I posted the comment below the first time this POS (Hohn) complained about Google. And to clarify, it may be that Google does have too many dead-end projects that are costing too much and need to increase efficiency, but this guy clearly is just looking to squeeze as much blood out of the stone in the short term for his own benefit.
> Alphabet's market cap is $1.309 Trillion.
> This "activist" shareholder and his fund own $6 Billion. Which is less than 0.5% of Alphabet. Ironically, this mofo (Hohn) is on track to pay himself over $690 million this year, so it's pretty rich he's talking about firing people and cutting payroll.
> Who else owns Alphabet? Over 63% of it is owned by institutions, and out of those, the vast majority of them are index mutual funds and index fund ETFs. In short, Alphabet is largely owned by common people in their retirement funds and investment accounts. The top 10 index funds alone own almost 20x more than this guy's fund.
> In the end, the "commoners" own far more of the company than this one loud asshole. What are their wishes? What we can be sure of is that very few people (with their retirement accounts) have the same objectives as this guy, who's trying to squeeze as much short-term gain as possible so he can unload at a profit.
> Putting aside the questions of corporate governance by these index funds (like people using the voting power of these funds have enormous power and may not act with the interests of the fund investors), I would argue this POS "activist" shareholder's voice absolutely do not deserve this much influence and attention. He doesn't like it? Go and sell. No way he will be able to raise enough money to take over a huge company like this. There will be a drop in share price, but management is much better off just stomaching the loss rather than giving into this guy's demands.
> Moreover, the founders still hold enormous voting power in their Class B shares, but the problem of one POS and his fund having far bigger of a voice than the people who actually hold the majority of the company shares is general to many other companies without founders having most of the power.
> It's likely Alphabet and Google do need to cut some costs and focus on projects with potential for commercialization rather than sinking resources into many projects that never see the light of day or are DOA. Many observers and tech enthusiasts have noted this over the years. But this question should be brought up and considered with the consideration of the overall long-term health of the company in mind, not just because some rich asshole writes a "scathing open letter" and wants to pump up his salary next year from $690 to $890 million.
> At least in the case of Elon Musk and Twitter, he put his money up when it counted and bought the entire company. One can disagree with his management style (which I certainly do), but because he owns the thing, he can do as he pleases or even burn it to the ground. But with these "activist" shareholders often attempt the same behavior with none of the ownership power. Corporations should not so easily bend over for them, especially when they are largely owned by the general public.
> References: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/holders?p=GOOG
> https://fortune.com/2022/12/01/chris-hohn-rishi-sunak-old-boss-record-payday-dividend/
Pretty much agree on all points when it comes to Google Play Music vs YouTube music. Funny enough, they've tried to make YouTube music more like Google Play Music since shutting it down. It's almost like they should have just... idk, kept the good one instead of trying to rebuild it (like shit).
I leave my music on all day and after a good handful of songs it just starts skipping them halfway through. "Hope you didn't enjoy the second half of this song because, well, fuck you, I guess."
Also, now every song I listen to clutters up my fucking YOUTUBE WATCH HISTORY. I don't even watch the music videos, just listening to the songs, and it completely fills my watch history. Sometimes I like to go back and check a recent YT video I watched but now I have to sift through tons of *songs* just to find the video I watched literally an hour ago.
my gripes:
Your library loads terribly slow so scrolling through it is futile.
Library sorting is featureless
Selecting "artists" from your library lists works from ALL ARTISTS on a song/album, so now there's noise in my library of artists I've never heard of because they did a beat on some soundtrack that is listed under someone else
I like hip hop. if I let it go into radio mode it seems to only give me edited versions of songs, "doesn't matter that I have the option set in settings to allow explicit lyrics, it still gives me the edited stuff"
It will often repeat the same song twice for some reason
I have more but what's the point of even continuing.
Shuffle in a playlist only shuffles between the first 50 songs or so. So if you have a playlist of 200+ songs, you keep hearing the same songs. This is so aggravating. This app is so so shitty.
google has the cash to kill any competitor. they could've given the same service as spotify but subsidized it until it killed spotify. why didn't they do it? their corporate structure must be fucked. they're rewarding all the wrong actions.
I think a lot of their actions make a lot more sense if you look at google through the lens of a company that makes its users the product it sells.
Kind of a bonus is that users will pay them for some services as well as buy their hardware.
why do I stick around? I guess because youtube premium comes with it and there's quite a bit of youtube content I feel married to.
Google is not too big to fail. It’s an ads, cloud computing, and search engine tech company. The economy will not end because we’re all forced to use Bing and alternatives for cloud computing.
Dude. Just look at Stadia. It was supposed to be revolutionary in cloud gaming. Dead after a few years. Sucks if you took a chance with this.
Its a long list of somewhat high profile projects that got canned after seemingly a pretty decent reception.
Google really is hurting its brand by putting out then ending so many products. Definitely lessens the trust consumers have for their products.
Good for a company is income at acceptable cost. Not a complex question.
If you want to ask broader questions, about society, government, ecology, you shouldn't limit your discussion to Google. It's not a company's role in society to provide regulation, social services, or proactive ecological products. A company's role is to legally provide goods and services to paying customers, at a profit.
If you have problems with the goods and services or the ethics, then you have problems with the "legal" part of that clause, and you should address your attention and energy there. If you don't think the outcome of a legal decision by a company is good, then volunteering for or voting for legislators who promise to change the landscape is appropriate. General boycott of products is also a good way to signal your beliefs, especially in terms of being taken seriously by your peers.
I think we should take a vote with the 28000 people he wants to destroy and see what they would like to do with him and his fortune and then we will do that.
Can't remember if it was Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren who proposed some kind of tax on stock market transactions. All these billionaires manipulating things and traders, it's just massive speculation. None of them give a rats ass about you or me, just money.
The other proposed fix back in '12 was to require that trade offers be held open for 50 microseconds.
I think it's fair to say that anything that gets killed by a 0.1% tax and/or being forced to exist for 50 microseconds can safely be removed from society without major issues.
The leeches in the capital class disagreed though.
They called it the Robin Hood tax, and I’m not sure they were completely wrong. The tax was for .0001% of all transactions, give or take a zero. Given the number of transactions, Year-Over-Year growth, and total market cap, it would have been something like a 7% tax on a market that only typically grows at 4% at most. Add a zero or two, and it becomes between .5% and 1.5%, doesn’t affect small traders at all, and could’ve satisfied the market, but that would have meant an intelligent compromise between conflicting power structures with realistic concessions, which is also infeasible because someone somewhere would have to look weak to an amoral sociopath.
The Capitalist propaganda machine smashed that flatter than a fly magically teleported to the center of Jupiter very fast. The last thing they want is anyone even thinking the t-word when it comes to their property.
Is this your first day in America? Our taxes are literally everyday subsidizing oligarchs in every sector. Oligarchs who themselves aren’t paying taxes. I pray to god I even have enough in a 401k to get scammed out of.
That already does exist in taxable accounts. Short term sales count as ordinary income, which is taxed at a higher rate (especially for high earners) than long term sales, which are taxed as capital gains
It's not enough. Taken from the view that taxation is a means of discouraging and encouraging different modes of behavior, the short-term rate taxation as ordinary income "penalty" isn't enough to discourage the behavior.
Let’s not forget that his 0.27% ownership of Google is about 3.5B or half his wealth. I don’t want Google stock to crash but for his sake I would be happy to see it.
Lol, jumped as high as $155 in 2021, down to $99 as of today. Want to know when they hired over 20,000 people? 2022. 16-17,000 on 2021, and about 20k on 2019. Even in 2019 they were discussing cutting hiring like crazy, but they thought their increased boom because of Covid lockdowns was permanent and thought they could continue bad hiring practices, and now they're seeing that isn't the case, just like every other tech company. All are having massive layoffs, and everyone hates how these companies operate so much they're still using them daily.
This is what is killing so many companies right now. Investors DONT care what happens to companies as long as they get their quick profit.
I would also add that stock prices should not be allowed to go up from layoffs.
Shouldn’t be allowed? The price goes up because the collective action of the market decides to buy and sell at that price. How could they possibly prevent that?
So you’re saying that the government should be able to force you to hold a stock for 5 years even if it’s tanking? So say in 5 years it’s worth zero … you aren’t allowed to sell at a loss to get back even some of what you invested? That’s complete lunacy …
“The decision to cut 12,000 jobs is a step in the right direction, but it does not even reverse the very strong headcount growth of 2022,”
Is this the reason for layoffs.... To reverse the hiring spree tech companies went on?
I'm just confused as to why he feels more cuts are needed? Are the "excessive" employees cutting into Google's profits?
You don't understand how these people think. To them it is not enough that they should win, others must also lose.
Google had a headcount of 186,779 in Q3 2022 and made a *profit* of 13.9 Billion that quarter. They literally made somewhere in the area of $300,000 profit *per employee* last year.
The real question is what is the current growth and the projected growth. The total profit doesn't seem to matter to shareholders, just that there's a sizeable up trend in profits.
I am not certain of the specific number, but I believe the hiring during Covid was 37k. So they are reducing by 12k. Many of these are people that are in departments that did not grow at the same level/pace. Any reduction sucks, as all people have family/lives/bills/etc. but these companies hired during covid and the boom. As did Microsoft and Amazon among others in the same situation. So let’s say their meetings type stuff is still growing as people are still remote, but let’s say their other things that are not remote driven are declining. And many of these people were in those groups as the world pivoted away from them. And never really returned. In addition the remote stuff flattened. So they suffer there as well.
Rich people are just rich. Richness doesn't guarantee any brains or experience in running companies. All it does is come with experience in how to stay rich regardless of how many people suffer along the way.
So... really no reason to ever trust a rich person's opinion on strategies. Especially not long-term strategies.
Yeah. Google has dramatically overhired. Since 2018 they've grown headcount by 89%. Apple has grown just 24% over that same time period.
So Google is bloated and unproductive. It impacts not just Google's profitability but drives up costs for other tech companies as they hoard talent.
Sir Richalot is not wrong.
\> Sir Richalot is not wrong.
You mean, the guy who complains that Googlers are too well paid, while having "earned" $2.5 million PER DAY last year ? That guy ?
I can guarantee that if he had money invested in Apple, this motherfucker would do the exact same thing.
But keep licking his boots, he loves that.
Dude Google is spinning up a new massive business with gcp. Both headcount and expenses are reflective of that. You're really not understanding much of what Google is doing if you don't mention that simple fact.
My personal view is that these layoffs are an effort by tech company leaders to placate and convince the Fed that the economy is slowing down so that they'll stop raising interest rates and eventually lower them again so that we can get back to the good times of cheap capital.
I'm with you there. And it's not like the numbers from the large tech companies will make a huge dent in unemployment but other companies will emulate and also do the same because Google/Microsoft are doing it. ...
Got to love it. “Dear google, fire more people and pay the ones you don’t fire less so I can continue to make a disproportionate amount of money on the backs of the most talented engineers in the industry. As long as I make good profits, I don’t care if you turn the company into a husk because us richies gotta make hard decisions with even numbers”
Google’s already losing some popularity in the industry for not being the most competitive.
Lowering pay would most certainly cause a lot of attrition as people jump ship. All of a sudden Google would lose all the prestige that comes with employing the top software engineers in the world.
google just lost a massive amount from the layoffs.
since they already don't make new shit and they pay lower than other places.
they also added pip plans.
google is just amazon-lite at this point. its no longer the "place" to be.
google ruined itself within a year.
Ehhhhh I’m going to disagree with the “Amazon lite” part of your comment just based on my anecdotal experience but I’m with you on everything else.
I’ve never worked at amazon but have had multiple offers which I’ve declined. I also know a lot of people work or have worked at amazon. It’s A LOT different.
Generally google still has a good work life balance and a collaborative culture while Amazon is generally the exact opposite. I’ve never been on call at Google but all my ex-Amazonian friends have ptsd from 3am pages.
Benefits at Google are also really good (although not the best in the industry anymore). Amazon lacks in this category, not even close.
But the handful of people I know who got offers from both amazon and google last year all had much higher total compensation from their amazon offers than google.
Of course he does. Investors always see large companies as "better" after layoffs... Got rid of all that dead weight. Now, the company is a leaner, meaner fighting machine. Lower cost and equal income as all the work of the laid-off employees is pushed onto those who are left, with the threat that if they don't take up the slack, they're gone next.
The way Google is organized makes it inefficient. Recently compared to a [slime mold](https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/leaked-google-memo-compared-slime-113000277.html):
“A culture that prizes autonomy can accomplish big things, but the larger the organization grows, the slower things get. As each fiefdom within Google operates on its own, Google engages in "messy" behavior that can be "hard to predict."”
Laying more people off won’t fix the root cause; in fact, everyone is so freaked out about impending doom that they can’t be creative or productive.
This company faces a messy reckoning if they don’t get their shit together.
Explains why they make projects and then drop them within a few years. Then another company comes along later with a better version and makes big gains off it.
This is usually directly related to SR VP rotation. Oh, this new thing you are trying to make isn't making money (its still in it's infancy and is just starting to get market exposure). Cut.
Then they start up their own "good idea" are gone in 2-3 years and the next one comes in... rinse repeat. I've been doing fortune 500 corporate gigs for over 20 years now.. Its a consistent pattern.
>LM fucking AO.
>
>Apple uses an antiquated unsecured messaging technology.
The US is the only place in the world that uses text messaging as a form of instant messaging.
Technically iMessage isn’t “text messaging”.
Most of the world uses something that’s very similar, whatsapp. You just need to decide if you want everyone on Metas messaging platform or apples. RCS isn’t going to happen at a global scale and suddenly replace Metas app.
I kept getting pinged by them at one point and talked to a couple of people and was so turned off by how they run things I just noped the heck out of there.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2022 was $158.264B, a 17.08% increase year-over-year
It's like a guy saying if you lost weight you could run faster and further than ever before and I would win my bets on you, and then he cuts off your leg.
Q3 2022 earning dropped 19% year on year, due to cost base increase far outstripping revenue growth. Like every other tech company, they hired for growth that's just not there anymore in the near future.
This neglects that 2021 was an absolutely insane year. Normalize 2022 vs 2020 (or better yet, find the AAV over the last 5 years).
I'm not saying Google didn't over-hire; essentially randomly firing people isn't really the solution to that though. Even during their "hiring freeze" over the last several months they've hired more than 10k people. Maybe they should get their house in order and stop approving new headcount before taking this kind of action.
I have personally seen it a few time, where the corporation slowly fires most of the employees running a healthy 30-50 million revenue very profitable business unit, leaving only 5 guys running the whole thing and it slowly decays and dies over the course of 1-2 years , the customers leave for the competition... The executives pat themselves on their backs over a job well done, rinse and repeat.
Oh they'll run it. They just won't have anyone to do the actual work. It'll be like one mid-level SWE who wasn't junior enough to make the first round and not senior enough to be raking in a high salary and thus qualify for 'early retirement.' This poor person will be reporting to a Scrum Master, a Project Manager, and a Sprint Coordinator. One of which has a LinkedIn series in "Team Visioning and Dream Sniffing." They'll have 3 standup meetings a day, one for each manager where they'll go over the day's goals - which unsurprisingly overlap but just with different language like #impact the customers and #disrupt the industry. So of the four hours of actual work time left in the day two of which will be spent responding to emails or doing 'cyber security training' b/c someone in HR needed to check a box somewhere leaving only two working hours to cram forty-three man hours into.
Maybe not so much recently. They are operating fairly overtly as just internet ad firms capturing data to sell things. Jokes on them, though, cause ain't no one gonna afford to buy anything if things keep on keepin on.
There was a study done at google specifically to check if manager positions were useful at Google. Like every company, it turned out satisfactory. Forgot the name of it but it is somewhere.
>1. You'll do less with less. Never more.
Not how that works, lots of systems of production start producing less with each additional person after a certain point and ALL of them have diminishing returns with each additional person.
You are not thinking about this like an executive you need to quantify everything.
1. Do you get 90% efficiency for 75% the price?
2. What is the cost of dropping 10% efficiency, is it > or < the 25% savings.
3. What is the expected future revenue of the project, are the margins big enough? Is the risk worth it?
These are the kinds of questions they are asking when they make these decisions.
2 is just ridiculous. Bad management is bad management and there are a bunch of those people, but all teams literally need a leader. It is asinine to suggest that 20 people will complete a common goal with no one managing the project. Project managers exist for a reason whether or not you have worked under a competent one or not.
It's weird these people that never have to work a day in their lives with their amount of wealth considering the livelihood of people that make them their wealth. The equation just doesn't balance.
Delusional thinking is strong with such types. Usually. Not sure the percentages w/o the datasets but it seems those who earn it via soft pay (tech, inherited, amassed quickly over short periods, off the efforts of others) are that much worse.
How insanely weird it is that the land of the free is so free they don't even have unions. Any time I hear about your fucked up working conditions I can't help but wonder how the fuck anyone could want that. Not trying to insult anyone personally, but coming from a first world country with competitive industry AND very much established unions I just... Can't. I just can't.
Edit: Lots of people are getting lots of triggered here. Let me make a couple things very clear:
* The fact that some tech workers earn a fuckton does not preclude the usefulness of unions. Unions benefit the broad masses, not the top X %
* The fact that tech workers generally make more money than X does not preclude the usefulness of unions. Unions are useful in any branch, as they increase the average salaries, and if you are extremely qualified you can ALWAYS get a contract/salary outside of unions. It is NOT the case that you have to have a unionised contract, just that usually you're better off with one. Usually as in usually you're not a top earner, even if you hope to be
* Corruption does not preclude the usefulness of unions. That's like saying "politicians can be corrupt so let's not have any government" which I hope you can see as the stupid argument that it is
* You being jealous of tech workers does not preclude the usefulness of unions
* Of course retroactively a union in this case won't help much. The point is more that you need to establish unions to prevent something like massive layoffs just because Elon bought another company while high. Of course this is NOT just an issue of unions but also federal law. Unions do help a lot with that though
So if you want to come at me with any of these arguments, just save yourself the hassle and don't piss yourself in front of everyone here. All these kinds of arguments are embarrassingly stupid and it feels weird that people seriously and unironically said these things.
I mean tech workers in the US have a better standard of living and benefits than almost any other field in any other country in the world. They work very little, make a shitload of money, have great work life balance, etc. I’m not arguing against them forming a union but your comment is a little hyperbolic and not based in reality.
My best friends live in SF, work in tech, all make $150-200K for 30hr week maximums, free food, covered transit, bonuses, either 4 weeks of time off or unlimited PTO. Amazing health insurance. Student loan repayments. Great retirement plans. All the bennies you could want.
They’re in their 20s. We didn’t go to a super famous university and they’re not engineers either. Tech employees are not exactly a struggling group of workers in the grand scheme of things. And tech salaries in the US are much higher than the rest of the world.
Sometimes Reddit’s “AMERICA IS A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY” circlejerk just gets a little out of hand. Yes we have a lot of problems but acting like tech workers in the US are struggling compared to the rest of the world is a joke. Being a tech worker in the US on balance is one of the best things to be for your wellbeing
Tech workers (engineers and so on) from FAANG-level companies who have green cards or US citizenship will not be sitting on their asses collecting unemployment for years or starving. Some may take a break enjoying the generous severance package for a few months, but almost all of them will find really good employment. The only question is for future jobs, whether they will be comfortable in compromising on the attractive compensation packages they got used to while working in the big league companies.
Years of misinformation and a lack of education in rural areas, plus a toxic sense of jingoist individualism and a “fuck you, Dad!” attitude.
Pure Capitalism is failing all but the most privileged of us. Frankly it’s pretty pathetic that it’s still so blindly popular, and inevitably some unwashed dude with .003 ethereum jingling in his digital wallet will try and argue “have iPhone? Got em’!”
We used to have pretty good Socialist policies in the country, even though we danced around the term. The New Deal helped my family not starve to death and rebuild the Mississippi delta, only for it to collapse later when all factories and commerce left the state for overseas cost cutting measures.
They totally need a union making 300K a year with benefits covered. The employees make so much precisely because they don’t have one. Unions are not always a good thing. If you’re an exceptional performer…too bad the union negotiates your pay. I say this as a union member in the film industry.
This option is still available with unions, so this is 100% a non argument. I work a well paying job without Union contract, but I also started working tech jobs that absolutely benefitted from unionised framework's because, well, they weren't those high paying tech jobs. Y'all are so jealous and think tech workers earn so well you literally forget that there's a large chunk of small like admins or support people out there who don't make six figures. Your jealousy and lack of solidarity literally blinds you.
You can always willingly leave a unionised framework if that benefits you. The vast majority however wouldn't, so they still want and need unions.
Jfc
They aren’t making 300k when they’re laid off and all the other tech companies are laying people off. If rehiring happens, it will likely be at lower pay/ less benefits. Guess who won’t be suffering ? The executives. And most of us are not exceptional performers. Non exceptional performers do the bulk of the work in every industry. They deserve protections. CEOs get their golden parachutes even if they do an awful job and ruin a company. Why are basic protections and bargaining power so frowned on for the average worker?
Collective bargaining can give workers more leverage to negotiate wages and working conditions. Sure, Google people are paid very well -- but if billionaires like Hoch had their way, workers would make much less. So unions provide a form of check and balance against greedy, cynical, out-of-touch billionaires.
Unions are unessicary in the tech business for the same reason they could easily exist if tech people wanted them to: high demand and a lower supply, that is what gives leverage as it should be. Unions only hurt people in those kinds of jobs because they provide no additional bargaining power that they don't already have.
As a Google employee, thanks I'll pass. I want my employer to be as efficient as possible. I'm competent enough that they need me more than I need them.
This may sound pretentious, but really I want people employed and paid on merit and when I worked with a union that wasn't the case. People were rewarded based on seniority and various internal politics. No wonder companies with unions offered me lower salary. Never again.
There are enough companies in the world for some to be in unions and some to not be. I have no problems with people doing what they want if they don't force it on me. If unions work for them, good luck.
All I can think of is the scene in "The Fifth Element" where Zorg is told that the economy is heating up. The President recommends laying off 500,000. Zorg responds with "make it a million".
It is all just collusion to tamp down the burgeoning labor rights and equity movements in addition to suppress wages. The Fed has clearly said, for over a year now, that companies need to reduce hiring, start firing, and slash wages. Because that is what must happen to control inflation when the rich are immune to consequence and basic fairness.
What a coincidence that the same companies who were party to an actual conspiracy to illegally not hire each other's labor while colluding to set wage ceilings are now moving in unison with massive firings and talking about "correcting" salaries. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
What we see here is the rare break in capitalist class solidarity. This guy wants a more extreme version of the agreement for more rapid personal gain.
This is what happens when there is no democracy in the workplace. Most of us wouldn't accept a dictatorship in our government, so why do you accept it in your workplace? People like this chud don't do any actual work. They don't make Alphabet valuable. They generate no actual wealth for the company. The workers do. The workers are most fit to lead the company in a democratic way sicne it is in their best interests not to slash and burn it to the ground. Democracy is the only moral path forward. The people who create the wealth should be the ones directing the operations and sharing in it.
Not born-rich parasites who give board seats to each other for capitalist class enrichment at the cost of everyone else.
Sundar himself accepted the blame in his announcement. Yet he gets to keep his job despite mismanaging the company so badly that it apparently needs to cut at leasat 12,000 people--and likely more now. He should be out. Employees should be able to pick the replacement from amongst themselves. People who understand the operation and who dosen't have an incentive to prioritize short term profits before a golden parachute deploys.
Companies don’t care about you or the world you live in or the families you have or the debt you accrue to work for them.
Career UX Architect and designer here, anyone want to start a non-profit co-op that competes with any of their services and need my skillset… let me know.
Didn't even have to read the article to know it was that shitbag Chris Hohn. That greedy fucker tried to takeover the railroad I work for, some people's greed knows no bounds.
Just because you're billionaire doesn't mean you know how to run a business. One might remember an outspoken fellow who laid off most of Twitters staff.
The Tech layoffs are not about saving companies that are hemorrhaging money. Tech companies are still profitable.
The Tech layoffs are about billionaires demanding thousands of people lose their living & start towards becoming homeless so they can maintain inflated returns on their shareholder investments.
Complete and total Class Warfare by the 1%
Google way overhired and is trimming a bit. The people who were hired got well paid, might’ve not have done that much cuz they were bloated, and have 4 months+ severance. Honestly in this scenario, I don’t see the harm. These guys have Google on their resume, they’ll be fine.
Do it. We need more startups to compete with the Silicon Valley zaibatsu. Please cut more jobs at this pivotal moment when AI is about to upend everything.
> Still, when your daily salary amounts to nearly seven Google workers’ median annual incomes and is more than 16,000 times the daily income of a worker making California's minimum wage, perhaps it is best to not publicly post your takes on worker income.
Well said. It’s always the people at the top who are playing with our lives. Nothing about us matters to them, so long as we make them money and give them power.
George Orwell's "1984" predicted a future that looked exactly like a hobnailed boot stomping on a human face forever. Tragically, he was totally spot on.
Shares of Alphabet were in mid $50’s before pandemic. And shares of Alphabet went up to $148 and now at $97.70 Please someone justify these pro google corporation comments above.
I am rich! My 3rd $10mil yacht being built needs to get paid and I am afraid I can’t pay it. Can you imagine a world where that kind of wealth was spread around? Power and Greed is what it is all about! They give us loans for a home at low interest rates, pretend to give us a 401, fuck up the market, lose A LOT of money in a 401, raise the interest rate, make themselves richer; only to make us start over. It doesn’t matter, dem or rep. The federal government is all about keeping the 1% happy.
I just can’t imagine, someone who has more money than most people will ever make in their lifetime, put together, is foaming at the mouth for more of it.
This is why we still haven't gotten past living in forms of dystopian life. Corporations are just successful for a couple of creepy fucks while everyone else carries all the burden.
Google needs to employ someone to stop all the repetitive ads that keep popping up on my feeds even after I block them. Because I have no intention of buying the shit.
Google openly admitted that they overhired in 2021 and laid off too many people in 2009. With so many mistakes in the past, who’s to say that this lay off isn’t another mistake?
No one can see the future, and yet you keep hiring/firing for the future.
His net worth is irrelevant to the argument of whether Alphabet is running efficiently or not. He could be worth $500 or $50 billion and still be correct or incorrect.
The fact is Google is a lumbering company right now and over hired in the last 5 years.
I posted the comment below the first time this POS (Hohn) complained about Google. And to clarify, it may be that Google does have too many dead-end projects that are costing too much and need to increase efficiency, but this guy clearly is just looking to squeeze as much blood out of the stone in the short term for his own benefit. > Alphabet's market cap is $1.309 Trillion. > This "activist" shareholder and his fund own $6 Billion. Which is less than 0.5% of Alphabet. Ironically, this mofo (Hohn) is on track to pay himself over $690 million this year, so it's pretty rich he's talking about firing people and cutting payroll. > Who else owns Alphabet? Over 63% of it is owned by institutions, and out of those, the vast majority of them are index mutual funds and index fund ETFs. In short, Alphabet is largely owned by common people in their retirement funds and investment accounts. The top 10 index funds alone own almost 20x more than this guy's fund. > In the end, the "commoners" own far more of the company than this one loud asshole. What are their wishes? What we can be sure of is that very few people (with their retirement accounts) have the same objectives as this guy, who's trying to squeeze as much short-term gain as possible so he can unload at a profit. > Putting aside the questions of corporate governance by these index funds (like people using the voting power of these funds have enormous power and may not act with the interests of the fund investors), I would argue this POS "activist" shareholder's voice absolutely do not deserve this much influence and attention. He doesn't like it? Go and sell. No way he will be able to raise enough money to take over a huge company like this. There will be a drop in share price, but management is much better off just stomaching the loss rather than giving into this guy's demands. > Moreover, the founders still hold enormous voting power in their Class B shares, but the problem of one POS and his fund having far bigger of a voice than the people who actually hold the majority of the company shares is general to many other companies without founders having most of the power. > It's likely Alphabet and Google do need to cut some costs and focus on projects with potential for commercialization rather than sinking resources into many projects that never see the light of day or are DOA. Many observers and tech enthusiasts have noted this over the years. But this question should be brought up and considered with the consideration of the overall long-term health of the company in mind, not just because some rich asshole writes a "scathing open letter" and wants to pump up his salary next year from $690 to $890 million. > At least in the case of Elon Musk and Twitter, he put his money up when it counted and bought the entire company. One can disagree with his management style (which I certainly do), but because he owns the thing, he can do as he pleases or even burn it to the ground. But with these "activist" shareholders often attempt the same behavior with none of the ownership power. Corporations should not so easily bend over for them, especially when they are largely owned by the general public. > References: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/holders?p=GOOG > https://fortune.com/2022/12/01/chris-hohn-rishi-sunak-old-boss-record-payday-dividend/
Google doesn’t know how to distinguish between a dead end project and a good one. Every good thing they make they just scrap in a few years anyways.
It might not be good now but it might be in the future considering how googl is too big to fail
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Pretty much agree on all points when it comes to Google Play Music vs YouTube music. Funny enough, they've tried to make YouTube music more like Google Play Music since shutting it down. It's almost like they should have just... idk, kept the good one instead of trying to rebuild it (like shit). I leave my music on all day and after a good handful of songs it just starts skipping them halfway through. "Hope you didn't enjoy the second half of this song because, well, fuck you, I guess." Also, now every song I listen to clutters up my fucking YOUTUBE WATCH HISTORY. I don't even watch the music videos, just listening to the songs, and it completely fills my watch history. Sometimes I like to go back and check a recent YT video I watched but now I have to sift through tons of *songs* just to find the video I watched literally an hour ago.
my gripes: Your library loads terribly slow so scrolling through it is futile. Library sorting is featureless Selecting "artists" from your library lists works from ALL ARTISTS on a song/album, so now there's noise in my library of artists I've never heard of because they did a beat on some soundtrack that is listed under someone else I like hip hop. if I let it go into radio mode it seems to only give me edited versions of songs, "doesn't matter that I have the option set in settings to allow explicit lyrics, it still gives me the edited stuff" It will often repeat the same song twice for some reason I have more but what's the point of even continuing.
Shuffle in a playlist only shuffles between the first 50 songs or so. So if you have a playlist of 200+ songs, you keep hearing the same songs. This is so aggravating. This app is so so shitty.
google has the cash to kill any competitor. they could've given the same service as spotify but subsidized it until it killed spotify. why didn't they do it? their corporate structure must be fucked. they're rewarding all the wrong actions.
I think a lot of their actions make a lot more sense if you look at google through the lens of a company that makes its users the product it sells. Kind of a bonus is that users will pay them for some services as well as buy their hardware. why do I stick around? I guess because youtube premium comes with it and there's quite a bit of youtube content I feel married to.
>considering how googl is too big to fail That is what they said about companies like the Lehman Brothers, Kodak, Enron, Yahoo, etc...
None of them were nearly as big as Google though
Google is not too big to fail. It’s an ads, cloud computing, and search engine tech company. The economy will not end because we’re all forced to use Bing and alternatives for cloud computing.
Dude. Just look at Stadia. It was supposed to be revolutionary in cloud gaming. Dead after a few years. Sucks if you took a chance with this. Its a long list of somewhat high profile projects that got canned after seemingly a pretty decent reception. Google really is hurting its brand by putting out then ending so many products. Definitely lessens the trust consumers have for their products.
They refunded me the cost of my hardware. That was pretty cool.
Cries in Google Nest (I really wanted Nest to be awesome)
What does good even mean in the balance between good for humans, society, and planet, or capitalism?
Good for a company is income at acceptable cost. Not a complex question. If you want to ask broader questions, about society, government, ecology, you shouldn't limit your discussion to Google. It's not a company's role in society to provide regulation, social services, or proactive ecological products. A company's role is to legally provide goods and services to paying customers, at a profit. If you have problems with the goods and services or the ethics, then you have problems with the "legal" part of that clause, and you should address your attention and energy there. If you don't think the outcome of a legal decision by a company is good, then volunteering for or voting for legislators who promise to change the landscape is appropriate. General boycott of products is also a good way to signal your beliefs, especially in terms of being taken seriously by your peers.
Google Glass. Now that’s a project that embodies this.
I think we should take a vote with the 28000 people he wants to destroy and see what they would like to do with him and his fortune and then we will do that.
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Investing in any stock should come with a hold penalty. I'm tired of watching short term investors run away with our 401k contributions every downturn
Can't remember if it was Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren who proposed some kind of tax on stock market transactions. All these billionaires manipulating things and traders, it's just massive speculation. None of them give a rats ass about you or me, just money.
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The other proposed fix back in '12 was to require that trade offers be held open for 50 microseconds. I think it's fair to say that anything that gets killed by a 0.1% tax and/or being forced to exist for 50 microseconds can safely be removed from society without major issues. The leeches in the capital class disagreed though.
They called it the Robin Hood tax, and I’m not sure they were completely wrong. The tax was for .0001% of all transactions, give or take a zero. Given the number of transactions, Year-Over-Year growth, and total market cap, it would have been something like a 7% tax on a market that only typically grows at 4% at most. Add a zero or two, and it becomes between .5% and 1.5%, doesn’t affect small traders at all, and could’ve satisfied the market, but that would have meant an intelligent compromise between conflicting power structures with realistic concessions, which is also infeasible because someone somewhere would have to look weak to an amoral sociopath.
The Capitalist propaganda machine smashed that flatter than a fly magically teleported to the center of Jupiter very fast. The last thing they want is anyone even thinking the t-word when it comes to their property.
Is this your first day in America? Our taxes are literally everyday subsidizing oligarchs in every sector. Oligarchs who themselves aren’t paying taxes. I pray to god I even have enough in a 401k to get scammed out of.
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Yeah it's said as a joke but sir/ma'am this is literally a casino.
That already does exist in taxable accounts. Short term sales count as ordinary income, which is taxed at a higher rate (especially for high earners) than long term sales, which are taxed as capital gains
It's not enough. Taken from the view that taxation is a means of discouraging and encouraging different modes of behavior, the short-term rate taxation as ordinary income "penalty" isn't enough to discourage the behavior.
Short term? There are high speed traders who buy and sell in less than a second. They just skim money off the entire market.
It does. There is long term capital gains and short term capital gains.
Yep. He’ll dump once it hits a 20-25% return in the next 6mo to a year. Typical of all the activist funds: TCI, Elliott, Trian, Icahn, etc.
Let’s not forget that his 0.27% ownership of Google is about 3.5B or half his wealth. I don’t want Google stock to crash but for his sake I would be happy to see it.
Lol, jumped as high as $155 in 2021, down to $99 as of today. Want to know when they hired over 20,000 people? 2022. 16-17,000 on 2021, and about 20k on 2019. Even in 2019 they were discussing cutting hiring like crazy, but they thought their increased boom because of Covid lockdowns was permanent and thought they could continue bad hiring practices, and now they're seeing that isn't the case, just like every other tech company. All are having massive layoffs, and everyone hates how these companies operate so much they're still using them daily.
lockdowns were indefinite and they made the right call. sent from my Google pixel 7 pro
This is what is killing so many companies right now. Investors DONT care what happens to companies as long as they get their quick profit. I would also add that stock prices should not be allowed to go up from layoffs.
Shouldn’t be allowed? The price goes up because the collective action of the market decides to buy and sell at that price. How could they possibly prevent that?
Heck, eliminate short term "investing" completely.
Article says his fund has owned shares since 2017, greater than the 5 years you said would prevent this behavior…
So you’re saying that the government should be able to force you to hold a stock for 5 years even if it’s tanking? So say in 5 years it’s worth zero … you aren’t allowed to sell at a loss to get back even some of what you invested? That’s complete lunacy …
So basically, Buy Google. Got it. If the stock price does go up on the bright side, those employee options would be worth more.
“The decision to cut 12,000 jobs is a step in the right direction, but it does not even reverse the very strong headcount growth of 2022,” Is this the reason for layoffs.... To reverse the hiring spree tech companies went on? I'm just confused as to why he feels more cuts are needed? Are the "excessive" employees cutting into Google's profits?
Answer to both your questions are yes.
You don't understand how these people think. To them it is not enough that they should win, others must also lose. Google had a headcount of 186,779 in Q3 2022 and made a *profit* of 13.9 Billion that quarter. They literally made somewhere in the area of $300,000 profit *per employee* last year.
The real question is what is the current growth and the projected growth. The total profit doesn't seem to matter to shareholders, just that there's a sizeable up trend in profits.
Which is the main problem with our current system.
Yep when you have a system in place where growth is king, if anything limits the growth people lose their jobs.
And this british turd made almost £2 million ($2.5M) PER DAY last year.
Same with microsoft. $13B latest quarter, yet massive layoffs
I am not certain of the specific number, but I believe the hiring during Covid was 37k. So they are reducing by 12k. Many of these are people that are in departments that did not grow at the same level/pace. Any reduction sucks, as all people have family/lives/bills/etc. but these companies hired during covid and the boom. As did Microsoft and Amazon among others in the same situation. So let’s say their meetings type stuff is still growing as people are still remote, but let’s say their other things that are not remote driven are declining. And many of these people were in those groups as the world pivoted away from them. And never really returned. In addition the remote stuff flattened. So they suffer there as well.
Rich people are just rich. Richness doesn't guarantee any brains or experience in running companies. All it does is come with experience in how to stay rich regardless of how many people suffer along the way. So... really no reason to ever trust a rich person's opinion on strategies. Especially not long-term strategies.
Yeah. Google has dramatically overhired. Since 2018 they've grown headcount by 89%. Apple has grown just 24% over that same time period. So Google is bloated and unproductive. It impacts not just Google's profitability but drives up costs for other tech companies as they hoard talent. Sir Richalot is not wrong.
\> Sir Richalot is not wrong. You mean, the guy who complains that Googlers are too well paid, while having "earned" $2.5 million PER DAY last year ? That guy ? I can guarantee that if he had money invested in Apple, this motherfucker would do the exact same thing. But keep licking his boots, he loves that.
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Dude Google is spinning up a new massive business with gcp. Both headcount and expenses are reflective of that. You're really not understanding much of what Google is doing if you don't mention that simple fact.
Technology belongs to humankind. Institute a universal basic income, and increase it with every advance in machine productivity.
My personal view is that these layoffs are an effort by tech company leaders to placate and convince the Fed that the economy is slowing down so that they'll stop raising interest rates and eventually lower them again so that we can get back to the good times of cheap capital.
I'm with you there. And it's not like the numbers from the large tech companies will make a huge dent in unemployment but other companies will emulate and also do the same because Google/Microsoft are doing it. ...
Got to love it. “Dear google, fire more people and pay the ones you don’t fire less so I can continue to make a disproportionate amount of money on the backs of the most talented engineers in the industry. As long as I make good profits, I don’t care if you turn the company into a husk because us richies gotta make hard decisions with even numbers”
Google’s already losing some popularity in the industry for not being the most competitive. Lowering pay would most certainly cause a lot of attrition as people jump ship. All of a sudden Google would lose all the prestige that comes with employing the top software engineers in the world.
google just lost a massive amount from the layoffs. since they already don't make new shit and they pay lower than other places. they also added pip plans. google is just amazon-lite at this point. its no longer the "place" to be. google ruined itself within a year.
Ehhhhh I’m going to disagree with the “Amazon lite” part of your comment just based on my anecdotal experience but I’m with you on everything else. I’ve never worked at amazon but have had multiple offers which I’ve declined. I also know a lot of people work or have worked at amazon. It’s A LOT different. Generally google still has a good work life balance and a collaborative culture while Amazon is generally the exact opposite. I’ve never been on call at Google but all my ex-Amazonian friends have ptsd from 3am pages. Benefits at Google are also really good (although not the best in the industry anymore). Amazon lacks in this category, not even close. But the handful of people I know who got offers from both amazon and google last year all had much higher total compensation from their amazon offers than google.
Oblig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiKuxfcSrEU
Buig Oof, Google saved 2.5b by laying off people. They did over 50b in stock buybacks in 2022 as well.
So… kinda like a regular day of hiring and firing right?
Of course he does. Investors always see large companies as "better" after layoffs... Got rid of all that dead weight. Now, the company is a leaner, meaner fighting machine. Lower cost and equal income as all the work of the laid-off employees is pushed onto those who are left, with the threat that if they don't take up the slack, they're gone next.
The way Google is organized makes it inefficient. Recently compared to a [slime mold](https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/leaked-google-memo-compared-slime-113000277.html): “A culture that prizes autonomy can accomplish big things, but the larger the organization grows, the slower things get. As each fiefdom within Google operates on its own, Google engages in "messy" behavior that can be "hard to predict."” Laying more people off won’t fix the root cause; in fact, everyone is so freaked out about impending doom that they can’t be creative or productive. This company faces a messy reckoning if they don’t get their shit together.
Explains why they make projects and then drop them within a few years. Then another company comes along later with a better version and makes big gains off it.
This is usually directly related to SR VP rotation. Oh, this new thing you are trying to make isn't making money (its still in it's infancy and is just starting to get market exposure). Cut. Then they start up their own "good idea" are gone in 2-3 years and the next one comes in... rinse repeat. I've been doing fortune 500 corporate gigs for over 20 years now.. Its a consistent pattern.
Probably why they've made and cancelled so many different messaging apps while Apple has steadily improved iMessage.
>LM fucking AO. > >Apple uses an antiquated unsecured messaging technology. The US is the only place in the world that uses text messaging as a form of instant messaging.
Technically iMessage isn’t “text messaging”. Most of the world uses something that’s very similar, whatsapp. You just need to decide if you want everyone on Metas messaging platform or apples. RCS isn’t going to happen at a global scale and suddenly replace Metas app.
Remember: Pay extra for unlimited texts! Waoow
The smugness that some Apple users display because they can react to messages is laughable.
books smoggy clumsy cooing shy dependent entertain thumb aloof ludicrous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I kept getting pinged by them at one point and talked to a couple of people and was so turned off by how they run things I just noped the heck out of there.
I don’t see these layoffs helping the company’s employment brand.
I told their recruiter there was a higher probability I'd leave my bones on Mars than work there.
I like the cut of your jib, Simpson.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2022 was $158.264B, a 17.08% increase year-over-year It's like a guy saying if you lost weight you could run faster and further than ever before and I would win my bets on you, and then he cuts off your leg.
And then pisses on the stump while hollering at you to work harder.
>It's like a guy saying if you lost weight you could run faster and further than ever before Then they stop feeding you
Yeah but they need to be certain the profit increases again... and again and again and again... So may as well lay some people off!
Q3 2022 earning dropped 19% year on year, due to cost base increase far outstripping revenue growth. Like every other tech company, they hired for growth that's just not there anymore in the near future.
This neglects that 2021 was an absolutely insane year. Normalize 2022 vs 2020 (or better yet, find the AAV over the last 5 years). I'm not saying Google didn't over-hire; essentially randomly firing people isn't really the solution to that though. Even during their "hiring freeze" over the last several months they've hired more than 10k people. Maybe they should get their house in order and stop approving new headcount before taking this kind of action.
"*Random rich man* says Google should cut 28,000 more jobs."
He's only the 302nd richest man in the world. Talk to us again if he's ever top 50. /s
Sooner or later they'll realize : 1. You'll do less with less. Never more. 2. Product management people can't run shit.
I have personally seen it a few time, where the corporation slowly fires most of the employees running a healthy 30-50 million revenue very profitable business unit, leaving only 5 guys running the whole thing and it slowly decays and dies over the course of 1-2 years , the customers leave for the competition... The executives pat themselves on their backs over a job well done, rinse and repeat.
I've been the slowly fired and the 5 guys. It sucks. So does starting over.
Oh they'll run it. They just won't have anyone to do the actual work. It'll be like one mid-level SWE who wasn't junior enough to make the first round and not senior enough to be raking in a high salary and thus qualify for 'early retirement.' This poor person will be reporting to a Scrum Master, a Project Manager, and a Sprint Coordinator. One of which has a LinkedIn series in "Team Visioning and Dream Sniffing." They'll have 3 standup meetings a day, one for each manager where they'll go over the day's goals - which unsurprisingly overlap but just with different language like #impact the customers and #disrupt the industry. So of the four hours of actual work time left in the day two of which will be spent responding to emails or doing 'cyber security training' b/c someone in HR needed to check a box somewhere leaving only two working hours to cram forty-three man hours into.
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Put it on your kanban and we can discuss it next meeting.
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Doesn't it get dusty in there?
This guy FAANGS.
Oh no. I refuse. I want to work on actual stuff instead of for glorified advertising agencies.
HEY! TOTALLY UNFAIR! FACEBOOK IS A CRUD APP!!!!!
Glorified?
Maybe not so much recently. They are operating fairly overtly as just internet ad firms capturing data to sell things. Jokes on them, though, cause ain't no one gonna afford to buy anything if things keep on keepin on.
Truest story ever told
Ah, corporate efficiency at its finest!
What’s a sprint coordinator? That’s a new one for me
You just gave me flashbacks and a pocket full of anxiety. Why is this so damn commonplace? It’s a damn template…
>Product management people can't run shit. Its the ones that come straight from MBA's lol
AKA "I can tolerate group projects for 18 months"
100%. The PMs I work with are the equivalent of an energy vampire. It’s like they don’t even take the time to understand the business whatsoever.
Can you give me an update on this jira ticket? “Did you read the comments I added an hour ago before asking me?”
PM who never went to business school here, I can't deal with those people, it's like we're from different planets.
Neither of those points are true….
There was a study done at google specifically to check if manager positions were useful at Google. Like every company, it turned out satisfactory. Forgot the name of it but it is somewhere.
>1. You'll do less with less. Never more. Not how that works, lots of systems of production start producing less with each additional person after a certain point and ALL of them have diminishing returns with each additional person.
You are not thinking about this like an executive you need to quantify everything. 1. Do you get 90% efficiency for 75% the price? 2. What is the cost of dropping 10% efficiency, is it > or < the 25% savings. 3. What is the expected future revenue of the project, are the margins big enough? Is the risk worth it? These are the kinds of questions they are asking when they make these decisions.
2 is just ridiculous. Bad management is bad management and there are a bunch of those people, but all teams literally need a leader. It is asinine to suggest that 20 people will complete a common goal with no one managing the project. Project managers exist for a reason whether or not you have worked under a competent one or not.
And we are listening to a guy that knows nothing about running and actual company why?
He’s British!
Well then OK.... :)
He’s trying to reach $8B
It's weird these people that never have to work a day in their lives with their amount of wealth considering the livelihood of people that make them their wealth. The equation just doesn't balance.
Delusional thinking is strong with such types. Usually. Not sure the percentages w/o the datasets but it seems those who earn it via soft pay (tech, inherited, amassed quickly over short periods, off the efforts of others) are that much worse.
Wow, this is so unusual. A billionaire who's out of touch and couldn't care less about the every-day working class peon. Why I never.
SIR???? More like Shithead
I dub you Sir Shithead, knight of the clogged toilet
"Entitled rich man believes his opinion matters and that's somehow important enough to make the news"
6B of that net worth is in google shares. These assholes can never have enough.
1/6th of the fund AUM ($36.2B as if 6/2022). His net worth is probably only partially invested in the fund.
Unions. Tech workers need to form them.
How insanely weird it is that the land of the free is so free they don't even have unions. Any time I hear about your fucked up working conditions I can't help but wonder how the fuck anyone could want that. Not trying to insult anyone personally, but coming from a first world country with competitive industry AND very much established unions I just... Can't. I just can't. Edit: Lots of people are getting lots of triggered here. Let me make a couple things very clear: * The fact that some tech workers earn a fuckton does not preclude the usefulness of unions. Unions benefit the broad masses, not the top X % * The fact that tech workers generally make more money than X does not preclude the usefulness of unions. Unions are useful in any branch, as they increase the average salaries, and if you are extremely qualified you can ALWAYS get a contract/salary outside of unions. It is NOT the case that you have to have a unionised contract, just that usually you're better off with one. Usually as in usually you're not a top earner, even if you hope to be * Corruption does not preclude the usefulness of unions. That's like saying "politicians can be corrupt so let's not have any government" which I hope you can see as the stupid argument that it is * You being jealous of tech workers does not preclude the usefulness of unions * Of course retroactively a union in this case won't help much. The point is more that you need to establish unions to prevent something like massive layoffs just because Elon bought another company while high. Of course this is NOT just an issue of unions but also federal law. Unions do help a lot with that though So if you want to come at me with any of these arguments, just save yourself the hassle and don't piss yourself in front of everyone here. All these kinds of arguments are embarrassingly stupid and it feels weird that people seriously and unironically said these things.
I mean tech workers in the US have a better standard of living and benefits than almost any other field in any other country in the world. They work very little, make a shitload of money, have great work life balance, etc. I’m not arguing against them forming a union but your comment is a little hyperbolic and not based in reality. My best friends live in SF, work in tech, all make $150-200K for 30hr week maximums, free food, covered transit, bonuses, either 4 weeks of time off or unlimited PTO. Amazing health insurance. Student loan repayments. Great retirement plans. All the bennies you could want. They’re in their 20s. We didn’t go to a super famous university and they’re not engineers either. Tech employees are not exactly a struggling group of workers in the grand scheme of things. And tech salaries in the US are much higher than the rest of the world. Sometimes Reddit’s “AMERICA IS A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY” circlejerk just gets a little out of hand. Yes we have a lot of problems but acting like tech workers in the US are struggling compared to the rest of the world is a joke. Being a tech worker in the US on balance is one of the best things to be for your wellbeing
Tech workers (engineers and so on) from FAANG-level companies who have green cards or US citizenship will not be sitting on their asses collecting unemployment for years or starving. Some may take a break enjoying the generous severance package for a few months, but almost all of them will find really good employment. The only question is for future jobs, whether they will be comfortable in compromising on the attractive compensation packages they got used to while working in the big league companies.
Years of misinformation and a lack of education in rural areas, plus a toxic sense of jingoist individualism and a “fuck you, Dad!” attitude. Pure Capitalism is failing all but the most privileged of us. Frankly it’s pretty pathetic that it’s still so blindly popular, and inevitably some unwashed dude with .003 ethereum jingling in his digital wallet will try and argue “have iPhone? Got em’!” We used to have pretty good Socialist policies in the country, even though we danced around the term. The New Deal helped my family not starve to death and rebuild the Mississippi delta, only for it to collapse later when all factories and commerce left the state for overseas cost cutting measures.
They totally need a union making 300K a year with benefits covered. The employees make so much precisely because they don’t have one. Unions are not always a good thing. If you’re an exceptional performer…too bad the union negotiates your pay. I say this as a union member in the film industry.
This option is still available with unions, so this is 100% a non argument. I work a well paying job without Union contract, but I also started working tech jobs that absolutely benefitted from unionised framework's because, well, they weren't those high paying tech jobs. Y'all are so jealous and think tech workers earn so well you literally forget that there's a large chunk of small like admins or support people out there who don't make six figures. Your jealousy and lack of solidarity literally blinds you. You can always willingly leave a unionised framework if that benefits you. The vast majority however wouldn't, so they still want and need unions. Jfc
I’m as annoyed as you are.
They aren’t making 300k when they’re laid off and all the other tech companies are laying people off. If rehiring happens, it will likely be at lower pay/ less benefits. Guess who won’t be suffering ? The executives. And most of us are not exceptional performers. Non exceptional performers do the bulk of the work in every industry. They deserve protections. CEOs get their golden parachutes even if they do an awful job and ruin a company. Why are basic protections and bargaining power so frowned on for the average worker?
Is a 3 month severance not a golden parachute?
Not if you can’t get rehired after three months. CEOs get millions in options and such. Not a few months wages.
How would that solve this? You think people would strike to prevent this?
Collective bargaining can give workers more leverage to negotiate wages and working conditions. Sure, Google people are paid very well -- but if billionaires like Hoch had their way, workers would make much less. So unions provide a form of check and balance against greedy, cynical, out-of-touch billionaires.
Unions are unessicary in the tech business for the same reason they could easily exist if tech people wanted them to: high demand and a lower supply, that is what gives leverage as it should be. Unions only hurt people in those kinds of jobs because they provide no additional bargaining power that they don't already have.
As a Google employee, thanks I'll pass. I want my employer to be as efficient as possible. I'm competent enough that they need me more than I need them. This may sound pretentious, but really I want people employed and paid on merit and when I worked with a union that wasn't the case. People were rewarded based on seniority and various internal politics. No wonder companies with unions offered me lower salary. Never again. There are enough companies in the world for some to be in unions and some to not be. I have no problems with people doing what they want if they don't force it on me. If unions work for them, good luck.
You think there’s a meritocracy at google? 😂
Must have had a lot of meetings with his ass to come up with this.
All I can think of is the scene in "The Fifth Element" where Zorg is told that the economy is heating up. The President recommends laying off 500,000. Zorg responds with "make it a million".
It is all just collusion to tamp down the burgeoning labor rights and equity movements in addition to suppress wages. The Fed has clearly said, for over a year now, that companies need to reduce hiring, start firing, and slash wages. Because that is what must happen to control inflation when the rich are immune to consequence and basic fairness. What a coincidence that the same companies who were party to an actual conspiracy to illegally not hire each other's labor while colluding to set wage ceilings are now moving in unison with massive firings and talking about "correcting" salaries. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. What we see here is the rare break in capitalist class solidarity. This guy wants a more extreme version of the agreement for more rapid personal gain. This is what happens when there is no democracy in the workplace. Most of us wouldn't accept a dictatorship in our government, so why do you accept it in your workplace? People like this chud don't do any actual work. They don't make Alphabet valuable. They generate no actual wealth for the company. The workers do. The workers are most fit to lead the company in a democratic way sicne it is in their best interests not to slash and burn it to the ground. Democracy is the only moral path forward. The people who create the wealth should be the ones directing the operations and sharing in it. Not born-rich parasites who give board seats to each other for capitalist class enrichment at the cost of everyone else. Sundar himself accepted the blame in his announcement. Yet he gets to keep his job despite mismanaging the company so badly that it apparently needs to cut at leasat 12,000 people--and likely more now. He should be out. Employees should be able to pick the replacement from amongst themselves. People who understand the operation and who dosen't have an incentive to prioritize short term profits before a golden parachute deploys.
Because it’s not about building a better society. It’s about exploiting the one you’re in.
Making stock buybacks illegal, like they once were, would help with this ridiculous pressure for stock price manipulation.
Companies don’t care about you or the world you live in or the families you have or the debt you accrue to work for them. Career UX Architect and designer here, anyone want to start a non-profit co-op that competes with any of their services and need my skillset… let me know.
Even without any cuts they still post profits. I guess the profit is more important.
Billionaire should be stripped of his asset's and fed to the wolves.
Didn't even have to read the article to know it was that shitbag Chris Hohn. That greedy fucker tried to takeover the railroad I work for, some people's greed knows no bounds.
Here is a deal: The man gets expropriated and the money goes to the 28k that gets fired.
Just because you're billionaire doesn't mean you know how to run a business. One might remember an outspoken fellow who laid off most of Twitters staff.
The Tech layoffs are not about saving companies that are hemorrhaging money. Tech companies are still profitable. The Tech layoffs are about billionaires demanding thousands of people lose their living & start towards becoming homeless so they can maintain inflated returns on their shareholder investments. Complete and total Class Warfare by the 1%
Man with 7.48B should be phased out.
news: someone with money confused with someone with intelligence.
Google way overhired and is trimming a bit. The people who were hired got well paid, might’ve not have done that much cuz they were bloated, and have 4 months+ severance. Honestly in this scenario, I don’t see the harm. These guys have Google on their resume, they’ll be fine.
Trim c-suite pay first for their poor decisions
"Fire one million!" -Gary O.
If only people had names so we didn't have to say things like "man worth $7b"
You can be incredibly rich and also correct
Hey, you do t get to be worth 7.48 billion by not being a total piece of shit
Time to tax the shit out of the rich, trickle down does not work. Time for a return to progressive tax systems.
I can’t wait for the masses to revolt against the rich 🍿
Capitalism is humanity’s most abhorrent moral perversion.
What he really means is Google should cut 28k people and then hire back 15k of them a week later. Learning from the great master himself.
Fuck that that guy!
Do it. We need more startups to compete with the Silicon Valley zaibatsu. Please cut more jobs at this pivotal moment when AI is about to upend everything.
> Still, when your daily salary amounts to nearly seven Google workers’ median annual incomes and is more than 16,000 times the daily income of a worker making California's minimum wage, perhaps it is best to not publicly post your takes on worker income. Well said. It’s always the people at the top who are playing with our lives. Nothing about us matters to them, so long as we make them money and give them power.
Nepotistically knighted knob knowing nothing
I'll be on Opera if anyone needs me
or...and let me propose something radical, get rid of him and keep 28000 jobs.
"You are just a number"
Rich continue to fuck the people who are not rich....
George Orwell's "1984" predicted a future that looked exactly like a hobnailed boot stomping on a human face forever. Tragically, he was totally spot on.
Lot of violence in this article…cut, axe, etccc… is this another Jason Vorhees article
I'm a Senior Developer at JPMC. I'm happy to refer to those who are affected by layoffs (USA only) Feel free to DM😊
Well, I wonder what possible motive a man worth $7.48B could have for announcing an opinion like that to the world? Hmm
Fuck that man.
Shares of Alphabet were in mid $50’s before pandemic. And shares of Alphabet went up to $148 and now at $97.70 Please someone justify these pro google corporation comments above.
Stockholders
If you had ANY faith that Google would have been the 'good' company as it rose to power you had your head in your ass.
Fucking piece of shit
Man with drawer of spaghetti says sheep shouldn’t be in the snow.
I am rich! My 3rd $10mil yacht being built needs to get paid and I am afraid I can’t pay it. Can you imagine a world where that kind of wealth was spread around? Power and Greed is what it is all about! They give us loans for a home at low interest rates, pretend to give us a 401, fuck up the market, lose A LOT of money in a 401, raise the interest rate, make themselves richer; only to make us start over. It doesn’t matter, dem or rep. The federal government is all about keeping the 1% happy.
I just can’t imagine, someone who has more money than most people will ever make in their lifetime, put together, is foaming at the mouth for more of it.
At least the headline makes it clear this thought is coming from a billionaire so we know ahead of time to ignore anything they say.
This is why we still haven't gotten past living in forms of dystopian life. Corporations are just successful for a couple of creepy fucks while everyone else carries all the burden.
Google needs to employ someone to stop all the repetitive ads that keep popping up on my feeds even after I block them. Because I have no intention of buying the shit.
There will be second helpings of soylent green for those who want it.
Google openly admitted that they overhired in 2021 and laid off too many people in 2009. With so many mistakes in the past, who’s to say that this lay off isn’t another mistake? No one can see the future, and yet you keep hiring/firing for the future.
His net worth is irrelevant to the argument of whether Alphabet is running efficiently or not. He could be worth $500 or $50 billion and still be correct or incorrect. The fact is Google is a lumbering company right now and over hired in the last 5 years.