[AStellersSeaCow]

Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs.

It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.

Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.

On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.

All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.

[drblastoff]

> layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance

Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.

[AStellersSeaCow]

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/layoff.asp

First sentence: "A layoff is the temporary or permanent termination of employment by an employer for reasons unrelated to the employee's performance."

[drblastoff]

A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays?

“Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.” - https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311....

“Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation” - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

“Microsoft Uses Layoffs to Push Underperforming Employees Out” - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-p...

“They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...

[AStellersSeaCow]

I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".

Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors.

Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit.

It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.

[throwtothemoon]

Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team.

Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?

No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.

[AStellersSeaCow]

> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?

This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.

What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.

> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.

There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.

It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.

[bagacrap]

> "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".

Do you actually believe this to be the case? Why on Earth would Google do this? You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews, so at best this is just a hunch you have. Ask yourself if it's a hunch that makes sense.

Sundar is never going to actively cast shade on the people he just let go, but he did emphatically say "the process was far from random".

[AStellersSeaCow]

> You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews

I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by the layoffs, while people who were high performers in the current and/or prior cycles were impacted by the layoffs. The experiences of other people managers within the company (and at Amazon and Microsoft) agree with this.

I don't want to get too into Kremlinology, because I don't have enough data to say for sure how people in my org were selected beyond "performance wasn't a major consideration". But there is definite high-level tilt towards cutting people from certain areas in the company (parts of maps and devices were hit hard, most of cloud was barely impacted).

[szundi]

Parent commenter's point is that they have to fire some good performing to make it legally a layoff, not a mass firing.

[throwtothemoon]

The key definition people are missing here is "good performing". What does that mean? In times of macroeconomic certainty, companies are going to focus on core revenue generating business. It makes a ton of sense that some OSS folks got fired, because OSS doesn't generate revenue. Managed services generate revenue.

[berniedurfee]

Big companies typically execute layoffs in a way that minimizes the risk of discrimination litigation.

That usually means laying off a mass of people without consideration for their individual attributes.

Layoffs are literally never personal… at least in theory.

[lunarhustler]

I was under impression that in America you have at-will employment.

Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?

[lumb63]

I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.

[AStellersSeaCow]

People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability.

But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.

[ugh123]

>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.

Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.

[abigail95]

What law in California provides the difference between a normal firing and a layoff, with employee performance being a distinctive factor?