Man worth $7.48B says Google should cut 28,000 more people after layoffs
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
He could be doing this only for selfish personal interest in his stake in Google, but that ALSO has no bearing on whether or not he is right about this. He could be both right about this AND have a selfish personal interest. Or he could be wrong about it, but either way this is a bad take that lacks critical thinking.
Apple has never in the last decade had any trouble recruiting top tier personnel, but now that advantage has significantly increased.
To me, that's a great reason to be long AAPL and short whatever companies give into the nonsense this guy is peddling.
So far.
> first disclosed from an email to AppleInsider [...] says that some Apple retail channel employees who work in places like Best Buy stores have received a thirty-day notice about their rights as it pertains to a layoff
> It's not clear what percentage of the workforce is affected. It's a notable enough volume of firings to be able to glean the information from multiple sources, however.
> A second part of the initial email suggests that Retail Customer Care employees will be notified later on Friday, and over the weekend. We could not verify independently that this will happen, however.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/20/layoffs-in-some-o...
Seems like a very small layoff so far, hitting Apple retail employees working for Apple but in resellers (so not Apple Store employees, but Apple employees none-the-less), but maybe they are just starting small. Again, time will tell.
Title should read: "Upper class hedge fund manager thinks engineers make too much money, wants it for himself".
“wants it for his investors”
His job is to advocate on behalf of his investors to get the best return he can. For this service he is well paid. We need to stop demonizing people for doing their job, successfully. Just because he is rich doesn’t mean his argument is wrong.
Even when their job is to actively hurt you, your family, and those around you?
W.T.F.
I mean I hate to bring up the analogy, but at the Nuremberg Trials we hung people for 'just doing their job' because just following orders can lead to millions dead and other completely and totally terrible outcomes for humanity.
He doesn't go into any detail outside of "fire people and pay the ones you don't fire less"
He's just a parasite on society who wants to suck more blood.
Surely if it drops back below 92 he'll change his mind ...
Seems reasonable to me. We learned how inefficient conglomerates are back in the 60s/70s.
> I don’t like this guy’s job.
You:
> But it’s his job.
Right, they already said that part. They still don’t like his job.
Other people:
> This guy is wrong because of his job and the fact that he's apparently good enough at it that he's become rich.
Me:
> Neither of these facts has anything to do with his argument. He's neither right nor wrong based on his job or his success at his job.
And frankly, if the son of a mechanic can get to the point of earning $2m/day, that's an indication that he has some amount of clue.
He has a clue how he should be paid more, yes.
Google is worth as much as it is because it can afford the best engineers. If it can't, they'll go elsewhere and it won't be worth that much. Obviously they should all be replaced with offshore contractors.
No, the goal was to keep it tilted in capital's favor. Which group wields greater decision-making power? Which type of income is more lightly taxed? Capital vehicles (corporations) have almost all of the rights and practically none of the responsibilities - or vulnerabilities such as mortality or geographic limitation - of human laborers. Yes, the playing field needs to be leveled ... the other way.
It seems lots of people commenting here want Google to be a sinecure program for superfluous engineers. They're ardently pro-capitalist when it comes to startups and VC money and fleecing the proles with predatory advertising. But curiously left-wing and we're-all-in-this-together when their privileges are threatened.
I think painting this as a "capitalists vs the left" thing is reductive and unhelpful. Personally, speaking as someone who Americans would probably consider extreme-left, I very much agree with your second paragraph, but I don't see this as "capitalism vs the left", I see it as the elite rich abusing their position to the detriment of everyone else. A story as old as time.
Google leadership decide how to allocate people and resources.
Some areas are bloated, but others definitely aren't. Goog has 10x staff per capita (not linear scale) as a comparable MAAN_ I work at.
They definitely don't have enough in GCP and have a track record of under-resourcing support and engineering. It should be high-status department that doesn't pinch pennies, but they do. AWS OTOH is high-status and rarely touched by layoffs because it's both critical to running the company and highly-profitable.
Not much analysis as to whether or not he's right...
https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=87
It's a useful skill, but not worth 7.48B IMHO. They say hate the game, not the player. But then, the players have chosen this game, and often don't want it to change.
He may be qualified to make that call or be as unqualified as any random person off the street.
Apart from this, what is telling about it?
Why do we listen to these people with no experience in the tech field and no knowledge of how google works internally?
20% vs 21% is basically meaningless in this context. We can't run it a 1000X or see the counterfactual to know what figure would be more correct.
I just take 20% to mean "a good chunk" and much preferable to a style of fake precision you seem to think is better here.
To do any real analysis you'd need an org chart, head counts, and a P/L with much more granularity than Google publishes. He has none of these. The people with all of those chose 6%, and even that seems to have been largely due to pressure.
This guy is only pressuring, there's no data behind this, no reasoning, nothing smart or worth listening to.
Thank god for the modern invention of the weekend thanks to unions, labor movements and all the campaigns, I'm sure most people cannot imagine life without it. But it is a relatively recent invention.
Very few people put their labor where their mouth is.
Google, along with rest of FAANG are massively over staffed, which they could get away with in a zero-interest rate economy when money was super-cheap, but not anymore.
They could all cut 70%+ without significantly hurting their revenue growth, which makes all the economic sense in the world in the current environment.
Short-term, maybe. But as things start to fall apart, their revenue would surely stop to grow at the same rate.
"Its just money; its made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It's not wrong. And it's certainly no different ..."
Because if we aren't back to 0% in ~2 years the government will be doing its job without money, proverbially killing people just to get something to eat.
So I guess, given your comment as that being the cause of huge wages, that's great news for most people here!
And not a single one of these people will ever look in the mirror and ask "are we the baddies?"
No self-awareness whatsoever.
This is of course a common bias people have, not understanding what others do, but it's also exacerbated by a) being a privileged white man, b) his paycheck depending on it, and c) that analysing a company's numbers gives some investors a false sense of understanding the company – because they "understand" their investment they think that translates to understanding internals.
What does his skin color have to do with this? You could have just simply said "privileged multi-billionaire".
White men have a lot of privilege, that’s fairly well accepted, and something I know from first hand experience. That privilege is what leads to things like mansplaining and overconfidence in one’s own opinions, or even deeming one’s own opinions to be facts. It leads there because the privileged are less likely to receive pushback on their ideas, more likely to receive praise, or even funding for their ideas, and society treats them as overall more correct.
Huge generalisations of course, but so is most of this thread.
What did you guys think would happen?
That the company who hired you to build a surveillance monopoly on the internet was going to look out for your best interests?
On a long enough timeline, many SWEs will engineer their job out of existence. Those left over will have to compete with the mythical 10x engineer and the latest AGI shitbot that can debug code all day long without ever having to take a bathroom break, or maternity leave.
To those affected: don’t capitulate to, or engage with the pity machine. It’s all cope. Those jobs, that headcount, is never coming back.
Take your skills and go build something you actually have true equity in.
Godspeed code monkey.