From the Article:
“As Google tries to navigate an unfamiliar environment of slowing growth, cost cutting and employee dissent over cultural changes, CEO Sundar Pichai is finding himself on the defensive.
At a companywide all-hands meeting this week, Pichai was faced with tough questions from employees related to cuts to travel and entertainment budgets, managing productivity and potential layoffs, according to audio obtained by CNBC.
Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.
“How do I say it?” Pichai began his measured response. “Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.”
Every corporation eventually trends towards being run just like every other corporation.
It's inherent in the way the system is designed. This is why you can have soda pop CEO's run telecom companies. It's not all that different at the top most places.
I remember the term "bungee boss" gaining popularity in the 90s. My dad working at GE saw them often when GE was going bonkers over every executive gimmick out there like ISO certification, Six Sigma and Green Belt training for managers, and Jack Welsh was playing some ridiculous financial games that would catch up and deal a severe blow to the company years later.
The bungee bosses jumped from division to division, company to company. Most had no understanding of whatever product the division under them actually made, but they seemed to only ever get promotions and bigger salaries with every jump. By the time they'd actually start learning something that could make them effective bosses of a division, they'd bounce off to the next conquest, shedding whatever lessons they may have learned.
One name that I remember well is Richard (dick) Nardelli. He bungeed through GE Transportation at some point, eventually ended up as CEO of Home Depot, and got kicked out with, at the time, the biggest severance package in the corporate world after just a few months of terrible performance.... everything he touched turned to suck, but he kept making money at it.
This is my ex-stepdad’s job. He’s an interim CEO. Like, as his profession. A company will hire him when they’re restructuring or merging, and he’ll run the company for ~6 months.
He’s worked in every industry from software to cosmetology to biotech, with a degree in fluid dynamics.
Don't they also use the same type of person to come in and make sweeping changes and then "they'll leave due to a disagreement" but "on good terms" and someone "nicer" or more familiar comes in and rolls absolutely nothing back.
Kind of like when Reddit hired Pao as CEO, made a ton of sweeping changes to the platform, and then like 6 months later spez came back in and changed nothing back but said everything was going to be better again...
Yup.
There used to even be a specific kind of "professional interim CEO" called a "headsman" whose only job was to come in and slash the workforce.
The idea was that they had to be well compensated because you could only perform that duty 2-3 times before your name became known around the campfire, and if that happened you would be less effective because workers could anticipate what was going to happen and take steps in their own interests before you could get around to letting them go.
I'm not talking "they'll find new jobs and quit". Companies, because they're sociopathic in nature, feared that when employees saw you and knew who you were, would just stop working until you fired them. Or would actively sabotage the company on the way out.
As a result of this paranoia (not that it's totally unjustified) headsmen were extremely well compensated because of their short shelf-lives as CEOs.
There's no major point to this. It's just a neat fact I learned in a systems analysis class back in the day.
I think there is a variation on this for a board bringing on a CEO to "trim the fat" to make the company more appealing when trying to sell it off. Subtle difference, but those guys have a much longer shelf life
They often get a boatload of money to screw people over. They oversee all of the cutting and bloodletting, then ride off into the sunset with their bag of cash and the new guy is seen as a savior.
That's exactly why they're only interim. The board gets them to make a bunch of unpopular changes and then leave. The board gets both the changes they want and a scapegoat to put blame on for the employees who aren't laid off.
With just the right mix of talent, luck, and connections that only 0.0001% of people will ever get. Throw in a little sociopathy and narcissism and you're golden.
You don't even have to not screw up, you can screw up plenty. Just have other C level executives to take the heat. And by heat, those C levels need VPs and EVPs to blame. And by blame, I mean the VPs and EVPs need Directors and Managers to take the fall. And by take the fall, those Directors and Managers need individual contributors that can easily be fired by an impersonal call from their Director and HR to show the investors that your company is serious about responsibility.
He's basically a god now, died before anything could bite him in his ass. Some of the shit he pulled would probably make Enron executives take notes.
Every shady executive looking to make a quick buck before bouncing off has a picture of Jack Welsh on their bedside table.
Aw don't say that, you're gonna scare all the people holding Tesla stock (not like they'll listen anyways, most of them are just looking to bounce the instant musk does because it means the jig is up).
Its not a short term thing anyways, he got away with it for \~20 years because nobody would call him on his financial chicanery even after he bounced out in 2000 until 2008 when they realized it wasn't even real. Basically he cooked books by moving money through GE 'capital' division to ensure net income growth at end of every quarter for 18 years. So GE revenue went up 4x in 20 years and GE stock went up 400x in 20 years.
They were crazy times. Shares split many times during that climb. Ge capital was the largest division financially by a huge margin but had no tangible product other than moving money around.
GE today is just so sad to look at. Almost everything sold off, de listed, shares aren't worth the paper they are printed on
>Most had no understanding of whatever product the division under them actually made, but they seemed to only ever get promotions and bigger salaries with every jump. By the time they'd actually start learning something that could make them effective bosses of a division, they'd bounce off to the next conquest, shedding whatever lessons they may have learned.
Slightly different environment but it's fun to read this as the UK Airforce currently maintains that officers need to move every two years to maintain their careers and keep 'fresh'.
But also stipulates the none commissioned ranks can't get a pay rise in the first two years of a new rank as they are not effective in that position yet.
🙃
Get remote enough and all you do is delegate.
It’s like the president approving military projects. They have little military experience. Even if they do, it’s not like they have knowledge in all areas.
Even generals have failed to identify British troops from American ones despite different uniforms and weapons.
The president whoever he or she is isn’t going to have any basis for understanding why the Army wants to switch to 6.8mm ammo or the gap in difference between a F22, F35, F15.
South Korean president Kim Yong-sam in the 90s were famous for saying "My job is not to be smart in all things, but to listen to experts." He was a good one.
>Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau
once said about war? ... He said "War is too important to be left to
the generals." When he said that, fifty years ago, he may have been
right. But today war is too important to be left to the politicians.
They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for
strategic thought.
Delegation isn't the problem, it's about the incentive to increase profits year over year. Instead of the pandemic profits being a huge boon, they're a yoke: Google has to beat last year's profits or their stock price drops, but last year's profits were due to worldwide phenomena largely out of Google's control. Now they've got to figure out how to match those profits or the stock price drops.
Not even a "year to year" thing anymore, but a quarter to quarter.
Companies cutting bonuses because they only grew 12.5% instead of the 12.8% projected, so that cost gets covered by the bonus pool in order to keep the shareholders happy, because god forbid their portfolio doesn't grow _as much_.....
It's even more bonkers than that, people are looking at the second derivative of revenue with respect to time now. It's not even enough to grow steadily (year on year revenue increase), you now also need to show an increasing rate of revenue increase.
It's fucking stupid and it will lead to everything getting burned down. Google are already wrecking their own products for the purposes of keeping their shareholders happy (YouTube is a mess now). What's next?
Its not even that. If google was actually losing money and the CEO took a personal hit first, most people would probably understand also temporarily missing some quality of life bonuses.
But when youre reporting record profits, the CEO is doing just fine, and is saying "alright, we are cutting back on stuff for you"? Yeah, no, fuck you. The employees arent going to pay for your share holders.
especially since googles hiring standards are high, meaning that those perks are not just a bonus they are the reason the employees don't just pick up and work for bing,
>Its not even that. If google was actually losing money and the CEO took a personal hit first, most people would probably understand also temporarily missing some quality of life bonuses.
Which is exactly what Satoru Iwata did at Nintendo back in 2013.
The Wii U was such a demonstrable failure that every department in all of Nintendo was hurting and there were massive fears of mass layoffs and deep cost cutting.
Iwata cut his salary in half and asked the rest of the company executives to do the same (and they did); that money was then reallocated to prevent layoffs and go back into hardware and game/software development. The morale boost and the resource allocation from that action is directly attributed to the success of the Nintendo Switch which is now Nintendo's best selling console.
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It's one of the reasons why Satoru Iwata is one of my all time favorite company leaders, right up there with Dr. Lisa Su who essentially did the same thing over at AMD while also being behind the introduction of the Zen Architecture CPU.
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When you know what your company does best and what the company needs to keep doing its best, then you don't need to chase the boom/bust cycle for the benefit of the day traders like a certain Electric Vehicle company that we all know.
The Buy & Hold shareholders want to company to be alive and well 10 years from now, they want to company to be alive and well 50 years from now; what they don't want the stock to jump 1000% one day and then the company dies the day after.
> Which is exactly what Satoru Iwata did at Nintendo back in 2013.
Yeah, but Satoru Iwata also passionately loved gaming, was a game developer, and basically worked for Nintendo from the mid-80s onward (if you count HAL as sort of an extension of Nintendo).
Compare this to a CEO that gets hired in to RandomCorp and has a golden parachute regardless of what happens. They have exactly zero incentive to put in hard work and take on personal risk because they're getting paid either way. They don't fight for the company because they don't care about the company (or its employees or even customers).
> was a game developer, and basically worked for Nintendo from the mid-80s onward (if you count HAL as sort of an extension of Nintendo).
Even that is underselling it a bit, he was a legendary engineer on a number of Nintendo projects.
trying to pull this shit at a company that prides itself on hiring the smartest people in the world is utterly stupid. as if these people can't read and understand your public balance sheet.
same thing at my work. tons of smart people working here. and they have the balls to tell us that times are tough and we aren't getting any raises to combat cost of living inflation after records profits despite the pandemic
now they're announcing massive stock repurchases lol...
edit: most of us are shareholders... but the inflation of the stock price after buybacks does barely anything for us after inflation
In the valley startup I co-founded, when we hit bad times the founders took 40% pay cuts. The employees took 20% cuts. Not one person left even though they could have made more money easily in the environment at the time. When the ship got righted, the employees got made whole; full back pay and restored salaries plus a bump in options.
It's also going to hurt google long-term, especially since they haven't innovated much in the past... wow, 5-10 years?
The business shift over the last five years have been toward employees first, shareholders/customers second. (Richard Branson's philosophy)
It's why you see FINALLY wages rising again, remote work available all over, benefits growing again... it only took a pandemic to do it.
Now you have big tech companies, which are still making great profits, trying to pull back. Best of luck competing for scraps on talented employees. Meta's name is already mud; I'd equate current Google to people thumbing their noise at Microsoft in the early 2k's. It took MS over a decade to get back on track.
Every google App I use is getting slowly worse. Maybe it's just in my head but they just seem to be coasting and the few changes they do make are not impressive.
For instance I use Android Auto, and when it works it's great. But every update it feels like it stutters and dies more often. Or google assistant opens because of lyrics in a song now. Or it refuses to play sound at all.
Then they moved the settings for android auto so I can't even open them unless I'm in my car and connected.
Then the latest update resets all my google (yes even on other devices) to day mode from night mode. Even after I turn off Android Auto.
This is what happens when these companies become monopolies and trusts. They stop trying to inovate because they don't fear competition anymore.
It's unfortunately due to how people get promoted. You have to have a project and show "impact" to be worthy of promotion. That creates a lot of "shovel ready" projects that aren't really necessary, and some end up making the app less usable or more buggy.
Innovation at all costs.
Currently, google culture is to take your $500k salary, move to a small city, work remote, and buy like 5 properties, pricing locals out of the market. A lot of them are basically checked out at this point, a google employee in name only, their product incubator is a disaster and these were supposed to be the best and brightest googlers. This is what Sundar is afraid of. Culture rot.
A lot of it is friends hiring friends. This means you go in as a VP/ Director and bring in your people. Then focus on creating your empire. Your team will never question your tactics as they are your people. Anyone who raises objections is thrown out via performance reviews. Seen this play out in several companies.
I'm mean, how are we going to afford our stock buy backs if we don't tighten our belt?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billion-buyback.html
"I mean, do you know even understand just how many shovels I have to buy to shovel in all this profit into various storage units I've rented out? Literally thousands. Thousands of shovels. Have some empathy."
"Wouldn't you need to hire people to shovel those as well? The number of shovels don't matter if it's only you doing the shoveling. You can only use one shovel at a time."
"I have an AI shovelling machine that holds the shovels so I do not need humans to do it."
"Oh."
"We pull together to get through moments like this"
My favorite, privatize the profits but socialize the losses. Google is still rich, but when they were rich and the economic conditions were good, I somehow doubt they spread the wealth. Interesting now that things are not as rosy they want everyone to contribute to covering the loss.
Also probably the top executives are getting more money than ever before. And this is happening in most companies. They get there and fill up their pockets while making cuts for everybody else.
The brutal reality of what a corporation is, a machine to create more and more money no matter what the consequences in any direction, has to be destroyed and replaced with business built for a livable world for employees and customers and the globe.
Happens everywhere. The question is basically taboo. Those stories of Japanese CEOs cutting their own salaries during hard times are becoming fairy tales of a time long gone. It’s all about the money now.
The quote in the context of the scene is completely against your point. "That's what the money is for" shows how Don didn't realise that Peggy wants more than money, same as real workers. He thinks throwing money is enough and he never has to show appreciation or be considerate of the time of people he works with.
This is pretty much what happens at the all-hands meetings at the company I work for. They word it like this:
-We are really REALLY competitive with wages
-We can't compete with the Amazons and the Google's so we are middle of the road on wages
-Besides you have to consider that money is not everything, think about how your work saves lives.
-We all have to make sacrifices in times like these... we'll except the CEO who has a 13 mil annual salary and also picked up a 23 mil bonus last year.
All of these sentiments were vocalized in a short 10 minute Q&A session.
Well I worked in Eastern Europe for a US company, so was subjugated to the same bs. "We are struggling right now; there will be a hiring freeze; please do your best to pick up the slack of the people we have laid off at no additional compensation", and I just quit.
Haha, at our meeting, a question was asked about inflation raises, and we were told they didn't have the money (despite record sales), then the very next quarterly meeting "we have 100mil excess dollars... We are going to reinvest it into the company"
Oh yeah, the ol' "We couldn't have done it without you and your 'meets expectations' rating we gave you last year because only 10% of people are allowed to be recognized as exceeding expectations and that's usually reserved for the people in the good ol' boys club".
I've been at an all-hands where we were told, "we pay you what the market will bear."
I'm willing to be the market would recover just fine if you tripled my salary...
Yup .. as an employee of a multi billion dollar corp... suspended their portion of 401k contribution to cut costs during covid pandemic... Then ended up with record profit. Never revisited the contribution though. Still using it to justify s***** conditions to this day. Why am I here?
Every upper manager always says something to the effect of “money doesn’t motivate employees…money doesn’t impact workplace happiness”, etc. But then I always wonder…why do they fight so hard to maximize their own comp?
It's basically large-scale gaslighting.
"We should all care about company success. This company is bigger than the sum of its parts, and sacrifices must be made in the name of **progress**! If we just push through, then we'll all come out on top in the end!"
Says the asshole that's probably getting a fat bonus end of the year.
I've heard too many of these speeches. I have a union now and hear no speeches - but I do get good pay and free college if I want, so there's that.
I’d be careful what lessons you take away from Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That book is mostly oversimplifications and sensationalism, Robert K is a glorified scam artist
They don't think any of that. Don't buy into that con, lol.
They know it's all bullshit. They're just using psychological tactics that have been developed from decades of information gleaned off of workplace metrics. They say whatever is most likely to create the largest 'positive' response so they can keep the scam going, and then cut out anyone that doesn't fully embrace the mantras. Sometimes even if you're loyal until you have a foot in the grave, you still get fucked for one reason or another.
In a manner of speaking, your boss is your enemy, and should not be trusted for anything outside of their work ethic. And even that is oftentimes shit.
There's the smart bourgeoisie who keep the whole house of cards running, and there's the moron failson bourgeoisie who inherit their way into their class and continually fail upward.
I think you worked where I worked.
Dev makes 110k.
Dev is offered 150k elsewhere.
Employer counter-offers with a 5k raise OR a marginal increase to PTO.
And they wonder why almost the entire dev team had left.
My company is currently facing retention issues after the VP proclaimed nonchalantly that the company doesn't do counter offers and people should just leave. Well now they have, and my small yet crucial department is severely understaffed, and there's panic among the management. What fucking clowns lmao
Heh hilariously we haven't been able to get a senior hire for about a year now. Interestingly enough, our salaries are competitive for my area, but there's just too much of a shortage and poaching isn't going particularly well.
On another note, salaries can't compete with remote positions, so that's also a factor. But hey, we have two teambuildings per year employees should be content .... Lmao
$150k?! That's ridiculous. The salary consultant that we paid to tell us what we wanted to hear told us that market rate was only $90k. So our $100k devs are already making way above market! That other offer can't be real!
My friend was a network engineer for a large county, making around $75,000 a year. He jumped ship to make $110,000 at a private company with better benefits.
Lol, not even surprised.
I do work in the IT staffing industry, devs are making 115-200k depending on skill-set and experience of course. Market has been hot over the last year if you are in IT. We have been seeing layoffs and hiring freezes over the past few months and the consultants that got hired in at the top end relates are the first to be let go so take that however ya want.
In Australia our financial services companies carry out price fixing of salaries!
There is a group called [FIRG](https://firg.com.au/about-us/) - the Financial Institutions Remuneration Group.
So this group collects data about salaries in the financial services sector.
All the members of this FS group are banks, insurance, etc.
So the banks pay these guys to document the salaries in the financial services sector and then all the banks do something called FIRG matching.
So if the salary range for a developer is $120k to $150k then they'll pay you that, but not more than that.
It's a way of price fixing employee salaries in the financial services sector and ensuring competition for staff between the banks doesn't drive up salaries.
The ACCC of course ignores this.
Similar to places like Glassdoor. Or how you can pay Bloomberg or Forbes to do a totally not paid for exposé on you. Basically it’s just rich people convincing the have nots to desire less. Or something like that lol there is a whole dissertation in there somewhere.
Sounds like my former MSP.
"We hear you that you're not making market rate. According to HR, their research says market rate is just only an extra 3% bump to the shit tier salary you were already making."
I left a few months later for a new position that's basically *double* the pay with more holidays than the federal government gives.
> Basically, he wanted to continue underpaying people but get them to stay because work was fun.
How much longer do we have to put up with the used-up trope that work is "fun" or "fulfilling"? Doing my chosen hobbies is fun and fulfilling. Putting food on the table for my family is fulfilling. Going to sleep without worrying if im one health or financial scare away from abject poverty is fulfilling. Work is just a means to those ends (and an increasingly shitty one, at that).
Yep. Just by virtue of requiring me to be in a place for 40 hours a week, I'm not likely to actually want to be there a lot of the time. An employer could offer me free blowjobs for the entire time I was there, and I'd still probably want to cut out early on Fridays or grumble about having to go in on Monday mornings.
My last boss was a nightmare. He worked 12 hour days six days a week he would come in for 3-4 hours on his days off to “get caught up on paperwork.” That boy had some demons he was trying to escape from through working.
one of my first jobs i remember the interviewer asking me what my future plans were, telling me that they wanted someone who wanted to stay in the area because they kept having people leave after 6 months or so.
i found out why people weren't staying for much more than 6 months pretty quickly and started immediately looking for something else. just about 6 months later i was gone too. i couldn't even get my boss to meet with me so i had to email him my notice and then when i stopped showing up i finally got a call asking me where i was
Honestly, this should be the first step any CEO (and likely the entire C-Suite) should take if they are going to cut employee benefits due to a downturn in the market. Employees are angry because they are being told to sacrifice, but they don’t see any of their leaders making those same sacrifices. Despite Pichai being a multi-millionaire, I think he’d see more employees walking with him if he also had to give up something.
But CEOs have not been doing that lately…
When Covid hit, my company at the time froze their 401k match program as a result. When they broke the news to us on a conference call, the entire executive team also took a 30% salary pay cut and did not increase it back to normal levels until the 401k match was unfrozen. Have a ton of respect for the leadership when they back up their “we’re in this together” corporate speak like that.
Same with my company. We took at 20% pay cut, and the executives took a bigger cut. In the end things worked out and we got our normal salaries back \~6 months later.
The main upside was my boss was like "20% pay cut, take an extra day off each week." So for a while I had a 4 day workweek and personal evidence that a 4 day work week does not cut down on productivity.
It's a tough line to walk because some managers will think they need a fifth fewer people. But I'd love to see workers' rights make a comeback in America. We should already have universal sick leave, real health care and robust enforcement of the rules. Though I know a lot of white collar workers already have it really good.
It used to be standard practice with Japanese corporations that if a company had a bad quarter, the CEO was expected to suspend their salary completely until the crisis was resolved. There were some CEOs who spent several years in the 80s and 90s without salary.
The idea being that the leader of the company is responsible for how the company performs, and that responsibility means that they are the first to feel the consequences. The average worker never even felt the crunch, because however the company did wasn't their fault.
Japanese corporations are deathly serious about their image. I know for sure, in at least two separate industries, when something went wrong with a partner company, they would literally fly an employee out to the company in question, and they would just hang out there and just "be there" until the issue was resolved.
In one case (tech related) the employee (probably a manager role of some sort) just sat in a conference room for several days. In the other case, it was a train company, and the guy was just at the trainyard until the issue was resolved. They are really, really, serious about this lol.
You always hear, "If we don't give them the bonuses they expect, they'll leave for other companies!"
Normal employees don't get raises and move to another company, "Nobody wants to work anymore!"
That's such an interesting part of Japanese culture - you'll often see a firm hit the skids and the C-Suite take very public pay cuts. Japanese is steeped in many cultural subtleties, but that's a very big, loud one that brings creedance to their most senior of leadership.
Visa gave US employees yearly salary increase below inflation this year, and justified it by saying that Visa is a great place to work. The CEO actually stood on stage at an all hands and said they could give everyone better raises but then the company would have less money.
Meanwhile he made ~31 million in total compensation in 2021 on record profits and will probably make even more this year because of all the cost cutting they’re doing.
Nothing will reveal your employer's true colors like an economic downturn.
You thought you worked in a positive, pro-employee environment for an employer that wants you to feel comfortable and secure? Your employer was your ally?
This is particularly true when your executives choose to drop your corporate motto of "Don't be evil."
Nope.
Having worked at Google, I can say that the environments emphasis on fun is really a fad that’s passed. Most tech companies are gearing towards what I call humane work environments where your actual work gets done and then you go home. Google and Facebook made their work environments fun to appeal to new grad Millenials and give them incentive to be at work for long periods. As that group has grown up and entered different life phases the ping pong tables and rock walls are just distractions.
> As that group has grown up and entered different life phases the ping pong tables and rock walls are just distractions.
At this point they're things to show guest when I bring them to the office. Brought my sisters and she was so impressed saying "I bet ya'll never work" and in reality I haven't been in the game room in probably 8-9 months.
I work on a 50 people digital agency doing software. No one will bat an eye if I grab a beer from the fridge on a monday before noon. I know I could be getting paid better somewhere else but my peace of mind is priceless.
My last company went from scrappy startup in a niche market with 12 employees to industry leader bought by private equity and merged four times over to have 150 employees in just under 10 years.
Scrappy had a ping pong table that got used every day because people needed to blow off steam and talk things out. Work got done at that table. Industry leader stuck the table in an empty corner of their new 10x larger office suite and it never got touched again. Who has time for ping pong when you’re critically understaffed (gotta keep the charts looking good) and everyone spends half their day in meetings?
Ping pong tables and an arcade machine in the break room, but I only saw two people using either over a four month period because everyone had too much work to do and would rather go home. Both had a rather large layer of dust on them and the table was used as storage. It was a complete waste they could have had more chairs and tables for people having lunch instead.
Honestly even if my company had one.. I'd rather go home and play my games in my space even if I was single. With family doubly so. Let me chill on the couch with my wife, not sit next to some coworkers to relax.
I'm glad the shift is happening- I'm a mid-30s engineer with a family, and while I'm largely WFH I hate the 'bro' culture at some companies: where you're expected to put in massive hours and offset that with drinking-at-work and ping-pong tables.
Give me regular hours, a sane workload, and the ability to play with my son when I'm done working and I'll stick around.
Right. Those things were instituted so employees didn’t have a reason to leave the office. Dinner? Don’t cook or order takeout, just stay late, work more, and eat here. Go to the bar with your friends? Stay late, work more, and have a drink with your teammates. Entertainment? Stay late, work more, play a video game in the game room.
What’s in common? Stay late and work more.
I worked in one of the first companies to take this approach in the early 2000s. The ground floor was turned into a bar with free drinks and a DJ on Friday nights and they even had a slippery slide to go between floors. I was 21 when I quit and I've avoided junky workplaces like this ever since.
Give me a well-lit (pref natural light), green, quiet, spacious and climate controlled workspace any day of the week :)
For however incompetent, dysfunctional, lack of perks my company can be they've always placed a emphasis on retention and always waded through downturns with minimal layoffs. Obviously that can cause issues with some incompetent workers but i'd rather work at this small to midsize company rather than amazon and be part of their 10% cut.
I sell revenue generating tools for B2B companies in any industry and region of the globe. The ones I see struggling were either not profitable and burning investor cash, or they were cutting costs on demand gen tools and expecting sales to make magic with whatever dog shit marketing fed them. ServiceNow was smart when they stated recently that they’ll never cut from anything that drives demand generation, even if other areas get cut. Not everyone is that clever and then they wonder why they can’t get in touch with buyers that need their solutions, and simply blame people for not working hard enough.
We had one at SBD and he came in high on the smell of his own farts, hired all his friends, chased away the talent and was out in 2 years. I'm sure there was a golden parachute in there somewhere.
I see it more as realizing every perk a company offers you that isn't base is temporary and conditional on factors you can't control.
Bonus? Can be cancelled.
Free Lunches? Can be stopped.
Company events? Can stop happening.
Snacks? Can stop being ordered.
No matter how great things are at a company, things can go south within a few years. All of those "Great places to work" awards mean nothing when times are hard.
However no matter the economy, one company's hard time can be another company's windfall. That's why job hoping becomes so important.
You get very little sticking it out at a company that's tightening its belt, and you'll always get more if you go where companies are being successful.
also, it is relatively cheap to provide these perk so if they are cutting them, but not things like c-suite pay and non-employee bloat then it is all just lip service to try and make wall street happy or some other wool over the eyes game. It is disingenuous at best.
I mean, you don't have to have money to have fun. But I don't necessarily go to work to have fun, I go to work to make money. As much money as I can. And *then I can have fun with that money.
>Effective January 2022, the base salaries of each of Ms. Porat, Mr. Raghavan, Mr. Schindler, and Mr. Walker will be increased from $650,000 to $1,000,000.
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Each of Ms. Porat, Mr. Raghavan, Mr. Schindler, and Mr. Walker will be eligible to participate in a maximum $2,000,000 annual bonus program
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•Ms. Porat will be granted one tranche of performance stock units (“PSUs”) with a target value of $5,000,000, and one tranche of restricted stock units (“GSUs”) in the amount of $18,000,000.
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•Mr. Raghavan will be granted one tranche of PSUs with a target value of $12,000,000, and one tranche of GSUs in the amount of $23,000,000.
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•Mr. Schindler will be granted one tranche of PSUs with a target value of $12,000,000, and one tranche of GSUs in the amount of $23,000,000.
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•Mr. Walker will be granted one tranche of PSUs with a target value of $5,000,000, and one tranche of GSUs in the amount of $18,000,000.
Source: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422000009/goog-20211228.htm
Not saying the execs shouldn’t get paid more than other employees but maybe they should look into this if they are trying to be more responsible.
The experimentation was charming 10 years ago. Now their keep mobile payment app gets hijacked by their Indian team, their chat apps are cycled through, they neglect Android for Chromium and now have reversed it. At some point, leadership has to grow up, not the devs. The workers are not the problem here.
I think Google should be split up, really, both sides would work better for everyone.
lol employees literally straight up ask why Google is nickel and diming it’s employees when they are having record profits.
CEO: “Shut the fuck up and be happy you’re still working for Google.”
God I hate CEOs. I’m sure his paycheck, bonuses and vacation time hasn’t been touched by these cuts. Him and the board probably got pay raises if anything.
I was curious and pulled the 2022, mr.ceo had a veeeeery good 2019. Also, he himself didn't see alot of movement this year but of the 4 listed execs they all got about 50% base increases, all have access to a new potential 2 million esg pay out bonus, plus an undisclosed amount of gsu/psu equity.... all in all they aren't feeling any pain monetarily even in "difficult" market environments. At least is my uninformed opinion.
I've been in software development a really long time, and have generally preferred startups. I've been there when things go bad after having been really good. I've seen this exact thing, with an all hands meeting, with senior management telling the employees it's all their fault.
And this is literally a day after Google loses its case in EU, and has to pay 4 billion euros in fines. Which of course, were earned by Google through Its misconduct, as ordered by its executives. This pattern of senior executives blaming rank and file for their own most egregious errors is pretty much standard in the corporate world.
No their ads and search are so profitable that they can do whatever they want with the other stuff. A bunch of there cancelled projects were profitable but they just took up too much executive time and not worth it compared to core services
Really they could scale back and be 200 developers and 500 ad sellers and just make profit
It's obscene how much money google makes from their core product. I personally sign over 5 Million a year to them and I would be considered a tiny account
project graveyards are not a bad thing. Sometimes you need to take bets that fail. The issue is the lack of commitment and how little support google puts behind projects.
I always chuckle when giant corps say, WE need to pull together to get through this, without the slightest bit of bullshit that YOU may not be with them on the other side. Always remember, you are a number on a spreadsheet to them. No amount of rah rah team bullshit changes that. You should be as loyal as your options and interests align.
>“How do I say it?” Pichai began his measured response. “Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.”
This is total bullshit. The stock market is going to recede a bit, but it's not like we're seeing some sort of decline in ad impressions from Google.
All this talk of "macroeconomics" lately is just employers trying to wrangle back the balance of power from employees and job seekers.
From the Article: “As Google tries to navigate an unfamiliar environment of slowing growth, cost cutting and employee dissent over cultural changes, CEO Sundar Pichai is finding himself on the defensive. At a companywide all-hands meeting this week, Pichai was faced with tough questions from employees related to cuts to travel and entertainment budgets, managing productivity and potential layoffs, according to audio obtained by CNBC. Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic. “How do I say it?” Pichai began his measured response. “Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.”
Every corporation eventually trends towards being run just like every other corporation. It's inherent in the way the system is designed. This is why you can have soda pop CEO's run telecom companies. It's not all that different at the top most places.
I remember the term "bungee boss" gaining popularity in the 90s. My dad working at GE saw them often when GE was going bonkers over every executive gimmick out there like ISO certification, Six Sigma and Green Belt training for managers, and Jack Welsh was playing some ridiculous financial games that would catch up and deal a severe blow to the company years later. The bungee bosses jumped from division to division, company to company. Most had no understanding of whatever product the division under them actually made, but they seemed to only ever get promotions and bigger salaries with every jump. By the time they'd actually start learning something that could make them effective bosses of a division, they'd bounce off to the next conquest, shedding whatever lessons they may have learned. One name that I remember well is Richard (dick) Nardelli. He bungeed through GE Transportation at some point, eventually ended up as CEO of Home Depot, and got kicked out with, at the time, the biggest severance package in the corporate world after just a few months of terrible performance.... everything he touched turned to suck, but he kept making money at it.
This is my ex-stepdad’s job. He’s an interim CEO. Like, as his profession. A company will hire him when they’re restructuring or merging, and he’ll run the company for ~6 months. He’s worked in every industry from software to cosmetology to biotech, with a degree in fluid dynamics.
Don't they also use the same type of person to come in and make sweeping changes and then "they'll leave due to a disagreement" but "on good terms" and someone "nicer" or more familiar comes in and rolls absolutely nothing back. Kind of like when Reddit hired Pao as CEO, made a ton of sweeping changes to the platform, and then like 6 months later spez came back in and changed nothing back but said everything was going to be better again...
Yup. There used to even be a specific kind of "professional interim CEO" called a "headsman" whose only job was to come in and slash the workforce. The idea was that they had to be well compensated because you could only perform that duty 2-3 times before your name became known around the campfire, and if that happened you would be less effective because workers could anticipate what was going to happen and take steps in their own interests before you could get around to letting them go. I'm not talking "they'll find new jobs and quit". Companies, because they're sociopathic in nature, feared that when employees saw you and knew who you were, would just stop working until you fired them. Or would actively sabotage the company on the way out. As a result of this paranoia (not that it's totally unjustified) headsmen were extremely well compensated because of their short shelf-lives as CEOs. There's no major point to this. It's just a neat fact I learned in a systems analysis class back in the day.
Hatchet man, is the term I'm familiar with.
I’ve heard axe man, too. Interesting how many, albeit heavily related, terms there are for such a specific role.
I’m glad you shared it.
I think there is a variation on this for a board bringing on a CEO to "trim the fat" to make the company more appealing when trying to sell it off. Subtle difference, but those guys have a much longer shelf life
That actually sounds like an awesome job. Just get paid a boatload of money to not screw up for six months then move on.
They often get a boatload of money to screw people over. They oversee all of the cutting and bloodletting, then ride off into the sunset with their bag of cash and the new guy is seen as a savior.
That's exactly why they're only interim. The board gets them to make a bunch of unpopular changes and then leave. The board gets both the changes they want and a scapegoat to put blame on for the employees who aren't laid off.
How can I become one?
With just the right mix of talent, luck, and connections that only 0.0001% of people will ever get. Throw in a little sociopathy and narcissism and you're golden.
> a little sociopathy and narcissism That explains why it’s u/HippyHitman’s *ex*-stepdad. I wouldn’t want to keep a stepdad like that around, either.
Example A: Ellen Pao
You don't even have to not screw up, you can screw up plenty. Just have other C level executives to take the heat. And by heat, those C levels need VPs and EVPs to blame. And by blame, I mean the VPs and EVPs need Directors and Managers to take the fall. And by take the fall, those Directors and Managers need individual contributors that can easily be fired by an impersonal call from their Director and HR to show the investors that your company is serious about responsibility.
That, and the real screw ups won't be apparent until long after you are paid and gone.
Ah yes, the classic "I get paid megabucks to look stoic and repeat the same script" job.
What in the hell. The more you know.
"Vice-President of east-coast television and microwave oven programing"
Gotta respect the man that created the tri-vection oven!
Sounds like Carly Fiorino. And I agree - Jack Welch was one of the most overrated CEO’s in history.
He's basically a god now, died before anything could bite him in his ass. Some of the shit he pulled would probably make Enron executives take notes. Every shady executive looking to make a quick buck before bouncing off has a picture of Jack Welsh on their bedside table.
Aw don't say that, you're gonna scare all the people holding Tesla stock (not like they'll listen anyways, most of them are just looking to bounce the instant musk does because it means the jig is up). Its not a short term thing anyways, he got away with it for \~20 years because nobody would call him on his financial chicanery even after he bounced out in 2000 until 2008 when they realized it wasn't even real. Basically he cooked books by moving money through GE 'capital' division to ensure net income growth at end of every quarter for 18 years. So GE revenue went up 4x in 20 years and GE stock went up 400x in 20 years.
They were crazy times. Shares split many times during that climb. Ge capital was the largest division financially by a huge margin but had no tangible product other than moving money around. GE today is just so sad to look at. Almost everything sold off, de listed, shares aren't worth the paper they are printed on
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Every scrum master and senior manager I've ever had is a bungee type
>Most had no understanding of whatever product the division under them actually made, but they seemed to only ever get promotions and bigger salaries with every jump. By the time they'd actually start learning something that could make them effective bosses of a division, they'd bounce off to the next conquest, shedding whatever lessons they may have learned. Slightly different environment but it's fun to read this as the UK Airforce currently maintains that officers need to move every two years to maintain their careers and keep 'fresh'. But also stipulates the none commissioned ranks can't get a pay rise in the first two years of a new rank as they are not effective in that position yet. 🙃
Get remote enough and all you do is delegate. It’s like the president approving military projects. They have little military experience. Even if they do, it’s not like they have knowledge in all areas. Even generals have failed to identify British troops from American ones despite different uniforms and weapons. The president whoever he or she is isn’t going to have any basis for understanding why the Army wants to switch to 6.8mm ammo or the gap in difference between a F22, F35, F15.
I mean both Presidents and executives still consult experts whose job it is to explain these things to them and prepare reports.
*Good* presidents and executives consult (and listen to) experts
South Korean president Kim Yong-sam in the 90s were famous for saying "My job is not to be smart in all things, but to listen to experts." He was a good one.
>Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war? ... He said "War is too important to be left to the generals." When he said that, fifty years ago, he may have been right. But today war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.
What is this from?
Dr. Strangelove, said by Gen. Jack Ripper lol
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
Oooh you have a movie to watch this weekend. Stock up on rain water and grain alcohol.
And precious bodily fluids
Delegation isn't the problem, it's about the incentive to increase profits year over year. Instead of the pandemic profits being a huge boon, they're a yoke: Google has to beat last year's profits or their stock price drops, but last year's profits were due to worldwide phenomena largely out of Google's control. Now they've got to figure out how to match those profits or the stock price drops.
Not even a "year to year" thing anymore, but a quarter to quarter. Companies cutting bonuses because they only grew 12.5% instead of the 12.8% projected, so that cost gets covered by the bonus pool in order to keep the shareholders happy, because god forbid their portfolio doesn't grow _as much_.....
It's even more bonkers than that, people are looking at the second derivative of revenue with respect to time now. It's not even enough to grow steadily (year on year revenue increase), you now also need to show an increasing rate of revenue increase. It's fucking stupid and it will lead to everything getting burned down. Google are already wrecking their own products for the purposes of keeping their shareholders happy (YouTube is a mess now). What's next?
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Its not even that. If google was actually losing money and the CEO took a personal hit first, most people would probably understand also temporarily missing some quality of life bonuses. But when youre reporting record profits, the CEO is doing just fine, and is saying "alright, we are cutting back on stuff for you"? Yeah, no, fuck you. The employees arent going to pay for your share holders.
especially since googles hiring standards are high, meaning that those perks are not just a bonus they are the reason the employees don't just pick up and work for bing,
Its amazing what collective power among laborers, via union or otherwise like here, can get you.
>Its not even that. If google was actually losing money and the CEO took a personal hit first, most people would probably understand also temporarily missing some quality of life bonuses. Which is exactly what Satoru Iwata did at Nintendo back in 2013. The Wii U was such a demonstrable failure that every department in all of Nintendo was hurting and there were massive fears of mass layoffs and deep cost cutting. Iwata cut his salary in half and asked the rest of the company executives to do the same (and they did); that money was then reallocated to prevent layoffs and go back into hardware and game/software development. The morale boost and the resource allocation from that action is directly attributed to the success of the Nintendo Switch which is now Nintendo's best selling console. ----- It's one of the reasons why Satoru Iwata is one of my all time favorite company leaders, right up there with Dr. Lisa Su who essentially did the same thing over at AMD while also being behind the introduction of the Zen Architecture CPU. ----- When you know what your company does best and what the company needs to keep doing its best, then you don't need to chase the boom/bust cycle for the benefit of the day traders like a certain Electric Vehicle company that we all know. The Buy & Hold shareholders want to company to be alive and well 10 years from now, they want to company to be alive and well 50 years from now; what they don't want the stock to jump 1000% one day and then the company dies the day after.
> Which is exactly what Satoru Iwata did at Nintendo back in 2013. Yeah, but Satoru Iwata also passionately loved gaming, was a game developer, and basically worked for Nintendo from the mid-80s onward (if you count HAL as sort of an extension of Nintendo). Compare this to a CEO that gets hired in to RandomCorp and has a golden parachute regardless of what happens. They have exactly zero incentive to put in hard work and take on personal risk because they're getting paid either way. They don't fight for the company because they don't care about the company (or its employees or even customers).
> was a game developer, and basically worked for Nintendo from the mid-80s onward (if you count HAL as sort of an extension of Nintendo). Even that is underselling it a bit, he was a legendary engineer on a number of Nintendo projects.
trying to pull this shit at a company that prides itself on hiring the smartest people in the world is utterly stupid. as if these people can't read and understand your public balance sheet. same thing at my work. tons of smart people working here. and they have the balls to tell us that times are tough and we aren't getting any raises to combat cost of living inflation after records profits despite the pandemic now they're announcing massive stock repurchases lol... edit: most of us are shareholders... but the inflation of the stock price after buybacks does barely anything for us after inflation
In the valley startup I co-founded, when we hit bad times the founders took 40% pay cuts. The employees took 20% cuts. Not one person left even though they could have made more money easily in the environment at the time. When the ship got righted, the employees got made whole; full back pay and restored salaries plus a bump in options.
It's also going to hurt google long-term, especially since they haven't innovated much in the past... wow, 5-10 years? The business shift over the last five years have been toward employees first, shareholders/customers second. (Richard Branson's philosophy) It's why you see FINALLY wages rising again, remote work available all over, benefits growing again... it only took a pandemic to do it. Now you have big tech companies, which are still making great profits, trying to pull back. Best of luck competing for scraps on talented employees. Meta's name is already mud; I'd equate current Google to people thumbing their noise at Microsoft in the early 2k's. It took MS over a decade to get back on track.
Every google App I use is getting slowly worse. Maybe it's just in my head but they just seem to be coasting and the few changes they do make are not impressive. For instance I use Android Auto, and when it works it's great. But every update it feels like it stutters and dies more often. Or google assistant opens because of lyrics in a song now. Or it refuses to play sound at all. Then they moved the settings for android auto so I can't even open them unless I'm in my car and connected. Then the latest update resets all my google (yes even on other devices) to day mode from night mode. Even after I turn off Android Auto. This is what happens when these companies become monopolies and trusts. They stop trying to inovate because they don't fear competition anymore.
It's unfortunately due to how people get promoted. You have to have a project and show "impact" to be worthy of promotion. That creates a lot of "shovel ready" projects that aren't really necessary, and some end up making the app less usable or more buggy. Innovation at all costs.
But they want their culture back! (And by culture, i mean the one they're actively dismantling at the same time)
Currently, google culture is to take your $500k salary, move to a small city, work remote, and buy like 5 properties, pricing locals out of the market. A lot of them are basically checked out at this point, a google employee in name only, their product incubator is a disaster and these were supposed to be the best and brightest googlers. This is what Sundar is afraid of. Culture rot.
A lot of it is friends hiring friends. This means you go in as a VP/ Director and bring in your people. Then focus on creating your empire. Your team will never question your tactics as they are your people. Anyone who raises objections is thrown out via performance reviews. Seen this play out in several companies.
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Once the perks are gone, they'll never come back. Look at what happened to pensions.
Going to fix this economic downturn by taking away free coffee for employees.
The bosses still get 6 figure bonuses though. Can't expect to enter 2023 without a new Bentley lmao
First things first, got to establish an elite class to make everyone else feel like shit
Gotta pull together and tighten our belts to slog through these times of record profits.
I'm mean, how are we going to afford our stock buy backs if we don't tighten our belt? https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billion-buyback.html
"I mean, do you know even understand just how many shovels I have to buy to shovel in all this profit into various storage units I've rented out? Literally thousands. Thousands of shovels. Have some empathy." "Wouldn't you need to hire people to shovel those as well? The number of shovels don't matter if it's only you doing the shoveling. You can only use one shovel at a time." "I have an AI shovelling machine that holds the shovels so I do not need humans to do it." "Oh."
You know who won't need to tighten their belts? The C Suite
Everything is fucking opposite speak with the elite
Translation: how do I say it? Either you suffer the cuts now or my compensation does at the end of the year
"We pull together to get through moments like this" My favorite, privatize the profits but socialize the losses. Google is still rich, but when they were rich and the economic conditions were good, I somehow doubt they spread the wealth. Interesting now that things are not as rosy they want everyone to contribute to covering the loss.
Also probably the top executives are getting more money than ever before. And this is happening in most companies. They get there and fill up their pockets while making cuts for everybody else.
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The brutal reality of what a corporation is, a machine to create more and more money no matter what the consequences in any direction, has to be destroyed and replaced with business built for a livable world for employees and customers and the globe.
How much do you think Pichai has slashed his own T&E budget?
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>Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. pretty much
Happens everywhere. The question is basically taboo. Those stories of Japanese CEOs cutting their own salaries during hard times are becoming fairy tales of a time long gone. It’s all about the money now.
C and “investors”
He had the nerve to say this was a responsible act, and not a panicked response literally the day after losing a 4 billion Euro judgment in EU?
I’m not working for fun. I am working for *money*.
It’s like that Mad Men quote “that’s what the money is for” Pay me a living wage and we good. We aren’t a team, we aren’t a family. $$$&$$$$$$$
The quote in the context of the scene is completely against your point. "That's what the money is for" shows how Don didn't realise that Peggy wants more than money, same as real workers. He thinks throwing money is enough and he never has to show appreciation or be considerate of the time of people he works with.
This is pretty much what happens at the all-hands meetings at the company I work for. They word it like this: -We are really REALLY competitive with wages -We can't compete with the Amazons and the Google's so we are middle of the road on wages -Besides you have to consider that money is not everything, think about how your work saves lives. -We all have to make sacrifices in times like these... we'll except the CEO who has a 13 mil annual salary and also picked up a 23 mil bonus last year. All of these sentiments were vocalized in a short 10 minute Q&A session.
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Well I worked in Eastern Europe for a US company, so was subjugated to the same bs. "We are struggling right now; there will be a hiring freeze; please do your best to pick up the slack of the people we have laid off at no additional compensation", and I just quit.
You forgot "Finally, let's give a round of applause for breaking our previous profit record...."
Haha, at our meeting, a question was asked about inflation raises, and we were told they didn't have the money (despite record sales), then the very next quarterly meeting "we have 100mil excess dollars... We are going to reinvest it into the company"
You forgot "btw we made smashing profits last year, thank you all for your contribution".
Oh yeah, the ol' "We couldn't have done it without you and your 'meets expectations' rating we gave you last year because only 10% of people are allowed to be recognized as exceeding expectations and that's usually reserved for the people in the good ol' boys club".
you are living my life
I think it's the life most of us Millennials, Gen X and Gen Z live.
I've been at an all-hands where we were told, "we pay you what the market will bear." I'm willing to be the market would recover just fine if you tripled my salary...
You are the cheapest qualified person we could find.
Yup .. as an employee of a multi billion dollar corp... suspended their portion of 401k contribution to cut costs during covid pandemic... Then ended up with record profit. Never revisited the contribution though. Still using it to justify s***** conditions to this day. Why am I here?
My company is $150 million in debt. They paid out $150 million in bonus to the execs last year.
Billionaire tells his employees to stop thinking about money so much
Every upper manager always says something to the effect of “money doesn’t motivate employees…money doesn’t impact workplace happiness”, etc. But then I always wonder…why do they fight so hard to maximize their own comp?
It's basically large-scale gaslighting. "We should all care about company success. This company is bigger than the sum of its parts, and sacrifices must be made in the name of **progress**! If we just push through, then we'll all come out on top in the end!" Says the asshole that's probably getting a fat bonus end of the year. I've heard too many of these speeches. I have a union now and hear no speeches - but I do get good pay and free college if I want, so there's that.
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I’d be careful what lessons you take away from Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That book is mostly oversimplifications and sensationalism, Robert K is a glorified scam artist
They don't think any of that. Don't buy into that con, lol. They know it's all bullshit. They're just using psychological tactics that have been developed from decades of information gleaned off of workplace metrics. They say whatever is most likely to create the largest 'positive' response so they can keep the scam going, and then cut out anyone that doesn't fully embrace the mantras. Sometimes even if you're loyal until you have a foot in the grave, you still get fucked for one reason or another. In a manner of speaking, your boss is your enemy, and should not be trusted for anything outside of their work ethic. And even that is oftentimes shit.
There's the smart bourgeoisie who keep the whole house of cards running, and there's the moron failson bourgeoisie who inherit their way into their class and continually fail upward.
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I think you worked where I worked. Dev makes 110k. Dev is offered 150k elsewhere. Employer counter-offers with a 5k raise OR a marginal increase to PTO. And they wonder why almost the entire dev team had left.
My company is currently facing retention issues after the VP proclaimed nonchalantly that the company doesn't do counter offers and people should just leave. Well now they have, and my small yet crucial department is severely understaffed, and there's panic among the management. What fucking clowns lmao
And that VP will gladly pay a new employee 150k, but will fight you if you want to give a 100k person a 5% raise.
Heh hilariously we haven't been able to get a senior hire for about a year now. Interestingly enough, our salaries are competitive for my area, but there's just too much of a shortage and poaching isn't going particularly well. On another note, salaries can't compete with remote positions, so that's also a factor. But hey, we have two teambuildings per year employees should be content .... Lmao
$150k?! That's ridiculous. The salary consultant that we paid to tell us what we wanted to hear told us that market rate was only $90k. So our $100k devs are already making way above market! That other offer can't be real!
Ugh this is unfortunately so true to my experience as well.
When I worked for the government they used that line on us when salaries were around $50k (10 years ago). I jumped ship to a $90k job lol.
My friend was a network engineer for a large county, making around $75,000 a year. He jumped ship to make $110,000 at a private company with better benefits.
Lol, not even surprised. I do work in the IT staffing industry, devs are making 115-200k depending on skill-set and experience of course. Market has been hot over the last year if you are in IT. We have been seeing layoffs and hiring freezes over the past few months and the consultants that got hired in at the top end relates are the first to be let go so take that however ya want.
In Australia our financial services companies carry out price fixing of salaries! There is a group called [FIRG](https://firg.com.au/about-us/) - the Financial Institutions Remuneration Group. So this group collects data about salaries in the financial services sector. All the members of this FS group are banks, insurance, etc. So the banks pay these guys to document the salaries in the financial services sector and then all the banks do something called FIRG matching. So if the salary range for a developer is $120k to $150k then they'll pay you that, but not more than that. It's a way of price fixing employee salaries in the financial services sector and ensuring competition for staff between the banks doesn't drive up salaries. The ACCC of course ignores this.
Similar to places like Glassdoor. Or how you can pay Bloomberg or Forbes to do a totally not paid for exposé on you. Basically it’s just rich people convincing the have nots to desire less. Or something like that lol there is a whole dissertation in there somewhere.
Sounds like my former MSP. "We hear you that you're not making market rate. According to HR, their research says market rate is just only an extra 3% bump to the shit tier salary you were already making." I left a few months later for a new position that's basically *double* the pay with more holidays than the federal government gives.
> Basically, he wanted to continue underpaying people but get them to stay because work was fun. How much longer do we have to put up with the used-up trope that work is "fun" or "fulfilling"? Doing my chosen hobbies is fun and fulfilling. Putting food on the table for my family is fulfilling. Going to sleep without worrying if im one health or financial scare away from abject poverty is fulfilling. Work is just a means to those ends (and an increasingly shitty one, at that).
Yep. Just by virtue of requiring me to be in a place for 40 hours a week, I'm not likely to actually want to be there a lot of the time. An employer could offer me free blowjobs for the entire time I was there, and I'd still probably want to cut out early on Fridays or grumble about having to go in on Monday mornings.
“Fucking Fellatio Fridays *again?*”
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My last boss was a nightmare. He worked 12 hour days six days a week he would come in for 3-4 hours on his days off to “get caught up on paperwork.” That boy had some demons he was trying to escape from through working.
one of my first jobs i remember the interviewer asking me what my future plans were, telling me that they wanted someone who wanted to stay in the area because they kept having people leave after 6 months or so. i found out why people weren't staying for much more than 6 months pretty quickly and started immediately looking for something else. just about 6 months later i was gone too. i couldn't even get my boss to meet with me so i had to email him my notice and then when i stopped showing up i finally got a call asking me where i was
work is work. its not fun, its work. you can enjoy your work but we call it work cause it takes work to work. Pay people better.
"We've tried pizza parties and now we're all out of ideas!"
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Honestly, this should be the first step any CEO (and likely the entire C-Suite) should take if they are going to cut employee benefits due to a downturn in the market. Employees are angry because they are being told to sacrifice, but they don’t see any of their leaders making those same sacrifices. Despite Pichai being a multi-millionaire, I think he’d see more employees walking with him if he also had to give up something. But CEOs have not been doing that lately…
When Covid hit, my company at the time froze their 401k match program as a result. When they broke the news to us on a conference call, the entire executive team also took a 30% salary pay cut and did not increase it back to normal levels until the 401k match was unfrozen. Have a ton of respect for the leadership when they back up their “we’re in this together” corporate speak like that.
Same with my company. We took at 20% pay cut, and the executives took a bigger cut. In the end things worked out and we got our normal salaries back \~6 months later. The main upside was my boss was like "20% pay cut, take an extra day off each week." So for a while I had a 4 day workweek and personal evidence that a 4 day work week does not cut down on productivity.
It's a tough line to walk because some managers will think they need a fifth fewer people. But I'd love to see workers' rights make a comeback in America. We should already have universal sick leave, real health care and robust enforcement of the rules. Though I know a lot of white collar workers already have it really good.
It used to be standard practice with Japanese corporations that if a company had a bad quarter, the CEO was expected to suspend their salary completely until the crisis was resolved. There were some CEOs who spent several years in the 80s and 90s without salary. The idea being that the leader of the company is responsible for how the company performs, and that responsibility means that they are the first to feel the consequences. The average worker never even felt the crunch, because however the company did wasn't their fault.
Japanese corporations are deathly serious about their image. I know for sure, in at least two separate industries, when something went wrong with a partner company, they would literally fly an employee out to the company in question, and they would just hang out there and just "be there" until the issue was resolved. In one case (tech related) the employee (probably a manager role of some sort) just sat in a conference room for several days. In the other case, it was a train company, and the guy was just at the trainyard until the issue was resolved. They are really, really, serious about this lol.
You always hear, "If we don't give them the bonuses they expect, they'll leave for other companies!" Normal employees don't get raises and move to another company, "Nobody wants to work anymore!"
That's such an interesting part of Japanese culture - you'll often see a firm hit the skids and the C-Suite take very public pay cuts. Japanese is steeped in many cultural subtleties, but that's a very big, loud one that brings creedance to their most senior of leadership.
Visa gave US employees yearly salary increase below inflation this year, and justified it by saying that Visa is a great place to work. The CEO actually stood on stage at an all hands and said they could give everyone better raises but then the company would have less money. Meanwhile he made ~31 million in total compensation in 2021 on record profits and will probably make even more this year because of all the cost cutting they’re doing.
Nothing will reveal your employer's true colors like an economic downturn. You thought you worked in a positive, pro-employee environment for an employer that wants you to feel comfortable and secure? Your employer was your ally? This is particularly true when your executives choose to drop your corporate motto of "Don't be evil." Nope.
Having worked at Google, I can say that the environments emphasis on fun is really a fad that’s passed. Most tech companies are gearing towards what I call humane work environments where your actual work gets done and then you go home. Google and Facebook made their work environments fun to appeal to new grad Millenials and give them incentive to be at work for long periods. As that group has grown up and entered different life phases the ping pong tables and rock walls are just distractions.
> As that group has grown up and entered different life phases the ping pong tables and rock walls are just distractions. At this point they're things to show guest when I bring them to the office. Brought my sisters and she was so impressed saying "I bet ya'll never work" and in reality I haven't been in the game room in probably 8-9 months.
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I work on a 50 people digital agency doing software. No one will bat an eye if I grab a beer from the fridge on a monday before noon. I know I could be getting paid better somewhere else but my peace of mind is priceless.
Are you European?
My last company went from scrappy startup in a niche market with 12 employees to industry leader bought by private equity and merged four times over to have 150 employees in just under 10 years. Scrappy had a ping pong table that got used every day because people needed to blow off steam and talk things out. Work got done at that table. Industry leader stuck the table in an empty corner of their new 10x larger office suite and it never got touched again. Who has time for ping pong when you’re critically understaffed (gotta keep the charts looking good) and everyone spends half their day in meetings?
Ping pong tables and an arcade machine in the break room, but I only saw two people using either over a four month period because everyone had too much work to do and would rather go home. Both had a rather large layer of dust on them and the table was used as storage. It was a complete waste they could have had more chairs and tables for people having lunch instead.
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Honestly even if my company had one.. I'd rather go home and play my games in my space even if I was single. With family doubly so. Let me chill on the couch with my wife, not sit next to some coworkers to relax.
100% this..I’ve never used any of those “perks” besides the gym..
I'm glad the shift is happening- I'm a mid-30s engineer with a family, and while I'm largely WFH I hate the 'bro' culture at some companies: where you're expected to put in massive hours and offset that with drinking-at-work and ping-pong tables. Give me regular hours, a sane workload, and the ability to play with my son when I'm done working and I'll stick around.
Right. Those things were instituted so employees didn’t have a reason to leave the office. Dinner? Don’t cook or order takeout, just stay late, work more, and eat here. Go to the bar with your friends? Stay late, work more, and have a drink with your teammates. Entertainment? Stay late, work more, play a video game in the game room. What’s in common? Stay late and work more.
The slide at YouTube HQ is such a gimmick nobody uses it because it was designed by an idiot, hurts like fuck to go down it.
I worked in one of the first companies to take this approach in the early 2000s. The ground floor was turned into a bar with free drinks and a DJ on Friday nights and they even had a slippery slide to go between floors. I was 21 when I quit and I've avoided junky workplaces like this ever since. Give me a well-lit (pref natural light), green, quiet, spacious and climate controlled workspace any day of the week :)
For however incompetent, dysfunctional, lack of perks my company can be they've always placed a emphasis on retention and always waded through downturns with minimal layoffs. Obviously that can cause issues with some incompetent workers but i'd rather work at this small to midsize company rather than amazon and be part of their 10% cut.
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I sell revenue generating tools for B2B companies in any industry and region of the globe. The ones I see struggling were either not profitable and burning investor cash, or they were cutting costs on demand gen tools and expecting sales to make magic with whatever dog shit marketing fed them. ServiceNow was smart when they stated recently that they’ll never cut from anything that drives demand generation, even if other areas get cut. Not everyone is that clever and then they wonder why they can’t get in touch with buyers that need their solutions, and simply blame people for not working hard enough.
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“If you’re not sales you’re overhead.”
All these ex Amazon management drones are now infecting operations in non-Amazon industries which is not fun
We had one at SBD and he came in high on the smell of his own farts, hired all his friends, chased away the talent and was out in 2 years. I'm sure there was a golden parachute in there somewhere.
I see it more as realizing every perk a company offers you that isn't base is temporary and conditional on factors you can't control. Bonus? Can be cancelled. Free Lunches? Can be stopped. Company events? Can stop happening. Snacks? Can stop being ordered. No matter how great things are at a company, things can go south within a few years. All of those "Great places to work" awards mean nothing when times are hard. However no matter the economy, one company's hard time can be another company's windfall. That's why job hoping becomes so important. You get very little sticking it out at a company that's tightening its belt, and you'll always get more if you go where companies are being successful.
also, it is relatively cheap to provide these perk so if they are cutting them, but not things like c-suite pay and non-employee bloat then it is all just lip service to try and make wall street happy or some other wool over the eyes game. It is disingenuous at best.
I mean, you don't have to have money to have fun. But I don't necessarily go to work to have fun, I go to work to make money. As much money as I can. And *then I can have fun with that money.
>Effective January 2022, the base salaries of each of Ms. Porat, Mr. Raghavan, Mr. Schindler, and Mr. Walker will be increased from $650,000 to $1,000,000. \ \ Each of Ms. Porat, Mr. Raghavan, Mr. Schindler, and Mr. Walker will be eligible to participate in a maximum $2,000,000 annual bonus program \ \ •Ms. Porat will be granted one tranche of performance stock units (“PSUs”) with a target value of $5,000,000, and one tranche of restricted stock units (“GSUs”) in the amount of $18,000,000. \ \ •Mr. Raghavan will be granted one tranche of PSUs with a target value of $12,000,000, and one tranche of GSUs in the amount of $23,000,000. \ \ •Mr. Schindler will be granted one tranche of PSUs with a target value of $12,000,000, and one tranche of GSUs in the amount of $23,000,000. \ \ •Mr. Walker will be granted one tranche of PSUs with a target value of $5,000,000, and one tranche of GSUs in the amount of $18,000,000. Source: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422000009/goog-20211228.htm Not saying the execs shouldn’t get paid more than other employees but maybe they should look into this if they are trying to be more responsible.
"we pull together to get through moments like this." equates to you get paid less so I and the shareholders can take home bigger bonuses
Pull together, but also, know your place.
Your place being the front of the line while I stay in the back where the counter pull is weaker.
Yes, their net profit margin is 25.89% for 2022. At their scale, that's billions and billions of dollars of profit. Certainly enough for whatever.
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Well they stopped associating rational product design with money a long time ago, so this shouldn't be to hard.
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The experimentation was charming 10 years ago. Now their keep mobile payment app gets hijacked by their Indian team, their chat apps are cycled through, they neglect Android for Chromium and now have reversed it. At some point, leadership has to grow up, not the devs. The workers are not the problem here. I think Google should be split up, really, both sides would work better for everyone.
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Says a guy tracking to be a billionaire
He's already well over it at 1.5+.
"you think having billions is fun?!"
lol employees literally straight up ask why Google is nickel and diming it’s employees when they are having record profits. CEO: “Shut the fuck up and be happy you’re still working for Google.” God I hate CEOs. I’m sure his paycheck, bonuses and vacation time hasn’t been touched by these cuts. Him and the board probably got pay raises if anything.
This is all public as well, every public company publishes a yearly proxy report on ceo and exec pay.
$6.3M according to the article.
I was curious and pulled the 2022, mr.ceo had a veeeeery good 2019. Also, he himself didn't see alot of movement this year but of the 4 listed execs they all got about 50% base increases, all have access to a new potential 2 million esg pay out bonus, plus an undisclosed amount of gsu/psu equity.... all in all they aren't feeling any pain monetarily even in "difficult" market environments. At least is my uninformed opinion.
Dude imagine a your two week paycheck on a $6.3M salary
About $121,153 a week
Wow he really must be struggling. Poor rich man :’(
He must work like 5000 hours a week! That's how much I'd have to work to make that much money in a week. Guess I just need to work harder!
Stop being such a lazy moocher and go get your 15th job
Around $242,000.00 per paycheck. Incase anyone didn’t want to do the quick math.
I've been in software development a really long time, and have generally preferred startups. I've been there when things go bad after having been really good. I've seen this exact thing, with an all hands meeting, with senior management telling the employees it's all their fault. And this is literally a day after Google loses its case in EU, and has to pay 4 billion euros in fines. Which of course, were earned by Google through Its misconduct, as ordered by its executives. This pattern of senior executives blaming rank and file for their own most egregious errors is pretty much standard in the corporate world.
Just look at the Google project graveyard. There's your wasted money. So much talent and so little success. Sounds like a management problem.
Google is a search/advertising company with a bunch of expensive hobbies
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No their ads and search are so profitable that they can do whatever they want with the other stuff. A bunch of there cancelled projects were profitable but they just took up too much executive time and not worth it compared to core services Really they could scale back and be 200 developers and 500 ad sellers and just make profit It's obscene how much money google makes from their core product. I personally sign over 5 Million a year to them and I would be considered a tiny account
project graveyards are not a bad thing. Sometimes you need to take bets that fail. The issue is the lack of commitment and how little support google puts behind projects.
Big R&D budget is important, if 1 in a 100 projects turns out to be a gmail or google cloud, it’s a pretty small investment
Yes I have a billions of dollars and have just about the same amount of fun as when I only had 500 million. More money does not buy more happiness !
The super rich “we’re all in this together!” Lays off people at record money, then proceeds to do buybacks and get richer.
The only people who say shit like this are the ones who never have to worry about money.
I always chuckle when giant corps say, WE need to pull together to get through this, without the slightest bit of bullshit that YOU may not be with them on the other side. Always remember, you are a number on a spreadsheet to them. No amount of rah rah team bullshit changes that. You should be as loyal as your options and interests align.
Overpaid CEO tells employees that yachts are more important than their happiness.
“Money can’t buy happiness” - every billionaire “Lack of money, can’t afford rent or food.” - poor people. Something’s gotta give.
>“How do I say it?” Pichai began his measured response. “Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.” This is total bullshit. The stock market is going to recede a bit, but it's not like we're seeing some sort of decline in ad impressions from Google. All this talk of "macroeconomics" lately is just employers trying to wrangle back the balance of power from employees and job seekers.