The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership
andzwa.medium.com
andzwa.medium.com
I dunno, something had to give at some point? Leadership sent the message last year but it wasn’t well received: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-ceo-faced-intense-push...
Like, blame definitely falls on leadership here, ICs didn’t come up with the ten chat apps or streaming gaming failure, but the chilling couldn’t last forever.
Is that a fact or just your perception?
I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google.
The Blind app is an interesting place.
That's from Silicon Valley, the parody show
It worked. Not a bad plan in the early/mid 2010s ;)
Life experience tells me this is highly unlikely.
Even if you take it to say managers cannot figure it out and always get it wrong (0% hit rate). Random layoffs are still a net negative even if they outperform managers picking the firings.
It's pretty funny how even without unions, companies have no recourse to me barely working and collecting a quarter mil a year.
My understanding is that google historically simply didn’t give raises or approve projects for under performers. As long as someone didn’t rock the boat or put up low quality CRs, or stop working entirely, they would be left alone - and maybe google wouldn’t bother to give them any new stocks when their grant expired.
Thats not chill, that's exhausting and common at many dorectionless organisations with poor leadership. As an IC its not something yoy can fix
And you know that when people call it "best WLB" they're talking about something specific.
You can also chill out working at a quiet local bookstore or other “BaristaFIRE” jobs that people like, but you’re not getting paid $500k to do it…
(Microsoft definitely competes now)
Seems like you are putting quite subjective segmentation of the market there.
Well, yes, before they had levels, they did not have levels.
I'm not sure this is much a a statement however - Meta has had levels for many, many years.
At Google, you can see other people’s levels, and they have titles: “Senior”, “Staff”, and so on.
Plus, almost everyone E5 and above posts their titles on linkedin.
Google's long been criticised for byzantine and ineffective hiring and ranking processes. The thought occurs that perhaps management have decided that unbiased random staff reductions are the least-harmful way to go about this.
The problem remains that under circumstances of layoffs, those with options to do so are still more likely to leave, resulting in a net negative selection against the most effective and productive workers. (Or at least those who can make a case for appearing to be same.)
I'm not utterly convinced of the above, though it's a working hypothesis and will be interesting to see how it plays out over time.
Layoffs in this case are merely done to manipulate the metrics used by wall street analysts. That's the only reason they are being done.
Of course, I am assuming that the market will turn around some time in the future. If the market remains this bleak forever, tech candidates no longer have any choices so Google doesn't have to care.
The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.
Most everyone who is not in leadership/upper management has endless complaints about what idiots they are.
Because it's like child rearing, or teaching, or vim vs emacs but there are more choices and many more dimensions, oh and there's almost no data, big cargo cults (from Toyota Improvement System, Deming, Agile manifesto to endless books by those who made it in the last decade), uncertainty is high, general intelligence is low, the interpersonal skills deficit is mind-boggling, burnout/disillusionment/fanaticism are rampant, perverted/misaligned incentives too, and of course all of that is driven by fundamental business constraints and various other sources of path-dependence.
My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.
I joined two years ago so that’s just how things are done here as far as I’m concerned!
The reality is dumb people do not have a monopoly on dumb things. Nor smart on smart things. Timing and circumstance are impossible to separate from any situation. Are lucky people also skilled at taking the correct risks? Almost certainly. Is this a learned thing? I'm not sure.
My gut is it is learnable. But not if others are learning the same thing. What makes a smart choice is influenced by what everyone else is doing.
At some point between the ages of 20 and 30, you begin to believe that, although it is difficult to point out what they are better at than you or your peers, in order to be in the position they are in, "leaders" must be better in some way--say, in the technical skills, the strategies and tactics used to achieve a goal, the personality that inspires subordinates--than you and your colleagues.
Then, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly, thanks to age, experience, and new, maybe more jaded, eyes, you realize that the words, strategies, and perspectives communicated or elaborated by those "leaders," which you thought were nonsense but had decided to consider something you simply did not have the tools to understand, were, in fact, nonsense, delusional thinking, intellectual garbage.
And, at that point, you may try to understand how it is possible for such important companies to have such incompetent leaders. But that is another story.
It is also a virtuous circle: you come in early, you are promoted because there is virtually no one else around, or you are chosen as the best among a group of fairly mediocre people--maybe they use a die to choose who will become the new "leader" of the group--and in a couple of months you go from being just another IC to a rising star.
You are quickly recognized as such and, in an environment with very loose feedback cycles such as management in the technology sector, you are free to fake your way up to the top. As soon as you are exposed, if ever, you can recycle yourself elsewhere as a true and proven leader of vast experience.
Or, assuming you are not very good at leadership in absolute terms, you do a good job anyway because most management is skirting responsibilities, taking advantage, in a good way, of colleagues and the machinery that makes the company work, and, most of all, going with the flow.
It’s easy to assume therefore that the words are intellectual garbage, but that’s not always the case. In fact there’s no way to tell competent and incompetent leadership apart just from speeches they give, but make no mistake the distinction exists, and as an employee it’s critical to ferret out the answer over time as you will learn entirely the wrong lessons if you work for muppets for any length of time.
Fortunately good leadership does exist. It is usually built over decades of a solid skill foundation (ie. Experts leading experts) rather than MBAs, and the top skill is sniffing out bullshit. Of course every company has a mix of people, but in healthy ones there will be a critical mass of competent people and they generally know who each other are and keep things pointed in the right direction.
When you say in the previous comment that "it's easy to assume that words are intellectual garbage, but that's not always the case," I see the position/authority bias at work: it can't be nonsense, they are the leaders, what they say has to make sense, if only seen in the context of having to speak all day, or to dozens, hundreds, thousands (unlikely outside of politics) of people every day.
Or look at the layoffs at Twitter, Meta, Google, etc.: even if they seem to make little sense (some of the decisions anyway) in the way they are done, somehow they have to make sense, either because the layoffs are a "blunt instrument," or because the shareholders are asking for something particular or whatever.
I would like to bring an example. A person in my company was hired in a management role, overseeing a function for a group of hundreds of people. As soon as they gave their first "speech," it was clear to my shrewd eyes that the words uttered made no sense, that they were lying about their past, their accomplishments, and that their skills were not what was advertised. If I focus my attention on what people do in a context where I am competent, it takes between very little and not much to assign them to a broad range of competence: incompetent, somewhat competent, okay competent, very competent.
Similarly, I've played a couple of sports at a high level, and if I see people training for, say, an hour, I can assign them to a level of competence, with little margin for error. The guy who does everything differently and originally is sort of an invention of novels and TV shows. Sometimes, very rarely, they show up in real life, so I might add a little bucket labeled "mysterious."
The executive hired by my company fell squarely into the category of incompetent. But because the executive had been hired into that management position by people deemed competent (they weren't, that's why it was a flywheel, a charade), my colleagues considered the executive competent for years, despite the obvious nonsense. It was rather bizarre to observe, but position bias (and "whatever" bias) is as strong as many of the biases related to physical characteristics that we carry around with us all day, every day. And when I tried to explain to my colleagues what I had seen, they did not believe me. I think they still don't believe me.
I'm a cynic about business and management, not a manager and will not be one, am an engineer, also partake in the usual bitching about managers and business decisions that we all do.
But a lot of the hate is not too rational, and a lot of times the decisions that engineers would prefer would be disastrous for the company. Also, engineers really hate to share any responsibility for commercial failures. It must be a soul sucking job to run a company or sell a product that is uncompetitive. Talk to any engineer about their pet company or product or industry with some notable failure (Boeing, HP, DEC, Sun) and the story is always the same, management and bean counters sucked the life out of it to feed wall street parasites. You hear very little about how their products were sub-standard, too expensive, or out-competed by other companies despite their also being beholden to MBAs and shareholders and pointy haired bosses.
I've not known many executive decisions like that (right or wrong) being made without any input from technical side of the business, perhaps not Joe shitkicker in the trenches but technical leads. and I've very rarely encountered a technical person who concedes that their project or product or team should be given fewer resources. Almost always the complaint is that if only they were given more resources, they could have been successful, which rarely understands business and market realities and often confuses cause and effect.
And the egos and empire building and infighting and so on are definitely a thing that happens, and they are definitely not restricted to management. Engineers and technical people are some of the worst offenders!
I'm not trying to absolve executives and managers here, but I do think some engineers need better perspective and yes some empathy with the business side. Almost no new engineer needs to be told that their leaders are poor -- they'll hear it from their coworkers in their second week on the job and continuously after that until they retire. What I've rarely if ever heard is "damn we shipped a real piece of crap here, it must be embarrassing for our executives and sales people who have to sell it and answer to our customers, we could have done much better".
Reality is most people are not the awesome standouts they believe themselves to be and truly strong leaders/engineers/sales people/product manager/etc. are extremely hard to find.
'When I first got into politics, I thought it would be like the rest of life. You know, when you see a great NFL player, he's a lot better than the college guys, who are a lot better than the high school guys. Same with pianists. The guys in the concerts are some of the best of the best. But that wasn't true in politics. The people that were really good at politics had no bearing on being senators or dog catchers. It was all a mixed bag.'
My apologies for butchering that.
But, I think that management is a lot like that. Peter Principle, yadda yadda yadda. We all know. But it's the expectation that your boss knows anything that really gets you. Gotta stop expecting your 'superiors' to know how to fog a mirror.
Further than this, I think the concept and framing of management as "leadership" is very clearly a scam. The people in charge are in charge -- fine, give unto Caesar and all that -- but we also have to pretend that they have a quasi-mystic property that makes people /want/ to follow their orders.
The average manager is average at being a manager. Lots are below. Very few are at the top end of the curve, at there's no particular reason that they would be the ones at Director/VP/C*O level.
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It really doesn’t. First, that’s a Michigan case interpreting Michigan law. Almost every non trivial US company is incorporated in Delaware and subject to Delaware law.
Delaware law does have somewhat similar cases, eBay v. Newmark is a good one to read but …
Second, in both the Ford and Craigslist cases what was happening was really blatant. Courts are not in the business of deciding this or that corporate policy isn’t instantly maximizing shareholder value. What they won’t necessarily let you do is announce that you, being a controlling shareholder, never ever intend to make money and it sucks to be a minority shareholder.
Investors who want to change that have to get enough members on the board or attempt some variety of takeover or buy out.
This has more of a flavor of Google's 2011 "caught fixing wages and forced to pay a $300 million fine" scandal.
Of course some believe that the idea that they might have done something that they have already been found guilty of in the past to be nothing more than a implausible harebrained conspiracy theory.
There was a similar court case in the 80s. I believe it was a shareholder lawsuit and that it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court was asked whether a company can take into account a variety of stakeholder & community interests in its decisionmaking, or must it seek to maximize shareholder return.
In the case, the court ruled that shareholder return is the only legitimate goal.
I suspect this case was very influential, and I would be grateful to anyone who can track it down.
Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. has language to the opposite conclusion, but it’s dicta.
A general social trend to value tech in our lives seems lost on the genius CEOs. They really seem to think billions care they specifically exist, when really if they did not someone else would have been CEO. Some other company that came before Google would be Google big if not Google quality in search (which has gone to shit under the management of their current genius CEO).
Hubris, lack of social awareness, lack of career experience outside the Google RDF created a hyper-normalized world view.
Paraphrasing PG, who wrote somewhere, I forget where, don’t underestimate the power of money to motivate. We’re not picking good companies, just playing simple arithmetic games with fiat money.
That would be Marissa Mayer.
This is a myth. Lynn Stout argued against the relevance of Dodge v. Ford (1919) in this article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744
This misstep kind of undermines the rest of the piece, which now reads like a superficial just-so story in the same way.
Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already.
I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no, I don't sit around wringing my hands and thinking, but what will become of our beloved and sacred google? I could not possibly give a shit about google. But maybe someday I'll get a fucking boat.
Going to Stanford is likewise privileged.
Being privileged isn't an insult, just a recognition of fact.
Come on, making 300k a year or more is privilege even within the context of US white collar jobs.
It's literally not a fact, it's an opinion.
Hey what's your job? You don't need to tell me. But I'm gonna go ahead and say you're privileged compared to a rural chinese farmer that has never held a phone.
Most people in America are privileged compared to a rural Chinese farmer.
The median Google employee is privileged compared to average American citizens.
It's healthy to acknowledge this.
The real healthy thing is to acknowledge what are facts and what are not facts.
A ball is moving 15 mph. Is the ball moving fast or slow?
Btw, you're whole framework for 'privileged' is broken because it's a binary condition and 1 dimsenional.
Check out this incident where a profession NBA player was harassed by the policy simply for being black: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/us/sterling-brown-milwaukee-s...
He makes millions every year playing basketball. Is he privileged?
I have no sympathy for these people.
Learn a real skill and do something useful.
Before you jump and say they do have a skill: why are they whining then? People who have skills don't whine when they are laid off. They just go and find another place to work.
The fact that they need to whine so loudly about it tells you everything you need to know: they have nothing of value to contribute, or they were getting paid many times more than their skill is actually worth.
I totally own it. I not only don't complain about being "laid off". I often quit jobs myself and spend some "gap" time doing nothing before I find the next job.
Currently I'm not working for anyone because I'm sick of all tech jobs.
That is a privilege that not many people can afford, especially lower income workers. You're speaking from an enviable position of privilege while complaining about others having privilege. Perspective.
The middle class VS upper class is a perfectly legitimate conflict.
Suppose you were are from a lower class, surely the middle class has more interests in common with you than the capital-class does?
I don't know why people are buying into cult of Google either, I think that's silly, what matters here isn't just that a bunch of people got laid off, but also that now all their former co-workers still at Google have to pick up all their jobs without any more compensation for it. All the saves money from reduction of cost is going to nobody but shareholders - which employees might be a little bit if they're vested, but not to the degree of larger shareholders who contribute nothing.
They contributed investment capital to the company.
Humans are Feudal creatures by instict - thats why feudalism lasted thousands of yeats.
Democracy and freedom are fragile and unnatural, they must be cherished.
> There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism.
This is the brain disease of American politics, anyone pointing out injustice of any kind is accused of Marxism.
The only acceptable way for society to evolve is ever-increasing privilidges for the wealthy untill average man can never hope to afford real estate and can't afford a layer.
Then we will arrive at feudalism.
Feudalism failed when capitalism competed with it.
Too late, I'm already a communist. A very capitalistically successful one, mind you.
Further along this thread is way off topic, I don't want to kick off a flame war of communism vs capitalism, I wanted to see what people have in mind about how companies like Google, that exist in a capitalist system, can be forced to care for the needs of their employees over the needs of their shareholders. Whether or not the system should / can be changed is, well, another thread or something lol, not for here.
That said your comment has some interesting ideas that I'm seeing as misconceptions ("some people in Europe that thought it would work" are arguably some of the most important philosophers in the western tradition) but maybe you're thinking along some lines I'm not aware of, so if you want to chat about this I'd love to do so in email, my address is on my profile page here.
I.e. you're positing the "Labor Theory of Value", which is the basis of Marxism.
The LToV errs in assigning zero value to risk-taking and the fact that some people are far more productive than others.
Supply + Demand determine the value.
"Supply + demand" seems an oversimplification of a huge chain of irrational human links.
What actual risk does an investor take? Loss of capital? Compared to an employee who, in the situation where capital is lost, loses the means by which they feed and house themselves, and in the USA, provide healthcare for themselves?
On top of which, right now, investors aren't really taking much loss. This action by Google is done for shareholder value. So not only is the loss for an employee higher in a situation that "harms" a shareholder, it's also more pervasive: the employee might get fired anyway through no fault of their own, even if it's not because the company is going bankrupt and everyone's losing their money.
And while all this is happening the investor has invested in other ventures, potentially even competitors. If google goes bankrupt they lose their initial investment, which by most financial advisories I see should not account for a significant portion of their investment, retirement, or even just savings, so by material measures, they'll be fine.
Meanwhile the employee has put in their time, energy effort. They haven't been able to explore other means of making money, do research into potential investments for themselves. They've been building social capital, specific domain knowledge, client relationships, things that hold some value after a Google collapse, but not all.
At the end of the day I just don't see why what an investor does has any value at all compared to an employee. Can you help me understand better what you mean?
Without investors, the employee does not get paid, as there is no money to pay him.
robinhood.com says you're incorrect.
No risk => no gains
The rich-get-richer mechanism in question is investing pre-existing large amounts of money in investments that are more or less zero risk, specifically from the perspective of the investor's personal livelihood and well-being. This is simply not available to most people, even if they do have access to zero-commission fractional-share trading on Robinhood.
Also, "labor" covers a large amount of people, of whom a very small subset are Robinhood users, and of whom an even smaller subset are legitimately successful traders, as opposed to one-off financial market lottery winners (who are themselves a small subset of all users).
Of course, many lost money, too. No risk => no gain
The point is, they could invest in the markets, despite being poor.
These investors aren’t contributing capital to the company—they are betting on one square on a roulette wheel.
They are whining because they know they were being over compensated at Google and that they are unlikely to be able to find another job that pays so much money with so little effort.
They're not my enemies but they're not my friends. I don't feel sympathy for them. If anything, they should feel sympathy for me and give me some of that extra cash they've been getting. Why do they deserve it more than I do? I can do "nothing at all" just as well as they did.
Why not?
> If anything, they should feel sympathy for me
Maybe they do, have you talked to some? Also, why should they feel sympathy for you, if you're not interested in feeling sympathy for others?
> give me some of that extra cash they've been getting. Why do they deserve it more than I do?
They don't. Is it their fault that they get paid more and you get paid less for the same or different jobs? Are you pointing your finger at the right people, here?
> I can do "nothing at all" just as well as they did.
You seem to not like when people aren't paid per their labor output. You and I are probably quite aligned in our values, if that's the case. You and I both, for example, surely both find it insane that there are people, hardworking or otherwise, who now command orders of magnitude more capital than anyone on earth, or even in history.
Compared to a billionaire, you at whatever you make, let's say 50k, working harder than a googler making 200k for the same or easier job, are basically siblings in capital. I'd even go so far as to call you class allies.
Perhaps the direction of your anger being pointed distinctly away from the people who are actually causing this injustice is helping same? So why are you mad at random people who make a little bit more than you, rather than at someone that makes several tens of millions a year by simply existing?
My values and your are not aligned at all.
Understand: I don't want sympathy from anyone. I don't think I deserve sympathy, nor do I need it.
Do I need to explain sarcasm to you?
Not that I particularly mind either way: we are all a privileged lot in the tech world. Myself absolutely included!
We'd quickly just shut down all conversation ever because none of us are 8 year old british chimney sweeps covered in soot. In which case, how is the world a better place?
We can acknowledge that there's a lens where some people have privileges ("privileged isn't a binary state") and then still have a discussion about what happened.
If working at Google such a privilege and is the goal, work towards it. Like so many other people did, take up a student loans and put yourself through school, build your resume, take up projects, internships, work experience etc. Prep for interviews, what ever it takes. Then you can take the job and enjoy the "spoils", what ever those are.
One can't just decide not to put in the work and then look at the guy who did and say... privileged.
Being a President of Unites States is a privilidge, surely you dont dispute that?
Are you putting in the work to become President? If not, you are not allowed to call him priviliged.
> If working at Google such a privilege and is the goal, work towards it.
Being the Pope is a privilidge too, do you even want to be the Pope?
If I don't want to be the Pope, should I be unable to recognise that it's a position of power, privilidge and prestige?
So umm you are claiming that you are part of a class that will always have work and stability unlike the people who work at faang. (Debatable but lets take the claim at face value). You are literally saying that we should not care about the plight of googlers because they are in a different class, which is subject to drawbacks which people like you don't face because of your class. And that that makes them privliged. Did i get that right?
That is an interesting definition of privlidge you have there.
I'm trying hard to feel sorry for SV FAANG workers getting laid off but I can't[1].
I'm also struggling to see how their self-esteem will take years to recover from this.
Those cosseted 'engineers' earn probably 2 to 4 times a year more than me, and get meals etc. Their severance package is probably my annual wage. Plenty of time to find another gig with their FAANG resumes that suits their expectations.
Perhaps if they spent a few years in the less rarified development jobs a lot of us deal with they might better understand their position in the world.
[1] No I'm not.
Can't happen because health insurance has an out-of-pocket maximum for the year
> Or you're living paycheck to paycheck because school cost you $150k (plus interest).
College prices do need to be reined in, but if you are making 300k you should be able to handle a 150k debt.
> Those laid off got a bad deal, period, because it has less to do with actual "merit" and more to do with at-will is a bad deal.
Seems like a pretty good deal, honestly. Generous severance packages.
Nobody likes layoffs but pretending that this is some kind of humanitarian disaster is just grotesque
Were these layoffs mostly recruiting/HR types, various managers, marketers, etc, or programmers?
Did they chop 70% of their recruiting/HR types, but closer to 1% of their techies, or vice versa?
Analyzing these layoffs IMO might be best done through the lens of what kind of roles were cut. If they didn't truly hit the real talent (the best programmers) there's a much different analysis that could be made.
Just clarifying the MNPI thing.
I don’t think that only programmers are “real talent” though.
Google is a public company. If part of the team is costing them more than the value they create for shareholders, there will be immense pressure to down size. This is actually healthy in a way since talent frees up for other companies. The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up
True but COBRA coverage lets you pay to stay on your job-based health insurance (cheaper) for a limited time after your job ends (usually 18 months).
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
I live in a state with a pretty damn good Obamacare implementation, and I'm quite grateful.
Perhaps it's more reasonable if it's for a single young person with a high deductible. The last time I was on COBRA, the cost was unbelievable. For a family of 4, it was over $3k per month, and that was 5 years ago.
You can certainly get health insurance without being tied to employment. Without COBRA or any other workarounds. Has everone forgotten Obamacare? (Single payer would be nicer though.)
This over-hiring and over-firing is being instigated by the Fed. Tech (or otherwise) companies are reacting to that.
First the layoff were a fairly obvious hamfisted way to simply appease investors. Profit margins are in-line with historical norms, 2021 was an outlier and it is insane to expect profit growth not to slow from that - the company is still wildly profitable. It really just demonstrates that the vision of being a 'unconventional' company is gone, and the vision of the executive team is just to react to whatever perceived threat is in-front of them that week (activist investors, now 'generative AI') and, of course, maximize their stock compensation.
Google 'bloat'. This is a bit undeniable but it's also unavoidable for companies Google's size. There are like eight layers of management between people who do things and people who talk about doing things. That number is probably too high but I'm not sure people have figured out a great alternative other than 'hierarchy' for directing an army of people. Honestly the best thing management can do is 'rest-and-vest' and rewrite the same vision/roadmap document/deck ten times under different names least they try to demonstrate their value by constantly re-orging and shuffling around priorities (millionaire children moving the food around their plate to make it seem eaten).
Total comp and lavish 'perks'. Google's talent is, on average, better than most other companies and it hires in very expensive areas so it's going to be more expensive. It is very clear they are moving hiring to cheaper 'discount' areas so this will likely stall/decrease. The 'perks' are heavily overstated. This is a fun fake narrative. The micro-kitichens are like bulk processed gains and cereals or faux-healthy products that manage to both be not particularly appetizing, not actually healthy (a chickpea fried in vegetable oil is still bad for you), and not expensive - so they are mostly just for show and sit there untouched. The cafe food is served in troughs again with an emphasis on the cheaper vegetable or grains upfront or the infamous kale -with a single trough with any protein at the end that they still try to partially submerge in quinoa. There are long tables where employees eat quickly and alone. It's an overtly cynical exercise to make you work longer and just like 'unlimited vacation' the dealer is clearly winning here. Same goes with travel or 'fun' budgets, all cut and now the same as any other company.
There are many lessons for us to take away from the layoffs this year, and it helps no one to trivialize it into cold facts. It has a real impact on people.
By the way, these large companies have more than capable LDAP systems to lockdown access without nuking everything from orbit. The damage the companies fear when cutting access immediately is, in reality, probably the damage that is happening as employees create internal lists of who was laid off. The damage are companies burning good will during record profits.
This is a great opportunity to change the industry and how workers view their job.
Not in that context. They have a duty to their shareholders, not absolute maximum profits. Plenty of further unethical methods that could be used if that was the goal.
Iron law of organizations states that any org over time will put the perpetuation of the org first, not the orgs mission that it was founded with. Those with that vision leave for better places, leaving voids filled by those whom cannot genuinely replace it. Purpose is lost, things slow down, and every solution is a myriad of bandaids and placebos to keep it afloat. A cow to milk. This was obvious when all these projects were born to fail and hiring practices started filtering hiring for binary search trees.
Same story across the board. They've lived past their expiration date, and rely upon the law and vertical integration to prevent anyone else from competing.
But Google isn't owned by them, it's owned by Page and Brin.
So basically Google has become like any big company. If this were true, then it was the a failure of the leadership chain. At some level some leader should be able to call bullshit of this. After all, Pichai should not care about vanity metrics but how Google really grows, right? It's just sad that at certain point that a leader high above simply can't understand every aspect of a business and therefore won't be able to tell if his reports are doing real jobs or chasing vanity metrics.
"first time?"
When the people oustide it stop seeing it as a business, then Google's goose is cooked.
Try treating employees pretty well, encourage a lot of new grass root projects in a supported environment.
No one in Google will be doing anything grassroots now. The end of this experiment is a shame.
For a while it dragged other companies up with it e.g. for top talent you had to go half way towards Google perks.
Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservati...
How many of these people have been fired?
It is true that you can sue a company for securities fraud if they do essentially anything that you can claim made the share value go down, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
Well... that's a slightly complicated question. It's definitely not quite as simple as "companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all other concerns". But while directors and executives are given wide latitude to run the company according to their judgment, they don't have carte blanche to do "whatever they want" either.
More to the point, while a company as a whole can do more than simply "maximize profit to the exclusion of all else", the caveat seems to be that they can do so if the owners (eg the shareholders) agree.
From the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case:
While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
The question I see then, is how much influence a single shareholder can truly yield based on this principle. That is, of course, assuming they don't single-handedly hold a controlling share of the company to the point that they can simply replace the board with whoever they want and enforce any arbitrary edict. Given a publicly traded company, it seems clear that some shareholders are going to want the "maximize my stock value at any expense" while others are going to go for more of a "do the humanitarian thing and treat (employees|the environment|whatever) well" or such-like.
See:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what...
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brook...
...but the thing that makes such a "tort" lawsuit matter is damages, what damage did I do to you that you are now suing me. Like, if you're a pedestrian and I hit you with my car, your lawsuit against me depends on showing a monetary value for how I damaged you, for example, days of lost work. If you weren't injured, and went on about your day, week, month and life, you weren't damaged and there's no grounds for the lawsuit, even though my gross negligence could have damaged you 9 times out of 10. (This is an example to make a different point, we are going to ignore "emotional distress", etc.)
if you're a shareholder and I am the CEO and I have the company pursue goals that don't maximize the value of your shares, that cost resources and don't have a chance of maximizing shareholder value, when I could have, I have monetarily damaged you.
With respect to the Dodge decision, could other Ford shareholders have sued the Dodge brothers for forcing Ford to yield dividends once the Dodge brothers then used those dividends to undercut the value of Ford stock by creating a competitor? Or do minority shareholders not have a duty to other minority shareholders the way majority shareholders do?
In what conceivable world is "active users" a vanity metric??
That seems true for a lot of corporations. At senior levels it’s all very hunger games
To turn this around a bit, Maybe you are being greedy? Perhaps you really want easy money - on the backs of the poor and middle class - to subsidize our industry?
But also those who represent the rank and file's 401(k)'s/IRA's, lest we forget.
Subscriptions and paywalls proliferate because Google as middleman takes a cut and makes online ads too expensive.^1
Yet Google gets a "free subscription" and in this case publishes a copy in its cache.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
1. Argument of US government and state AGs in latest suit against Google for Sherman Act violations. See paras 9 and 267.
> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law.
> At its heart this is a problem about unrestrained capitalism.
I was making this argument yesterday on the post about blizzard firing the employee critical of the stack ranking policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473
These companies are having record profits, and doing layoffs anyway. I think they can get away with this because everyone's talking about recession and inflation. Thus they can increase pressure on current employees to work harder for the same or less money, and add further "proof" of their fears by doing layoffs and saying recession forced them. That's the wind around explanation I have but the article says it as simply as I think leadership is thinking about it: they probably aren't doing holistic class analysis and nefariously thinking about new and exciting ways to extract more labor for less money, they probably straight up are just trying to increase profit by reducing cost overhead.
But I agree with the article that this is in the end just then problem with unfettered capitalism. Incredibly, I had no idea the Ford story about the origins of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." Is that an oversimplification? Is that truly the first step down the stairs away from intelligently leveraged capitalism? I assumed the usa was the way it is because of a natural result of what happens when capital accumulates and is allowed to function as a analogue for political power: corporations will accumulate and then wield political power towards the goal of further accumulation. I had no idea the progress made on this front was already enshrined in law in Ford's time.
To me this seems inevitable. Corporations are like little AIs with a "never stop growing" directive. When society lets them get away with extracting more labor for less money by framing against recession, what means of protection do employees have, especially in the usa with comparatively minor unemployment benefits and layoff protections. It seems to me the only path forward, if we want then situation to improve for ourselves, is unionization. If we try to change the company from within by working with leadership, we're "activist employees" and a threat to shareholder profit, and get fired. If we wait, we get laid off when they can get away with it.
This is all predicated on the idea that the layoffs aren't necessary. The company won't die if the layoffs don't happen. It won't go bankrupt. It will simply be less profitable. And? So what? Does the value of the product change? Does the fact that google.com route basically all internet traffic change? In fact, if they leaned into reducing profit to share among employees, they'd be looking at being a co-op, which are provably more stable than traditional corporations and by some studies, more profitable... Just not for shareholders that don't actually do anything to contribute to that profitability.
Edit: reading more into it, the Ford thing doesn't necessarily make it federal law to seek shareholder profit above all other concerns. I don't believe that changes much about my comment: they're still doing this for the shareholders, not the employees.
I’d generally prefer someone from a technically sound venture funded startup.
In 2011 Google had 32,467 employees.
In 2021 Google had 156,500 employees.
It is simply not the same organization as it was when you worked there. The 2011 employees account for at most 10% of the workforce today once attrition is taken into account.
Why both of them? This has never made any sense to me.
I don't know how it works in United States. In Europe, Companies declaring the money deducted from the salary they have paid to the tax office, the employee is correcting if it is right or wrong. If they need to pay, they pay more, if not, they receive more.
Anyway my feeling is still the same, being employed by google means you're unemployed. This is a feeling. Being employed by apfel would make me feel different.
Now look, you have a data point.
In my whole life, there's no single ad that makes sense for me to see and click, because it's annoying.
I love smart search results, not smart ad results.
And also the successful business as i know run no Ad campaign.
You're just making assumptions.
"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hierarchy of "intelligence" should flatten, imo towards people being more knowledgeable. Not like you need to take away people's Harvard PHDs to make sure every American has what they need to at least graduate highschool, or, you know, be able to read.
I don't necessarily agree that greater education leads to greater invulnerability to ads and the modern poisons in our society: most of my friends are smarter than me by many measures, and yet as far as I know I'm the only one not at least mildly addicted to Instagram and co., despite all of us often having conversations where we all seem to agree that that shits bad for you. Nah it takes something other than knowledge / educational privilege, i don't know what specifically, but something else.
Nevermind all these difficult projects you worked on. Nevermind that your ex colleagues gave you glowing references. Nevermind all your open source projects. Nevermind that the project you led and worked on has never been hacked in 3 years in spite of having hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. It's all worthless because I don't see any fancy branding in your resume.
According to who exactly? Some stupid person somewhere? Why should anyone here care?
This is the claim: intelligence is just some combination of education, class, and race
Let's state the obvious here: genetics. Why did you conveniently leave that one out? Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something? Can you prove that they don't exist?
Also, before you assume I'm being more specific: I'm not saying equal access to education is a wasted endeavor. Sure, make the public school system good in rich and poor areas
But we're talking about intelligence in general here, so leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying
Nevertheless I do deny it. Genes don't cause anything, they just sit there in nucleuses. If you don't include the entire causal chain you're not serious either.
I doubt this can be demonstrated to have a much stronger effect than educational opportunities, which is a function of class, which in some societies, such as American society, is a function partially of race, for historical and contemporary reasons, as well as a function of economic condition (the two are inexorably linked for reason of generational wealth).
> leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying
I'm very much of the opinion, and as far as I understand it research backs me up here, that while of course various aspects of intelligence can be affected by genetics, the overall outcomes are vastly more affected by things we have lots of control over, such as the egalitarianian-ness of our society, than things we don't really have control over, such as each individual's genetics (and do we want to go down the path of structuring our hierarchies around this? shall I go get the swath of sci fi warning against this?)
You seem to disagree, not sure why, though I'm curious!
> Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something?
Nope, just seems mostly irrelevant in this conversation. What's the point of talking about genetics here? How about we do achieve educational access egalitarian, truly, and we find out some people aren't doing quite as good of art, or writing quite as good as poetry, or dreaming up quite as interesting apps, or doing engineering quite as fast, because they lost a genes lottery. Do you think it's a good idea to start structuring hierarchies around this? Seems cruel and pointless to me.
Yep this is what I was looking for. Given this, the original claim isn't right
> Can you demonstrate that genetic factors play a stronger part in how our society defines "intelligence" than the things I mentioned?
Claim above was that intelligence "is really just" access to education, but now the goalpost has shifted
Now it's that access to education is "the most significant part". Is it? How could we know either way? By churning out a bunch of studies? The claim still isn't falsifiable
It really is just that.
Similarly, strength is really just about how much you work out. "But genetic factors!!" Eh, it's mostly just about how much you work out. It's not really worth talking about genetic factors when the majority of the population can't do a single pullup. Are we moving goalposts, or rather just doing actionable conversations?
> Now it's that access to education is "the most significant part". Is it? How could we know either way? By churning out a bunch of studies? The claim still isn't falsifiable
I'm not going to do your work for you. For some reason you really wanna talk about genes. I'll be honest, I'm going to take you at good faith here, but I'm mighty suspicious of where you're hoping this conversation will go.
Why are you more interested in talking about genetic factors of intelligence than the far more significant factors in economic conditions? What's the deal here? Where you going with this?
Some people can get shredded really easily because of genetics. Some people are just naturally more fit than others
> but I'm mighty suspicious of where you're hoping this conversation will go.
My point is your initial point is an oversimplification. If you throw the same resources at the same group of people from a similar socioeconomic status, there will still be a difference of ability. Some people will move faster than others
So the crux of my argument is this: just because there's an inequality of outcome does not imply that the cause is purely socioeconomic. Given constitutional differences, striving for equality of outcome is a sub-optimal use of resources
Should there be standards or some kind of baseline? Yes. But striving for absolute equality of outcome at the expense of everything else is a net negative for society
It is good and right to provide good and equal educational opportunities to people regardless of economic status. Countries like the USA aren't, and should. What are you arguing for here, some kind of genetic evaluation first to make sure we aren't "wasting resources" on a kid that will do math a little more slow? Why not just redirect abundance to the point it doesn't matter?
Marketers probably have a similar view, and lo and behold you're both looking through the same lens, namely, Google and The Current Forces Shaping The Ad Market.
Advertising is a useful and symbiotic relationship, but may best be disintermediated... so to speak.
Don't believe me ? Just try them until you find out bad things by yourself.
But really: why don't more people use ublock origin? It makes the web actually usable
If I go on a website and see a bunch of sponsored bullshit, it makes me much less likely to ever go there again