When layoffs come for high performers: Google 2024 edition

It’s January 2024 and a thousand Googlers woke up to an email saying their job is gone. This in itself is not surprising. A larger cut happened one year ago, and many people at Google would admit it’s still generously staffed.

What is surprising are the names that appeared in this round of layoffs. Many of the names I see are long time Googlers I’d consider high performers.

What’s going on?

First, you have to understand why teams get overstaffed. That’s easy. Managers want to have big organizations so they can push to be promoted from Manager to Director to VP. I don’t blame them, VPs at Google make a lot of money. Incentives work.

This isn’t news, so can’t it be prevented? Well… it’s hard. VPs need things to happen. Their biggest lever is money in the form of machines and headcount. They also have multiple layers of management between them and ground truth of the actual work. The person asking for the headcount has more information about how seemingly hard the work is, and geez all these projects seem both important and hard. With all the layers of management and turnover in the ranks, you can escape actual delivery of results for a long time.

A manager optimizing for personal incentives will get very good at persuading VPs that they need headcount¹. Good managers do this too, but it’s not the skill they optimize for most². The actual job of engineering leadership tends to keep the good ones occupied most of the day.

There are good organizations that fight back against this. How do they do it?

First, they need a great executive in charge. Somebody who is skilled at asking good, hard questions despite constant context switching. They cut through bullshit, don’t tolerate fools, and stay disciplined on growth. Political middle managers in those orgs get moved out, or at worst fail to progress.

You also need good middle managers. People who prioritize building things other than the uint32 next to their name in the org chart. And that brings me to Bob³.

Bob was always the example I gave that proved you could advance at Google without playing the headcount game. Bob had street credit, he built a famous open source project. He wrote a book on engineering leadership that Google used to teach classes on the topic. He probably doesn’t even remember the time he helped me with building my own team, because he seemed to be doing that every day for somebody new.

When Bob got promoted to Director, he had a team far smaller than typical for that level. How did he do it? He took on a hard problem in an area important to the business. He hired a small team by focusing on specific skills and talents. He built bridges with neighbouring teams to help. And then he got results. Afterwards, he went around teaching others how to copy his methods. He was always doing extra credit leadership work.

Basically, he acted like a Google leader did in it’s earlier days. Makes sense, Bob was an OG Googler.

So when other managers griped to me about needing to switch to a team with more headcount to advance their careers, I’d counter: “let me tell you about a guy named Bob”.⁴

And that brings me to the point. Bob was laid off. I’m sure the layoff algorithm⁵ flagged him for having too small an org to justify his level⁶.

Conversely, none of the political managers I know were laid off. Turns out they’re really good at sniffing out the layoff algorithm and preparing. Incentives work.

The OGs are playing the wrong game. You can imagine how this will play out over time.

I’m not too worried about Bob. He’ll have lots of options. But I’m worried about Google. They’re supposed to be better than this. Big G, are you okay?