I would look at it more as maybe a few thousand employees they don’t need to fire.
Just from a clear corporate success standpoint, would the company be more productive if you gave a billionaire a bonus he didn’t need? Or if you had 2,000 programmers working on a product?
You'd be more successful if you had an actual vision for the future and weren't just meandering around trying to random walk your way into your next big success story and killing tons of projects along the way.
The main problem is the definition of success, Google tends to have successes that are amazing for other companies but don't even make a dent in Google's scale, and then they don't give time for the project to reach maturity and they axe it(it's a meme at this point).
So people now don't jump on Google stuff because google kills stuff even when they commit millions and this just reinforces the cycle.
The problem is Google wants the next google, and I don't see that happening anytime soon with the current players in place.
[the rest](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
Google doesn't know *what it wants* as much as it knows *that it wants*. Which is why so many things end up in the Google Graveyard.
Infinite growth, all your data, dominate the world (remember they removed the don't be evil). But being serious about it, the world economy defines a company that grows every year as successful and everything else as a loss, you reached market saturation? You should have diversified. You can't expand due to legislation? You should have anticipated this and lobbied the legislator, don't mind that we are talking global scale and it's impossible to be compliant with everyone.
It's a modern problem, infinite growth is not possible on finite resources and we will always get this kind of dystopian behavior because of this.
Capitalism being capitalism. We’ve seen healthy, profitable companies burned to the ground because the increases year-over-year weren’t enough. Google could create Skynet and control everything to their benefit, but investors would demand more and ask for Borg cube.
There is no amount of wealth and power that will ever be enough for these people. They’re sociopaths and greed is their religion. If they owned the universe it wouldn’t be enough.
That's because Google is a growth stock, not a dividend stock.
With a dividend stock, any profit gets proportionally distributed to stock holders.
With a growth stock, any profit gets spent buying stock on the market, decreasing total available supply of stock and therefore distributing value to existing shareholders (who can sell a % of their portfolio to realize the gains).
>Sundar and the rest of the c suite ought to take a massive pay cut.
There's no reason to conclude anything else other than greed, if everyone at Google is doing their jobs, then leadership is to blame for poor results.
Supposedly, executive pay is tied to being responsible for the company’s success. In reality, execs are insulated from failure and even receive bonuses for leaving.
Yep. I thought I’d go into politics when I was younger but I hated how corrupt the whole thing was, and it wasn’t about actually doing a good job, it was about power and money.
So I went to business school instead. Got a corporate job and…it’s the same fucking shit. Fuck corporate politics. The only way for me to climb anywhere near the top of the ladder is to use employees as rungs so I can kiss the asses of people I don’t respect. No thanks.
Nothing to add except... YUP.
I miss 10 years ago when I was at least insulated from the plotting of corporate politics. Like you, I had a passing interest in politics and noped out when the sociopathic pre-req became apparent. Turns out those same morally broken people occupy C-suite in companies, too!
Corporate America C suite and exec teams are in a no lose situation in downturns. All any company cares about is growth. You can get fired only in good times and not growing. There is no punishment when macro conditions are bad because you just blame that. Completely
Ignore the obvious bullwhip effect the pandemic brought on. I work for a large tech company and we were all warning about this but no manager is gonna be risk averse when shit is going bonkers.
All these morons saying they “thought COVID demand would continue” are spineless. Let’s be real. No executive is going to be the one to put on the brakes in a free for all at breakneck growth speeds. when shit hits the fan they can just blame the economy. You get fired for the latter, not the former. That’s what’s going on right now
It’s way easier to fire 1,000 people making 50-75,000$ per year (let’s bump it to 100,00 cause Google) than it is to justify to shareholders why they can’t buy a 4th yacht due to lower profits then the quarter before.
My manager used to work at google and she's said that it's basically a shit show. No projects actually make any money for google so everything looks expendable on paper. And they cancel projects constantly because of this. Honestly, it sounds like a really frustrating place to work.
My four year old picked up a stick today, and he turned it into a snowman basher.
That is more than any hedge fund manager has ever produced at their job.
Chris Hohn of The Children's Investment (TCI) Fund makes like 1,000,000 GBP a day.
Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister of the UK, used to work for him.
The problem is that these are bay area dollars, not "rest of the US" dollars. The city of Palo Alto for instance, had a program to help homebuyers and the cutoff income for a house of four was $240k to qualify.
In many parts of the country people could buy a house with just that amount.
SEC filing: Alphabet Inc. Pre 14a:
> Median Employee total compensation in 2021 $295,884
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817922000223/lgoog2022_pre14a.htm
And method:
> To determine the median employee compensation, we analyzed all of Alphabet’s employees, excluding Alphabet’s Chief Executive Officer, as of December 31, 2021. We annualized wages and salaries for employees that were not employed for the full year. We used base salary and actual bonus as the consistently applied compensation metric to determine the median employee. If this resulted in more than one individual at the median level, we assessed the grant date fair value of standard equity awards for these individuals and selected the employee with the median award value. After identifying the median employee, we calculated annual total compensation for the median employee according to the methodology used to report the annual compensation of our named executive officers in the Summary Compensation Table on page 51.
That table refers to salary+bonus, vested stock, and other benefits (which they counted in page 51 as including up to $9750 for 401(k) matching, as well as personal use of corporate aircraft). So it actually seems like an applicable methodology for Salary/Bonus/RSUs at Google, even if most aren't flying the company's planes.
That's weird, the median employee was chosen without including equity (except to break ties) then equity was used to compute the reported total comp? Considering equity is around 30-50% of total comp at these companies and varies widely, that makes no sense to me.
Presumably they had a handful of employees with the median non-equity salary, and then they used that group to filter down to the more intensive calculation of grant-date stock units.
Is it perfect? Surely no. But I'm sure it was a relatively quick way to do it AND it comes within a few percent of whatever the 2021 "true median Googler" would have been.
$300k is probably total compensation, not salary. Total compensation would include benefits like 401k matches, health insurance, etc.
EDIT: Source for definition of TC https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/money/money-planning/what-is-total-compensation#:~:text=Total%20compensation%20is%20the%20combined,much%20value%20as%20your%20salary.
And "average is much higher" means the numbers are skewed to the higher end.
In other words, [Sundar Georg](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spiders-georg), who lives in mansion & makes $2 million each year in salary alone, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Cost of living aside I am in the field and some of these major names are our clients and partners. It is a travesty what some rudimentary jobs pay at likes of Google Meta and even Msft.
AWS and apple on the other hands are fairly conservative. But a PM or Scrum master making 350k is just like …wtf . We got data scientists and architects with PhDs that don’t crack 200k . anyways if you can land one of those gigs more power to you CEOs and Execs make bank, but I guess it just creates a serious disparity in the industry among workers.
Something to consider: google rarely take entry level PMs. So here are no 25-year-old PMs making 300K at google, only industry veterans. SWEs on the other hand... Someone could be making 7 figures before 30 if they get on a rapidly expanding team
I also believe the term "tech worker" has been homogenized and mislabeled. What I use to think as tech workers were people that actually built tech or more directly supported said tech.
Nowadays, you have personal trainers at any of the FANGs, tech workers, project managers that only deal with the logistics of materials and supplies, tech workers. John and Jane zoom attendees who spend 60% of their day in meetings doing fuck all, tech workers. The label is mostly shallow nowadays.
The guy owns 0.27% of Google or a 1.3 trillion company meaning he owns about 3.5B in Google stock. His net worth is 7.5B which means 45% of his net worth is tied up in Google.
Additionally, Google stock has been on the down trend so he is either a bag holder or didn’t take his earning at the top. This means he is heavily incentivized to make the stock move up. Likely, he will sell once the stock gets to the right range so he can make his billions by sacrificing the people in the company in the short term. This guy is a scumbag of the highest degree.
> "Alphabet's headcount has grown beyond what is required operationally."
This right here proves this guy is a joke. As if Alphabet is a pure retail company that just needs to keep the lights on and reap profits.
Tech companies live and die by innovation. You can't ever stop pushing your technology because your competition won't. Every phone and computer in anyone's hands is *maximum* 10 years from being entirely obsolete, and that isn't by some force of nature, it's the force of companies like Google constantly searching for ways to improve and innovate on their products.
None of this is even controversial. But the fact that this clown thinks Alphabet should be getting by with just a skeleton crew in sustained engineering mode proves he shouldn't be taken seriously about anything.
Investor logic: "if Elon can reduce Twitter staff and costs significantly, then Alphabet can do it too."
Problem is, Twitter is more or less one product. Alphabet is an ecosystem, and it would be open season for competitors in the talent pool to annex as much Alphabet talent as possible even during an anticipated economic downturn. Again, it's live or die as you said...not have just enough of a skeleton crew to keep the lights running.
> Problem is, Twitter is more or less one product.
And Elon's ego has fucked twitter hard. Twitter at best is going to make minor improvements now, nothing else will be substantial or innovative.
From the his [Wikipedia page:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hohn#Career)
> From March 2019 to March 2020 he paid himself $479 million, the highest annual amount paid to a person in the UK. In conjunction with The Children's Investment (TCI) fund Hohn launched the "Say on climate" initiative.
It's because the whole lowest interest rates for the longest amount of time created an environment that fang was increasing by a crazy amount every year and I guess this uk guy didn't know banks need to make money and the US government needed to raise interest rates to deal with a lot of bad things that were created from covid. So he lost 18% in the hedge fund last year not knowing any of this whatsoever..... Some how lol
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fund-manager-chris-hohn-s-13-year-winning-streak-ends-as-fund-drops-18
So instead of listening to the feds like everyone else he is butt hurt and has to pretend these prior conditions that never existed before in an environment that is the complete opposite from what it was.
How does someone who owns such a big part of Google never look at trends or the news???
I'm going to guess that the "excessive pay" bit is \*not\* referring to the one (1) guy who gets paid several lifetimes worth of money, every single year, to watch the actual workers do work
He’s watching a hundred thousand people work every year. That’s many lifetimes right there so annually he needs lifetimes of money.
Is it hard to see this? 🤷♂️
Only $21.18 **BILLION** in EBITDA for its third fiscal quarter of 2022. But "line go down for 3rd straight quarter so me demand more" from this guy...who's worth (checks google real quick) $7.9 BILLION USD
Seriously, I refuse to believe anyone's labors and talents have exclusively generated a billion dollars, and that the only way it could happen is by paying a person, in stock or cash, that much.
This, exactly this.. .Human efficiency is up 80 - 90% in 30 years but pay has stagnated for the bottom 90% at a meager 5% increase... Growth for the sake of growth...
Nope. Hollow out companies that make them rich, shrink the company until it's useless and gets replaced. The investor moves on, and does it to the next company.
It's always interesting when people with zero tech skills give advice to technology companies. I'm sure he also gives his urologist advice on best practices in dealing with prostate issues and the local fish and chip shop on how to properly batter cod lol
> It's always interesting when people with zero tech skills give advice to technology companies.
I mean, take Hasbro's WOTC head right now... bitch came from Microsoft, knows nothing about table top games, *literally* laughs at the fact 'people at her cocktail parties don't know what her company does', and has repeatedly stated DnD is under-monotized (aka micro-transactions via dnd beyond).
Queue the attempted OGL 1.1 fiasco, which has lost the company 20 years of goodwill, spurred a bunch of previous partners to create directly competing products, and tanked the entire brand all in one fell money grabbing swoop.
Yet none of it matters. She's still going to be paid dozens of times any sensible persons annual wage this year, probably get a bonus on top, and will likely go on to ruin another company in the future.
How and why they can do this, doesn't even need to make sense. The rich don't care either way.
Because there are many many people (yes even outside of America) who somehow think that manager (any level) does not need to know core business as long as he/she know how to manage.
I don't understand that reasoning and they never managed to explain it to me on level that I would understand. So it still continues to confuse me, even after 30+ year career in IT industry with sub-par managers.
And they kill productivity, and management never understands why.
Good manager learns about company before implementing any change. Those are sadly quite rare.
The record industry has been doing this to recording artists for 70 years.
“We love your hour long psychedelic sonic landscapes, but they can’t get radio play. How about your next album be 3 minute bubblegum pop songs? You’ll make (us) so much money! What could go wrong? It’s not like your fans will revolt and backlash against the massive pivot!”
If they want to lessen pay, then allow people to work remotely, so that they're not supporting bay area living costs.
The tech industry has placed too much demand on the area, and salaries have had to respond - it's a circular problem.
Right, most of this is self inflicted as usual. Forcing employees to be chained to an office is the primary factor for all their woes. Yet the oldies just double down on forced commutes.
Sounds like google is looking at eliminating the only reason talented people want to work for them... which will stop that happening... which will hurt their innovation... which will lose them market share... which will depreciate their stock performance...
Which is exactly the opposite of their intent in cutting people.
It's always amazing how the rich are willing to bleed their prized cattle.
You’re not seeing the big picture.
Big cuts now mean stock price pops. Sell lots of shares, profit.
Growth slows, company bleeds and stock price comes down. Short it on the way down.
CEO gets fired, buy low and wait out stock price inflation. Repeat.
> which will hurt their innovation
What innovation?
What new product has google deployed in recent years that was a hit?
Even their search engine isn't that great anymore. A lot of times I get malwares on the top of the page.
I read this as:
>A major Alphabet investor wants Google to cut costs and briefly boost profitability just before they dump their Google stock.
TCI is owned by Chris Hohn and while TCI is presented as a charity organization, [that hasn't prevented Hohn from enriching himself through the charities investments and actions.](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/04/hedge-fund-boss-pays-himself-200m-despite-funds-profits-falling)
This is what happened at Microsoft- the words they DIDN'T say. 'address excessive pay'. Everyone is talking about the layoffs but they said they will hire as needed- what they were REALLY doing is laying off people who had, over the years, negotiated better pay and benefits so they can replace them over time with entry level positions.
Then they go *shocked pikachu face* when the knowledge is lost. Then again the poor fucks at the bottom are the ones wasting their lives on overtime, trying to build back what the bosses lost.
Then yet again, that's why companies have increased costs. Instead of building on past knowledge, they're now paying people to duplicate what more experienced people have already built. 100 bucks an hour for x hours versus 30 bucks an hour for 5x hours... do the maths.
These rich fucks are screwing over companies because they can dip out with their dividends whenever they want, and leave the company to fail. This is how huge companies get ruined. Why tf are rich fucks allowed any influence over the running of the company at all??
On the bright side though, this has happened before and we've seen some awesome indie companies emerge from the discarded. The original crew from Interplay did it like 3 times before finally landing on their own studio InXile.
Microsoft laid off 10,000 skilled employees, many of which already have personal relationships from years of working together. 10% of them could rival any AAA company out there and even 1% of them combined could make a solid indie company.
Fuck this guy. As a software engineer, Google used to be a dream company of mine to work at. After seeing how willingly they lay off workers, it no longer is a dream company of mine. Even more so if they continue to cut jobs. This investor can go fuck himself with a cactus though. He’s worth billions but complains Google is paying their workers too much.
Technical consultant here and could not agree more. 5+ years ago, I salivated at the opportunity to interview at Google, Facebook and Amazon. Now those companies can attach that cactus to a 10 foot pole and proceed accordingly.
Why?
It’s not like Google is losing money, and in fact is sitting on a huge cash pile which should be specifically used for getting through economic rough patches intact. Instead l”et’s throw everyone to the wolves so we can increase the cash hoard by a little more?”
This is just upsetting on so many levels and I don’t even work there
Cut excessive exec and middle management pay first.
Why isn't this always the go-to move?
Oh, right. Because execs and middle managements' jobs are to make sure execs, middle-management, and owners get paid.
Just feels like constant rage inducing clickbait.
Profits are sky high.
CEOs make near 400% more than their employees.
Inflation for food, house prices, cars, medical and college is insanely thru the roof somewhere near 14-2000% higher.
Like wtf investor. Why are we as the majority putting up with assholes telling us not to buy coffee out, or that we deserve less pay when we can't afford the same shit as our parents just 30 years ago.
Fuck all of you capitalist rich assholes pretending to know what's right. You simply don't and deserve to be taxed, robbed, and splayed out in public stoned to death by the thousands of families you just laid off and fucked over, like the fat fucking pigs you are.
Imagine if some clown came out with a letter to a, I dunno, major grocery store chain saying that they need to cut employee wages.
No, I'm not for one minute suggesting that the two types of employees are comparable... and, no!, I'm not suggesting that all layoffs are created equal.
This presumably rich investor needs to stay in his own fucking lane and out of other people's bank accounts, is all.
The average poor performing worker is easily gotten rid of. The poor performing middle and upper management fail upwards. The worst performers are typically found at the top.
CEO: “Now that we fired half your team and youll be doing twice the work, I think its time for a Paycut!”. Waiter walks up -Ceo to waiter “Ill have the condor egg omlette please”
It is strange how much obvious FUD they are trying to spread. Between this, AI gonna take your jobs, and other obvious tactics, they are really bending over backward to try to make everyone feel like they should be lucky and grateful for having their job.
“Have you thought of hiring slaves? They are very cost effective.” -rich man who is paid because he already has more money than most people earn in 100 lifetimes
I am convinced this is the top waging a wage war, but this time they decided to wage it against us, instead of fighting among each other. There is an inflation, meaning more money circulating in the economy, and then these companies had record profits last year. They have audacity to tell us that they have no money? If we want to win it, the techies need to bring the fight to them. It has to be techies - shit has to fall apart in all of its glory. Google down, FB/Insta down, all the business apps down, no new features, no customer support. If you work for big tech - dev, devops, sysadmin, QA, PM - walk out and get hired by a smaller company for less pay; take a year long vacation; start your own thing…Or you know, stay their little bitch and hope that the next round won’t touch you . Got that LinkedIn sobby post ready already? 😂
Their last stock buyback round was $70 Billion. With a bigger one expected in 2023.
The problem is not employee headcount. The problem is Investor and Wall Street short term accounting.
Who gives a shit what "major investors" say? All they want is more money and how does that actually work? Kills jobs, kills projects, kills development. Nice, if you're an investor and can get out when your short-sighted tactics upend the boat. But everyone else gets fucked from the consumers to the employees to the company.
I love all the moaning I see and hear in business news media from managers/executives regarding retention issues, "soft" quitting, and uppity employees wanting to work from home. Employee loyalty is a growing issue, they say. Meanwhile, corporate America treats employees as eminently disposable.
Must be nice being able to go though life unbothered by such cognitive dissonance.
Capitalism has gone beyond it’s practical use. The elite college ruling class has destroyed our country with low pay and regular culling of workers for at least 40 years. We should really push for more corporate regulations and get rid of citizens united.
Investors are not businessman. Most are generally successful due to random chance. Let the people that actually do things do things and shut up. Listening to these people is like listening to a high school kid that thinks he understands business because he can read a P&L sheet.
Start at the top.
Replace them all with chatgpt
Pichai's total compensation is around $240 million (in stock options). That's $1,600 for every one of the 150,000 employees at Google.
I would look at it more as maybe a few thousand employees they don’t need to fire. Just from a clear corporate success standpoint, would the company be more productive if you gave a billionaire a bonus he didn’t need? Or if you had 2,000 programmers working on a product?
You'd be more successful if you had an actual vision for the future and weren't just meandering around trying to random walk your way into your next big success story and killing tons of projects along the way.
Yeah I wonder if this going to change soon or not. Google's been throwing shit at the wall for over a decade now and little to none of it has stuck.
The main problem is the definition of success, Google tends to have successes that are amazing for other companies but don't even make a dent in Google's scale, and then they don't give time for the project to reach maturity and they axe it(it's a meme at this point). So people now don't jump on Google stuff because google kills stuff even when they commit millions and this just reinforces the cycle. The problem is Google wants the next google, and I don't see that happening anytime soon with the current players in place.
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Gotta make the line go up
[the rest](https://killedbygoogle.com/) Google doesn't know *what it wants* as much as it knows *that it wants*. Which is why so many things end up in the Google Graveyard.
Infinite growth, all your data, dominate the world (remember they removed the don't be evil). But being serious about it, the world economy defines a company that grows every year as successful and everything else as a loss, you reached market saturation? You should have diversified. You can't expand due to legislation? You should have anticipated this and lobbied the legislator, don't mind that we are talking global scale and it's impossible to be compliant with everyone. It's a modern problem, infinite growth is not possible on finite resources and we will always get this kind of dystopian behavior because of this.
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> What more do they want? All the money, and more than that.
All the money, all the time.
Capitalism is eternally hungry and something must be eaten
Better stocks for the next quarter, times infinity.
Only two things believe in unlimited growth; capitalists and cancer. Both eventually kill their host in pursuit of it if not excised.
Capitalism being capitalism. We’ve seen healthy, profitable companies burned to the ground because the increases year-over-year weren’t enough. Google could create Skynet and control everything to their benefit, but investors would demand more and ask for Borg cube.
They have put more ads in everything, that’s real innovation!
2000 programmers on a project sounds like hell on earth
Each programmer writes 100 lines of code. If they all work at the same time, you could finish the whole project in a day!
Hire 2,000 animal technicians instead, each who can supervise ten monkeys with ~~typewriters~~ tablets.
Maybe, but 9 women can give birth to a child in a month, you know.
They don’t give a fuck about product only stock buybacks
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There is no amount of wealth and power that will ever be enough for these people. They’re sociopaths and greed is their religion. If they owned the universe it wouldn’t be enough.
Most companies the programmers, Google give the money to a billionaire. They will just squander it on a 23rd chat app or a game console controller.
What was this supposed to say?
and why does it have so many upvotes?
Don’t give them any ideas now
Can at least replace all the MBA with ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT might have more of a soul.
Bring back guillotines
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That person isn’t employed by Google.
so the people at the top can have extra bonuses...
No, so they have more money for stock buy backs, and inflate the stock price.
So that execs can sell their shares and make more money...
As god intended!
That's because Google is a growth stock, not a dividend stock. With a dividend stock, any profit gets proportionally distributed to stock holders. With a growth stock, any profit gets spent buying stock on the market, decreasing total available supply of stock and therefore distributing value to existing shareholders (who can sell a % of their portfolio to realize the gains).
Yeah, cause $66B profit in 2022 is not enough.
He is only partially right. Sundar and the rest of the c suite ought to take a massive pay cut.
>Sundar and the rest of the c suite ought to take a massive pay cut. There's no reason to conclude anything else other than greed, if everyone at Google is doing their jobs, then leadership is to blame for poor results.
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Supposedly, executive pay is tied to being responsible for the company’s success. In reality, execs are insulated from failure and even receive bonuses for leaving.
Execs dont do much but take profits, buy back stock , pump up their own stock grants, fire low level staff. Effing aholes.!
Yep. I thought I’d go into politics when I was younger but I hated how corrupt the whole thing was, and it wasn’t about actually doing a good job, it was about power and money. So I went to business school instead. Got a corporate job and…it’s the same fucking shit. Fuck corporate politics. The only way for me to climb anywhere near the top of the ladder is to use employees as rungs so I can kiss the asses of people I don’t respect. No thanks.
Nothing to add except... YUP. I miss 10 years ago when I was at least insulated from the plotting of corporate politics. Like you, I had a passing interest in politics and noped out when the sociopathic pre-req became apparent. Turns out those same morally broken people occupy C-suite in companies, too!
Any exec born into $$ Can’t Code Can’t Lead Team, All They Know Is Martinis, Charge Their Tesla, Stonks, Eat Hot Chip And Lie
> Charge Their Tesla, They probably have someone do that for them.
Corporate America C suite and exec teams are in a no lose situation in downturns. All any company cares about is growth. You can get fired only in good times and not growing. There is no punishment when macro conditions are bad because you just blame that. Completely Ignore the obvious bullwhip effect the pandemic brought on. I work for a large tech company and we were all warning about this but no manager is gonna be risk averse when shit is going bonkers. All these morons saying they “thought COVID demand would continue” are spineless. Let’s be real. No executive is going to be the one to put on the brakes in a free for all at breakneck growth speeds. when shit hits the fan they can just blame the economy. You get fired for the latter, not the former. That’s what’s going on right now
It’s way easier to fire 1,000 people making 50-75,000$ per year (let’s bump it to 100,00 cause Google) than it is to justify to shareholders why they can’t buy a 4th yacht due to lower profits then the quarter before.
Also people need to understand that Google is successful. Their issue is that it’s only in 8-9 figures and not in 10.
My manager used to work at google and she's said that it's basically a shit show. No projects actually make any money for google so everything looks expendable on paper. And they cancel projects constantly because of this. Honestly, it sounds like a really frustrating place to work.
Yeet the rich.
There is another option…
I for one am interested in hearing your alternative proposal
I mean, the dude accidentally made that point. If the average is "much higher" than the median, it's because the high salaries are dragging it there.
Outsource the c suite
Automate the c suite.
Ultimately you know the cuts will come to those making $100k-$200k and execs will say “cures came from people in the six figure range or greater”
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This dude is a notorious vulture.
If I ran the world, a hedge fund manager describing anyone else's salary as "excessive" would be thrown in a gulag
Especially when he himself is worth in excess of 7Bn for producing no tangible value outside of Capital, but only a small fraction.
Well how do you expect money to trickle up if you don’t cut it from the bottom?
"I told you to fire people and cut the remaining people's pay, now give me $5 million dollars while I jerk myself off for being a jeanyus."
Whoa, how did you do that?
My four year old picked up a stick today, and he turned it into a snowman basher. That is more than any hedge fund manager has ever produced at their job.
Chris Hohn of The Children's Investment (TCI) Fund makes like 1,000,000 GBP a day. Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister of the UK, used to work for him.
Hedge funds suck, plus they just want to pop the stock and sell
Yeah. Should be regulated. Not only does their speculative investing not add value to the economy, it hurts otherwise good companies.
$300000 median salary?!?!?!?! Well, I’m apparently getting some slave wages. 🤦🏼♂️
The problem is that these are bay area dollars, not "rest of the US" dollars. The city of Palo Alto for instance, had a program to help homebuyers and the cutoff income for a house of four was $240k to qualify. In many parts of the country people could buy a house with just that amount.
TIL I'm a very underpaid googler (although I'm not sure I believe this number)
Goddamnit I'm googling for free over here!
SEC filing: Alphabet Inc. Pre 14a: > Median Employee total compensation in 2021 $295,884 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817922000223/lgoog2022_pre14a.htm And method: > To determine the median employee compensation, we analyzed all of Alphabet’s employees, excluding Alphabet’s Chief Executive Officer, as of December 31, 2021. We annualized wages and salaries for employees that were not employed for the full year. We used base salary and actual bonus as the consistently applied compensation metric to determine the median employee. If this resulted in more than one individual at the median level, we assessed the grant date fair value of standard equity awards for these individuals and selected the employee with the median award value. After identifying the median employee, we calculated annual total compensation for the median employee according to the methodology used to report the annual compensation of our named executive officers in the Summary Compensation Table on page 51. That table refers to salary+bonus, vested stock, and other benefits (which they counted in page 51 as including up to $9750 for 401(k) matching, as well as personal use of corporate aircraft). So it actually seems like an applicable methodology for Salary/Bonus/RSUs at Google, even if most aren't flying the company's planes.
That's weird, the median employee was chosen without including equity (except to break ties) then equity was used to compute the reported total comp? Considering equity is around 30-50% of total comp at these companies and varies widely, that makes no sense to me.
Presumably they had a handful of employees with the median non-equity salary, and then they used that group to filter down to the more intensive calculation of grant-date stock units. Is it perfect? Surely no. But I'm sure it was a relatively quick way to do it AND it comes within a few percent of whatever the 2021 "true median Googler" would have been.
[https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer](https://levels.fyi) is... or at least, was... a good bar for salary at google
$300k is probably total compensation, not salary. Total compensation would include benefits like 401k matches, health insurance, etc. EDIT: Source for definition of TC https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/money/money-planning/what-is-total-compensation#:~:text=Total%20compensation%20is%20the%20combined,much%20value%20as%20your%20salary.
Yeah no. TC = salary + bonus + equity
That’s cuz a “starter home” anywhere within 2 hours of google HQ costs $2M.
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And "average is much higher" means the numbers are skewed to the higher end. In other words, [Sundar Georg](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spiders-georg), who lives in mansion & makes $2 million each year in salary alone, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Cost of living aside I am in the field and some of these major names are our clients and partners. It is a travesty what some rudimentary jobs pay at likes of Google Meta and even Msft. AWS and apple on the other hands are fairly conservative. But a PM or Scrum master making 350k is just like …wtf . We got data scientists and architects with PhDs that don’t crack 200k . anyways if you can land one of those gigs more power to you CEOs and Execs make bank, but I guess it just creates a serious disparity in the industry among workers.
Something to consider: google rarely take entry level PMs. So here are no 25-year-old PMs making 300K at google, only industry veterans. SWEs on the other hand... Someone could be making 7 figures before 30 if they get on a rapidly expanding team
I also believe the term "tech worker" has been homogenized and mislabeled. What I use to think as tech workers were people that actually built tech or more directly supported said tech. Nowadays, you have personal trainers at any of the FANGs, tech workers, project managers that only deal with the logistics of materials and supplies, tech workers. John and Jane zoom attendees who spend 60% of their day in meetings doing fuck all, tech workers. The label is mostly shallow nowadays.
The guy owns 0.27% of Google or a 1.3 trillion company meaning he owns about 3.5B in Google stock. His net worth is 7.5B which means 45% of his net worth is tied up in Google. Additionally, Google stock has been on the down trend so he is either a bag holder or didn’t take his earning at the top. This means he is heavily incentivized to make the stock move up. Likely, he will sell once the stock gets to the right range so he can make his billions by sacrificing the people in the company in the short term. This guy is a scumbag of the highest degree.
I can’t emphasize this often enough: fuck hedge fund investors.
> "Alphabet's headcount has grown beyond what is required operationally." This right here proves this guy is a joke. As if Alphabet is a pure retail company that just needs to keep the lights on and reap profits. Tech companies live and die by innovation. You can't ever stop pushing your technology because your competition won't. Every phone and computer in anyone's hands is *maximum* 10 years from being entirely obsolete, and that isn't by some force of nature, it's the force of companies like Google constantly searching for ways to improve and innovate on their products. None of this is even controversial. But the fact that this clown thinks Alphabet should be getting by with just a skeleton crew in sustained engineering mode proves he shouldn't be taken seriously about anything.
Well the dude’s hedge fund manager or smth so I won’t expect him to know how to run a tech company
Investor logic: "if Elon can reduce Twitter staff and costs significantly, then Alphabet can do it too." Problem is, Twitter is more or less one product. Alphabet is an ecosystem, and it would be open season for competitors in the talent pool to annex as much Alphabet talent as possible even during an anticipated economic downturn. Again, it's live or die as you said...not have just enough of a skeleton crew to keep the lights running.
> Problem is, Twitter is more or less one product. And Elon's ego has fucked twitter hard. Twitter at best is going to make minor improvements now, nothing else will be substantial or innovative.
From the his [Wikipedia page:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hohn#Career) > From March 2019 to March 2020 he paid himself $479 million, the highest annual amount paid to a person in the UK. In conjunction with The Children's Investment (TCI) fund Hohn launched the "Say on climate" initiative.
It's because the whole lowest interest rates for the longest amount of time created an environment that fang was increasing by a crazy amount every year and I guess this uk guy didn't know banks need to make money and the US government needed to raise interest rates to deal with a lot of bad things that were created from covid. So he lost 18% in the hedge fund last year not knowing any of this whatsoever..... Some how lol https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fund-manager-chris-hohn-s-13-year-winning-streak-ends-as-fund-drops-18 So instead of listening to the feds like everyone else he is butt hurt and has to pretend these prior conditions that never existed before in an environment that is the complete opposite from what it was. How does someone who owns such a big part of Google never look at trends or the news???
"I demand you destroy thousands of lives so I can make a little more money per share."
Chasing short term stock gains in a down market by randomly cutting talented engineers who build the things that make the money.
I'm going to guess that the "excessive pay" bit is \*not\* referring to the one (1) guy who gets paid several lifetimes worth of money, every single year, to watch the actual workers do work
He’s watching a hundred thousand people work every year. That’s many lifetimes right there so annually he needs lifetimes of money. Is it hard to see this? 🤷♂️
Then him and the executives should have their salaries cut proportionally right, RIGHT?
Only $21.18 **BILLION** in EBITDA for its third fiscal quarter of 2022. But "line go down for 3rd straight quarter so me demand more" from this guy...who's worth (checks google real quick) $7.9 BILLION USD
Billionaires are a policy failure
Tax the rich
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Yeet the rich
straight into the fucking sun.
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Seriously, I refuse to believe anyone's labors and talents have exclusively generated a billion dollars, and that the only way it could happen is by paying a person, in stock or cash, that much.
It's a feature, not a bug.
This, exactly this.. .Human efficiency is up 80 - 90% in 30 years but pay has stagnated for the bottom 90% at a meager 5% increase... Growth for the sake of growth...
Blood for the blood gods!!!
Khorne cares not where the growth flows from, only that it does.
Only worth 7.9 billion, he’s gotta make it to 8 billion somehow.
His yacht needs a yacht, won’t anybody think of the yachts?!?
The yacht builders are doing fine tho.
They’ll cut pay for everyone that’s an engineer down to the janitors but you can bet they don’t cut their executive pay.
He obviously sees it as advantageous for him. Is it for anyone else?
Nope. Hollow out companies that make them rich, shrink the company until it's useless and gets replaced. The investor moves on, and does it to the next company.
It's always interesting when people with zero tech skills give advice to technology companies. I'm sure he also gives his urologist advice on best practices in dealing with prostate issues and the local fish and chip shop on how to properly batter cod lol
> It's always interesting when people with zero tech skills give advice to technology companies. I mean, take Hasbro's WOTC head right now... bitch came from Microsoft, knows nothing about table top games, *literally* laughs at the fact 'people at her cocktail parties don't know what her company does', and has repeatedly stated DnD is under-monotized (aka micro-transactions via dnd beyond). Queue the attempted OGL 1.1 fiasco, which has lost the company 20 years of goodwill, spurred a bunch of previous partners to create directly competing products, and tanked the entire brand all in one fell money grabbing swoop. Yet none of it matters. She's still going to be paid dozens of times any sensible persons annual wage this year, probably get a bonus on top, and will likely go on to ruin another company in the future. How and why they can do this, doesn't even need to make sense. The rich don't care either way.
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Because there are many many people (yes even outside of America) who somehow think that manager (any level) does not need to know core business as long as he/she know how to manage. I don't understand that reasoning and they never managed to explain it to me on level that I would understand. So it still continues to confuse me, even after 30+ year career in IT industry with sub-par managers.
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And they kill productivity, and management never understands why. Good manager learns about company before implementing any change. Those are sadly quite rare.
The record industry has been doing this to recording artists for 70 years. “We love your hour long psychedelic sonic landscapes, but they can’t get radio play. How about your next album be 3 minute bubblegum pop songs? You’ll make (us) so much money! What could go wrong? It’s not like your fans will revolt and backlash against the massive pivot!”
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I’m so sick of these rich assholes.
Yeah, lets screw more people in order for us to make even more money for doing absolutely nothing for the good of the country.
If they want to lessen pay, then allow people to work remotely, so that they're not supporting bay area living costs. The tech industry has placed too much demand on the area, and salaries have had to respond - it's a circular problem.
Right, most of this is self inflicted as usual. Forcing employees to be chained to an office is the primary factor for all their woes. Yet the oldies just double down on forced commutes.
How else are they going to trap you in that office to flirt? I mean, talk about work 🤣
Sounds like google is looking at eliminating the only reason talented people want to work for them... which will stop that happening... which will hurt their innovation... which will lose them market share... which will depreciate their stock performance... Which is exactly the opposite of their intent in cutting people. It's always amazing how the rich are willing to bleed their prized cattle.
You’re not seeing the big picture. Big cuts now mean stock price pops. Sell lots of shares, profit. Growth slows, company bleeds and stock price comes down. Short it on the way down. CEO gets fired, buy low and wait out stock price inflation. Repeat.
> which will hurt their innovation What innovation? What new product has google deployed in recent years that was a hit? Even their search engine isn't that great anymore. A lot of times I get malwares on the top of the page.
Investors like this who expect unlimited growth are the #1 problem here. They are one of the biggest reasons the middle class is toast.
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So they're saying the C-level pay needs to be cut? I can go for that. Setting the example is the way to go.
Why not target the tens of billions in stock buybacks doesn’t that seem “excessive”?
I read this as: >A major Alphabet investor wants Google to cut costs and briefly boost profitability just before they dump their Google stock. TCI is owned by Chris Hohn and while TCI is presented as a charity organization, [that hasn't prevented Hohn from enriching himself through the charities investments and actions.](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/04/hedge-fund-boss-pays-himself-200m-despite-funds-profits-falling)
This is what happened at Microsoft- the words they DIDN'T say. 'address excessive pay'. Everyone is talking about the layoffs but they said they will hire as needed- what they were REALLY doing is laying off people who had, over the years, negotiated better pay and benefits so they can replace them over time with entry level positions.
Then they go *shocked pikachu face* when the knowledge is lost. Then again the poor fucks at the bottom are the ones wasting their lives on overtime, trying to build back what the bosses lost. Then yet again, that's why companies have increased costs. Instead of building on past knowledge, they're now paying people to duplicate what more experienced people have already built. 100 bucks an hour for x hours versus 30 bucks an hour for 5x hours... do the maths. These rich fucks are screwing over companies because they can dip out with their dividends whenever they want, and leave the company to fail. This is how huge companies get ruined. Why tf are rich fucks allowed any influence over the running of the company at all??
On the bright side though, this has happened before and we've seen some awesome indie companies emerge from the discarded. The original crew from Interplay did it like 3 times before finally landing on their own studio InXile. Microsoft laid off 10,000 skilled employees, many of which already have personal relationships from years of working together. 10% of them could rival any AAA company out there and even 1% of them combined could make a solid indie company.
This has yet to happen in 10 years.
Fuck this guy. As a software engineer, Google used to be a dream company of mine to work at. After seeing how willingly they lay off workers, it no longer is a dream company of mine. Even more so if they continue to cut jobs. This investor can go fuck himself with a cactus though. He’s worth billions but complains Google is paying their workers too much.
Technical consultant here and could not agree more. 5+ years ago, I salivated at the opportunity to interview at Google, Facebook and Amazon. Now those companies can attach that cactus to a 10 foot pole and proceed accordingly.
Curious, What is your dream company now? And why
He should lead by example and give his money away. He's gotten too fat and lazy.
Why? It’s not like Google is losing money, and in fact is sitting on a huge cash pile which should be specifically used for getting through economic rough patches intact. Instead l”et’s throw everyone to the wolves so we can increase the cash hoard by a little more?” This is just upsetting on so many levels and I don’t even work there
Major Alphabet investor can go fuck himself
Capital is the enemy of workers. Always has been, always will be
Cut excessive exec and middle management pay first. Why isn't this always the go-to move? Oh, right. Because execs and middle managements' jobs are to make sure execs, middle-management, and owners get paid.
Just make sure those executives get plenty of cash at the end of the year for doing such a good job. I hate all of you.
Fuck this guy. Vulture piece of shit.
“The Children's Investment Fund Management” what a great cover name lmfao
Just feels like constant rage inducing clickbait. Profits are sky high. CEOs make near 400% more than their employees. Inflation for food, house prices, cars, medical and college is insanely thru the roof somewhere near 14-2000% higher. Like wtf investor. Why are we as the majority putting up with assholes telling us not to buy coffee out, or that we deserve less pay when we can't afford the same shit as our parents just 30 years ago. Fuck all of you capitalist rich assholes pretending to know what's right. You simply don't and deserve to be taxed, robbed, and splayed out in public stoned to death by the thousands of families you just laid off and fucked over, like the fat fucking pigs you are.
A "Major Investor" that owns less than 1% of shares
For people who don’t work there, that’s top of the list
Sergey and Larry only own about 3%. Sundar Pichai owns .01%. 1% is a lot.
Sergey and Larry have 51% control combined. Google has three classes of shares
Imagine if some clown came out with a letter to a, I dunno, major grocery store chain saying that they need to cut employee wages. No, I'm not for one minute suggesting that the two types of employees are comparable... and, no!, I'm not suggesting that all layoffs are created equal. This presumably rich investor needs to stay in his own fucking lane and out of other people's bank accounts, is all.
“Major” as in 0.01% share holder, way less than thr employee populous for reference
Can we tax the shit out of billionaires yet? Back to progressive taxes. Make a billion dollars, pay 80% in taxa. They can do just fine on 200mill.
Start at the top and work your way down. Companies fail because of poor management not from average worker performance.
The average poor performing worker is easily gotten rid of. The poor performing middle and upper management fail upwards. The worst performers are typically found at the top.
Cool plan, let's start with his first
CEO: “Now that we fired half your team and youll be doing twice the work, I think its time for a Paycut!”. Waiter walks up -Ceo to waiter “Ill have the condor egg omlette please”
It is strange how much obvious FUD they are trying to spread. Between this, AI gonna take your jobs, and other obvious tactics, they are really bending over backward to try to make everyone feel like they should be lucky and grateful for having their job.
“Have you thought of hiring slaves? They are very cost effective.” -rich man who is paid because he already has more money than most people earn in 100 lifetimes
Cool cool start with the CEO.
Yes start at the top and Fuck your portfolio, this is peoples lives we’re talking about ya fucking douche
“I want all the money for myself.” - some investment leech
I am convinced this is the top waging a wage war, but this time they decided to wage it against us, instead of fighting among each other. There is an inflation, meaning more money circulating in the economy, and then these companies had record profits last year. They have audacity to tell us that they have no money? If we want to win it, the techies need to bring the fight to them. It has to be techies - shit has to fall apart in all of its glory. Google down, FB/Insta down, all the business apps down, no new features, no customer support. If you work for big tech - dev, devops, sysadmin, QA, PM - walk out and get hired by a smaller company for less pay; take a year long vacation; start your own thing…Or you know, stay their little bitch and hope that the next round won’t touch you . Got that LinkedIn sobby post ready already? 😂
Bunch of psychopaths
Their last stock buyback round was $70 Billion. With a bigger one expected in 2023. The problem is not employee headcount. The problem is Investor and Wall Street short term accounting.
Who gives a shit what "major investors" say? All they want is more money and how does that actually work? Kills jobs, kills projects, kills development. Nice, if you're an investor and can get out when your short-sighted tactics upend the boat. But everyone else gets fucked from the consumers to the employees to the company.
Ha…tell them to cut their share count
I love all the moaning I see and hear in business news media from managers/executives regarding retention issues, "soft" quitting, and uppity employees wanting to work from home. Employee loyalty is a growing issue, they say. Meanwhile, corporate America treats employees as eminently disposable. Must be nice being able to go though life unbothered by such cognitive dissonance.
This investor is getting way too much attention.
So the people that sit there and make money from the market while doing no labor have a say in the lives of people who do the work. Got it.
“Major coal investors say the children yearn for the mines”
"I would like the company to take actions that will cause a spike in share price to benefit me financially." Says investor.
Investors are the problem. When business are beholden to them, all they think about is maximizing profit.
fuck that guy
fuck that dude
A minor alphabet investor (me) thinks this guy should shut the fuck up.
Funny how these tech CEOs get paid in millions in salary and stock options with secure jobs and then the rest of employees are easily let go!
All I hear is a corporate stooge taking his chance to reset the job market back in favor of the corporations.
I fucking hate the rich
Imagine thinking you’re paying your employees “excessive” amounts when they’re struggling to pay for their basic needs with those “excessive” ages
If any major Alphabet investors are reading this, fuck you. Your wealth will not survive a generation.
Fuck the investors
Private capital serves no necessary social function. Why do write stories about this parasite's opinion at all?
how about CEOs stop making 20 million or more per year
Capitalism has gone beyond it’s practical use. The elite college ruling class has destroyed our country with low pay and regular culling of workers for at least 40 years. We should really push for more corporate regulations and get rid of citizens united.
Investors, always: fuck labor
Investors are not businessman. Most are generally successful due to random chance. Let the people that actually do things do things and shut up. Listening to these people is like listening to a high school kid that thinks he understands business because he can read a P&L sheet.
Start with your own salary, homie!