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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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?
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".
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”.
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.
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.
As opposed to paying dividends, which does create value? Buybacks and dividends are both ways of returning money to investors.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] voisin|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwup238|1 year ago|reply
If Google’s trajectory is any indication, that’s what their workers are doing anyway.
[+] [-] piva00|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neya|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thfuran|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Newlaptop|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anal_reactor|1 year ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] IshKebab|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SilverBirch|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neilc|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thiscatis|1 year ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/technology/dan-price-resi...
[+] [-] jmclnx|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] finolex1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tasuki|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phmqk76|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|1 year ago|reply
As opposed to paying dividends, which does create value? Buybacks and dividends are both ways of returning money to investors.
[+] [-] pandaman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] greyw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] flappyeagle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zac23or|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PeterZaitsev|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nine_zeros|1 year ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] greyw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] richrichie|1 year ago|reply
Who built it?
[+] [-] mordae|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stoperaticless|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] telepathy|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] mateus1|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] quantified|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ZuckMusk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] olix0r|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] syngrog66|1 year ago|reply
"You might be a psychopath/sociopath if..."
[+] [-] user90131313|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] translucyd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LightBug1|1 year ago|reply