Hedge fund billionaire Christopher Hohn wrote a letter to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai advising him to "cut thousand more jobs". In a viral letter, the billionaire dated January 20 that Google's 12,000 layoff is a step in the right direction, but it does not reverse the very strong headcount growth of 2022. "Ultimately management will need to go further". It doesn't seem the madness is over 😞 and it's not only Google. Others will continue too. #google #amazon #microsoft #meta #layoffs
Lot of companies over hired and engineers are paid more than other jobs. It's true. But letting them go listening to investors would kill the morale and innovation engine. These investors may not understand much about what keeps such companies profitable.
What innovation engine? Few developments out of tech giants recently - just acquisitions and blatant copying
From 30000 foot it looks like that. But even to keep things running the way you see now at Google and Meta scale requires quite a bit of engineering work. There aren't new products but plenty of product features that makes billions of ppl use it. They are working on lot of AI stuff which isn't visible or live but definitely part of innovation engine.
that’s just one. i bet there will be more shareholders pushing tech companies to go for more deeper cuts. its just sad that people who make millions a day, are having issues with people making half of that, in a year.
Businesses pay market rate. It's a business at the end of the day, not charity. This whole 'they make so much money they shouldn't mind sharing more with others because Jesus' is the most ironic thing to see in this platform - I mean you literally just pitied people making 500k a year. Imagine that lol. How much of that are you giving to people who make say 50k, out of charity? Probably zero. You could afford to share your half your salary and still have an amazing life, yet you don't do it - am I right? So why expect anyone who makes a lot of money to give it away when you don't?
Do you have an idea that ppl may somewhere in the world make less than 10K in a year?
A billionaire in search of more billions. Color me shocked. How much longer until these oligarchs have the power to Pull A Zorg and throw a million people on their behinds whenever they feel like it?
Leeloo has my ❤
Always and forever.
I mean, why would anyone take offense to this? Public companies are driven by profit, not the approval of their employees. If an activist investor makes a demand to increase profits it will be heard by the board. Lesson here is don't throw your entire life to your company. They don't care about you though you might think so with their welcoming pronouns and E&B propaganda
I agree with your lesson and I think that's the mindset every employee should have. But the email is bad advice for the company's future because it sacrifices long term prospects for short term share price boosts. Google will never be able to recruit top talent ever again and will become the next ibm, with chatGpt on the horizon that could ultimately be devastating to Google.
Microsoft laid off engineers too. It's the same story everywhere, which means you need a new startup that will create disruption. It will tough in this economic situation, not impossible though.
Make Meta go private
Investors are free to demand this, however the ownership structure of Google and Meta like companies means they don't have to pay heed to this. The fact that they did indicates that it is mostly to keep internal talent by protecting or shoring up their comps.
They will as they are heavily incentives to do so. Besides deterring activists from ousting them, the other incentive is that majority of their compensation is based on boosting stock prices. One fool proof way to boost stock price is to cut costs and labor is probably the largest cost in tech companies. Expect more layoffs and some freebies to vanish. This happens in every recession.
Google famously didn’t do this during 2008 and it paid dividends
Twitter has shown what is possible.
He's right though
A billionaire asking to reduce salaries; these people live in their own worlds and people are just numbers. What if this doesn’t stop at tech and applies to other sectors?
They want everyone to live on the bleeding edge of poverty so they can be more easily exploited, thus pocketing the vast majority of the profit made on the back of cheap labor. Why do you think the US minimum wage has stayed obscenely low for decades, so many workers have few (if any) benefits, and little vacation time? Exploitation at its finest, courtesy of politicians being bought by oligarchs and corporations.
Other sectors are not ridiculously underutilized, overstaffed and overpayed. There’s a normal America out there.
Sundar be like yes my lord
The number of likes in the above post is mind boggling!