. But then, he shows me all his positive feedback that he got on his reviews…shit does not add up. My guess is, they created this big layoff list. Now they trigger competition, so they can higher at lower pay and get same results. This is just my take at this. I never worked for any FAANG, and I will never do so. But it was just shocking, not surprised but just shocked for my friend. Maybe they were just cutting out big salary paid people. Idk. These people devoted their lives and got shafted.
Isn't this obvious? The quiet quitting and demands for remaining at wfh coupled with other corporations cranking up prices for their products (from energy to bread) made for an uppity worker class. Musk practically telegraphed the corporate leadership consensus as the way to address this. Extreme job insecurity will do its magic.
p.s. the interesting thing to find out is how your friend's former coworkers, peers and juniors, who got to hear about his layoff are taking the news. Shocked? 'Shocked into what' line of queries could enlighten the forum as to the 'wisdom' of company X's payroll triage.
It's pretty clear, having been part of the hiring and firing process of several large US tech giants, that these companies have zero idea what they're doing in the performance/review process. This kind of bullshit exists solely to save face in front of shareholders. It has zero to do with running a successful technology company.
This is so true, when people were begging to be promoted because they wanted more money I would have "the talk" with them which was basically,
"Look, if you get a raise and no promotion, expectations will be the same next year as they are this year, so all good. If you get a promotion then expectations for next year, AND EVERY YEAR AFTER NEXT YEAR, are going to be higher. If you've got that in you, okay then but there isn't a 'ya know, I'd rather not be this senior' button, the only way to cut those expectation cords is to leave."
Scott McNealy would tell people on promotion, "One step up, one step closer to the door." which captured this same thought.
But all of that is peanuts compared to the next step, which is that now, assuming they still want to work at a company, they have to go out and interview and set their salary expectations to something that someone is willing to hire them at. This seems especially hard for the senior folks I've interviewed coming from Google because so much of their expertise is on systems that only exist inside of Google.
A lot of the experience is transferable even if the tools are different. The industry has adopted many opensource products that have equivalents at Google (bazle, Prometheus, Grafana, containers, etc). The strongest asset any xoogler has is likely to be bias-to-action and engineering maturity (used to having to complete work to a high standard). There is business value there for companies hiring.
I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp. In some markets an L5 could expect at 50-60% comp cut (more for more senior roles).
>>> I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp.
This captures it but there is nuance here. Many people, perhaps a majority of people, especially in the engineering professions, have a mental model where "how much I'm paid" is the "score" for "how good I am at my job."
So when someone with this mental model is offered a position at half, or even two thirds the compensation level for doing what they had been doing before, cannot get past thinking "This company clearly doesn't realize how good I am if they aren't willing to pay me what I'm 'worth.'" So they pass on the offer. And weeks, sometimes months, go by and they can see that eventually they are going to run out of money, so they take one of these offers but they resent it. And in resenting it they don't bring any sort of reasonable attitude to work and grumble about how "it could be so much better if you just did it the way I suggest" or something like that. And they spend a year, at most two, until either they are asked to leave or they quit in disgust.
If they have saved enough money to maintain an acceptable lifestyle without dedicated employment, they will often join the ranks of the 'self employed' where occasionally they consult but mostly they don't. If they haven't saved enough money they sometimes move to a new area, cut contact with friends where it is too embarrassing for them to say they are "unemployable"[1], and get by on smaller work in a reduced cost environment.
Bottom line is that it is a tough time for these folks. They are being thrust into a self examination situation that they may not have prepared themselves for. I have nothing but empathy for people in this conundrum. I walked through that fire and came out the other side stronger but not everyone does.
[1] They aren't, it really is just a disconnect between their self image and market rate for their skills.
That’s why it’s much safer to move up on the management track. An IC on a higher level almost has to be able to walk on water and constantly produce outstanding work whereas for managers it’s mucb more possible to do your job as usual without producing breakthroughs.
However, I also wanted to point out that "Distinguished SWE" != "IC". There are plenty of L8/L9 Google employees who are on technical ladders but whose jobs are mainly -- or solely -- about people management. Those people have Principal/Distinguished X as their title.
This was very common in the olden days and remains true for long-tenured employees. Google's been moving away from this model by requiring that employees move onto a management ladder once their job is mainly about people management. However, I doubt anyone would want to piss off all those Principal and Distinguished SWEs/RSes by forcing them onto a different ladder and replacing their titles.
The flipside is that it's very difficult to get promoted as a manager. As an IC you can at least show some skills to prove that you deserve to be at the next level. A manager can usually only get promoted if there's enough scope or if there's an opening at the higher level (eg. senior manager left).
Getting promoted requires the "people skills" to put the packet together and get the recommendations. If you are too eccentric, people will flat-out tell you that when you ask for a recommendation. ("I don't think you're quite ready for Level X, you need to work on Y.") Certainly you can cherry-pick who you ask, but if you have enough people that like you enough to get you promoted, you probably aren't a big pain to work with. I crossed paths with the occasional L8 or L9 at Google and everyone I met was very pleasant and enjoyable to interact with. And smart, it goes without saying.
Not everyone is a perfect angel 24/7 (one of my favorite high-level engineer's hobby was to antagonize our Director, probably decreasing his manager's lifespan by about 10 years due to the stress), but I guess one social skill you can have is knowing what bridges you can set on fire for your own entertainment. (I was also entertained.)
The "eccentric" folks tend to find their own way, outside of corporate promotions. You don't have to be nice to anyone to win a chess tournament or make a popular open-source library. You just do those things, and your work speaks for itself. Those are kind of more narrow areas in which you can succeed and measure, where Big Tech promotions are a little bit more nuanced, requiring not only technical excellence, but some social skills and navigation of corporate politics.
I work on AWS and interact with a fair bit of Principal and Sr Principals. None are "eccentric." Highly competent, great at processing high volumes of information and context switching, asking amazing questions, ready to help, and really quick to pick up new things, and debug.
I think Sr Principal and Distinguished are achieved by excellence AND tenure. Too much context/tribal knowledge is required so hard for anyone to be effective at a high level otherwise.
To be clear, these people often times deal a lot with operational issues. And they're keeping track of a lot of initiatives and fires. So sometimes I see some lose patience in meetings against managers/leadership. But that's understandable I think given their stress. Happens pretty rarely.
Huh, that’s an interesting point. Personally, when I see “L9 IC”, I assume that the person is an extremely eccentric genius who likely does not work especially well with a team. But I’m not an L9, nor do I work at a FAANG, so who knows.
Those kinds of people are generally stuck at a lower level. L7/8/9 is very much a political game. To get there (generally) you need to make your entire org/company look very good, and generally to make your team look good you need to work well with them so that you can convince them to work on the high impact projects that you identify.
It is nearly impossible to have the impact required for these levels by building a thing yourself. These companies are too big. You can't just say "I built a better database" because even if you somehow did to that you'd need to convince the company to shift to it.
L9s are usually having industry-wide impact and that involves a shit ton of just talking with people and convincing them that your path through the forest is the right one. You need the right ideas, but you also need the skills to convince a whole bunch of smart people, often at other companies entirely, that your ideas are right.
I can't think of a single famous software engineer that continuously redefined the entire industry, every single year. Like, some language designers and tooling creators have redefined the industry once a decade. But every year? For what definition of redefine does that apply?
Or that loser Steve Jobs. Look at him. I mean he had a good few years in the beginning - Apple I (1976), the Apple II (1977), the Apple Lisa (1978), but then fails to do anything redefining until the Macintosh (1984), takes another break for 4 years until the NeXT Computer (1988), 10 years! until the iMac (1998). 2001 was a good year for him with iTunes (2001), iPod (2001) but again takes a 2 year break before iPhone(2007) and then skips out again for 2 years until the iPad in 2010.
None. It's all plain BS that capitalistic companies are using as a leverage to gamify the market. Engineers are particularly bad in playing this game and are easy to deceive so that they start to believe it is a real thing (as seen in some comments above).
When a football team does not meet the expectations, it is the manager who gets blamed for the failure and who gets the sack and rarely the players. We, sadly, live in a different world.
In a past life, I was part of calibrations for L8/L9 at a FAANG. Even though "impacts the industry" is part of the spec, it didn't come up in calibrations I sat in on. Major impact on the most important company initiatives was really the bar that I saw, but writing a bunch of code definitely did not meet the bar.
Performance ratings seemed to either be "Met" or "Greatly Exceeded" as the work of these folks often spanned multiple review cycles, so some stuff my be In Progress & On Track for one cycle, but has landed and achieved impact in a following one.
All this means is getting promoted and sustaining progress on the tech track is very difficult. Compared to that I feel promotion on the management track is easier, all you need to do is get more people under you.
From the data (the analysis was posted a few days ago on HN), it appears FANGS have been targeting employees with a long tenure in their layoffs. These are generally more expensive and from a management helicopter view don't appear to be value for money.
That sounds like the equivalent of picking a random half of your applications and throwing them in the garbage because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
Maybe... don't do that? It isn't like this process is dictated by physics or something, that sounds incredibly inefficient and not that difficult to fix.
This is just absolutely awful. We all have now knowing that infinite economical growth is nothing but a delusion. Why can't the management and the share holder apply the same to the company and employee? It is simply not possible to expect human being to continuously grow without a limit. Once they reach the top level, what they should do is actually maintaining the same good output and run a marathon instead.
someone said managers were affected more than engineering in this layoffs. also read the comments about this L9 promotion game. they knew they were expected to stay on top of their field.
infinite economic growth is possible, but not infinite constant 2%, and definitely not the US tech sector hiring frenzy that went on for years
inflation is a nominal thing, I'm talking about growth in real terms.
there are two kinds of growth, extensive and intensive. the first one is using more natural resources, expanding to mine the ocean and the moon, and so on.
the second one is where the intensity of the economic activity increases, so with the same input there are more outputs. technological change helps to reduce waste, increase efficiency. investing in infrastructure and other capital goods allows for increased productivity.
one big thing is simply investing in people to be more productive, eg. increasing "human capital".
of course eventually sustainable growth has to approach some asymptote, and eventually physical limits kick in. (free energy in the universe gets used up.) however our growth trajectory is very mild compared to those limits, so in practice we can continue increasing both the intensive and expansive growth asymptotically.
regular old economics theory says that "wealth is created" via trade between parties with comparative advantages, which is basically specialization through technological progress.
and even on Earth we are more limited by our own politics, culture and technology (logistics, organization, management, education included) than by physics.
and if we assume we practically can't run out of new ideas/technology, new ways to make the whole economy a tiny bit more efficient, then that simply translates to infinite growth. not exponential, but growth nonetheless.
of course the critique that "GDP go up" must not be viewed as an end goal is absolutely valid. however it's simply a contradiction to say that we want more basic infrastructure for everyone, but no growth at all (or degrowth), because every new brick will be accounted as capital, every new shelter provided will be accounted as GDP in the usual model. (and of course maybe there are better models that are easier to grasp for people, but ... currently this is how all economic theories account for things and think about growth, as far as I know).
Why are you even performance reviewing an L9? That's sort of missing the point. For all you know, their contributions could be profound and subtle and totally invisible to you and many others, while still having massive impact.
From the employee end, the contract is: you take my time and expertise and give me money/benefits/etc.
Yet performance review rating systems place, "did the job well and met all professional obligations," somewhere in the middle-to-low end of their, "scales."
So even if you, employee, come in as a highly experienced individual with plenty of skills and you perform all of your duties and fulfill your contractual obligations to the letter: it's not enough.
Just more capitalism at work.
The effect this has on human organization of labour is hilarious sometimes. It seems to me that when your performance review scale is based around these unrealistic expectations then workers have to readjust the way they see their roles. It's not enough to do a good job! One must exceed expectations to be treated with respect. And when we start dangling carrots like that people will find many clever ways to get it with as little effort as possible.
Hop around teams to find the lowest-performing team in order to stand out. Sounds great from the organization's perspective: you're spreading your experience around and lifting up all boats! Except that knowledge transfer almost never happens and team churn is highly disruptive on software projects. So things end up in constant state of technical debt.
Sabotage your co-workers and steal recognition for their work/ideas/etc! Hoard your domain knowledge and prevent others from getting in on your work so that you stand out come review season! Make sure you're good friends with the team lead so that you get all of the preferred projects!
From my personal experience if you have a good personal relationship with your manager, when you want to leave the company they may told you there’s an unannounced layoff in months so you can wait until then. You get extra cash and they can meet the headcount reduction goal.
Although it’s hard to know whether this is the case here \_(ツ)_/¯
I actually saw a linkedin post where someone described this exact scenario as the context for them being chosen for layoffs. They were very senior so maybe this was the L9. I’ll never find the post
This a big pet peeve of mine on linkedin and twitter - doesn't matter if I navigate away from the page for just a second; if the algorithm reshuffles my feed at all, there's a good chance I'll never see that post I was looking for again.
It's a real bummer if I ever need to find anything. The only solution I can think of is storing every link I come across in a searchable format, just in case I need to find anything.
> The only solution I can think of is storing every link I come across in a searchable format
I take screenshots of any content I find interesting. Effortless, even on mobile (where links suck), and usually enough context to search for it again. If I ever want it, its usually shortly after first seeing it, if not.. its lost in the endless pile of photos.
I used to bookmark some Twitter posts/links that I found interesting, but then I gave up even on that because then I'd have to navigate and search through an ever expanding list of bookmarks (not an easy task, also).
Sounds about right. A while back, during a merger, an enterprising colleague, when asked casually by the manager if what he'd do if he were laid off, said "I think I really like sailing" - the rest of us when asked said we'd probably just get another tech job.
He got let go with a very nice severance package and immediately went full time consulting on (what I imagine) was a side gig for him before hand. Years later we met on another job and laughed reminiscing about it.
“Hey, just between you and me… you mentioned you were planning to retire soon. Why not take a bunch of stock and 6 months of pay and do me a favor and volunteer yourself in this RIF?”
I could see that. I could also see a Principal+ having enough visibility and experience to be pretty sure when layoffs were coming, and mentioning to the right person that it'd make sense for themself to be included this time.
Why shouldn't an L9 get laid off? They even laid off some VPs (including mine). The layoffs hit all up and down the org chart. The most senior people are also the most expensive people, and considering that layoffs for cost reasons are always trying to meet a specific total savings value, it does make sense to trim from higher up people too.
Because most L9's at Google have created significant contributions to the industry, these are folks like David Patterson (created RISC), Rob Pike (created Golang) etc...
Foundational work that affects Google's bottom lines but also the rest of the industry. Its this work done earlier that even allowed these glorified managers to be employed and have their ridiculous salaries.
Its frankly shocking that some VP+ can come in and fire a Distinguished Engineer. Its the equivalent of pissing on the shoulder of a titan. Totally deplorable that this is allowed or tolerated.
> Because most L9's at Google have created significant contributions to the industry,
I see that you're using the past tense there. "But what have they done for me lately?" L9 isn't a sinecure. It is a very highly compensated position, and the ongoing production from all of that compensation needs to be high.
But I think you missed the larger point, which is that, during a layoff, even good employees let go. When you let go X% of your workforce, that means you're letting go even good employees. And you're letting go roughly X% of people at all levels. Some L9s were gonna have to go, same as some L4s were gonna go. No one is immune from a layoff. Indeed having people that are immune is legally problematic.
When you do a layoff, you are accepting that you are potentially going to be letting anyone and everyone go. Yes, even high level long-tenured engineers.
People might also be forgetting that they might have asked to be laid off. I had a person do this a few years ago when one of my high performers told me they were leaving soon and wanted a comp package so they could take a vacation and still get paid.
It’s not voluntary. It’s people communicating and doing each other a favor that works for everyone. It’s not far fetched that a VP and a distinguished engineer would have a meeting at least occasionally.
Just stating a lot of people are jumping to a conclusion without any facts.
Look at it this way.
VP: I have to come up with a list of people to let go. It’s a large amount and you have worked across many teams maybe you have some insight on some teams that we should look at first.
DE: … gives some advice. You know I was planning on leaving soon and maybe this is a good time to leave. I can help you hit your quota and you can give me a decent severance package.
VP: I hate to see you go but would be glad to help you out.
You're just speculating and making this all up though. The vast, vast majority of people affected by the layoff didn't know anything was coming. Could be 100% of them.
Sure but the L9 most likely had 1 on 1s with the SVPs who were in the know, and if they L9 had mentioned that they were thinking of retiring soon, especially after how well the stock as done recently, then the SVP might have just put them on the list to save a few other jobs.
> And you're letting go roughly X% of people at all levels. Some L9s were gonna have to go, same as some L4s were gonna go. No one is immune from a layoff. Indeed having people that are immune is legally problematic.
You have a valid point here, the Airtable data shows 5 VPs were also let go.
What's this ridiculous diefication you're doing of people. It's all just work, and if the work doesn't arguably produce more than what you cost, you're not really very persuasive of an investment, especially if you can be replaced, and everyone can.
Being really good at skateboarding can earn you a bit of money and notoriety, but not necessarily and it's a hell of a lot of work, which will end eventually. Being really good at skateboarding and having good style sells things for the companies that pay you, but your skill is ancillary, it's the notoriety of the skill that matters.
I'd add to this that I've met people with high levels of achievement and competency, and they are inspiring in some ways, but I don't hold them up and herald them like this. They're just people, they have people problems, nobody is really exempt from that. They can be alcoholics, they can go bankrupt, they can go out of fashion and get old, they can break bones, their dogs can die, their cars can get broken into, their partners can leave them or they can be virgins who never figured out human interaction. If you're getting robbed in a sketchy part of town, you can't yell out "but.. but I'm an L9 engineer at Google" and somehow get out of it, unless the guy robbing you is a homeless junior trying to enter the industry and since you got in 20 years ago when there were only 2 rounds of interviews, one of which was to estimate how many windows there are in Seattle, maybe you can get them in.
Since we're all doing hot takes, mine is simply that Google has stopped innovating. It's perfectly reasonable to hold an L9 up to a high standard, like figuring out what the next paradigm shift will be and how do we jump out in front of it.
The whole industry has this problem. No one knows what the next big thing will be so it's all just bean counters who want to optimize existing revenue streams. You don't need L9's for that. What was once brave and new is now routine and can be handled by lower-level people.
It was telling that one of the titans of the US tech industry and one of the few real innovators left in the States wanted to copy a Chinese app, I'm talking about Musk wanting to transform Twitter into a WeChat "for the world" [1]. Unfortunately that aspect was lost because of the whole the political brouhaha surrounding Twitter's acquisition. It used to be the other way round, the Germans or the Chinese used to copy the US tech titans.
There's also Zuckerberg. I'm not into AR/VR at all, but he at least tries to build a new tech sector almost from the ground-up. There's very few of those people left in the US.
>Its the equivalent of pissing on the shoulder of a titan. Totally deplorable that this is allowed or tolerated.
Google is a corporation, not a gerontocracy where the elders are somehow above the hierarchy. Engineers, distinguished or otherwise are simply employees, just like the CEO. The owners of a corporation and whoever they delegate authority to get to decide who stays. This isn't deplorable, that's how private businesses work. If you expect tenure you choose the wrong workplace.
If a relatively old company is able to reign in seniority somewhat that to me is a pretty healthy signal.
There are L9 managers whose sole contributions have been empire building and politics. I know one who in fact had negative contributions but played the politics very well
Not only that, but you are going to have good and bad performers at every level. It isn't like you take all your employees and put the best of them into upper management; they are completely different jobs and different skill sets.
Sucks to be someone who was just about to turn 40 and was affected by this layoff, knowing they'd have had additional legal protections were they only a little bit older.
Totally agreed. All the other protected statuses work both ways, as in, you can't discriminate against people who are pregnant/parents, but you also can't discriminate against those who are not (i.e. by expecting them to shoulder greater responsibilities, or targeting them for layoffs first).
No, it's the other way around. They were saying that some directors (managers of 30+ employees) held an official position of "L9 IC" - since L9 IC is much more respectable than a director, which would be something like L6 on the management track.
More broadly, there have been a bunch of cuts at the VP and director levels. I have visibility into an org where a VP and three directors where let go.
Also, for context, L9 = Sr Director = Distinguished SWE = Distinguished Scientist depending on the ladder they're on. Historically Google was quite flexible in letting people remain on a technical ladder as they move to people management. Just because someone's title is Principal X or Distinguished X doesn't mean their full-time job isn't people management. I can see evidence of that very clearly in my own org, for example.
Another comment pointed out they make like $2M/yr. While I understand and respect what that level represents from a value prospect, I'm... sure they'll be fine. They are making more in a year than I am in 10, hard to care really.
I dont know, reality perhaps?
I don't know for google, but the idea that titles/level always reflect what the employee's performance actually is has been debunked for me a long time ago.
As far as I'm aware they wouldn't have known it was coming and wouldn't have been able to volunteer. I haven't heard of anyone who was voluntarily laid off. As far as I know you were either (seemingly randomly) laid off, or you're still employer, in which case you could just resign, but you wouldn't get severance.
I would think if you have a high title the company would have high expectations to go along with it. If this person hadn’t done anything useful in a while, very reasonable to let them go.
To clarify, since people seem to think so, he wasn't the particular person fired, just an example. Another example is Rob Pike, who was L9 when he retired in 2021.
Patterson was very well liked when I was at Berkeley. Maybe a little eccentric but not in a bad way. He famously would buy his students pizza at the end of the semester, saying he used royalties from the textbook that he wrote and taught from (Hennessy* and Patterson).
I saw the advice in a thread on here about voluntarily quitting during the first round of layoffs. Perhaps that's what happened here? Maybe they just said "f it I'm out, I've got some money to spend."
The Google layoff planning was supposed to be limited to VP+ (L10+) as I understand, with many directors (8-9) finding out about them at the same time as everyone else. Almost certainly it was the same for ICs. OFC I am sure many long time folks are well connected enough to know in advance anyway, but I think it’s unlikely
I feel for the guy referenced in that post, but he shouldn't have gone to work at 4AM "to finish an important analysis", no matter how urgent, especially after a certain age. It can get to you pretty fast, I'm thinking about future health prospects.
Ehhh... There's an interesting question there as to what degree some of these folks contribute to the bottom line. For sure, many have made groundbreaking contributions to the field, although often in an academic setting.
That doesn't necessarily translate to shipping production software, so some may be vanity hires as much as people actually working on products. In tighter times that becomes tougher to justify. I have no idea but I wouldn't rule it out.
That assumes that managers doing layoffs have a good "hit rate."
Cmon - they don't know what the fuck they're doing. They definitely aren't the ones actually making a difference. Which is why layoffs are so funny. It's like the blind leading the blind.
Or maybe she just got unlucky. Attributing skillful planning/execution to a company that publicly announced that it has made a series of large mistakes seems like a stretch.
Not a Google case, but I heard that a principal or distinguished engineer was laid off from Meta. They pushed some unpopular technical bets which turned out to be very costly for the org. This is a typical "I told you so" story. And there had to be someone accountable for the failure. I guess this could be something similar... or not.
Yeah. Imagine laying off Kelsey Hightower. Imagine the destruction of goodwill to GCP that would have. These layoffs seem insane. All this talent just gone. The high level management seems to make a bit more sense but very technical and capable SWEs surely could have been placed in different teams or divisions.
It sometimes gets mentioned that Google and related companies often hire in order to keep talent away from their competitors. If the competition is not in a position to hire, or is laying off employees, then that makes it harder for Google to justify their headcount.
"A few years ago" there were half the employees in total, or less. I'm guessing the L9 IC population has grown similarly - I just heard of a former colleague at another company bring hired in at that level.
Also, not everyone even makes their level visible, with makes me miss skeptical of this supposed survey.
If I had to guess, I would speculate it was more of a buyout than a layoff. That person probably wanted to leave anyway, and Google just made it easier for them.
If Twitter is anything to go by, I saw one Google engineer with a 20year history find out they got laid off in the same way as anyone else and expressed surprise.
I think a lot of people are way too quick to say that others who have kids in college and possibly expensive hobbies/houses/etc. don't need the money. That said, long-term Google employees should generally be pretty comfortable given relatively sane financial decisions.
I'm Steven, the OP of this Airtable.cool link. Just a FYI this was originally posted on my Linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:70265782... - check it out if you want to see some charts I created from this data and other discussions.
Long-time lurker of HN so pleasantly surprised someone posted the Airtable.cool link here!
This is the first I've heard of WARN. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... it looks like they have to give people 60 days notice ahead of mass layoffs. I'm guessing part of it involves publishing a list like this of the roles of all the people who will be laid off?
Right, so what happened is that, almost two weeks ago now, 6,800 people in the US were, practically speaking, laid off in the middle of the night with no warning whatsoever. All of their accounts were disabled, their badges were deactivated, and they were functionally no longer employees.
Legally speaking though, because of WARN, the actual status of those employees is that they are still employed for two months (three in New York because we have a better WARN Act). So they'll still be getting their pay and benefits for that period, to be compliant with the WARN Act. This is the people who are on that list.
That’s generally how it works - there is the federal WARN act and state acts as well, so the details can vary, but typically the goal is to announce mass layoffs “in advance.” But the devil is in the details. Sometimes companies time their severance against WARN, so you’ll get a round of layoffs that take effect in 60 days followed by a WARN notice dated forward. Other times, companies claim an exemption to the notice period, of which there are a few.
Just goes to show that the “do no evil” corporation is just that. Another corporation that is a slave to greedy boards and shareholders that only care about the price of the stock.
Cut 5% of the workforce and see immediate gains in stock.
Google peaked at Google Search and Google Ads. Everything else is subpar or average (Android), with the exception of the open source contributions like Go, Kubernetes, and app containerization.
One of these days FAANG will become relics and shadows of their former selves. Just like the railroad companies in the early 1900s.
> Youtube (yes, it was acquired. But you cannot deny Google's touch pushed Youtube to the top)
They bought it because their competing product failed so badly barely anyone remembers it existed. I'm not so sure Google actually helped much beyond increased bandwidth for higher-quality video.
Despite not knowing big G's influence on Youtube, I can still say with confidence that YT has been a consitent, huge time sink in the past decade since they were bought.
And don't underestimate how important it is to be capable, performant, and available. Outages and routinely slow performance is how you bleed customers. No doubt G had a hand in bolstering our little video site
Maps - idea is from DARPA, commercialized by G and other tech companies
Chrome - I prefer Chromium
YT - they planet scaled it, but the original idea was not theirs
Flights - okay, this is kind of useful but I only use this a handful of times during the year
Not me. Android is an easy pick, not because Google is perfect, but because the alternative (and there is only 1 alternative) is worse in so many ways, especially for freedom.
Just being able to use a web browser with proper ad-blocking and paywall-bypassing alone (Firefox Nightly) is enough to make the choice easy, not to mention being able to use an SD card for storage, being able to connect via USB to my Linux PC and download photos, I could go on and on.
I completely forgot about the open USB/SD card stuff even though I use it all the time. Yeah that is pretty cool.
I am more projecting onto a potential of things like Linux Phones. Once they get the stability issues resolved, they have the potential to be something wonderful.
Thank you! I don't have that data, but it's easily requestable thru the CA EDD website (see my linkedin post https://bit.ly/google-warn-data ). The hard part is cleaning and extracting the levels from the titles which varies considerably by company
Yeah and 6+ was < 10%. This list definitely seems biased toward the higher levels. 41 Staff SWEs and only 60 Senior SWEs is a crazy ratio. Consistent with the rumor that they targeted high comp packages.
Terminal level generally indicates a glass ceiling that most folks can't rise above. Senior and Staff are generally terminal levels for the rest of the industry.
I'm Steven, the uploader of the Airtable shared view here! I created airtable.cool as a side project for better social media previews and showing view descriptions. Didn't realize when I posted it this morning (on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevenqzhang_analysis-of-goog...) that it would go viral! Anyways, I think I fixed the performance issue that was causing airtable.cool to go down earlier
I was curious too - so I checked out the airtable.cool site which says this:
> Airtable.cool is a tool that gives you link previews and analytics for your existing Airtable shared view links.
> Airtable.cool is purely just a wrapper/user interface addition to Airtable.com shared views. We wrap the airtable.com form in an iframe so that previews and link tracking works, but all the data is hosted on Airtable.
I don't know much about the expectations, but if you're that high level then you're probably taking risks. Sometimes those risks pay off, sometimes they don't. Moreover, sometimes you just need time in-between for inspiration or for discovery.
Not sure, but they have to be doing something right for the organization to reach that level. I'm also for shaking things up though. It's time to breath new life into these companies.
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.
TIL; Google sure has a lot of titles. Curious, why is there SWE III but L4 (I presume level4?) or SWE II but L3? I wonder if it ever gets confusing to think about career progression there??
There have been L2s at various points in time for apprenticeships and things like that. They keep changing it so not sure if those folks are officially L2s anymore or even what the program is called.
Also there are L1 staff in data centers IIRC.
It’s not that confusing, for most roles you just start counting at 3.
There are also plenty of L2s on eng job ladders outside of SWE. The levels are kinda sorta roughly equivalent by pay across different roles, hence levels 1 and 2 don't exist in SWE because their pay is below the lowest any SWE would be making.
There was a transition period (think it was 1-2y) where nobody would be promoted to 7.5 anymore. People who were already 7.5 had the duration of the transition to try to get promoted to 8. If they were still 7.5 at the end of the period they were converted back to 7.
I am pretty sure the period in which you were at Google was after the transition started
The SWE ladder goes from L3 - L9. L5 is a place most average software engineers will stay. Getting above L6 as an individual contributor makes you a very special person.
The SWE ladder goes to L10 (Fellow). There's also Sr Fellow (L11) but that might be just Sanjay and Jeff, and I think Jeff is technically on the manager ladder as an SVP now.
Does an L9 trump a "senior staff engineer"? Back in the day when I used to interview engineers, I recall staff engineer being a very senior position at big businesses.
At most garden variety BigCorps that I'm aware of, these days staff engineer is basically anyone with a decent amount of experience. A step above senior, that's about it. Principal is next, and actually does have a bit more meaning, but still not _that_ special. Based on everything I've read, Google L9 easily trumps both of those positions and by a fairly large margin.
The official titles are 5 is senior, 6 is staff, 7 is senior staff. That doesn't necessarily map to how titles are at other companies though, a 7 IC is already rare enough that many engineers won't interact with any for years; even most 6s are manager types.
Staff Engineer is L6, and Senior Staff is L7. These are quite high, the vast majority of engineers at Google won’t make it to these levels. Depending on the the team/org, they may tackle large, complex problems and dictate the direction of functional areas and organizational strategy.
Thanks for this! I saw it on Facebook, and the person I got it from must have seen it on LinkedIn. As an Xoogler (not due to the layoff) I have an interest in this.
Any idea why the Page Up and Page Down buttons don't seem to be working on either of these presentation views? The experience is fundamentally broken on desktop. Having to scroll through a huge page (with a tiny scrollbar) is no fun at all when you can only do it with a mouse.
Think you would have to request the filings in California. You can view the list of warnings without a request of which you can find the numerous Google listings on Jan 20[1], but details I don't believe are published publicly.
Follow the link, click latest listings for 2022-present, and it should open a spreadsheet in chronological order.
Buy? yes. Keep? Depends if your use infringes on the companys rights and if it wants to cause you legal issues. A company having a trademark doesn't mean it owns every use of the word after all.
I'm Steven, the poster of this originally https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevenqzhang_analysis-of-goog... - you have to request records and then EDD will email you CSVs or word doc tables that you can then copy paste into google sheets/Airtable/etc. :) . see the pinned comment on the linkedin post
On Jan. 20, Google parent Alphabet announced it would slash 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce. CEO Sundar Pichai said he took “full responsibility” for the cuts after a pandemic-fueled hiring spree that increased the company's workforce by 14% in 2020 and 15% in 2021
They are technically separate as Moffett Air Field is federal land and not in Mountain View. In practice you can cross a bridge over Stevens Creek and go from one to the other, and they share snacks and bikes so they’re essentially treated as the same campus.
(I have to admit I was very confused how someone might get the acronyms all correct and misattribute the city…then I spotted that you pulled this from Google’s data.)
A lot of people are saying this biased towards letting go of high-paying engineers. Rather, from anecdotes I've heard, there seems to have been a focus on long-tenured folk (people who have been around for 10+ years).
There may have been some rationale that these folks are too comfortable, etc. But, when you let go of people who have been around that long, it sends a pretty bad message about how you treat long-standing contributors. I think it also underestimates the value those long-tenured folk bring purely by nature of having context on past decisions.
Would not the folks who've been around for 10+ years have comp way higher than a more recent hire given Google's 4+ year refresher structure coupled with stock growth?
Grants vest over four years so being there longer than that doesn’t organically increase your comp or give you more benefit from stock growth. I guess it could be different for people at very high levels
My complete asspull rationale when I saw the distinguished engineer got cut was that maybe they thought he wouldn't be as useful if Google tries to hard pivot into generative ai just because he was so focused on search as a topic. More generally high tenureship could come with baggage as to how they view the business and how things are just done. However, at the end of the day smart people are just smart people and even with a background in another discipline or lots of history at a company can adapt to new modalities of operation and still add value so I don't really believe it.
It is something I could see a manager or other suit saying though when looking over salaries to justify the decision...
You might applying very specific kinds of business mentality to incompatible verticals. Not everyone has "career growth" desires or expectations, or if they do, it is in very different ways. I don't think people go into the massage therapy industry thinking "I'm going to be a Director of Massage Therapy!"
> I don't think people go into the massage therapy industry thinking "I'm going to be a Director of Massage Therapy!"
Yeah, of course not. That would be ridiculous.
First you have to put in the work to make it to Senior Massage Therapist. Then Staff, Senior Staff, and finally Principal Massage Therapist — then you can do a lateral ladder transfer over to Director of Massage Therapy.
I think they are FTEs for historical reasons. If they were to be spun up from scratch today as a new perk to be offered, I highly doubt that they would be anything other than contractors (like how the cafe staffs are run).
That means they can be offered job back as contractor, for all you know they can band together, start a venture and offer their service to Goog and others. Afterall layoffs does not mean that there is cut back on employee perks.
I wonder what the calculus there was. I didn't even think it was possible to layoff anyone of that caliber.
Who decides that a L9 is going to be cut. Some VP who joined after the L9? The Board? The founders? Did the CEO make enough contributions to decide this cut?
I'm still stunned.