It does seem that executive compensation is just straight up broken. Even bad CEOs are paid enormous sums of money for their shoddy performance. Sundar Pichai is a poor performing CEO, he's very likely done permanent damage to Google's business. For this, he is going to be rewarded with generational wealth. It's hard to see what exactly we're paying CEOs for. Are we paying them to attract the best talent? No, you'd have a queue of fantastic candidates queueing around the block for 1/10th of what Sundar is being paid. Are we compensating them for performance? Again no, they get massive compensation packages up front whether they succeed or fail. Are we compensating them for the extra-ordinary responsibility they have? Well apparently not, because they don't face any consequences for fucking up.
So why are we paying them so much? Because the compensation committee says so. Why does the compensation committee say so? Well, because the compensation committee is formed of executives, so the whole thing is just a massive circle jerk.
At what point do the shareholders say "hold up a sec, why are we bleeding all this cash to a bunch of executives whose entire strategy is just to follow the market".
I think many things in the world would be better if executives had real personal liability. Reminds me, the executive of the company responsible for the huge port explosion in Tianjin, China was apparently personally liable (suspended death sentence!): https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...
Reading Marx and Lenin helps a great deal to understand that relationship, although the material conditions of some (especially in exploited nations) may already provide an intuitive understanding.
I doubt I’m the only communist on HN, despite the site’s clear pro-capitalist bias.
You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. If you do it again, we'll have to ban you again, so please don't do it again. Please stop with flamebait/battle comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523506 too.
150 million people died to communism dang in the last 200 years. If you cant post facts on your forum the this place isn’t worth anyones time. Your feelings dont invalidate logic. There is nothing egregious about the word retarded go read its exact definition. Maybe the word dang is offensive to me. What makes u right and me wrong? Were adults, with all due respect, mind your own business hall monitor. Genicidal support deserves to be flamed
This has nothing to do with how bad communism was or your favorite facts. It has to do with breaking the rules of this site. If you keep doing that, we will have no choice but to ban you again.
Can you please point me to the rule that specifies every word I cannot use?
Plus you like working on this site why don’t you just make the words not postable if it offends you so much. Why leave this dangerous language around? Why don’t you go 1984 and clean up your allowed dictionary?
Don’t you know that in order to think you have to risk being offensive? You have no problem offending me by threatening ostracization. Your posts aren’t constructive they are divisive and authoritarian. Your comments don’t add to the conversation they just remind people that they’re not free to express her full opinion for fear of someone’s feelings.
In fact, you might offend more people than anyone on the site if you view your comment history.
You should make every decision like it can one day be turned on you.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There are rules against ideological battle, name-calling, and fulmination, among other things. It's not particularly a borderline call that you're breaking the rules.
It has nothing to do with you being right or wrong. It has to do with sticking to the rules of the game we're trying to play here. It isn't "authoritarian" when an umpire tells you you can't tackle the pitcher. It's just how baseball works. If you want to play football instead (for example), you should go to a football game.
I use this account because I stand by this comment and I’m willing to defend it as a person. But next time ill just use one of my other 100+ downvote enabled accounts. Your site security was shit when I signed up and used to single-handedly alter rankings and comments, but but kudos to you for making upgrades.
I am willing to defend my comments, so if you think I’m wrong, then Sun Tzu says don’t interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake. Been in my ability to talk publicly will not have the results you want. It’ll piss me off and then I’ll reraliate and waste both our time with you trying to figure out why your rankings are suddenly being manipulated. I have so many accounts. I can literally make an account have downvoting capabilities myself.
Family members tell me in Italy the plant managers are personally liable for worker injuries. A workplace death is a big deal, even if the executive in charge resides in another country.
Maybe this is just the outside view talking, but it seems like a CEOs biggest function is to be the public face of the company. To take abuse and answer tough questions so the investors don't have to. This requires a fair bit of PR talent, and also the ability to withstand a lot of public hatred. Apparently that's worth a lot of money.
> To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT
You joke, but I'm almost positive this would work.
I had a colleague many years ago who, while in business school, would frequently use speeches or emails from our CEO as the backbone of his essays, sometimes using them almost verbatim. I asked him once if he was worried about getting caught for plagiarism. His response was something along the lines of, "All executive communication is so much meaningless boilerplate corporate-speak that it's next to impossible to tell once person's work from the next". He eventually got his MBA and never did get called out for plagiarism.
CEOs have an army of people at their disposal to do the said “PR talent” stuff. They absolutely do not deserve what they get and they are not tech gods as media paints them to be. I’m sick of media defending CEOs instead common workers.
Caste solidarity is everywhere when you start looking for it.
Another example, go to court without a lawyer, make a minor procedural violation and the judge will rip your head off. Hire a attorney who does the same thing and all of the sudden it isn't a big deal, the judge may not even mention it. Judges tend to be former lawyers and the legal caste feels that one of them must be paid lavishly for you to receive a defence. Don't pay them? You should be punished!
I modestly propose that tech workers should join in on this game with similar solidarity, members of the executive caste like Sundar should suddenly find themselves without access to email for example, and then should be forced to pay a nerd tens of thousands of dollars to go talk to the guy who runs the email server to have his account reinstated. If he talks to the guy directly, without paying the requested fee and fails to use the correct IT Crowd reference or doesn't know what version of Python added type annotations off hand, his account should be permanently removed and all of his devices banned from the internet.
Not quite true: the pro se litigant will often get every possible consideration from the court.
As an example: the person who ran over all those people in Kenosha at that parade. Do you really think that if I went into a courtroom as an attorney and refused to wear a shirt, or made a fort out of boxes, that the judge would “not even mention it”?
If you do I encourage you to watch some in-court hearings. They are typically open to the public and you will surely find pro se litigants being extended every possible courtesy to their rights as Americans.
I have attended court proceedings and have witnessed what I have described on several occasions. I suspect high profile televised court cases are atypical in many ways.
Consider this for a moment, if a judge is merely a fact finder why would having a attorney alter the outcome of the case? It is known that people respond more positively to others with a similar background, is it all that crazy to think that bias may extend to judges?
High profile cases are atypical in some ways but the salient difference is that I can point you to an example and you can watch it. I can’t really point you at examples in your county courthouse but it is definitely great that you’ve seen some courtroom activity. It’s unfortunate though, that you’ve taken away some conclusions that aren’t quite apt.
The judge is the opposite of the fact finder. The judge is the law finder. The jury is the fact finder (unless you’ve forfeited your right to a jury and are undertaking a bench trial). But I get the general idea of the question and I can answer it in the context of attorneys influencing any party this way:
An attorney should not alter the final disposition of a dispute, meaning that if a person is guilty or liable and the attorney’s actions cause an outcome where they “get away with it” we can all agree the system failed. Lawyers are there so your rights don’t get trampled, so you don’t give anything away, and because they understand the terrain over which the parties will negotiate.
Sure, judges probably prefer drinking beers with lawyers than with indigent sovcits. But unlike a hyena presented with a decaying carcass, the judges I’ve encountered can suspend their baser instincts for a few minutes at a time in order to /do their job/ and part of that job is respecting the Constitution and the rights of the litigants.
> Lawyers are there so your rights don’t get trampled
Aren't those rights all legal rights, or laws? What happened to our law finder between the second and third paragraph?
Edit: Also isn't that sort of admitting that if you don't go in with a lawyer your rights get trampled? It seems we agree.
> the judges I’ve encountered can suspend their baser instincts for a few minutes at a time in order to /do their job/ and part of that job is respecting the Constitution and the rights of the litigants.
Scientifically speaking the evidence is human begins are not capable of doing that. For example rulings of judges tend to heavily align with their political preferences, if they didn't nobody would care who is appointed to the supreme court and what party they favor. Another example litigants often wish to venue shop to find a court that is more likely to rule in their favor, if this perfect law finder actually existed that behavior wouldn't alter outcomes.
Pro se litigants are afforded more procedural allowances than lawyers are when they appear in court, even when they rail against the court and the proceedings.
Judges are more likely to rule in favor or pro se litigants on procedural matters (at least at the beginning) precisely to avoid letting the the litigants' lack of procedural knowledge bias the outcome of the case. I have seen many experienced "pro se" litigants take advantage of this.
if a judge is merely a fact finder why would having a attorney alter the outcome of the case?
It doesn't. Pro se litigants in civil cases usually lose their cases because they had shit cases to begin with (based on the substantive merits). It's almost always why they couldn't find any attorney willing to take their case.
In the relatively rare situation that a pro se litigant has a good case but no attorney willing to take it on (usually a low-value case), the judge will either coach them on procedure or assign a lawyer in the courtroom to assist them with that. (This happens a lot in LA County.)
There’s about three hundred billion hours of YouTube from that Kenosha parade murderer who just got sentenced. I think those search terms should get you there.
Beware, watching court is addictive (so many insane unpredictable moments) and time consuming (many, many more extremely boring trivial moments).
So one case? That's your example? I go to court all the time, I'm an attorney. Your experience watching the one case on TV isn't representative of how it normally goes. Judges, basically as a rule, provide insane levels of deference to pro se litigants that they do not provide to attorneys. I'd think that your smarmy comments would have implied this level of common sense on your part, but here we are!
Hello, brother. I think you might want to read a little further into the thread, because I'm not saying what you think I am. I'm also an attorney and I have convicted a pro se litigant in addition to watching at least two handfuls of trials where self-represented defendants were involved. Every single time, the court provided "insane levels of deference to pro se litigants that they did not provide to attorneys." You are precisely correct except where you contradict me.
Also, my experience watching trials on youtube is in fact representative of how it normally goes: I have never seen a judge act in a poor manner toward a self-represented party, on youtube or elsewhere. In the Kenosha parade murder trial, the judge was able to sigh deeply and respect the rights of the defendant, but I suspect if you or I built a fort out of books and boxes on our counsel table, or declined to wear a shirt, we would be immediately disbarred.
I was only mentioning the youtube/Kenosha angle because you asked for an example.
The executives have to be paid large salaries by the shareholders so that they'll put shareholders interests well above those of company employees and customers. This allows them to justify overriding their normal human connection with their employees, and replacing any tendency towards co-worker loyalty with shareholder loyalty. Of course that also justifies treating customers as poorly as possible - just not so poorly that they stop coming back (although if they can monopolize an industry, customers will have nowhere else to go - see broadband providers, etc.).
This is a primary reason why investment capitalism is such a destructive economic system in the long run. Shareholders tend to want to extract as much profit from the company in a short a time as possible; the long-term health of the company and their customers is generally not their primary concern.
... doesn't that make the CEO place his compensation over the shareholders? Yes, they use things like stock options to try to align it, but practically that just gives an artificial target to cook the books/revenue for.
Pichai is simply a poor performer. Google's core businesses have gone markedly downhill just over the past few years:
- A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.
- Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.
- There have been a dozen threads here lately -- just over the past few months -- about Gmail's SPAM filters going haywire.
- AI is poised to eat Google's lunch, and there are rumors that they're lobbying Congress for AI research bans/restrictions, "because it's unsafe."
Honestly, with Pichai at the helm, they're going to go the way of DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory.
> A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.
I thought something happened to my browser session or something when it started giving useless results. Youtube is giving me nonsense after a certain set of results. I am shocked because search is THE tech of Google and wondered how they could screw this so badly. Sundar has caused the downfall of Google.
Google A/B tests their recommendations. Either these recommendations improve their topline metrics or you're in some exotic test group for some in-flight experiment.
Either way, these are deliberate choices whose results likely show that showing bad recommendations is good for business.
My guess is that worse first-page search results leads to more people clicking on the sponsored results, because at least they have some relevance to what they searched for.
However, I think the long-term result of this approach could be the loss of their seemingly insurmountable dominance of the search market.
> Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.
I'm actually finding that aside from programming related queries or searching for reddit threads, Yandex is now the best general search engine, beating out Google, Bing, the bing derivatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave search, and I imagine Yahoo.
It's insane to me that the quality of search has slipped so low, and it also makes me wonder what it is about Yandex that allows it to avoid the modern hellscape of SEO optimized websites that spend 10,000 words saying nothing. It feels like it's got to be something to do with the fact that they have some large bias towards the age of a website.
Right, I believe they state that 99% of their search results are from their own index, and then 1% supplement that with various other sources including Bing, Google, etc.
The poster I replied to said it was a Bing derivative which was not correct.
Brave results look pretty similar to bing for me, and pretty dissimilar to Google. I've been using it for a while since it's now the Brave default, and I just doesn't seem to break ranks from DDG/Bing whenever I bother to compare them.
> - A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.
Not to mention malware redirect sites which Google, previously excellent at detecting, is seemingly clueless about and ranks them as high as Page 1 at times.
But Pichai is doing tremendous job. He had been hired to keep the lights on at Google for as long as possible and this is what he is doing.
You can mine Google for next 5-10 years but it is basically a dead end company. The goal is to give back as much as possible to shareholder so they an allocate capital to better performing ventures they choose. Google is irreparable and sinking.
Search is a joke. Whenever I want to search some conference videos on a topic I get trash after 2-3 results which is totally unrelated with "You may like" nonsense.
Correct. They don't care. I'm not sure if it is because of their culture or if it is a financial decision. Likely it is both.
My conclusion is based on my experience being a content consuner. A quick DuckDuckGo search will show you thousands upon thousands of horror stories that content creators have posted about YT doing them wrong.
I've been saying this for years. He simply doesn't have what it takes.
> A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.
I just searched for HackerNews and have to scroll down to find HN because of ads.
I don't think you should blame Pichai for that. With or without him, Google was already going downhill. You can say he did not reverse course, but doing that means taking risks and I imagine investors of multi-billion dollar companies don't want CEOs to do that.
The kneejerk reactions to the Google layoff are quite interesting in comparison to other layoffs. Meta laid off 2x the % and there was less news or general backlash, and several well known startups have laid off 15-20% of their workforce to mostly normal reactions.
I understand that Google is a sort of indicator for the tech sector as a whole and people viewed it as a sort of "safehaven" prior to layoffs, but to me it shows how entitled tech workers are, especially those in insular cultures like Google.
I guess it also shows the immense brand value Google has, though this seems to be eroding slowly among SWEs, at least in my circles.
1. Like you said, google is sorta an indicator for the industry, and a safe haven. It is a bellwether for the 21st century of Silicon Valley and it defined software engineering and tech for a while. Its buses, food, and perks were famous enough to get movies about its interns.
2. You can't fire Zuck, its not possible without his consent, since he is the majority shareholder. You could fire Sundar. Other tech CEOs that did layoffs (eg. MSFT) have generally well-liked CEOs or already are experiencing leadership changes (salesforce).
3. To build on (2), people don't really seem to like Sundar. He isn't a technical guy, just an MBA from McKinsey (he has an unrelated-to-software engineering degree). There has been a lot of ink spilled on if he has a vision at Google, which I won't take an opinion on, but he was CEO for a lot of the time where people thought Google was getting worse. People complained about quality of search, bureaucracy in the company, inability to diversify income (although they still make a lot of money), etc. The only good thing I've heard anyone say about his was an (Indian) Uber driver who said that he represented the dream for Indian immigrants - going to IIT, moving to America, and getting put in charge of a major global corp.
4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.
5. Cynically, most companies time bad press to news cycles, google didn't do this. Meta did layoffs near the election, which was a much bigger news event.
> 4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.
Meta did lock people out overnight all systems except e-mail. For some reason, some employees had access to workplace until ~10:XXAM EST, which doesn't seem intentional. No one at Meta really uses email.
They didn't explain why people were let go. The Q&As afterwards were brutal. Many high performers or people on high priority projects (e.g. ads) were let go.
Ex-meta employees seem to be overall more demoralized by the company already. Why complain about how you were let go when it seems in line with how the company was treating you anyway?
Exactly. Google laid off like what, 5%? That's less than annual piped from Amazon. It's a tiny dent. In the meantime Amazon is doing massive layoffs on top of pip.
There may also be an element of self-selection here.
I follow the tech news loosely and from my experience Meta have received significantly more high-level news coverage, including a lot of doom-sayer pieces.
The Google news tends to be localised to tech-related news sites. There's no talk of doom, but rather that Google may be preparing for a wider downturn across all industry (i.e. recession.)
This is just part of life. The private sector particularly tech has always had far worse job security compensated by far better pay.
Being cut off in the night is unfortunately a necessity in the era of people airing their grievances on social media.
Seems to me all these tweets about how company X stabbed you in the back is just making it harder for the individual to find a new job.
Yes you might need to access your savings and push back the early retirement plan, yes you'll need to look at expenses and rationalise. Yes you might not be as employable as you thought.
I don't mean to be callous but if you've just lost your job or will find it harder to find your next one you need to wake up to this reality asap. This too shall pass and we will be back to boom but until then get your life in order.
It's only been high due to historic reasons and hype. Business has been on a decades crusade to push down payment for the software labor aristocracy, and to be fair security has nothing to do with it too. There is absolutely no inherent reason why someone should get higher compensation but get a less secure job, beyond the hype for that job, and security should be guaranteed regardless.
I understand both sides of the equation. I absolutely want to keep the level of autonomy a founder has with a start-up, which you will not have with a union, but at certain point, start up stops being an upstart ( Google, Meta come to mind ) so different rules may apply.
But you are right, average compensation tends to up as a result and even out across the ranks ( and some people don't like that too ).
I understand the psychological effect of termination during the night. But rationally thinking, I don’t find any difference to other forms of termination. For the company though, the prompt termination has a much better security prospect.
It would be a pretty bold move to announce layoffs in advance and to do it at some convenient time. You are basically asking ip to get stolen by people who think/know they will be laid off, especially if it is out of spite.
This is a good place to remind tech workers that they should not get comfy in big tech.
Older workers are a massive liability. They will try to get rid of you and they will prefer foreign replacements on the younger side.
They will also claim that they need to increase diversity while doing it.
Everyone is celebrating the fact that most big tech companies are no longer run by Americans. It’s because the system is designed to discriminate against you and get rid of you.
My personal theory is highly liberal tech workers are going to turn into the new “Dey Terk Ur Jerbs” flyover country citizens they spent the last 20 years laughing at.
“Look at the racist losers who hate immigrants! What morons voting for repuvlicans.”
Look in the mirror at 45, it’s you now. And watch how you get laughed at next.
US workers at Google have already been fired. Non-US haven't. The number of US workers is known. The number of intended firings is known. The ratio of US workers to Non-US is known.
Doing the math the conclusion is that non-US workers will be disproportionately affected by the layoff. I think the layoffs are foolish, but they aren't an offshoring plan.
Agreed, I see plenty of tech jobs in the public and non-profit sectors.
Problem is that they're not paying what would be considered acceptable to a big tech worker.
I saw a 20-something on TikTok saying that she feels like her compensation should be ~500K/year. That's a rate at our org where you're talking about multiple exec salaries combined. It's not based in reality for the vast majority of the country. This feels a bit like golden handcuffs.
> That job you can't be fired from, that ensures employment as long as you want? It's in the public sector.
No, its not. You can be fired from public sector jobs. Many of them (outside of high level ones, e.g., where you are or serve at the pleasure of some elected official) have due process protections, but people can and do get fired from even those.
It’s hard to fathom how the upper management of these companies couldn’t see this coming when they were binging on hiring.
Did they really believe we were in some new era of pandemic-fueled hyper-growth and that they would be less competitive if they didn’t grow by tens-of-thousands of employees?
It's probably some kind of prisoner's dilemma. If you managed a department of a company which is expanding too fast, and you predict there's going to be layoffs in 1-2 years, the optimal game theoretic move (for yourself) might be to hire even more aggressively, so that when you're asked to do a x% layoff, your department is buffed up ready to shed the low performers.
My boss at my previous job made $40 million a year, and he was literally single-handedly tanking the company. He got fired and so he went to work for Sundar Pichai at Google ... making even more.
People who are on the low rungs of the ladder assume that the people way above them must have been intelligent to get up there. It's not always a great assumption.
Maybe. I know why I am not pursuing any non-IC role these days, which seems to be THE way to ridiculous compensation packages. I am not willing to put up with the stresses involved if I am to do it well. And that is before you get to dealing with the backstabbers, yes-men and obligatory birthdays. It gets old fast.
Cook asked for, and was granted, that pay cut in response to 60% of shareholders not being happy with his level of compensation. Good on him for doing so, but $49m is still a lot.
>Corporations - and in particular tech companies - have consciously colluded with each other to push a false narrative about how they are the victims of an economy that continues to enrich them. And that’s because their leadership isn’t judged by how well they treat their employees, but rather by how they protect the interests of their shareholders.
This is the core of it, and, contrary to many, not something that we have accept as inevitable or immutable.
When 80+% of GOOG's revenue comes from advertising, it is bound to cause pressures to cut costs especially when the leading indicators are showing a broad recession across the board.
If Sundar had just kept the headcount betting that the recession won't impact GOOG, and was proved wrong, the investors and employees would be out with pitchforks.
If the recession does hit, at least Sundar has cut costs before the fact and his rational investors should be happy with that outcome.
If the recession doesn't pan out as deep as they have estimated, they could just restart hiring.
It is terrible for the people impacted by this decision and I empathaize with them. But when heads of peer group companies are also doing similar cuts (some even deeper than GOOG), I see it as a broader economic trend and not something specific to GOOG.
(The problems related to GOOG's service mix, cash cows and innovation impact are a separate issue and the CEO should be judged on that separately. All things considered, the current headcount reduction decision is a rational one, imo.)
He's the CEO,he's there at the wishes of the board who in turn are accountable to shareholders. The metrics he's judged by unfortunately are not long term but rather quarterly reporting, as long as these numbers look good and the share price reflects it, they'll keep him there. This year we've obviously seen a decline from the frothy peaks and this mass layoff is likely the consequencenof that.
It's a common occurrence in that share price growth is conflated with CEO performance when in fact the general market is responsible for it.
> My answer is that it shouldn’t be, and that if we had a culture where the Chief Executive feared for their job, they might take a different tact with the company.
It would probably be worse for the company. The biggest problem with layoffs for a company is that it creates a culture where employees fear for their jobs, which leads them to perform worse, and quit the moment they have any leverage, making the company far more inefficient.
One of the major reasons tech companies are blaming the layoffs on pandemic hiring is not because that’s the truth or that the execs believe it’s the truth (although it might be) is that they can use the pandemic to present the layoffs as a one time thing extraordinary event, to prevent fear of being fired from setting into the company culture.
bruv y’all we work willingly for big tech companies. they answer to shareholders. they use their money and connections to work with governments and shitty actors, and y’all don’t complain then. in fact you go along with it.
it’s hard to feel bad for millionaire employees who don’t understand this basic fact.
especially when regular people are suffering, it’s cringe to see people making way more than most people cry about how things are not fair. you’re getting many months of full pay and health insurance extensions.
we choose willingly to play the game when we sign offer letters and it’s not like employees are loyal (no reason to be) to companies. accept it and move on.
start a co op b corp now and run it your way with your millions. don’t play the game and still complain expecting things to change.
> it’s cringe to see people making way more than most people cry about how things are not fair. you’re getting many months of full pay and health insurance extensions.
Far from it. What is cringe however is that not all employees get these, like in normal countries, and that we create artificial division between highly paid devs and "normal people", cause newsflash - they are normal. And they are much closer to you than to their bosses. Only difference is they may have a few more months before homelessness hits, and maybe more brainwashed into thinking they're different. What we all need is solidarity.
Yeah I actually feel bad for the regular people who have no support.
It’s hard to feel bad for people who make 300k plus tc because I know what’s it like to have money and savings after having no money prior to getting into tech. I was living with my parents til 25 for example and when I got a tech job suddenly I could afford a car and my own place. And savings.
I’m sure google pays even more, so I feel cringe there. I don’t feel solidarity with most tech workers who barely work and goof off (personal experience) while maybe 20% actually do the heavy lifting.
There is nothing wrong with goofing around or slacking off. Cause for your 300k your boss makes 300 000 000, and his work is going golfing and having fancy dinners, and calling it work.
If you have fallen for the corporate bullshit and push yourself to work hard, that is on you. We should be organising and pushing for everyone to barely work and have decent salaries, not just whoever has the top job in demand this decade ...
Have you ever worked a manual labor job? I have so I’m just curious. I get your sentiment but I live in the real world.
The world is run by privileged people. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that the best way to survive is to literally hack the system for myself because A) politicians don’t work for me even if they say they do (maybe it I had a billy) and B) I don’t have time to wait
I was born in a corrupt third world country where human rights might as well be a joke. A miracle (don’t really know what else considering my dad doesn’t have a degree) got us out of there and I got to come to the USA. It’s way better here but the problem and blessing here is capitalism means that many people need to stay “cheap” and down (but not totally destitute like in my 3rd world) in order to maintain the system so the politicians (bought by rich fucks) can keep making us feel good and fuck us right before we get the carrot.
That being said I still find it hard to sympathize with people who don’t work. We don’t live in communism where we just get paid to pretend we work. The best thing we can do is make enough money through the system that exists here and those of us who are neutral good (like me) will start companies and hire people to give them a better chance.
Don’t wait on google. Don’t wait on politicians. If you’re worth a damn you’ll hack the system and make it work for you TODAY. You know you don’t need to have a VC funded juggernaut to make a difference right?
Never worked at google and don’t have any intention working there but at least where I worked (unicorn from a couple years ago) I remember a team that moved so slow and then I realized they spent more time down in the game lobby than at their desk. More people realized this and they became a joke of a team who later got re-org’d.
I hope this teaches everyone a lesson that all these glorified CEOs can be as dumb as rocks. Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk, Nadella have proven this in last few months. We need to stop glorifying these people as demigods. Their only job is to exploit workers as much as they legally can to produce maximum value for shareholders. The people who actually create this value are the ones who always get the short end of the stick. Meritocracy is such a lie, I’m sick of it.
CEOs work for the shareholders not for the employees.
Over the past 2 years, GOOGL is up 3% while QQQ (benchmark) is down 11%.
Why would the shareholders want to fire Sundar Pinchai?
It's weird to me that people don't take the slightest amount of time to think about who can fire Sundar before writing a whole article about firing Sundar.
If you want to fight for worker's rights - advocate for unions or something, this is just clickbait.
So why are we paying them so much? Because the compensation committee says so. Why does the compensation committee say so? Well, because the compensation committee is formed of executives, so the whole thing is just a massive circle jerk.
At what point do the shareholders say "hold up a sec, why are we bleeding all this cash to a bunch of executives whose entire strategy is just to follow the market".