Depends on the company and management. Google codifies this role to some extent as Tech Lead, which is an engineer expected to act as a force multiplier and mentor more than an individual contributor.
It doesn't always work as designed (ok, maybe rarely works as designed), and TLs can get too bogged down in cat herding, planning, and bike shedding to actually work as an engineer. But at least the spirit of the role is sound.
I'm the frontend lead in a company of about 200 people (mostly devs) these days, and the idea of being a force multiplier is spot on. I'm not there to be the best dev or the most knowledgable; I'm there to lead the conversation and amplify people who are saying good things. Having a pretty deep understanding of the tech is useful so I can tell what those good things are. I am absolutely not in the company to show off or take credit for what my teams do.
Where I disagree is with the idea of fighting with product owners. If there's a disagreement around approach or tech choices that's a sign we don't have enough information. Fighting or refining won't solve that. It's a signal that we need to do more discovery work and understand the problem better.
I never said one should be fighting. My point is that POs/PMs should know the domain at least as much about the domain as TLs do.
The problem is not needing discovery work or understanding the problem. The problem is when the Tech Lead is the one who's providing all the data for that discovery, or helping them understand the problem better, because of lack of expertise of PO/PM. Or having to push back because of incomplete knowledge.
If there is lack of information or incorrect information, POs should be able to get that information themselves. If a TL is the sole source of that info, then it becomes an issue.
IME this is very common. And it takes too much time of a Tech Lead's day.
My experience at Google has been that TLs were generally strong engineers who were doing that kind of mentorship and product leadership, so to the degree that it's a "promotion" (same money, more responsibility isn't a promo in my book) it does seem to go to those who are doing it.
Now TLM (Tech Lead + Manager), however......there's a role that's set up for failure. Be a manager but be judged entirely on your technical contributions.
Is that a higher level position ("promoted" suggests that)? In my FMCG IT department I am the TL & "technical architect", but I am on the same level as a senior developer, just having in the top 3 priorities the coaching and mentorship of all technical people in the department and no code expected (I do write some as examples or templates). What is the TL level in Google vs developers and architects?
The TL role is a little restrictive IMHO. I’ve worked with very junior people who have a very effective ability to pair and improve others’ effectiveness. Perhaps as they learn they also teach.
Sadly "in stasis" is pretty generous. I know several people who were in that win of the Allen org and they've all said that Jody Allen viewed it as a waste of time and money and was delighted at the opportunity to close it and never reopen courtesy of the pandemic.
It's sad. The LCM was magical. It's weird Jody Allen couldn't have just shoved off the LCM onto some other staffers or something if she was bored of it.
After who knows how many people donated the hardware they’d carefully preserved for years with the expectation it would be preserved at the museum as part of Paul Allen’s legacy.
I worked in a part of Amazon that had a lot of ability to help detect and flag this sort of fraud. I had to fight hard to get even a proof of concept project greenlit.
There was exteme organizational disinterest - partly for a bad but predictable reason (we made a lot of money off these fraudsters) and partly for a reason so bad it still makes me cringe (money recovered from identified fraudsters went into the balance sheet of a different SVP's org, so our org viewed it as a waste of time).
I made the case that the longer we let the problem fester, the less people would trust Amazon to buy anything. Leadership didn't really care but got sick of me constantly making noise about this and eventually signed off. That said, at my project's peak I had four engineers and one data scientist. Compare to consumer fraud and vendor fraud, both of which negatively impact Amazon directly, which were fought by entire VP-level orgs of hundreds of people.
In the end we put together a system that detected blatant fraud easily and in worrying volume, but as soon as I left - which meant there wasn't anyone in leadership sponsoring it - it was quietly mothballed.
That sounds a lot like the current state of credit card fraud detection in the US. Merchants, the end company you're buying from, end up holding the bag for fraud. At the other end, the payment networks for Visa and Mastercard have all the visibility, history and context, but none of the liability.
Excellent example of workers knowing what’s best yet having less than zero control over it (at best setting precedence that it was a waste of time to combat unjust hierarchical decision making through hard work and advocacy without role based power). A bigger change is needed without waiting on those who achieve power to change their minds for a min
Well if nothing else, I'm glad that my intuition is not too far off-base. I had assumed that with a fairly minimal amount of analysis of the data that Amazon definitely has or can get, fraud would stand out plainly, therefore failure to address is organisational, not technical.
Yeah, I hate the way they were conducted but can't think of a better way that wouldn't open the company up to a lot of risk.
I'm not convinced that announcing them in advance is actually better anyways. We have partner teams in Europe who get to spend a month or more after the announcement worrying about whether or not they still have a job. Morale on the teams in the US took a noticeable hit, but the teams in EU have seemed utterly miserable for the last week.
I was laid off in the EU (not from Google, and not in this wave) — and yeah, productivity completely tanked for months while we waited for the relevant information to seep through HR’s stonewalling.
I think it’s better to have some warning, but it would have been great if they could have said “your job ends in three months, here are your options” instead of leaving people hanging while they figured out the details on the corporate side. Or even, if paranoid about disgruntled employees, to say “welcome to your garden leave, here are your options.”
Current Googler, I have no insider info at all, found out about this the same Friday morning as everyone else. Everything expressed here is speculation based on my own observations and conversations with HR leaders at Google and other companies involved in this round of industry layoffs.
It's unfortunately not surprising that some current and rising stars in the open source world were impacted by this. There's an important factor in layoffs that is poorly understood and almost never underlined in reporting: layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Layoffs have important legal and personal implications. They need to be applied broadly, either across the entire company or across divisions within the company that are unsustainable. They can't consider performance as a primary factor, since doing so both necessitates a lot more paper trail and makes unemployment insurance much more complicated. They can't be contested by individuals, since they don't count as termination in the legal sense.
On the plus side, because they are not tied to performance it gives impacted employees an honest, blameless justification for why their role ended. The fact that there's public outcry about high performers being impacted provides air cover for everyone else.
All that said, I agree with the posters who have called this out as being a fuck-you, know-your-place gesture from the wealth class to the professional class.
A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays?
“Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.”
- https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311....
“Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation”
- https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
“They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...
I'll temper my general "layoffs must be done without regard to performance" into a more specific "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".
Google and other big tech companies who participated in this round of layoffs explicitly ignored the most recent performance signal. They may have used older signal, but it clearly wasn't a significant driving factor. At most it may have been a tiebreaker if all else was equal. As noted in that link, seniority, redundancy, skills, and placement within the business were communicated to be the overwhelming factors.
Don't have access to that BI link, but it'd be pretty dunderheaded if MS did use layoffs for low performer housecleaning. Every time you let someone go because of low performance, you have a very non-negligible chance of that person suing you for how you conducted the termination. In the event of someone being _fired_ for low performance, their manager should have a clear paper trail documenting the low performance and the lack of improvement that led to their firing. That paper trail won't exist in the case of surprise layoffs. Doing that en masse would be opening yourself up to a hell of a class action suit.
It's also possible that people are saying layoffs not meaning the technical term, but to mean "fired a bunch of people in a small timespan". That was the Amazon business-as-usual approach, but it was called "unregretted attrition" rather than (correctly) firing or (incorrectly) layoffs.
Whatever the messaging may be, I can assure you, MS is using this as an opportunity to clean house of low performers and particularly low-revenue generating teams, see: HoloLens team.
Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
No matter what language they use e.g., layoffs, the net result is still the same. People who aren't having as high impact or on high revenue generating services are going to get culled. I'm assuming the same is going to hold true for Google, Amazon, whatever... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
> Consider this: you have a high-performer and a low-performer. You have a mandate to reduce your team size by 1. Who do you choose?
This isn't how layoffs work. They don't to go each manager and tell them to reduce their team by X - that does happen, but it happens by way of managing people out for performance reasons, and it's not called layoffs. It's firing/unregretted attrition.
What happened here (at least at Google and Amazon) is that a relative handful of upper management worked with a relative handful of people in HR to use some formula to identify thousands of people to lay off. They definitely targeted some projects more than others, and entire projects/orgs/divisions were scrapped as part of it.
> ... if they don't do that, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
There's general agreement within Google that this absolutely puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Googlers in good standing and with years of knowledge about our business and systems were let go. When (if?) the economy recovers, we'll hire new people to do the same job, but worse.
It isn't being driven by competitive factors, it's being driven by a combination of profit-seeking and workforce-cowing.
> "in this case, layoffs were done with at most marginal regard to performance".
Do you actually believe this to be the case? Why on Earth would Google do this? You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews, so at best this is just a hunch you have. Ask yourself if it's a hunch that makes sense.
Sundar is never going to actively cast shade on the people he just let go, but he did emphatically say "the process was far from random".
> You are not privy to either the list of employees who were let go or their historical performance reviews
I know this local to my org. I can say first-hand that most low performers from the current and prior cycles were not impacted by the layoffs, while people who were high performers in the current and/or prior cycles were impacted by the layoffs. The experiences of other people managers within the company (and at Amazon and Microsoft) agree with this.
I don't want to get too into Kremlinology, because I don't have enough data to say for sure how people in my org were selected beyond "performance wasn't a major consideration". But there is definite high-level tilt towards cutting people from certain areas in the company (parts of maps and devices were hit hard, most of cloud was barely impacted).
Yes, clearly certain product areas were targeted which makes obvious business sense. But you're making it sound like high performers were actually targeted by these layoffs, which is patently ridiculous.
My own anecdata confirms that /only/ low performers or people working on projects that should never have existed to begin with were let go.
I've some pretty "hilarious" things about the round of firing.
For example, one friend mentioned that someone on his team was let go while they were on call and actively handling a security incident.
Another person had two people critical to their project laid off. They didn't cut the whole team, just the two most critical people. Regardless, that team is kinda up shit creek now, but still employed by Google.
The key definition people are missing here is "good performing". What does that mean? In times of macroeconomic certainty, companies are going to focus on core revenue generating business. It makes a ton of sense that some OSS folks got fired, because OSS doesn't generate revenue. Managed services generate revenue.
I’m still stunned by how many Googlers think they are not in the “wealth class”. Half, even maybe a quarter, of a normal-length career is enough for a Googler to retire.
People making $250k on average getting laid off is admittedly less of a tragedy than people making $75k on average getting laid off. The former would have more opportunity to save and potentially less impact on their lifestyle and financial stability.
But the laid off workers have a lot more in common and a much closer standard of living with each other than with the billionaires whose wealth their layoffs are serving to marginally increase.
>layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance, because otherwise they aren't layoffs, they are mass firings.
Call it what you want, but layoffs serve multiple purposes. Starting with low performers should be table stakes for any layoff, otherwise you disincentivize high potential employees.
Not so sure. I was in a research lab at a similar school a couple decades ago. There were two staff lab assistants (not sure they'd be considered administrators by any stretch), and the PI shared an executive assistant with three other PIs. That's not a ton of local overhead.
At the department level, there were of course deans, provosts, counselors, admissions people, etc etc etc, but even that departmental overhead wasn't more than maybe a 1:8 ratio compared to the number of grad students.
I'm sure there was similar or even greater proportional administrative staff once you got to the university level, but even if you include every single employee in big departments like Research and Graduate Admissions, it wasn't anywhere close to even half the number of students. I know this because the entirety of the administration fit into a few old buildings in half the campus, while the rest of the buildings on that half and all of the buildings in the newer part of campus were filled with labs and classrooms.
So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things (running directly counter to the general trends in worker productivity in that time), or they've created an immense amount of new make-work for themselves and their colleagues. Articles like this point pretty strongly at the latter explanation.
>>> So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things
I feel that since they have no shortage of money, they don't feel the pinch of hiring more admins. Thus the number of admins has increased.
It doesn't always work as designed (ok, maybe rarely works as designed), and TLs can get too bogged down in cat herding, planning, and bike shedding to actually work as an engineer. But at least the spirit of the role is sound.