Should you not at least entertain and address the hypothesis that in an era of free/subsidized capital, while funneling a lion's share of free cash flow into share buybacks, employee headcount was also allowed to grow unreasonably and unsustainably?
At some point, a correction is due. It would appear to me that if there is not a valid profit-seeking or profit-supporting role for an employee, it is not in the shareholders' interest, the manager's interest or the employee's long-term interest to continue down that path indefinitely in the name of "culture". Listing failed projects or time-filling fluff with the ex-Google tagline may not actually be so valuable to future potential employers.
Even after these layoffs, Google's workforce will have grown substantially over the past 3 years; as a matter of fact these 12k layoffs are only 33% of employees added from 2021-2022. Is it possible that even after the layoffs announced here that there still exists a certain level of over-employment?
There will always be critiques and potential to improve how these decisions are made and communicated, and I certainly do not defend communicating via e-mail, but sometimes ripping off the band-aid is better for morale than slowly axing one department at a time, with everyone wondering who will be next and how long it will continue.
Time will tell if this was indeed a bad decision, but framing it as such simply through the lens of share buybacks while ignoring the exponential growth in hiring over the past 5 years seems a little myopic.
As Sal points out, you are completely misinterpreting the points. And no, even IF you need to "rip off the band-aid", that doesn't allow you to ignore the law, as these one-size-fits-all firings that we've seen in the tech sector do. Notably, they don't actually do what you claim to do - because labor laws differ substantially between countries and a lot of firings will be found null and void by labor courts. Whether it is the implicit firings by Twitter some of which have already been suspended, or firings by email such as here, which are null and void under German law, which explicitly excludes the electronic form for the termination of labor contracts.
Just because something appears necessary doesn't mean that going through with it without much concern for the consequences is a good idea. Public goodwill is one thing, getting a host of legal baggage is another. And when you have to pay a year of back salaries, a fine and legal costs, suddenly the cost savings aren't as big anymore.
I don't think I misinterpreted the points made, I am just reframing the situation by looking at employee headcount along with the economic cycle rather than comparing headcount to share buybacks.
It seems that you are making a legal argument, which I did not see in the original article. Time will tell whether these fines of which you speak materialize... a quick search did not reveal anything material as of now.
No, you're trying to reframe it in terms of making up for bad management decisions with yet more bad management decisions while letting employees take the fall for said management decisions.
I don't think rewarding bad decisions is in the interest of either shareholders or the long-term stability of the company.
I don't think the argument here is that layoffs should never happen. Rather, why and how they were done. Laying someone off after spending billions on share buybacks and doing so by email and then taking away what you already told them they can have (paid medical leave) is showing an extreme lack of empathy and understanding of the culture that the company used to have. Note that I am not a googler or xoogler but always admired the company.
The comparison between Victorinox and Google is not apples to apples. A company the size of Victorinox is much more likely and able to maintain a strong culture, and its small size means there's more pressure to maintain its human values, because there's more accountability, visibility, and long-term incentive to treat people well. Google is a behemoth public company that is going to try whatever it can to make money for shareholders, including share buybacks, replacing engineers with cheaper ones when possible, and--probably--replacing as many people as possible with AI. There are credible stories of Google employees having second jobs or clocking in merely for the free lunches, or simply doing nothing at all. The multiple hiring frenzies may be as much to blame as the firing ones. I agree about the problems you describe, but I'm not sure a company the size of Google will ever be able to offer the kinds of values that a Victorinox can. The incentives are just all wrong. Maybe we should start with making it harder to fire people in the US, and then the hiring and the nurturing of talent would get the attention they deserve.
I understand that this is "not a numbers game of how many fired" but still feel the need to ensure an apples to apples comparison. It is true that Amazon has many more employees than Google and that its cuts weren't as large percentage wise is the entire employee base is accounted for. However, what we should be comparing really is corporate employees. Based on Washington post article published in November this number was around 350K. So the 27K layoff is actually closer to 8% which is higher than Google. Further, beyond the 60 day warn period, the severance package amazon offered does not compete with what was offered by Salesforce, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, let along Google. Besides the point though :)
But the scale of the cuts is rather greater: Amazon, for instance, has so far this year let go about 1,8% of its global workforce.
Should you not at least entertain and address the hypothesis that in an era of free/subsidized capital, while funneling a lion's share of free cash flow into share buybacks, employee headcount was also allowed to grow unreasonably and unsustainably?
At some point, a correction is due. It would appear to me that if there is not a valid profit-seeking or profit-supporting role for an employee, it is not in the shareholders' interest, the manager's interest or the employee's long-term interest to continue down that path indefinitely in the name of "culture". Listing failed projects or time-filling fluff with the ex-Google tagline may not actually be so valuable to future potential employers.
Even after these layoffs, Google's workforce will have grown substantially over the past 3 years; as a matter of fact these 12k layoffs are only 33% of employees added from 2021-2022. Is it possible that even after the layoffs announced here that there still exists a certain level of over-employment?
There will always be critiques and potential to improve how these decisions are made and communicated, and I certainly do not defend communicating via e-mail, but sometimes ripping off the band-aid is better for morale than slowly axing one department at a time, with everyone wondering who will be next and how long it will continue.
Time will tell if this was indeed a bad decision, but framing it as such simply through the lens of share buybacks while ignoring the exponential growth in hiring over the past 5 years seems a little myopic.
As Sal points out, you are completely misinterpreting the points. And no, even IF you need to "rip off the band-aid", that doesn't allow you to ignore the law, as these one-size-fits-all firings that we've seen in the tech sector do. Notably, they don't actually do what you claim to do - because labor laws differ substantially between countries and a lot of firings will be found null and void by labor courts. Whether it is the implicit firings by Twitter some of which have already been suspended, or firings by email such as here, which are null and void under German law, which explicitly excludes the electronic form for the termination of labor contracts.
Just because something appears necessary doesn't mean that going through with it without much concern for the consequences is a good idea. Public goodwill is one thing, getting a host of legal baggage is another. And when you have to pay a year of back salaries, a fine and legal costs, suddenly the cost savings aren't as big anymore.
I don't think I misinterpreted the points made, I am just reframing the situation by looking at employee headcount along with the economic cycle rather than comparing headcount to share buybacks.
It seems that you are making a legal argument, which I did not see in the original article. Time will tell whether these fines of which you speak materialize... a quick search did not reveal anything material as of now.
No, you're trying to reframe it in terms of making up for bad management decisions with yet more bad management decisions while letting employees take the fall for said management decisions.
I don't think rewarding bad decisions is in the interest of either shareholders or the long-term stability of the company.
I don't think the argument here is that layoffs should never happen. Rather, why and how they were done. Laying someone off after spending billions on share buybacks and doing so by email and then taking away what you already told them they can have (paid medical leave) is showing an extreme lack of empathy and understanding of the culture that the company used to have. Note that I am not a googler or xoogler but always admired the company.
The comparison between Victorinox and Google is not apples to apples. A company the size of Victorinox is much more likely and able to maintain a strong culture, and its small size means there's more pressure to maintain its human values, because there's more accountability, visibility, and long-term incentive to treat people well. Google is a behemoth public company that is going to try whatever it can to make money for shareholders, including share buybacks, replacing engineers with cheaper ones when possible, and--probably--replacing as many people as possible with AI. There are credible stories of Google employees having second jobs or clocking in merely for the free lunches, or simply doing nothing at all. The multiple hiring frenzies may be as much to blame as the firing ones. I agree about the problems you describe, but I'm not sure a company the size of Google will ever be able to offer the kinds of values that a Victorinox can. The incentives are just all wrong. Maybe we should start with making it harder to fire people in the US, and then the hiring and the nurturing of talent would get the attention they deserve.
I understand that this is "not a numbers game of how many fired" but still feel the need to ensure an apples to apples comparison. It is true that Amazon has many more employees than Google and that its cuts weren't as large percentage wise is the entire employee base is accounted for. However, what we should be comparing really is corporate employees. Based on Washington post article published in November this number was around 350K. So the 27K layoff is actually closer to 8% which is higher than Google. Further, beyond the 60 day warn period, the severance package amazon offered does not compete with what was offered by Salesforce, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, let along Google. Besides the point though :)
But the scale of the cuts is rather greater: Amazon, for instance, has so far this year let go about 1,8% of its global workforce.