When I was there, someone getting fired was extremely rare, which doesn’t seem to fit well with “you can always replace people” line that you’re talking about?
But Google is a big place and it was long ago, so perhaps it’s a “blind men and the elephant” thing.
Yeah, I probably should have put firing in quotes since there are a zillion ways to get someone to leave. Being "Laid off" is a form of firing, telling someone all of their multipliers are being zeroed out so that they "quit" is a form of firing. Putting someone on a "performance improvement plan" where the requirements to get off that plan is to do really unpleasant work is a form of "firing." Lots of ways to get someone to walk out the door without having to escort them out. And if you went to the managing within the law class they gave it was clearly explained it was so much better if the employee "chose" to quit than Google "firing" them because involuntary termination carried with it the risks of being sued.
Did you ever run percent when you were there? I started at Google in 2006 and one of the 'fun' things people did was run the 'percent' command that would tell you what percentage of Google employees were 'newer' than you, so if it was 10% you knew that 10% of the people were new. I was curious how it worked and found that it just counted rows in a database that had active employee names and start dates. Pretty simple hack.
The amazing thing was how quickly the number grew! And at TGIF there were the Nooglers in their propeller caps and everyone was like wow look at all those newbies. About 6 months in I noticed two things, first there was like 25% of the company was newer than I was, and that the number of employees being reported in the financial reports was about the same as when I joined. One could do the math. Waves of people would be hired, large chunks of them wouldn't survive the first year, and another chunk wouldn't survive 'slotting'. They were just no longer at the company. After a couple of years, as I remember it there were three of us, out of about 30, from the group that joined when I did, still at the company.
When I looked for it, it was pretty clear there was a tremendous amount of 'churn' in employment. I asked Lazlo Bock about it once, he was heading up 'People Operations' at the time and he assured me there were always plenty of candidates in the pipeline and Google wanted only the best and brightest. The people we had? Well they weren't always a good fit "culturally" with the company, after all Google was unlike any company that had ever existed, right?
It was just one of the more egregious times where the 'actions' and the 'words' didn't actually communicate the same message.
Yes, there was lots of turnover and "percent" started looking pretty extreme for me after a few years. But at the time, I assumed that's just how it is with software developers in Silicon Valley. We can and do change jobs frequently. It was well-known that it's the best way to get a raise. But I also knew more old-timers at Google than at other places.
For better or worse, tech has become a cyclical job and we’ve seen big firms printing billions due almost annual layoffs. This started around Covid and will continue likely as the new norm.
Prior to that, I only saw layoffs during market downturns (2001, 2008, 2012) and generally much smaller.