I'm an ex-google employee laid off as part of the 12000.
To answer your question, basically not at all. Half a year before the layoffs, they explicitly consolidated power towards your direct managers around the assignment of work and especially quarterly and yearly assessment.
Not just toward managers in general -- before that point there was a consolidation of power towards managers in general over the years, but luckily a group of manager's peers would balance out or question any extreme examples, which moderated a lot of what can sometimes go wrong.
But right before the layoffs the system was changed to have an explicit emphasis on your direct manager.
These shit-tests reveal things. When one side has power over the other, some things aren't meant to the tested unless you want to consistently discover how little people care about the folk that have very little impact over their lives.
Is anyone else sick of long-winded prefaces? If they don't get the point in the first paragraph, I just skip it and go to the comments. The top comment gives me the jist anyway.
The laws get _weird_ if you have "resident" status in more than one country.
Just to make the rules easier to enforce, it's sometimes easier to show you have resident status somewhere else. I had much bigger issues with the fact that land ownership / house ownership / bank account laws care a lot about non-resident-ownership.
Supposedly they have to do that for safety deposit boxes too, but as recent events have shown in LA, that doesn't stop them from seizing everything including those boxes and then opening them up to take inventory. A judge objects, but it's too late. Now people are having to prove that they own whatever was in those boxes to get back their stuff back, and if they can't -- everything is gone.
To answer your question, basically not at all. Half a year before the layoffs, they explicitly consolidated power towards your direct managers around the assignment of work and especially quarterly and yearly assessment.
Not just toward managers in general -- before that point there was a consolidation of power towards managers in general over the years, but luckily a group of manager's peers would balance out or question any extreme examples, which moderated a lot of what can sometimes go wrong.
But right before the layoffs the system was changed to have an explicit emphasis on your direct manager.