Corporations are becoming greedier and greedier! Hit them in their bottom line and watch all your content through piped video!
“We’re done chewing you up. So we’re going to spit you out now.”
Ignoring the inflammatory editorializing:
Any layoff sucks and this is increasingly one of the worst possible times to be underemployed in tech.
But as far as layoffs go? This seems pretty “good”. 60 day notice to search for new positions (internally or externally) while still employed by Google. Even if Google wants to fuck them over, any manager of basic competence knows to not put critical path work on the person who has already been fired. I don’t know Google severance package details but I assume they are good?
And… one of the reasons why this is a horrible time to be underemployed is that (whatever we currently call the) FAANG employees are pretty much set for life. If you have a FAANG-like on your CV you go to the head of almost every hiring pile. So if you are even moderately competent and likable, you have good odds of getting a new high paying job. And… Google is the G in that outdated acronym.
The 60 days of employment is a requirement of the WARN act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)
When employees are laid off at Google, they lose access to any systems, can’t contact co-workers in the usual manner, etc.
Google severance has been increasing worse since they had their first 12,000 employees get laid off.
(whatever we currently call the) FAANG
I don’t know how they ever left Microsoft out of that, but I think they’re going with MAMAA now (no Netflix, add Microsoft, swap for Meta and Alphabet)
“eliminate”… They’re really making full use of dropping the “don’t be evil” clause aren’t they.
“eliminate” is a word added by TechCrunch, not by Google/Youtube.
Google’s actual phrasing was:
To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.
I guess “eliminations” is still related to eliminate. But I’d argue that TechCrunch is playing it up a bit by using more rage-inducing language.
Didn’t they just do several rounds of layoff?
I guess layoffs are a sign of a dying company…
Yeah, all the largest companies in the world conducting layoffs are dying simultaneously.
Not saying it isn’t possible, but layoffs would not be the bellwether for that. Companies lay people off all the time, even when they aren’t hurting if they think they can pad their bottom line.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
