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Google Layoffs
Friday, March 31st, 2023 10:48 pmOn Friday, January 20th, 2023, Google announced they would lay off approximately 12,000 employees. This was over two months ago, and I haven't blogged about it yet in part because I haven't been quite sure what to say. This post collects various thoughts I've had, but doesn't provide a narrative thread It's been 70 days of suck, and the process has almost reached the "everyone who was laid off is no longer at work" stage.
There didn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to the layoffs. Some projects were decimated and effectively cancelled. Other high-importance products lost a few people here and there. Folks with 15+ years of experience were cut, as were people who'd been at the company for three months. People who'd just been promoted were laid off, as were folks with a low performance rating—but plenty of folks with "moderate impact" were passed over. People who had been working on shutting down Stadia got laid off because their transfer to a new team hadn't gone through yet. My sibling team lost a fantastic member I'd been working with closely, presumably because their cost center was set to a different team in Geo due to a headcount trade four years ago, and the senior vice president who made the layoff decisions didn't realize they were tossing out someone doing great work an area so important that nobody else got laid off. Things like headcount and budgets always seem abstract and fluid at Google until all of a sudden they become rigid as a rock.
The next Monday, senior leaders hosted what was probably the most stilted all-hands meeting in Google history. Google's made tough decisions before, but they were frequently accompanied by a meeting where deciders shared the context and rationale with frankness and Googlers' questions were answered directly and empathetically. In addition to educating people about the decision, this had the effect of humanizing executives: they were on stage recognizing concerns and emotionally showing that they weren't completely happy that it had come to this. The layoffs meeting had none of that. The Q&A page went up on Friday afternoon U.S. time and closed on Sunday, meaning international employees didn't have a chance during work hours to ask their questions or vote on others. Everything said during the meeting was read from a script of language that some lawyer had clearly massaged, leading to a stilted delivery devoid of empathy. They cut one person "answer" two factual questions as basically "we can't share any information about that." True to form, Googlers sounded off live in our favorite internal peanut gallery: our meme posting service had by far its highest traffic ever; the tech lead and an SRE worked quickly to spin up several more servers worth of capacity to handle the magnified ray of anger, dissatisfaction, and disappointment in the form of captions on amusing pictures. We are, thankfully, still a company where people are committed to calling out executives on their questionable words and deeds.
I hate layoff euphemisms. A lot of Google leaders, and many ordinary Google employees, have used phrases like "This team had three people impacted by layoffs", or "I was affected by Google's layoffs." Everyone was impacted by the layoffs; some people were laid off (which itself is a bit of a weasel word for "fired without cause"). British English has a horrible euphemism for layoffs: I was made redundant. "Redundancy" suggests that two people are doing duplicative work and you could just have one person do it. These folks weren't doing redundant work; Google just decided they didn't want to keep doing the thing that person was doing.
The day of layoffs, I helped facilitate a video chat open forum for folks who were still there. I was honored to be able to help folks process whatever stage of grief they were at. It also provided an interesting lens on how things looked in different parts of the company. My larger team (roughly a hundred people) only lost a couple coworkers, which hits differently than the contractor who said every full time employee on their team had been laid off, they were now reporting to a vice president, and all the contractors were now responsible for winding down the project.
Employees in the United States who were laid off were informed by a message in their personal email at around 2am (depending on time zone). Anyone who isn't in the habit of checking their personal email first thing in the morning might have noticed something was amiss because the "work profile" version of the all the Google apps were no longer on their phone, they couldn't log into any work websites on their laptop, or they showed up at the office and their badge didn't work.
There's no perfect way to do a layoff, but that's a pretty terrible way. Googlers who leave usually send a farewell email to their team and to any social mailing lists they've been involved with. We've even got an "epitaphs" website that collects these farewell messages so someone who didn't realize someone had left can find their contact information and other thoughts they departed with. There's also been a tradition over the last six or eight years of folks writing thoughtful departure documents. These have ranged from "Here's a list of company actions I'm upset about" to "Here are some of the great things I was involved with." Not letting employees tell their own farewell story feels like a failure of basic decency.
Suddenly cutting employees off from even email also prevents people from responsibly handing off projects. There's a now famous story ofa Site Reliability Engineer who paged his team to let them know he'd been laid off during his oncall week and they should get someone to take his place. This commitment to operational reliability is quintessential SRE, but most projects don't have this kind of fallback option. The Monday after layoffs I realized I had an interview scheduled for that Wednesday that I wasn't a good fit for. I emailed the recruiter and the interview scheduler suggesting they find someone else to conduct the interview. I sent a friendly reminder email on Tuesday, then on Wednesday I tried to contact them on Google Chat. Googlers had figured out that if a chat message fails to send, it's a good indicator that someone's been laid off, whereas emails just go into the void with no out-of-office message. Sure enough, both the recruiter and scheduler had been laid off, so I joined the virtual interview and offered the Android candidate the choice of doing a backend system design interview or having me reach out to the hiring triage channel and get it rescheduled. They wisely chose the latter, though their chance of getting a job is probably still in limbo. This lack of handoff doesn't just affect business critical projects either: Google has a variety of social efforts, ranging from leadership roles in underrepresented affinity groups to silly employee badges that appear on the company directory. (I wrote a script to give a badge to anyone who submits code with a palindrome changelist number, for example.) Those bits of social glue and lubricant help make Google the wonderful place it is, and responsible Googlers often take care to put them in good hands when they're getting ready to move on to a new adventure.
Ironically, laid off Googlers in countries with more protracted legal processes have been able to retain access to email and other non-production systems for a few hours through a few days. As far as I'm aware, none of those folks have done anything untoward like leaking confidential information or disrupting anything, so evidence suggests the cruel midnight termination without notice maneuver was unnecessary.
Speaking of protracted legal processes, you may have heard Americans with a certain economic and political orientation say things like "France has economic challenges because it's too hard to fire people so businesses don't want to hire people." European countries do have more robust labor laws than the U.S.—a result of "socialism" not being a dirty word while they rebuilt after World War II—and every country seems to have a different process with worker councils and individual consultations and even (in Poland) a rule that a company can only hire from the pool of laid off workers for a year afterwords. European employees have thus become actors in a two-month tragicomedy of meetings and announcements and confusion and dispute. From this side of the pond it hasn't sounded like a great time, but they at least get to (a) proactively make sure important projects have coverage, (b) point out really bad layoff choices that were made without context, and (c) feel like they've got some degree of agency. I get the sense, though, that while the spirit of the law is that there should be collective negotiation between the company and employees, Google's generally been doing the bare legal minimum and constructing things so they can arrive at laying off the set of people they planned to lay off in January, regardless of what people say in so-called negotiation. In one example I've heard, a group in an office offered to take a pay cut to match the savings from laying people off, but that offer was ignored.
Deciding who to lay off before announcing layoffs also results in a suboptimal set of departures. People who were really excited to keep working at Google were shown the door while people who are burned out and starting to think about leaving don't have the opportunity to take a severance package and might instead hang around for awhile to "quiet quit" until the current glut of tech labor clears through the market.
Morale has been markedly low for the last two months. Last summer Google announced a lot of budget cuts, including cancelling travel with non-refundable tickets, in an effort to control costs in the "new economic reality" with high inflation, an end of cheap interest rates, and a shift in spending away from Internet businesses. As Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook announced big layoffs last fall, I and many other Googlers thought that Google wouldn't follow suit, that between cutting costs and a hundred billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet that Google would weather the economic storm while protecting its most valuable asset: smart people who are motivated by Google's mission and culture. Having jettisoned thousands of smart people without even the chance to say goodbye, a lot of remaining Googlers are reassessing their motivation and reflecting on the culture that's not like it was a few years ago.
There didn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to the layoffs. Some projects were decimated and effectively cancelled. Other high-importance products lost a few people here and there. Folks with 15+ years of experience were cut, as were people who'd been at the company for three months. People who'd just been promoted were laid off, as were folks with a low performance rating—but plenty of folks with "moderate impact" were passed over. People who had been working on shutting down Stadia got laid off because their transfer to a new team hadn't gone through yet. My sibling team lost a fantastic member I'd been working with closely, presumably because their cost center was set to a different team in Geo due to a headcount trade four years ago, and the senior vice president who made the layoff decisions didn't realize they were tossing out someone doing great work an area so important that nobody else got laid off. Things like headcount and budgets always seem abstract and fluid at Google until all of a sudden they become rigid as a rock.
The next Monday, senior leaders hosted what was probably the most stilted all-hands meeting in Google history. Google's made tough decisions before, but they were frequently accompanied by a meeting where deciders shared the context and rationale with frankness and Googlers' questions were answered directly and empathetically. In addition to educating people about the decision, this had the effect of humanizing executives: they were on stage recognizing concerns and emotionally showing that they weren't completely happy that it had come to this. The layoffs meeting had none of that. The Q&A page went up on Friday afternoon U.S. time and closed on Sunday, meaning international employees didn't have a chance during work hours to ask their questions or vote on others. Everything said during the meeting was read from a script of language that some lawyer had clearly massaged, leading to a stilted delivery devoid of empathy. They cut one person "answer" two factual questions as basically "we can't share any information about that." True to form, Googlers sounded off live in our favorite internal peanut gallery: our meme posting service had by far its highest traffic ever; the tech lead and an SRE worked quickly to spin up several more servers worth of capacity to handle the magnified ray of anger, dissatisfaction, and disappointment in the form of captions on amusing pictures. We are, thankfully, still a company where people are committed to calling out executives on their questionable words and deeds.
I hate layoff euphemisms. A lot of Google leaders, and many ordinary Google employees, have used phrases like "This team had three people impacted by layoffs", or "I was affected by Google's layoffs." Everyone was impacted by the layoffs; some people were laid off (which itself is a bit of a weasel word for "fired without cause"). British English has a horrible euphemism for layoffs: I was made redundant. "Redundancy" suggests that two people are doing duplicative work and you could just have one person do it. These folks weren't doing redundant work; Google just decided they didn't want to keep doing the thing that person was doing.
The day of layoffs, I helped facilitate a video chat open forum for folks who were still there. I was honored to be able to help folks process whatever stage of grief they were at. It also provided an interesting lens on how things looked in different parts of the company. My larger team (roughly a hundred people) only lost a couple coworkers, which hits differently than the contractor who said every full time employee on their team had been laid off, they were now reporting to a vice president, and all the contractors were now responsible for winding down the project.
Employees in the United States who were laid off were informed by a message in their personal email at around 2am (depending on time zone). Anyone who isn't in the habit of checking their personal email first thing in the morning might have noticed something was amiss because the "work profile" version of the all the Google apps were no longer on their phone, they couldn't log into any work websites on their laptop, or they showed up at the office and their badge didn't work.
There's no perfect way to do a layoff, but that's a pretty terrible way. Googlers who leave usually send a farewell email to their team and to any social mailing lists they've been involved with. We've even got an "epitaphs" website that collects these farewell messages so someone who didn't realize someone had left can find their contact information and other thoughts they departed with. There's also been a tradition over the last six or eight years of folks writing thoughtful departure documents. These have ranged from "Here's a list of company actions I'm upset about" to "Here are some of the great things I was involved with." Not letting employees tell their own farewell story feels like a failure of basic decency.
Suddenly cutting employees off from even email also prevents people from responsibly handing off projects. There's a now famous story ofa Site Reliability Engineer who paged his team to let them know he'd been laid off during his oncall week and they should get someone to take his place. This commitment to operational reliability is quintessential SRE, but most projects don't have this kind of fallback option. The Monday after layoffs I realized I had an interview scheduled for that Wednesday that I wasn't a good fit for. I emailed the recruiter and the interview scheduler suggesting they find someone else to conduct the interview. I sent a friendly reminder email on Tuesday, then on Wednesday I tried to contact them on Google Chat. Googlers had figured out that if a chat message fails to send, it's a good indicator that someone's been laid off, whereas emails just go into the void with no out-of-office message. Sure enough, both the recruiter and scheduler had been laid off, so I joined the virtual interview and offered the Android candidate the choice of doing a backend system design interview or having me reach out to the hiring triage channel and get it rescheduled. They wisely chose the latter, though their chance of getting a job is probably still in limbo. This lack of handoff doesn't just affect business critical projects either: Google has a variety of social efforts, ranging from leadership roles in underrepresented affinity groups to silly employee badges that appear on the company directory. (I wrote a script to give a badge to anyone who submits code with a palindrome changelist number, for example.) Those bits of social glue and lubricant help make Google the wonderful place it is, and responsible Googlers often take care to put them in good hands when they're getting ready to move on to a new adventure.
Ironically, laid off Googlers in countries with more protracted legal processes have been able to retain access to email and other non-production systems for a few hours through a few days. As far as I'm aware, none of those folks have done anything untoward like leaking confidential information or disrupting anything, so evidence suggests the cruel midnight termination without notice maneuver was unnecessary.
Speaking of protracted legal processes, you may have heard Americans with a certain economic and political orientation say things like "France has economic challenges because it's too hard to fire people so businesses don't want to hire people." European countries do have more robust labor laws than the U.S.—a result of "socialism" not being a dirty word while they rebuilt after World War II—and every country seems to have a different process with worker councils and individual consultations and even (in Poland) a rule that a company can only hire from the pool of laid off workers for a year afterwords. European employees have thus become actors in a two-month tragicomedy of meetings and announcements and confusion and dispute. From this side of the pond it hasn't sounded like a great time, but they at least get to (a) proactively make sure important projects have coverage, (b) point out really bad layoff choices that were made without context, and (c) feel like they've got some degree of agency. I get the sense, though, that while the spirit of the law is that there should be collective negotiation between the company and employees, Google's generally been doing the bare legal minimum and constructing things so they can arrive at laying off the set of people they planned to lay off in January, regardless of what people say in so-called negotiation. In one example I've heard, a group in an office offered to take a pay cut to match the savings from laying people off, but that offer was ignored.
Deciding who to lay off before announcing layoffs also results in a suboptimal set of departures. People who were really excited to keep working at Google were shown the door while people who are burned out and starting to think about leaving don't have the opportunity to take a severance package and might instead hang around for awhile to "quiet quit" until the current glut of tech labor clears through the market.
Morale has been markedly low for the last two months. Last summer Google announced a lot of budget cuts, including cancelling travel with non-refundable tickets, in an effort to control costs in the "new economic reality" with high inflation, an end of cheap interest rates, and a shift in spending away from Internet businesses. As Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook announced big layoffs last fall, I and many other Googlers thought that Google wouldn't follow suit, that between cutting costs and a hundred billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet that Google would weather the economic storm while protecting its most valuable asset: smart people who are motivated by Google's mission and culture. Having jettisoned thousands of smart people without even the chance to say goodbye, a lot of remaining Googlers are reassessing their motivation and reflecting on the culture that's not like it was a few years ago.
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