Google gave investors a $70B buyback,and laid off 12,000 people | Hacker News Reader

Google gave investors a $70B buyback,and laid off 12,000 people

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91 pointsZuckMusk185 comments

Google isn’t a work program. It is set up to make money and return money to investors either via capital gains (buybacks) or income (dividends). The fact that they laid people off means they felt they could accomplish this mission better without those people.

These facts are irrefutable and confusing them for your own desire for how the world should work is a waste of time. If you don’t like this setup, then don’t work for Google or other companies prone to mass layoffs. Start your own business. Work for government. There are plenty of ways to avoid layoff risk. But you won’t get paid Google salaries.

Or better yet, work for companies like Google and do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted. Cold hard self interest works both ways.

If Google’s trajectory is any indication, that’s what their workers are doing anyway.

> do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted

The minimum is actually a lot, because at companies like that individual performance is monitored closely and other people are going to be working very hard.

From what I understand though, it’s often possible to just “look” busy without actually being productive. Seems like cranking out design docs and scheduling meetings to make yourself and your work appear important can push one up the ladder a lot faster than making improvements to the codebase will. Optics matter most in organizations the size of Google.

My experience at a FAANG was that it's like any other job. You are on a team and you have a supervisor. You are expected to be productive. The stories of people finding themselves floating freely at a huge company without being expected to deliver business value are mostly apocryphal.

I don't think we are talking about people floating freely without management. Everyone is on a team and has a supervisor, but different people have wildly different skill at politics and "appearing productive." We all know at least one person who was hired at a lower or similar level, yet who basically does nothing productive. They make up for it with bullshit: lots of managing upward, credit taking, writing good sounding but ultimately contentless docs, they're well dressed and groomed, charming, high charisma, ivy league mannerisms. They always end up with a sharp upward career trajectory, parachuting into Director, VP, SVP and so on roles.

I think there's a subtle point here about the cost of layoffs being hard to quantify but hugely underestimated by large companies.

A culture where employees feel that their dedication to the company mission is reciprocated must surely provide value?

I think what you are talking about was what large companies that were startups built over the last 5-10 years and felt betrayed by the anti company sentiment even though they had all a ton of fantastical things for employees and mostly unchecked employee growth. Now its swinging the other way.

Also don't confuse my statement reading the market with what i believe.

I think it's a bigger slight against yourself to "not try" in your life and your work. You won't learn as much and feel less accomplished. Just find somewhere where you'll feel good about it.

You should definitely try hard in your life and your work. Google is not your life, however, and you don't own your work for them. They only deserve the dedication they demonstrate towards others, which is none.

Still, kinda sad to be spend such a big portion of your time on earth doing something nobody gives a shit about, not even you.

Me, I’d sooner take a job where I’m contributing positively to society, even if I could make a bit more in adtech.

Don't think about the time you waste. Think about the time you actually can use.

Doing the bare minimum at work isn’t “not trying” in your life. It’s not even “not trying” at work. It’s just trying the agreed upon amount.

Thought experiment: tell the interviewer you “plan to do the bare minimum at work”.

If that harms your chance to be hired, that’s evidence that the status quo agreement isn’t that.

“Oh yes, we value work-life balance. We’re like a family here!”

Both parties lie in an interview. It’s a dance.

I often hear and also tell people “take vacation when you want, we will work around it. Don’t work on vacation.” That’s the bare minimum, no gold star for that. But also “working the weekends should be the exception, not the norm.”

This seems normal at most FANGs/big companies. People also have a lot of choice around when to come in, leave, and have a hybrid in office policy. Where are the lies?

As if companies were straight with you lol, they're experiencing their own poison

I tell the interviewer that "I will go above and beyond to fulfill my duties". For me "Above and beyond" means that I will try to show up for work and will at least pretend to be interested.

A job interview isn’t an exchange of true statements. It’s a game with each player having different goals. Whichever side you’re on, your goal is to win.

And as an interviewer, winning means not hiring the sort of person who's going to do the absolute bare minimum, because then you'd have to suffer through working with them.

Yes and your goal also isn’t to hire a person who’s so ambitious and such a go-getter that they’ll hate your dysfunctional organization and leave super fast.

Hiring someone who works competently and efficiently for eight hours a day could be better for the company than hiring someone who works twice as long but is not as competent or focused.

Of course!

My experience is people who have the attitude of doing the bare minimum do not have “works competently and efficiently for eight hours a day” as a target in mind when they say that.

For a lot of engineering work, competent and diligent for 30 hours per week could easily out-perform 40.

Every surplus ounce of effort you put towards work is an ounce of effort you deprive your spouse, your children, and yourself.

Why would you do that to your family, all to help some shareholders who don’t give a rat’s ass about you?

Time, maybe, but not effort.

You're no good to your family as a zombie drained of all energy by work.

If anything, soul-crushing boredom is likely to achieve that more thoroughly than being engaged with your work.

YMMV but no, that's not how energy works for me. If I'm bored, I can take a nap. Literally just sit there in front of the computer with my eyes closed and fall asleep.

Without work, you might find yourself deprived of a spouse and children, so you probably better try and run the rat race at least a bit faster than the slowest rat. Take it from a slow rat indeed.

It might be surprising to many but there is a life outside of the office...

Yes but most people work at least eight hours a day each weekday (Monday through Friday) and it’s incredibly painful for those that don’t want to waste 40 hours a week of their life to have to deal with people that do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work.

If people don’t like the job they’re doing; they should quit and find something else to do.

> to have to deal with people that do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work.

Not my problem

We designed a system that's actively hostile to life and well being to profit the top 0.1%

No contract states you have to give your best, and there is no way for anyone to enforce that anyways

I never said it was your problem. That was the whole point of my post. It’s a problem for people that don’t want to waste eight hours a day, that want those hours to be meaningful and work with other motivated people.

>We designed a system that's actively hostile to life and well being to profit the top 0.1%

And your proposed solution is to personally be actively hostile to the well being of those around you for your own benefit?

this is exactly what companies going through mass layoffs while distributing record dividends are doing.

And as they say, two wrongs always makes right.

Behaving like a sheep won't change their behavior tho. What's the point of leaving only them the option to abuse?

If you want to be abused feel free to go ahead no one will stop you. I hope you're confident with your choices because death bed regrets don't sound like fun, especially when it comes to grinding for big brother

One party is a multinational megacorp with billions of dollars and the other party is a worker. Whether the worker does a "wrong" or a "right" or is even exceptional at doing "right"s, their behavior will never invite more favor from the megacorp, as evidenced by the many layoffs at many megacorps over the last 4 years.

What is funny is that in my insides I'm 100% sure the type of people that spout that crap about "not my problem" and fuck their co-workers are the ones that would act the most dictator-like and dystopian-capitalists if given the chance. They just reveal their true way of thinking- the fact they chose "the worker" cause they have no power doesn't mean they wouldn't flip if they had power.

Imagine acting in the most anti-communal way while thinking you have a moral high ground and fuck the little guys around you because you think you're sticking it to the man.

And that is 8 hours a day. 12 hours long shifts are extremely common around here, with only 1 weekend free in a month. Sure, office jobs are mostly 8 hours long, but the rest are 12 hours, and there is a LOT of those kind of jobs. Overtime hours are typically not paid either.

Why would you not want to do meaningful things instead of work for a huge corporation, even if you think you're "sticking it" to them? Why not give it your full effort and work with good people you respect?

+1 I don't understand why people work hard for such corporations. Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm. I think if the execs can pay themselves $200M for taking the responsibility and being so horribly wrong about the direction they took the company in, then why shouldn't the rank and file employees do the bare fucking minimum that they are paid to do. Treat intellectual work the same as bagging groceries, do it from 9 to 5, only when sitting at the desk, and only for bugs that have been assigned. If the bug don't say "add an extra debug log" then don't add an extra debug log.

> Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm

Of course, it is the norm.

Any real idea, any real effort does what is absolutely number 1 on the forbidden, sacrilege, NEVER DO THIS list: it would upset the social balance in management. More than that, it would upset the balance in unpredictable ways.

> absolute bare minimum

Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy.

(Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)

> (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)

Too bad all of those totally don't matter. What you're saying here comes down to doing what management wants. And management, above all else, DOES NOT WANT THE STATUS-QUO UPSET. The chairs in management are to be divided according to endless politicking and 5000 meetings for every line in the org chart, the only thing that matters. If any effort is actually successful beyond what was agreed beforehand ... that would undo the "work" of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of management meetings.

In other work drafting design documents, doing interviews, improving existing codebases, mentoring junior ICs (to do the same) ... it's not a design document to create a new successful product on the internet. It's a design document discussing whether component #1823871 of Google maps should be monitored by a Python, C++, Java or Go program, and whether it this monitoring server gets configured using json, yml, chubby, files with strings, protobuf, python (configuration in code, python to configure flags, python to configure startup files, python to change build files, or python read by the program upon startup), Go, Java or Go. Don't forget: 8 page minimum, and you can't have less than 40 reviewers.

This document is then followed by a manager from outside your org deciding that the whole monitoring is being shipped to India, and 3 months later you check on borg ... and surprise! There ISN'T anything monitoring it, as far as you can tell. Your manager assures you your work was not for nothing, but your design document curiously has never been accessed, and everybody you ask (btw: you're quickly told you're not supposed to do that) says management forbade them from looking at your design document.

Later you learn that there isn't a single team in India that actually has access to your document (if you're working long enough at Google and actually know how to check that, which used to be 99%, but now ... perhaps 20%).

A year later, the product takes down all of Google maps, your team's lack of monitoring gets blamed for the outage ... but 10 minutes after you go to your manager with this the postmortem, suddenly, gives you "access denied". Then, you get scheduled for a support checkin where the person doing the support checkin has no idea what it's about.

Of course, what it's really about is that your forced one of the managers in your org to explain to higher ups how your concern is being addressed while still meeting budget constraints ... Which could have upset the status quo (recognizable by "Moderate impact" on your GRAD review) or actually upset the status quo ("Not Enough Impact" on your review). Congratulations!

Ah I felt like I just stepped back in time. Dang that was vivid!

Articulate, accurate, and simultaneously funny and sad.

These bureaucratic processes have been around for a while, but within the past ~2 years it all became shamelessly overt, and is now explicitly about "business as usual".

> (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)

A good engineer can do all that's needed of them in 20-30 hours a week. It's not quite coasting, but it's not difficult either.

But the layoff letter wasn't empathetic enough!*

*got 12 weeks severance at $7k/week

This business thinking is not a law of nature, it's a choice. Putting investors as the most important cohort of all the people involved in a business (workers, society, and investors) is a relatively new invention from the 80s after Jack Welch's tenure at GE.

So talking about it is important, we don't need to have business causing damages just to please investors. Even more when said investors in a public company have not contributed to the bottom line of a business, they bought some papers expecting that those papers would yield them some value, they haven't participated in the business to actually create the value they expect. They haven't directly funded the business for product research and/or expansion.

This way of thinking has been disseminated as being "The Truth" of business while... It actually isn't, returning money to investors used to come only after taking care of your workers and after providing a benefit to society, training workers used to be a thing so your company could keep its edge in the long-term.

The way you believe business should be is completely taken over by the financialisation of everything, businesses should be returning value to investors because they provide value to society, because they employ and train good people, not to just suck out the most value possible in the short term.

Discussing this is necessary, Google isn't a jobs program but it also doesn't need to be a purely return-to-investors machine, a business is much more than that, reducing it to that point is what gave the USA what Boeing has become, I don't think you would like more of that.

> This way of thinking has been disseminated as being "The Truth" of business while... It actually isn't, returning money to investors used to come only after taking care of your workers and after providing a benefit to society, training workers used to be a thing so your company could keep its edge in the long-term.

Business always has and always will be investor focused. Because they own it. Because the whole thing is literally made up out of their money.

Likewise, the tradeoff between short-term cashflow and long-term viability always has and always will be a choice investors have to make.

The optimal choice depends on the business and where it is in the business cycle. A wise investor ends up with Berkshire Hathaway; a foolish one ends up with Boeing and loses his shirt.

> Because the whole thing is literally made up out of their money.

No. Waaaaaast majority of it is made of employee work and customer's money. Owners merely started it in the right time and place to match the demand.

No. Employee value and customer money can only contribute to a system once investor money and entrepreneurship construct that system.

“Merely started in the right time and place to meet demand” is something of an understatement. Try it sometime before you gloat about how easy it must be versus the employment end of the business.

It's all interdependent, investors without workers and customers would never make money, workers without someone with capital injection to start the business would not have places to be employed at.

Most of the value was generated by labour though, not by investments, do you agree? There's no value generated by a pile of cash somewhere, you need someone to do something so it can increase in value somehow.

Of course it’s interdependent.

> Most of the value was generated by labour though, not by investments, do you agree?

Not sure how this seems logical to you. Both components are required, so you can’t really compare numerically.

Given how many people start and fund successful businesses from the ground up, versus how many people have successful careers, it seems clear to me that the start is by far the hardest part.

This lines up with my experiences as an employee, investor, and entrepreneur.

Both components are required but as much as you want to start a business if you don't have labour to actualise the idea/business, ramp it up, etc. you simply don't have a business. There's no value without labour, that's a given not much up for discussion.

The start can be the hardest part but it's definitely not where most of the value comes from, that's what I'm saying.

> Owners merely started it in the right time and place

LOL. If it is "merely" a matter of starting in the right time and place, why don't you go ahead and start a few companies who will treat their employees in the ideal way you prefer.

> Because the whole thing is literally made up out of their money.

Yes because labor comes out of thin air.

What industries are less prone to layoffs? I thought cybersecurity was one of them, then my buddy got snagged during a recent layoff cycle.

>These facts are irrefutable and confusing them for your own desire for how the world should work is a waste of time.

Are you seriously saying that identifying the gap between how things work and how things should work is useless? The only domain in which that is true is the laws of physics. In other domains, the way things work can be changed.

>Are you seriously saying that identifying the gap between how things work and how things should work is useless

I'm not sure how you're getting that impression. It's pretty obvious the linked tweet is upset at google's behavior specifically, rather than the relationship between employees and companies in our society. That's what the parent commenter is objecting to.

Yes, and in doing so suggesting that the relationship between companies and society is immutable and that companies acting this way is inevitable. Neither is the case, since companies are a legal construct created by societies that can be regulated as those societies choose. And, indeed, other societies have chosen to regulate companies differently and don't have companies doing this sort of thing nearly as much.

It’s also arguably the most beneficially productive imperative in those domains that are shaped by iterative change towards an idealized conception.

Google actually works for government. It came about from DoD funding FYI and continues to make a fuck ton of money from government contracts.

Google makes a very small percentage of their revenue from government contracts.

The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970. Questioning whether or not it should be the basis of how we organize an economy is perfectly valid. Simply saying "this is the responsibility of Google" is missing the point. Cases like this should make us ask if this should be the way we assign responsibility to businesses or if we should assign them different responsibilities.

>The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970.

What were the robber barons of the 19th century doing then? Or do you think that companies like standard oil were not "only set up to make money"?

The robber barons are specifically examples of people considered not to be fulfilling their social responsibilities. The idea that business are only responsible to make money is the new concept, not that people were acting only to make money previously. It was seen as a bad thing, now its a deflection for bad behavior.

To anyone curious I'd also really recommend reading the original piece

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

The argument made here includes not just that the company should not spend it's resources on things other than profit for the sake of shareholders, but also worries about employees and customers. At least in this article Friedman was advocating for something much more positive than the situation we found ourselves in today

It is also a fact that Google had an average tenure of 1.1 years in 2022. Perhaps this extraordinarily low figure might be connected to your facts.

Company loyalty was already mostly dead in big tech before the layoffs. It was also the fault of the companies, but more to do with the ability to get raises via job hopping versus internal promotion, not job security.

There's probably no single cause for such a short average tenure length. However, Marcus Lemonis always blames high turnover on bad management. Every time a boss tries to argue with that premise he immediately shuts them down.

Let's try to enumerate possible causes for short tenures:

* Actual job was not the thing promised in the interview

* Hired person and work environment do not "click"

* Got a better paid offer after N months

* Hired person was not up to the task and fired

* Work environment was toxic

* Hired person was toxic

And probably a few more. In all these cases, IMO there is a much bigger responsibility on the company,because they are the stronger side and the one that has the last word on hiring someone. So, it ends up being manager's fault. Having been a hiring manager myself, I can only excuse the manager in the case of a really, really, good faker during the interview phase. But those are not the norm.

> and the one that has the last word on hiring someone

False. A lot of times, companies make an offer which are then rejected by a candidate because they have another better offer. Maybe not in 2024, but it was very common until 2022.

Candidates have the last word in NOT joining a company. But only companies have the last word on hiring someone.

If you wanna split hairs - "Hiring" happens only when a contract is signed between a candidate and a company. A candidate can choose not to sign, thus preventing hiring process to complete.

In the spirit of the overall thread, specifically re: your comment "IMO there is a much bigger responsibility on the company,because they are the stronger side and the one that has the last word on hiring someone." - a company is not always on the stronger side. In 2021, a lot of workers had the upper hand.

It still doesn't matter that much when talking about short average tenure. Obviously in a hot market it is going to be more complicated for companies to retain talent, but being a successful company is not an easy task in any case.

Average tenure does not indicate how long someone lasted before leaving the company. If you double the company size in a year you've almost certainly suppressed average tenure to below a year.

Yes but a hiring frenzy can end in a) company is successful enough and keep the headcount as it was b) not A

I believe that is misreported information. There was record low attrition in 2021 and an increase in 2022 due to suppressed attrition in 2021 (and a record hot job market), as well as record hiring (lowering average tenure). Even then I think that number is off base. I doubt it's even possible to make any real conclusions if it wasn't given surround facts.

Google is an advertising company - why do its employees seem to think they work for Doctors Without Borders?

Because Google is good at advertising?

Because that's what Google has been telling everyone, and especially their employees. Every wall has a motivational poster.

Also it’s public so a lot of those shareholders are pension funds and your 401k.

Buybacks are just time boxed dividends.

Well said. As someone who has worked with Google consultants throughout his career, I always felt they were overpaid for the value they brought to the table. A few years ago, one of my clients wanted some advice on what Google Cloud products to migrate to their high traffic website while keeping costs at check. Our backend systems were fully SQL based. We may have met 3 consultants from their HQ at least and none of them even had any idea on a) the offerings that were available and b) which product should be used when. One of their consultants just kept throwing product names at us hoping it would stick, but it got really bad when he recommended a very expensive NOSQL offering for our completely SQL backend. We both walked out of the meeting mid-way after being annoyed with them.

Their lifestyle is quite luxurious - you can roam around their entire campus without being asked questions, there's gaming rooms and places where you can take a nap at work and half the time people were barely at their desks doing their actual jobs. I always thought this was also one of the reasons why many clients started moving off their platforms (apart from also becoming more expensive over the years) to the point where Google is almost considered a laggard now in the AI space.

Can you share there years of experience and alma mater (If you don't mind)

One of them had over 3 years in the cloud space alone. The other two probably close to 5 years. All of them were from the top 3 universities in the country. I guess it had to do with the forced quota system. In big companies, there is a need to mandatorily fill their positions with x percent of locals. Sometimes, it is not a good thing.

Or they felt that investors wanted them to have layoffs.

From talking to people in the know, the layoffs don't even seem to make sense. Why layoff all the developers in a project and keep the program managers, product managers, and engineering managers (and not even cancel the project)? Why kill the Python team and ask the Flutter team to take over their work? Why do projects seem to have more managers than individual contributors?

I don't think this is part of a coherent long term strategy. It's just a reflexive reaction to demands to from major investors to reduce costs. Nevermind that Google is still hiring for the positions that they are laying people off for.

This is because Google has grown to be one of the most bureaucratic companies in industry, and it is the bureaucrats who have the utmost power in such companies. Naturally, it is engineers who are let go and bureaucrats who stay during a layoff

I make sure to tell all homeless people, “just start a business bro”

Do you come across homeless people directly impacted by or even upset about Google’s mass layoffs?

Might be irrefutable but it's not like it's immutable.

Buybacks used to be illegal so it's not like it couldn't change again depending of peoples "desire".

Stock buybacks are an illegal stock manipulation that were routinely prosecuted as such before the Reagan administration waved a magic wand and decided it was kosher. If Google has $70 billion for stock buybacks, then Google has $70 for taxes, and strong pro-unionization rules are called for to tip the balance of power towards workers. Why did we create rules of the road where corporations and shareholders became the guiding force of our economy, when workers’ spending power keeps us afloat?

> It is set up to make money and return money to investors either via capital gains (buybacks) or income (dividends).

Seeing this always saddens me. That the primary purpose of these insanely rich and powerful entities is just 'make the rich richer' and everything else is considered incidental. Is this really the best we can do?

yes. Capitalism is the best system. Even in communist china, only after transitioning to market capitalism they got tech companies producing prosperity.

We also allow forming other kinds of companies. You can create worker cooperative tech company that has more diverse goal instead of just making money.

I’m not sure it is the Chinese tech companies that produced prosperity. It is due to their low cost manufacturing base for the last thirty years and consequent rapid urbanization. If anything, their tech companies have been largely laggards on the world stage with most being simple derivatives of western brands capitalizing on their large population base and barrier to foreign entry. They don’t have a very good track record of being issued patents outside their jurisdiction either.

> If anything, their tech companies have been largely laggards on the world stage with most being simple derivatives of western brands capitalizing on their large population base and barrier to foreign entry.

That is because they started out without basically anything 25 years ago as one of the poorest countries in the world. It takes about 25 years to build up your infrastructure by using capitalism, they are there now, today they can start to innovate.

Before they caught up the most productive effort will always be to just build up all the standard infrastructure instead of trying to innovate, so of course they didn't innovate. But today there is no such thing, you will see them transition to an innovative economy just like Japan did 50 years ago.

Edit: Note that tech company includes computer hardware manufacturing, those companies are absolutely a core part to Chinas miracle, being able to produce high end computer parts at scale requires a very developed economy. If not for US bans China would be even more dominating there.

To be fair, it isn’t only the rich they make richer. Think pension plans and other regular folk who rely on returns in their portfolio to retire.

The richest Americans own the vast majority of the US stock market, according to Fed data. The top 10% of Americans held 93% of all stocks, the highest level ever recorded.

Source? I can’t imagine pensions only hold 7% of stocks.

I was skeptical too, but it's plausible. According to the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts release [0], the bottom 90%'s share of "corporate equities and mutual fund shares" in Q4 2023 was about 13% (5.24 / 39.94)

[0] - https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

You can argue it's unethical to overhire as it takes bright hardworking people who could otherwise be curing cancer or whatever and instead allocates them to busywork just so Facebook etc can't hire them instead.

Google didnt purposefully overhire. They misread the landscape during covid and then business plans changed.

I don't have personal knowledge here but there are headlines like this https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake...

Maybe Google employees should really ask why it's okay not to launch a major product in the past 10 years, why it is okay to have their Gemini blatantly censor users, why it is okay that most of the E6+ engineers are either in the meeting or on the way to a meeting room, why the company needed to double its headcount during the Covid era, why there are VPs who report to VPs who report to VPs, and directors who report to directors who report to directors, or why a god damn internal tool that has 30 users would need a director PM. The list goes on, and the empire rottens from within. And all these are not evil but layoff is?

Yet just because a company is making money the company can’t optimize itself? Some people deserve to be fired.

They could sell the assets shutter the company as fire everyone for huge dividend. It’s more complicated than that.

There is nothing evil about this at all.

People on HN constantly talk about how useless a large chunk of the FAANG workforce is- unnecessary projects just so someone can get a promotion, initiatives that are reinventing the wheel, managers who overhire to increase their headcount without any meaningful work for their employees to do, projects which get cancelled without ever launching. And that's just on the product and engineering side, HR, finance, and marketing have their own set of "bs jobs" and dysfunctions. Laying off the people responsible for all that makes sense.

Continuing the operate the profitable parts of the business, while shutting down the bad parts, is a good thing for a healthy company. Capital flowing to productive uses is a good thing for everyone in the long-term, even if it comes with the short-term hassle of some employees needing to find new jobs.

That's completely true, but if a company refuses to admit any mistakes or wrongdoing, then we get used to having to dissect all of its actions looking for secret malice, or at least incompetence. Every single change in a sizeable company is called "a new direction" and it's always up to us to figure out what this actually means. That's why we're afraid of changes.

I feel like our economy system misses a way to reward honest companies, and it resembles the Russian "we know they know we know they are lying, but we're still all excited about the new amazing opportunity".

Yeah and none of these people are going to struggle to find another job. I guess it sucks for the H1B people.

Tbh I don't under why someone would think passing Google's interview process immediately makes someone a great hire. Care to explain?

You really don't understand that or you just don't like it? Because the reason is very simple and obvious...

It takes much more than the ability to rebalance red-black trees on a whiteboard to make a good software engineer. But judging by your comment you won't agree so let's leave it at that.

I think a big part of this is what happens before that. Google hires lots of people because they think those people will create more value and growth. The reason it's under pressure to fire them and return money to shareholders is because shareholders no longer think Google is good at creating growth with these investments. Arguably they're right, you could take a look at Google's Ads business and say "Hey! This is fantastic, fire anyone not working on this and just give me a great dividend", it would arguably be better for the shareholders.

Now in reality, that swing from "Invest and grow" to "Just return cash" is driven far more by fickle market sentiment than a real solid basis in fact, but that's still the pressure they respond to.

It wasn't "good" when Google hired a ton of people during Covid, and it isn't "evil" when they have subsequently let some people go. The people who are being laid off are generally given very generous severance packages, and I think it would be hard to argue that Google treats its employees poorly in general.

Google should employ a workforce that they think meets their needs as a business, and when that involves letting some people go, they should do their best to treat those people fairly, which AFAIK they generally do.

Not to go full ad hominem but the author of this tweet is Dan Price, best to do some background research on him before trusting him to be calling out others for “don’t be evil”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/technology/dan-price-resi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128234227/https://www.nytim...

Dan is a grifter of the highest degree. This is important context

There are few one-dimensional characters. It seems lots of people discount any worthwhile acts performed by people who also perform bad acts. Many of us are a little complex, quite a few of us highly so.

I remember a very long time ago in college, the prof was talking about stock equity.

I asked "Why can't the company buy back stock to increase value ?". He was shocked at the question and explained in detail why doing that is bad. It was something about doing that does not create real value.

So now we are living in that environment with no care about the impact of buy backs.

>I asked "Why can't the company buy back stock to increase value ?". He was shocked at the question and explained in detail why doing that is bad. It was something about doing that does not create real value.

As opposed to paying dividends, which does create value? Buybacks and dividends are both ways of returning money to investors.

From my understanding, buybacks return money to investors, who are free to plow that cash into something else that "creates value". It's not like Google is the only place that knows how to use that money effectively.

> I asked "Why can't the company buy back stock to increase value ?". He was shocked at the question and explained in detail why doing that is bad. It was something about doing that does not create real value.

Either you misunderstood your professor or your professor was very misinformed.

Stock buybacks and stock dividends are two ways for companies to return value to shareholders. They’re not actually as different as non-Econ people think. They both have the same effect of returning value to shareholders.

> So now we are living in that environment with no care about the impact of buy backs.

I’m old enough to remember people hand-wringing about stocks that did not have dividends or buybacks. The complaint was that they weren’t sharing profits with shareholders which was somehow evil.

Ironic that people are now angry that companies are sharing profits with shareholders.

I think the bottom line is that people like to get outraged over anything companies do.

Stock buybacks were always an illegal form of stock manipulation, until Reagan decided it was fine, and then it stopped getting prosecuted.

That explains it, the class was BR (Before Reagan).

That guy really planted the seeds of all the issues we are having now.

He was wrong maybe?

> He was shocked at the question and explained in detail why doing that is bad.

I'd love to know!

> It was something about doing that does not create real value.

No, it does not create value. Neither destroys it. Stock buybacks are net neutral as long as the shares are priced fairly.

Was the prof working in a field related to finance?

In an ideal world, this is a suboptimal way to pay investors for many reasons (e.g. part of the money spent on the buyback will be taken by market speculators for one) and it's better to pay direct dividends. But in the real world the taxes on dividends are higher than the taxes on the capgains so a buyback transfers more value to the investors than a dividend payment for the same amount.

Adapting a quote from Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s):

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising a CEO. You need to think of a CEO the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about any CEO.

It is interesting to see such statements popping up in the context as if something is horribly wrong with that. Google is not a charity or even some B-Corporation - it is commercial company which operates for benefits of their owners.

It is also worth to note many of those "owners" are not individuals but something like pension funds, which often have troubles to fulfil their obligations and need to maximize their returns above all.

Having said that, it is quite certain among those 12000 let go there have been some bad decisions, where Google would be much better off, over long term retaining those people and putting them to the good use.

The reason people are complaining is because the in current capitalism:

- Shareholders are given a preference over labor

- Executives continue to print shares for their own compensation. Like a food chain, the years/decades of value is being sucked off by shareholders and execs without adequately compensating the people who built it. No, the handful of shares given to engineers doesn't cut it when they were the one who toiled to make it happen.

This system is not rewarding workers appropriately. That's the root cause.

If employees continued to get residuals/printed stocks after losing their jobs, they'd feel more ok with such mass layoffs where value is sucked by some at the expense of others.

Current capitalism? It’s always been this way.

Shareholders (the owners of the company) are always given preference. They own the company.

Yes, shares are printed for CEOs but also employees (quite generously at Google) so I’m not sure I’d go down that line of thinking.

There was no capitalism that did not favor owners.

What you perceive as previous version was in fact the direct result of socialist unions threatening to burn down the factories unless better terms are negotiated.

> being sucked off by shareholders and execs without adequately compensating the people who built it

Who built it?

Certainly not the (passive) shareholders.

Without the passive DARPA funding in the beginning, Google would not exist.

I doubt DARPA were passive. But how much of google do they now own? Or should that be 'we' if you're a US citizen.

In any case 'investment' doesn't build anything, it just an enabler for others to build. Just like betting on a race horse is not the same as actually riding around the track and passing the finish line.

Passive shareholders bought the shares at IPO. IPOs are the reason why we have these large public companies. Passive shareholders deserve the profits.

World will not change meaningfully.

From first principles (or something)

- People form hierarchy (required for coordination)

- everybody want to take more for them self

- ones at the top have means to take more for them self

From other side:

- in hierarchy there are more people bellow, than on top

- coordination is easier among fewer heads

- motivation is dilluted below (1000 employees getting +100¥, vs one at the top getting 100 000¥)

Also I have a feeling that most devs are quite well of compared to other professions and can even own stock of companies and be the ones benefiting from company optimisations (layoffs)

> This system is not rewarding workers appropriately. That's the root cause.

Hearing people complain that Google (one of the top paying tech companies) is not appropriately rewarding workers or making claims that Shareholder activities don’t benefit workers at a company famous for paying workers heavily in shares is ironic.

The assets built by workers continue to earn money for Google long after the asset builders have left. They should continue to have residuals for it - either in cash or in diluted shares.

That's all. If people get this, they'd be happy employees.

Aren't google employees getting shares of the company? My understanding is that employees directly participate in the success of google through dividends/buybacks like any other shareholder.

Maybe they will finally stop moving buttons around meaninglessly in Android. I can't believe someone looked at the Alarm UX and thought "Stop" vs "Snooze" was easier than "Dismiss" vs "Snooze". Or that they should swap the sides of share and flip buttons on the Camera.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/google-staffers-question-exe...

Investors are dumb enough to link employee count with company health, so they have to give them a huge bribe to calm them down

Yes and they even use quantifiable things like revenue per engineer, it’s palliative right?

There is nothing wrong with layoffs. What is disappointing to me is that companies will do mass layoffs after posting immense profits.

As a tech worker, the message I get is: you’re going to get fire eventually unconditional to you or your company’s performance. So I feel like my future is pretty much beyond my control.

Yup. It is not in your control. That's OK. You're not in control of the ocean or river, or the weather, or the ground under your desk. You are often in control of the vessel you navigate them with. Navigate your people, skills and situations.

Companies are not oceans. Giving up and accepting abuse from these companies is definitely one way to deal with it, but I don't believe it's a good one.

That does seem to be the prevalent thinking in corporate America. Busting unions and using the government to persecute labor leaders seems to have worked.

“Companies are not charities” shouldn’t be an excuse to let them destroy the workforce.

Companies are companies. Oceans are oceans. Of course. It's a metaphor.

Are you in control of your company's sales or corporate strategy? If so, are you in control of the markets they operate in? You are so not in control of your job. It just seems so based on some level of statis in the environment. What's your concrete advice here?

We can't control the physics that controls oceans. But we can control regulations and laws in which corporations operate in. That's why IMO the metaphor is deeply flawed.

As for advice, honestly, we all know it already. Voting, getting into unions, fighting for legislation, organizing your community/peers and even simpler acts like spreading knowledge that the status quot is not actually immutable.

IMO anything other than accepting it without a fight is already a better option.

Just gotta accept that some things are out of your control. Or go work for the profit center, employees in good standing working on ads at google werent laid off.

I'm deeply angry after reading this post.

Dan Price is a grifter who posts things like this in bad faith. Don’t engage.

wow

"You might be a psychopath/sociopath if..."

This is called capitalism and I really don't understand how people that tweet this think what economic reality is in the world and USA ? If only they could read and understand.

It's companies at the scale of governments - which is a distortion of capitalism.

Is it thought that "the creators of capitalism" didn't think through what would happen "late stage" and we are dealing with a "never before in history" mutation of that?

Capitalism evolved. That’s like saying “did the first settler of Chicago not think through the future problem of crime?”

You could say the same for all economic ideologies. This is why you need checks and balances along the way.

Some are more prone to human flaws than others, but the real issue is almost always how greed has found ways to circumvent the methods in place to not allow these mutations to occur.

As always, take "pure" ideas with huge amounts of salt.

Then vote for government that doesn’t allow companies to grow to government scale. Western antitrust regulations are not being enforced properly and it is to everyone’s detriment.

So you agree with the distortion. Thanks.

I agree with what you said also, to a certain extent. But then we go down the path of: is there anyone with enforced antitrust on their manifesto? Considering the overwhelming lobby influence of 'government scale companies', will there ever be? I'll suggest: no.

I don’t think they stated that they agreed with the ‘distortion’ statement. They only stated that if you believe that is the case, the government would be the one who should regulate that distortion out of existence.

I personally don’t believe this is a distortion of capitalism as much as it is just a later stage of capitalism’s inevitable self destruction.

I know. I was just trying to find common ground. Forced, but in this day and age you almost have to ...

On the latter point, perhaps you're right. The key is whether it's inevitable or not. I don't profess to know.

That Google is a monopoly that should be a broken up is a whataboutism.

It's intrinsic in capitalism that firms often increase in value as they fire works.

Your values determine whether that's a feature of a flaw though.

No, capitalism is distortion of free markets. Capitalism literally means preventing workers from keeping the profits, replacing then with a flat wages.

Markets are an important force of progress, capitalism is feudalism all over again.

There is no real negotiation going on between employer and employees. If you don't believe me, ask any HR person whether they allow custom contracts.

Because people don’t understand what capitalism is, only what it was. The most ironical part is that the ones who predicted what is going on are the communists.

Agreed. (Pun intended.)

Capitalism seemed to work for a while only because it has been tempered with socialists fighting back hard and incentives being aligned for a while (build more high-tech, time-saving stuff like fridges).

Now when the market has saturated with time-saving goods, capitalism needs to widen the divide between workers and owners more and more just to keep going.

Capitalism did work. Socialism has never worked. Capitalism still works. Socialism still doesn't work.

Outside of the US does this actually convince anyone? Just repeating the hymn?

Capitalism has raised billions of people out of poverty. Yes, the people who are no longer starving are happy to no longer be starving. Communism on the other hand usually leads to mass famine. Even nordic democratic socialism is falling apart. None of the systems are perfect, they are all hampered by power hungry leaders. Capitalism clearly seems to be the best option.

"outside of the US" its still true.

Outside of the US, do people think that truth can be changed because you aren't in the US? Just deny literally 100+ years of history?

The only way Socialism works is in The Utopia that's never existed.

The real life examples of socialism are authoritarian nightmares. Thinking that outside of the US this isn't still true is an... interesting... attempt to deny history.

Absolute capitalism doesn't work. Every modern economy is its share of socialist policy. The question today isn't whether you support socialism, but rather where you draw the line.

True... but we've never had absolute capitalism. Just like we've never had absolute communism. Absolute socialism. Absolute monarchy. etc.

What we have is imperfect capitalism vs imperfect communism vs imperfect socialism vs ...

The reality is that imperfect capitalism, despite its flaws, is better than the alternatives, despite the attempt to ignore their flaws.

Because that's the only way you can argue socialism is better... is arguing the idea of socialism vs the reality of capitalism.

We can discuss the "line" that gets drawn but when that line crosses from one system to the other? We can absolutely judge Capitalism vs Socialism vs Communism.

and the problem is the predicted solution from the communists is worse.

You can sit and scream "companies are going to become mega corps and kill us all!!!"... but then when you scream "the solution is government ownership of everything, that will save us all!!!" you lose credibility.

For reference: All of human history and the real world results of socialism/communism/marxism.

The real truth is people understand what capitalism was... what it is... and understand that despite the issues? The alternatives are worse.

We really should restrict buybacks.

Why

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

We should moderately increase the capital gains tax so that buybacks are less advantaged for investors than dividends. Probably would not change the rate of companies doing buybacks, but why encourage it when so many people don’t seem to like it (doesn’t bother me, but I’m not wedded to buybacks either).

There is nothing wrong with buybacks.

I don't get why anyone would be upset at the CEO earning $200M/year, when the founders are worth $100,000M each.

I wouldn't say I'm upset, but as a (small) shareholder, it's generally in my best interest to compensate executives less. I can't do anything about founder equity.

Because Sundar is an awful leader. Or at least not the right leader for a company that needs to be innovative.

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