> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law.
Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.
Law in the sense that there is legal precedence from court cases, yes. Law in the sense that there are literal statutes saying so, no. Sadly, both matter.
There is not such precedence. There sort of is precedence that you have to say you're doing it, but you can implement that by basically doing anything you want.
It is true that you can sue a company for securities fraud if they do essentially anything that you can claim made the share value go down, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.
Well... that's a slightly complicated question. It's definitely not quite as simple as "companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all other concerns". But while directors and executives are given wide latitude to run the company according to their judgment, they don't have carte blanche to do "whatever they want" either.
More to the point, while a company as a whole can do more than simply "maximize profit to the exclusion of all else", the caveat seems to be that they can do so if the owners (eg the shareholders) agree.
From the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case:
While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
The question I see then, is how much influence a single shareholder can truly yield based on this principle. That is, of course, assuming they don't single-handedly hold a controlling share of the company to the point that they can simply replace the board with whoever they want and enforce any arbitrary edict. Given a publicly traded company, it seems clear that some shareholders are going to want the "maximize my stock value at any expense" while others are going to go for more of a "do the humanitarian thing and treat (employees|the environment|whatever) well" or such-like.
civil law, you've heard that you can sue anybody for anything? You can...
...but the thing that makes such a "tort" lawsuit matter is damages, what damage did I do to you that you are now suing me. Like, if you're a pedestrian and I hit you with my car, your lawsuit against me depends on showing a monetary value for how I damaged you, for example, days of lost work. If you weren't injured, and went on about your day, week, month and life, you weren't damaged and there's no grounds for the lawsuit, even though my gross negligence could have damaged you 9 times out of 10. (This is an example to make a different point, we are going to ignore "emotional distress", etc.)
if you're a shareholder and I am the CEO and I have the company pursue goals that don't maximize the value of your shares, that cost resources and don't have a chance of maximizing shareholder value, when I could have, I have monetarily damaged you.
The linked wikipedia article directly contradicts the medium article on this.
With respect to the Dodge decision, could other Ford shareholders have sued the Dodge brothers for forcing Ford to yield dividends once the Dodge brothers then used those dividends to undercut the value of Ford stock by creating a competitor? Or do minority shareholders not have a duty to other minority shareholders the way majority shareholders do?
Over the past decade, Google paid massive salaries to people building one failed bet after another, while Search and Youtube Ad revenue continued to grow and literally nothing else matters.
No kidding. When I see FAANG on a resume I read: grinds leetcode, comfortable jumping through mindless hoops, comfortable with extreme amounts of bureaucracy as long as they’re being paid, etc.
I’d generally prefer someone from a technically sound venture funded startup.
I worked at Google for 7 years, admittedly a decade ago. We didn't grind leetcode, We didn't jump through mindless hoops, and we had almost 0 bureaucracy. So for at least that letter in the acronym it was nothing like you describe.
It is simply not the same organization as it was when you worked there. The 2011 employees account for at most 10% of the workforce today once attrition is taken into account.
It doesn't expire for 60 days because they're not "really" unemployed till then. Which is still extremely bad government policy; you don't want your best taxpayers to leave.
Paying tax as an employee isn't opt-in.
Paying tax as an employer isn't opt-in.
Why both of them? This has never made any sense to me.
I don't know how it works in United States. In Europe, Companies declaring the money deducted from the salary they have paid to the tax office, the employee is correcting if it is right or wrong. If they need to pay, they pay more, if not, they receive more.
Anyway my feeling is still the same, being employed by google means you're unemployed. This is a feeling. Being employed by apfel would make me feel different.
I too go to dinner and expect to pay with the pearl I find in my oyster. FAANG are relatively merit based jobs that pays exceptionally above band and a lot of people try to get into them. The jobs are scarce, sure there is more talent, but you basically are getting insurance on candidate quality.. Saying I'd rather hire someone who comes from something much more statistically unlikely and even harder to do due diligence.
My experience is opposite to what you described. I got into faang with minimal leetcode grind and didn't have to jump many hoops. The career move not only removed the unnecessary bureaucracy from my daily activities and tools, but also finally gave me actually challenging problems to work on. I suppose it's always a matter of perspective, but I'd wager 90% of work at 90% of startups doesn't equate rocket science. When looking for a startup to work for, you have to filter out a lot of bad ones and the balance between difficult and impossible can be hard to strike. If you have a good idea and a decent skillset founding can be impressive, but generally I've found faang engineers to seem more apt than most people I've met at/seen in startups, with the exception of 1-2 superstars per startup.
This ruling [Dodge vs Ford Motor Company (1919)] stands at the heart of the current situations being faced by companies like Google today.
—-
It really doesn’t. First, that’s a Michigan case interpreting Michigan law. Almost every non trivial US company is incorporated in Delaware and subject to Delaware law.
Delaware law does have somewhat similar cases, eBay v. Newmark is a good one to read but …
Second, in both the Ford and Craigslist cases what was happening was really blatant. Courts are not in the business of deciding this or that corporate policy isn’t instantly maximizing shareholder value. What they won’t necessarily let you do is announce that you, being a controlling shareholder, never ever intend to make money and it sucks to be a minority shareholder.
Yeah, this is bullshit. Shareholders aren't compelling this to happen. At most theyre cheering it on.
This has more of a flavor of Google's 2011 "caught fixing wages and forced to pay a $300 million fine" scandal.
Of course some believe that the idea that they might have done something that they have already been found guilty of in the past to be nothing more than a implausible harebrained conspiracy theory.
There was a similar court case in the 80s. I believe it was a shareholder lawsuit and that it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court was asked whether a company can take into account a variety of stakeholder & community interests in its decisionmaking, or must it seek to maximize shareholder return.
In the case, the court ruled that shareholder return is the only legitimate goal.
I suspect this case was very influential, and I would be grateful to anyone who can track it down.
The point is that the meaning of "seek to maximize shareholder return" is defined almost entirely by management, not shareholders. That's what "management" means.
Is there any publicly available commentary on what kinds of roles these big tech companies such as Google were chopping, and in what percentages?
Were these layoffs mostly recruiting/HR types, various managers, marketers, etc, or programmers?
Did they chop 70% of their recruiting/HR types, but closer to 1% of their techies, or vice versa?
Analyzing these layoffs IMO might be best done through the lens of what kind of roles were cut. If they didn't truly hit the real talent (the best programmers) there's a much different analysis that could be made.
It’s top secret, for some reason. What that could even be hiding I have no idea - if the goal is increasing investor confidence then you’d think they’d release at least some vague data
Pay attention to the upcoming earnings call on Feb 2. I bet they'll talk about some of these details. Until then, saying anything would be, I suspect, materially significant non-public information.
The company can make an official statement making it public at any time. Releasing information to the public is not restricted to earnings calls, but they generally don't have incentive to do otherwise.
Yes, this is what I was getting at. You see this information released once per quarter in a very regimented and tightly controlled way, with lawyers triple-checking everything first. You're just not gonna materially significant numbers released off-cycle. You would simply wait for the end of the quarter.
To make stuff not MNPI the company just has to release it. Then it just becomes public information. They can release literally everything if they want to.
I understand that layoffs are a blunt instrument and it is unlikely that all of the “right” people were affected, but Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and vest. No Facebook PSC, no Amazon stack ranking, no Netflix “sports team”. Obviously it is team dependent, but it really has that reputation. The well-known tradeoff is that getting a promo to a post-senior level is borderline impossible.
Like, blame definitely falls on leadership here, ICs didn’t come up with the ten chat apps or streaming gaming failure, but the chilling couldn’t last forever.
I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google.
> I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google.
When I was in college years ago, I knew a guy whose plan was to turn his Amazon internship into a FTE offer, work there a couple years, and then go to Google and quote "sit."
It worked. Not a bad plan in the early/mid 2010s ;)
When I started 10 years earlier just being able to get paid to program was amazing. My first job in 2001 was for minimum wage. I wonder how many developers exist who wouldn't if pay wasn't so high.
We are likely about to find out. In the end this could be a good thing, shake out a lot the bootcampers and leave the people who like to code. On the downside, people like me like to code and also rest n' vest. :/
I think neither? Or rather, it's a function of 1) the accuracy of managers knowing who is a sitter and 2) the percentage of your company is sitters. If the percentage is, say, 20% and the manager hit rate is, say, 20%..I'd say both moves end up firing more useful people than sitters.
Even if you take it to say managers cannot figure it out and always get it wrong (0% hit rate). Random layoffs are still a net negative even if they outperform managers picking the firings.
It's pretty funny how even without unions, companies have no recourse to me barely working and collecting a quarter mil a year.
It's a fact that it is the collective perception. Whether people actually get to chill is team dependent but from my understanding you can't really do 30 hour weeks at Facebook, Amazon or Netflix, but it's more possible at Google.
The statement you challenged was "Google has long been known as the FAANG to go to if you want to chill, coast, and vest". Additional people chiming in saying they, too had this perception is evidence that that is something Google is known for, and not just by OP.
Obviously it is impossible to measure this sort of thing objectively, but if you know enough people that bounce around in FAANGs or check Blind, this is pretty widely the opinion.
Blind turns into the worst version of a company pretty quickly. It would have you believe that both anyone can get a job at certain companies and that others fire their entire staff.
My understanding is that google historically simply didn’t give raises or approve projects for under performers. As long as someone didn’t rock the boat or put up low quality CRs, or stop working entirely, they would be left alone - and maybe google wouldn’t bother to give them any new stocks when their grant expired.
That's what people there tell me. I'm sure it depends a lot on what part of Google people work for, but yeah, come in late, leave early, long lunches, work-outs, meetings to discuss meetings... I don't know how they got things done. In plenty of companies things that took a team of seven with a manager could be accomplished by two. So, yeah, the reputation has some known basis but may not reflect all of Google.
Everyone in the Bay knows that Google is the retirement home. I knew people who worked there who left because no one on their team would write anything. Show up at 11, lunch at 1, leave at 4 after meetings.
And you know that when people call it "best WLB" they're talking about something specific.
Google had that reputation when compared to Amazon and Facebook, but that is hardly a bad thing considering the culture at those companies (and it's not like they are doing too hot right now either despite all that stack ranking and overwork). There are plenty of large tech companies with real "retirement home" reputations – Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, VMware, Adobe, Intel, HP, Dell... There's no comparison between this tier and Google in terms of tech standard, productivity and really anything else.
There's probably a significant difference when you factor in stock appreciation (particularly for the long timers), but I'd wager base salary stays within 10-20% at all these companies for the same level/experience/location.
can you provide some data for those who are absolutely not "in" the stock market? how did you interpret that wager? what starting date and what sell price?
The wager wasn't about the stock market, but about base salary being within 10%-20% for all companies for the same position. This is absolutely not the case. Check levels.fyi for more information
Meta does not have public levels. Everyone’s title is Software Engineer, from IC3 to IC10. Some senior ICs do have a view into levels, since they are involved in performance reviews.
At Google, you can see other people’s levels, and they have titles: “Senior”, “Staff”, and so on.
That's an interesting observation and something I somewhat suspect myself.
Google's long been criticised for byzantine and ineffective hiring and ranking processes. The thought occurs that perhaps management have decided that unbiased random staff reductions are the least-harmful way to go about this.
The problem remains that under circumstances of layoffs, those with options to do so are still more likely to leave, resulting in a net negative selection against the most effective and productive workers. (Or at least those who can make a case for appearing to be same.)
I'm not utterly convinced of the above, though it's a working hypothesis and will be interesting to see how it plays out over time.
Google itself benefited from that image. Many people chose an offer from Google with total comp X instead of another company with total comp Y when X is lesser than Y by a significant amount. In the future, seldom any one will make any such decision. Google has to pay more for the same caliber of people.
Of course, I am assuming that the market will turn around some time in the future. If the market remains this bleak forever, tech candidates no longer have any choices so Google doesn't have to care.
I personally know someone that joined Google and had some bug fixes or something ready in their first couple weeks and their team told them they don't work that way, don't be competitive. Sounds great! :)
The market for talent is quite competitive. Companies need to pay market rates and have a staff that's large enough to compete. In a market where capital is cheap they will bid up rates and hire more people. If you don't do this you give your competitors a chance to beat you. Companies might be able to slow it down a little bit, but not entirely. Similarly in a market where capital is expensive they need to reduce the spend and team size.
Google is a public company. If part of the team is costing them more than the value they create for shareholders, there will be immense pressure to down size. This is actually healthy in a way since talent frees up for other companies. The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up
In my experience, COBRA is not cheaper, because you end up paying the company's part, as well as your own, and you suddenly realize how much of the load they carried.
I live in a state with a pretty damn good Obamacare implementation, and I'm quite grateful.
In my experience, COBRA ends up costing about 2.5x for employees who've left a company that subsidizes their insurance premiums.
Perhaps it's more reasonable if it's for a single young person with a high deductible. The last time I was on COBRA, the cost was unbelievable. For a family of 4, it was over $3k per month, and that was 5 years ago.
> The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up
You can certainly get health insurance without being tied to employment. Without COBRA or any other workarounds. Has everone forgotten Obamacare? (Single payer would be nicer though.)
Not sure about your state's Obamacare, but all the plans offered in my state only cover in network providers. Whereas my employer's plan also covers out of network which I used for therapy. Now I'm stuck paying full price and unemployed for therapy as COBRA was way too expensive to keep going, even with my severance, because who knows how long it's going to take to get a job. It's been pretty slow so far and I've spent everyday sending my resume around and shaking down my network.
Yet, everyone here is ignoring this. In reality, every company (whether Silicon, Oil or Rocks) is just a businesses; and at the end of the day they are in the business of arbitrage: They buy something with $xx and sell it for $yy. Interest rates affect that.
This over-hiring and over-firing is being instigated by the Fed. Tech (or otherwise) companies are reacting to that.
You work for google because you make insane money and have cachet you can take anywhere and get hired instantly. Hell, you can pull in 10 million funding for your startup idea if you like. Or just retire, get a boat, go sailing.
Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already.
I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no, I don't sit around wringing my hands and thinking, but what will become of our beloved and sacred google? I could not possibly give a shit about google. But maybe someday I'll get a fucking boat.
By that logic everyone in the world is privileged compared to those earning 5% less than them, including every person here complaining about a Google employee's privilege. So what does that word mean exactly?
Regardless of the number, getting paid for your labor & skills is not "privilege". Employees at Google are getting fleeced by the corporation and its shareholders just like the rest of us are by ours. Remember the big tech poaching scandal from a decade ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...)?
Hey what's your job? You don't need to tell me. But I'm gonna go ahead and say you're privileged compared to a rural chinese farmer that has never held a phone.
Given how many of them leave their kids with the grandparents and move to Guangdong, etc. to work in the factories and live in bunk houses and send money back home, only seeing their kids once a year during Spring Festival, I think they might not be content. (On the other hand, I guess the ones still farming would be happier, by virtue of self-selection.)
If you ask the people who were gentrified out of the mission when FAANGers decideed the Peninsula wasn't cool and would move into the Mission, if FAANGers are privileged or just a regular joes and janes, I'm pretty sure I can predict their answer.
Relative to COL, it depends. I mean sure, If they moved to King City, maybe? But then why all the complaints about SF affordability if the answer is "move to a locale where your income allows you to afford rent without rent control" --if you can find a job"
Earning $200k/yr without doing anything special is a privilige very few people in the world get to enjoy.
I have no sympathy for these people.
Learn a real skill and do something useful.
Before you jump and say they do have a skill: why are they whining then? People who have skills don't whine when they are laid off. They just go and find another place to work.
The fact that they need to whine so loudly about it tells you everything you need to know: they have nothing of value to contribute, or they were getting paid many times more than their skill is actually worth.
And I bet you think your $50K/$100K/$150K or whatever else salary is perfectly justified and you are adding great value to the world. Why is that? Or will you admit that you are privileged as well?
I have admitted multiple times on HN and elsewhere that I don't think anything I've done in my career has been particularly valueable or useful to society.
I totally own it. I not only don't complain about being "laid off". I often quit jobs myself and spend some "gap" time doing nothing before I find the next job.
Currently I'm not working for anyone because I'm sick of all tech jobs.
Okay then I guess everyone on the planet with a steady job is privileged. What about the business/corporate class? Do you think they have more or less privilege than their workers?
> Often quit jobs myself and spend some "gap" time doing nothing
That is a privilege that not many people can afford, especially lower income workers. You're speaking from an enviable position of privilege while complaining about others having privilege. Perspective.
Typically when you use "quotes" it means you're using the same exact words that someone stated. I didn't say you were "whining", I said you were complaining. And you were.
Privileged or not they're all workers, as any other person who depends on a salary. They earn more but it doesn't make them less workers than others, solidarity among workers is the bare minimum we should have...
Mate these people aren't your enemy no matter how much you think they make compared to you. You think it was only blue haired 300k social media managers that got layed off or something? There's sand pounding IT guys there that got layed off too, I know for a fact cause some are my friends. Yeah it was a Google job so it was lux but they were running fiber and getting called in at 2am cause some clueless executive's email broke again.
I don't know why people are buying into cult of Google either, I think that's silly, what matters here isn't just that a bunch of people got laid off, but also that now all their former co-workers still at Google have to pick up all their jobs without any more compensation for it. All the saves money from reduction of cost is going to nobody but shareholders - which employees might be a little bit if they're vested, but not to the degree of larger shareholders who contribute nothing.
But what labor did they contribute? Follow the chain and at most what they did was buy someone else's labor and attach it to the Google brand (through having more cash for hiring), there's other ways to do that though, like loans, or structuring as a co-op so all employees are simply the only shareholders.
There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism. The theory is cute and some people in Europe thought it would work. It didn't and that's how we ended up with capitalism. Humans are capitalist traders by instinct. Marxism makes logical sense, however.
Humans are Feudal creatures by instict - thats why feudalism lasted thousands of yeats.
Democracy and freedom are fragile and unnatural, they must be cherished.
> There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism.
This is the brain disease of American politics, anyone pointing out injustice of any kind is accused of Marxism.
The only acceptable way for society to evolve is ever-increasing privilidges for the wealthy untill average man can never hope to afford real estate and can't afford a layer.
> There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism.
Too late, I'm already a communist. A very capitalistically successful one, mind you.
Further along this thread is way off topic, I don't want to kick off a flame war of communism vs capitalism, I wanted to see what people have in mind about how companies like Google, that exist in a capitalist system, can be forced to care for the needs of their employees over the needs of their shareholders. Whether or not the system should / can be changed is, well, another thread or something lol, not for here.
That said your comment has some interesting ideas that I'm seeing as misconceptions ("some people in Europe that thought it would work" are arguably some of the most important philosophers in the western tradition) but maybe you're thinking along some lines I'm not aware of, so if you want to chat about this I'd love to do so in email, my address is on my profile page here.
The assumption that price paid == utility is only valid in the economic equivalent of "assume no friction" from intro-level physics. The equivalence isn't guaranteed to hold once you bring individuals' budget sets and various market distortions into play (information problems, sticky prices, et alia). You see the same thing on the supply side, with the assumption that price sold == marginal cost breaking down in general, except under very specific conditions.
Bottom line: you're still only valuing something by what you are willing to pay for it. That is its value to you. (Others assign a different value, but that's how the market works.)
Right but notice utility is mentioned nowhere. Demand is totally irrational, because it's human. See toilet paper, fujifilm x100v, tesla stock, NFTs. Supply can be arbitrarily subject to the irrational whims of humanity as well - see oil, diamonds.
"Supply + demand" seems an oversimplification of a huge chain of irrational human links.
What actual risk does an investor take? Loss of capital? Compared to an employee who, in the situation where capital is lost, loses the means by which they feed and house themselves, and in the USA, provide healthcare for themselves?
On top of which, right now, investors aren't really taking much loss. This action by Google is done for shareholder value. So not only is the loss for an employee higher in a situation that "harms" a shareholder, it's also more pervasive: the employee might get fired anyway through no fault of their own, even if it's not because the company is going bankrupt and everyone's losing their money.
And while all this is happening the investor has invested in other ventures, potentially even competitors. If google goes bankrupt they lose their initial investment, which by most financial advisories I see should not account for a significant portion of their investment, retirement, or even just savings, so by material measures, they'll be fine.
Meanwhile the employee has put in their time, energy effort. They haven't been able to explore other means of making money, do research into potential investments for themselves. They've been building social capital, specific domain knowledge, client relationships, things that hold some value after a Google collapse, but not all.
At the end of the day I just don't see why what an investor does has any value at all compared to an employee. Can you help me understand better what you mean?
Google is an outlier in that the employees (in some departments) can begin to approach the wealth of the large investors. In most companies, the shareholders are rewarded far and away beyond what employees are rewarded with, even though their opportunity costs are generally lower (even if they theoretically risked large nominal amounts in their investments). The assertion is that investors generally tend to be rewarded disproportionately to their value contributed.
How many Robinhood users have made more than pocket change without losing it all in a subsequent gamble? And of those who did, how many are not already at an upper income bracket?
Obviously you realize that investing in stocks is risky. Risk is the flip side of making investment gains. Anyone who invests in stocks takes a risk that it tanks.
You asserted that Robinhood is evidence that "labor" in general has access to "rich-get-richer" mechanisms. My assertion is that this assertion is not valid.
The rich-get-richer mechanism in question is investing pre-existing large amounts of money in investments that are more or less zero risk, specifically from the perspective of the investor's personal livelihood and well-being. This is simply not available to most people, even if they do have access to zero-commission fractional-share trading on Robinhood.
Also, "labor" covers a large amount of people, of whom a very small subset are Robinhood users, and of whom an even smaller subset are legitimately successful traders, as opposed to one-off financial market lottery winners (who are themselves a small subset of all users).
When an investor buys shares of a company, the company doesn’t get that money, the other seller investor does. No investment capital is “contributed” to the company (unless the seller is actually the company itself).
These investors aren’t contributing capital to the company—they are betting on one square on a roulette wheel.
Theoretically, being a shareholder exposes you to the risk of the company failing or the shares otherwise becoming worthless. The previous owner is selling their investment to you, and it is now as if you are the original investor, for whatever price the shares were originally sold by the company. So there's a kernel of substance in there at least.
If they have real skills they can find employment else where.
They are whining because they know they were being over compensated at Google and that they are unlikely to be able to find another job that pays so much money with so little effort.
They're not my enemies but they're not my friends. I don't feel sympathy for them. If anything, they should feel sympathy for me and give me some of that extra cash they've been getting. Why do they deserve it more than I do? I can do "nothing at all" just as well as they did.
Maybe they do, have you talked to some? Also, why should they feel sympathy for you, if you're not interested in feeling sympathy for others?
> give me some of that extra cash they've been getting. Why do they deserve it more than I do?
They don't. Is it their fault that they get paid more and you get paid less for the same or different jobs? Are you pointing your finger at the right people, here?
> I can do "nothing at all" just as well as they did.
You seem to not like when people aren't paid per their labor output. You and I are probably quite aligned in our values, if that's the case. You and I both, for example, surely both find it insane that there are people, hardworking or otherwise, who now command orders of magnitude more capital than anyone on earth, or even in history.
Compared to a billionaire, you at whatever you make, let's say 50k, working harder than a googler making 200k for the same or easier job, are basically siblings in capital. I'd even go so far as to call you class allies.
Perhaps the direction of your anger being pointed distinctly away from the people who are actually causing this injustice is helping same? So why are you mad at random people who make a little bit more than you, rather than at someone that makes several tens of millions a year by simply existing?
I think your frustration is better directed at capitalism in general instead of your fellow workers. Also if you can do their job as well as them, go spend time studying how to interview at Google and get a job there too.
And below you in the IT sewer are the poor and forsaken, who look upon your work and statements and call you equally privileged while you post on a startup forum started by some of the wealthiest individuals around. You are equally out of touch and yet unable to see this as you look upwards and claim no, it is them that are out of touch.
None of that really disagrees with the commenters point though. They might indeed be privileged and out of touch (nearly guaranteed in fact), but that does not mean Googlers aren’t even more so.
Not that I particularly mind either way: we are all a privileged lot in the tech world. Myself absolutely included!
It's not a useful/interesting to just say "you're privileged, stop having thoughts/opinions".
We'd quickly just shut down all conversation ever because none of us are 8 year old british chimney sweeps covered in soot. In which case, how is the world a better place?
We can acknowledge that there's a lens where some people have privileges ("privileged isn't a binary state") and then still have a discussion about what happened.
What is with this thread? Why is a job being called a privilege? Are we completely discounting hard work and merit. Its not like people are inheriting jobs at Google.
If working at Google such a privilege and is the goal, work towards it. Like so many other people did, take up a student loans and put yourself through school, build your resume, take up projects, internships, work experience etc. Prep for interviews, what ever it takes. Then you can take the job and enjoy the "spoils", what ever those are.
One can't just decide not to put in the work and then look at the guy who did and say... privileged.
If you're upset that you spend your days fighting rats and not making insane money, I think you should target your anger at your boss who keeps you in that situation, rather than at other workers who have it better than you.
> I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work.
So umm you are claiming that you are part of a class that will always have work and stability unlike the people who work at faang. (Debatable but lets take the claim at face value). You are literally saying that we should not care about the plight of googlers because they are in a different class, which is subject to drawbacks which people like you don't face because of your class. And that that makes them privliged. Did i get that right?
That is an interesting definition of privlidge you have there.
I'm trying hard to feel sorry for SV FAANG workers getting laid off but I can't[1].
I'm also struggling to see how their self-esteem will take years to recover from this.
Those cosseted 'engineers' earn probably 2 to 4 times a year more than me, and get meals etc. Their severance package is probably my annual wage. Plenty of time to find another gig with their FAANG resumes that suits their expectations.
Perhaps if they spent a few years in the less rarified development jobs a lot of us deal with they might better understand their position in the world.
I love how all the W2s be fighting against themselves as though they aren't all in the same position. Yes, there's a big difference between $300k and $30k. It doesn't feel quite so big, though, when one medical bill can bankrupt you, regardless. Or you're living paycheck to paycheck because school cost you $150k (plus interest). We all have a lot more in common than not. Hard is hard and people matter. Those laid off got a bad deal, period, because it has less to do with actual "merit" and more to do with at-will is a bad deal.
>Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders.
Not in that context. They have a duty to their shareholders, not absolute maximum profits. Plenty of further unethical methods that could be used if that was the goal.
Iron law of organizations states that any org over time will put the perpetuation of the org first, not the orgs mission that it was founded with. Those with that vision leave for better places, leaving voids filled by those whom cannot genuinely replace it. Purpose is lost, things slow down, and every solution is a myriad of bandaids and placebos to keep it afloat. A cow to milk. This was obvious when all these projects were born to fail and hiring practices started filtering hiring for binary search trees.
Same story across the board. They've lived past their expiration date, and rely upon the law and vertical integration to prevent anyone else from competing.
My two cents; by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success.
A general social trend to value tech in our lives seems lost on the genius CEOs. They really seem to think billions care they specifically exist, when really if they did not someone else would have been CEO. Some other company that came before Google would be Google big if not Google quality in search (which has gone to shit under the management of their current genius CEO).
Hubris, lack of social awareness, lack of career experience outside the Google RDF created a hyper-normalized world view.
Paraphrasing PG, who wrote somewhere, I forget where, don’t underestimate the power of money to motivate. We’re not picking good companies, just playing simple arithmetic games with fiat money.
> Before getting into that it’s worth noting that all publicly listed companies operate under a fiduciary duty to maximise profits for their shareholders.
Myth or not - mass terminations don't maximize profits anyway. In fact it is impossible to predict what will maximize or reduce profits beyond some trivial scenarios. Imagine if you could - every company would be nearly infinitely profitable. So they can do anything under the guise of "maximizing profits" and nobody can challenge it because there is no objective measure for it.
Stout's article and follow-up book The Shareholder Value Myth both make much the same argument. She thinks people want to have a simple picture of the "purpose" of a corporation, and lean on this idea of shareholder value maximization as a crutch. In reality, a corporation is just another chaotic political body with different voting rules.
I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and not mess it up and maybe grow it by x%. Most engineering leadership above the staff level is usually better at "aligning" with upper management and that's why they're kept around.
The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.
Because it's like child rearing, or teaching, or vim vs emacs but there are more choices and many more dimensions, oh and there's almost no data, big cargo cults (from Toyota Improvement System, Deming, Agile manifesto to endless books by those who made it in the last decade), uncertainty is high, general intelligence is low, the interpersonal skills deficit is mind-boggling, burnout/disillusionment/fanaticism are rampant, perverted/misaligned incentives too, and of course all of that is driven by fundamental business constraints and various other sources of path-dependence.
My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.
Big companies are all about politics, all the time, in my experience. Smart business/product decisions require many quarters, sometimes years, of discipline and commitment to pay off. Whereas a shorter term focus results in less headache, possible promotion, and guaranteed bonuses. If/when the company craters, you can just bail. The sign of a great executive is somebody who empowers their organization to think ahead of the next earnings report, and backs it up (and doesn't get fired themselves in the process). They're an endangered species.
It’s also harder to attribute something you did 4 years ago as paying dividends now. Heck you probably won’t have any people with context on why that was a good decision on the team anymore.
I joined two years ago so that’s just how things are done here as far as I’m concerned!
If the executive isn’t great, then yes the company won’t be great either. That, however, begs the question why you (one) would work there. Why accept low standards, average colleagues, meaningless work.
But perception and relationships is what will ultimately drive sales, because customers are people too. What's difficult is finding the balance between product, marketing/sales, and tech. An easy example but I find Steve Jobs really personified this, the marketing vision was an integral part of the product. The failure is favouring one over the other, and yes naturally in big companies the relationship people will take over, but startups too tech centric without customer culture regularly fail too.
There is no exception. Don't fool yourself. Nor should you fool yourself into thinking this means management is inferior/inept. Or that it is sales.
The reality is dumb people do not have a monopoly on dumb things. Nor smart on smart things. Timing and circumstance are impossible to separate from any situation. Are lucky people also skilled at taking the correct risks? Almost certainly. Is this a learned thing? I'm not sure.
My gut is it is learnable. But not if others are learning the same thing. What makes a smart choice is influenced by what everyone else is doing.
To paraphrase, it is not that most leadership/high management is poorer than expected, it appears poorer even when it is expected to be poorer than expected.
At some point between the ages of 20 and 30, you begin to believe that, although it is difficult to point out what they are better at than you or your peers, in order to be in the position they are in, "leaders" must be better in some way--say, in the technical skills, the strategies and tactics used to achieve a goal, the personality that inspires subordinates--than you and your colleagues.
Then, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly, thanks to age, experience, and new, maybe more jaded, eyes, you realize that the words, strategies, and perspectives communicated or elaborated by those "leaders," which you thought were nonsense but had decided to consider something you simply did not have the tools to understand, were, in fact, nonsense, delusional thinking, intellectual garbage.
And, at that point, you may try to understand how it is possible for such important companies to have such incompetent leaders. But that is another story.
This is empirically verifiable and, dare I say it, quite visible.
It is also a virtuous circle: you come in early, you are promoted because there is virtually no one else around, or you are chosen as the best among a group of fairly mediocre people--maybe they use a die to choose who will become the new "leader" of the group--and in a couple of months you go from being just another IC to a rising star.
You are quickly recognized as such and, in an environment with very loose feedback cycles such as management in the technology sector, you are free to fake your way up to the top. As soon as you are exposed, if ever, you can recycle yourself elsewhere as a true and proven leader of vast experience.
Or, assuming you are not very good at leadership in absolute terms, you do a good job anyway because most management is skirting responsibilities, taking advantage, in a good way, of colleagues and the machinery that makes the company work, and, most of all, going with the flow.
"Leaders" are good at one thing: communicating in a palatable way to other leaders. It's a skill, and it is useful to an extent, but it isn't worth the "2x-10x pay because boss has to be paid more than reports"
The reason executives talk the way they do is because when you’re speaking to thousands of people everyone has different base context and interprets things a little different. Messages need to be coarse grained and contain little nuance. This is at the heart of all politics.
It’s easy to assume therefore that the words are intellectual garbage, but that’s not always the case. In fact there’s no way to tell competent and incompetent leadership apart just from speeches they give, but make no mistake the distinction exists, and as an employee it’s critical to ferret out the answer over time as you will learn entirely the wrong lessons if you work for muppets for any length of time.
Fortunately good leadership does exist. It is usually built over decades of a solid skill foundation (ie. Experts leading experts) rather than MBAs, and the top skill is sniffing out bullshit. Of course every company has a mix of people, but in healthy ones there will be a critical mass of competent people and they generally know who each other are and keep things pointed in the right direction.
I think that "messages need to be coarse-grained and contain little nuance," as stated in the comment, is a comforting thought, but it has little truth to it. I just have observations, many of them anyway, and not any proper experimental or observation study, but reflecting on them has changed the lens through which I look at leadership and management.
When you say in the previous comment that "it's easy to assume that words are intellectual garbage, but that's not always the case," I see the position/authority bias at work: it can't be nonsense, they are the leaders, what they say has to make sense, if only seen in the context of having to speak all day, or to dozens, hundreds, thousands (unlikely outside of politics) of people every day.
Or look at the layoffs at Twitter, Meta, Google, etc.: even if they seem to make little sense (some of the decisions anyway) in the way they are done, somehow they have to make sense, either because the layoffs are a "blunt instrument," or because the shareholders are asking for something particular or whatever.
I would like to bring an example. A person in my company was hired in a management role, overseeing a function for a group of hundreds of people. As soon as they gave their first "speech," it was clear to my shrewd eyes that the words uttered made no sense, that they were lying about their past, their accomplishments, and that their skills were not what was advertised. If I focus my attention on what people do in a context where I am competent, it takes between very little and not much to assign them to a broad range of competence: incompetent, somewhat competent, okay competent, very competent.
Similarly, I've played a couple of sports at a high level, and if I see people training for, say, an hour, I can assign them to a level of competence, with little margin for error. The guy who does everything differently and originally is sort of an invention of novels and TV shows. Sometimes, very rarely, they show up in real life, so I might add a little bucket labeled "mysterious."
The executive hired by my company fell squarely into the category of incompetent. But because the executive had been hired into that management position by people deemed competent (they weren't, that's why it was a flywheel, a charade), my colleagues considered the executive competent for years, despite the obvious nonsense. It was rather bizarre to observe, but position bias (and "whatever" bias) is as strong as many of the biases related to physical characteristics that we carry around with us all day, every day. And when I tried to explain to my colleagues what I had seen, they did not believe me. I think they still don't believe me.
You’re conflating competence with the realities of messaging at scale. In reality they are not related as both competent and incompetent leaders at large corporations have to speak in a somewhat wishy-washy way to account for the widely varying contexts that a broad audience holds.
The other thing that would probably help engineers is that business and management is extremely difficult, in a way more than engineering, and that whether or not a particular person or decision is good or bad is often times not something that many engineers have the information or capability to evaluate.
I'm a cynic about business and management, not a manager and will not be one, am an engineer, also partake in the usual bitching about managers and business decisions that we all do.
But a lot of the hate is not too rational, and a lot of times the decisions that engineers would prefer would be disastrous for the company. Also, engineers really hate to share any responsibility for commercial failures. It must be a soul sucking job to run a company or sell a product that is uncompetitive. Talk to any engineer about their pet company or product or industry with some notable failure (Boeing, HP, DEC, Sun) and the story is always the same, management and bean counters sucked the life out of it to feed wall street parasites. You hear very little about how their products were sub-standard, too expensive, or out-competed by other companies despite their also being beholden to MBAs and shareholders and pointy haired bosses.
The product suffers when resource priority shifts in the wrong direction. Often times management infighting and empire building becomes the business priority and the actual product is a secondary evil that needs to limp along to fund the empires.
The right and wrong direction are up for debate. Everything is an opportunity cost, so if the product is not successful or making money, then shifting resources away from it to something more productive may sink the product faster, but might not have been the wrong for the business.
I've not known many executive decisions like that (right or wrong) being made without any input from technical side of the business, perhaps not Joe shitkicker in the trenches but technical leads. and I've very rarely encountered a technical person who concedes that their project or product or team should be given fewer resources. Almost always the complaint is that if only they were given more resources, they could have been successful, which rarely understands business and market realities and often confuses cause and effect.
And the egos and empire building and infighting and so on are definitely a thing that happens, and they are definitely not restricted to management. Engineers and technical people are some of the worst offenders!
I'm not trying to absolve executives and managers here, but I do think some engineers need better perspective and yes some empathy with the business side. Almost no new engineer needs to be told that their leaders are poor -- they'll hear it from their coworkers in their second week on the job and continuously after that until they retire. What I've rarely if ever heard is "damn we shipped a real piece of crap here, it must be embarrassing for our executives and sales people who have to sell it and answer to our customers, we could have done much better".
Everything in this guy's takedown of Google management is more or less endemic to human nature. It's not a Google thing. It's not a Silicon Valley thing. If you have a group of more than 25 people doing almost anything you'll see some version of the same story play out. A truly inspired and energetic leader can slow it down as well as a foolish one will bring it on quicker but it's still inevitable.
I'd broaden that to say most people working at these companies are poor, including the engineers.
Reality is most people are not the awesome standouts they believe themselves to be and truly strong leaders/engineers/sales people/product manager/etc. are extremely hard to find.
I remember Obama talking about this. I'll (poorly) paraphrase:
'When I first got into politics, I thought it would be like the rest of life. You know, when you see a great NFL player, he's a lot better than the college guys, who are a lot better than the high school guys. Same with pianists. The guys in the concerts are some of the best of the best. But that wasn't true in politics. The people that were really good at politics had no bearing on being senators or dog catchers. It was all a mixed bag.'
My apologies for butchering that.
But, I think that management is a lot like that. Peter Principle, yadda yadda yadda. We all know. But it's the expectation that your boss knows anything that really gets you. Gotta stop expecting your 'superiors' to know how to fog a mirror.
? I'm not sure you really get how the government works if you think it's susceptible to the kind of "management" we would like in the business context, or if you think winning elections to ram through various policy ovjectives isn't the entire point to a lot of people (of both/every political stripe). The system rewards quick wins, not governance.
Further than this, I think the concept and framing of management as "leadership" is very clearly a scam. The people in charge are in charge -- fine, give unto Caesar and all that -- but we also have to pretend that they have a quasi-mystic property that makes people /want/ to follow their orders.
The average manager is average at being a manager. Lots are below. Very few are at the top end of the curve, at there's no particular reason that they would be the ones at Director/VP/C*O level.
I wonder if the world is trending in this direction. If anything, the moat between the two is growing larger, highlighting the differences. Everyone in your bubble may seem to be growing and learning, but you're also the type who spends their off time browsing highly technical message boards.
There's a good HL Mencken quote about the likelihood of people getting collectively smarter:
"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
I feel quite strongly about this. Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons).
Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hierarchy of "intelligence" should flatten, imo towards people being more knowledgeable. Not like you need to take away people's Harvard PHDs to make sure every American has what they need to at least graduate highschool, or, you know, be able to read.
I don't necessarily agree that greater education leads to greater invulnerability to ads and the modern poisons in our society: most of my friends are smarter than me by many measures, and yet as far as I know I'm the only one not at least mildly addicted to Instagram and co., despite all of us often having conversations where we all seem to agree that that shits bad for you. Nah it takes something other than knowledge / educational privilege, i don't know what specifically, but something else.
It's worse than that. It's not about education anymore but pure credentialism.
Did you study at MIT, Harvard or Yale? Did you work at FAANG? No? Then surely you must be an idiot.
Nevermind all these difficult projects you worked on. Nevermind that your ex colleagues gave you glowing references. Nevermind all your open source projects. Nevermind that the project you led and worked on has never been hacked in 3 years in spite of having hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
It's all worthless because I don't see any fancy branding in your resume.
> Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons).
This is the claim: intelligence is just some combination of education, class, and race
Let's state the obvious here: genetics. Why did you conveniently leave that one out? Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something? Can you prove that they don't exist?
Also, before you assume I'm being more specific: I'm not saying equal access to education is a wasted endeavor. Sure, make the public school system good in rich and poor areas
But we're talking about intelligence in general here, so leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying
This is cope. Nobody goes around denying Down's syndrome exists, so when you say "they're denying genetics" you actually mean "they're denying it except for all the times they don't".
Nevertheless I do deny it. Genes don't cause anything, they just sit there in nucleuses. If you don't include the entire causal chain you're not serious either.
Can you demonstrate that genetic factors play a stronger part in how our society defines "intelligence" than the things I mentioned?
I doubt this can be demonstrated to have a much stronger effect than educational opportunities, which is a function of class, which in some societies, such as American society, is a function partially of race, for historical and contemporary reasons, as well as a function of economic condition (the two are inexorably linked for reason of generational wealth).
> leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying
I'm very much of the opinion, and as far as I understand it research backs me up here, that while of course various aspects of intelligence can be affected by genetics, the overall outcomes are vastly more affected by things we have lots of control over, such as the egalitarianian-ness of our society, than things we don't really have control over, such as each individual's genetics (and do we want to go down the path of structuring our hierarchies around this? shall I go get the swath of sci fi warning against this?)
You seem to disagree, not sure why, though I'm curious!
> Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something?
Nope, just seems mostly irrelevant in this conversation. What's the point of talking about genetics here? How about we do achieve educational access egalitarian, truly, and we find out some people aren't doing quite as good of art, or writing quite as good as poetry, or dreaming up quite as interesting apps, or doing engineering quite as fast, because they lost a genes lottery. Do you think it's a good idea to start structuring hierarchies around this? Seems cruel and pointless to me.
> that while of course various aspects of intelligence can be affected by genetics
Yep this is what I was looking for. Given this, the original claim isn't right
> Can you demonstrate that genetic factors play a stronger part in how our society defines "intelligence" than the things I mentioned?
Claim above was that intelligence "is really just" access to education, but now the goalpost has shifted
Now it's that access to education is "the most significant part". Is it? How could we know either way? By churning out a bunch of studies? The claim still isn't falsifiable
> Claim above was that intelligence "is really just" access to education, but now the goalpost has shifted
It really is just that.
Similarly, strength is really just about how much you work out. "But genetic factors!!" Eh, it's mostly just about how much you work out. It's not really worth talking about genetic factors when the majority of the population can't do a single pullup. Are we moving goalposts, or rather just doing actionable conversations?
> Now it's that access to education is "the most significant part". Is it? How could we know either way? By churning out a bunch of studies? The claim still isn't falsifiable
I'm not going to do your work for you. For some reason you really wanna talk about genes. I'll be honest, I'm going to take you at good faith here, but I'm mighty suspicious of where you're hoping this conversation will go.
Why are you more interested in talking about genetic factors of intelligence than the far more significant factors in economic conditions? What's the deal here? Where you going with this?
> Similarly, strength is really just about how much you work out.
Some people can get shredded really easily because of genetics. Some people are just naturally more fit than others
> but I'm mighty suspicious of where you're hoping this conversation will go.
My point is your initial point is an oversimplification. If you throw the same resources at the same group of people from a similar socioeconomic status, there will still be a difference of ability. Some people will move faster than others
So the crux of my argument is this: just because there's an inequality of outcome does not imply that the cause is purely socioeconomic. Given constitutional differences, striving for equality of outcome is a sub-optimal use of resources
Should there be standards or some kind of baseline? Yes. But striving for absolute equality of outcome at the expense of everything else is a net negative for society
Nobody is talking about equality of outcome except you. Why did you bring it up?
It is good and right to provide good and equal educational opportunities to people regardless of economic status. Countries like the USA aren't, and should. What are you arguing for here, some kind of genetic evaluation first to make sure we aren't "wasting resources" on a kid that will do math a little more slow? Why not just redirect abundance to the point it doesn't matter?
You think the 12-15 course hours you took in OOP languages was some sort of purely academic pursuit?
Marketers probably have a similar view, and lo and behold you're both looking through the same lens, namely, Google and The Current Forces Shaping The Ad Market.
Advertising is a useful and symbiotic relationship, but may best be disintermediated... so to speak.
An ad is useful to me as soon as they told both good and bad things about their products. But in reality , it's not. It's almost the same as lie, until you fall into the traps.
Don't believe me ? Just try them until you find out bad things by yourself.
> My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.
> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law.
> At its heart this is a problem about unrestrained capitalism.
These companies are having record profits, and doing layoffs anyway. I think they can get away with this because everyone's talking about recession and inflation. Thus they can increase pressure on current employees to work harder for the same or less money, and add further "proof" of their fears by doing layoffs and saying recession forced them. That's the wind around explanation I have but the article says it as simply as I think leadership is thinking about it: they probably aren't doing holistic class analysis and nefariously thinking about new and exciting ways to extract more labor for less money, they probably straight up are just trying to increase profit by reducing cost overhead.
But I agree with the article that this is in the end just then problem with unfettered capitalism. Incredibly, I had no idea the Ford story about the origins of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." Is that an oversimplification? Is that truly the first step down the stairs away from intelligently leveraged capitalism? I assumed the usa was the way it is because of a natural result of what happens when capital accumulates and is allowed to function as a analogue for political power: corporations will accumulate and then wield political power towards the goal of further accumulation. I had no idea the progress made on this front was already enshrined in law in Ford's time.
To me this seems inevitable. Corporations are like little AIs with a "never stop growing" directive. When society lets them get away with extracting more labor for less money by framing against recession, what means of protection do employees have, especially in the usa with comparatively minor unemployment benefits and layoff protections. It seems to me the only path forward, if we want then situation to improve for ourselves, is unionization. If we try to change the company from within by working with leadership, we're "activist employees" and a threat to shareholder profit, and get fired. If we wait, we get laid off when they can get away with it.
This is all predicated on the idea that the layoffs aren't necessary. The company won't die if the layoffs don't happen. It won't go bankrupt. It will simply be less profitable. And? So what? Does the value of the product change? Does the fact that google.com route basically all internet traffic change? In fact, if they leaned into reducing profit to share among employees, they'd be looking at being a co-op, which are provably more stable than traditional corporations and by some studies, more profitable... Just not for shareholders that don't actually do anything to contribute to that profitability.
Edit: reading more into it, the Ford thing doesn't necessarily make it federal law to seek shareholder profit above all other concerns. I don't believe that changes much about my comment: they're still doing this for the shareholders, not the employees.
It doesn't encapsulate the abstract goal you're trying to achieve, which might be value to the user. Heroin has many active users, but some might argue that heroin doesn't maximize value/usefulness for the user over the long run.
Everyone keeps complaining about being locked out of systems with just an email. Seriously, why do you care about this? You don't work there anymore: say goodbye to your friends over text message or email. The reason from the employer's side is obvious: knowledgeable, angry people with access to sensitive systems can wreak a lot of havoc. So take your severance and get out! Locking people out of systems is not a new practice and the outraged indignation I'm seeing on LinkedIn--Xooglers calling the practice "inhuman" and "abusive"--are just incredibly entitled and naive. No one in any other profession is getting the level of severance that these people are getting in a layoff; you are a highly paid professional with Google on your resume and you're going to be just fine.
Imagine working at a company for 16 years only to discover you were laid off when your badge no longer works on your way to work. You can say "duh, told you so" and "well you got severance so suck it up", but it does not take away from the emotional impact of losing a major part of your identity.
There are many lessons for us to take away from the layoffs this year, and it helps no one to trivialize it into cold facts. It has a real impact on people.
By the way, these large companies have more than capable LDAP systems to lockdown access without nuking everything from orbit. The damage the companies fear when cutting access immediately is, in reality, probably the damage that is happening as employees create internal lists of who was laid off. The damage are companies burning good will during record profits.
Don't make the company part of your identity! You are a disposable hired gun. People need to get real, no one ever promised these people lifelong job security and they had no business expecting it. 16 years is long enough to have survived 2008/9: if you went through that and still thought the company cared about it's employees, I have no sympathy.
You are totally right! My point is that the industry’s culture encourages you to make your work your identity though, and no one wins for ridiculing people who were laid off (not saying you are, but other comments here are).
This is a great opportunity to change the industry and how workers view their job.
Actually they're about the financial class trying to protect the value of their wealth by pressuring the companies they own to contain salaries, in order to curb inflation.
You get a better understanding of the US if you keep in mind that "the financial class" means retired homeowners who own Vanguard funds, not people who look like the Penguin.
But Google isn't owned by them, it's owned by Page and Brin.
True to some extent, but pensioners don't make the decisions, or take a huge cut of the short term windfalls/commissions/etc that they can generate; the financial class are really those pulling the levers.
This article could have been written about IBM in the 1970s and 1980s! When I joined IBM in 1991, the old timers used to talk nostalgically about the old days when they could do anything they wanted and the internal politics were vicious.
Was it bad Google leadership? Or capitalist excesses? I don't believe we even live in capitalism. We live in Creditism. It is obvious tech was the beneficiary of easy money, zero interest rates and expanded monetary supply. Its no coincidence as the Fed, raises rates and tries to simultaneously drain liquidity there will be less investment in tech, and pressure on income. If you are looking for someone to blame - blame the Fed. But as we see easy money is at the expense of causing inflation.
To turn this around a bit, Maybe you are being greedy? Perhaps you really want easy money - on the backs of the poor and middle class - to subsidize our industry?
"Another reason that Google is wasteful is that it's too easy. The people inside it don't see it as a business as they don't have to struggle against the market forces everyone else has to deal with. Why would you when ads is so profitable?"
When the people oustide it stop seeing it as a business, then Google's goose is cooked.
First the layoff were a fairly obvious hamfisted way to simply appease investors. Profit margins are in-line with historical norms, 2021 was an outlier and it is insane to expect profit growth not to slow from that - the company is still wildly profitable. It really just demonstrates that the vision of being a 'unconventional' company is gone, and the vision of the executive team is just to react to whatever perceived threat is in-front of them that week (activist investors, now 'generative AI') and, of course, maximize their stock compensation.
Google 'bloat'. This is a bit undeniable but it's also unavoidable for companies Google's size. There are like eight layers of management between people who do things and people who talk about doing things. That number is probably too high but I'm not sure people have figured out a great alternative other than 'hierarchy' for directing an army of people. Honestly the best thing management can do is 'rest-and-vest' and rewrite the same vision/roadmap document/deck ten times under different names least they try to demonstrate their value by constantly re-orging and shuffling around priorities (millionaire children moving the food around their plate to make it seem eaten).
Total comp and lavish 'perks'. Google's talent is, on average, better than most other companies and it hires in very expensive areas so it's going to be more expensive. It is very clear they are moving hiring to cheaper 'discount' areas so this will likely stall/decrease. The 'perks' are heavily overstated. This is a fun fake narrative. The micro-kitichens are like bulk processed gains and cereals or faux-healthy products that manage to both be not particularly appetizing, not actually healthy (a chickpea fried in vegetable oil is still bad for you), and not expensive - so they are mostly just for show and sit there untouched. The cafe food is served in troughs again with an emphasis on the cheaper vegetable or grains upfront or the infamous kale -with a single trough with any protein at the end that they still try to partially submerge in quinoa. There are long tables where employees eat quickly and alone. It's an overtly cynical exercise to make you work longer and just like 'unlimited vacation' the dealer is clearly winning here. Same goes with travel or 'fun' budgets, all cut and now the same as any other company.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadIs maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservati...
How many of these people have been fired?
It is true that you can sue a company for securities fraud if they do essentially anything that you can claim made the share value go down, but that doesn't mean you'll win.
Well... that's a slightly complicated question. It's definitely not quite as simple as "companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all other concerns". But while directors and executives are given wide latitude to run the company according to their judgment, they don't have carte blanche to do "whatever they want" either.
More to the point, while a company as a whole can do more than simply "maximize profit to the exclusion of all else", the caveat seems to be that they can do so if the owners (eg the shareholders) agree.
From the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case:
While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
The question I see then, is how much influence a single shareholder can truly yield based on this principle. That is, of course, assuming they don't single-handedly hold a controlling share of the company to the point that they can simply replace the board with whoever they want and enforce any arbitrary edict. Given a publicly traded company, it seems clear that some shareholders are going to want the "maximize my stock value at any expense" while others are going to go for more of a "do the humanitarian thing and treat (employees|the environment|whatever) well" or such-like.
See:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what...
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brook...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
...but the thing that makes such a "tort" lawsuit matter is damages, what damage did I do to you that you are now suing me. Like, if you're a pedestrian and I hit you with my car, your lawsuit against me depends on showing a monetary value for how I damaged you, for example, days of lost work. If you weren't injured, and went on about your day, week, month and life, you weren't damaged and there's no grounds for the lawsuit, even though my gross negligence could have damaged you 9 times out of 10. (This is an example to make a different point, we are going to ignore "emotional distress", etc.)
if you're a shareholder and I am the CEO and I have the company pursue goals that don't maximize the value of your shares, that cost resources and don't have a chance of maximizing shareholder value, when I could have, I have monetarily damaged you.
With respect to the Dodge decision, could other Ford shareholders have sued the Dodge brothers for forcing Ford to yield dividends once the Dodge brothers then used those dividends to undercut the value of Ford stock by creating a competitor? Or do minority shareholders not have a duty to other minority shareholders the way majority shareholders do?
I’d generally prefer someone from a technically sound venture funded startup.
In 2011 Google had 32,467 employees.
In 2021 Google had 156,500 employees.
It is simply not the same organization as it was when you worked there. The 2011 employees account for at most 10% of the workforce today once attrition is taken into account.
Why both of them? This has never made any sense to me.
I don't know how it works in United States. In Europe, Companies declaring the money deducted from the salary they have paid to the tax office, the employee is correcting if it is right or wrong. If they need to pay, they pay more, if not, they receive more.
Anyway my feeling is still the same, being employed by google means you're unemployed. This is a feeling. Being employed by apfel would make me feel different.
Now look, you have a data point.
—-
It really doesn’t. First, that’s a Michigan case interpreting Michigan law. Almost every non trivial US company is incorporated in Delaware and subject to Delaware law.
Delaware law does have somewhat similar cases, eBay v. Newmark is a good one to read but …
Second, in both the Ford and Craigslist cases what was happening was really blatant. Courts are not in the business of deciding this or that corporate policy isn’t instantly maximizing shareholder value. What they won’t necessarily let you do is announce that you, being a controlling shareholder, never ever intend to make money and it sucks to be a minority shareholder.
Investors who want to change that have to get enough members on the board or attempt some variety of takeover or buy out.
This has more of a flavor of Google's 2011 "caught fixing wages and forced to pay a $300 million fine" scandal.
Of course some believe that the idea that they might have done something that they have already been found guilty of in the past to be nothing more than a implausible harebrained conspiracy theory.
There was a similar court case in the 80s. I believe it was a shareholder lawsuit and that it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court was asked whether a company can take into account a variety of stakeholder & community interests in its decisionmaking, or must it seek to maximize shareholder return.
In the case, the court ruled that shareholder return is the only legitimate goal.
I suspect this case was very influential, and I would be grateful to anyone who can track it down.
Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. has language to the opposite conclusion, but it’s dicta.
Were these layoffs mostly recruiting/HR types, various managers, marketers, etc, or programmers?
Did they chop 70% of their recruiting/HR types, but closer to 1% of their techies, or vice versa?
Analyzing these layoffs IMO might be best done through the lens of what kind of roles were cut. If they didn't truly hit the real talent (the best programmers) there's a much different analysis that could be made.
Just clarifying the MNPI thing.
I don’t think that only programmers are “real talent” though.
I dunno, something had to give at some point? Leadership sent the message last year but it wasn’t well received: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-ceo-faced-intense-push...
Like, blame definitely falls on leadership here, ICs didn’t come up with the ten chat apps or streaming gaming failure, but the chilling couldn’t last forever.
Is that a fact or just your perception?
I remember people trying to make the claim that Google paying smart people to not work was a good strategy because it prevented those workers from creating start-ups that would compete with Google.
The Blind app is an interesting place.
That's from Silicon Valley, the parody show
It worked. Not a bad plan in the early/mid 2010s ;)
Life experience tells me this is highly unlikely.
Even if you take it to say managers cannot figure it out and always get it wrong (0% hit rate). Random layoffs are still a net negative even if they outperform managers picking the firings.
It's pretty funny how even without unions, companies have no recourse to me barely working and collecting a quarter mil a year.
My understanding is that google historically simply didn’t give raises or approve projects for under performers. As long as someone didn’t rock the boat or put up low quality CRs, or stop working entirely, they would be left alone - and maybe google wouldn’t bother to give them any new stocks when their grant expired.
Thats not chill, that's exhausting and common at many dorectionless organisations with poor leadership. As an IC its not something yoy can fix
And you know that when people call it "best WLB" they're talking about something specific.
You can also chill out working at a quiet local bookstore or other “BaristaFIRE” jobs that people like, but you’re not getting paid $500k to do it…
(Microsoft definitely competes now)
Seems like you are putting quite subjective segmentation of the market there.
Well, yes, before they had levels, they did not have levels.
I'm not sure this is much a a statement however - Meta has had levels for many, many years.
At Google, you can see other people’s levels, and they have titles: “Senior”, “Staff”, and so on.
Plus, almost everyone E5 and above posts their titles on linkedin.
Google's long been criticised for byzantine and ineffective hiring and ranking processes. The thought occurs that perhaps management have decided that unbiased random staff reductions are the least-harmful way to go about this.
The problem remains that under circumstances of layoffs, those with options to do so are still more likely to leave, resulting in a net negative selection against the most effective and productive workers. (Or at least those who can make a case for appearing to be same.)
I'm not utterly convinced of the above, though it's a working hypothesis and will be interesting to see how it plays out over time.
Layoffs in this case are merely done to manipulate the metrics used by wall street analysts. That's the only reason they are being done.
Of course, I am assuming that the market will turn around some time in the future. If the market remains this bleak forever, tech candidates no longer have any choices so Google doesn't have to care.
Google is a public company. If part of the team is costing them more than the value they create for shareholders, there will be immense pressure to down size. This is actually healthy in a way since talent frees up for other companies. The bigger problem is that in the USA healthcare is tied to employment. That's messed up
True but COBRA coverage lets you pay to stay on your job-based health insurance (cheaper) for a limited time after your job ends (usually 18 months).
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...
I live in a state with a pretty damn good Obamacare implementation, and I'm quite grateful.
Perhaps it's more reasonable if it's for a single young person with a high deductible. The last time I was on COBRA, the cost was unbelievable. For a family of 4, it was over $3k per month, and that was 5 years ago.
You can certainly get health insurance without being tied to employment. Without COBRA or any other workarounds. Has everone forgotten Obamacare? (Single payer would be nicer though.)
This over-hiring and over-firing is being instigated by the Fed. Tech (or otherwise) companies are reacting to that.
Of course all of this had to go bad. Come on now. Stop whining already.
I work in the IT sewer fighting rats. I will always have work. I'm filthy and I smell bad, but I'm doing fine, and no, I don't sit around wringing my hands and thinking, but what will become of our beloved and sacred google? I could not possibly give a shit about google. But maybe someday I'll get a fucking boat.
Going to Stanford is likewise privileged.
Being privileged isn't an insult, just a recognition of fact.
Come on, making 300k a year or more is privilege even within the context of US white collar jobs.
It's literally not a fact, it's an opinion.
Hey what's your job? You don't need to tell me. But I'm gonna go ahead and say you're privileged compared to a rural chinese farmer that has never held a phone.
Most people in America are privileged compared to a rural Chinese farmer.
The median Google employee is privileged compared to average American citizens.
It's healthy to acknowledge this.
The real healthy thing is to acknowledge what are facts and what are not facts.
A ball is moving 15 mph. Is the ball moving fast or slow?
Btw, you're whole framework for 'privileged' is broken because it's a binary condition and 1 dimsenional.
Check out this incident where a profession NBA player was harassed by the policy simply for being black: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/us/sterling-brown-milwaukee-s...
He makes millions every year playing basketball. Is he privileged?
I have no sympathy for these people.
Learn a real skill and do something useful.
Before you jump and say they do have a skill: why are they whining then? People who have skills don't whine when they are laid off. They just go and find another place to work.
The fact that they need to whine so loudly about it tells you everything you need to know: they have nothing of value to contribute, or they were getting paid many times more than their skill is actually worth.
I totally own it. I not only don't complain about being "laid off". I often quit jobs myself and spend some "gap" time doing nothing before I find the next job.
Currently I'm not working for anyone because I'm sick of all tech jobs.
That is a privilege that not many people can afford, especially lower income workers. You're speaking from an enviable position of privilege while complaining about others having privilege. Perspective.
The middle class VS upper class is a perfectly legitimate conflict.
Suppose you were are from a lower class, surely the middle class has more interests in common with you than the capital-class does?
I don't know why people are buying into cult of Google either, I think that's silly, what matters here isn't just that a bunch of people got laid off, but also that now all their former co-workers still at Google have to pick up all their jobs without any more compensation for it. All the saves money from reduction of cost is going to nobody but shareholders - which employees might be a little bit if they're vested, but not to the degree of larger shareholders who contribute nothing.
They contributed investment capital to the company.
Humans are Feudal creatures by instict - thats why feudalism lasted thousands of yeats.
Democracy and freedom are fragile and unnatural, they must be cherished.
> There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism.
This is the brain disease of American politics, anyone pointing out injustice of any kind is accused of Marxism.
The only acceptable way for society to evolve is ever-increasing privilidges for the wealthy untill average man can never hope to afford real estate and can't afford a layer.
Then we will arrive at feudalism.
Feudalism failed when capitalism competed with it.
Too late, I'm already a communist. A very capitalistically successful one, mind you.
Further along this thread is way off topic, I don't want to kick off a flame war of communism vs capitalism, I wanted to see what people have in mind about how companies like Google, that exist in a capitalist system, can be forced to care for the needs of their employees over the needs of their shareholders. Whether or not the system should / can be changed is, well, another thread or something lol, not for here.
That said your comment has some interesting ideas that I'm seeing as misconceptions ("some people in Europe that thought it would work" are arguably some of the most important philosophers in the western tradition) but maybe you're thinking along some lines I'm not aware of, so if you want to chat about this I'd love to do so in email, my address is on my profile page here.
I.e. you're positing the "Labor Theory of Value", which is the basis of Marxism.
The LToV errs in assigning zero value to risk-taking and the fact that some people are far more productive than others.
Supply + Demand determine the value.
"Supply + demand" seems an oversimplification of a huge chain of irrational human links.
What actual risk does an investor take? Loss of capital? Compared to an employee who, in the situation where capital is lost, loses the means by which they feed and house themselves, and in the USA, provide healthcare for themselves?
On top of which, right now, investors aren't really taking much loss. This action by Google is done for shareholder value. So not only is the loss for an employee higher in a situation that "harms" a shareholder, it's also more pervasive: the employee might get fired anyway through no fault of their own, even if it's not because the company is going bankrupt and everyone's losing their money.
And while all this is happening the investor has invested in other ventures, potentially even competitors. If google goes bankrupt they lose their initial investment, which by most financial advisories I see should not account for a significant portion of their investment, retirement, or even just savings, so by material measures, they'll be fine.
Meanwhile the employee has put in their time, energy effort. They haven't been able to explore other means of making money, do research into potential investments for themselves. They've been building social capital, specific domain knowledge, client relationships, things that hold some value after a Google collapse, but not all.
At the end of the day I just don't see why what an investor does has any value at all compared to an employee. Can you help me understand better what you mean?
Without investors, the employee does not get paid, as there is no money to pay him.
robinhood.com says you're incorrect.
No risk => no gains
The rich-get-richer mechanism in question is investing pre-existing large amounts of money in investments that are more or less zero risk, specifically from the perspective of the investor's personal livelihood and well-being. This is simply not available to most people, even if they do have access to zero-commission fractional-share trading on Robinhood.
Also, "labor" covers a large amount of people, of whom a very small subset are Robinhood users, and of whom an even smaller subset are legitimately successful traders, as opposed to one-off financial market lottery winners (who are themselves a small subset of all users).
Of course, many lost money, too. No risk => no gain
The point is, they could invest in the markets, despite being poor.
These investors aren’t contributing capital to the company—they are betting on one square on a roulette wheel.
They are whining because they know they were being over compensated at Google and that they are unlikely to be able to find another job that pays so much money with so little effort.
They're not my enemies but they're not my friends. I don't feel sympathy for them. If anything, they should feel sympathy for me and give me some of that extra cash they've been getting. Why do they deserve it more than I do? I can do "nothing at all" just as well as they did.
Why not?
> If anything, they should feel sympathy for me
Maybe they do, have you talked to some? Also, why should they feel sympathy for you, if you're not interested in feeling sympathy for others?
> give me some of that extra cash they've been getting. Why do they deserve it more than I do?
They don't. Is it their fault that they get paid more and you get paid less for the same or different jobs? Are you pointing your finger at the right people, here?
> I can do "nothing at all" just as well as they did.
You seem to not like when people aren't paid per their labor output. You and I are probably quite aligned in our values, if that's the case. You and I both, for example, surely both find it insane that there are people, hardworking or otherwise, who now command orders of magnitude more capital than anyone on earth, or even in history.
Compared to a billionaire, you at whatever you make, let's say 50k, working harder than a googler making 200k for the same or easier job, are basically siblings in capital. I'd even go so far as to call you class allies.
Perhaps the direction of your anger being pointed distinctly away from the people who are actually causing this injustice is helping same? So why are you mad at random people who make a little bit more than you, rather than at someone that makes several tens of millions a year by simply existing?
My values and your are not aligned at all.
Understand: I don't want sympathy from anyone. I don't think I deserve sympathy, nor do I need it.
Do I need to explain sarcasm to you?
Not that I particularly mind either way: we are all a privileged lot in the tech world. Myself absolutely included!
We'd quickly just shut down all conversation ever because none of us are 8 year old british chimney sweeps covered in soot. In which case, how is the world a better place?
We can acknowledge that there's a lens where some people have privileges ("privileged isn't a binary state") and then still have a discussion about what happened.
If working at Google such a privilege and is the goal, work towards it. Like so many other people did, take up a student loans and put yourself through school, build your resume, take up projects, internships, work experience etc. Prep for interviews, what ever it takes. Then you can take the job and enjoy the "spoils", what ever those are.
One can't just decide not to put in the work and then look at the guy who did and say... privileged.
Being a President of Unites States is a privilidge, surely you dont dispute that?
Are you putting in the work to become President? If not, you are not allowed to call him priviliged.
> If working at Google such a privilege and is the goal, work towards it.
Being the Pope is a privilidge too, do you even want to be the Pope?
If I don't want to be the Pope, should I be unable to recognise that it's a position of power, privilidge and prestige?
So umm you are claiming that you are part of a class that will always have work and stability unlike the people who work at faang. (Debatable but lets take the claim at face value). You are literally saying that we should not care about the plight of googlers because they are in a different class, which is subject to drawbacks which people like you don't face because of your class. And that that makes them privliged. Did i get that right?
That is an interesting definition of privlidge you have there.
I'm trying hard to feel sorry for SV FAANG workers getting laid off but I can't[1].
I'm also struggling to see how their self-esteem will take years to recover from this.
Those cosseted 'engineers' earn probably 2 to 4 times a year more than me, and get meals etc. Their severance package is probably my annual wage. Plenty of time to find another gig with their FAANG resumes that suits their expectations.
Perhaps if they spent a few years in the less rarified development jobs a lot of us deal with they might better understand their position in the world.
[1] No I'm not.
Can't happen because health insurance has an out-of-pocket maximum for the year
> Or you're living paycheck to paycheck because school cost you $150k (plus interest).
College prices do need to be reined in, but if you are making 300k you should be able to handle a 150k debt.
> Those laid off got a bad deal, period, because it has less to do with actual "merit" and more to do with at-will is a bad deal.
Seems like a pretty good deal, honestly. Generous severance packages.
Nobody likes layoffs but pretending that this is some kind of humanitarian disaster is just grotesque
Not in that context. They have a duty to their shareholders, not absolute maximum profits. Plenty of further unethical methods that could be used if that was the goal.
Iron law of organizations states that any org over time will put the perpetuation of the org first, not the orgs mission that it was founded with. Those with that vision leave for better places, leaving voids filled by those whom cannot genuinely replace it. Purpose is lost, things slow down, and every solution is a myriad of bandaids and placebos to keep it afloat. A cow to milk. This was obvious when all these projects were born to fail and hiring practices started filtering hiring for binary search trees.
Same story across the board. They've lived past their expiration date, and rely upon the law and vertical integration to prevent anyone else from competing.
A general social trend to value tech in our lives seems lost on the genius CEOs. They really seem to think billions care they specifically exist, when really if they did not someone else would have been CEO. Some other company that came before Google would be Google big if not Google quality in search (which has gone to shit under the management of their current genius CEO).
Hubris, lack of social awareness, lack of career experience outside the Google RDF created a hyper-normalized world view.
Paraphrasing PG, who wrote somewhere, I forget where, don’t underestimate the power of money to motivate. We’re not picking good companies, just playing simple arithmetic games with fiat money.
That would be Marissa Mayer.
That seems true for a lot of corporations. At senior levels it’s all very hunger games
This is a myth. Lynn Stout argued against the relevance of Dodge v. Ford (1919) in this article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744
This misstep kind of undermines the rest of the piece, which now reads like a superficial just-so story in the same way.
The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.
Most everyone who is not in leadership/upper management has endless complaints about what idiots they are.
Because it's like child rearing, or teaching, or vim vs emacs but there are more choices and many more dimensions, oh and there's almost no data, big cargo cults (from Toyota Improvement System, Deming, Agile manifesto to endless books by those who made it in the last decade), uncertainty is high, general intelligence is low, the interpersonal skills deficit is mind-boggling, burnout/disillusionment/fanaticism are rampant, perverted/misaligned incentives too, and of course all of that is driven by fundamental business constraints and various other sources of path-dependence.
My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.
I joined two years ago so that’s just how things are done here as far as I’m concerned!
The reality is dumb people do not have a monopoly on dumb things. Nor smart on smart things. Timing and circumstance are impossible to separate from any situation. Are lucky people also skilled at taking the correct risks? Almost certainly. Is this a learned thing? I'm not sure.
My gut is it is learnable. But not if others are learning the same thing. What makes a smart choice is influenced by what everyone else is doing.
At some point between the ages of 20 and 30, you begin to believe that, although it is difficult to point out what they are better at than you or your peers, in order to be in the position they are in, "leaders" must be better in some way--say, in the technical skills, the strategies and tactics used to achieve a goal, the personality that inspires subordinates--than you and your colleagues.
Then, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly, thanks to age, experience, and new, maybe more jaded, eyes, you realize that the words, strategies, and perspectives communicated or elaborated by those "leaders," which you thought were nonsense but had decided to consider something you simply did not have the tools to understand, were, in fact, nonsense, delusional thinking, intellectual garbage.
And, at that point, you may try to understand how it is possible for such important companies to have such incompetent leaders. But that is another story.
It is also a virtuous circle: you come in early, you are promoted because there is virtually no one else around, or you are chosen as the best among a group of fairly mediocre people--maybe they use a die to choose who will become the new "leader" of the group--and in a couple of months you go from being just another IC to a rising star.
You are quickly recognized as such and, in an environment with very loose feedback cycles such as management in the technology sector, you are free to fake your way up to the top. As soon as you are exposed, if ever, you can recycle yourself elsewhere as a true and proven leader of vast experience.
Or, assuming you are not very good at leadership in absolute terms, you do a good job anyway because most management is skirting responsibilities, taking advantage, in a good way, of colleagues and the machinery that makes the company work, and, most of all, going with the flow.
It’s easy to assume therefore that the words are intellectual garbage, but that’s not always the case. In fact there’s no way to tell competent and incompetent leadership apart just from speeches they give, but make no mistake the distinction exists, and as an employee it’s critical to ferret out the answer over time as you will learn entirely the wrong lessons if you work for muppets for any length of time.
Fortunately good leadership does exist. It is usually built over decades of a solid skill foundation (ie. Experts leading experts) rather than MBAs, and the top skill is sniffing out bullshit. Of course every company has a mix of people, but in healthy ones there will be a critical mass of competent people and they generally know who each other are and keep things pointed in the right direction.
When you say in the previous comment that "it's easy to assume that words are intellectual garbage, but that's not always the case," I see the position/authority bias at work: it can't be nonsense, they are the leaders, what they say has to make sense, if only seen in the context of having to speak all day, or to dozens, hundreds, thousands (unlikely outside of politics) of people every day.
Or look at the layoffs at Twitter, Meta, Google, etc.: even if they seem to make little sense (some of the decisions anyway) in the way they are done, somehow they have to make sense, either because the layoffs are a "blunt instrument," or because the shareholders are asking for something particular or whatever.
I would like to bring an example. A person in my company was hired in a management role, overseeing a function for a group of hundreds of people. As soon as they gave their first "speech," it was clear to my shrewd eyes that the words uttered made no sense, that they were lying about their past, their accomplishments, and that their skills were not what was advertised. If I focus my attention on what people do in a context where I am competent, it takes between very little and not much to assign them to a broad range of competence: incompetent, somewhat competent, okay competent, very competent.
Similarly, I've played a couple of sports at a high level, and if I see people training for, say, an hour, I can assign them to a level of competence, with little margin for error. The guy who does everything differently and originally is sort of an invention of novels and TV shows. Sometimes, very rarely, they show up in real life, so I might add a little bucket labeled "mysterious."
The executive hired by my company fell squarely into the category of incompetent. But because the executive had been hired into that management position by people deemed competent (they weren't, that's why it was a flywheel, a charade), my colleagues considered the executive competent for years, despite the obvious nonsense. It was rather bizarre to observe, but position bias (and "whatever" bias) is as strong as many of the biases related to physical characteristics that we carry around with us all day, every day. And when I tried to explain to my colleagues what I had seen, they did not believe me. I think they still don't believe me.
I'm a cynic about business and management, not a manager and will not be one, am an engineer, also partake in the usual bitching about managers and business decisions that we all do.
But a lot of the hate is not too rational, and a lot of times the decisions that engineers would prefer would be disastrous for the company. Also, engineers really hate to share any responsibility for commercial failures. It must be a soul sucking job to run a company or sell a product that is uncompetitive. Talk to any engineer about their pet company or product or industry with some notable failure (Boeing, HP, DEC, Sun) and the story is always the same, management and bean counters sucked the life out of it to feed wall street parasites. You hear very little about how their products were sub-standard, too expensive, or out-competed by other companies despite their also being beholden to MBAs and shareholders and pointy haired bosses.
I've not known many executive decisions like that (right or wrong) being made without any input from technical side of the business, perhaps not Joe shitkicker in the trenches but technical leads. and I've very rarely encountered a technical person who concedes that their project or product or team should be given fewer resources. Almost always the complaint is that if only they were given more resources, they could have been successful, which rarely understands business and market realities and often confuses cause and effect.
And the egos and empire building and infighting and so on are definitely a thing that happens, and they are definitely not restricted to management. Engineers and technical people are some of the worst offenders!
I'm not trying to absolve executives and managers here, but I do think some engineers need better perspective and yes some empathy with the business side. Almost no new engineer needs to be told that their leaders are poor -- they'll hear it from their coworkers in their second week on the job and continuously after that until they retire. What I've rarely if ever heard is "damn we shipped a real piece of crap here, it must be embarrassing for our executives and sales people who have to sell it and answer to our customers, we could have done much better".
Reality is most people are not the awesome standouts they believe themselves to be and truly strong leaders/engineers/sales people/product manager/etc. are extremely hard to find.
'When I first got into politics, I thought it would be like the rest of life. You know, when you see a great NFL player, he's a lot better than the college guys, who are a lot better than the high school guys. Same with pianists. The guys in the concerts are some of the best of the best. But that wasn't true in politics. The people that were really good at politics had no bearing on being senators or dog catchers. It was all a mixed bag.'
My apologies for butchering that.
But, I think that management is a lot like that. Peter Principle, yadda yadda yadda. We all know. But it's the expectation that your boss knows anything that really gets you. Gotta stop expecting your 'superiors' to know how to fog a mirror.
Further than this, I think the concept and framing of management as "leadership" is very clearly a scam. The people in charge are in charge -- fine, give unto Caesar and all that -- but we also have to pretend that they have a quasi-mystic property that makes people /want/ to follow their orders.
The average manager is average at being a manager. Lots are below. Very few are at the top end of the curve, at there's no particular reason that they would be the ones at Director/VP/C*O level.
In my whole life, there's no single ad that makes sense for me to see and click, because it's annoying.
I love smart search results, not smart ad results.
And also the successful business as i know run no Ad campaign.
You're just making assumptions.
"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hierarchy of "intelligence" should flatten, imo towards people being more knowledgeable. Not like you need to take away people's Harvard PHDs to make sure every American has what they need to at least graduate highschool, or, you know, be able to read.
I don't necessarily agree that greater education leads to greater invulnerability to ads and the modern poisons in our society: most of my friends are smarter than me by many measures, and yet as far as I know I'm the only one not at least mildly addicted to Instagram and co., despite all of us often having conversations where we all seem to agree that that shits bad for you. Nah it takes something other than knowledge / educational privilege, i don't know what specifically, but something else.
Nevermind all these difficult projects you worked on. Nevermind that your ex colleagues gave you glowing references. Nevermind all your open source projects. Nevermind that the project you led and worked on has never been hacked in 3 years in spite of having hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. It's all worthless because I don't see any fancy branding in your resume.
According to who exactly? Some stupid person somewhere? Why should anyone here care?
This is the claim: intelligence is just some combination of education, class, and race
Let's state the obvious here: genetics. Why did you conveniently leave that one out? Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something? Can you prove that they don't exist?
Also, before you assume I'm being more specific: I'm not saying equal access to education is a wasted endeavor. Sure, make the public school system good in rich and poor areas
But we're talking about intelligence in general here, so leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying
Nevertheless I do deny it. Genes don't cause anything, they just sit there in nucleuses. If you don't include the entire causal chain you're not serious either.
I doubt this can be demonstrated to have a much stronger effect than educational opportunities, which is a function of class, which in some societies, such as American society, is a function partially of race, for historical and contemporary reasons, as well as a function of economic condition (the two are inexorably linked for reason of generational wealth).
> leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying
I'm very much of the opinion, and as far as I understand it research backs me up here, that while of course various aspects of intelligence can be affected by genetics, the overall outcomes are vastly more affected by things we have lots of control over, such as the egalitarianian-ness of our society, than things we don't really have control over, such as each individual's genetics (and do we want to go down the path of structuring our hierarchies around this? shall I go get the swath of sci fi warning against this?)
You seem to disagree, not sure why, though I'm curious!
> Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something?
Nope, just seems mostly irrelevant in this conversation. What's the point of talking about genetics here? How about we do achieve educational access egalitarian, truly, and we find out some people aren't doing quite as good of art, or writing quite as good as poetry, or dreaming up quite as interesting apps, or doing engineering quite as fast, because they lost a genes lottery. Do you think it's a good idea to start structuring hierarchies around this? Seems cruel and pointless to me.
Yep this is what I was looking for. Given this, the original claim isn't right
> Can you demonstrate that genetic factors play a stronger part in how our society defines "intelligence" than the things I mentioned?
Claim above was that intelligence "is really just" access to education, but now the goalpost has shifted
Now it's that access to education is "the most significant part". Is it? How could we know either way? By churning out a bunch of studies? The claim still isn't falsifiable
It really is just that.
Similarly, strength is really just about how much you work out. "But genetic factors!!" Eh, it's mostly just about how much you work out. It's not really worth talking about genetic factors when the majority of the population can't do a single pullup. Are we moving goalposts, or rather just doing actionable conversations?
> Now it's that access to education is "the most significant part". Is it? How could we know either way? By churning out a bunch of studies? The claim still isn't falsifiable
I'm not going to do your work for you. For some reason you really wanna talk about genes. I'll be honest, I'm going to take you at good faith here, but I'm mighty suspicious of where you're hoping this conversation will go.
Why are you more interested in talking about genetic factors of intelligence than the far more significant factors in economic conditions? What's the deal here? Where you going with this?
Some people can get shredded really easily because of genetics. Some people are just naturally more fit than others
> but I'm mighty suspicious of where you're hoping this conversation will go.
My point is your initial point is an oversimplification. If you throw the same resources at the same group of people from a similar socioeconomic status, there will still be a difference of ability. Some people will move faster than others
So the crux of my argument is this: just because there's an inequality of outcome does not imply that the cause is purely socioeconomic. Given constitutional differences, striving for equality of outcome is a sub-optimal use of resources
Should there be standards or some kind of baseline? Yes. But striving for absolute equality of outcome at the expense of everything else is a net negative for society
It is good and right to provide good and equal educational opportunities to people regardless of economic status. Countries like the USA aren't, and should. What are you arguing for here, some kind of genetic evaluation first to make sure we aren't "wasting resources" on a kid that will do math a little more slow? Why not just redirect abundance to the point it doesn't matter?
Marketers probably have a similar view, and lo and behold you're both looking through the same lens, namely, Google and The Current Forces Shaping The Ad Market.
Advertising is a useful and symbiotic relationship, but may best be disintermediated... so to speak.
Don't believe me ? Just try them until you find out bad things by yourself.
But really: why don't more people use ublock origin? It makes the web actually usable
If I go on a website and see a bunch of sponsored bullshit, it makes me much less likely to ever go there again
Subscriptions and paywalls proliferate because Google as middleman takes a cut and makes online ads too expensive.^1
Yet Google gets a "free subscription" and in this case publishes a copy in its cache.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
1. Argument of US government and state AGs in latest suit against Google for Sherman Act violations. See paras 9 and 267.
> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law.
> At its heart this is a problem about unrestrained capitalism.
I was making this argument yesterday on the post about blizzard firing the employee critical of the stack ranking policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34498473
These companies are having record profits, and doing layoffs anyway. I think they can get away with this because everyone's talking about recession and inflation. Thus they can increase pressure on current employees to work harder for the same or less money, and add further "proof" of their fears by doing layoffs and saying recession forced them. That's the wind around explanation I have but the article says it as simply as I think leadership is thinking about it: they probably aren't doing holistic class analysis and nefariously thinking about new and exciting ways to extract more labor for less money, they probably straight up are just trying to increase profit by reducing cost overhead.
But I agree with the article that this is in the end just then problem with unfettered capitalism. Incredibly, I had no idea the Ford story about the origins of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." Is that an oversimplification? Is that truly the first step down the stairs away from intelligently leveraged capitalism? I assumed the usa was the way it is because of a natural result of what happens when capital accumulates and is allowed to function as a analogue for political power: corporations will accumulate and then wield political power towards the goal of further accumulation. I had no idea the progress made on this front was already enshrined in law in Ford's time.
To me this seems inevitable. Corporations are like little AIs with a "never stop growing" directive. When society lets them get away with extracting more labor for less money by framing against recession, what means of protection do employees have, especially in the usa with comparatively minor unemployment benefits and layoff protections. It seems to me the only path forward, if we want then situation to improve for ourselves, is unionization. If we try to change the company from within by working with leadership, we're "activist employees" and a threat to shareholder profit, and get fired. If we wait, we get laid off when they can get away with it.
This is all predicated on the idea that the layoffs aren't necessary. The company won't die if the layoffs don't happen. It won't go bankrupt. It will simply be less profitable. And? So what? Does the value of the product change? Does the fact that google.com route basically all internet traffic change? In fact, if they leaned into reducing profit to share among employees, they'd be looking at being a co-op, which are provably more stable than traditional corporations and by some studies, more profitable... Just not for shareholders that don't actually do anything to contribute to that profitability.
Edit: reading more into it, the Ford thing doesn't necessarily make it federal law to seek shareholder profit above all other concerns. I don't believe that changes much about my comment: they're still doing this for the shareholders, not the employees.
In what conceivable world is "active users" a vanity metric??
There are many lessons for us to take away from the layoffs this year, and it helps no one to trivialize it into cold facts. It has a real impact on people.
By the way, these large companies have more than capable LDAP systems to lockdown access without nuking everything from orbit. The damage the companies fear when cutting access immediately is, in reality, probably the damage that is happening as employees create internal lists of who was laid off. The damage are companies burning good will during record profits.
This is a great opportunity to change the industry and how workers view their job.
But Google isn't owned by them, it's owned by Page and Brin.
To turn this around a bit, Maybe you are being greedy? Perhaps you really want easy money - on the backs of the poor and middle class - to subsidize our industry?
When the people oustide it stop seeing it as a business, then Google's goose is cooked.
First the layoff were a fairly obvious hamfisted way to simply appease investors. Profit margins are in-line with historical norms, 2021 was an outlier and it is insane to expect profit growth not to slow from that - the company is still wildly profitable. It really just demonstrates that the vision of being a 'unconventional' company is gone, and the vision of the executive team is just to react to whatever perceived threat is in-front of them that week (activist investors, now 'generative AI') and, of course, maximize their stock compensation.
Google 'bloat'. This is a bit undeniable but it's also unavoidable for companies Google's size. There are like eight layers of management between people who do things and people who talk about doing things. That number is probably too high but I'm not sure people have figured out a great alternative other than 'hierarchy' for directing an army of people. Honestly the best thing management can do is 'rest-and-vest' and rewrite the same vision/roadmap document/deck ten times under different names least they try to demonstrate their value by constantly re-orging and shuffling around priorities (millionaire children moving the food around their plate to make it seem eaten).
Total comp and lavish 'perks'. Google's talent is, on average, better than most other companies and it hires in very expensive areas so it's going to be more expensive. It is very clear they are moving hiring to cheaper 'discount' areas so this will likely stall/decrease. The 'perks' are heavily overstated. This is a fun fake narrative. The micro-kitichens are like bulk processed gains and cereals or faux-healthy products that manage to both be not particularly appetizing, not actually healthy (a chickpea fried in vegetable oil is still bad for you), and not expensive - so they are mostly just for show and sit there untouched. The cafe food is served in troughs again with an emphasis on the cheaper vegetable or grains upfront or the infamous kale -with a single trough with any protein at the end that they still try to partially submerge in quinoa. There are long tables where employees eat quickly and alone. It's an overtly cynical exercise to make you work longer and just like 'unlimited vacation' the dealer is clearly winning here. Same goes with travel or 'fun' budgets, all cut and now the same as any other company.