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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
That said, serious competition would also be good for Google. The maps org is still huge but a lot of what they are doing is tiny iterative improvements these days, not enough swinging for the fences to really add new and exciting products/APIs. If nothing else comes of this, hopefully it spooks some Geo org planners into thinking bigger.
Managers are heavily expected to keep growing their team(s). A manager whose team is flat in terms of size and scope year over year is going to be viewed as underperforming, even if they dramatically improved what they do own (in most of the company, at least).
This means a lot of managers hire for the sake of hiring, and create projects to facilitate that hiring rather than because the projects add any real value. They'll work with their PMs to invent some numbers to sell the project to leadership, but at the end of the day a lot of what goes on there is makework, solving problems that don't exist or re-solving solved problems without improving the solution significantly.
That said, since there's so much cutthroat resource contention, plenty of extremely important/valuable projects are chronically understaffed. I'm sure there's meaningful work for most to all of the engineers currently working at Amazon, but a pretty significant chunk of them are absolutely not doing anything meaningful today.
Part of the issue is they can't/won't compete on comp or benefits with other big tech companies, but still have high-ish standards on hiring, relative to the industry as a whole.
That means they need a huge candidate pool, since most won't make it through interviews, and most of those who do won't accept their offer since they can get better offers from other companies.
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.