A high performance team is a chaotic system. You can’t remove a piece of it with predictable results. Remove a piece and the whole system may fall apart.
To think the layoffs had no effect on the quality of output from the system seems very naive.
Yes, it has some effect on the company. In my opinion, lots of teams had too many cooks in the kitchen. Work has been less painful post-layoffs. However, it doesn't seem like anyone related to Gemini was laid off, and if so, it really is a no-op for them.
The Gemini team is not at risk of layoffs. The thing is, I'm not on that team. Also, I wouldn't have spoken up about this even before layoffs, because every training I've taken has made it clear that I shouldn't question this, and I'd have nothing to gain.
In fact, we had a situation kinda like this around 2019, well before layoffs. There was talk about banning a bunch of words from the codebase. Managers and SWEs alike were calling it a silly waste of time. Then one day, someone high up enough got on board with it, and almost nobody said a word as they proceeded to spend team-SWE-months renaming everything.
Does google have any anonymous feedback channels? That would be useful to facilitate honest feedback from employees who fear getting into trouble, but want to raise concerns to avoid snafus like this one.
You're looking at it ;) only half-serious because nothing confidential should show up on HN. I'm venting a little here, which I usually don't do, but there's nowhere to say this at work.
There's not really a good form of internal anonymous feedback. The closest thing is putting anonymous "questions" that are really statements on random large meetings and then brigaiding the vote system to get them to the top, which isn't cool but some people do it. And I doubt those are totally anonymous either.
