During the pandemic, Big Tech was booming and hiring new employees as fast as they could. With all that hubbub behind us, and an uncertain economic outlook, those Giants of the Internet are cautiously trimming some of that fat in preparation for leaner times.
That, at least, is the argument for the recent wave of lay-offs at Facebook (Meta), Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, SalesForce, Lyft, DoorDash and Carvana. It seems, though, that the recent layoffs at Google might have been a little different.
Instead of culling the recent hires, the trusted hands at open source teams, and those teams themselves, are being hit especially hard argues an opinion piece at El Reg. Chris DiBona, founder of Google's Open Source Program Office, Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and Google engineer, Cat Allman, former Program Manager for Developer EcoSystems, and Dave Lester, Head of Google's open source security initiatives, are the main names being mentioned.
El Reg's observation might be a coincidence, however; and the way the layoffs are being executed kinda points to that. No exit interviews, but just people's access badges disabled, and firings by e-mail: at least one engineer got the message in the middle of his production shift. Which gave rise to an interesting speculation by former Google engineer Mike Knell:
Best theory I have is that an outside company was hired and given a "clean room" export from the HR systems to work with.
Stripped of identifying information and any demographic data that could incur a *direct* disciminatory bias in the results. They were then told to write code to determine which rows to cut from the dataset based on the output of some weighted formula designed to determine the "fireability" of that employee while maximising the savings achieved by the exercise. They then took the output of that algorithm, stack ranked the results (because Google just LOVES to stack rank things, especially people) and returned the top 12,000 employee IDs.
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In the latest lay off round hit to tech, Yahoo has announced they will be releasing around 1,600 workers, including half their Business unit, with 1,000 of the cuts coming by the end of the week:
The layoffs are part of a broader effort by the company to streamline operations in Yahoo's advertising unit. The Yahoo for Business segment's strategy had "struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack," according to a Yahoo spokesperson.
"Given the new focus of the new Yahoo Advertising group, we will reduce the workforce of the former Yahoo for Business division by nearly 50% by the end of 2023," a Yahoo spokesperson told CNBC.
Yahoo said the company would shift efforts to its 30-year partnership with Taboola, a digital advertising company, to satisfy ad services.
Those losing their jobs will be provided severance packages.
Related:
- Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?
- Amazon to Slash More Than 18,000 Jobs in Escalation of Cuts
- Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts
As layoffs ravage the tech industry, algorithms once used to help hire could now be deciding who gets cut:
Days after mass layoffs trimmed 12,000 jobs at Google, hundreds of former employees flocked to an online chatroom to commiserate about the seemingly erratic way they had suddenly been made redundant.
They swapped theories on how management had decided who got cut. Could a "mindless algorithm carefully designed not to violate any laws" have chosen who got the ax, one person wondered in a Discord post The Washington Post could not independently verify.
Google says there was "no algorithm involved" in its job-cut decisions. But former employees are not wrong to wonder, as a fleet of artificial intelligence tools become ingrained in office life. Human resources managers use machine learning software to analyze millions of employment-related data points, churning out recommendations of whom to interview, hire, promote or help retain.
[...] A January survey of 300 human resources leaders at U.S. companies revealed that 98 percent of them say software and algorithms will help them make layoff decisions this year. And as companies lay off large swaths of people â with cuts creeping into the five digits â it's hard for humans to execute alone.
[...] These same tools can help in layoffs. "They suddenly are just being used differently," [Harvard Business School professor Joseph] Fuller added, "because that's the place where people have ... a real ... inventory of skills."
Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
Related:
- Yahoo to Lay Off 20% of Staff by Year-End, Beginning This Week
- Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?
- Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts
- Amazon Will Reportedly Lay Off 10,000 Employees
After a tweet exchange where Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned a fired former Twitter executive's disabilities and work performance, Musk has issued a rare apology and offered to rehire former Senior Director of Product Design Haraldur "Halli" Thorleifsson.
Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021, saying on the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that he decided to let his successful design agency Ueno get acquired by Twitter because he really believed that, much like Musk, Twitter had "never lived up to its potential." Until his exit from Twitter, Thorleifsson led an innovation team at Twitter, but Musk apparently was not familiar with the meaningful contributions Thorleifsson made to the company until after he let Thorleifsson go. Now Musk apparently regrets dismissing Thorleifsson.
[...] Before Thorleifsson got the official notification that he'd been fired from Twitter, he told the BBC that he had a theory explaining why it took Twitter nine days to respond to his inquiries about layoffs.
"My theory is they made a mistake and are now looking for anything they can find to make this a 'for cause' firing to avoid having to fulfill their contractual obligations," Thorleifsson told the BBC.
According to The New York Times, the cost of firing Thorleifsson may be greater to Twitter than the cost of keeping him on, which could be another factor motivating Musk's decision to try to rehire the former design executive. Twitter users have speculated that his severance package could be worth $100 million, and Thorleifsson seems willing to take the money and leave. He tweeted that he's OK with his exit from Twitter and asked Musk to confirm he'll receive his full severance.
Related:
Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 08, @03:27AM (3 children)
Do the open source projects return as much money to Google as their closed source projects? Given that corporations and investors are looking for cash returns on their investments, you need look no further than this to find the "bias".
Mind you, I really don't know the answer to my question. It is a question after all. Android is open source, and it appears to be both a money sink, and a revenue generator. But, I don't know what the numbers are. But from the investor's point of view, Android staff may well be deadwood that needed to be trimmed. Any ideas?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 08, @04:36AM (1 child)
This is exactly where my assumptions went as well. The goal of investors who push for layoffs is nearly always to maximize short-term ROI. Even though the open-source work provides valuable strategic benefits (e.g. a better Linux helps both GPlay and making their servers cheaper to operate), the closed-source work is more likely to directly provide revenue. And they don't care if it damages the company well after the 1Q2023 reporting is done.
It's worth remembering that in these kinds of situations, who is actually valuable isn't going to determine anything, and who appears to be valuable will determine everything. And I'm quite certain an MBA who knows nothing about tech would look at the open-source teams and say "So you're spending millions on these departments and divisions that have no revenue? That doesn't make any sense!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, @08:55AM
Meanwhile some greedy person who knows about tech but whose job and $$$$$$ is dependent on cutting costs will just get rid of the teams that don't directly contribute to revenue or operations, take the bonuses etc and run before the shit hits the fan. After that it's Someone Else's Problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Wednesday February 08, @10:21AM
It depends on how you measure stuff as well. For example, investment into openssl probably doesn't make much money for google. But google makes a lot of money from the fact that openssl exists and works well. So a PHB might cut these projects because they don't understand the technology stack and can't make a proper technical risk assessment to google's bottom line.
Note that this seems to be the route that kills tech companies. Corporate enshittification.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 08, @07:44AM (2 children)
Karma is an Algorithm too.
Anyway, Open Source projects teams need not be kept hired necessarily, they are mostly already emotionally bound enough to their projects so there is high probability they will continue to freely develop for free.
Kudos to Vanguard, Blackrock and others for taking good care for the Investors.
The edge of ċ¤Şç cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Wednesday February 08, @11:09AM (1 child)
Open Source doesn't mean that you'll get what you want free of charge. It only means that you get what is there free of charge. You want this change to happen? Cough up some dough. Twice so if I'm the maintainer, do this in my spare time and I don't really see the benefit of this being part of the project.
Like, say, if Google gets to siphon information away from it and it's baked into the code in such a way that it's less work to just write it anew rather than to fork and clean up the code base...
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday February 08, @05:37PM
Also works the other way around. While I don't see Google close-sourcing Chrome due to the user profiling gold mine that is, there are other open source programs that do not have that advantage. I'm thinking about Puppeteer here -- kinda a necessary tool for web app testing -- where the main competitors are Playwright (Microsoft) and Selenium (community). When ad revenue goes down, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to close source this, and have a steady stream of recurring revenue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday February 08, @10:10AM (2 children)
> the way the layoffs are being executed kinda points to that. No exit interviews, but just people's access badges disabled, and firings by e-mail:
I get that cash flow goes up and down, politics happens, and people need to be laid off sometimes.
But *always, always* remember that these are people. Firing by email is not acceptable. If an organisation treats employees like this, what does that say about the organisation's ethics? Presumably that moral stance will also apply to their customers. For this reason I fight strongly against contracts with Oracle, will not work with them, will not do business with them, recommend the same to colleagues.
Remember.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Wednesday February 08, @12:59PM
As well, this sort of thing is a source of workplace violence.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday February 09, @05:40PM
Google is famous for randomly canceling projects, and customer support is a very small shell script that doesn't care.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, @05:12PM
$$$ pumped into open source projects are good, when they get to control what goes into browsers
think Red Rat and systemd