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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> Alphabet’s Board of Directors today authorized the company to repurchase up to an additional $70.0 billion of its Class A and Class C shares in a manner deemed in the best interest of the company and its stockholders

The most important item on the report

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Also...10,000 fired... Employees previous equivalent quarter:190,711 and now:180,895

Edit: 190,711 employees on March 31, 2023

Closest comparison is the last quarter were they ended with 182,502

Correct. Edited my comment to clarify number of 190,711 was as of March 2023.

People layed off (about 10,000) in Jan 2023 were still on the books in March 2023. Termination didn't take effect until April.

Layoff is not the same as "fired". Please use the correct terminology in consideration for those who lost their jobs.

Also, the termination dates for those who were laid off in January 2023 would be around April 2023 (the layoff news came earlier due to WARN act), so the employee count as of 2023-03-31 might not include those people. This means a difference of ~10000 can be accounted for by the 2023-01-20 round of layoffs.

this isn’t a fucking HR email thread, fired means layoff in these lands

There's a meaningful difference between the two. You're fired for doing something wrong. You're laid off if the company wants to cut costs.

That is what corporate HR and Executives want you to think.

Layoffs can make it look like the company is having problems so instead of doing that they will create vague KPIs so that employees will not meet them so they can be fired.

That doesn't scale.

AFAICT, Google didn't go to the effort of creating vague objectives for people to fail at. Instead they've blanket cut teams regardless of their success or performance.

What you're observing is that companies lie, not that there aren't differences between the two.

whatever the drones command. end result is the same.

Have some respect. People lost their jobs. They weren't fired because they did something wrong, they were laid off because the company did something wrong.

im also being “laid off” buddy :)

2023-03-31 would have been after the last day for the January layoff group, at least for US workers not in the NY office.

In what world is “laid off” better than “fired”? Either way the company screwed you, doesn’t matter how they justify it

If you've been fired, it typically signals you had very bad performance or committed some fireable offense. If you were laid off, you were ostensibly just on the wrong team at the wrong time.

It's not about how you view your last employer, it's about how your next potential employer will view you.

And HR will do their best to find an excuse to turn "layoff" into "fire" so the company won't need to pay unemployment

This happens naturally with turnover if they freeze hiring.

Exact same level of authorization in April '22 and '23

Why don't American companies pay dividends? I assume it's not tax efficient to pay dividends in the US?

If you as a shareholder receive a dividend of X% of the share price, you owe tax on it. But if the company buys back stock and as a result the share price increases by X%, you do not owe tax on that unrealized gain until you choose to sell your stock. That’s good for investors.

Also, dividends are taxed as ordinary income whereas stock buybacks lead to capital gains, which almost always have a lower tax rate.

Qualified dividends are taxed at the same rate as long term capital gains, although the rules for what qualifies can be tricky (special one-time dividends in particular).

Only if youve held the stock for less than 6 months. Most dividends are taxed at capital gains rate.

but there is no guarantee of a stock buyback increasing the stock price by x%, correct?

They are doing a dividend too.

MSFT pays dividends.

What an odd statement. Care to explain why you think a routine buyback announcement is important?

Stock buybacks are done when a company think either 1. they are massively under valued, or 2. when there isn't a better investment for their cash.

Google does it regularly as they pay out so much RSUs they want to keep the same number of shares on the market. You can look and see them historically doing this

A side effect is avoiding dilution from RSU grants.

Poster is correct: that is not the reason for them.

We can confirm this. Compare RSUs granted/year -- $150M -- to buybacks this quarter -- $70B. ~700x as much.

Where are you getting that $150M spent on RSU grants per year from? Unless I'm missing it, I don't see that in the report and it seems way too low.

Let's say the average engineer gets $100k/year in RSUs. (I would guess the actual number is higher.) That would only cover 1500 engineers.

You're right, it's too low, see link at bottom: my guess is the $2B number, inclusive of all granted but not vested, is the correct #.

In general people way overestimate the # of SWEs at Google relative to the employee #, even within Google.

I don't wanna get too cute in public but some fermi estimates including, say, number of employees per engineer at a 100 person startup, and a jaundiced yet correct view of how much is outsourced at a company with a lot of grunt level SWE work common to every company, bridges the multiplier from there.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1364742/000156459021....

It's in the earnings. It was $5.2B this quarter against $15.7B repurchased.

[deleted]

According to https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/0... their stock-based compensation expense was $15.539b in 2023 (and actual repurchases were $2.324b).

Brief notes after spending 10 minutes figuring out how to get this, not nitpicking or saying you got anything wrong. Source was page with "54" at the bottom

- Unvested grants over 4 years vs. buybacks this year - #s are for 2020, not 2023 - # excludes tax witholdings (i.e. shares they'll never grant). - For 2020, grants of 15.539 - 10.273 witholding = ~5B, matching sibling comment's correction - $2.324B is one of 4 columns, real number is $50.274 B - so for 2020, real #s are 5.26B in unvested grants over 4 years versus 50.274B in buybacks that year. - for 2023, 22.578 - 10.164 = 12.4B in unvested grants over 4 years, versus 62B in buybacks that year

At today's closing price this is 3.6% of outstanding shares

Do they mention what price?

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