Technology

This is the best way to do headcount reductions imo. In large organisations there's always someone who's been there for a long time and gotten tired of the work, and that would gladly take this type of offer if it's lucrative enough.

To demonstrate - imagine that you've been considering quitting your job for a while. Then someone comes along and says that if you do that, you also get some additional cash for free. You'd probably take it, right?

And if you necessarily need to reduce headcount, then there's also the argument that if someone leaves voluntarily, then someone who wants to stay doesn't have to get pushed out.

So yeah, I'm not against this

Have you considered voluntary redundancy?

No.

Have you considered involuntary redundancy?

I really should switch to Graphene

Imagine all of this talent going to work for grapheneOS and/or hardware company willing to make a phone with grapheneOS as its OS.

I don't work for Google. I'm but a voluntary ~~product~~ customer. But if they could offer me a way to get away from them, I'd gladly take it.

Right now I'm moving my personal domain over to cloudflare and email to mxroute. Considering setting up some calendar and similar groupware stuff on kubernetes on Oracles free tier as well.

That's the other rub...if I want to cloud host anything, I get to choose between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Alibaba. Wonderful selection we have there.

(I recognize there are smaller players out there like linode and ovh and a trillion VPS providers...only reason I'm considering Oracle is because they give so much free "forever". And kubernetes is fun for me in like a jigsaw kind of way. Not like the puzzle but the guy from Saw)

Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel hardware and Android software were merged into one division, and Google today announced a “voluntary exit program” for employees working in the Platforms & Devices group.

At least there's some plausible reasoning for this, instead of blanket headcount reduction to pad profits. Reasoning doesn't change much of course.

Did they title the offer "Fork in the Road," too?

Is that where they put a loaded gun on the table and then turn around?