This is the first one where I've noticed that they have X amount of days to find another job in the company. I wonder how that works and what percentage of the 100 will actually not end up laid off.
This actually happened to me at Google in 2019. My position was eliminated and I was given 3 months to find a new role before I was axed. HR was extremely accommodating during this. I had a person to contact and to help keep me on track. I interviewed for a wide variety of teams, and there were tons of openings back then.
Ultimately I found a transfer role, but it was a bit past the deadline. With a couple days ago I went to HR with evidence that the transfer was in-progress and on track, and they extended that time for a couple weeks.
The funniest part was when I asked HR if I should come into the office while I was looking, and HR was like "I don't see why you'd bother".
The infuriating part was that my position was eliminated because the team lead didn't like me. Three weeks after my transfer deadline the position was re-opened. HR didn't really do anything about that, and my new manager asked me not to push on it.
> This is the first one where I've noticed that they have X amount of days to find another job in the company. I wonder how that works and what percentage of the 100 will actually not end up laid off.
A lot of this going on right now. Business is strong and companies don't necessarily want to let top talent go, but they simply can't afford the R&D expenditures anymore; it's all going to interest payments.
“simply choose not to afford” is more correct here. YouTube is in no danger of shuttering due to lack of revenue and financial support from the corporate entity that operates it. Instead, that entity is choosing to weaken YouTube by layoffs, rather than accept a decrease in net revenue after expenses. This may or may not stem from US taxation changes, but it is regardless critical to distinguish between cannot (e.g. “the business will collapse from debt if we don’t layoff workers”), versus, will not (e.g. “profitable business chooses to layoff x% workers rather than reduce profits x% due to tax law change”), when considering these tech layoffs. YouTube is not under threat of collapse due to lack of funding, so the latter applies.
To be fair, a 1.4% reduction in force isn't going to weaken YouTube. That's just some light spring cleaning. It's only newsworthy in the current zeitgeist.
You could probably do a 90% musk off and still be fine for years at YouTube. Maybe keep the content moderation team though… but developers could go. YouTube does not need new features just maintenance at this point
If the alternative to the layoff was the collapse of YouTube, then “cannot afford to” applies. Otherwise, “will not afford to” applies.
My point is that we should not implicitly frame layoffs as “cannot afford” without having evidence or claims to support that. If YouTube cannot afford 100 engineers, YouTube’s profitability at all hinges on $50mil/year of expenses, which is a rounding error to the overall business operating it.
It is highly unlikely that the future of YouTube hinges on the absence of these 100 engineers, given the financial and megacorp contexts available to us. Thus, usage of the “cannot afford” framing in this case comes across as an unsupported argument that YouTube is in severe financial distress.
If that distress is real, let’s hear more about it! If the layoffs were due to dire circumstances around funding and runway, that’s material and interesting news — and would explain why the corporation had no choice (“can’t afford”) in the matter.
The article mentions "operations and creator management teams". I didn't interpret that as engineers. But either way, if they aren't required, why pay the money? You can put it to something else instead.
> But either way, if they aren't required, why pay the money?
The way a lot of layoffs work isn't that those fired weren't required but rather that their work load gets spread out to the rest of the org slowing everything down.
For example, HP fired the in house IT staff and instead contracted it out to an offshore IT firm (which was not great). This lead to just about every department creating their own shadow IT group and a lot of things that should be easy to do (like granting permissions) becoming an absolute nightmare.
And where is that "something else"? Stock buybacks. [1]
I understand that businesses take short term loans to cover payroll as part of normal operating procedure, but Google in general makes shitloads of money - plenty to cover their payroll. They aren't sitting on a mountain of employees who need to be paid out of ever more expensive loans. They are sitting on a mountain of cash.
Ultimately I found a transfer role, but it was a bit past the deadline. With a couple days ago I went to HR with evidence that the transfer was in-progress and on track, and they extended that time for a couple weeks.
The funniest part was when I asked HR if I should come into the office while I was looking, and HR was like "I don't see why you'd bother".
The infuriating part was that my position was eliminated because the team lead didn't like me. Three weeks after my transfer deadline the position was re-opened. HR didn't really do anything about that, and my new manager asked me not to push on it.