Google tightens screw on staff expenses as economy slows

Google is joining the legions of other tech companies that are tightening up on company expenses in preparation for a potentially bumpier ride ahead in the global economy. In an email to senior managers sent last week – seen by The Information – Google's overlords urged divisional bosses to restrict travel to "business …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

HR message to all staff

The company is now on the downturn, in a decade we will be IBM, you have no future here.

No more perks, so do just enough not to get fired, leave at 5:00 everyday.

If you have options they aren't going to be worth as much so you can probably write them off rather than having them as golden handcuffs. You're going to be made redundant at 40 anyway, once we hire that ex-IBM CEO

Good job that all Googles senior programmers have no other job opportunities

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: HR message to all staff

PS,

We... the '"C" level execs will be expecting you all to work together on this cost-cutting plan. Several of us a mega-yachts on order and we need the bonuses to pay for them. We are grateful for your understanding.

[Trigonoceps occipitalis]

Re: HR message to all staff

When I started as a project manager (far too long ago) I was given advice about IBM. The company, then, had the reputation for not firing people. "Get into their office" was the advice. If the IBMer was not bringing profit he (they were all hes then) slowly lost working place privileges, if the office was in the end of the corridor by the toilets you knew he was an employee of little influence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: HR message to all staff

Google employees don't have offices anyway, it's all open spaces...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on... who here hasn't ordered a lap-dancer's pole or a bouncy castle to liven up the office

[Anonymous Coward]

used?

[JimboSmith]

Oh come on... who here hasn't ordered a lap-dancer's pole or a bouncy castle to liven up the office

You are Boris Johnson and I claim my peerage.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see the Boris Fanclub have downvoted you.

[JimboSmith]

Ah the days of travelling for work, my mum said she can’t see the point especially with all that new tangled videoconferencing. She was able to play bridge quite happily with her regulat group during lockdown. They used an online multiplayer bridge game and zoom which worked perfectly.

One trip I had to make was to a location served by Easyjet and BA from the UK. The problem was that company policy was lowest cost wins which would have been Easyjet. Except that their flight was too late in the day to get me there to meet the others and the organised onward transport. So I spoke to my manager who was sensible and I explained the issue. I said BA would be preferable for timings but the extra cost wouldn’t to the bean counters. She said she understood and I said I had an idea what if she paid the expenses for the cost of the Easyjet ticket. I would then pay the extra for BA using my frequent flyer miles. She agreed that was sensible and generous of me. So with manager authorisation I booked everything and went business class as a treat. We found a rail ticket to fudge the expenses for the ticket cost, so all good. Took some explaining when said I would be flying BA to the organiser. He thought I was clever to have got to fly BA but mad to be using my own miles, really mad.

I’ve since read on the internet that others have done this too.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>She was able to play bridge quite happily with her regulat group during lockdown

That's the irony, the very standard stuff that biz-dev or legal do is easily handled remotely or by email.

But you can save a lot of time and money by sending an engineer to the site something is being built or installed. The saving from explaining in person to however is assembling it which alignments are critical or discovering that a testpoint is impossible to reach. Saves the cost of the flight.

But for Google with lots of programmers working internally on internal projects I suspect a lot of their travel is of "business vision leaders go to Hawaii for a conference on vision leadership". The best saving is just to never bring these people back.

[Anonymous Coward]

..and they'll happily send you a day early to save €80 on a flight and not care about losing a days work from you while you're flying because that doesn't come out of the expenses budget!!!!

[An_Old_Dog]

On-Site Observations

Problem Reported: a newly-installed, top-of-the-line-hardware file server was slow.

On-Site Observation: the contractor who installed the server had used flat-pack telephone/serial cables (8 physically-parallel wires in a plastic sheath, with RJ-45 plugs on each end), instead of certified CAT-6 twisted-pair cables.

[phands]

Nothing new here. When I worked for Google from 2007, they had a panic about expenses about Q3/Q4 every year. This too will pass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Google via DuckDuckGo with Adblocker

Revenues thru advertising will drop further.

Fuck Google.

[Potemkine!]

Keynesian disaster

Those megacorps don't seem to realize that by anticipating a recession with costs reduction they make it happen for real. Less money spent means also less money for suppliers, which in return will invest less, so less money for megacorps... they are starting the vicious circle.

== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==