Googler... ex-Googler
I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck.
To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos).
What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?
I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.
> But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.
Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.
One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.
Godspeed!
I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly.
They are themselves cogs in the machine.
A machine that goes all the way to the executive class, and they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.
We all participate in this hostile culture, in various ways. Usually using the excuse that we need to pay rent, eat, find the work interesting, or with some other excuse that justify the means.
It seems like it's hard to do the right thing when you have something you want to buy or otherwise spent your whole life getting here, before realizing what here is.
The reality of one's lack of value to one's own employer is often baffling. It makes you wonder how anyone manages to stay employed at all, since apparently everyone is replicable and unimportant. I have been through layoffs where other people on my team, doing the same job I did approximately as well, got laid off. No explanation given for why them and not me. And it could happen to me at any time.
It doesn't matter how good my evals are or how big my contributions. It doesn't matter that there are multiple multi-million-dollar revenue streams which exist in large part due to my contributions. It doesn't matter that I have been told I am good enough that I should be promoted to the next level. Raises barely exist, let alone promotions. Because theoretically some other engineer could have done the same work I actually did, the fact that I'm the one who did it doesn't matter and I deserve no reward for doing it beyond the minimum money necessary to secure my labor.
Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause? If the company doesn't see me as more than X dollars for X revenue, why should I?
That was painful to read.
I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition.
Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs, none of us did. Folks I talked to on the inside stopped just short of saying that was why we were chosen.
It was especially galling because years before at the company that eventually got acquired by Google, I survived a round of layoffs, and leadership issued stay bonuses for everyone who was left. Those bonuses explicitly stated that they were still valid in the event that we were laid off before their time period was up.
Big companies are soulless.
I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:
- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
Right, okay, let's look at their most recent SEC filling to see how much money they lost in 2024 to justify layoffs... right, they made 350 billion in revenue (the highest ever in their history from what I can see) with a 100 billion in net income. Yep, this checks out, they definitely need to lay off people, can't afford them.
ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.
Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.
I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).
I have been in a similar situation, on a Saturday morning right after a farewell for a colleague and planning for next big release and timelines, late Friday.
I got an email from my company early on next Saturday, so I tried to log into my laptop which was now wiped(to my horror).
At that very moment I checked my DMs and realized most of my team was out the door.
No warnings, no justification. I had been promised promotion, I had been promised growth, and I had already seen a round of layoffs with promises to not do more. We were the "valued" members and we were needed.
Well not so much I guess.
Now I don't care, tbh maybe I still do. I want to, just not care though, and I am always prepared, if even a single bad sign comes up I will be out. But I don't know if I will still see it coming.
I just want to tell to anyone else in a similar situation, don't be sad often it might be a good thing.
I managed to land jobs within the same month and my next job paid me over 2x my previous one. And it helped me grow in my career.
I have changed a lot more jobs till date and I love what I do now, but I still often care too much.
I hope people can find hope here.
Also a couple of my friends had similar luck and one of my former colleagues also now has a startup of their own, they built it on top of their open source project that got surprisingly popular.
Best of luck, world can be rough but, I hope folks just don't stop trying to do something to improve it for themselves and rest of us.
And F execs, I guess. :)
> Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too.
I don't want to sound condescending, but if being forced out of the job means end for your relationships built for years, maybe these relationships weren't built as they should. They should have been built with the people as people, not coworkers, and definitely not using company as the communication ground.
This is a wild read for someone that has spent the bulk of their career as a "mercenary" for small to mid-size largely non-tech companies (e.g., their product wasn't purely technical) and no matter what the official company Koolaid line was, you always know you are one "restructuring" away from being made redundant, the company doesn't give a crap about you or your contributions, and you very much are a "cog." I've been blessed to work for a company or two where this was less the case than others, and more or less bought into their own culture hype, but it's still fundamentally this way, the relationship between employer and employee. It's sad and interesting to me to see what sounds like an experienced developer for such a large company coming to this realization all at once. Given what I've read and learned about Google layoffs since ~2022 this seems pretty bog standard large company stuff.
Everyone is replaceable/expendable, even if you actually aren't, it doesn't matter. It isn't worth investing so much emotional energy and your personal identity into a company unless you are a major shareholder.
> Googler...
Whole things reads like someone leaving a cult.
It's ok to be sad about leaving a job but your identity shouldn't be so tied up in it that you're crying in a blog post online.
We all lose jobs and we all get on with it. Obviously they're talented and will land fine somewhere.
I'm not trying to be mean but it's bad that a person can get upset to this point around a job. The corp isn't caring.
I also work in a big tech company. We had bunch of layoffs, some based on performance (which often was a lie), some random. In all instances, the company made a lot of money and kept hiring at a high pace.
At that stage, I know I'll be laid off eventually for one reason or another, I just don't know when. My partner tells me that I should quit on my own terms so I'm not depressed when it happens. But my salary is very competitive, and I'll get severance too. Still, I fear this moment and it's really hard to feel invested in the company. If it wasn't for my colleagues, I think I'd be slacking, waiting for my time.
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp"
Yup. Must have been a horrific wake up call :(
It can be shock to discover how little the company as an entity, and its upper management in particular, actually values you (or any other employee.) Employees are indeed cogs in a megacorp, and the relationship is transactional. The company demands loyalty because it can and because it is profitable, not because it will be reciprocated.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/google-layoffs-andr...
> Google laid off hundreds of employees from its platforms and devices unit, the team responsible for the Android operating system, Pixel phones and Chrome browser. The move, first reported by the Information, comes months after Google offered voluntary buyouts to all 20,000 employees in the division, signaling deeper structural changes at the tech giant.
You’re always a cog. Don’t treat a job with passion unless you’re getting something more than a salary from it - e.g. more professional networking, expanded skill set for your next role, etc. This seems to happen too often. Be invested in your career not the company you work for.
All the talk about doing great things as a team is usually all b.s. It’s just excellent theater. Most of us are side actors in someone else’s script and believe we have the lead role.
As an ex-Googler I say: blessing in disguise. When working at a $MEGACORP it's easy to think there's barren wasteland out there beyond the walls, so it's scary. But that is very much not so. I get that opportunities to work on browsers are relatively few and far between, but if you can do something else, try working for a smaller company which treats you more like a human being, and less like a replaceable cog.
Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
The most important takeaway is this:
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp."
Remember, if you don't own it this is always the case.
ALWAYS!
First, this is pretty rough what happened to the person. My condolences.
Second, completely tangential to the content of the blog post: Was anyone else surprised by the number of comments/"mentions"/likes/reposts? I haven't seen so much activity on a single blog post in years. Normally, blog posts that accept comments have 10 or less comments. This one has hundreds.
It’s always sad to see people lose their jobs, but it’s telling how often it’s ex-Googlers posting about layoffs. Feels like a lot of the shock is just realizing they’re just as replaceable and as much of a "cog in the machine" as everyone else. Google spent years selling the idea that it was special, but this feels like a real coming back down to earth moment for the employees.
I hate to say it...but this is how working for a company works. It's more prevalent at the largest ones and less so at the smallest ones, but it's just the norm.
In the US, it's at-will employment. You can leave, or be fired, at any time - for virtually any reason. (As long as it doesn't break discrimination laws) Investors only care about quarterly returns, and so you have to expect a publicly-traded company may let people go for that reason alone.
They're not your friends. They're not your family. You exchange hours of your life for money. That's all. It sucks, but that's just how it is. Google is no exception, it is one company like literally all others.
Weirdly, Amazon had far more compassion than Google here. When my role got eliminated at Amazon, I got an email at 5am PT to my personal email telling me that my role was eliminated. It also told me what I would still have access to, and how to access them from the outside.
Crucially, it said that I would still have limited corp access until 1pm, and then told me which things I still had access to.
I got on my work machine, and found that all of my previous emails had been erased (or at least blocked from my view), so I couldn't download an email archive or otherwise see anything. I also couldn't send emails externally anymore. Most of my systems access had been cut off where I could have downloaded or exported anything "secret" as per the email.
But they did let me send emails internally. I still had slack access to affinity groups. So I was able to shoot off a bunch of goodbye emails and slack messages.
And true to their word, at 1pm, my laptop rebooted and I was then locked out. But at least I got to say goodbye and share my personal email and linkedin with a bunch of people, and they were able to send me "so sorry to see you go" replies, which was nice.
Must be a Chrome developer. His blog is frustratingly hard to read on Firefox. I felt like I was going blind in real time.
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Love sudden realization.
I wonder how many people within companies think “well, they are a cog, but I’m certainly not” just to be left on a road soon after.
Content aside, does anyone else have poor scrolling performance on his blog? I saw similar issues on both mobile and desktop, what's with that?
It sucks and especially the abruptness, but I find it hard to muster sympathy. Google employees receive some of the highest renumeration in the industry. Combined with the prestige of Google on his resume he'll land back on his feet in no time.
If you haven't seen Argyle's gui-challenges series, it's some of the best content I've found for learning how to use a variety of cutting-edge CSS features. I thought he was one of the best voices for the Chrome team.
A company with $350B in annual Revenue, $200B in Gross Profit, $100B in Cash in the bank lays off a few hundred people making a few hundred thousand dollars a year each, the savings amount to rounding errors. It's hard to understand what these Tech companies are trying to accomplish with the never ending rolling layoffs other than to engender fear in the workforce. It's like all that Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting stuff a few years back broke the collective brains of the C-Suite and they decided they just cannot tolerate labor having any sort of bargaining power at all and needed to mete out punishment to put workers back in their place.
Google is one of those places where you never need to ask if someone worked there.
Everything seems random if you lack information.
My bet would be that the author's compensation was one of the highest among his peers on the same role.
This is to me, btw, is a sign of a well built relationship with a colleague: you know each other's compensation.
I wonder if there is some megacorp regression to the mean going on here. Google holds itself up as somehow special, and I think that it's right to be cynical about that today. I also think there was a golden age of sorts, back when real-world distributed systems were much more fringe, and Google was a legitimate trailblazer. Then, the spreadsheet number crunchers come in, and the elves leave Middle Earth[1].
[1]: In reference to this famous essay: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
>I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
This article could have been interesting if they talked about why they ever thought they weren't just a cog. Like what cognitive blinders did they have on? Does Google have a unusually effective "we're all a family" type of internal propaganda?
>I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Boy, this whole post sure has a lot of "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" about it.
« Relationships that took me years to cultivate… mostly going to be gone too »
Why? What prevents you from spending time with your ex-colleagues?
I guess the lesson is: don’t get emotionally attached to your job. Despite all the “we’re like a family” talk, at the end of the day, you’re just an employee. Never forget that.
Offboarding is when any illusion of your non-cog relationship to a company is belied. You're suddenly a virus that the immune response is trying to destroy. Your presence is a threat to the host that must be eliminated. On the one hand you wish companies would be a little more human about it: it's me, I'm not a criminal! On the other hand, they've got security controls that almost mandate a swift and pitiless execution.
> Works for massive advertising company on Chrome, the browser widely known for anti-competitive practices and destroying the ecosystem of the Web.
> Surprised when company does nasty, profit-driven thing.
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Yes, you were. Next time, please choose a company that contributes to society rather than shoving ads in everyone's faces.
A strong but constant reminder that companies are not your family or friends despite what will say the corporate bullshit.
You should never invest more of your time and energy than what is expected for your position. And keep your side activities and hobbies as personal things using your personal email and accounts.
This is also why you should not owe fidelity to your company and don't hesitate to switch if you have a good opportunity because on its side the company will not hesitate.
Everything might be good and you can generate money, and still the day you are in a redundancy for whatever reason you will be worthing nothing to the company. Like that, just like a replaceable cog. And you will be badly handled because "it is the company policy and we can't do anything than being harsh in such a situation".
The worse is that usually the decision is non-sense but the one deciding is not the one that has to deal with the decision and with you. So you will try to argue, and they will try to invent reasons to rationalize the decision that is imposed on them also, you will try to contest, and they will become angry to have their bullshit called and will double down... And you will feel bad, not understand the situation.
The only thing I can tell you is the that if you are in such a situation is to not worry and go on, except in rare cases, for everyone I saw it happened, the event was finally for the best because the next step in their life was better in the end: better job, better salary, better project, being able to do what you always dreamed to like create a company or evolve your career.
I was laid off (as a founding engineer) nine years ago from a startup. It __still__ burns to this day.
There's a betrayal in there that is hard to let go. It was a catalyst for burnout and an overall vitriol for the entire tech industry that hasn't really let up to this day.
Luckily, I created a product that has given me financial freedom with zero employees. I don't think I'd have made it if I kept working for people.
Layoffs are one thing, but to be cut off without any notice, that really sucks. I usually know months in advance that when I'll leave, so I'll have time to finish what I'm working on and train the people who will take over my responsibilities. It seems weirdly destructive for a company not to allow for that.
As for email, calendar etc, I think the lesson here is not to depend on anything from your employer. Keep everything under your own control, so you won't lose too much when you get fired.
Got my role terminated when I was taking care of my father in India.
Worked a research institute in Germany, used my vacation days and kept writing code to improve the project. I was the sole developer.
For a month, I worked remotely , then i get 3 notices for not coming to office. In a week, I was terminated for not showing up in office, though i was working remotely.
In a shock, accepted the mutual termination agreement. No severance, access cut to email/chat.
Not related to the layoff (I'm very sad for what author is experiencing), but the blog looking is very great and functional. Looking on the page code I see that is using a CSS framework that I'm never heard off Open Pros (https://open-props.style/), looks like a much better solution than Tailwind and friends. I see that a components collection is the development too Open Props UI (https://open-props-ui.netlify.app/)
I didn’t see one mention of AI related feature or talk they were working on.. that’s the real reason. If you’re not wasting time peddling some AI feature that nobody will ever use or give a second look, you are not onboard the hype train.
Does Google (or whoever is making these decisions) think that layoffs are in the long-term best interest of the company? If so, are they correct?
Or is it related to the possibility that Google may have to divest itself of Chrome due to anti-trust enforcement?
I’m sorry that this happened to him. There are innumerable ways to let go of people with dignity. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this treatment from Google. It will not be the last. Google is a great company with great people. Google is incompetent at handling layoffs. They could learn from banks on Wall Street. The banks do layoffs routinely and have a process that’s more empathetic than Google, and that’s not a high bar.
Sorry to hear. I have never worked for Google or any corporation of that scale but I got my fair share of a harsh layoff two years ago (at a reasonably small company). The company used to run a hybrid shift, with specific days for remote and onsite. We got a mail (from the higher ups) a day before saying no employee should show up at the office the next day, under the guise of a fumigation exercise. The next day shows up, I am in a meeting with my colleagues (a regular standup), a fraction of my teammates receive an email with an meeting invite link. We join the meeting, our mics and cameras were automatically turned off by the host/organizer, the CEO's face spotlit in the meeting, he then delivered the news in a very cold way, the meeting ended, we were logged out of all company accounts in the next 15 minutes, that was the last team meeting we had :)
Sounds like work colleagues should have a signal chat, or at least whatsapp, to stay in touch when someone suddenly disappears from the company. Not to take revenge or leak company secrets or anything like that, just to stay in touch and meet up for social events occasionally. If someone at work is my friend, that doesn't end when they're fired and I support them as much as I can in difficult times.
My condolences. Both to Adam and Google. Here is a relevant poem I found once. [0]
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54305/the-cloud-corpo...
having been in your position a year ago, I can definitely sympathise :(
the one thing I can say (again, from experience with having worked for google while engaging with the open source world as part of my job) is that the relationships you have been building up might well survive the loss of your job, especially if your next job ends up being in the same general area. also, i can highly recommend starting a group chat with your ex-team, that was really good for all of us in the time following the layoff.
> But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.
Isn't Chromium open-source ? Also, please don't use your corporate calendar for personal stuff...
The author listed the tasks that were coming up for him at Google, and yet Google still let him go. It doesn’t matter what your role is or how important your tasks are, a company can always replace you. Management doesn’t care, because you’re just a cog in the machine.
Yep, it sucks. Speaking from experience - I was laid off a few years ago. I was sad my time ended, but my path forward was to leave SF with money and time to visit countries I'd always wanted to see.
It's a trend away from the post-WW2 "promise of lifetime employment". Over the decades, companies have crept toward "human autoscaling" so slow no one noticed. You're far from alone - every other company is doing it. Go see the numbers at https://layoffs.fyi . When the whole industry is doing something, companies must follow suit to stay alive.
Nurture your network! Keep being present on their feeds. Reach out to the ones on your team that you had personal relationships with. Some will shun you; it's not personal, they're ashamed and fearful. It is human nature, same as the company's behavior toward you is a company's nature.
There was never a better time to take things into your own hands. Go look at @IndyDevDan's content on youtube and test the limits with agentic coding: https://agenticengineer.com/state-of-ai-coding/engineering-w...
Spend your 8-20 paid weeks agentic-coding (not vibe-coding) silly projects for your nieces and nephews. You'll come back stronger and more employable than ever.
Don't be sad to be kicked out. The boot that kicked you was attached to a Hills Hoist.
It's always really hard to be let go, especially when you were a successful person in the company. Sadly, companies choose the people to fire by some obscure means, mostly the money earned. I've been recently dismissed from work due to "reorganisation", and it really hit me hard in terms of psychological health. Please take care of yourself, do not lose your strength, don’t let your sense of self-worth be harmed by this (I got really vulnerable after this event), and wishing you good luck in finding the next job!
It is a very, very hard thing to wrap your head around, and life doesn't always give you time to process it before your savings run out. I had a hard time finding work this year and I invested in a (tech) career coach, Larry Jacobson, and he was an immense help. He told me things that were very hard to hear, and helped immensely.
Why this site has such abnormally slow scrolling in Safari, but is smooth in Chrome? There's nothing special about this site. It's like going back in time when the internet was optimized only for a single browser. It's kind of like "I'm a Chrome dev and I don't care about other browsers"?
I learned about "cog in the machine" a few years after starting in tech and I became a contractor and have been ever since (20+ years). I get paid a daily rate and as long as there is work I keep earning, no sick/holiday pay, no reviews, bs corporate networking for promotions etc.
I have zero job security and could be let go any time, but that's built into my rate and I realised that's the case for normal employees anyway as the OP has discovered to his horror. The funny thing is I have outlived many a "permanent" employee in some places I've worked.
> argyle@google.com is no more
I'm working through this on a personal level as well because it's not healthy to make one's self worth dependent on a relationship one has no control over.
The inner call to make your work matter is, I think, a good one and something that if we had more of then the world would be in a better place. That being said, I think Ecclesiastes has an important message that has at least saved me quite a lot of trouble.
Nothing we're doing is anything more than variations of things already done and even if we're successful then it's only to the benefit of morons.
So work hard but make sure to take the afternoon off every once and a while to surprise your spouse with flowers and a picnic.
That's just how it is for a lay off, in megacorp and elsewhere.
Not sure how this is HN-worthy.
Please test your site on a phone. 2fps while scrolling text is not ok.
Why is it always a googler writing these articles? Okay, you got laid off, but it's news because the company was google?
FYI ex-Googler/Nerdy.dev !== OP
was surprised to see this here tbh as its something that was posted to the author's (again, author, not OP) bluesky which made it maybe not _personal_ personal-news but ... I don't know ... way more personal than all up in HN I dunno ... shrugs ...
You like a company based on the environment, the peers, and the work. But it is not necessarily that someone way out in a different office likes you.
They are cogs in a machine, not you. And you are the worst thing of self reflection that cog has ever dealt with. Challenge the cogs and make them squirm.
It hurts, but the sooner you realize what you mean to them, the better.
You have to understand who you work for - most companies don't really care about their employees - they are means to an end and if they weren't absolutely needed, corps would do the work other ways.
And Google is way past "Don't be Evil" days...
Dammit. I listened to Adam on https://shoptalkshow.com/659/ just last week and really admired his impressive depth of knowledge about CSS and the web and how well spoken he is on the subjects.
"The magic of first love is our ignorance it can ever end".
One of the most difficult realizations you must confront in this industry is that almost everything you build will disappear. It will be ruined, ignored, slandered, and then forgotten. Almost all of your late night epiphanies and bugs conquests will fade anonymously into the anonymous blackbody spectrum entropy demands planet Earth emit.
You must come to peace with this reality. You must accept the transience of glory into your heart. You must prepare yourself, deep down, for any reality of off-sites and planned presentations and electric roadmaps to disappear in an instant. It gets easier after the first few times, trust me. You emerge a sadder and wiser man.
The only thing we can do is create moments of excellence --- occasions on which we can reflect when we are old and gray and take solace, even pride, in knowing we put every bit of ourselves into a task and did it well. There's honor and nobility in excellence even when doomed.
And who knows? You can't predict what will endure. If we're lucky, once in our careers, if we continually apply the best of ourselves, we'll do something that escapes all this destruction and endures.
Getting laid off sucks, but this comment isn't about that. What I noticed when I read the post is that the website isn't very good. It's laggy, as in slow to load, scroll, and for the mouse-hover stuff to respond, and this is on a fancy modern macbook. It seems to focus on pretty modern web aesthetic over presenting content. This is exactly the kind of website that makes me bemoan the tendency to prioritize looking better than a simple website when comparing 2 static images, and not prioritizing the experience of actually using the website.
I find these things have a real "well it works on my machine" about them. Whereas sites that stick to simple tech (ex. HN) are far more likely to work well on all machines.
> Just like that.
These statements always catch me a bit off-guard. Is there no such thing as a cancelation period in the US? When my employer wants to kick me out, he needs a good reason for that and I'd still be paid for 3 months. Which is often even longer, depending on how long you belong to a company.
Edit: I'm in germany
Google rips away people via tos with no explanation everyday should have argued for more toil during your tenure
Fellow ex-googler near tax due date, get your tax documents ASAP as losing access to your corp email and laptop will make things slower.
Sorry to hear. Your next opportunity might be around the corner…
my take on this is that "2 week notice" should probably apply to businesses as well?
Sadly two management levels above we’re just a line in a spreadsheet. Maybe even one level above.
“Hey look, this one is cog is spinning at a cost $200k/year, why don’t we replace it with a cog from a low cost country and save some money?” Or “remove it and make this one other cog do the work of this obe?” People doing the replacement have to show they did something, as well!
Important… ex-Important
Welcome back dude and don’t screw up your jungian walk through the fire. You got this
The comments on Bluesky are really cool, did you implement it yourself?
I wonder what other things Bluesky has!
This article was actually posted 3 days ago. I saw it back then and read the comments. You can see the old timestamp here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnerdy.dev%2Fex-googl...
I think this is what HN calls the "second chance pool".
I absolutely hate when HN reposts an article and alters/falsifies the timestamps. It's so incredibly misleading.
Tangentially, I thought the term Xoogler was used to refer to an ex-Googler.
Or has that term fallen into disuse now?
Glad I have a chance to peek into his world, but should he have posted this?
I hope you use your new free time to beat every expert song on Wacca
Life goes on after your job, unless you make your job your life
Can barely read this post because scrolling feels so sluggish and weird on a Chrome-based browser on a Pixel 9 Pro. Hope the playful effects are worth it for the author.
google is not like it was in the 2000's, 2010's. Its much more corporate, politicky, and evil.
Don't blame CEOs its the chief counsel or similar.
Back in the day Convex Computer Corporation was laying off a large fraction of its staff.
The plan was to come into the warroom and just hang out. Your manager would come and get you and take you into a private conference room to discuss your package with an HR specialist. The packages were pretty decent, at least.
In gallows humor I drew some stick figures on a white board for each of my team with their unix logins below them. As people were RIFfed, I would go over and put a universal red circle and slash "no" symbol around the figures who were laid off.
My time came and I marked myself as a "no" and handed the red marker to a co-worker.
I remember being a little ticked off at my manager, but when I came back to say goodbye to everyone I noticed his figure / login name had been exed out. The last thing he did before metaphorically being shot in the head was to metaphorically strangle half his children.
"What was deluxe became debris, I never questioned loyalty. But this dead end demolishes the dream of an open highway."
If Google realizes they made an oopsie, I hope he respectfully tells them "no, thanks." I could never go back to an employer that did this to me, then said it was just a mistake.
They would sell you for meat if they could.
I had my access hard cut off and laptop locked, a cold reminder that your relationship goes as far as the business will allow.
Always, ALWAYS build your homey network at your job, because that is your door to walking on to the next job.
Be sure to try to get the best severance possible, take time off, explore opportunities. You often won't have that kind of pressure off moment if you're serious about your career so take advantage.
I'm a hired gun for now for academia and a small startup and I've probably never been happier career wise. I work with non-fake employees, and solve problems that make money. No 401k for now, but my sanity is more valuable to me after the circus of the last year at my old place. (Fake employees in VP position, director position, both fired 1y after I left.)
Could be worse, at least you got severance.
Microsoft has moved on to phase two and pretends you were a performance problem and gives you no severance. Microsoft also pays like shit. Don't work for Microsoft.
It sucks.
The runway they give you is generous, sure. I got two and a half months on payroll and another six of severance and COBRA. I got the same spiel: not about merit, bosses shocked and surprised, free to apply to internal roles…
It still sucks, because the very first thing you do, the thing we’re all trained to do, is to think: “What did I do wrong?” And in the weeks ahead, you’re going to look back at the body of your work, the output you created, and you’re going to realize that you did nothing wrong.
Rather, you were just inconvenient to keep. It was little more than a decision of personal politics, not objective merit. An inconvenient line on a spreadsheet to a leader somewhere who wanted to steal your ideas for themselves, or who couldn’t stand sharing power with an undesirable element within the company. Or maybe they remembered that time you shot down their idea, or have a report showing you were active in the “wrong” chat channels. Maybe you weren’t in the hub they wanted to prioritize, or maybe you were too involved in politics for their liking.
Or maybe they just felt that your premium wages would be better spent on a fleet of underpaid, overworked Indian professionals with tenuous contracts.
It could be any of those. It could be all of those. But you’ll know, deep down, that the decision made wasn’t remotely objective, and therefore had no place in an objective institution like a business. Your leaders gave into vibes, and felt you were an acceptable casualty.
At some point you’re likely to feel rage. Hang onto that, and use it to temper your future. A future where you won’t make such petty decisions. Where you’ll stand up for your workers. Where you’ll build a better working environment that treats humans with dignity and respect, where layoffs are a last resort after a reorg, after everyone whose role actually got eliminated had their skills and output shifted to new, valuable roles instead of shown the door.
The rage is acknowledgement that you deserved better, and by extension your colleagues, peers, family, and friends.
Realizing no current business is any different than the others because they’re all run by MBA bros from consulting firms who lack any original thoughts for themselves is, in a sense, liberating. You finally see that there is no “better” out there, and certainly no objectivity or meritocracy. That everything thus far has been a temporary illusory reprieve from that reality.
But once you see it, once you acknowledge it, you can finally join others in building such a future together.
Silver lining: one less person working on the spying machine.
These megacorps will have so much fun in the upcoming recession. They turned public opinion against them through sociopathic profiteering and then mass layoffs. When the cows come home it won't be fun and games like before.
Sucks when you first experience the inherent fragility of working for somebody else.
Same thing is happening to me this week at Amazon, I'm just not writing a post about it
No one complains when TComp just 500k+
Only when laid off.
I just find this very sickening. On one hand, Google laid him off and best excuse I can think of is, "reduce operational expense". On the other hand, they happily paid $32 billion dollar for Wiz where the both fonder net around $3 billion dollar.
I don't know guys but there needs to be some crackdown on this bull that is going on with corporate America. Something feels really off lately with these tech companies on how they make excuse and get away.
Sorry to hear, Adam! Know that this isn't about you — it's them. Unfortunately, we are all cogs in this capitalistic system where replacement isn't a matter of if, but when...
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
You had to be fired to realize this?
Getting laid off is a unique experience -- I can't find a better word than that. I mean, on one hand we always knew this was a business transaction: I'm providing a service, you're paying me to provide a service. But work, on some level, is a social activity. You often make lasting friendships at jobs, especially a job you enjoy. If you share an office with your team[0], it isn't unusual for that to become your closest "group of friends." And you're friends mostly because you spend 8+ hours a day together five days a week. When the job ends, that daily refueling that your friendships received also ends. It's not unusual for the last day of that job to be one of the last times you communicate with those people and the last time you end up in the same place, together.
It's why a job starts to feel like "a family."
Just for the sake of context: some of the "unique" aspects are unique to the field of Software Development; some may be unique to my particular skill-set/location/circumstances. It's "unique" in that right when it happens, it ... sucks. But the two times it's happened to me -- both cases of "economic realities" or "radical business restructuring" -- it ended up being a few weeks off and into a better job -- in both cases, forms of "dream jobs." I've never gone more than 4 weeks without a paycheck since I was 16. I live near the car capital of the world and don't like cars/have no interest in working for any car/car-related company. I've worked for a global multi-national telecom, a conferencing provider, a maker of IoT devices for huge third-party companies, machine learning for a fraud company and remote medical software with a hint of robotics. The IoT job and the last job happened after being laid off. After about 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth, I had at least two offers in play both times I lost my job. In both cases, the economy and hiring trends were negative. In one case it was so close to Christmas that many people were difficult to reach.
I received a piece of advice way too late in my career from a 50-year-old man who was working for a startup that -- literally anyone who had any familiarity with the space would have given about a 99.99995% chance of cratering in bankruptcy. I was brought in on contract to help them get through some code written off-shore, he was my "project manager." Over lunch he'd offered me a job directly with the company[1]. I mentioned "benefits, salary and job security" and he said: "You won't beat the pay, the benefits are fine, and you're a software developer -- even 2008, unemployment in our sector was low enough to be considered 'full employment'. And if they get bought or succeed, the stock could make you a lot of money." Random advice, even from graybeards, is not often the kind that I take blindly, but having just gone through being unemployed during a -- not terrible, but not great -- economic time and finding more than one offer on the table in about three weeks, I couldn't argue with him. Thinking back to the scores of employees who were laid off when I worked at the telecom, I could name only one (non-manager) guy in IT who didn't end up some place much better a month after they started looking for work, again[2].
While there's never any guarantees and I don't want this to be a "buck up, camper" kind of dismissal of the misery of losing a job, I suspect the ex-Googler will land on their feet and maybe they'll look back on this and say "Yeah, but if I'd stayed there, I'd have missed out on all of the stuff I'm working on, now."
[0] Even if not, though physical proximity encourages it.
[1] This was not only allowed at the company I worked, it often came with an e-mail announcing when it happened in "celebration"-style. We rarely directly contracted to a third-party, so it wasn't a sort of "temporary placement agency" or anything like that. In fact, the reason I was contracted directly was because the owners of the company went to school with the owners of the startup and the 50-year-old guy was a former employee of my employers. They'd worked out an arrangement during a time when business was slow.
[2] Depending on how long that person worked there, they may have received over a year of severance paid at 100% of the employee's salary -- in one case, paid in a single lump sum cheque (due to the company going bankrupt and the court preventing them from paying the outstanding severance checks of employees who were laid off a week prior to the bankruptcy). One guy took a year off and still landed a job in a month.
The problem is often- a idealised view of the world, where merit and accomplishment is the deciding factor, meanwhile its all diplomacy, social networks and backstabbing at court. Then again, these "meritless" systems are parasitic on the meritocratic workers producing the actual value and progress.
The cooperate cruft grazes on blissfully unaware engineers. Which is why they should try to be poisonous to the cruft wherever they go.
"I'm told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I'm told it's not based on merit"
If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next.
Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic.
But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
Similar thing happened to me, after almost 27 years, but my company was a great deal more respectful, in the way that they did it. I left on the best of terms; which is extremely rare, with layoffs. To this day, I still have a lot of respect for my old company.
Also, the writing had been on the wall, for years. I was quite prepared.
What I wasn't prepared for, however, was my post-layoff treatment by the modern tech industry. That was an eye-opener.
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.
Sorry to hear. Yups you are/were/will be. It happened before. It will happen again. Perhaps not to you, but to me, him (pointing left), her (pointing right).
Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
I don't seem to sound like an asshole. For the past couple of decades "your services are no longer required - please return your laptop" happens on a monthly basis. If you follow the news (and I believe all of us here do), every now and then we read about Company XYZ laying off 3000. Company ABC laying off 5000. So, it's just a roulette and it has to do where the ball will sit. It's not personal (in 99.9% of the cases).
I had the 'pleasure' a few years back to work for a global bank and I was asked on a quarterly basis to give names of who will be gone on the next round(s). Nothing personal. Simple arithmetic.
So.. save, invest, keep emergency fund(s), and you will be ok.
Great reminder that we are all worth almost nothing to our employers as human beings so exploit your employer to the maximum.
Other commenters are corect: you are a cog in a machine. You are replaceable. Many people in tech have for too long fallen for the delusion that, as an engineer (or just in tech in general), you are somehow immune to this, that the company does care about you.
All of these big tech companies have never not been insanely profitable. These layoffs aren't necessary for the survival of the business. They're simply suppressing labor costs by cutting 5% of the employees, pushing their duties on the remaining 95% (for no additonal pay of course) and the 95% aren't asking for raises if they fear losing their jobs. It's permanent layoff culture.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc all have a ton of inertia, just like IBM did. And that's their future. They are sowing the seeds of their own destruction with short-term profit-seeking. These companies are nothing without the employees that sustain them.
That's a good time to read up on Google's involvement in genocide and tyranny.
In this neoclassical/neoliberal economy where the only thing that matters is "delivering value for the shareholders" and profits for the billionaire class. I am not surprised. A bit jaded, honestly.
I have only started my career in the past 10 years and have seen this story unfold time and time again across many companies. Big, small, or medium company. It doesn't matter.
You. Are. Expendable.
I will say the problem is much more pronounced when it's a publicly traded American company; or a company that was recently acquired or funded by private equity, "angel investment", or a vulture capitalist firm.
Folks. Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests. We cannot keep relying on billionaire class to "do right by us" because quite frankly. They do not give a shit.
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TL;DR this guy got laid off and is not happy about it.
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Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hour of announcement. The CEO detailed the process of selecting people. The severance was very generous (3-6 months pay) along with health and other benefits. The impacted employees were allowed to keep the laptop and any other assets they took from the company. They even paid the same severance to contractors.
After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.