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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

This 'I take full responsibility' thing is getting really tiresome. Of course you take full responsibility, you're the f'ing CEO, and in case on account of this someone loses their house I'm sure you'll make good on it, because it's your responsibility, right?

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It's the opposite of taking responsibility though, they're not displaying any actions that can be quantified as them actually being responsible. If a company is doing mass layoffs it's because the executives fucked up, not the employees. The lack of corporate/executive responsibility is off the charts. They make big mistakes and everyone except them pays. I wouldn't be surprised if the executive team have to vacation after this on the company dime and receive an extra bonus since they took "responsibility".

Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation. You would think people that command billions of dollars and tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI, they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...

Agreed. This is the rough equivalent of saying 'I take responsibility' while laughing all the way to the bank over the backs of those that made the money in the first place. Absolutely revolting.

It's an over-compensation for the earlier responses that blamed things on "unforeseeable market conditions" or something in a "we did everything perfectly and this is just the way the world is" kind of excuse.

It doesn't really help the people who are out of a job, but I think it's a nice gesture at least to say "this one is on us, we'll reflect on what went wrong and try to do things differently next time" even though I have around 0 faith that any of these leaders would hire less in another Covid-like scenario where funding was cheap and demand for their services was growing.

It's a two sided street: Google is super profitable and could easily support their workforce through an economic downturn. But they feel their shareholders are more important than their employees. And so the employees, whose loyalty is demanded in good times, receive none of that loyalty in return in bad times.

Also, pretty weird to see 'careers.google.com' up and running and apparently hiring for all kinds of roles while at the same time letting go of all these people.

Microsoft had <24hr old job postings on the day they announced lay-offs. They don't always have to go in lockstep esp for companies this big. There are always teams that need backfills.

If you're saying "I take full responsibility", I'd expect a meaningful consequence on your part, such as resigning, forgoing your bonus for the year or a significant pay cut. That's what's happening to the staff being laid off.

But because exec comp is mostly stock based, he's actually getting a massive pay increase.

>Of course you take full responsibility

But politicians normally don't say that, but they also don't have stocks :)

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