8 ms·

Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interes

Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.” Good retention policy does provide value to users. -- > "When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount of complaints began around why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses." +1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled employees in human history whining about this kind of thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels like more than that. > "We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."

ghaff 6y ago
I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that vein. That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.
- vletal 6y ago
  I like how living in the close proximity to the city center might seem somehow special from the perspective of suburban oriented culture even though it is usually a norm in Europe.
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  That's still a ton of entitlement... "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment." vs "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I get pretty tired of this back and forth arguing in circles over who is more entitled than whom, who has more of a right to complain, who is the most aggrieved, who has the biggest disadvantage to brag about. Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever, because there's always someone who has it worse, right? The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one, and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame anyone higher? Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me. But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100% unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's situation, good or bad.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Lots of people at Google, including many developers, don't make "hundreds of thousands of dollars." It's also just a unilateral change in the terms of their employment (unavoidable as it is during the current times) that might increase their costs by $25K? after taxes. That other people have it much worse doesn't change the fact that a fair number of people are seeing a change from what they agreed to.
  - chad_strategic 6y ago
    Out of ~600 or some comments, this wins the award! Thank you for really getting to the point of this article. But I would add... I left my job etc, but now I going to stand on soap box and write an article about and make myself sound so self righteous.
  - munificent 6y ago
    "I have an apartment and a bank account right now." vs "I live in a tent encampment." vs "I live in a shantytown in a third-world country." vs "I am on death row." vs "I am on death row for a crime I didn't commit." vs... It's important to try to maintain perspective about our own good fortunes. But it's also human nature to feel our own pain as relative to our previous experience. Someone's always got it worse than you but that doesn't mean it's fair to expect everyone else to wander around farting rainbows with grins plastered to their faces. All of the Googlers I know are well aware of the many ways in which we're fortunate and privileged. But we're also, you know, human, and occasionally whining about stuff is just part of the human experience.
- hackily 6y ago
  My apartment in SF does not have a kitchen. Food provided by the company helped me get by! With no car, and only a handful of restaurant options within 1 mile, it's not the easiest to get by without a company cafeteria. I can sympathize with why many people would like to be able to expense food.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    What does expensing have to do with your situation though? You seem to have an issue with access to food rather than how much it costs. How does the company giving you some more money help with that?
- fossuser 6y ago
  In my mind the company provides food as a perk in part so people hang around and chat without leaving the office, it also makes it more pleasant to work there. It’s not to feed you in your own home.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Sure. That's why they do it. (Along with the fact that it's an expected perk in some circles.) Which is also why paying a meal per diem doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's also somewhat understandable why there would be a bit of grumbling about a benefit being taken away, however unavoidably. Of course, for many employees, the elimination of commuting makes remote work a significant win financially. But others never intended to do much more than sleep in their apartments and the current situation is therefore a net negative, even just financially.
Aeolun 6y ago
It’s always seemed like more of a hassle to expense lunch/dinner etc. given what we’re getting paid. Who the hell wants to deal with concur for every lunch?! Then again, if your only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the corporate machine, it might work.
- kazen44 6y ago
  at my old job (roughly 60 people) the company just got regular lunch ingredients (usually some meats, cheese and just normal bread) for the entire company. culturally it was expected everyone had lunch in the common area from this stockpile. costs for this where deducted from your pay, but because it was bought at suchs a large scale it was very cheap compared to buying your own lunch or making it at home. (roughly 20€ per month I believe). this system worked pretty nice imo, lunch wasn't anything fancy but it was healthy, cheap and having lunch with coworkers from other departments helped massively in regards to culture.
rapsey 6y ago
I don't know about that. Was MS ever not filthy profitable? They are very successful with azure, was that started by balmer or nadella? People here give MS too little credit. Their reach is MASSIVE. No american company has the world wide reach that MS has. Practically every enterprise in the world is their customer.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Profit is a lagging indicator that often leads companies astray with short-term decision making at the expense of long-term relevance. Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that point, they were having profit issues too - but what lead to that was arguably short-term thinking). Today, I'd argue Intel has made similar decisions that put them on a bad long term path. MS would have stayed alive for a while, but been a shadow of their former self. Obviously, it's hard to prove a counterfactual like this - but this is how I model it.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    Enterprises are the slowest to change of all and this is MS bread and butter. I completely disagree MS was ever close to becoming irrelevant. Silicon valley is in it's own little world. The rest of the planet is firmly a MS customer. MS can take all the good ideas, implement them and sell them worldwide before a startup can get out of silicon valley. Case in point: slack vs. teams.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Arguably that focus on O365 and Azure - the strategy that enabled Teams success was due to Nadella. You're right though - 'irrelevant' is too provocative and strongly worded. I'm more focused on future bets and trends. I think that trend shifted at Microsoft from trending towards future irrelevance back in the other direction, to being a competitive threat again.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  Agreed. I find it interesting that Apple has money, hardware, OS, many apps, web presence. And now ARM CPU knowhow. Why aren't they forcibly pushing into Corporate? Sure, they'd have to develop corporate fleet management stuff but at this stage they could buy a few companies and be 80% of the way there. Or build it right from the start for only a handful of their hundreds of billions. How many iphone toting CTOs in your average non-silicon valley companies would jump for Apple "Just Works" in their business? Either they see something they don't like or a Gates/Jobs handshake said no.
lhorie 6y ago
> why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office This is surprisingly not specific to Google. I've heard of other instances of this in other bay area companies, including mine. For us, it had to be put to rest at a company-wide all-hands meeting, along with other overly entitled complaints like "comp is not competitive", when in reality levels.fyi ranks it higher than even FAANG. Greed sometimes defies logic.
sangnoir 6y ago
> Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding). As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new tech or project did Satya launch that you can attribute MS's "turnaround" to? IMHO, it's mostly PR/hearts-and-minds stuff, but I quit MS tech a long time ago and haven't been following closely. In retrospect, I think the Win mobile failures were overblown, the zeitgeist then was mobile would replace desktop/laptop computers, therefore failing on mobile could be fatal to Microsoft, and remained as a stain on Ballmers name. The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.
- niketdesai 6y ago
  Nadella I think brought focus on ideas and prioritization that complimented Ballmer's ideas. He doesn't need to launch new projects, but ensure they are managed into a place of relevance. In that regard, it really showcases the excellent people MSFT has in the chain and how they can help each other get to where they collectively want to go.
- rrradical 6y ago
  Stratchery did a nice piece on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    That stratechery piece confirms that a number of Satya's "quick wins" were projects mostly developed under Ballmer but credited to Nadella... Which is exactly my point - that Ballmer doesn't always get the credit he deserves, for the sake of magnifying the contrasts between the 2 leaders.
    - lallysingh 6y ago
      I don't know about this. I think great engineers delete more code than they write. Perhaps something similar is relevant here.
dcole2929 6y ago
I really hate this narrative that Nadella came in and turned things around. He's absolutely made great decisions since taking the reins but most of his early success was just riding out things that Ballmer set in motion. Not to mention most of Ballmer's misses were more Bill said no.
newobj 6y ago
MSFT "irrelevant" ... ah, ok, so you're just measuring capturing zeitgeist vs. sustainability of the business model ... ok MSFT revenue has NEVER stopped growing: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...
jariel 6y ago
"Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous " This is definitely not true. Ballmer increased revenues massively, and launched a slew of new products (XBox, MS Live, cloud etc.) and realigned the company. Have a look [1] Nadella has done nothing approaching that level of importance yet, so far, he is riding the wave that was handed to him. Now the stock price - this is a different thing. It sagged under Ballmer even as MSFT was massively growing revenues, around Naella's time investors realized that MS 'was not fading' and all that extra EPS was like a share price slingshot. Ballmer was as transformative and important as Gates. Nadella's early transformations were around culture, but that's just PR. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-revenue-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
- fossuser 6y ago
  Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success, not current revenue. The fact that it sagged under Ballmer and is now up under Nadella aligns with how I'm framing things. I suppose you could argue that's entirely PR, but I don't think that's the case. People thought MSFT under Ballmer was trending down, now they think it's trending up. I'd argue that's due to strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left. I've mentioned in other comments that revenue (while good) isn't the whole story.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    >Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success Sure, the stock price is always a prediction of future success. But it can change overnight, and when it does, it's not because reality or the "facts on the ground" changed overnight (usually) it's because perception changed. Often if not always because a catalyst made people aware of something that was building for a fair amount of time. >strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left. I'm not saying this is wrong, but I don't think it's appropriate to treat the stock price as evidence of it.
  - jariel 6y ago
    That's a good point but it wasn't really 'Ballmer' - it was the existential changes in the industry. I believe if Ballmer had of hung on for a few more years, that change would have happened eventually. Investors eventually would realize 'This is not just Windows and Office'.
avasylev 6y ago
>> “What? Sushi again???” Could that be just someone not liking sushi? As someone who doesn't like sushi and rather eat hotdog form gas station, I could see myself saying that.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  These are Google cafes we're talking about, there are literally ten different main courses on offer. The whining is about there being "sushi again" at the Asian station when they wanted ramen, and they don't want to switch to curry, pizza, pasta, bouillabaisse, tacos or the salad bar, or walk across the street to another cafe.
jodrellblank 6y ago
> "+1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled employees in human history whining about this kind of thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels like more than that." The charitable interpretation is that total compensation has just dropped, while the work hasn't. It's Loss Aversion[1], losing something hurts more than gaining the equivalent thing. Google isn't suffering from people staying at home using the internet more, it's not like Google cut manager salaries by 50% to keep the factory lights on and the orphans fed. Google's share price is up at least 50% since Jan 2020, and they've taken away some thousands of dollars of remuneration from staff and saved money on not having to run kitchens, and are demanding that staff feel grateful about this by handwaving at suffering people elsewhere. > ">”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.”" Calling legal and privacy efforts "a waste of resources" and saying they provide "zero value" /is/ saying they are not important. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

ghaff 6y ago

I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that vein. That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.

vletal 6y ago
I like how living in the close proximity to the city center might seem somehow special from the perspective of suburban oriented culture even though it is usually a norm in Europe.
hundchenkatze 6y ago
That's still a ton of entitlement... "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment." vs "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I get pretty tired of this back and forth arguing in circles over who is more entitled than whom, who has more of a right to complain, who is the most aggrieved, who has the biggest disadvantage to brag about. Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever, because there's always someone who has it worse, right? The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one, and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame anyone higher? Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me. But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100% unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's situation, good or bad.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Lots of people at Google, including many developers, don't make "hundreds of thousands of dollars." It's also just a unilateral change in the terms of their employment (unavoidable as it is during the current times) that might increase their costs by $25K? after taxes. That other people have it much worse doesn't change the fact that a fair number of people are seeing a change from what they agreed to.
- chad_strategic 6y ago
  Out of ~600 or some comments, this wins the award! Thank you for really getting to the point of this article. But I would add... I left my job etc, but now I going to stand on soap box and write an article about and make myself sound so self righteous.
- munificent 6y ago
  "I have an apartment and a bank account right now." vs "I live in a tent encampment." vs "I live in a shantytown in a third-world country." vs "I am on death row." vs "I am on death row for a crime I didn't commit." vs... It's important to try to maintain perspective about our own good fortunes. But it's also human nature to feel our own pain as relative to our previous experience. Someone's always got it worse than you but that doesn't mean it's fair to expect everyone else to wander around farting rainbows with grins plastered to their faces. All of the Googlers I know are well aware of the many ways in which we're fortunate and privileged. But we're also, you know, human, and occasionally whining about stuff is just part of the human experience.
hackily 6y ago
My apartment in SF does not have a kitchen. Food provided by the company helped me get by! With no car, and only a handful of restaurant options within 1 mile, it's not the easiest to get by without a company cafeteria. I can sympathize with why many people would like to be able to expense food.
- ghaff 6y ago
  What does expensing have to do with your situation though? You seem to have an issue with access to food rather than how much it costs. How does the company giving you some more money help with that?
fossuser 6y ago
In my mind the company provides food as a perk in part so people hang around and chat without leaving the office, it also makes it more pleasant to work there. It’s not to feed you in your own home.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Sure. That's why they do it. (Along with the fact that it's an expected perk in some circles.) Which is also why paying a meal per diem doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's also somewhat understandable why there would be a bit of grumbling about a benefit being taken away, however unavoidably. Of course, for many employees, the elimination of commuting makes remote work a significant win financially. But others never intended to do much more than sleep in their apartments and the current situation is therefore a net negative, even just financially.

Aeolun 6y ago

It’s always seemed like more of a hassle to expense lunch/dinner etc. given what we’re getting paid. Who the hell wants to deal with concur for every lunch?! Then again, if your only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the corporate machine, it might work.

kazen44 6y ago
at my old job (roughly 60 people) the company just got regular lunch ingredients (usually some meats, cheese and just normal bread) for the entire company. culturally it was expected everyone had lunch in the common area from this stockpile. costs for this where deducted from your pay, but because it was bought at suchs a large scale it was very cheap compared to buying your own lunch or making it at home. (roughly 20€ per month I believe). this system worked pretty nice imo, lunch wasn't anything fancy but it was healthy, cheap and having lunch with coworkers from other departments helped massively in regards to culture.

rapsey 6y ago

I don't know about that. Was MS ever not filthy profitable? They are very successful with azure, was that started by balmer or nadella? People here give MS too little credit. Their reach is MASSIVE. No american company has the world wide reach that MS has. Practically every enterprise in the world is their customer.

fossuser 6y ago
Profit is a lagging indicator that often leads companies astray with short-term decision making at the expense of long-term relevance. Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that point, they were having profit issues too - but what lead to that was arguably short-term thinking). Today, I'd argue Intel has made similar decisions that put them on a bad long term path. MS would have stayed alive for a while, but been a shadow of their former self. Obviously, it's hard to prove a counterfactual like this - but this is how I model it.
- rapsey 6y ago
  Enterprises are the slowest to change of all and this is MS bread and butter. I completely disagree MS was ever close to becoming irrelevant. Silicon valley is in it's own little world. The rest of the planet is firmly a MS customer. MS can take all the good ideas, implement them and sell them worldwide before a startup can get out of silicon valley. Case in point: slack vs. teams.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Arguably that focus on O365 and Azure - the strategy that enabled Teams success was due to Nadella. You're right though - 'irrelevant' is too provocative and strongly worded. I'm more focused on future bets and trends. I think that trend shifted at Microsoft from trending towards future irrelevance back in the other direction, to being a competitive threat again.
_carbyau_ 6y ago
Agreed. I find it interesting that Apple has money, hardware, OS, many apps, web presence. And now ARM CPU knowhow. Why aren't they forcibly pushing into Corporate? Sure, they'd have to develop corporate fleet management stuff but at this stage they could buy a few companies and be 80% of the way there. Or build it right from the start for only a handful of their hundreds of billions. How many iphone toting CTOs in your average non-silicon valley companies would jump for Apple "Just Works" in their business? Either they see something they don't like or a Gates/Jobs handshake said no.

lhorie 6y ago

> why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office This is surprisingly not specific to Google. I've heard of other instances of this in other bay area companies, including mine. For us, it had to be put to rest at a company-wide all-hands meeting, along with other overly entitled complaints like "comp is not competitive", when in reality levels.fyi ranks it higher than even FAANG. Greed sometimes defies logic.

sangnoir 6y ago

> Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding). As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new tech or project did Satya launch that you can attribute MS's "turnaround" to? IMHO, it's mostly PR/hearts-and-minds stuff, but I quit MS tech a long time ago and haven't been following closely. In retrospect, I think the Win mobile failures were overblown, the zeitgeist then was mobile would replace desktop/laptop computers, therefore failing on mobile could be fatal to Microsoft, and remained as a stain on Ballmers name. The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.

niketdesai 6y ago
Nadella I think brought focus on ideas and prioritization that complimented Ballmer's ideas. He doesn't need to launch new projects, but ensure they are managed into a place of relevance. In that regard, it really showcases the excellent people MSFT has in the chain and how they can help each other get to where they collectively want to go.
rrradical 6y ago
Stratchery did a nice piece on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
- sangnoir 6y ago
  That stratechery piece confirms that a number of Satya's "quick wins" were projects mostly developed under Ballmer but credited to Nadella... Which is exactly my point - that Ballmer doesn't always get the credit he deserves, for the sake of magnifying the contrasts between the 2 leaders.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    I don't know about this. I think great engineers delete more code than they write. Perhaps something similar is relevant here.

dcole2929 6y ago

I really hate this narrative that Nadella came in and turned things around. He's absolutely made great decisions since taking the reins but most of his early success was just riding out things that Ballmer set in motion. Not to mention most of Ballmer's misses were more Bill said no.

newobj 6y ago

MSFT "irrelevant" ... ah, ok, so you're just measuring capturing zeitgeist vs. sustainability of the business model ... ok MSFT revenue has NEVER stopped growing: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...

jariel 6y ago

"Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous " This is definitely not true. Ballmer increased revenues massively, and launched a slew of new products (XBox, MS Live, cloud etc.) and realigned the company. Have a look [1] Nadella has done nothing approaching that level of importance yet, so far, he is riding the wave that was handed to him. Now the stock price - this is a different thing. It sagged under Ballmer even as MSFT was massively growing revenues, around Naella's time investors realized that MS 'was not fading' and all that extra EPS was like a share price slingshot. Ballmer was as transformative and important as Gates. Nadella's early transformations were around culture, but that's just PR. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-revenue-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...

fossuser 6y ago
Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success, not current revenue. The fact that it sagged under Ballmer and is now up under Nadella aligns with how I'm framing things. I suppose you could argue that's entirely PR, but I don't think that's the case. People thought MSFT under Ballmer was trending down, now they think it's trending up. I'd argue that's due to strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left. I've mentioned in other comments that revenue (while good) isn't the whole story.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success Sure, the stock price is always a prediction of future success. But it can change overnight, and when it does, it's not because reality or the "facts on the ground" changed overnight (usually) it's because perception changed. Often if not always because a catalyst made people aware of something that was building for a fair amount of time. >strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left. I'm not saying this is wrong, but I don't think it's appropriate to treat the stock price as evidence of it.
- jariel 6y ago
  That's a good point but it wasn't really 'Ballmer' - it was the existential changes in the industry. I believe if Ballmer had of hung on for a few more years, that change would have happened eventually. Investors eventually would realize 'This is not just Windows and Office'.

avasylev 6y ago

>> “What? Sushi again???” Could that be just someone not liking sushi? As someone who doesn't like sushi and rather eat hotdog form gas station, I could see myself saying that.

Clewza313 6y ago
These are Google cafes we're talking about, there are literally ten different main courses on offer. The whining is about there being "sushi again" at the Asian station when they wanted ramen, and they don't want to switch to curry, pizza, pasta, bouillabaisse, tacos or the salad bar, or walk across the street to another cafe.

jodrellblank 6y ago

> "+1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled employees in human history whining about this kind of thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels like more than that." The charitable interpretation is that total compensation has just dropped, while the work hasn't. It's Loss Aversion[1], losing something hurts more than gaining the equivalent thing. Google isn't suffering from people staying at home using the internet more, it's not like Google cut manager salaries by 50% to keep the factory lights on and the orphans fed. Google's share price is up at least 50% since Jan 2020, and they've taken away some thousands of dollars of remuneration from staff and saved money on not having to run kitchens, and are demanding that staff feel grateful about this by handwaving at suffering people elsewhere. > ">”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.”" Calling legal and privacy efforts "a waste of resources" and saying they provide "zero value" /is/ saying they are not important. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion