"Why is he getting a raise while we are getting cost cuts and layoffs?"
He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
Also:
> More than a dozen memes from employees have filled Google’s internal discussion forums, many with several hundred likes, according to posts viewed by CNBC
This is the worst form of journalism. Cool, someone made a few memes. So what? You can make up any narrative if you scroll Twitter (or in this case memegen) long enough. That doesn't make it a real problem that you have to report on.
Journalistic integrity gets continuously eroded with stories like this. Like your source is a high level director with a few hundred reports... nope, it is a meme post on an internal tool. Just feels lazy.
A well-researched article on the benefits being cut, maybe some analysis on how much it could be saving the company or what the impact of 12,000 jobs might be worth would make this much more readable.
Verge churns out an “article” every few hours that is just a bunch of Twitter embeds sandwiched between a few sentences of fluff. Sometimes they even retype what’s in the Tweets, to fill up space, or presumably if the embeds break. (Or maybe it’s some desperate SEO play). Truly atrocious content.
> This is the new baseline of quality, because they can’t afford talent.
This is at best an incomplete statement.
Advertising moved to a more lucrative technology and if good journalism comes to depend on subscription revenue, readers are not willing to pay in sufficient number.
We are now at least two generations removed from the faint echo of grammar being taught by somewhat informed personnel. Neither the people writing nor the people reading are adequately equipped.
ChatGPT now impresses people, for pity's sake.
Talent is hard to find in all domains, for money or love.
Bloomberg and Reuters for financial stories that are relevant to the markets. They have a major financial incentive to not mess it up i.e. their customers will cancel their 10,20k/yr/person subscriptions.
Even if memegen is only used by 5% of the company (it's probably much more?) it's an important enough part of the company culture that some developers were allowed to maintain/expand it on company time. It was always very active during all-hands meetings and individual posts would get hundreds or thousands of interactions from what I saw.
The question is basically 'are these memes representative of feelings within a larger subset of the company' and these sorts of takes don't really address that question at all. Memegen is not twitter.
These are literally the Google-internal-social-media version of "meaningless article about something happening on Twitter". I'm sure these articles are easy money though or we wouldn't keep seeing them.
Wait, you're telling me that more than a dozen memes have "filled" Google's discussion forums? Google, with its ~175,000 employees? And "many" of these 13 or so memes have been liked?
To quote Sterling Archer... "oh, my stars!"
I don't know if it's just this reporter that's the joke or if it's CNBC as a whole.
> He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs.
He is getting a raise because the relative power of his position gives him coercive power over employees.
If any particular employee is upset with the decision he can make them feel pain, while it would take a lot of employees working together to cause him any pain at all. He can arbitrarily exercise his power because there is little to stop him or hold him back.
This would be true if Sundar chose his own compensation, but he does not. It is decided by the board.
I'm not saying it's the right thing for the board to do (if I were on the board, I would've suggested he keep his pay even or take a cut), but it's not right to say that Sundar gets paid more because he has "coercive power" over employees.
You’re focusing on the wrong party here, the employees are getting cost cuts rather than a raise because they lack negotiating power. Him getting a raise is a result of employees losing.
> Him getting a raise is a result of employees losing.
it's not a direct relationship.
The CEO gets a pay rise if the board believes it to be something worth doing - for example, rewarding the CEO for doing something unpopular (and taking flak for it).
The employees "losing" isn't a cause, it's an effect. The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable. And if a company is more profitable, the CEO is doing it's job. A company doesn't look out for employees; at least only up to the extend where the employees make them money.
Again you’re ignore the root cause for the proximate cause. A companies looks after their employees when they are forced to do so by market forces, unions, laws etc. None of which applied here.
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
That doesn’t explain timing as companies always want to be more profitable and Google was profitable before and after these cuts. So what prevented those cuts from happening sooner? It would have backfired if attempted sooner.
Thus the CEO’s decision to shaft these people is the result of those employees lack of economic, political etc power. If everyone would say quit for a better offer then he wouldn’t make that decision and thus wouldn’t get rewarded for the decision.
I think they're presenting a more accurate description of how the world actually works, which is useful. When people make a claim that X happens because of Y, that is a claim of causality which can be true or false or missing important factors.
Just like in physics where you can choose a point of origin to make calculations easier. Choosing the frame from which to analyze the situation can often determine the conclusion with presuppositions encoded into the language of the frame.
Here is the truth: Wage measures power, not usefulness, not productivity. Productivity puts a cap on wages because you can't pay a person more than they produce, but it does not determine the wage.
So when someone says:
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
This denies the idea that labor could be powerful enough to hurt the bottom line of the company enough that layoffs are not profitable.
The frame (more profit good) hid that for labor more wage and less layoffs are good. What is best for the company is being confused for what is best for everyone or what is best for labor, and labor cannot get what is best for themselves because they have no power.
You presupposed that what is best for the company is what is best with your choice of frame.
> What is best for the company is being confused for what is best for everyone
and there we have it - the difference in point of view. No company (nor anyone really) is making decisions that is "best for everyone", because that would imply altruism. And i am a stern believer that altruism does not exist.
Except he didn’t actually explain why and more specifically when just what.
The question isn’t why the CEO got rewarded for doing X, but what changed to allow him to make this now vs those same cuts happening 10 years ago. It’s not like Google was in an unprofitable downward spiral and needed cuts to turn things around the only change is how wildly profitable they are.
lots changed, but mainly the economic environment. Google is still wildly profitable of course.
The relevant question is could those workers generate more than %5 returns on that $70B google is using for stock buybacks. The company leadership and investors seem to think the answer is NO.
Therefore you fire the workers, Give cash to investors, and the investors park it with the fed getting >5% interest, with zero risk, and no need to worry about workers, products, or customers.
This is the entire point of the FED rate raises. Hoover up all of the money floating around being invested in company growth and new product development.
Once you get enough layoffs and paycuts, eventually inflation will go down because people cant buy shit.
> Once you get enough layoffs and paycuts, eventually inflation will go down because people cant buy shit.
If people can't buy stuff why wouldn't you expect marginal cost to go up?
More people buying more stuff means economies of scale. Less people buying less stuff means the loss of economies of scale.
If people are less able to buy stuff, I don't see any reason to believe that prices would go down. If anything it seems like it creates an incredibly negative feedback loop.
A company might firesale their inventory resulting a temporary reduction of inflation, but it seems like production would decrease because demand decreased, which would result in more layoffs and stagnation.
I am not an economist, so I guess I am curious why stagflation is not the expected result.
> I don't see any reason to believe that prices would go down.
and they won't. Lowering inflation is not the same as ensuring prices drop (it might happen, but it would be an unintended effect of the Fed's policies).
prices will remain high (compared to pre-covid) but be stable after inflation drops down. And i would imagine that the Fed's policies would change if they start seeing deflation (which is when prices drop).
It depends on the ppint of view, and the goals of that point of view.
From an employee point of view the primary goal is to keep your job. Pay raises, perks, wfh etc are all secondary to that. If you are laid off that is a failure. If your colleague is laid off you start getting worried. You see the failure and respond to that.
Since the laid off person failed, both the laid-off and the remaining consider the company to have failed, and by extension the company bosses to have failed, and expect pain at management level.
This is a point of view, and it's shared by many employees, but its not the only point of view.
Another group of people are the shareholders. They couldn't care less about staffing being up or down. They care about the share price. Staff, and costs, being cut means more profit. More profit means higher dividends or higher stock price. [1]
So this is a successful action. From the point of view of the board (which are a proxy for the shareholders), this is a good-job and the management is rewarded accordingly.
Now most people are employees, and the press wants most people to click on the headline, so most people consider layoffs to be bad. Even if you hold a few Google shares, and directly benefit, you don't consider your good fortune, you see 12000 failures, and naturally feel compassion for them.
(By the end of the week/month/year the compassion will have faded, and you'll be back checking your share prices.)
There could have been an article on how well Google stock price is doing, and will do, but no-one would read that.
Now as to your assertion that we're focusing on the "wrong thing". From one point of view, yes, 12000 people directly failed. If each had 3 friends remain that's 36000 who are very nervous. Let's describe the next 100 000 people as "startled".
From the other point of view its all upside.
Personally I'm neither a Google employee nor a shareholder so I'm neutral. Of course I feel compassion for the laid off, I'm not a monster. But I also understand the rules of the capitalism game the US has chosen to play. The rules the US has chosen, and I suspect the rules those 12000 will staunchly defend, is that ultimately its about the money point of view, not the labor point of view.
Google is playing the game. If you care enough then go somewhere else, or work to change the game[2]. But at the very least acknowledge the game itself, and learn the rules.
[1] a share buy-back is just a dividend disguised for tax purposes, and for employee compensation purposes.
[2] changing the rules is hard because the game is bipartisan at grass-roots level. The American-Dream is literally to be the direct benefit of capitalism. The money-talks ethic is fundamental to the American way-of-life.
It’s because the journalist isn’t a journalist, they’re just a writer filling a need. There’s already public sentiment that google sucks, so they just find the simplest story to support it. People rage read like they scroll forever on social media.
I think the confusion is bad journalism. It’s not that at all.
This is why he’s compensated so much, so that he can choose to do other things than care about the plight of the employees that the board wanted to lose.
I love kale and porridge but this seems like the porridge scene in the matrix: does a body good. They should send the latency committee to study the neurochemical signalling in the nerve pathways to understand how fast the brain decides it tastes like chickenfeed. Then fire the decider because it was too fast.
I can remember when the name collision on the internet was rare, now it's all day, every day. Given that my grandfather was David Smith, this leaves me with Smith and Watson, meaning that all roads lead to Ireland or Scotland, even if they involve swimming the English Channel.
> He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
The mechanics of that maneuver make it seem that staff are being laid off for the sake of creating resources that make compensation possible.
Would there be less layoffs if the compensation package was not as much?
Layoffs reduce operating expenses and increase the company's stock price. This means shareholders and board members get richer. And they reward the CEO for it by giving him a large stock grant. So yes, the two have a direct causal relationship.
I can tell you point blank that I have participated in layoffs where freeing up opex by LRing people was done _explictly_ to fund increasing the compensation of other team members including higher level manager promotions (and associated pay packages).
He's been CEO for what, close to a decade now? Why should he get a raise for a situation that he put the company in? Or is the logic that anything a CEO does deserves to be justified by paying them more?
It may not be a “real” problem, but reporting on the excessive comp of public company executives is valuable and sourced from employees, no less. The ratio of CEO to employee salary is at a major imbalance.
I doubt that it is the worst form of journalism, Lots of people on social media eat this kind of stuff up. Clickbait journalism but it gets eyeballs and likes.
I think it’s the other way around, journalists are reporting on the real sentiment that the employees feel. The business reasoning can help us understand what things happen, but the employees can experience their feelings regardless.
Well, the Google campus is basically Software Engineer Employee Disney World. I'm sure a few of them took "The Internship" at face value and are convinced that they're doing something other than just selling ads. They can't just be elite mercenaries, that would shatter their noble, pioneering egos.
Seriously, everything Google touches that doesn't bring in ad revenue does one or both of the following:
1. Is canceled after several years regardless of quality or impact
He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
Also:
> More than a dozen memes from employees have filled Google’s internal discussion forums, many with several hundred likes, according to posts viewed by CNBC
This is the worst form of journalism. Cool, someone made a few memes. So what? You can make up any narrative if you scroll Twitter (or in this case memegen) long enough. That doesn't make it a real problem that you have to report on.