Google institutional investor calls for wider cuts: 30k jobs The billionaire hedge fund manager who runs a major Google investor isn't satisfied with the record 12,000 redundancies the US tech giant is making, and wants to see thousands more forced out of the organization. Estimated to be worth around $8 billion, Sir Christopher Hohn reportedly paid himself £1.5 million ($1.8 million) a …
I come from a family where my grandparents are substantially wealthy (but I didn't nor have any of it right now) but my grandfather grew up extremely poor. Even he has seemingly forgotten the difficulties of growing up destitute. And REALLY doesn't grasp the amount of sheer luck that allowed him to arrive at current state as he subscribes to Ayn Rand's 'Objectivism'. (as a lover of philosophy if anyone wants to argue her tripe is philosophy, I will have a god-damn street brawl with you). I don't think the trope of losing one's self and changing because of you success is really unfounded from a person who has grown up adjacent to a very successful person. Not to completely discount his skill or intelligence, he is definitely a smart man who was good at his job, but he didn't do as much of the work alone as even he thinks.
Derek from Veritasium made a video that does a decent job of explain success blindness, especially when it is amplified through the culture here in the States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
While the numbers are important, they don't give a very good idea of the productivity of any particular individual or group of individuals. But, if you start at the top, executives including Mr Hohn, are almost always paid more than the value they can ever have contributed to the company. So, why isn't he calling for the executives to take pay cuts? If this is all he can offer, he can be replaced by a ChaGPT bot that has read a couple of Jack Welch books.
There are regular case studies that demonstrate that a headcount approach to management almost only ever brings short term benefits and usually leads to declines in the medium to long term. You have to pay compensation that is sufficient to attract, and keep, the talent you need to continue to perform. This is particularly true in tech where markets change quickly. For examples of how quickly, and how badly things can go wrong, he could do worse than look at fellow investor 3i. Darling of investors for years and now it has all gone to shit.
Google has a pretty impressive track record in paying its staff reasonably well, trying out new markets, and also not being afraid to ditch stuff that isn't working (Boston Dynamics, a long list of web-based products). The Alphabet structure also allows it to invest heavily in new areas at a discount to capital markets, whilst keeping its main business on its toes by breaking out the numbers. Can't always says this of the competition that loves to roll underperforming pet projects in with cash cow departments.
Google's overall salaries are very good but they do have a much higher performance related element than most other companies. Google offer a 40% base with 60% performance related. Most other companies offer a higher base proportion of on target earnings, 50% minimum but often 60% and maybe even as high as 80%.
If you go by the tiktok videos posted by people who work at the likes of MAANG all they do all day is drink coffee, snack, wander around, hang out with their friends and maybe go to meetings once or twice.
And the majority of people being laid off seem to be middle managers, HR/Talent and DIE.
You don't need to sit by the desk and stare at IDE to get work done. Most work is done in one's head and typing stuff in is just a small insignificant part of this.
Most productive developers I know would be seen as "slacking" whole day. Browsing el Reg, Reddit, Instagram, reading random articles, even playing games while their brain is piecing all the work together in the background, typically in non linear fashion. When they are ready, they stop what they are doing and type stuff in.
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Most productive developers I know would be seen as "slacking" whole day. Browsing el Reg, Reddit, Instagram, reading random articles, even playing games while their brain is piecing all the work together in the background, typically in non linear fashion. When they are ready, they stop what they are doing and type stuff in.
Yeah we know all about the slacking off and playing games... shop floor cricket is our current favourite.
You get a big ball of brown sticky parcel tape off some of the supplier's boxes, then someone bowls it at the batter, if it makes it to the far end of the main gangway, thats 4 runs, over cell #7, thats 6 runs, and through the boss's window is known as an own goal. at which point the command is 'scatter' and the slowest is declared 'loser' (also has a fair chance of being fired).
OK, can people please stop pulling that $4 million figure out anymore. It was a number Musk pulled out of his orifice, for what he thought Twitter were losing per day when he took over. There has been no update to that figure since he sacked the entire C-suite, the board, 3/4 of the employees, stopped paying bills, and proceeded to alienate every major advertiser. So there is zero chance that the figure is anything like $4 million anymore.
Twitter is a dumpster fire that is still burning due to the sheer amount of crap that was in the Dumpster to start with. It will eventually sputter and die, taking a large portion of Musk's wealth and standing with it, but it's also got zero to do with Google, and cannot even be remotely compared to Google. So really bringing it up here was just trolling...
I love anonymous cowards with terrible hot takes.
Twitter has one business focus in one domain. Alphabet has many business focuses on lots of different areas.
The situations are different.
Twitter is a dumpster file under Musk. He's fired so many people that it isn't at all certain what would happen if
there was a major issue/outage.
Musk has made a huge mistake and shown everybody very publicly how big of an idiot he really is. Twitter is imploding, they can’t maintain their apis so have locked out 3rd party apps, they’re not paying their cleaners so devs are cleaning the toilets and their workspace, advertisers have left in droves as many of those “useless devs” were gatekeepers and safeguards to stop really bad content on twitter, not all techs are devs.
The people left are mostly on visas and may as well be forced labour at this point as it’s either accept pay reductions and work 24/7 for musk, or risk getting kicked out of the country.
Also, it’s not a good sign when they have stopped paying rent for major offices either. It almost feels like Musk is deliberately running it into the ground so he can say he tried but it was beyond saving.
But yeah, seems to be going great. Yay Musk.
"The billionaire hedge fund manager who runs a major Google investor isn't satisfied with the record 12,000 redundancies the US tech giant is making, and wants to see thousands more forced out of the organization."
"I'm a billionaire and want more money. Fuck the little people, they can get jobs elsewhere even though there is a recession".
Knob.
"Hi Chris."
"Hi Sundar, Nice to hear from you. How life at the Big G"
"Oh you know, just fired 12k.
Getting a bit of blowback about my stock options though.
Could you pop out a press release asking us to fire 20k instead."
"No Problemo - Why don't I make it a round 30k, that should make them properly grateful eh?"
Corporate tussles: It's actually like WWF wrestling
So the company is losing money with no prospect inside of fixing it, but the person who’s job is to ensure it does not and who is calling for something to be done is an “arsehole”?
Your hatred is not going to make things better and if people who work for the company do not produce what sells, they have to find another job.
But they aren't loosing money. Take YouTube for example, they make a massive killing over the adverts, it doesn't matter that quite a large amount of adverts are scam adverts now, it appears Google gives no shits as long as those adverts are being paid for and making them money.
This is the Milton Friedman formulation. The only responsibility of a company is to its shareholders.And since the modern shareholder is an asset stripping carpet bagger the only metric becomes the latest quarterly earnings. If the company crashes and burns next year that's just too bad.The vultures ( no disrespect t El Reg) will have flown. Probably having opened a bear account too, to benefit from the wreckage.
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