tl;dr Secure your own mask first before assisting others. Read this if you want to skip this post: https://medium.com/@lloyd-f-hough/an-introduction-to-class-warfare-for-the-software-engineer-1810833055d7 I am L5 TL in cloud and our VP held ama after layoffs and they gave out lot of information about layoff criteria. It was eye opening and made me change the way I think and plan about work. Disclaimer: this is applicable for our VP and everyone under them, ymmv. So, about layoff criteria: * Layoffs are not random, it may look so, but they really aren’t. * The most important thing in final layoffs list is ensuring that no particular group is disproportionately affected. This group could be based on many dimensions such as tenure, performance, remote-worker, gender, level, age, disability status, ratings etc. This review is done by a third party consulting firm. This is also why it’s almost impossible to guess the exact criteria. You may have guessed that this is to reduce legal risk. * The initial list is created based on other factors- which division is performing poorly (expense > revenue), which employee has poor growth track, productivity (no idea how this is measured), etc. Bottomline is you have high chances of getting fired if you’re not working for a team which is not making money or if you have bad ratings or if your productivity is lower. You have some control over the latter two - rating and productivity. For ratings, you already should know what can be done. For productivity: As an IC, especially at lower level CL count is a measurable productivity indicator (happy to hear more what other things can be measured objectively, irrespective of how accurate/meaningful they are). For managers, number of reports and productivity of the team is what can be measured. I hope this is not a news to most of you, but what are you doing about it? Now, if you’re a TL, you’re in a weird position, since you’re spending more time in alignment, meetings etc, and there is no official title for that in the system, so you will likely show up at the bottom based on productivity indicators. What I have personally changed? I have reduced meeting frequency, and started doing more IC work. I prioritize my career growth over the team now. I know that may sound horrifying to you - but unfortunately this is the reality we are heading into. If you haven’t seen this happening around you already, you will notice soon - not that I want that to happen- but it’s going to be the survival of the fittest. This is what already happens at Amazon. Other companies are already planning to move in similar direction - Twitter and Meta cutting middle management is no coincidence.
Take the best shot with the hands you’re dealt with. Do your best at job and all the best.
100%
Remote work isn’t a protected class. It’s totally legal to let go of people because they want to work remote.
IANAL, but if Google fired remote workers disproportionately, it can be regarded as workplace discrimination, at least in California
What LawyerGPT has to say. I think we are both right: In most cases, it is legal for a company to terminate its remote workers, as long as the termination does not violate any applicable labor laws or employment contracts. However, the company must still follow any applicable notice and severance requirements, if they exist. It is important to note that certain circumstances could make the termination of remote workers illegal. For example, if a company terminates only remote workers who belong to a protected class, such as on the basis of race, gender, religion, age, or disability, then the company could be found to have engaged in illegal discrimination. Similarly, if a company terminates remote workers as a form of retaliation for engaging in protected activities, such as reporting discrimination or filing a complaint with a government agency, then the termination could be illegal. Additionally, in some cases, a company's decision to terminate remote workers could give rise to legal claims by those workers. For example, if a company terminates a remote worker in violation of an employment contract, or if the termination is part of a broader effort to avoid paying benefits or wages owed to the workers, then the workers may be able to sue the company for breach of contract or wage and hour violations.
Good. The culture of rewarding people for how many meetings they’re in needs to end.
tl:dr VP convinced you to work hard 🤷♂️
Yep they did and I am thankful to them.
cool. "Meetings are especially good because they provide the opportunity to identify problems and push their resolution up the management chain. In a world where forgiveness has been replaced with layoffs, it is vastly better to ask for permission than forgiveness. Do this frequently. Encourage your managers to do the same. They’re in the same boat you are. " did you understand this point? I didn't
Nice post OP. This will suck/be more challenging for inexperienced folks but that's the reality we are heading into. Btw what's a CL count?
CL is Google internal code review tool- pull requests, code commits, code lines
Because LOCs are an excellent measure of work. /s Altering a complex #def used throughout the codebase for a 1 LOC cl is _clearly_ less impactful than a 10K file rosie for a s/thier/their/g class typo. This sort of dead horse dumbassery was beaten/litigated ad nauseam way back in the MS/IBM for OS/2 dev payment. Of course it was still a thing in the late 90s/early 2Ks at HP for internal perf metrics. It's asinine. If you give engineers the rules, they will game the system, not necessarily to coast (although that is a thing) but mostly just to avoid the dumbfuckery of box checking/hoop jumping management requires to justify their existence. Maybe there will be a version of bard they can point at cs, cr, and buganizer that can generate reasonable metrics that meet the criteria of both providing a reasonably accurate assessment of a given engineer's efforts whilst staying out of the engineer's way/slowing them down. And management can send those reports up the chain w/whatever fruity "my worker bees are so great because of my leadership" they want. Until that glorious day arrives, it seems we're destined to relitigate the same lunacy w/out end. /meh
this is not tough time, suck it up. The tough time is that you have to put your tuition on credit card and you have no idea you will have a job and you wonder whether you need to go back which you try so far to get away
thousands of people have been laid off who have family and young children..
Roblox is still dreaming.