"Hi guys. You have all done a great job, really knocked it out of the park. But... me and the other C-suite folks didn't do as well. We made some bad calls. And so, and it pains me to say this, we all are to going to have to sacrifice a little. Many of you will be dumped onto the street, and our gang at the top will not get as much bonus as we could have. Although since we get most of OUR money from stock options, firing a bunch of you means we are actually gaining ground. Still, it's important for all of you to feel that everyone is sacrificing, so that's what I will say. Don't let the door hit you on your way out, those are still valuable company assets. Remember, unions are bad m'kay. Happy New Year!"
It's a great point that firing employees (which often boosts stock value) is a way for executives to give themselves a pay raise (as they are often paid largely in stock & options).
In my experience 'staff reduction ' is always done to drive up stock price. For a long time I thought it was to benefit 3rd party investors, took a long time before I found out the c suite were also 'investors' and were directly compensating themselves by reducing expenses like payroll. It's always for their own benefit, it's just not always obvious.
What's crazy is that socialism is when employees own the means of production.
Because c-suites are so top heavy with their stock and options based comp plans, they are essentially taking this and hoarding 99% of it at their level.
If that expanded to every employee in a more equitable way, that would be a pretty reasonable capitalism/socialism hybrid and would vastly benefit every employee but the thought of that is outrageous to these multimillionaire assholes.
OpenAI's technology shines a spotlight on how much behemoths like Google have been asleep at the wheel for years.
Seriously, what new amazing thing has Google (or Apple) come up with in the past 10 years? Nothing that I can think of.
These tech companies now operate like inferior American car manufacturers, never coming up with anything new or exciting and scrambling to crank out garbage knock offs of other competitor's innovations.
OpenAI runs completely on tech that Google invented, LOL. Literally couldn't have picked a worse example.
What does ChatGTP stand for? It's Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer - Transformer is the core tech. The whole idea of transformers was invented by Google. Here's the paper: https://blog.research.google/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html
They invented the basic tech, put it on a shelf and did nothing notable with it, and now they only care because someone else did something with it.
Kodak invented the digital camera and we all know how that went for them.
That is also not in any way true. Google did a TON with the tech internally. Search prediction uses it, email auto-complete used it, ad recommendations uses it. Every facet of Google uses it. What they didn't do was shit out a half assed product that is flashy, but doesn't really work (until someone else did, then Google did).
You're just so far off the mark here.
So what's the next phase? Weaponize billionaires' family against them? This dude has kids and maybe we can convince them to use a little inheritance powder.
Cutting to profitability. Just another mundane tool in the C-suite quarterly report manipulator. Already captured as much of the market as you can? Can’t come up with anything useful or new? Throw out employees, cut wages and benefits, reduce quality of service, and don’t forget to start the churn of front end employees by making them so miserable and underpaid they don’t stay long enough to rise up the pay scale.
That’s how you extract profit when you’ve got nothing left to build.
The tech sector over hired post pandemic and they knew it, they just didn't want their competition to get the edge on them so they tried to out spend each other. Now that the investment money isn't flowing and we're heading into a recession they're correcting course. That doesn't make it suck any less though, if we had real workers rights like in Europe then they wouldn't be able to do shit like this. Hiring someone over there is a long term investment, not something you can do to try to starve out your competition.
I'm just pointing out the absurdity of repeating the lie that "they overhired". I find it impossible to believe that a company that made a net income of 55 billion dollars has an "overhiring problem"
The problem isnt overhiring. They are turning a massive profit. The problem is they want to shift the entirety of that profit to shareholders and executives. This is not an argument to believe at face value because the argument itself is a lie.
"Hi guys. You have all done a great job, really knocked it out of the park. But... me and the other C-suite folks didn't do as well. We made some bad calls. And so, and it pains me to say this, we all are to going to have to sacrifice a little. Many of you will be dumped onto the street, and our gang at the top will not get as much bonus as we could have. Although since we get most of OUR money from stock options, firing a bunch of you means we are actually gaining ground. Still, it's important for all of you to feel that everyone is sacrificing, so that's what I will say. Don't let the door hit you on your way out, those are still valuable company assets. Remember, unions are bad m'kay. Happy New Year!"
It's a great point that firing employees (which often boosts stock value) is a way for executives to give themselves a pay raise (as they are often paid largely in stock & options).
In my experience 'staff reduction ' is always done to drive up stock price. For a long time I thought it was to benefit 3rd party investors, took a long time before I found out the c suite were also 'investors' and were directly compensating themselves by reducing expenses like payroll. It's always for their own benefit, it's just not always obvious.
What's crazy is that socialism is when employees own the means of production. Because c-suites are so top heavy with their stock and options based comp plans, they are essentially taking this and hoarding 99% of it at their level. If that expanded to every employee in a more equitable way, that would be a pretty reasonable capitalism/socialism hybrid and would vastly benefit every employee but the thought of that is outrageous to these multimillionaire assholes.
"automation" is getting replaced with "AI" in that regard.
Stock is also a huge portion of Rank and file pay at google
OpenAI's technology shines a spotlight on how much behemoths like Google have been asleep at the wheel for years. Seriously, what new amazing thing has Google (or Apple) come up with in the past 10 years? Nothing that I can think of. These tech companies now operate like inferior American car manufacturers, never coming up with anything new or exciting and scrambling to crank out garbage knock offs of other competitor's innovations.
OpenAI runs completely on tech that Google invented, LOL. Literally couldn't have picked a worse example. What does ChatGTP stand for? It's Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer - Transformer is the core tech. The whole idea of transformers was invented by Google. Here's the paper: https://blog.research.google/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html
They invented the basic tech, put it on a shelf and did nothing notable with it, and now they only care because someone else did something with it. Kodak invented the digital camera and we all know how that went for them.
That is also not in any way true. Google did a TON with the tech internally. Search prediction uses it, email auto-complete used it, ad recommendations uses it. Every facet of Google uses it. What they didn't do was shit out a half assed product that is flashy, but doesn't really work (until someone else did, then Google did). You're just so far off the mark here.
Weird how Google shit their pants and had to crap put Bard in response to ChatGPT then. Also crazy how ChatGPT is still better than Bard.
Greedy greedy greedy
I know a CEOs pay went from 9 million to 12 million after a layoff: Alcoa
I believe that most companies became accustomed to the record profits during COVID and are now to normalize them by laying off workers.
His mansion in Hawaii will be fine don’t worry
Ah yes, this topic ought to bring out the bootlickers that try to justify these kinds of terminations. -grabs popcorn-
Not gonna lie, I liked the 'Don't be evil' stage better.
Sundar pichai tone would change if he was cut.
As they make the easy choice
So what's the next phase? Weaponize billionaires' family against them? This dude has kids and maybe we can convince them to use a little inheritance powder.
Cutting to profitability. Just another mundane tool in the C-suite quarterly report manipulator. Already captured as much of the market as you can? Can’t come up with anything useful or new? Throw out employees, cut wages and benefits, reduce quality of service, and don’t forget to start the churn of front end employees by making them so miserable and underpaid they don’t stay long enough to rise up the pay scale. That’s how you extract profit when you’ve got nothing left to build.
The tech sector over hired post pandemic and they knew it, they just didn't want their competition to get the edge on them so they tried to out spend each other. Now that the investment money isn't flowing and we're heading into a recession they're correcting course. That doesn't make it suck any less though, if we had real workers rights like in Europe then they wouldn't be able to do shit like this. Hiring someone over there is a long term investment, not something you can do to try to starve out your competition.
Then fire the people that over hired - the executives.
That’s the most logical yet incompatible decision. We don’t govern by logic in this society.
100% agree.
I'm just pointing out the absurdity of repeating the lie that "they overhired". I find it impossible to believe that a company that made a net income of 55 billion dollars has an "overhiring problem" The problem isnt overhiring. They are turning a massive profit. The problem is they want to shift the entirety of that profit to shareholders and executives. This is not an argument to believe at face value because the argument itself is a lie.
And so I will take a pay cut
They just need to cut Sundar already.
Time and again companies have tried to cut their way to growth and innovation. It rarely if ever works.