There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen. I’ll lay out the reasons below:
1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.
2. Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete since they likely won’t have prestigious firms on their resume already compared to FAANG that American Employees would have.
Open to policy suggestions but I don’t see any good methods that prevents new candidates from being unfairly disadvantaged and stops months of preparation being put to waste due to offers being revoked
On a general level sure maybe, but for this particular case, there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs. They're swimming in money and are highly profitable.
Pulling the rug out underneath a new employee who is days away from starting and moving his whole life to a new country is simply shitty behaviour.
Per The Goal, these sorts of broad untargeted cost-cutting measures usually hit revenue as hard as they do costs, I do wonder if Sundar’s “we're heading for a different economic reality” doom mindset will become a self-fulfilling prophecy... At Google that looks like "oh we lost our gov't contacts because we couldn't meet the new software build-chain rules in time because we were understaffed and trying to bet more people on Bard... now we have to lay off more people" and so on.
But they are definitely so flush with cash that any prediction of a doom spiral of every increasing cost-cutting measures would be way way premature.
They at least lost some money from ads from new possible products, if everything is doom and gloom. But these cost-cutting measures are just to be in the news and protect the price of their stocks (look, we are decreasing our costs). Because otherwise in the news it would be "look, people don't care about online products like it was 2020, so stocks should go down a bit".
I get that the HN crowd is sensitive to FAANG layoffs. That being said, it's hard to take seriously an anonymous comment claiming they know better than Google's executive board about whether or not they needed layoffs. Unless you were in those discussions, your ideas probably come from the same blog posts posted to HN in the last 6 months.
I don't stand to gain anything from defending them, but can we drop the hubris that almost any of us knows how these decisions are made at that level? I'm sure there's a C-suite or two skimming HN every once in a while, but most of us are regular old tech employees slinging code and talking to customers.
That doesn't make it any less awful for the people involved, and I feel for their situations.
I feel the opposite way, when you look at blunders like the Metaverse or Google's complete failure to capitalize on its work with LLMs, you really have to question whether the executive boards of FAANGs really know how to do anything but make themselves more money these days. I can't help but wonder if Google and other FAANGs would making more money and producing better products if the people slinging code and talking to customers were running the company.
I have no input on HN in general, but personally I don't work for FAANG nor do I want/intend to. I don't take issue with layoffs in general. I take issue with HOW they're done.
It's clear from all the news and HN coverage that whoever is responsible for the layoffs put in absolutely zero thought about compassion and empathy. For some well-paid engineers those layoffs probably didn't have a large effect on their financial situation. For a lot of other people, they probably did.
Take Google for example. Instead of notifying people about their layoff, a lot had to find out that they don't have a job anymore by trying to swipe their badge at the office entrance. They couldn't even bother to send an email.
That said, you're right. I don't know what's going on inside Google. But I don't need to know all the internal details to see that hiring thousands of people and then letting them go just 2-3 years later is simply stupid planning. From OPs story it also looks pretty apparent that there is not enough internal communication. They've had a hiring freeze for months, then apparently lifted it, then let people go. What exactly is the logical reason behind that? What business reason could there possibly be to do that?
> there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs
The trouble is, public companies like Google aren't owned by their execs anymore. They've lost control to a bunch of idiots on Wall Street. They optimize for stock price, not employee satisfaction, not customer satisfaction.
What about Meta? Zuckerberg can't be axed and controls 50+% of the voting shares. They are still doing big layoffs and cuts. They have also always been very aggressive about growth and hiring.
They are positioning it as more of a flattening, which may actually be what's happening but I'm guessing plenty of IC's are still losing their jobs there.
You only need to control about 10% to 15% of the stock to force through the kinds of layoffs and money saving activity that is happening. You don't even have to own that much, just band together with similar minded shareholders to form a voting block.
Zuckerberg is culturally very different to Larry and Sergey. VR was definitely an unusual choice, but if you look at the other choices he has made, he responds to the market.
The point with dual-share class is not that the person will automatically do things that are financially terrible, it is that you are beholden to that person's choices. Larry and, to a lesser extent, Sergey are known largely for making bad choices that benefit their employees/friends.
I think this is also due to the nature of their business: Google's search business is the most profitable business in the history of capitalism, you need to deploy almost no capital, you need almost no employees, and you can produce hundreds of billions in revenue...there is no business like it. Zuck is clearly aware that their core business is in decline and has been for a number of years so has been forced to make strategic choices. Google have had to do nothing, their execs are comical, the founders are clearly not up to it...but it doesn't matter. The result they get is nothing to do with the inputs going in.
Larry/Sergey is firmly in control of Google. Even if you buy up all the available GOOGL shares you will be outvoted by them. The company is not owned by Wall Street. Employees and most investors have GOOG stock that has no voting rights.
Usually, those "idiots" are pension funds, mutual funds, and ETFs owned by retail investors. And, this is normal for a mature company to no longer have insiders control the vast majority of voting shares.
Also, Netflix free float stock is no longer controlled by a few people. It is widely held, and it hasn't lost sight of its mission. It continues to optimize employee and customer satisfaction with great success for their stock price. (No, I am not a shill for Netflix.)
Money needs to have a return, even internally. Saying "we can afford it" buys you goodwill, but the same way employer goodwill towards employees shifts with the wind, so does consumer and employee sentiment.
People do not generally pick their grocery cart or smartphone based on how the brand makes them "feel". Upper middle class professionals with six figure plus salaries might, but they are far in the minority.
I will only respond to the last paragraph: Google could have done themselves a huge (reputational) favour by offering 5-10K USD compensation to these people. It was already budgeted -- usually 5K+ for single person to move country. And, they should have gone on a PR blitz about "making things right". Whether or not you agree with these PR campaigns, they work for many people. It's hard to resist feel good propaganda spread by marketing pros.
Another trick they could have used to avoid this problem: Replace each signed new hire with another layoff. Sure, in the very short term, it is harmful to the org, but how many people are we talking about? Maybe 500 signed offer letters? Also: Try offering money first. If candidate refuses, layoff another person internally.
> there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs
There is. These large tech companies were growing headcount at 20-30%/year, maybe even more at peak. And their revenue is now flat. If you are growing headcount 20% year and revenue isn't going up, what does that indicate?
The purpose of a company is to sell things that people want, not provide welfare for the well-educated (Google is one of the worst for this, they are still massively, massively, massively overstaffed but the dual share class has insulated them...they are basically a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly...btw, almost every monopoly I have seen in the wild ends up this way, execs always go native).
Why do you think rounds would be higher if an offer is unrevokable? That makes no sense to me. At the very least, companies rescinding offers should make a payment equal to a few months of pay. This trend of companies revoking offers and saying "too bad, sorry you quit your job, sold your house and most of your belongings for us."
i'm not saying that the company has no responsibility... any company (even one as massive as google) can do better than an email and "so bad so sad".
However, regardless of economic factors, the process of quitting your job, selling your house, and most of your belongings is inherently risky! In this case its VERY high risk VERY high reward (at least in my estimation).
This definitely disadvantages people needing to relocate for that dream job, but we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision.
> we can't eliminate the risk of such a massive decision
Lol we literally can, or at least mitigate. It’s easy to pass a law (if the particular legislature works for its people and not the corporate interests) that makes job offers binding and getting out of them requires making the other party at least partially whole.
>This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10
Not sure if I agree with this...
Is hiring in European countries with stronger labor laws harder? AFAIK the number of rounds is the same.
In European countries they have the concept of probation period to protect against an employee who isn't the right fit. We do as well in America, it's just called "at-will employment", so it's pretty much your entire tenure.
Different on a country-by-country basis but generally not really. For example, it's pretty common to have a 6 month probation period in Germany where both the employee and employer can quit/let go at any time with a 2 week notice period.
You can negotiate that clause away. An employer that wants at-will employment periods should pay US wages or at least contractor rates for those periods.
It's not. You can always fire someone who doesn't do their job. It's slightly harder to fire someone for having the wrong haircut. You can always try constructive dismissal, the penalties are peanuts. Or buy out their permanent contract, it's pretty cheap like an American sign-on bonus.
>There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesn't happen.
Google is making 25% profit on massive revenues, they're easily in the 10 best performing companies in the US. There's not a good economic reason for them to do something like this.
> Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.
I don't see what one has to do with the other. You only extend an offer after you've vetted the candidate, and afterwards there is no more screening, so sudden revocation doesn't have anything to do with candidate quality and everything to do with economic conditions. One might imagine that strict laws against early termination of a contract would lead to less hiring when the company fears that they might be affected by a downturn... but that would then pretty much be the intended purpose, to think twice before you can afford someone before hiring them?
It is incredibly connected. There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. If companies feel they need 4 or 5 rounds of interviews today before making an offer and you all of a sudden mandate that there's more of a risk for making an offer, they might decide on an extra round or two of interviews to try and be even more certain about their decision.
Personally I think a lot of the issues around hiring could be solved by making firing much more trivial and less risky for businesses: this would make a lot of the process around hiring and the many extra rounds of interviews less important. Companies would be a lot more incentivized to give people they like a shot and see if they can hack it in a role or not. This would IMO be a big improvement for say self-taught developers or those with non-traditional backgrounds who can get easily dismissed because they present more of a risk than somebody who went to X good school and worked at big corporation for Y years.
> There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred.
Why does it increase the risk? Are they regularly screwing over hires like this? If so, it's good to force the behavior change. If they only screw over hires like this in economic downturns, then "more rounds" wouldn't affect that so they wouldn't add more rounds.
I understand your perspective here. I think everybody is rightly outraged and has their blood boiling when they hear stories about employers screwing over hires. I'm right there with you for wanting fairness and a good process.
What's the solution to improving job-seekers lives though? I think this is a case where the incentives are really counterintuitive and solutions that sound good are the wrong ones to make peoples' lives overall better.
On the surface, it sounds great to focus on a goal oriented outcome and give employees better protections and make firing harder. Giving Americans European style workers rights sounds great. But in practice, I think that just makes the hiring process a nightmare and makes it a risk for businesses to try and add anybody because there's always a chance that things don't work out for some reason. This is why there's so many stupid rounds of interviews and hoops to jump through for every position now.
I think we'd go a long way to making hiring much better by doing the counterintuitive thing: making firing much easier and reduce business risk as much as possible. Make the risk for businesses nearly zero for hiring anybody because it's so easy to reverse things if they don't work out, and all of a sudden the incentive for multiple round interview processes goes away because you'd want to rush and snatch up anybody you like and want to give a shot without risking losing them in a 6 week multi-round interview process.
Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.
Feel free to hate me for saying all of that. I know it sounds bad on the surface and I can't really articulate this theory in a way that's perfectly convincing. But this is one of those things that for some reason makes perfect sense to me and is a strong gut feeling as the correct thing. Also note that I'm a job seeker at the moment, and I'm saying all of the above through a self-interested lens of wanting to make the hiring process as simple as possible.
> Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.
I'm not disagreeing with that in general, but I want an explanation of where the additional risk would come from in this situation. And why, because of that specific risk, companies would do something like add more hiring rounds.
If the additional risk is just getting stuck with an employee during a downturn, more hiring rounds wouldn't affect that, so there would be no reason to add them.
Also it seems like it's currently pretty easy to fire people. I'm not at all confident you could reduce the hiring process by making firing even easier. And how do you propose handling the people that already have jobs and need a commitment before quitting them?
The Effect of that kind of policy was already tried in Italy to a certain extent.
The result was that For every new "Temporary Investment" (meaning a project that needed 1-3 years of pushing) Noone was hiring and everyone, no exceptions was "renting" bodies from "consultancy firms". The result was distatrous for the companies that needed to pay Consultancy prices because they could not afford to hire without being able to downsize after 1-3 years and the employees who ended up in the consultancy sweat shops because they were pratically the only ones who would offer to hire. The salaries stagnated because the market stagnated (and still Italian Salaries in Tech are among the lowest in all EU). The only ones who profited from this were the middle men.
Many still see this kind of a policy as something to be admired but I would rather have a vibrating market and change jobs every 2-3 years rather than "settling for life" like the proponents of this system predicate at a sweat shop.
Google is profitable. They are not losing money, and they are in no danger of becoming unprofitable because of payroll. If we lived in world where folks measured things in a normal light, Google would not have frozen hiring, rescinded offers, and laid-off thousands. We live in the upside down world. We have to stop accepting the crazy, upside-down values of the modern world. The world would be better if Google just wanted to be an awesome search engine that made money by being great, instead of trying to grow quarter after quarter (unsustainable in the long run).
eh... Google, more than your average publicly traded company, does rely on external investment by way of the stock in order to conduct its operations. In particular, a very large percent of compensation, especially for the most valued employees, is equity-based.
Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Hence, profits were down. The C-suite's insight into the future seems to be that future revenues are not going to make up for the current cost structure. The stock price is roughly correlated with profits (let's ignore NVDA for a moment). So to keep the stock price afloat, profits must be propped up. If the stock price drops, all employees are suddenly paid less, especially the ones you value most. So not doing layoffs is equivalent to giving everyone a pay cut. Pay cuts are even worse for morale and long-term company performance than layoffs. The choice seems clear to me.
On top of that, when you're a publicly traded company, your obligation to your shareholders is at least as great as your obligation to employees. If you don't like that agreement, don't go public (as a worker, don't agree to work for a for-profit company). Google is a for-profit, not a cooperative.
> Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up.
Wrong. Google made 181.69 billion in 2020, 256.74B in 2021 [1] and 283B in 2022 [2]. A 10% YoY increase [2] is better than most of the years they have been public. They possibly made more money in last 2.5 years than all the years they have been public combined.
> Are you saying most employees would prefer losing their job or living without job security over a pay cut with job security?
Pay cuts don’t come with job security. You can get laid off after a pay cut as easily as without one.
Employees prefer not having their pay cut. The ones that are dismissed aren’t employees any more, so from the narrow perspective of the organization dismissing them, their morale doesn’t matter. Pay cuts impact the morale of the people still working more than lay offs do.
Now, where pay cuts – especially explicitly and enforceably temporary ones – come with some real measure of job security as a way of avoiding layoffs, that can be different, but that usually only happens where there is a specific contractual arrangement, usually via a preexisting union and labor-management negotiation (and even there its tricky, especially in the private sector, because firm guarantees are hard.)
Here in Germany nobody would move based on an offer, only based on a signed employment contract. Of course you can terminate the contract, but there commonly is a clause that you can't terminate the contract before it starts (to protect both parties from the other party backing out). And even if that clause doesn't exist, by law there is at a minimum a two week notice period, so this example of a company walking back on it a week before isn't possible. And while relocation reimbursements typically would contain a clause that effectively vests it over X years (meaning you have to pay part of it back if you quit) this clause legally can't apply in a case like this where there's no fault of the employee (he wasn't even there to potentially do something wrong).
Despite these basic protections, we still manage to hire people around here.
I felt the same way about the big tech layoffs and hiring freezes in 2008-2009. (Followed by huge, across the board, non-merit based salary boosts in 2010 and a hot job market to follow.)
For the startups maybe it's a different calculus, but for the big guys they're mostly doing fine and it's not really about cutting costs. It's that some group of consensus-makers decided that laying off is the appropriate, responsible, even inevitable trend in business.
Relatedly, when the socially acceptable thing was to over-hire blindly, few people called them out.
This simply isnt true. The idea that every cost of regulation is born entirely by the non-corporate party is corporate PR.
Unionizing does not result in worse outcomes for employees or new hires. Lawsuits don't raise the prices of McDonald's coffee. And stronger labor laws won't stop companies from needing personnel. It might move the needle a little, but these things are subject to more forces than you are imagining here, and most of them are much stronger than the offchance that you would need to pay to relocate someone you are immediately terminating.
Random thought... maybe international offers have relocation costs up to just several thousand dollars if the offer is canceled like this. The cost scales with revenue of the company and salary offered, so it's almost nothing for small business. I don't think it would be too onerous on Google to take a hit of a few thousand dollars for cases like this. Not nearly enough to ignore international talent. Unfortunately it will likely never happen because it's a USA law to protect foreigners against USA companies.
The issue is these businesses are hiring without strategy, consideration to risk, or proper forecasting. There should never be a situation within a fortune 100 business where the forecasting is so poor that offers are rescinded. I began making household budget accommodations for the macro economic situation in the first half of 2022. What was google doing at this point? How does a business spend $20-30K on the search process, send out an offer, then all the sudden realize they don't want to hire that person? What cascade of management failures is required for that to even be a possibility? How is it that these businesses don't consider the human cost of these decisions?
This sort of action is unprofessional, questionably moral, and unforgivable. I think the FANG companies were/are overrated. Why would you want to work for a business displaying this level of incompetence?
The reason is that they are deadly afraid of mass layoffs being leaked beforehand and causing the stock price to slide or a bunch of negative press about it, so the people who know aren't telling anyone but the VIPs in the company about it until the last possible minute.
They are getting a bunch of negative press for rescinding job offers. This doesn't seem any better. Better would be just not hiring people you don't need and not chasing growth like an unmonitored heroin addict.
I'm a big believer in automation. To me, it's kinda the point of being a programmer. But it intrigues me how eager some are to eliminate all human aspects from everything. Hiring, firing, building, shrinking. Let's just automate it all with a recursive algorithm. It's just business. Nothing personal.
I'm a human. I want to be personal.
Yes, there are billions of us and I'm pretty interchangeable. But...
I get interested in silly things like when somebody gets a pay raise because they got married. What kind of business sense does that make? It's debatable. But it makes obvious people sense.
I rather enjoy living in a people world, even while I work every day to automate it.
> 1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.
The problem isn't quality of candidate, the problem is unknown business changes. Sitting on your hands for 10 rounds vs 5 won't fix those unknowns.
Certainly companies might respond this way, but it makes no sense and won't actually prevent them from giving an offer to someone in the face of unknown layoffs.
Agreed, I don't think there would be any benefit to increase the number of rounds. Guessing there would be no extra signal with the marginal rounds, but candidate frustration would be through the roof. I'm already frustrated with 5 ha.
> Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete
Laws are generally created to benefit people who are not described as “overseas”
I’m not sure why you are referring to the “land of the free,” as I was referring to laws of countries in general. Laws are nearly always created to benefit the country creating them.
In this case, you could probably just impose a severance if an offer is terminated before X days (say 40) on the job without employee malfeasance; the problem with banning revoking offers is that the downside is very large. If companies had to pay out a few thousand bucks every time they screwed up like this, they'd have to be more cautious, but I don't think it would tip the scales towards not hiring at all or depending on consultants, etc. To avoid excessive moral hazard, the severance value should be calculated based on (X - Y)/2, where X is the minimum days worked and Y is the actual days worked.
> There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesnt happen.
I'm absolutely not interesting in arguing for any great solution but I do think people would serve their own interests better applying for jobs that fill needs and not that fill seats. I recognize it's easier said than done, but I really despise the livestock-based personnel management approach that infests most of big corporate.
Or companies will simply use the trial period to terminate.
Painful as it is it's much better to get a revocation of offer than for the company to go through the motions just to arrive at the "clear" moment of trial period and terminate you position after 1 month.
It's a strawman. If a company decided they were going to hire someone, they wouldn't suddenly decide to spend twice as much hiring that person, just in case they have a layoff in the future. It just doesn't follow
What if laws required companies with > N employees to pay M months of severance + any relocation reimbursements they promised if they terminate the employment agreement for reasons other than employee misconduct?
1. Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.
2. Ban revoking offers only for overseas employees (who are hurt most by this). This will ensure that the hiring bar for overseas employees is set sky high and it will already be harder for them to compete since they likely won’t have prestigious firms on their resume already compared to FAANG that American Employees would have.
Open to policy suggestions but I don’t see any good methods that prevents new candidates from being unfairly disadvantaged and stops months of preparation being put to waste due to offers being revoked