Doesn't every company hire as if they were hoarding Monopoly houses but not building hotels, so nobody else can build?

Why is this tone deaf? This is relatively consistent with the stories I've been hearing from friends at FAANGs and from a lower tier company, we have definitely been feeling the lack of engineers to hire for several years at this point

I think the tone-deaf part might be that its a billionaire saying that people being paid well under a million a year are making too much money.

Nobody becomes a billionaire off salary. Generally speaking, billionaires come to be billionaires because they created something that has value in the billions.

Someone who has created their own worth saying that there are people being paid salaries without creating enough value to justify said salaries is not tone deaf. I bet most billionaires - at the very least, the self made ones, which is most of them in the US - have a better sense of value than most other people.

The comment isn’t about making too much money. It’s about being given too much money in exchange for what is produced.

I don’t get it - which bit do you think is tone-death? Companies definitely try to keep engineers even if they don’t really need them to deny to others. But even if that’s not true how would it be ‘tone-death’?

How on earth is this tone deaf?

Anyone in the industry knows that's exactly why so many are hired and so little output happens. Anyone who has friends at the company will tell you those stories.

I've heard it from ex googlers themselves when I worked in SV. We recruited two of them, they hadn't worked on anything even remotely important/interesting at google for months, that was in 2015