Tell HN: Sundar Pichai made $8M today
If gurufocus is to be believed, he owns approx 1.76M shares. GOOGL closed at $98, up $5 today. Not bad for causing more hardship and pain on a +$100B reserve balance.
The goal is to increase shareholder value. And most of the increase today was due to macro market trends and not due to the layoffs (everything went up today)
I know this is the "official" corporate governance imperative for a public company, but in practice this isn't how companies are run (or at least, not Google/etc). Sundar isn't thinking about "shareholder value"... he's thinking about how to make the company (and its employees) successful. Which of course, sometimes means cutting people loose.
that's certainly one way to see it.
another way would be: Google spent over $50 bill in the last 12 months keeping its stock price up artificially.
Quite.
Google has 180k people, minus 12k = 168k. That means their burn rate is 16.8 to 84 billon a year
I'm speaking out of my ass because I don't know the average salary and overhead of a google employee but the low numbers assume $100k a year no zero overhead.
Please check my math
12000 * $100k = 1.2 billon
168k * $100k = 16.8 billon
They're a public company. If you want to know how much they spend, just check their quarterly financial reports. It'll be far more accurate than these guesses.
To show that $100b in reserves may not be that much if you need to keep the company afloat for 168k people.
First, if that is your goal then you really should use the actual available numbers target than make your own guesses that have a ludicrously large range.
Second, it is actually comparatively rare for big companies to have enough capital for years of runway. They plan to pay the salaries with their revenues, not with reserves. If companies really did planning the way you're implying ("big reserves aren't much if you need to keep the company afloat"), most the S&P 500 would be firing half their staff. So when you have a look in the financial reports for how large Google's expenditures are, have a look also at their revenue and operating income.
Third, the narrative you're trying to build is just utter bullshit. I'm sure there are good economic arguments to be made for these layoffs. And there are other companies for which company survival would be a good argument. But in this particular case, the idea that it is about company survival is just completely detached from reality. The company is still, as of the last released numbers, fabulously profitable.
Do you think programmers who sit in a chair all day deserve to be paid 5x what a coalminer makes?
As I noted in another comment, it's never lost on me that I make 10-20x what my siblings in non-tech in the midwest make in a year, and I just sit in front of my laptop all day. (and my stock can easily go up in one day, by more than they make all year).
So... yeah.
All these companies are in layoff mode but because they are trying to be frugal during the recession but none of them actually want to layoff that talent, each of which was one of 100 or of 1000 resumes sent to the company. Google gets 3 million applications a year and still has trouble finding people that can do the jobs they're hiring for.
Queue rant about how the interviewing process sucks.
Maybe it does, but of the people I've interviewed only about 1 in 10 is a clear "yes, this person can code well", 2 are "probably ok" and 7 are "based on the performance/style/etc... from the leetcode question I wouldn't let you near my code base..... maybe you'd rock but you didn't show me you'd rock. You made all kinds of basic mistakes that makes it seem like you don't actually code much or you write lots of bugs. Sorry, I was totally routing for you. I would 100% love to hire you but you failed to show me you can code". That's irrespective of if they "solved it".
weighted by how much people are willing to pay for the work product you create
It's probably really hard to find glassblowers these days. But, people don't want to buy that much handblown glass either.
(and before anybody says "I'd love to drink water out of hand blown glass!", remember opportunity costs: training glassblowers is probably straightforward but the projected value of their work does not support training them to blow glass considering they could train to do something in higher demand, so these potential glassblowers would want a high enough wage that you'd still settle for getting your drinking water glasses from Target)
Edit: Think about it. Sometimes a CEO's best move is to not mess something up. Other times, the best move is to take drastic measures. It's a rare blend that makes a good CEO for a given situation. I'm not saying Steve Jobs sucked. He was an outlier.
Maybe 2022's unexpected doses of increased class consciousness is going to extend in 2023. (Of course it is, post-pandemic trends only show signs of increasing, strap in!)
Corporate bean counters did the math and realized they were leaving money on the table, on average. One ant's contribution doesn't typically make or break a bigco.
On average, the stock price goes up. Why let the minions soak up those BPS (basis points)?
This is $666.666 repeating USD per person laid off from $GOOG. Make of that what you will.
Seems like a lot.
I assumed it would be more...
What a time to be in tech.