Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff Forget quiet quitting. Meta and Google have learned the art of the quiet layoff: telling staff to pick new roles after reorganizing or disbanding teams, and running out the clock on the reapplication process until some are left with no job. It's still essentially a layoff, albeit small, and it's less likely to draw attention …
Its a common trick, especially among larger companies which, despite their size, are structured as numerous business units. When your unit is closed or consolidated you are invited to find work elsewhere in the organization. Not necessarily at the same facility, of course. You get a few months to sort this out, and if you fail to be accommodated then you're literally redundant.
What never ceases to amaze me is why employees think they have any kind of status in the company. Sometimes they're difficult to replace -- actually, if you're smart you'll try to get into this position -- so you have a measure of job security. But for the most part in the US employment is "at will" and I'd guess in the New, Improved, Brexit Britain the same flexibility will become the norm, if its not already.
Some people have Brexit Derangement Syndrome. It usually goes hand in hand with a bad case of TDS.
Not all US states are 'right to work', which basically means you can leave a job with zero notice and they have no comeback but equally they can say 'don't come in tomorrow, bye'. As always with the US you can never have sensible centre ground. It is always one end or the other. So you get places where you can be taken to court for getting the wrong next job according to your previous employer.
Your answer is the EU workers rights and labour law directives. The British government has said that it aim to remove all EU laws on the statue books by the end of 2023. Whether there are enough people in the civil service to achieve this by the end of 2023 is another question. Presumably a lot of this will be performative divergence, slight changes to be able to say changes were made, but workers rights and labour law will be one of the things that the government will want to be able to show has changed substantially.
Also this is your regular reminder that member states have government representation at Commission and Council and voter representation in the Parliament. If a directive happened it's because member states chose to make it happen.
UK workers rights often exceed EU ones - e.g. 52 weeks maternity leave (39 paid) v. 14 weeks paid, 2 weeks paternity leave v. none, 28 days annual leave vs 20 days...
The Equal Pay, Sex Discrimination, Health and Safety at Work and Employment Protection Acts didn't come from Brussels, the only significant improvement I can remember coming from the EU was the working time directive.
The UK is perfectly capable of maintaining standards outside the EU.
Yes, but will it maintain labour protection standards with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg at the reins?
Well with the normalisation of zero-hours contracts over the past decade I'm sure our current UK government will be more than happy to continue ripping up both our workers' and civil rights so that we can revert to a nation of serfs that cannot strike, protest, own a house, heat our dwelling or buy food. We should be grateful to our future landowners who see fit to allow us to work in their unsafe and dangerous factories, as they are doing us a favour.
The UK is perfectly capable of maintaining standards outside the EU.
This is true. However, the (perfectly legitimate IMHO) concern is that a lot of those hard-won worker's rights, although originating in the UK, originate from protest, and industrial action, and that the current government is populated by exactly the sort of people these struggles were against.
EU regulations prevented these people from derogating our rights, and now we no longer have EU citizenship, a good number of these people have been making noises and movements towards removing them.
You'd have to be pretty naïve to think that the likes of Jacob-Rees Mogg are pro-workers rights, and want to increase the protections workers have against the race-to-the-bottom squeeze in rights and pay that unregulated free-market capitalism promotes.
> UK workers rights often exceed EU ones [..] The UK is perfectly capable of maintaining standards outside the EU.
Except that those standards weren't put in place by the current regime, which is dominated and driven by Brexiteers who were open about the fact Brexit would make it easier for them to get rid of such things.
The Equal Pay Act 1970 was a requirement for EC membership, if it hadn't have been passed before entry it would have had to have been passed after entry to avoid breaking Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome.
The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 came before the 1976 Equal Treatment directive but it had to be amended due to a landmark case in the UK.
The HSW Act 1974 was a response to an explosion at the Nypro chemical plant in Flixborough which destroyed the plant and killed 28 people. Later EC directives were inspired by this and the Employment Protection Act 1975 so reflected the UK's interests. Once there were directives covering the same area it was more difficult to back out of them. Neither act came from Tory governments (if you can even call the current ERG and Britannia Unhinged-driven regime a Tory government).
"if you can even call the current ERG and Britannia Unhinged-driven regime a Tory government"
I don't think I could.
Meanwhile, in a move that may well win the Brass Neck of the Month competition, Rees-Mogg has been calling anti-frackers (largely in his own party) "Luddites". https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62993487
"UK workers rights often exceed EU ones - e.g. 52 weeks maternity leave (39 paid) v. 14 weeks paid, 2 weeks paternity leave v. none"
I don't think UK has anything to be ashamed about maternity leave and compensation.
But your '14 weeks paid' is only the EU mandated minimum and does not reflect reality. Every country has their own individual parenthood compensations.
There's a handy Wikipedia table about parental leave around the world. In many EU countries the Maternity/paternity leave can be extended with a parental leave which can last for up to 3 years and be paid from 0-100% depending on the country. I don't think UK is especially high in that list.
"28 days annual leave vs 20 days..."
20 days is - once again - the EU mandated minimum. Netherlands has 28 days of annual leave - equaling UK - all the other EU countries have at least 30 days total paid leave per year.
It does, for now, but now the foxes are in charge of the hen-house what do you reckon will happen?
And let's not forget, the lazy feckless foxes that were previously in charge have been pushed out, and replaced by the rabid foaming-at-the-mouth ones. It's not a good time to be a hen.
The hard-right-wingers who were the main proponents of Brexit were open at the time (*) about wanting to use it as an excuse to strip away various protections and workers' rights (**).
The EU provides minimum standards on those, and while the UK may had legislation that met or exceeded that they weren't put in place by the current regime dominated by Brexiteers (and helped into power by their victory on that count).
*Those* are the people who want to get rid of them, and leaving the EU makes it easier for them to do so.
This is *exactly* the sort of thing that people like myself predicted and feared with Brexit, as it was obvious the EU had been protecting UK citizens from the worst tendencies of the government for a long time before that. I'm not remotely surprised that the present government is now moving hard in exactly that direction.
(*) For those paying attention to the reality of the situation and what they were actually voting for rather than the "unicorns and rainbows" propaganda
(**) As part of a more general move towards turning the UK into the low-rent, low-tax, laissez-faire, race-to-the-bottom economy. FFS, it says something that even the *president of the United States* (where even the "left" is extremely pro-free-market by anyone else's standards) is criticising Truss for her dogmatic adherence to long-discredited "trickle down" economics.
EU sets some minimum standards, and it has been more than hinted from certain quarters that it would be seen as beneficial to get rid of these.
It must be said that both law and practice varies a lot within EU. In Portugal there are few rights until employment becomes permanent after two years, then it is almost impossible to get rid of people. I know of a case where a drunk bus driver was dismissed and got compensation.
In Denmark you are permanent (unless it is a temp position) after three months, but that just means you have to be given three months notice, it generally is easy to fire someone who is not pregnant. There’s no redundancy pay and no legal minimum pay.
How? Double unpaid overtime? Formally go "80 hours/week or gtfo"? Force employees to divorce their spouses and give children and pets up for adoption? Build capsule hotels and force employees to remain on-site?
Note I'm not even listing Google's vaunted "20% of hours are for personal projects", IIUC that dies a long time ago, if not officially then in reality.
It does occur to me how quickly the clocks have been turned back. Executives everywhere must be clinking their champagne glasses. Only within a few months we went from a changed work reality and the Great Resignation back to "work, serf, or be fired to be replaced with another serf who works twice the hours for half the pay". If it's the Ukraine War then the bastards should be thanking Putin. In sociopathy they are birds of a feather.
One thing I've noticed in my years of consulting is that something like 3/4 of the work is completed by the top 10% of employees, and maybe half the work is completed by the 80% in a wide 'average' range. Wait, you say, that adds up to over 100%, that can't be right! But it is, because the 10% of bottom performers manage to do negative work - their "work" causes more work for others!
They write bad code that takes forever to debug or has to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch. They fail to follow corporate or industry accepted standards and cause "should not happen" problems when assumptions are made that standard practices were followed when they weren't. They distract others and keep them from doing their jobs. They create chaos and play power games that derail projects.
I haven't ever consulted for a Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. so I don't know if this is true in the tech world elite. I've mostly consulted for Fortune 500 companies so they can afford to hire some very good people. The 10/80/10 split seems to be universal in my experience, maybe it is 20/70/10 or 15/65/20 or something but it is along those lines everywhere I've been.
So you really could improve productivity while cutting costs if you could get rid of the RIGHT people - those doing negative work. The problem is half of them are in management, or are team leads angling for management, and the political games they play allow them to point the finger of blame at innocents who get fired instead.
Sometimes even the top performers are let go in situations like this - if they won't kiss the boss' ass or allow him to take credit for their work. I saw that happen once and passed his name along to someone I knew who was looking for a contractor with his skillset and he doubled his salary overnight.
My consulting contracts prevent me from trying to hire or recommend employees of the company I'm consulting for, but when they are former employees it is game on! I made sure the manager who pushed him out learned he was now making 50% more than him. He tried to get my contract terminated based on getting a contract for a former employee but the HR person who handles contracts told him to pound sand lol!
I definitely agree on the negative percentage. Where I work there are people who, if they stayed at home and did nothing, office productivity would actually INCREASE.
Unfortunately, I work in the (UK) public sector and the public sector is scared of trade unions and so doesn't have the balls to fire staff lest it end up in an employement tribubal.
UK civil servant pension pot is now Average Salary pension - and has been for ~20 years for new entrants and those willing to change from final salary (partner entitlements usually).
As for redundancies (and firing in general), the UK civil service don't like doing them, as the previous writer said, because of the unions (and retention) => so the negative workers with 10% is actually ~25% in the civil service.
You're lucky to work in the UK public sector, I suggest you look at your pension pot and shut the fuck up.
My wife works in the UK public sector. Her "pension pot" is a measly 3% matched private contribution pension, so might I politely suggest that ignoramuses with big mouths are the ones who should "shut the fuck up".
Edit:
The actual problem suffered in the UK public sector is caused by low pay. There are plenty of talented people about, but they often find that they can go and do a similar role elsewhere for twice the pay. Those whose roles are specialised, or vocational are shat on ever harder, because their skills are not easily transferrable to the private sector.
Public sector managers also tend to be the worst available, because they, too, could be earning twice as much in the private sector, if they were half-way competent. This is why I, as a developer, earn about £15k more in the private sector than my wife's boss, in the public sector. I shudder to think how much my manager, or his manger, or his manager, or her manager, or his manager are paid, in turn. As you get higher up the chain, I doubt the amount is commensurate with skill...
...I should add, that this is 3% of a salary which is well below the UK average, despite being highly qualified and experienced. A salary, which, on its own wouldn't even pay rent and bills on a 1-bed flat in the city where we live.
Anyone claiming that public sector workers are well paid and get good benefits are living in an absolute fantasy land, or are looking through rose-tinted lenses at the salary and conditions of those at the top of the tree, whilst ignoring the other 99.9%
"Those whose roles are specialised, or vocational are shat on ever harder, because their skills are not easily transferrable to the private sector."
Back in the day it came as a shock to TPTB when I handed in my notice and I don't suppose for a minute things have improved. I'd had the temerity to develop skills that were transferable. Somewhere I still have the letter denying my stated reason for leaving.* It was sent at the same time as I was being offered instant promotion - no promotion board and outside the annual cycle - to stay.
* Essentially that they'd left me stagnating on top of the SSO grade for years when the so-called "career grade" was PSO, one grade higher.
When I did that stuff, I believe that the career grade was the one that you would spend much of your productive career on. Your final grade was considered to be one or two higher. One reason that I left the Scientific Civil Service is that my (pleasant, competent, and fair) boss told me in my yearly staff review that my career grade was PSO or possibly SPSO, but if I had been to an Oxbridge type institution it would have been SPSO/DCSO. Perhaps he was right; I left the SCS to work for a Public Utility, and then left there at the age of 40 as a PSO, with a written offer of regrading as an SPSO if I stayed.
I've thought that there are 4 types of employees (and people!). The doers and thinkers; the enablers; the masses; and the boat anchors. The first does the hard or the vision stuff; the second help/make it happen; the third go along for the ride and do a bit; and the fourth stuff it up, or are actively difficult. The proportion might be 10:30:50:10
In business (and life?) the Pareto principle (80:20 rule) is certainly real: 80% of "good things" come from 20% of customers/staff/people; 80% of "bad things" come from 20% of customers/staff/people (and not normally the "good things" ones).
We can then superadd Sturgeon's Revelation: That Ninety percent of everything is crud - This is why most of us can't have/do nice things...
I know of the boat anchors: we had finance directors who were actively trying to prevent the company from running the project I was leading with statements such as "we cannot expose the company to such risk" (meaning their pension, even though what we did was at the time* a small percentage of turnover) and other means of obstruction just as deprioritising cost analysis despite us having a short delivery timeframe.
That is, until I made an appointment with the CEO (at least I had good managers who arranged that). Once he understood that I was effectively busy giving the company a monopoly, the boat anchors were informed they would indeed be thrown overboard if they didn't get out of the way, and so the project happened.
After which some other w*nker came in as "project manager" - of course, now the risk had gone the games restarted.
* It rapidly became the biggest revenue stream for the company, and the main reason for them to be bought later by a bigger competitor
"...negative work - their "work" causes more work for others!"
This applies to all who make mistakes and is worse than many think.
Example:- mistake made - throw away, start again - cost 1
second attempt - cost 2
but while making second attempt you are not doing what you should - cost 3 and other jobs now run late!
In many industries this is very hard to fix.
> Only within a few months we went from a changed work reality and the Great Resignation back to "work, serf, or be fired ...
Yes, this is almost certainly planned and by design. As you say, it simply won't due for the workerbees to have even the slightest amount of parity, let alone the upper hand, they must be crushed and ground back into submission.
If that means layoffs -- stealth or otherwise -- so be it. Lopping off a few heads now and then is a small, sometimes non-existent, price to pay, especially e.g. if the workers can be run off without a severance.
Never forget: most corporations like this are huge soulless machines purpose-built to wring the last dollar out of everyone and everything involved; and they are "lead" by equally soulless executives taking the word of heartless HR drones, and mindless beancounters.
Bloody grim, isn't it?
Good discussion.
You state "Because places like Meta usually set a relatively high hiring bar, it's assumed staff are generally smart enough to keep and will find another team somewhere." Maybe, maybe not. When I was a manager at [large tech company whose name is a three-letter acronym....yes, that one], it was made clear that no one identified for a resource action would -ever- be allowed to take another position.
"We know that in...the UK..., companies by law have to make some effort, however token, to find you other work within the org if you're made redundant, generally speaking. America, not so much."
For the Brits: Please sound off on how well companies treat your redundant behind.
In the U.S., you are on your own. Company efforts are usually window-dressing.
Sunday Pinch-a-Loaf, Baldie Zuckertart et al. copy each other, like flies on a pile. It is all about getting away with layoffs quietly.
We tech workers need to shout more.
In theory it's a bit better in the UK and the process is defined in law for large layoffs. For starters, people aren't made redundant, their positions are, so the company first has to define which positions it no longer needs. Then it can identify the groups of people who are affected by the positions going and then it comes up with a scoring system to decide who in the groups go. Scoring can be based on performance reviews, sickness record, disciplinary record, etc.
I've seen it work well (in the sense that it was fair in terms of selecting the ones to leave) and I've also seen it gamed by the management to make sure that they got rid of the "right" people. The gaming covers two scenarios really. Firstly, the one where management are crap/scared of using performance management to get rid of poor performers, so they skew the scoring to help. Secondly, to prevent the good people leaving; the rules are that the company has to ask for volunteers in each group and, legally they must accept volunteers before any compulsory redundancies. So if your best three engineers volunteer to go because they'll get a decent payoff then you have to accept them, so don't be surprised if a redundancy round comes closely after a re-org.
Interestingly, the one that worked well was in a company with a couple of unions.
Note that the above covers large layoffs - smaller ones have less process and are a bit simpler from a management point of view, but the company still has to demonstrate fairness.
but the company still has to demonstrate fairness.
Correction: they must appear to demonstrate fairness. A classic way to get rid of people is to put them on jobs they're not qualified for or that are pre-destined to failure, and after so artificially generating bad performance they're then put on a "Performance Improvement Plan" which is a process designed to appear fair but is in reality a mechanism by which their life is made so miserable that they will resign instead (saving redundancy money) or can be disposed of as bad performers (again, saving redundancy pay).
It's simply a covert way of constructive dismissal to try and bypass employee protection laws. Lesson 1 in all of this is that HR is not there for you, it's there for the company.
You're right that HR is there to protect the company but, in the UK, that means treating employees fairly and according to the law. None of the big companies I've worked for in the UK would have done what you describe because it opens the company up to unfair or constructive dismissal and HR would have been the first to jump in and stop it happening. Putting them in a job for which they are not qualified, with no training plan would cause problems at tribunal. In one company I was a mentor for engineers on improvement plans - which meant I was on their side and there to help them hit their targets - and the company went out of their way to help them succeed. Again, an unfair plan, unreasonable or unattainable goals don't play well at tribunals. Improvement plans cost money and time as do tribunals and I've seen HR persuade people to leave, with a decent payoff, just to avoid going through the arseache of an improvement plan.
Your mileage, of course, probably differs, and I know by reputation that there are nasty companies out there who ignore the rules, treat people like shit and turn up on the court steps with a cheque and NDA just before the tribunal starts. Given a choice, I wouldn't work for them.
Unless you have an absolute water tight case most people will not bother with tribunal. I was subject to constructive dismissal last year but managed to find a better job paying more money and closer to home so just chalked that one up to experience and walked away.
You do know that's still constructive dismissal, and you can still take them to a tribunal, don't you? It's still constructive dismissal if you quit to take another job, without actually being dismissed.
Yes, CD tribunals have a high burden of proof. I personally know people who have won them against shitty employers, though, and the compensation does just about make it worth the absolute ball-ache of going through the process.
I'm fully aware what constructive dismissal is, hence saying I was subject to it. The person involved openly admitted to my line manager what he said to me.
There is an old saying: pick your fights. This one was not worth fighting. I'd walked away to the best part of a 15% pay rise and a lot less stress. I did not want the absolute ball-ache of trying to prove what had been done as that would have just prolonged the stress.
"You're right that HR is there to protect the company but, in the UK, that means treating employees fairly and according to the law"
Or at least it means ticking the boxes to present a case that employees have been treated fairly and according to the law and avoiding any documented evidence that they haven't.
"...unreasonable or unattainable goals don't play well at tribunals."
No such process, here. In the U.S., HR most often works happily with management to remove the PIP ("Performance Improvement Plan") outcast, looking to find (read: create) fault and document it. No real money or effort will be spent, except on the write-ups leading to dismissal.
Alas, unions interfere with management's choreographed, easy-strangulation methods like the one above. That is one reason why management detests unions.
Only the naive in the U.S. believe that HR is there to help. The reality is, HR is the Gestapo at management's disposal. It is there entirely for the company's welfare, not the employee's.
People understand "Union!" quite well, as we have seen recently with Starbucks, Amazon, etc. It is remarkable to see low-wage workers organize in spite of fly-in "emergency" consultants' tactics, as unions have been decimated over recent decades in the U.S.
Worse, labor laws remain weak.
Tech workers in California probably have the best (albeit very limited) labor protections in the U.S., but only those in a union (a very small percentage) have clout. Management HATES unions, because the latter will strike, rather than put up with abuses. I remember being invited by accident to an online meeting where management was announcing some ridiculous, degrading performance metric for its unionized techs.
Non-union employees would have expressed concern and acquiesced, fearing for their jobs and thinking about leaving (if only there wasn't a mortgage to pay).
What did the union techs do? Immediately, the chat room alongside management's BS presentation sprung to life, with techs calling out the BS, posting funny-retort photos, showing previous-BS documents, etc. IT WAS AMAZING, INSPIRING, AND FUNNIER THAN HELL!
Guess what? The meeting ended early, leaving the @ssholes in management with egg on their faces and the union techs cheering!
Smart people respond to whatever incentives are present. Google et al go out of their way to hire smart people. As they wind back on remuneration and job security, expect the best to leave. Area 120 was set up to specifically attract entrepreneurial innovators. Now Google is cutting loose the very people most likely to generate future products. A CFO obsessed with expenses rather than profit is in charge. We all know how this ends: HP.
The smart money will trade into these stocks expecting a short term lift in profits from good people leaving, then exit at the peak just befire the long term damage become apparent.
With some music that game could be funnier.
I heard a nice expression some day: someone wasn't fired but he was let free to pursue other opportunities elsewhere. Nice PR BS, isn't it?
I'm so happy to live in a socialist Hell Hole, and not in the Land Of The Free To Be Fired Like a Piece of Shit.
== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==
Not sure about meta as zero to do with them, but its notoriously difficult to actually contact support and get contact with a real person at Google. If they are overstaffed, strange their support is a total nightmare
... by an amazing coincidence (not) , when I worked for a company that had big money subscription to various Google APIs that were used intensively, in that scenario we could easily make contact, even had a few different people we could deal with (to cover main contact being on holiday etc). Seems that money talks on the customer support side of things.
Yeah, if only they could identify and get rid of the employee who thought that increasing staff levels by 30% was a great idea, then wasted $20 billion of the company's money on a silly VR world that there was no market for - the enormous anchor dragging the company down could then be jettisoned.
Meanwhile, all these big tech companies are publicly advertising that they both expect their employees to work themselves to exhaustion, and that once they're all used up they'll be dumped like garbage. I guess that's the end of the image of them being the most desirable places to work, with table tennis, juice bars, personal projects and all that suddenly now ungroovy crap. Now you're expected to sweat and toil in fear of the day the accountant's pen banishes you from your alleged paradise, which in reality is now just another corporate hell hole. Oh well, welcome to the dinosaur club, the next generation will be along shortly to expose you as the relics you are rapidly becoming.
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- Your work group has been relocated to our offices in Kyiv, Ukraine. You must come into the office two days a week.
Kiyv might be doable (as long as they pay the commute), I would have more problems with Mariupol, it is a bit unsafe there at the moment.
when we were young teens:
- there's 20 persons dancing with music, on the dancing floor
- there's one butler with a broom
- there are 19 chairs exactly at the back stage of the dancing floor
Any time, with no warning, the butler would drop their broom on the floor and all 20 persons would run and try to sit on the 19 chairs.
The one with no chair is eliminated.
Remove one chair and repeat with the 19 dancers left. Until there is only one left, winning whatever price.
This was good laughs.
Some have apparently applied this innocent game, to people loosing/keeping their job. Reminds me of Squid games. Scary.
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There are always people that decide to leave when things change and 5% is less than normal attrition rate in such events. This practically means that anyone that wanted to do something else, took the 90 days off and left. Area 120 normally has people that want to do something entrepreneurship, so it makes sense for and of them not to want to stay as normal employees and move to do something on their own.
I suspect that this is an attempt to circumvent the WARN act is the US.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn
Basically, they're not "laying off" workers, they're shifting them and if the worker is "unsuccessful" at finding a new position then they're choosing to leave the company.
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