CEO received compensation for good cost-cutting measures? What am I missing here?
Employees are irrelevant in this scenario, replaceable units whose purpose is to produce.
Are either of the two relevant parties mad at the CEO?
If you want employees to matter beyond the cold calculus of dollars per beating heart per quarter, Alphabet ain't inside that kinda system.
Unions could help (because they explicitly acknowledge the $ per soul metric and seek to exploit it for the souls' benefit) but the U-word is a bad word to libertarian techbros.
Like what? Over-hiring? Many other companies avoided? Like which big ones? Amazon, Microsoft etc.?
> CEO panicked
Sounds like hyperbole
> fired thousands unprofessionally
How do you fire thousands professionally? I thought ensuring market and shareholder satisfaction was the top priority for CEOs and they get paid to make those unpopular decisions as/when deemed fit?
While true, it's fairly obvious that the Google firings have been badly mishandled. There are stories of SREs getting fired/locked out while still on duty. And in general, sending firing emails at 4am in the morning is very bad class in a company that claims where "don't be evil" and "trust your employees" are pillars of the company is, ... well, not good for PR.
They ended up rolling back the France layoffs when they realized they goofed, but Germany and the UK are still pending.
If that's not an example of rushed, I don't know what is.
Or how about sending that "Cloud had the best year ever" hours before the Canadian layoffs were announced.
i don't think sundar is a good ceo, but this absolutely false. most big tech companies also had layovers.
Can't we do a bit better than tabloid outrage fueled by just raw emotions? He did correct the course which was right thing to do. Hiring previously was also the right decision at that time, properly nobody knew covid scare would taper off so quickly and people would revert some of the newly found (and often wrong and unhealthy) habits. No panic anywhere, this is business as usual in every sense of that phrase. He received normal compensation, just its done every 3 years - before getting headfirst into outrage, maybe first read some facts?
I don't even get the outrage in this specific case - some, often under-performing (within given group) folks earning 300k + massive bonuses in stocks got fired, and either they 1) found immediately another well paid job; or 2) got already so rich they took 6/12 months sabbatical, plenty of HN posts about exactly this.
I mean good for them, heck good for everybody. Why the envy, desire for CEO to burn in hell or at least end up bankrupt homeless on streets? Nothing good ever comes from such an approach, just stupid short term populist moves for the simpler minds who don't think much ahead or in complex fashion.
Surely it was stupid to not realize that the last few years were temporarily fueled by Covid work from home trends and huge fiscal and monetary stimulus. If anything, the CEO making the same mistakes as all the other tech CEO’s indicates poor performance or at least average performance - not protection from criticism.
CEO not being penalised for over-hiring and bad decision making in the first place?
Turkeys are never going to vote for Xmas/Thanksgiving. CEOs and the board are never going to be punished or fire themselves for being awful.