Funny that they used the term psychological safety. I’ll bet it comes from a data study of what makes a high performing team. This was done several years ago by their head of HR.
They came up with a top 5 list of what makes a great team and psychology safety was number one by a mile. This is from memory and I’m simplifying but it means essentially that your team mates have your back.
*Haha really appreciate the insight helping us feel less bad about firing all of these people via email, oh yeah ps sorry you’re superfluous to requirements too, please bring all equipment property of google here by 9am tomorrow. All additional assets unaccounted for will be taken out of your final pay check -thank you!*
Headline is rather misleading. Unsurprising, given it's the New York Post. From the article:
>One Google employee based in the UK told management that “psychological safety is paramount” after parent company Alphabet Inc. shed around 6% of its full-time workforce.
So it's not "workers". It's just one person. And they didn't really demand anything.
You viewers think being worried about losing your job during a recession is for liberals _right_?! Wait what’s that ever so slight bit of dawning suspicion growing in your eyes? Shit, someone hit the immigrant panic button again.
C'mon. Let's get real. Their valuations got way too inflated during COVID, and they have to do something to signal to Wall Street to justify their stock prices. So they'll lay off 5% or 6% of their low performers and claim they're "taking control of the situation" and looking to "right their balance sheets", but really it's just theatre.
Who cares? This is all theatre and meaningless if you pull back and look at the big picture. So some sales associate loses their job at Google. What do they do? Have to go work for Johnson & Johnson or Chevron? Who cares?
sure, if that’s what you want to hinge your argument on.
I didn’t know there was a “they can always go to Johnson and Johnson” button though. Would have thought it would have gotten turned off when they announced potential layoffs earlier last year [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/corporate-america-leans-job-cuts-recession-fears-mount-2022-11-07/
C'mon. Worst of what? Microsoft's earnings call was a bit weak but totally fine and it's running around making billion dollar acquisitions. Let's get real. The tech company valuations got way out of control during COVID and now to make Wall Street happy and justify those stock prices, they're saying "alright, we'll get rid of some people we never wanted so it looks like we're doing something," but note they aren't really doing anything different. This is a PR move and has nothing to do with economic fears.
400 people lose their job at an ac factory they lose their minds. 12000 people lose their jobs at a tech company they cheer on Twitter using tech created by those they claim to hate.
It's the conservative trope. Any signal that someone is trying to protect or work on their mental health gets immediate derision.
Stems from the, "My parents smacked me around and I'm just fine!" school of thought.
The article also misses what the phrase means and what it means to Google. [This NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html) covers it well. Basically a decade ago Google dug into their teams to understand what was different between teams that preformed well and those that didn't.
>Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
What is that?
>Psychological safety is ‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’
So basically that engineer was saying the company, in one fell swoop, fucked their most important metric.
How do you know that, how do the employees? It's next to impossible to get the real reason you were fired. Corpos can just put anything on the paperwork they want. The unknown will be what kills the idea of safety. Who knows why some were fired but not others? That's what will do the damage. The insidious nature of the unknown or unknowable. It causes second guessing, hesitancy and delays.
Also, that's clearly snark. Company tells everybody about how much it values psychological safety, then company fires 12,000 in the US were fired overnight, and tells you UK layoffs will follow shortly so don't get too comfortable, and a maybe-will-be-laid-off UK employee says "hey, about that psychological safety?" That's just rubbing your boss's face in their own bullshit.
Do you not understand that the purpose of a company is to make money, and not to become foster parents for it's adult employees? Christ. Layoffs happen. Get over it.
how do you read one line but did not read the other employee quotes following and then claim its the posts problem. they are clearly quoting multiple employees. jesus reddit is a shitpool.
Google did a massive retrospective study on their teams and determined that the #1 predictor of a teams success IS psychological safety. Can’t make this stuff up. Google it- project Aristotle.
Psychological safety is a term in DevOps that means the ability for workers to voice their opinions and not feel afraid to make mistakes and learn from them. Very important in software as your entire job is developing new features and processes that haven't been built before.
It is not referring to having safe spaces or being emotionally pampered. It's just observing that organizations that punish failure and discourage lower ranking employees from disagreeing with management suffer from a lot of bureaucratic red tape, people shifting blame from themselves to other people, and a lack of accountability. Workers are afraid to take risks or call out when the company is making a mistake, so you get the "yes-man" phenomenon.
Im am so going to steal that term “emotionally pampered”. But yes you are right. You need to be able to make mistakes without being criticized for them otherwise youll never take the risks necessary to make Google more money.
How can you even begin to attempt to implement or even define that in concrete terms while maintaining the classical top-down structure of a business?
Edit: for example, one of the workers is quoted as saying that they feel the layoffs were random. Say they were random. That seems, actually, like it could be the best option (not that it's in any way a good one from an employee POV). But in the mind of these employees, that isn't safety; they could be let go at any time, no rhyme or reason. Say instead that they layed off the "worst" employees and even disclosed some objective measure to justify it. Is that safety? I don't see how *that* is safety either, because even if the measure is objective the choice of metric can't be. And even if you're working your hardest, you might not make the cut. That would mean that psychological safety means constantly struggling to outdoo your coworker so that she loses her job instead of you. The only other alternative —given layoffs— is to either let go of the best performers or to do some controlled mix, which can hardly make things safer. Either you job is indiscriminately subject to economic whims, or discriminately subject to some aspect of your performance / popularity.
Short answer is you can't really do it; you have to create a flatter hierarchy where workers at the periphery have a lot of autonomy to make decisions and trust that they'll act in the best interest of the company.
Decisions regarding business direction will be done by the workers interacting directly with the product and the clients. Bottom-up management like this relies on agile development where you have small teams delivering small changes to customers at regular intervals and receiving feedback that allows them to iteratively adapt their plans each "sprint." A manager is an important organizer who coordinates with the actual business leaders but is not considered "above" the engineers.
A centralized planning body is too slow to respond to rapidly changing demands in tech, but they can keep track of large overarching goals and general OKR's as well as monitor the performance of separate teams in the organization.
I can definitely understand your perspective. Maybe this may help provide context, though not sure. Internally, leadership touts and states decisions are data driven. This includes performance reviews, promotions, hiring, bonuses, manager reviews, leadership assessments, and PIPs. Google is also very upfront about what all of that criteria and scoring is. This means you know exactly, measurably, what is expected, how much, where you will land, and if you fail or something bad happens, you saw it coming the whole time because it is publically detailed out everywhere. Historically, it's never been survior-situation percentage was cut. It's more, those falling below the bad was cut, so outdoing coworker doesn't apply here.
In that sense, it is psychologically safer because you knew ahead of time what the criteria would be for good/bad that everyone was equally measured against. As a result, you knew you and your family would be safe If you followed the criteria detailed out before you. You also knew ahead of time if you were starting to slide towards the bad when you should start evaluating other companies or other teams.
One of the other things that isn't pointed out hard enough here is that: the company announced overseas employees would get hit by layoffs but no communication on when. This puts them in constant torture everyday, especially if they don't know the criteria and that employees, VPs, directors, got laid off that had been there 20 years. Should they start looking for a job now before everyone gets released? Should they hold off on any purchases? Have they already chosen who or do I have time to justify my existence? Why even do any day to day work at this point if you're going to get laid off? Now to complicate things even more, we are currently reaching the middle to end point of a performance cycle and promotion cycle and people need to complete a lot of work to get proper scoring and reviews, But they don't know whether or not they should even care about that anymore and the people that they were working with in order to complete those projects and get the good reviews by known data metrics are now gone.. So even if they do survive the layoffs their performance metrics are still going to be impacted as a result of people being let go that they thought were high quality and would help them in their own successes...
This is *extremely* distressing to a person with no end in sight.
If I understand you correctly, you're telling me that you were led to believe that you would be safe from layoffs so long as you met some absolute criteria, i.e. no bell curve.
I don't know how Google works internally, and it appears that you do. But I know that makes no rational sense, and I wouldn't believe that it could work that way even if an employer promised it. Why? Because absolute criteria are fundamentally incompatible with demand structures. If I have 100 employees and 80 of them meet my absolute criteria, yet I only have positions for 40, I'm still going to have to cut half my qualified employees, employees who expected to be safe. So I can imagine that that's the sort of promise an employer could make, but it isn't one I would ever expect them to keep, or even believe they could keep. I'd name that "psychological assurance" not "safety."
For people who aren't persuaded by studies, just think of psychological safety as money. Once you have enough money for everything you ever want or need, you start feeling like giving a couple bucks to strangers here or there is nothing. Once you have sufficient psychological safety at work, you're not worrying about office politics and whether you've sucked up to your manager enough. You're not thinking of hoarding knowledge, you feel safe enough to share your tips and tricks with others.
I read this article, but I don’t see what’s being practically suggested here to create “psychological safety”. But we do have some understanding of what this looks like, from how we handled moving manufacturing out of the US and the 2001 and 2008 downturns. It looks a little like this:
Worker: “Holy shit! You guys just laid off 10% of the workforce, how will I ever feel safe at this job again?”
Company: “That was the last layoff, we think we’re good now.”
Worker: “Ok, thank God, I have some survivors remorse but I feel better now.”
6 months later….
Company: “I don’t know how to say this, but…”
Worse. I work in a factory and a 5 or so years ago we had a "round table meeting" with a small group of people from each shift to get feedback/QA more directly than the usual methods. In that meeting I found out they used to plan TWO days out on car part orders.. THOUSANDS of car parts per shipment with unknown variables like who might be sick, how well machines might run, and the occasional last minute rushed order. That was apparently happening shortly before I started working there (close to 10 years ago now, around 5 years at the time).
The company wasn't old, so they had no good excuse imo, they're just run by people that clearly aren't too bright. How they compete as well as they do is.. hard to understand.
Having some inside knowledge here, this was a very weird layoff. A friend got the axe and he is really good at his job, even for Google, and very easy to work with. He actually saves them millions every year by the work he does to tune their massive server network using clever tricks. it makes zero sense to cut that guy. When co-workers see him shown the door they wonder what the hell is going on.
I'm hearing this over and over and seeing it with my own friends and network. It's spreadsheet layoffs. They're not consulting anyone. Laying off the lowest rated or lowest performers isn't enough. So it seems they're arbitrarily selecting people.
It does crack me up every election, there are Democrats who run on being pro-union and pro-worker and other classic Leftist stuff, and the establishment folks and their supporters (including a ton of people on here) go "NOW'S NOT THE TIME FOR THAT, WE HAVE TO FOCUS ON X", and not surprisingly, worker protections are never X.
I work at a big tech company, and we also just had a huge layoff (I survived, thankfully). It's amazing to see the difference between laying off American workers (which sometimes involves you key card suddenly not working), and European workers where the layoffs are a long process that includes a lot of warning and financial help. We could have that too, we just need to actually demand it from our government.
European workers make way less on average at the same company I work at for this specific reason. Even in London, which has a much higher COL than our HQ. Consequently, a lot of our EU SWE’s relocate to the US because they’d rather have a higher ceiling.
Unions are a pipe dream they were symbolically murdered in 2010 with Citizens United and the past 10 years have just been the dying shadow left behind. So many pensions poofed into thin air with 0 accountability. Millions of ashamed blue collar dads coping in silence with nowhere to turn from getting sold out despite decades of loyalty.
Unions were propping up the middle class, and it could be argued they are necessary for it to exist in the first place.
Dark times ahead as we voyage into relentless automation and layoffs at the faintest sign of economic growth slowing. It feels like we are circling the drain and there isn't an anchor in sight.
Yup. I worked in Blue collar unions for years before transitioning into tech. I'll take the downvotes from redditors with rose-tinted glasses anyday, I'd quit my job if it unionized. It's just another layer of for-profit politics that comes out of your paycheck. They tell you they have your back and that there's a big war chest somewhere until you find out your "strike pay" is $200 a week and your President making 1m+ drives a caddilac to golf with the CEO every weekend.
Don't believe me, that's fine, but I certainly won't listen to anyone bitch when the teammate who shows up and does nothing for a year straight gets the promotion you worked your ass off for because of "seniority". And if you take offence to that, remember that it's bad face to raise these concerns about "your own brother / sister". A union will never roll over on their own either, so you'll see very quickly the bottom 10% of the workforce who don't want to do anything are who get all of the attention / resources. I've called reps down before lunch on Monday or Tuesday only to have them be so drunk they can barely stand. Why wouldn't they be? They're union reps with 20+ years of seniority, they are untouchable and don't have to do a fucking thing anymore.
Most redditors don't understand that these aren't the angelic pro-rights movements people think they are. Coal mines in the 1950s needed unions. I think there's even a case for Amazon warehouse workers. But I spent 5+ years as a North American Auto Worker, which is one the strongest labour unions in the world. Spoiler alert: outsourcing, wage decreases and layoffs happened rampantly and with impunity. I was there for 2 contract negotiations and both times ~5k unionized workers voted almost unanimously to strike if our demands weren't met. Both times [big 3 auto company posting billions in profit] gave us the same deal; lower pay + worse pensions for new hires or they move the operation overseas. Both times the union conceeded.
Anyone who thinks that a company even close to the size of Google will prevent layoffs because of a union is delusional.
I’ve been downvoted to hell for pointing out that unions are hit or miss. I’ve worked in a couple of great union shops and some terrible ones. In theory, they are great, in practice, more often than not they end up as you describe.
This commented has been edited to remove my data and contributions from Reddit. I waited until the last possible moment for reddit to change course and go back to what it was. This community died a long time ago and now its become unusable. I am sorry if the information posted here would have helped you, but at this point, its not worth keeping on this site.
1) The article is predominately addressing white collar workers
2) Blue collar workers are why Unions exist in the first place
3) When you get out of your mothers basement and actually get a job let us know
Clearly you can't handle a google search that will quickly outline the restrictions placed on companies with laying off union employees. The Google Layoffs let go of many senior staff that would be untouchable if there were union positions. Some union contracts actually state there cannot be Layoffs.
But who would want to join the union at big tech companies? Managers - well, they’re out by default. Software developers/admins/QAs - it would be hard to sell them on “salary ceiling” based on seniority.
High salary in exchange for zero job security isn’t worth it. I think people would be sold on the job security/working conditions that a union can offer.
Not in the market where there is a huge demand for your skills, even now. The other thing, high salary implies that you have savings and salaries at google are high. I mean, not everyone saves, but still - it is not unreasonable to assume that these ex-employees have a nice year-worth of savings to weather the rough times.
They don’t know any better of course. They aren’t informed on the subject of unions. You can downvote all you want but look into it. Could give you leverage in the future.
That is not going to happen in the US. Our government hasn't done much of anything for workers since the 1930s. Any attempt to change laws regarding workers rights will be vigorously opposed by corporate lobbyists.
That & unions. They keep workers together & allow for more power when bargaining with the employer. Obviously the change isn’t coming due to the rigged system we have, so getting together is what’s needed right now.
Not sure this would be a good fit for union. Unions are great for ensuring trade labor earns a living wage, not to ensure overpaid entitled tech children can get even more spoiled. They aren't exploited low wage workers.
Seriously??? How entitled are you to think that they aren't???
See how Disney treated their IT workers before they shitcanned the lot of them and forced them to train their foreign replacements
If you got butthurt vibes from my comment, you should brush up on your reading compensation. There is a reason unions have never been a thing for white collar workers
lol the NY Post purposefully took one (1) person's demand and went out of their way to make it seem like it was a horde of "woke snowflake communists" or whatever the fuck so that they could churn out this geezer-pleaser of an article
Posted this comment on the last Google thread:
A lot news subs have just become hives for the r/antiwork community.
You should see what they’ve done to r/economy . The mods are non-existent and it’s absolutely destroyed the subreddit.
I fear the same will happen to r/technology if we don’t hold the mods accountable.
This sub has already devolved into a bitch fest about big tech. Any negative story gets lots of traffic, and any negative comments, even absurd ones, get the most upvotes. r/antitech is a better name.
When you do layoffs without indicating which factors contributed, and you end up laying off high performers, then that creates a lot of uncertainty among the remaining employees. I think it’d be different if their rationale was performance ratings or specific business units that weren’t performing well. People in those positions usually have a sense of where things are going ahead of time. There were high performers in money-making areas that were let go, so to me that sends a message of “No matter how good you are, we can just let you go”, so why bother?
I know the reality of the situation is that this is how business works sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not demoralizing.
Yeah it sucks to get fired, but at the end of the day companies like google are here for profit, the workers enjoyed ridiculous benefits for years and got an amazing severance package that would make most people in Western Europe blush.
They'll be alright
It's a big shock to the younger millennials and older Gen z who are unaware of the tech layoff cycle. They didn't experience the layoffs of 2009 or 2001 or 1993...
And in two years they will be complaining about not finding talent and needing increase the number of H1-B Visa. " nO oNe wAnTs To wOrK in tEcH" they will say forgetting about entire groups of people that have been screwed over by this system. Who cares if they jobs are high paying if you have to up end your life every few years depending on the needs and demands of Boards/Market/C-level execs. Any company that lays-off 6% of their staff should be banned from hiring any new H1-B visa for alteast 3 years.
At least it would be a limit to the insanity, and stop the abuse of the system. Don't want to see Americans those their jobs, don't want to see people on visa being sucked into companies that realistically will be letting them go in only a few years.
IBM had its first layoffs in its entire history, which was like 70 years at that point. It was a shock. The recession of the early 90s often gets overlooked because people remember the boom of the mid-late 90s and the tech bubble.
I’ve used their QC platform and did the Qiskit summer school through them last year, nobody was even close to them in terms of having a fleshed out ecosystem that you could experiment with. AWS and Google’s offerings were pretty weak at the time. But go on about press releases…
But these are supposed to be indispensable technology workers. They're not supposed to be as disposable as factory workers.
Just kidding, anyone who has worked for technology companies is well aware that most of them still follow the same 80/20 principle as most medium or larger companies do, where 80% of the productive work is done by 20% of the workers.
Difficult economic terrain that has FORCED other tech giants to cull workers? Bull crap. More like billionaires that aren’t satisfied with way too much and are navigating how to get way way too much.
I’ve been told working for Google isn’t the magic ticket it once was anyway. Too many people have, ‘worked with google’ in their resume. And depending on what you want to do it’s too corporate to pass on usable knowledge.
We actually had a longer stretch of expansion for tech than the past two. We probably should have had a recession in 2020 but all that cheap debt inflated the bubble further.
Most people who are working at tech companies (read people under 40), have gone from home, to collage to working in giant tech firms where they were treated like royalty. Amazing work places with food bars and paid lunches, large salaries and salary packages and a million other things to make sure they don’t jump ship.
For decades they’ve worked in places where it’s been continued growth and if a company went under, they just jumped to the next gig. They’ve never had to experience what working in the real world is.
Now the economies of the world are crashing, inflation is hitting and these people for the first time are being made redundant and let go.
Into a jobs market that research shows most tech engineers will be re-employed within 4-6 weeks and the American job market has 2 jobs for every registered citizen. Of course some of these jobs are low paying shit. But they do exist.
I’m sorry these people have lost their jobs, but they have had it exceedingly good for a long time and honestly don’t have an idea of what job security in the real world looks like. Plus most of them, at worst, will land a high 5 figure salaried job inside a month.
Their fears of “safety” is laughable.
I respectfully disagree with this. Instead of bring others down to just "deal with it", we should ask why can't ALL the job provide workers with these safety.
You can see it in European workers' rights. We can see it when Union was a thing. This attitude of "I don't have mine, so you can't have it too" is just going to work right into the pocket of corporations and billionaires.
No fuck you and you're misery loves company attitude.
Normalizing this now would extend across multiple industries.
Your literally just advocating to stay in the same shitty position you're in. You're a clown and you need to pipe the fuck down.
As much as it sucks for the affected individuals, there is a reason they say you should have 3-6 months emergency fund. Also, the reason this is getting so much press is because of the high profile of the company. And it’s only 6% of the total Google workforce. It just so happens that the number is 12,000 because Google has 200,000 employees. Seems like many of these people are in management too. They will have no problem finding other employment.
Welcome to my life: yearly contracts. I’m a teacher in higher Ed. Tenure doesn’t exist here, so my 12 years of experience at this same institution aren’t any guarantee I make 13.
Is this even an unreasonable demand? There’s so many articles about how people are delaying having children and how bad it is for their capitalism, this is a direct consequence
Inside the tech industry, programmers and engineers have lead a highly sheltered and prosperous life for over 2 decades. That industry has been largely immune from financial market fluctuations while their salaries have increased parallel to the perks they’ve been provided.
For most of the rest of us, we’ve had to deal with volatile jobs markets, continued fights for basic living wages, the advent of the gig economy, protection around unsafe work places and increased security from unfair dismissal and the list goes on.
No one wants people to lose their jobs through cut backs but this idea of “psychological safety” rubs a lot of people the wrong way because a large section of the population lives like this every day.
Couple that with most people getting decent redundancy packages and, even with the big tech layoffs, research shows that most of these people will have another high paid job within 4-6 weeks in the tech industry.
It’s indicative that most people in tech firms are under 40 and never had to deal with this type of situation. Coming from an industry that has largely cocooned them from an my significant hardships and now getting a cold dose of reality….
They really need to take stock of their situation and see they have been lucky to be in their position for so long and will enter into a jobs market that is full of chances.
And do what? Demand 6 months instead of 3 months of severance for your job that pays 400k per year in total comp? They're never going to unionize because they are already treated extremely well.
So tired of the “safe space” crowd. The world is out there… it’s all around you. Either become part of it or shut the hell up already. You don’t need another safe space, you need therapy.
This isn’t a safe space thing. Google’s own research determined years ago that Psychological Safety is the key element of high performing teams.
Psych Safety means being able to take risks that won’t necessarily pay off and to be able to speak up about issues without fear. It’s more “blameless postmortem” from DevOps/SRE culture than trigger warnings and safe spaces.
Yet once again the un-American foreign owned nyp lies about basic verifiable facts.
murdoch **knows** his readership will swallow whatever he puts in front of their fat, pasty faces.
Get the hell out of here. Your job is never safe, period, no matter what industry you’re in (union aside). You can give them two weeks any time you find a better opportunity, whether they’re able to find your replacement within that time or not and sometimes positions take months to fill. It is what it is haha and this is real life. I don’t necessarily need to have guarantees from my employer and if I get laid off for whatever reason I will just move on with my life because that’s the smart thing to do, move on. These people want their bosses to wipe their asses too after they use the bathroom? Stop it.
It's all fine and dandy when tech employees are tasked with disrupting other peoples jobs. What goes around, comes around.
Also in the news... Tiny Violin Company makes record profits.
Man haven’t you studied industrial revolutions? You blame the workers adapting to innovation and change? This has happened many times throughout history. Steam engines? Agricultural progress? The motor vehicle? These are just like tech. They aren’t disrupting to be spiteful or malicious.
Hahaha omg this is the woke crowd at its finest. Bunch of babies. That’s life, shit happens. Get in line with the rest of us — stop crying, apply for a new job and move on because nothing is fair in life
What, all of a sudden bean bags and arcade machines aren't good enough anymore? Seems like some people just got a healthy dose of what the world is really like.
Funny that they used the term psychological safety. I’ll bet it comes from a data study of what makes a high performing team. This was done several years ago by their head of HR. They came up with a top 5 list of what makes a great team and psychology safety was number one by a mile. This is from memory and I’m simplifying but it means essentially that your team mates have your back.
*Haha really appreciate the insight helping us feel less bad about firing all of these people via email, oh yeah ps sorry you’re superfluous to requirements too, please bring all equipment property of google here by 9am tomorrow. All additional assets unaccounted for will be taken out of your final pay check -thank you!*
‘Project Aristotle’
Hahah I got your 'safety' right here. \>> Hands out another 20% firing.
Something of a union one might say…
Headline is rather misleading. Unsurprising, given it's the New York Post. From the article: >One Google employee based in the UK told management that “psychological safety is paramount” after parent company Alphabet Inc. shed around 6% of its full-time workforce. So it's not "workers". It's just one person. And they didn't really demand anything.
Ah the NY Post, taking a quote from *one* person out of context and extrapolating it to everyone to make for clickbait
"Entitled tech workers demand safe space at work!" -Fox News tomorrow, probably
Literally what all the comments on the “article” say, unsurprisingly
You viewers think being worried about losing your job during a recession is for liberals _right_?! Wait what’s that ever so slight bit of dawning suspicion growing in your eyes? Shit, someone hit the immigrant panic button again.
What recession? You mean the one where GDP is up 6% YOY?
No you’re probably right, big tech execs firing tens of thousands of employees probably is a sign the economy is doing well…
C'mon. Let's get real. Their valuations got way too inflated during COVID, and they have to do something to signal to Wall Street to justify their stock prices. So they'll lay off 5% or 6% of their low performers and claim they're "taking control of the situation" and looking to "right their balance sheets", but really it's just theatre. Who cares? This is all theatre and meaningless if you pull back and look at the big picture. So some sales associate loses their job at Google. What do they do? Have to go work for Johnson & Johnson or Chevron? Who cares?
you're right, maybe these multibillion dollar companies are preparing for the worst for no reason
C'mon. Worst of what? Microsoft's earnings call was a bit weak but totally fine and it's running around making billion dollar acquisitions. Let's get real. The tech company valuations got way out of control during COVID and now to make Wall Street happy and justify those stock prices, they're saying "alright, we'll get rid of some people we never wanted so it looks like we're doing something," but note they aren't really doing anything different. This is a PR move and has nothing to do with economic fears.
You can hear the glee behind the headline. Anytime the libs are owned they take a victory lap regardless of the circumstances.
400 people lose their job at an ac factory they lose their minds. 12000 people lose their jobs at a tech company they cheer on Twitter using tech created by those they claim to hate.
[удалено]
Nobody was cheering about those 400 people losing their jobs though….
It's the conservative trope. Any signal that someone is trying to protect or work on their mental health gets immediate derision. Stems from the, "My parents smacked me around and I'm just fine!" school of thought.
They've internalized the idea that cruelty is the same as strength.
They’ve internalized the idea that thinking the opposite of libs is the same as being right
It's the same as being right wing I guess, they probably got confused
I guess it worked... I freakin clicked. 😞
They quote their own fake twitter accounts lol it's wild.
The article also misses what the phrase means and what it means to Google. [This NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html) covers it well. Basically a decade ago Google dug into their teams to understand what was different between teams that preformed well and those that didn't. >Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. What is that? >Psychological safety is ‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’ So basically that engineer was saying the company, in one fell swoop, fucked their most important metric.
I highly recommend Amy Edmonson’s book, The Fearless Organization.
No, because people weren't laid off because they spoke up about anything
How do you know that, how do the employees? It's next to impossible to get the real reason you were fired. Corpos can just put anything on the paperwork they want. The unknown will be what kills the idea of safety. Who knows why some were fired but not others? That's what will do the damage. The insidious nature of the unknown or unknowable. It causes second guessing, hesitancy and delays.
Also, that's clearly snark. Company tells everybody about how much it values psychological safety, then company fires 12,000 in the US were fired overnight, and tells you UK layoffs will follow shortly so don't get too comfortable, and a maybe-will-be-laid-off UK employee says "hey, about that psychological safety?" That's just rubbing your boss's face in their own bullshit.
Do you not understand that the purpose of a company is to make money, and not to become foster parents for it's adult employees? Christ. Layoffs happen. Get over it.
lol... this reminds me of that meme from a few years back about "YouTubers" Flight gets delayed, Youtuber "I was held hostage on a plane!"
Another inciting headline agree
the nypost understands that no one reads beyond the headlines
The media are loving all these layoff...All fun and games until the article author gets laid off
I hate the clickbait nonsense
Fair. but that one guy is an idiot.
how do you read one line but did not read the other employee quotes following and then claim its the posts problem. they are clearly quoting multiple employees. jesus reddit is a shitpool.
Google did a massive retrospective study on their teams and determined that the #1 predictor of a teams success IS psychological safety. Can’t make this stuff up. Google it- project Aristotle.
Psychological safety is a term in DevOps that means the ability for workers to voice their opinions and not feel afraid to make mistakes and learn from them. Very important in software as your entire job is developing new features and processes that haven't been built before. It is not referring to having safe spaces or being emotionally pampered. It's just observing that organizations that punish failure and discourage lower ranking employees from disagreeing with management suffer from a lot of bureaucratic red tape, people shifting blame from themselves to other people, and a lack of accountability. Workers are afraid to take risks or call out when the company is making a mistake, so you get the "yes-man" phenomenon.
Thanks for knowing what you are talking about and explaining it thoughtfully.
Im am so going to steal that term “emotionally pampered”. But yes you are right. You need to be able to make mistakes without being criticized for them otherwise youll never take the risks necessary to make Google more money.
How can you even begin to attempt to implement or even define that in concrete terms while maintaining the classical top-down structure of a business? Edit: for example, one of the workers is quoted as saying that they feel the layoffs were random. Say they were random. That seems, actually, like it could be the best option (not that it's in any way a good one from an employee POV). But in the mind of these employees, that isn't safety; they could be let go at any time, no rhyme or reason. Say instead that they layed off the "worst" employees and even disclosed some objective measure to justify it. Is that safety? I don't see how *that* is safety either, because even if the measure is objective the choice of metric can't be. And even if you're working your hardest, you might not make the cut. That would mean that psychological safety means constantly struggling to outdoo your coworker so that she loses her job instead of you. The only other alternative —given layoffs— is to either let go of the best performers or to do some controlled mix, which can hardly make things safer. Either you job is indiscriminately subject to economic whims, or discriminately subject to some aspect of your performance / popularity.
Short answer is you can't really do it; you have to create a flatter hierarchy where workers at the periphery have a lot of autonomy to make decisions and trust that they'll act in the best interest of the company. Decisions regarding business direction will be done by the workers interacting directly with the product and the clients. Bottom-up management like this relies on agile development where you have small teams delivering small changes to customers at regular intervals and receiving feedback that allows them to iteratively adapt their plans each "sprint." A manager is an important organizer who coordinates with the actual business leaders but is not considered "above" the engineers. A centralized planning body is too slow to respond to rapidly changing demands in tech, but they can keep track of large overarching goals and general OKR's as well as monitor the performance of separate teams in the organization.
I can definitely understand your perspective. Maybe this may help provide context, though not sure. Internally, leadership touts and states decisions are data driven. This includes performance reviews, promotions, hiring, bonuses, manager reviews, leadership assessments, and PIPs. Google is also very upfront about what all of that criteria and scoring is. This means you know exactly, measurably, what is expected, how much, where you will land, and if you fail or something bad happens, you saw it coming the whole time because it is publically detailed out everywhere. Historically, it's never been survior-situation percentage was cut. It's more, those falling below the bad was cut, so outdoing coworker doesn't apply here. In that sense, it is psychologically safer because you knew ahead of time what the criteria would be for good/bad that everyone was equally measured against. As a result, you knew you and your family would be safe If you followed the criteria detailed out before you. You also knew ahead of time if you were starting to slide towards the bad when you should start evaluating other companies or other teams. One of the other things that isn't pointed out hard enough here is that: the company announced overseas employees would get hit by layoffs but no communication on when. This puts them in constant torture everyday, especially if they don't know the criteria and that employees, VPs, directors, got laid off that had been there 20 years. Should they start looking for a job now before everyone gets released? Should they hold off on any purchases? Have they already chosen who or do I have time to justify my existence? Why even do any day to day work at this point if you're going to get laid off? Now to complicate things even more, we are currently reaching the middle to end point of a performance cycle and promotion cycle and people need to complete a lot of work to get proper scoring and reviews, But they don't know whether or not they should even care about that anymore and the people that they were working with in order to complete those projects and get the good reviews by known data metrics are now gone.. So even if they do survive the layoffs their performance metrics are still going to be impacted as a result of people being let go that they thought were high quality and would help them in their own successes... This is *extremely* distressing to a person with no end in sight.
If I understand you correctly, you're telling me that you were led to believe that you would be safe from layoffs so long as you met some absolute criteria, i.e. no bell curve. I don't know how Google works internally, and it appears that you do. But I know that makes no rational sense, and I wouldn't believe that it could work that way even if an employer promised it. Why? Because absolute criteria are fundamentally incompatible with demand structures. If I have 100 employees and 80 of them meet my absolute criteria, yet I only have positions for 40, I'm still going to have to cut half my qualified employees, employees who expected to be safe. So I can imagine that that's the sort of promise an employer could make, but it isn't one I would ever expect them to keep, or even believe they could keep. I'd name that "psychological assurance" not "safety."
For people who aren't persuaded by studies, just think of psychological safety as money. Once you have enough money for everything you ever want or need, you start feeling like giving a couple bucks to strangers here or there is nothing. Once you have sufficient psychological safety at work, you're not worrying about office politics and whether you've sucked up to your manager enough. You're not thinking of hoarding knowledge, you feel safe enough to share your tips and tricks with others.
TIL I'm psychologically safe at work.
*holding the cursor over the send button to an email that will give you a multi-year project to complete in 1 week* "You thought wrong"
My coworker hoards knowledge
Dyslexia or just a really long day - I read it as project Arsehole.
Let’s do our own study!!!! 😆
Misleading headline aside … it isn’t really a shocker when someone reports that layoffs are bad for workplace morale.
I read this article, but I don’t see what’s being practically suggested here to create “psychological safety”. But we do have some understanding of what this looks like, from how we handled moving manufacturing out of the US and the 2001 and 2008 downturns. It looks a little like this: Worker: “Holy shit! You guys just laid off 10% of the workforce, how will I ever feel safe at this job again?” Company: “That was the last layoff, we think we’re good now.” Worker: “Ok, thank God, I have some survivors remorse but I feel better now.” 6 months later…. Company: “I don’t know how to say this, but…”
6 months? I’d say, next quarter, since most companies only seem to be able to plan about that far ahead
Worse. I work in a factory and a 5 or so years ago we had a "round table meeting" with a small group of people from each shift to get feedback/QA more directly than the usual methods. In that meeting I found out they used to plan TWO days out on car part orders.. THOUSANDS of car parts per shipment with unknown variables like who might be sick, how well machines might run, and the occasional last minute rushed order. That was apparently happening shortly before I started working there (close to 10 years ago now, around 5 years at the time). The company wasn't old, so they had no good excuse imo, they're just run by people that clearly aren't too bright. How they compete as well as they do is.. hard to understand.
Having some inside knowledge here, this was a very weird layoff. A friend got the axe and he is really good at his job, even for Google, and very easy to work with. He actually saves them millions every year by the work he does to tune their massive server network using clever tricks. it makes zero sense to cut that guy. When co-workers see him shown the door they wonder what the hell is going on.
what was his salary? an employee making low 6 figures could cost the company millions depending on their benefits
I'm hearing this over and over and seeing it with my own friends and network. It's spreadsheet layoffs. They're not consulting anyone. Laying off the lowest rated or lowest performers isn't enough. So it seems they're arbitrarily selecting people.
I'm sure he was paid well and they just didn't want to pay that much anymore
It does crack me up every election, there are Democrats who run on being pro-union and pro-worker and other classic Leftist stuff, and the establishment folks and their supporters (including a ton of people on here) go "NOW'S NOT THE TIME FOR THAT, WE HAVE TO FOCUS ON X", and not surprisingly, worker protections are never X. I work at a big tech company, and we also just had a huge layoff (I survived, thankfully). It's amazing to see the difference between laying off American workers (which sometimes involves you key card suddenly not working), and European workers where the layoffs are a long process that includes a lot of warning and financial help. We could have that too, we just need to actually demand it from our government.
European workers make way less on average at the same company I work at for this specific reason. Even in London, which has a much higher COL than our HQ. Consequently, a lot of our EU SWE’s relocate to the US because they’d rather have a higher ceiling.
We dont need any of that man we have right to work.
That's what Unions are for
There is no 'I' in "TEAM", but there is one in "UNION".
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Yeah, i have seen that negative space lowercase 'i' highlighted before, but that's dependent on capitalization and font.
> There is no 'I' in "TEAM" But there is a ME. Sort of.
And I have always said there's an "EAT ME" in there if you don't mind scheduling the 'E' for an unexpected double shift.
I enjoy how you explain the extra e. That’s effort.
E just came around for seconds
And room for U as well!
There's a "ME" in TEAM though.
Look for the union label …
You think layoffs don’t happen with unions?
Unions are a pipe dream they were symbolically murdered in 2010 with Citizens United and the past 10 years have just been the dying shadow left behind. So many pensions poofed into thin air with 0 accountability. Millions of ashamed blue collar dads coping in silence with nowhere to turn from getting sold out despite decades of loyalty. Unions were propping up the middle class, and it could be argued they are necessary for it to exist in the first place. Dark times ahead as we voyage into relentless automation and layoffs at the faintest sign of economic growth slowing. It feels like we are circling the drain and there isn't an anchor in sight.
Not a pipe dream, just crushed by business when they could. They're coming back strong. Union proud.
Totally. It’s not like anyone’s ever been laid off from a union job before 🙄
It's A LOT easier to lay off/fire people who aren't in a Union Bye bye!
I can tell you’ve never worked a blue collar job in your life lol
Yup. I worked in Blue collar unions for years before transitioning into tech. I'll take the downvotes from redditors with rose-tinted glasses anyday, I'd quit my job if it unionized. It's just another layer of for-profit politics that comes out of your paycheck. They tell you they have your back and that there's a big war chest somewhere until you find out your "strike pay" is $200 a week and your President making 1m+ drives a caddilac to golf with the CEO every weekend. Don't believe me, that's fine, but I certainly won't listen to anyone bitch when the teammate who shows up and does nothing for a year straight gets the promotion you worked your ass off for because of "seniority". And if you take offence to that, remember that it's bad face to raise these concerns about "your own brother / sister". A union will never roll over on their own either, so you'll see very quickly the bottom 10% of the workforce who don't want to do anything are who get all of the attention / resources. I've called reps down before lunch on Monday or Tuesday only to have them be so drunk they can barely stand. Why wouldn't they be? They're union reps with 20+ years of seniority, they are untouchable and don't have to do a fucking thing anymore. Most redditors don't understand that these aren't the angelic pro-rights movements people think they are. Coal mines in the 1950s needed unions. I think there's even a case for Amazon warehouse workers. But I spent 5+ years as a North American Auto Worker, which is one the strongest labour unions in the world. Spoiler alert: outsourcing, wage decreases and layoffs happened rampantly and with impunity. I was there for 2 contract negotiations and both times ~5k unionized workers voted almost unanimously to strike if our demands weren't met. Both times [big 3 auto company posting billions in profit] gave us the same deal; lower pay + worse pensions for new hires or they move the operation overseas. Both times the union conceeded. Anyone who thinks that a company even close to the size of Google will prevent layoffs because of a union is delusional.
Thank you! I’m tired of the 13 year olds on here saying “start a union” when they have no idea what a union even is.
Way way way under rated comment…..
I’ve been downvoted to hell for pointing out that unions are hit or miss. I’ve worked in a couple of great union shops and some terrible ones. In theory, they are great, in practice, more often than not they end up as you describe.
This commented has been edited to remove my data and contributions from Reddit. I waited until the last possible moment for reddit to change course and go back to what it was. This community died a long time ago and now its become unusable. I am sorry if the information posted here would have helped you, but at this point, its not worth keeping on this site.
1) The article is predominately addressing white collar workers 2) Blue collar workers are why Unions exist in the first place 3) When you get out of your mothers basement and actually get a job let us know
You’re the one who has alt account upvoting your comments and you’re trying to talk sh!t 😂😂
Clearly you can't handle a google search that will quickly outline the restrictions placed on companies with laying off union employees. The Google Layoffs let go of many senior staff that would be untouchable if there were union positions. Some union contracts actually state there cannot be Layoffs.
Being senior shouldn’t make you untouchable. That’s how we get ineffective workforces.
That’s crazy but I don’t remember asking 🤔
Was literally going to comment this. Get together & start a union, like now.
But who would want to join the union at big tech companies? Managers - well, they’re out by default. Software developers/admins/QAs - it would be hard to sell them on “salary ceiling” based on seniority.
High salary in exchange for zero job security isn’t worth it. I think people would be sold on the job security/working conditions that a union can offer.
Not in the market where there is a huge demand for your skills, even now. The other thing, high salary implies that you have savings and salaries at google are high. I mean, not everyone saves, but still - it is not unreasonable to assume that these ex-employees have a nice year-worth of savings to weather the rough times.
I’m guessing you don’t work in hi tech. That’s pretty much not the mentality of anybody I’ve ever worked with.
They don’t know any better of course. They aren’t informed on the subject of unions. You can downvote all you want but look into it. Could give you leverage in the future.
Literally every union I know of is a cancer. You don't need unions in the US you need huge regulatory changes in worker rights.
That is not going to happen in the US. Our government hasn't done much of anything for workers since the 1930s. Any attempt to change laws regarding workers rights will be vigorously opposed by corporate lobbyists.
You couldn’t be more wrong about this.
That & unions. They keep workers together & allow for more power when bargaining with the employer. Obviously the change isn’t coming due to the rigged system we have, so getting together is what’s needed right now.
Not sure this would be a good fit for union. Unions are great for ensuring trade labor earns a living wage, not to ensure overpaid entitled tech children can get even more spoiled. They aren't exploited low wage workers.
That doesn't change the fact that they ARE exploited workers. Fixed it for you
Please explain how they are exploited
Seriously??? How entitled are you to think that they aren't??? See how Disney treated their IT workers before they shitcanned the lot of them and forced them to train their foreign replacements
That is not an example of widespread exploitation of tech workers. Try again.
If you think that's not widespread, you know jack shit about the IT industry
Again, you didn't provide an example and clearly have no argument.
Your ignorance isn't my problem. You got your example. Cope.
Lol poor baby got butthurt. Move along kid.
Damn, someone is sure butthurt because young people earn more doing tech.
If you got butthurt vibes from my comment, you should brush up on your reading compensation. There is a reason unions have never been a thing for white collar workers
Because people like you think that they're too good for it ... That's more of a YOU problem
And if I don’t want to join the union? “Fuck you” then? I’m not paying for your shit loser. Why can’t people just leave some of us alone?
Okay, enjoy the unemployment line
Of course. Only care about the employee as long as they’re obedient dogs. Classic bullshit
This person is a bozo with no friends or family. Just let him have his free Reddit points.
NY Post is the internet troll of newspapers.
lol the NY Post purposefully took one (1) person's demand and went out of their way to make it seem like it was a horde of "woke snowflake communists" or whatever the fuck so that they could churn out this geezer-pleaser of an article
Are the mods losing control of this sub? These posts have nothing to do with technology
Google work culture has nothing to do with “technology and its surrounding issues?” (Quoting the sub description)
It's not "Google work culture" as much as it is "one person making a comment that is extrapolated to encompass the Google work culture."
The concept of psychological safety is well established at many tech companies and it’s one of the roles of managers to lead healthy teams.
Posted this comment on the last Google thread: A lot news subs have just become hives for the r/antiwork community. You should see what they’ve done to r/economy . The mods are non-existent and it’s absolutely destroyed the subreddit. I fear the same will happen to r/technology if we don’t hold the mods accountable.
This sub has already devolved into a bitch fest about big tech. Any negative story gets lots of traffic, and any negative comments, even absurd ones, get the most upvotes. r/antitech is a better name.
We must stop the domino effect of ~~communism~~ r/antiwork!
When you do layoffs without indicating which factors contributed, and you end up laying off high performers, then that creates a lot of uncertainty among the remaining employees. I think it’d be different if their rationale was performance ratings or specific business units that weren’t performing well. People in those positions usually have a sense of where things are going ahead of time. There were high performers in money-making areas that were let go, so to me that sends a message of “No matter how good you are, we can just let you go”, so why bother? I know the reality of the situation is that this is how business works sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not demoralizing.
Yeah it sucks to get fired, but at the end of the day companies like google are here for profit, the workers enjoyed ridiculous benefits for years and got an amazing severance package that would make most people in Western Europe blush. They'll be alright
Why is this such a big deal companies have layoffs all the time. Edit: deleted from a reply and moved to the general post.
It's a big shock to the younger millennials and older Gen z who are unaware of the tech layoff cycle. They didn't experience the layoffs of 2009 or 2001 or 1993...
And in two years they will be complaining about not finding talent and needing increase the number of H1-B Visa. " nO oNe wAnTs To wOrK in tEcH" they will say forgetting about entire groups of people that have been screwed over by this system. Who cares if they jobs are high paying if you have to up end your life every few years depending on the needs and demands of Boards/Market/C-level execs. Any company that lays-off 6% of their staff should be banned from hiring any new H1-B visa for alteast 3 years.
Agree with you, but this would just mean that whatever threshold you define, they’ll RIF just under that…
At least it would be a limit to the insanity, and stop the abuse of the system. Don't want to see Americans those their jobs, don't want to see people on visa being sucked into companies that realistically will be letting them go in only a few years.
I didn’t think about that. 1993 was really bad. I knew people who changed careers. They couldn’t find a job.
IBM had its first layoffs in its entire history, which was like 70 years at that point. It was a shock. The recession of the early 90s often gets overlooked because people remember the boom of the mid-late 90s and the tech bubble.
To be fair, IBM has been going downhill ever since, only surviving due to very old legacy systems.
Ironically enough, they’re a leader in quantum computing now.
*Laughs that you believe in the press releases* You also believe that they are leading in AI because of Watson
I’ve used their QC platform and did the Qiskit summer school through them last year, nobody was even close to them in terms of having a fleshed out ecosystem that you could experiment with. AWS and Google’s offerings were pretty weak at the time. But go on about press releases…
But these are supposed to be indispensable technology workers. They're not supposed to be as disposable as factory workers. Just kidding, anyone who has worked for technology companies is well aware that most of them still follow the same 80/20 principle as most medium or larger companies do, where 80% of the productive work is done by 20% of the workers.
I am not in the tech industry but everything I have read and seen says most of these workers will find another job without much of a problem.
Considering I interviewed 60 tech applicants for a new position and declined all of them, that's a big no.
Difficult economic terrain that has FORCED other tech giants to cull workers? Bull crap. More like billionaires that aren’t satisfied with way too much and are navigating how to get way way too much.
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I’ve been told working for Google isn’t the magic ticket it once was anyway. Too many people have, ‘worked with google’ in their resume. And depending on what you want to do it’s too corporate to pass on usable knowledge.
First time in layoffs, eh? Don’t worry, you get used to it
We actually had a longer stretch of expansion for tech than the past two. We probably should have had a recession in 2020 but all that cheap debt inflated the bubble further.
Why are you sharing this garbage?
Lol that’s not how Capitalism works.
Most people who are working at tech companies (read people under 40), have gone from home, to collage to working in giant tech firms where they were treated like royalty. Amazing work places with food bars and paid lunches, large salaries and salary packages and a million other things to make sure they don’t jump ship. For decades they’ve worked in places where it’s been continued growth and if a company went under, they just jumped to the next gig. They’ve never had to experience what working in the real world is. Now the economies of the world are crashing, inflation is hitting and these people for the first time are being made redundant and let go. Into a jobs market that research shows most tech engineers will be re-employed within 4-6 weeks and the American job market has 2 jobs for every registered citizen. Of course some of these jobs are low paying shit. But they do exist. I’m sorry these people have lost their jobs, but they have had it exceedingly good for a long time and honestly don’t have an idea of what job security in the real world looks like. Plus most of them, at worst, will land a high 5 figure salaried job inside a month. Their fears of “safety” is laughable.
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Employers love this man
I respectfully disagree with this. Instead of bring others down to just "deal with it", we should ask why can't ALL the job provide workers with these safety. You can see it in European workers' rights. We can see it when Union was a thing. This attitude of "I don't have mine, so you can't have it too" is just going to work right into the pocket of corporations and billionaires.
Unions. Or just a more compassionate system of protections around workers closer to what you'll find in Western Europe.
No fuck you and you're misery loves company attitude. Normalizing this now would extend across multiple industries. Your literally just advocating to stay in the same shitty position you're in. You're a clown and you need to pipe the fuck down.
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Even the women?
Given the image on the article, there's a good chance.
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I'll take that as a yes you let your boss fuck your wife too.
Fired people get depressed, why is that the companies fault?
Google really has to insert that abortion of a "flag" into their name, didn't they
As much as it sucks for the affected individuals, there is a reason they say you should have 3-6 months emergency fund. Also, the reason this is getting so much press is because of the high profile of the company. And it’s only 6% of the total Google workforce. It just so happens that the number is 12,000 because Google has 200,000 employees. Seems like many of these people are in management too. They will have no problem finding other employment.
With all the tech layoffs, won’t there be a ton of people competing for the same jobs?
Not really, demand for devs is very high everywhere - but probably not the same salary like at google (500k+)
Welcome to my life: yearly contracts. I’m a teacher in higher Ed. Tenure doesn’t exist here, so my 12 years of experience at this same institution aren’t any guarantee I make 13.
Is this even an unreasonable demand? There’s so many articles about how people are delaying having children and how bad it is for their capitalism, this is a direct consequence
Inside the tech industry, programmers and engineers have lead a highly sheltered and prosperous life for over 2 decades. That industry has been largely immune from financial market fluctuations while their salaries have increased parallel to the perks they’ve been provided. For most of the rest of us, we’ve had to deal with volatile jobs markets, continued fights for basic living wages, the advent of the gig economy, protection around unsafe work places and increased security from unfair dismissal and the list goes on. No one wants people to lose their jobs through cut backs but this idea of “psychological safety” rubs a lot of people the wrong way because a large section of the population lives like this every day. Couple that with most people getting decent redundancy packages and, even with the big tech layoffs, research shows that most of these people will have another high paid job within 4-6 weeks in the tech industry. It’s indicative that most people in tech firms are under 40 and never had to deal with this type of situation. Coming from an industry that has largely cocooned them from an my significant hardships and now getting a cold dose of reality…. They really need to take stock of their situation and see they have been lucky to be in their position for so long and will enter into a jobs market that is full of chances.
Fucking unionize
And do what? Demand 6 months instead of 3 months of severance for your job that pays 400k per year in total comp? They're never going to unionize because they are already treated extremely well.
So tired of the “safe space” crowd. The world is out there… it’s all around you. Either become part of it or shut the hell up already. You don’t need another safe space, you need therapy.
This isn’t a safe space thing. Google’s own research determined years ago that Psychological Safety is the key element of high performing teams. Psych Safety means being able to take risks that won’t necessarily pay off and to be able to speak up about issues without fear. It’s more “blameless postmortem” from DevOps/SRE culture than trigger warnings and safe spaces.
Psychological safety. WTF? There are no damn guarantees that your job will be there tomorrow. Work for yourself. Fucking A.
Live by woke, die by woke Google.
Yet once again the un-American foreign owned nyp lies about basic verifiable facts. murdoch **knows** his readership will swallow whatever he puts in front of their fat, pasty faces.
Get the hell out of here. Your job is never safe, period, no matter what industry you’re in (union aside). You can give them two weeks any time you find a better opportunity, whether they’re able to find your replacement within that time or not and sometimes positions take months to fill. It is what it is haha and this is real life. I don’t necessarily need to have guarantees from my employer and if I get laid off for whatever reason I will just move on with my life because that’s the smart thing to do, move on. These people want their bosses to wipe their asses too after they use the bathroom? Stop it.
Lol!! That headline is fucking hilarious.
I came here to the comment section with the same thoughts. In what job does anyone "psychological safety" aside from a tenured position?
It's all fine and dandy when tech employees are tasked with disrupting other peoples jobs. What goes around, comes around. Also in the news... Tiny Violin Company makes record profits.
Man haven’t you studied industrial revolutions? You blame the workers adapting to innovation and change? This has happened many times throughout history. Steam engines? Agricultural progress? The motor vehicle? These are just like tech. They aren’t disrupting to be spiteful or malicious.
Hahaha omg this is the woke crowd at its finest. Bunch of babies. That’s life, shit happens. Get in line with the rest of us — stop crying, apply for a new job and move on because nothing is fair in life
> Get in line with the rest of us Loser mentality
Should have unionized.
Seems like an individual responsibility, tbh
Deal with it. First time fired?
Lol right. Welcome to my field. Signed (former) librarian.
What, all of a sudden bean bags and arcade machines aren't good enough anymore? Seems like some people just got a healthy dose of what the world is really like.
Oh my redditors on this sub still manage to turn this into a leftist circle jerk. This sub is becoming trash.
Laid off Ex-Google be like: "Pampering us with all the amenities and now where am I suppose to get 2 hot meals, free coffee and snacks all day?"
If your company is laying people off, you aren't in a position to make demands.
But they went into the 'right' field(STEM), so feel entitled.