The so-called “job creators,” everyone
“Reduce the ‘headcount’ but profits must not decrease by one single penny.”
Said no one who understands how businesses work, ever. If capitalism actually worked the way these people claimed it worked, we wouldn’t have so many idiot billionaires.
Our civilization rewards behavior like this, while literally punishing pro-social behavior like teaching.
Think about what that says about humanity. Our values are wrong and our entire species strives to elevate practicing sociopaths.
our society just rewards capitalism. it’s a simple economics problem, really. same product being made with fewer people to pay means company stock value goes up. if we really want to change, we need to flip that model over or heavily regulate it. things like increased hiring, pay raises, and societal contribution should be things that dictate the worth of a company to society, but we don’t speculate on stocks based on non monetary things like that. we just care about the bottom line at the end of the day…
Doesn’t even question what employees are possibly doing. Just says there are too many and they must be put out on the street. Says the people who are left are making too much money.
I say this a lot but…seriously…when do we start burning things?
My hatred of the owner class is matched only by my disappointment in my fellow humans for not only taking it, but often defending it.
The people we struggle for have abandoned their humanity. That’s what it takes to be one of society’s supposed winners or be in their good graces: practiced sociopathy.
And half of the peasants fantasize about being the sociopaths instead of ending their reign and this despicable con game of an economy.
Hedge fund. He doesn’t care about the employees or the company. Just the money he can make trading the stock.
I want to make money off of Google stock too, but I also want their shit to work so I can make more money in the future.
I own a little Google stock. I don’t mind they pay their employees a shit ton. I want them make good products. I’m not a fan of most their products but that’s just me
lol sorry to break it to you but a few bucks in fractional shares doesn’t count as “owning a little stock”
🤣
I feel like there aren’t enough heads turned on investors who could care about employees even less than companies do.
They even have more bargaining power than any employee or protester to make the company do what they want.
Summarize the letter into one or two sentences and read it in Mr Zorgs voice.
Yup, spot on.
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
I know this added nothing but I had to get that out.
a billionaire can’t sleep at night when he sees that number next to his name shrink
Can we, you know, eat this guy right now?
Yes, just get physically close enough to him and go for it.
If you can live with the consequences, you are free to do absolutely anything you want to do on this life.
I think the comments are cutting Alphabet too much slack. Yes the billionaire is heartless, but he isn’t wrong. Alphabet was careless. They binged on talent because they did not, and do not, place significant weight on the consequences of their hubris. Why? Because ultimately it is the workers that have to pay the price, not the executives that hired carelessly. If you do not force management to care, they won’t.
I always think of Indeed and their CEO. They too hired too many too quickly and were forced to fire. What did the CEO do? Not only did the company make sure the severance package was generous, the CEO took a pay cut too.
All well and good, but the thing is… Even the narrative that workers now have to pay for the CEO’s mistakes gives the CEO an unjustified excuse.
Nope. Alphabet is insanely, embarrassingly profitable and was during their first layoffs. There is no reason why they needed to fire anyone. If they committed to their workers a fraction of they level they demand their workers commit to them, they would not have done the layoffs.
The thing about Google is that they have one of the highest profit-per-employee metrics in the whole industry.
I have heard that sometimes they hire talents just so the competitors don’t get them, so talented people end up doing bullshit jobs and the salary discourages them from moving to more interesting but risky endeavors.
Edit: source https://www.businessinsider.com/google-meta-staff-do-fake-work-says-vc-keith-rabois-2023-3?r=US&IR=T
Yup, I heard this rumor at Google when I worked there, and it does make some amount of sense. If the best engineers aren’t working for the competition, then nobody else can compete. I doubt it’s true, but it did often felt like we were paid to work on trivial tasks.
It’s a shame because there was work that could have been done to improve Google’s business, but execs took engineers off of them to move to Google Cloud (AKA, “sit on your hands and wait 2 years for your doc to be approved”). Google had so many good products that engineers truly wanted to work on like Stadia, Domains, and Area 120, and they cancelled them all. It happened so often that a couple of my coworkers pretended to hate working on their team “so it wouldn’t get cancelled”.
Whenever I hear of another billionaire I’m filled with a kind of tearful revulsion.
“This thing employs people who produce AMAZINGLY profitable and world famous stuff.”
“It also has way too many people working on producing stuff, based on my analysis which began and ended with counting up how many people and what it costs to pay them.”
“Time to kill the people. Then it’ll only be the profitable stuff, and none of the cost of the people. I’m amazed no one has realized this yet.”
Sundar Pichai getting roasted by his peers for not being hardcore enough lmao.
“You barely emaciated the livelihoods of any workers this year, Sundar. Lookit how happy your employees are, it’s a fuckin disgrace, mate. Take a look at the stock price. It’s fookin depressed mate!”
Oh, I very much doubt that he’s the only billionaire who’s written a letter like this to Google in the past year.
They’ve written one like that to every tech company. It’s probably just so they can repeat the conditions from before they got sued for colluding to depress employee wages. This has the same effect, except this time it’s not collusion, it’s doing their fiduciary duty because shareholders are demanding it.
I can’t feel too bad for people who made $150 an hour to knowingly exploit the entire world just because they got fucked over.
He’s asking for layoffs because we raised his taxes OBVIOUSLY otherwise he would be calling for MORE jobs!
