A well-researched article on the benefits being cut, maybe some analysis on how much it could be saving the company or what the impact of 12,000 jobs might be worth would make this much more readable.
This is at best an incomplete statement.
Advertising moved to a more lucrative technology and if good journalism comes to depend on subscription revenue, readers are not willing to pay in sufficient number.
We are now at least two generations removed from the faint echo of grammar being taught by somewhat informed personnel. Neither the people writing nor the people reading are adequately equipped.
ChatGPT now impresses people, for pity's sake.
Talent is hard to find in all domains, for money or love.
The question is basically 'are these memes representative of feelings within a larger subset of the company' and these sorts of takes don't really address that question at all. Memegen is not twitter.
I never met a guy named Dave I didn't like.
I can remember when the name collision on the internet was rare, now it's all day, every day. Given that my grandfather was David Smith, this leaves me with Smith and Watson, meaning that all roads lead to Ireland or Scotland, even if they involve swimming the English Channel.
the press is supposed to bring added value to things like Reddit, not copy it
The mechanics of that maneuver make it seem that staff are being laid off for the sake of creating resources that make compensation possible.
Would there be less layoffs if the compensation package was not as much?
I think the confusion is bad journalism. It’s not that at all.
Seriously, everything Google touches that doesn't bring in ad revenue does one or both of the following:
1. Is canceled after several years regardless of quality or impact
2. Fails to change the world
This is why he’s compensated so much, so that he can choose to do other things than care about the plight of the employees that the board wanted to lose.
To quote Sterling Archer... "oh, my stars!"
I don't know if it's just this reporter that's the joke or if it's CNBC as a whole.
He is getting a raise because the relative power of his position gives him coercive power over employees.
If any particular employee is upset with the decision he can make them feel pain, while it would take a lot of employees working together to cause him any pain at all. He can arbitrarily exercise his power because there is little to stop him or hold him back.
I'm not saying it's the right thing for the board to do (if I were on the board, I would've suggested he keep his pay even or take a cut), but it's not right to say that Sundar gets paid more because he has "coercive power" over employees.
it's not a direct relationship.
The CEO gets a pay rise if the board believes it to be something worth doing - for example, rewarding the CEO for doing something unpopular (and taking flak for it).
The employees "losing" isn't a cause, it's an effect. The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable. And if a company is more profitable, the CEO is doing it's job. A company doesn't look out for employees; at least only up to the extend where the employees make them money.
The question isn’t why the CEO got rewarded for doing X, but what changed to allow him to make this now vs those same cuts happening 10 years ago.
The relevant question is could those workers generate more than %5 returns on that $70B google is using for stock buybacks. The company leadership and investors seem to think the answer is NO.
Therefore you fire the workers, Give cash to investors, and the investors park it with the fed getting >5% interest, with zero risk, and no need to worry about workers, products, or customers.
This is the entire point of the FED rate raises. Hoover up all of the money floating around being invested in company growth and new product development.
Once you get enough layoffs and paycuts, eventually inflation will go down because people cant buy shit.
Thats the "long answer why".
If people can't buy stuff why wouldn't you expect marginal cost to go up?
More people buying more stuff means economies of scale. Less people buying less stuff means the loss of economies of scale.
If people are less able to buy stuff, I don't see any reason to believe that prices would go down. If anything it seems like it creates an incredibly negative feedback loop.
A company might firesale their inventory resulting a temporary reduction of inflation, but it seems like production would decrease because demand decreased, which would result in more layoffs and stagnation.
I am not an economist, so I guess I am curious why stagflation is not the expected result.
and they won't. Lowering inflation is not the same as ensuring prices drop (it might happen, but it would be an unintended effect of the Fed's policies).
prices will remain high (compared to pre-covid) but be stable after inflation drops down. And i would imagine that the Fed's policies would change if they start seeing deflation (which is when prices drop).
Here is the truth: Wage measures power, not usefulness, not productivity. Productivity puts a cap on wages because you can't pay a person more than they produce, but it does not determine the wage.
So when someone says:
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
This denies the idea that labor could be powerful enough to hurt the bottom line of the company enough that layoffs are not profitable.
The frame (more profit good) hid that for labor more wage and less layoffs are good. What is best for the company is being confused for what is best for everyone or what is best for labor, and labor cannot get what is best for themselves because they have no power.
You presupposed that what is best for the company is what is best with your choice of frame.
and there we have it - the difference in point of view. No company (nor anyone really) is making decisions that is "best for everyone", because that would imply altruism. And i am a stern believer that altruism does not exist.
From an employee point of view the primary goal is to keep your job. Pay raises, perks, wfh etc are all secondary to that. If you are laid off that is a failure. If your colleague is laid off you start getting worried. You see the failure and respond to that.
Since the laid off person failed, both the laid-off and the remaining consider the company to have failed, and by extension the company bosses to have failed, and expect pain at management level.
This is a point of view, and it's shared by many employees, but its not the only point of view.
Another group of people are the shareholders. They couldn't care less about staffing being up or down. They care about the share price. Staff, and costs, being cut means more profit. More profit means higher dividends or higher stock price. [1]
So this is a successful action. From the point of view of the board (which are a proxy for the shareholders), this is a good-job and the management is rewarded accordingly.
Now most people are employees, and the press wants most people to click on the headline, so most people consider layoffs to be bad. Even if you hold a few Google shares, and directly benefit, you don't consider your good fortune, you see 12000 failures, and naturally feel compassion for them.
(By the end of the week/month/year the compassion will have faded, and you'll be back checking your share prices.)
There could have been an article on how well Google stock price is doing, and will do, but no-one would read that.
Now as to your assertion that we're focusing on the "wrong thing". From one point of view, yes, 12000 people directly failed. If each had 3 friends remain that's 36000 who are very nervous. Let's describe the next 100 000 people as "startled".
From the other point of view its all upside.
Personally I'm neither a Google employee nor a shareholder so I'm neutral. Of course I feel compassion for the laid off, I'm not a monster. But I also understand the rules of the capitalism game the US has chosen to play. The rules the US has chosen, and I suspect the rules those 12000 will staunchly defend, is that ultimately its about the money point of view, not the labor point of view.
Google is playing the game. If you care enough then go somewhere else, or work to change the game[2]. But at the very least acknowledge the game itself, and learn the rules.
[1] a share buy-back is just a dividend disguised for tax purposes, and for employee compensation purposes.
[2] changing the rules is hard because the game is bipartisan at grass-roots level. The American-Dream is literally to be the direct benefit of capitalism. The money-talks ethic is fundamental to the American way-of-life.
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
That doesn’t explain timing as companies always want to be more profitable. So what prevented those cuts from happening sooner.
Thus the CEO’s decision to shaft these people is the result of those employees lack of economic, political etc power. If everyone would say quit for a better offer then he wouldn’t make that decision and thus wouldn’t get rewarded for the decision.
Employees are getting cost cuts rather than a raise because they lack power. He’s getting a raise because employees are getting shafted.
By getting rid of people he shouldn't have hired - where's the penalty for that money wasting and poor judgement?
He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
Also:
> More than a dozen memes from employees have filled Google’s internal discussion forums, many with several hundred likes, according to posts viewed by CNBC
This is the worst form of journalism. Cool, someone made a few memes. So what? You can make up any narrative if you scroll Twitter (or in this case memegen) long enough. That doesn't make it a real problem that you have to report on.