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Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

The fact he wants to go up to 20% layoffs as it's a "round number" is telling.

I do see that as odd given what he proports to be but what do you get out of it? I was thinking that this guy goes with his gut feeling and happens to get lucky from time to time.

Indeed.

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 likely doesn't have a deep understanding of the numbers, just thinks it's overstaffed and 20% reduction sounds good cause it's nice and round.

He believes that a major company is overstaffed and needs to cut 1/5th of its workforce in the current economic climate.

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?

It's rich so of course he's qualified. /s

Why do we listen to these people with no experience in the tech field and no knowledge of how google works internally?

When people pick numbers because they "look nice" it's apparent they didn't down hundreds of hours of analysis on the companies divisions and which bets seem viable, where things are redundant, and come up with any real signal (like Buffet would). If they had, they almost certainly wouldn't conclude "it's exactly 20.000% should be gotten rid of, pick whichever 20% you want"

Personally, I am always more suspicious of 20.1% in this context when someone is obviously trying to bullshit with fake precision in a context that is inherently not that exact.

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.

He doesn't actually say that in the letter, that is just the journalist's phrasing: https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...

It's all just figures on a spreadsheet to him.

Figures on a spreadsheet... set to round all numbers to 10% boundaries? I don't trust that any real analysis has gone into this.

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.

Right, I mean a very simple spreadsheet that doesn't actually capture how the company works. Like, a toy spreadsheet. "20% looks nice—let's go with that".

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