Google lays off Bay Area workers, closes Mtn View child care center

Closing the day care is a big deal. I don&#x27;t know how they justified that; most company daycares cost as much, if not more than regular daycares and are run either at break-even, or at a very small profit.<p>And it&#x27;s a huge, huge perk. Taking your kids with you to work allows you to not make a second trip every morning and every evening to go to their daycare (which is never exactly on the way) it&#x27;s good for morale, it&#x27;s GREAT for work&#x2F;life balance, it&#x27;s good for the environment, and the kids spend more time with their parents.<p>PG&amp;E closed their daycare at 77 beale (Downtown SF) when they moved their headquarters to the ghost-town building in Oakland and very explicitly announced they had no plans to re-open a daycare. If you&#x27;re reading this and in a position where you can affect change, definitely consider a daycare on site, it&#x27;s a very effective way to dramatically increase retention of senior employees.

It doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. Is google turning into a pure cash cow with no ambition? You have this resource, developers, that you invest a lot into; why would you get rid of your core asset? Is there no NPV-positive way to allocate this asset? Is there 0 ambition to pursue new projects?<p>If it were any other team I would have understood. but devs? makes no sense.

Wow the child care thing must really hurt. I could absolutely imagine people making career decisions - not to mention decisions about where to live - based on the reasonable assumption that the child care provided by Google wasn&#x27;t going to be arbitrarily turned off.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine part of the Google hiring process was a note that said &quot;do remember that we might change our mind about providing child care, so don&#x27;t make any crucial decisions based on the ongoing existence of that benefit&quot;.

The childcare thing seems like it was already known.<p>From a December 2023 article (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;google-day-care-centers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5google.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;google-day-care-centers&#x2F;</a>):<p>&gt; <i>For the past several years, four Google Children’s Centers have operated in the San Francisco Bay Area. These Google-run day-care centers will be closing next year, but the company is expanding its parental benefits so that more employees, especially those around the world, can partake.</i><p>&gt; <i>At the moment, 300 parents in the Bay Area use this particular benefit, which was introduced in 2008 when Google had 20,000 employees. Annual entry is determined by a lottery system and those selected pay a tuition with only some subsidy from the company. This school year, which ends August 2024, will be the last one for these Google facilities.</i><p>&gt; <i>The company is helping those existing families find new day-care centers, while those working at the four Google Children’s Centers will receive an exit package that includes outplacement services.</i>

Force employees to come work onsite while simultaneously closing onsite childcare facilities... Makes perfect sense.

My team got laid off in fall 2023. I knew it would be a long road ahead, but it <i>still</i> feels like we’re just in the beginning of the tech layoffs. Extremely depressing. Hoping I can ride this out.

I knew someone who worked at the child care center. Things got really bad after the pandemic. I heard that people were promoted for very sketchy reasons. The result was a bureaucracy-heavy mess of incompetence and political infighting. It apparently was unbearable, and it is not a surprise to me that this happened. All the corner-cutting and nickel-and-diming made it clear that the higher-ups were trying to kill this perk. It is kind of sad, since this single perk was specifically called out when Google used to get the ‘Best Place to Work’ awards.

Oh. Both my kids went there. I had constant disagreements with the staff- it was really far too expensive, and some of the teachers were just lazy, others were overqualified.

We used the childcare at Patagonia when I was there prior to COVID. I believe it was run at a loss, the staff was excellent, student&#x2F;teacher ratio was really great and there was an emphasis on bilingual instruction. It was affordable — Google could do the same if they cared. I imagine they don&#x27;t.

<p><pre><code> Google should cut 75% of its headcounts and restart over. Simply that, same for Meta and other Giant software companies. But let&#x27;s focus on Google. The main products we choose to use are: 0. Search 1. Chrome 2. Gmail&#x2F;Workspace 3. Android 4. YouTube 5. Google Cloud The one we are &quot;forced&quot; to consume is Ads. How much innovation have you experienced in the last 5 years across these products, and when you sum it all, and there was some indeed, does it justify that many *new* employees? I think that the answer is no. BIG NO. Meaning, way too many people are just passing their time, &quot;working on something interesting that might take off one day&quot;.</code></pre>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linktr.ee&#x2F;awu_cwa">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linktr.ee&#x2F;awu_cwa</a> (&quot;Alphabet Workers Union-CWA&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alphabetworkersunion.org&#x2F;join" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alphabetworkersunion.org&#x2F;join</a>

I quit my job not long after becoming a single parent when my daughter was 10 months old.<p>That was back in the mid 1980s. The years I spent with my daughter were amazing. I learned how to be a &quot;mom&quot;, and it was a very enlightening experience. It changed me. She became the most important thing in my life.<p>I was living in Los Angeles and realized I did not want to raise my daughter there so I started researching places I would want to raise her. I left LA just a couple years later.<p>Fair to say I&#x27;ve lived a lower middle class life financially, but also fair to say a much better quality of life than most living in LA, and that includes Beverley Hills and Malibu.<p>These are trade offs we all have to consider, but I do not regret getting out of the &quot;Big City&quot;. I&#x27;d have probably spent 3 of the past 30 years sitting in gridlock traffic. It&#x27;s worth doing the math on that.

It&#x27;s weird how impersonal layoffs are. you are escorted out of office in some cases, and keys and other stuff stop working. You have to turn everything in, and possessions shipped to you at later date.

Feels like I should maybe just do something else. The startup I cofounded with decent funding is starting to flounder and big tech seems to have zero jobs. Not to mention the market has been with a new wave of thousands of ex-faang engineers far smarter than me. Going to college for CS seems like a waste now, but at least I have savings to burn.<p>Starting to lose sight of the point of doing this anymore...

If this was Twitter &#x2F; X that did this move, there would be high levels of extreme outrage and schadenfreude.<p>Google doesn&#x27;t care. They are simply cargo-culting the Meta layoffs strategy and the child care center was just a zero interest rate addition to Google.<p>A cost to the company so great that it was one of the first to end alongside with the expensive workers that had to go as well.

I worked at Google when the daycare was introduced. At the time, it was so expensive that very few employees could afford to use it. Was that still the case recently?

Wasn’t it around this time last year that Google had their big layoff? I suppose the rumor that Google implemented stack ranking might be true after all.

Google already cut back on the free food and the yoga classes.

Most of my friends who have kids complain that they spend like 3-4k per kid per month only to have the carer not even pay attention to their kid or worse totally ignore them or make them feel bad. That sounds horrible.<p>What do you guys look for in a day care? Just curious as I don&#x27;t have kids.

Reported on Layofs.fyi - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;1&#x2F;11&#x2F;24034124&#x2F;google-layoffs-engineering-assistant-hardware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;1&#x2F;11&#x2F;24034124&#x2F;google-layoffs-e...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;1&#x2F;11&#x2F;24034124&#x2F;google-layoffs-engineering-assistant-hardware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;1&#x2F;11&#x2F;24034124&#x2F;google-layoffs-e...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38959026">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38959026</a>

The child care was lottery based and from my understanding still cost money for Googlers (Xoogler from 21&#x27;-23&#x27;)

Why did they lay off people in core engineering? Is it performance management in the guise of a layoff?

Good. Wealthy parents in particular shouldn&#x27;t use daycare (much) because it&#x27;s harmful to their childrens&#x27; later life. They can afford to take a few years off work. It&#x27;s sad how so many people see daycare as a perfectly valid way to avoid the inconvenience of raising a child. Some parents just shove their kid into daycare too young when they&#x27;re not emotionally ready. Here are replicated studies from Canada showing that negative effects like criminality and not pursuing higher education persist to at least the end of teenage years. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ifstudies.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;measuring-the-long-term-effects-of-early-extensive-day-care" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ifstudies.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...</a>

Feels like the end of an era

On site daycare is just about the ONLY perk I care about

Serious question, why don&#x27;t Googlers unionize? They bring in far, far, far more revenue than they cost in salary. You&#x27;d be foolish not to leverage this collectively....

They&#x27;re closing the main office?

If they’re closing daycare centers they (Google) must be really far in the red, right?<p>What the hell? Remind me to never work for Google.

We all talk about AI as some magical thing that will take care of us, bring more love and peace.<p>Nah, it’s going to accelerate capitalism - concentration of wealth and power.<p>As soon as companies can keep their fat revenues and profits with fewer staff, they will choose that.<p>I’m willing to bet Google will never grow to 2X the staff they have but they will 2X the revenue with marginal increases to average compensation.

I&#x27;m honestly surprised the day care was still around. I thought Anne Wojcicki gutted it as soon as she had no need for it back in 2008 or so.

Google needs some people to resign in addition to those who were fired. Closing the daycare will work perfectly. That&#x27;s how psychopaths think.<p>Do not fool yourself. Google has been the enemy of innovation for some time, losing good developers is nothing for them.

Wow! The golden 10 years (or the roaring 10s?) clearly are coming to the end. Welcome to the rusting 20s.

Gee I wonder why the birthrate is down

Enshittification rolls downhill.