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Google CEO tells employees not to ‘equate fun with money’ in heated meeting

• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  > "Pichai, who expressed some annoyance during the meeting, said “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” and added that, “We shouldn’t always equate fun with money." Put your money where your mouth is, recommend the board make your CEO salary and compensation the same as when Google was 'small and scrappy' in the early years. Lead by example.
  • AlwaysRock 4y ago
    To be fair I'm sure Pichai would be happy to get paid the amount of equity that early founders did...
  • sidewndr46 4y ago
    Isn't Pichai personally invested in Google? I can't see what it would matter, given the amount of stock I would think he must own at this point.
    • FollowingTheDao 4y ago
      > I can't see what it would matter Because getting rid of perks means higher or stable profits which means the stock goes up and Pichai makes more money.
      • sidewndr46 4y ago
        Sorry I was not clear, I meant his salary is irrelevant. I have no idea why he would collect it in the first place.
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      All the more reason to do it then, at least show your subordinates that you're serious about taking measures to reduce expenses.
  • dontreact 4y ago
    I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore. That’s a pretty negative environment. It seems like a reasonable statement to say, we should try and find ways for the work itself to be fun, and not only expect expensed travel and offsite to be the only source of fun.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      I go to work exclusively to trade labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t go to work to have “fun”. I don’t hate my job any more than I hate breathing. They are both necessary for my survival.
      • dontreact 4y ago
        I’m sorry if you feel that way. If there is absolutely nothing you can find that is fun about your job then honestly yeah I would rather not have you on my team because it sounds like it would be a pretty bad time working together.
        • serverholic 4y ago
          Don’t high road him. Do you really think most engineers truly enjoy their jobs? Imagine a world where their needs are taken care of outside of work. Do you really think they’d stick around?
          • dontreact 4y ago
            I don’t know what the percentages are. All I know is there are many people who can enjoy some aspect of work, and I would much rather work with them than with someone who can’t enjoy anything about the work. People who are completely apathetic and find no enjoyment in any aspect of work probably are also best off working together.
            • qbasic_forever 4y ago
  • bberenberg 4y ago
    Would you be happy if they paid him $1 a year and drastically increased his equity stake? That's what CEO comp looks like in small and scrappy. I expect he would take it, and so would most anyone else.
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      You can't increase his equity without buying back shares and that's going to cost money. But yes the general sentiment is if you are serious about reducing costs, then reducing salary is a major way to get there. The idea is cut costs and the share prices will rise as the company becomes more profitable.
      • bberenberg 4y ago
        That's not really how equity works. A company can issue equity out of thin air, and in fact, this is how most employee stock based comp works. In fact, Google specifically is criticized on their financial returns because of how much of their compensation is based in equity which dilutes existing shareholders outside the company. You can read about the high level ideas of this at https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/modeling-stock-based-compensation/ https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/modeling-stock-base...
    • denton-scratch 4y ago
      Equity doesn't buy me breakfast, and nor does a dollar a year. You have to be rich already, if you're going to work for a dollar a year.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        Equity in public company vests frequently and you can sell it.
    • marricks 4y ago
      > and drastically increased his equity stake But he also to roll a critical three times in a row on a D20 to get a payout. Just to make it have the same feeling as small and scrappy, you know.
  • m00x 4y ago
    They didn't reduce comp, only perks, which affects him as well. If he cuts comp, I'm sure he'll do the same to himself. And honestly, swag is a great place to cut. It's such a waste of material and money. Most of it ends up in the dumpster.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      How much did they typically spend on "swag" per employee per year?
    • doomslice 4y ago
      They cut non-business critical travel which many employees for some reason felt was a perk of the job. I heard second hand that some employees would do "office tours" just to try the lunches at the different offices (under the guise of doing some in person meetings that certainly could have been done online). Cutting that kind of wasteful travel is necessary in an economic slowdown (and even necessary before that).
      • whatshisface 4y ago
        Perhaps necessary in an economic slowdown when you're a paper company with 2% margins... Let's be honest, Google does not "have" to do anything. They're just trying to grab some pennies. The interesting part is that they felt the pennies nearest at hand were in their employee perks, rather than in expanding their business. That is always a bad sign even if the company we're talking about is as profitable as Google. Not every business needs the best people working there, nor does every business need its employees to be highly motivated - it's a valid move in the extreme for Google to transition to being like SAP, but I can't believe all of the people in this thread that are defending that they have a right to do it without asking what their executives know that makes it seem so appealing.
      • dc-programmer 4y ago
        That is pretty decadent actually. Financials aside, I do believe frivolous activity like that creates a culture of unseriousness
    • 4y ago
  • tpmx 4y ago
    I remember when Google was small and scrappy He joined Google in 2004, the same year as its IPO. The company had 3021 employees at the end of that year.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      To be fair, a 3,000 person company can feel a lot different from a 10,000 person company and certainly from 150,000 person company.
  • asah 4y ago
    LoL, does that include his (early) stock package?
  • prox 4y ago
    I remember a time when Google was still interested in people and doing good, not being Just Another Tech Conglomerate.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      You actually believed that?
      • prox 4y ago
        Well let’s just say it didn’t get any better, quite the reverse
• xiphias2 4y ago
  A long time ago at Google ,,fun'' was equal to user and customer obsession (looking at logs and other data and trying to understand how to make the products better). Sundar is an amazing sales person and PM, but Google went too much on the PM/Sales side and puts too much pressure and impossible amount of work on engineers (I started my last quarter by knowing that I won't be able to finish most of the OKRs that were put on by other people from other teams to me, I signaled to my TL, but I didn't care at that point as I was planning to quit anyways). The pressure is so high that the best engineers and engineering managers there that I know are moving to research where they are left alone to do great and fun stuff.
  • mushufasa 4y ago
    > puts too much pressures and impossible amount of work on engineers My understanding is this varies widely by department/manager, and that on average big tech companies work way less hours per day than engineers at startups, for higher base pay & more liquid options. With much more support structure as well.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    When was Google about anything more than collecting user data to display ads. No user has ever said “it would really be great if we had more ads”. Giving the user what they want is antithetical to profitability for any company whose business model is anything else besides “customer gives us money and we give them goods and services”
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • vineyardmike 4y ago
      This is such a reductive view of most tech companies that have ads. Sometimes "giving customers [most of] what they want" is profitable - so they come back later and have a multi-year relationship and use a variety of profit-generating products. Even if that means forgoing short-term profit from extra ads.
• bko 4y ago
  > Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic. What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on. As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks. The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work. So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.
  • orange_joe 4y ago
    It’s fine to say the best engineers want to work on the most interesting problems, and that’s totally valid, but truthfully Google and other big tech companies need an army of highly skilled engineers to turn the red button blue. A simple fact is that maintaining the behemoth requires lots of skill and relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale to the army that Google would need to employ (even if it reduced its current headcount).
    • bko 4y ago
      I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing. It's not much different than compiler optimizations that squeeze out tiny efficiencies that are not noticeable and irrelevant to 99.9% of use cases. If you can make red button blue and quantify its effects in terms of UX (people being able to find the button or make reality more aligned with expectations of the user), I think that could be interesting. But I would love to hear from someone that has labored over such a task. If I were hiring someone to figure out which buttons to turn from red to blue, I would at least try to find people curious and serious about the task. I wouldn't just accept that its monkey work, throw some money at it and hope for the best.
• kesri 4y ago
  imo the problem with big tech executives who rose through the ranks in the growth phase of the company is that after the exponential growth in the employee count they expect the individual performance to be the same as their time in the company without changing anything in the leadership style. being scrappy might work when you have <1000 employees since the chaos might be manageable but when you have 100000 people working in the company scattered around the world, the leadership must also adapt otherwise you get bloated companies that are ran like a headless chicken. Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors for having fun instead of working and slacking off but it's so hard for them to hold themselves accountable for the situation of their companies. They get their bonuses when the company is performing well but when times are tough it's because of a regular employee slacking off. ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
  • infamouscow 4y ago
    > ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself. This is the lifecycle of all corporations. Before Google and Facebook we had Yahoo and Myspace. Now TikTok is doing the same thing and Sundar and Zuckerberg are crying about it. They shot themselves in the foot de-platforming and censor content creators. Those creators were welcomed with open arms by Google and Facebook competitors. I see more and more creators pushing their YouTube and Instagram audiences over to Rumble or TikTok. Clearly it's starting to be a real problem for the bottom line. Before you say TikTok does the same, that's true, but it's not the point. Creators don't like having to walk on eggshells if they can avoid it.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      Yes I’m sure that Google is going to lose billions because it deplatformed some fringe folks. If they were such a powerful voice, Truth Social wouldn’t be struggling.
      • infamouscow 4y ago
• dontreact 4y ago
  Huh I was at this meeting and it didn’t seem heated. To me it felt like a CEO explaining difficult choices and the reasoning behind them.
  • dmitriid 4y ago
    Google's net income in just Q2 was 16 billion dollars. These are not "difficult choices". But they do like to make them at the expense of employees. [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings...
  • tpmoney 4y ago
    My work place has been going through its “return to office” discussions and if there’s one thing it’s taught me it’s that tone and perception are wildly different among people. One persons “direct and no bullshit” is another’s “uncaring and defensive” is another’s “angry and abusive”. And if a news company can’t find one person to think something is “heated” or “dismissive” or “angry” they will latch onto that person for their headlines.
  • rabuse 4y ago
    Just a reminder that Google had a net income of $76 billion in 2021, and are sitting on cash equivalents of damn near $130 billion. The end is near!
    • stefan_ 4y ago
      So many difficult choices. Less swag, more stock buybacks because that's how executives get paid!
    • pyb 4y ago
      This. Pichai doesn't need to cut the perks/ travel expenses and freeze hiring. He just wants to. It's a weird power play.
  • socialismisok 4y ago
    Depends on how you interpret Memegen...
• ren_engineer 4y ago
  he's been CEO for the last 7 years, any drastic culture change is on him. Funny to watch these CEOs try to shift blame for their failures recently. All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason and now are crying about "deadweight" employees. Perhaps the people who approved the hiring plans are who should be blamed?
  • greesil 4y ago
    And to make it more fun it has yoyo'd. In 2020 it was panic, doom and gloom. Then suddenly it's irresponsible party time. And now back to doom and gloom.
    • johnbellone 4y ago
      The roaring 20s...
      • greesil 4y ago
        Not exactly how I'd characterize it :)
  • Longlius 4y ago
    And it'll also be hilarious in a few years watching them scramble to hire again once they cut the 'deadweight' and all those guys just to move to Ohio or something to work in regular companies without much loss in TC (but half the CoL). If you don't need the engineers, plenty of companies are hungry to snatch them up.
    • zinclozenge 4y ago
      Yea but then they have to live in Ohio.
      • dekhn 4y ago
        I learned something when I worked at Google that would never have occurred to me. They hired a ton of people from the midwest- smart computer people who couldn't find good jobs in the midwest. They moved out to Sunnyvale and Cupertino and hated it. Many of them wanted to return to the midwest, but got accustomed to Google pay and didn't want to take a cut moving. As a Bay Area aficionado, I couldn't quite get this, but when I saw how these folks lived in Cupertino and Sunnyvale (tiny, overpriced houses with ultra-competitive school districts) I could kind of understand the desire to return to an Ohio, or Illinois, or Indiana.
• FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Ahhahahah! Who's fun? Why make a profit at all then? Why even make money? Just to hoard it in a bank so no one else can have it?? This is some real Scrooge McDuck shat going on right here. Google the next Amazon! Welcome to the sweatshop ladies and gentlemen!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• winReInstall 4y ago
  So i get it the shareholder dividend is zero this year. Dont be medieval.
• astorsnk 4y ago
  >> > Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic. What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic. It's generally not stuff I need, or want, it's wasteful, and there are much better ways the company could be spending that money (and the HR/marketing employees time). I've stopped adding my address to the list at this point when they ask for it.
  • solardev 4y ago
    There's probably some division doing Swagalytics and measuring the ROI on forced employee advertising. Time for swagblock Origin, I guess.
    • jimbob45 4y ago
      This has always been my intuition as well. The employer gets free advertising and the employee gets free stuff. Ideally, the employee gets a bit extra to offer to friends and family for bonus marketing. Maybe Google thinks they don’t have to market anymore?
  • canadianwriter 4y ago
    I guess this might be hard to believe, but lots of people DO like it. It just depends on what kind of person you are. Eg. lots of people love those forced team building things. Different people like different things. For a large company though, it's hard to distinguish who wants what, so they default to just sending it to everyone.
    • jezzamon 4y ago
      I just opt out, or more often don't opt-in for a lot of the swag things that come my way if they're not something I'm interested in
  • 4y ago
• A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  << Pichai responded by saying that telling the entire workforce of cuts is “not a scaleable way to do it,” but he said he will “try and notify the company of the more important updates.” Importance is clearly in the eye of the beholder. If I were an employee, I would like to know. Trying to hide may do more damage than just adding it on internal news portal. Heavens know I get tons of notifications on everything. This would likely qualify as such a notification, I think.
• awestroke 4y ago
  Money for me, but not for thee. During times of record profits and huge cash reserves, difficult choices must be made. If you are not passionate about making stakeholders and leadership more money while they decrease spending on you, then you need to rethink your priorities!
  • m00x 4y ago
    Most of Google comp is stock, so wouldn't that bode well for employees as well? At my current position my base is about 20% of my TC.
    • bushbaba 4y ago
      Sadly citing that would do nothing for the budget. 10$/employee in ones org is many multiples of that outing
• standardUser 4y ago
  Lodging in city centers has become outrageously expensive and I talked to several people at Meta recently who were struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets. If I had to stress out about affording a room during a mandatory work trip, I'd be pissed too. If you can't afford to put your staff up at a decent hotel near your office, don't make them travel.
  • traveler01 4y ago
    These big companies clearly hate remote work as it seems. Even Apple is forcing its workers to go back to the office. I guess they want workers to be presential but don't want to pay them enough for the expenses huh.
    • hnaccount_rng 4y ago
      Why do you say "even Apple"? I would have expected Apple in particular to be against working from home and for on premise secrecy
    • r00fus 4y ago
      Apple is trying but not succeeding very well (from my friends who work there - some of whom do go in nearly daily). Google and Apple campuses are quite empty most of the time.
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
    I had to travel for work from London to Ottawa. They put me up in a suite hotel; there was a kitchenette, a huge TV, another huge TV in the bedroom, a second double bedroom, and a bathroom with twin washbasins. The next day I discovered a utility room with a washer and dryer; and a second bathroom, also with twin washstands. The only problem was that the hotel had no bar; to get booze, I had to go to the hotel next door. I later learned that there was a major international conference going on in Ottawa at that time, and all the hotel rooms had been taken by politicians and diplomats. They weren't doing me a favour; they were just ensuring as best they could that I didn't jump on the next flight back to London.
  • 4y ago
• takanori 4y ago
  > “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” he said. “Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.” Google is not small. Is too regulated to be scrappy. And is NOT a startup It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Yes it’s an ads monopoly with only 40% share at most and it’s competing with Amazon and Facebook.
  • unity1001 4y ago
    > Is too regulated to be scrappy. There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations. This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• dekhn 4y ago
  This morning I saw a Google Cloud executive post on their LinkedIn page that they had an offsite where they made custom Nike shoes that looked like Noogler hats. Um, maybe you should start your cuts there.
• iandanforth 4y ago
  "We operate on the second derivative of cash-flow which has gone negative." Your engineers are smart enough to understand this.
  • clavalle 4y ago
    They're also smart enough to understand that this means this is a phase change into maintenance mode.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  And yet this is the company that pampers them and gives them everything from massages to daycare. Cry me a river.
• mrj 4y ago
  I remember when my old company cut the "swag" to the tune of about $100,000 a year. The CFO was proud of himself but the work environment wasn't great before that, which lead to a few key people leaving. They had stayed not for swag but the social parts of the job were keeping people happy. A few more followed them. It wasn't long before half of the tech team had gone. At the time we were spending about 40k for recruiter fees to replace each engineer. During my exit interview I asked the CFO if he thought that math worked out. He had some regrets.
  • spamizbad 4y ago
    It's interesting that the Software Dev job market has been on fire for over a decade but retention strategies have evolved at a glacial pace. The industry just collectively decided turnover is to be expected and eat all the associated costs - which are significantly higher than many other professions inside the org.
    • pickovven 4y ago
      Let's not forget they also colluded to prevent poaching and still have employees sign illegal non-competes.
    • danaris 4y ago
      I mean, in general, management as a group has no idea how to retain employees. Part of this is because (as you allude to) a very significant chunk of them don't even believe that's important to do: employees are just interchangeable cogs in their system, grinding along to produce bonuses for them. But part of it is because retention is about motivation, which is a very, very complicated topic, and any attempt to create a one-size-fits-all solution to it will inevitably fail. Of course, a large percentage of those who do believe that retention is important are deeply convinced they know exactly what one-size-fits-all solution is The One True Way, and anyone who doesn't respond to it is just some degenerate weirdo. So they go on missing, and we go on shaking our heads.
    • deelowe 4y ago
      I sense there's a bit of a crisis with top tech firms. They cannot afford to keep paying the wages the tech market demands. Costs must come down. It's feels things are reaching a tipping point.
• behaveEc0n00 4y ago
  Google works on interesting things? I guess to PhDs into ML. They scrapped cutting edge R&D and became a one-trick ad-pushing pony. When the companies trajectory has been away from interesting ideas into ad laden messes and Gmail UX refreshes, the perks are all people show up for. I could work on shoving 10 ads in a YT video? Sign me up! I question whether Sundar is a good CEO. Google succeeded given the broader economic shift to tech, not his leadership. Pedaling nostalgia for a time when growth was easy suggests to me he has no idea how to iterate forward in interesting ways.
• zwieback 4y ago
  Covid was exceptional but in general I can't see how Google would escape the transition to a traditional corporation tied to stockholder expectations and macroeconomic conditions. This is just reality and whining about snacks and travel being cut is not helpful. Return to office, on the other hand, is a really interesting question and generally not handled well by leadership.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > This is just reality and whining about snacks and travel being cut is not helpful. Tyrany in Russia is a reality too. So was loosing your hand in a machine without compensation. Whether rights or snacks, if you want to keep them, you have to fight for them. If all Google employees quit on the same day, and refuse to return without getting a seat in the board, maybe they get somewhere.
    • prottog 4y ago
      > If all Google employees quit on the same day, and refuse to return without getting a seat in the board You're expecting way too much. I know plenty of people who work at Facebook all the while claiming that "they know it's bad for the world", and guess why? Because those $400,000 a year are still flowing in.
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        I am just saying people should be honest about not being willing to make a stand. Instead of talking about it as a law of physics
• thehappypm 4y ago
  He’s right, I don’t get why companies feel the need to do six figure morale events off campus. When I worked at a smaller company, we would do a company picnic in a park and play kickball and drink a keg of beer or sodas and just eat cheap food, and it was 100x more fun than the elaborate offsites I attended at Microsoft. Microsoft’s idea of a morale event is to rent out a stadium or a boat and have Macklemore or Walk the Moon do a concert
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  It's embarrassing when a company puts out a giant suggestion box to figure out how to be efficient. It means the company has no clue how it operates. You shouldn't have to ask random employees what the problems are. You should already know, because identifying and eliminating inefficiency (in order to improve quality) should be part of your standard practice. Putting out a giant suggestion box is the laziest and least useful way imaginable. You have no idea which 'suggestion' is a bigger problem, you have no metrics, no context. It's just 7,000 people complaining about 7,000 random things. Don't get me wrong - the low-level people always know what is wrong and know how to fix it. But nobody in upper management gives a shit. Which is why your company is inefficient. Soliciting advice from random ICs now will result in the same dont-give-a-shit syndrome by management. And management continues to do whatever bullshit helps themselves rather than the company or ICs.
  • azemetre 4y ago
    Never really thought about it until you laid it out, and yeah it is troubling. At my company there have been meetings on how to be “innovative.” The suggestions are straight out of Dilbert. Someone said we needed more meetings and everyone agreed. Another said that everything we do is innovative and everyone agreed. I have no idea how a modern corporation is suppose to work I guess. Maybe the dream is be innovative me become large then watch the next few generations of leadership slowly tear the company down into irrelevancy. I forgot where I read this but there’s an idea of a “manager” class that refuses to innovative or change anything because rocking the boat potentially means losing out on bonuses or stocks or promotions, so you do everything in your power to maintain the status quo until you go to the next gig basically playing a game of hot potato until you retire. The “manager” class has taken over the corporate world for decades. I think this was Econ talk but I’m unsure.
  • bushbaba 4y ago
    Google is not well run. People need to get that through their heads. They were so profit and cash flush that many bad behaviors were left unchecked. Well run is Amazon or Apple. Not perfect but the best run large companies out their today
  • scarface74 4y ago
• Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  Except if we equate the working environment with school then traveling to conferences is basically a school trip. That is the most fun, people who are lucky enough to having been in a sports team when they were younger understand that being on the road is the best. If you were a student/athlete then going on the road was a unique mix of working for a future shot in the world of pros AND fun being on the road with your mates.
• keewee7 4y ago
  Pichai's annual salary is close to $300 million. I understand the dynamics and inequalities that are inherent in capitalism. However the insane CEO and corporate board member salaries are simply not justifiable.
• jononomo 4y ago
  Wearing company swag is the most cringe-worthy thing you can do, second only to wearing a Harvard sweatshirt.
• jononomo 4y ago
  Last year I signed up for YouTube premium, but cancelled it after a few months. Then, a few months later, I noticed that Google was still billing me -- so I put in a complaint and explained the problem and pointed out the receipts I had... and they just rejected my complaint after "careful review" (lol) and didn't reimburse my money. It was only about $75, but I remember thinking to myself that Google is obviously going to &%^. I felt like I had no recourse and Google had just stolen $75 from me and then told me to #$%^ off.
  • arcbyte 4y ago
    I realized this year that the big tech companies are no longer the scrappy startups I grew up with. They're the IBM and Sears of today. Their days are numbered.
    • jononomo 4y ago
      It's been well over a decade since Google has been anything like a scrappy startup. What surprised me about this incident, however, was that Google flat-out robbed me and apparently does not care one iota about their reputation or the goodwill of their user base. The message to me could not have been clearer: WE STOLE YOUR MONEY, NOW FUCK OFF.
  • unity1001 4y ago
    Why have you not initiated a chargeback?
    • jononomo 4y ago
      that's a good question -- I wonder if I still can
      • gorbachev 4y ago
        Back up your google data (gmail, google drive, etc.) before you do, because there's a pretty high chance they'll premaban you after that.
• noogler2022 4y ago
  I was at this meeting. Seriously, Googlers are the softest, whiniest people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. We are coddled and spoiled and at the first hint of not being spoiled, people are falling apart and crumbling. One person had the nerve to say Google was “hurting” employees by taking away the travel and entertainment expenses. Hurting? I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. Another characterized Google as “aggressively cost cutting.” Holy fuck. All they did was freeze hiring and stop unnecessary T&E. If they think this is aggressive cost cutting, their mind will be blown if a recession hits is hard. I wish Google would go through the Meta route and lay off 15%. I’ve never worked with a lazier, more spoiled group of people in my life.
  • prottog 4y ago
    I know Google employees who pretty much took arbitrary time off during Covid. There was seemingly no accountability as the cash cow kept on producing and stock prices kept on going up. Google employees who feel hurt by these actions can feel free to find a better deal elsewhere. After all, they're clearly the cream of the crop by virtue of being paid huge sums of money...
    • Nasrudith 4y ago
      I believe the classic is "Be careful what you wish for." Petty bullshit and disregard for feelings of underlings is what got us the Traitorous Eight in the first place. Telling them basically "Grow up and get up early and wear a suit and tie." proved to be a failure of epic proportions.
      • htrp 4y ago
        Wouldn't you argue this is a good thing as all of these people can go on to take risks by starting new companies?
      • delaynomore 4y ago
        Failure for the company, but great for the industry!
  • 4y ago
• narrator 4y ago
  Anyone remember that Larry Page guy who used to run Google and created the brilliant culture that's now starting to fade away? He's now currently in a remote island in Fiji and has been since the start of the pandemic. What the hell happened to make him completely drop out of business and tech?
  • dunefox 4y ago
    He became a billionaire.
  • woooooo 4y ago
    That's actually way more relatable and human than being compelled to squeeze additional percentage out of an ads machine, imo.
• mathverse 4y ago
  Tech workers became too cocky and this is basically a message from the ones in charge, the billionaire class to say “know your place”. Your money and privilege can be taken from you at any moment. This is not about economy or things slowing down. It is about showing the tech workers they are just cogs in the machine, the laborers that should focus on work and not talk back to their employers.
  • prottog 4y ago
    To be fair, there are a lot of inflated egos among the rank and file of FAANG laborers.
  • jfdbcv 4y ago
    Googlers: I'll sign up for a random conference to get an all expenses paid trip to Europe Google: actually in light of recent macroeconomic conditions, don't do that Googlers: bruh!!! You are treating us like COGS in a MACHINE!
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • unity1001 4y ago
      > Googlers: bruh!!! You are treating us like COGS in a MACHINE! Yeah. If you expect that much excellence, committment, prioritizing the company over their freakin family from who you hire, you are responsible with treating them the way you promised them at the start.
  • beams_of_light 4y ago
    Exactly this. The labor market has been heavily weighted for the laborer lately, and this whole "macroeconomic headwinds" chant we're hearing from leaders of every Fortune 500 right now is simply them trying to stave off further increases in wages. The macroeconomic issues aren't going to realistically affect Google or most large companies.
    • 4y ago
• bioemerl 4y ago
  I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM. They're a huge company that consistently has neat ideas that they cripple with mismanagement and are slowly looking to squeeze what they have harder and harder with time to keep up profit growth. As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them. YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts. Google search barely works anymore. Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns. Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple. Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.
  • guywithahat 4y ago
    You clearly don't remember television. A 30 minute TV slot had ~7 minutes of unskippable ads, and that's not including the product placement inside the shows. YouTube will have more like 1-2 minutes of skippable ads for a 20-30 minute show, plus an ad inside the show you can fast forward past. I agree Google search barely works anymore though. I've currently switched to yandex which is still broken in other ways, and I've had bad luck with brave search and DDG results.
    • pclmulqdq 4y ago
      TV ads were skippable too if you used a DVR, and also, they are a lot easier to ignore. I used to only watch things live when I really wanted to be part of the shared experience of having seen the premiere (and the associated discussions). By virtue of being further from the device, it seems like TV ads are less onerous on attention than youtube ads.
    • beowulfey 4y ago
      In the early days of cable, one of the benefits offered was few to no ads[1]. The idea was subscription fees would usually cover the cost of the programming, and advertising wasn't needed for revenue. I definitely expect the cycle to repeat, personally. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
• neilv 4y ago
  > according to audio obtained by CNBC. Was this audio provided by Google intentionally, or was it a leak?
• barelysapient 4y ago
  I wonder how many years of swag and travel cuts it will take to pay for the decades of miss-managed product development. Take Google's discontinued messaging products for instance. Is it five now? That all basically did the same thing? We're going to be here a while if the payment plan for is travel and swag.
• theprincess 4y ago
  I worked at Google as an SRE. I'm at Meta now. I always disliked all the swag (goes straight into the trash) and parties and travel. But I'm a suburban mom so I don't need more junk and I like to be home with my family. Remote work is all the perks I'll ever want or need. Maybe tech companies should hire more suburban moms. We can be placated with boxes of wine and zoom yoga classes lmaooo.
  • cvhashim 4y ago
    You should sell the swag. Apparently there are people across the country who buy/collect corporate swag. Especially swag of ones that are dead startups or failed businesses.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ghaff 4y ago
      I suspect that, like many things the right person would want but which don't have a lot of intrinsic value, connecting them to someone who would actually put cash on the barrel is probably more trouble than it's worth.
      • vineyardmike 4y ago
        That's what eBay and internet aggregation is for.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          I have sold on eBay and it's a pain in the neck especially for a random one-off sale, and I'm probably not going to get >$100 for a random box of tech swag--which is what it would have to be for it to even start being worthwhile. I also have a big stack of laserdiscs. Same thing.
  • bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
    > Remote work is all the perks I'll ever want or need. Maybe tech companies should hire more suburban moms. TBH, as a hiring manager outside of a FAANG, "mid-career parents who want to work remotely" is really the sweet spot for me. I can't offer enough compensation to compete with FAANGs for new graduates of elite universities, so I have to look at lower tier institutions. That's not to say they're bad or anything... I and many of my best employees dropped out of state schools. But generally, the ceiling is lower, and identifying a new graduate's value is really hard. And because I'm at a tech company which is not in a super exciting tech hub, I have to be exceptionally remote friendly to land good candidates. But the thing is: there are tons of employees out there who are smart, get things done, and want to clock out for the day with enough time to cook dinner and play with their kids. We've even hired a few ex-Amazon/Googler's who left because the pay was great but they wanted to have a family. I selfishly find myself hoping that remote work isn't embraced by those places, or else I'll lose my hiring edge.
• pickovven 4y ago
  Please don't "equate fun with money" says the executive with the multi-million dollar compensation package. I don't even disagree, it's just hilarious coming from a CEO of one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world.
• cletus 4y ago
  It's so funny to me hearing Sundar Pichai of all people advocating for scrappiness considering he is probably the most overpaid CEO in the world [1]. Now also consider that Google's profits have never been higher [2]. The amount of net income per employee is eye-watering. This is end-stage capitalism and the relentless search for profit growth that ultimately squeezes the workers who make that profit possible. Years ago when I still worked at Google Patrick Pichette (then CFO before Ruth Porat) got up on stage at an annual meeting and announced that their scrappiness efforts had saved $40 million and that's a lot of money. Someone produced a meme saying "yes, that's the difference between your pay rise and mine". He did in fact get a pay rise that year of $40 million. The employees are right. Even when I was still there there were clearly cuts in the food, cuts in the MKs, cuts in swag, cuts in entertainment budgets and so on. [1]: https://qz.com/1979291/alphabets-sundar-pichai-is-the-most-overpaid-ceo-in-the-us/ https://qz.com/1979291/alphabets-sundar-pichai-is-the-most-o... [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...
  • dekhn 4y ago
    Pichette also virtue-signalled (scrappy-signalled) by insisting on taking public transportation in busy cities instead of private transport. Some folks thought this was great but I thought it was a waste of his time given his pay level and the lost work opportunities.
• brundolf 4y ago
  > Google launched an effort in July called “Simplicity Sprint,” which aimed to solicit ideas from its more than 174,000 employees on how to “get to better results faster” and “eliminate waste.” Earlier this month, Pichai said he hoped to make the company 20% more productive while slowing hiring and investments. > One of the top-rated questions posed by employees at this week’s meeting asked Pichai to elaborate on his commentary regarding improved productivity and the 20% goal. > “I think you could be a 20-person team or a 100-person team, we are going to be constrained in our growth in a looking-ahead basis,” Pichai said. “Maybe you were planning on hiring six more people but maybe you are going to have to do with four and how are you going to make that happen? The answers are going to be different with different teams.” Lol, this reads like Google just got bought by a private-equity firm. Just desperately trying to cut costs any way they can, with little regard to how that will play into the core business I'm obviously biased here, but imo an engineering organization succeeds by hiring smart engineers, making them happy, giving them agency, and giving them just enough structure so that they're working towards useful goals instead of spinning their wheels. This is what made Google so successful in the earlier days. The more you constrain with management and process, the more you slash-and-burn costs, the more you kill that energy: > Pichai admitted that it’s not just the economy that’s caused challenges at Google but also an expanding bureaucracy at Google. Sounds like Google's on the downhill. Subjectively feels like it started around the time Pichai became CEO- though correlation isn't causation. > Google has record profits and huge cash reserves It's clear this is being driven by short-term shareholder demands instead of actual operational desperation. Sad to see Google get strangled like this (though maybe also not sad, given what they've morphed into over the years).
• _dw7s 4y ago
  > Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic. I find it hard to believe that workers of Google caliber can't fathom the golden rule of capitalism.
• falcolas 4y ago
  We had this same kind of discussion a few weeks back. The funniest thing to me was how the CEO was hiding behind “the budget” for why they would not give raises commensurate with inflation. You know, the budget that the CEO and his cronies create? But anyways, apparently we don’t need COL adjustments because of the “total compensation package” and “amazing corporate culture”.
• nathanaldensr 4y ago
  LOL. Imagine your executive class are such worthless leaches that you have to ask your rank-and-file employees for ideas on how to improve the business. Oh, you'd be an American (really global) corporation.
• thinkingemote 4y ago
  Have they replaced the toilet paper with a lower grade? Not sure where that reference comes from, but it was something like someone saying "i knew it was time to leave when people were arguing with management about the reduction in quality of their toilet paper"
• kornhole 4y ago
  The alternative services for users and ways to avoid Google are now many and mature. Google sees more dark data ahead and these threats as cutting into their top line at an accelerating pace. They need to resize to this new world. It is a similar situation as that for Meta and other megatech companies in future. What areas of Google's business is really growing?
• beej71 4y ago
  I haven't set foot in a Google campus for a good 9 years, but I remember every time I visited one (I went to Mountain View, YouTube, and SF on business) thinking about how it gave me flashbacks to Hewlett-Packard, both in action and appearance. OK, so HP would never have a big slide and photo booth like Google did in San Francisco, but that just felt like it was trying too hard. (Granted, the food was a lot better at Google, and what a view of the Bay Bridge...) I don't think it's been a scrappy startup for a long time.
• swiley-gin 4y ago
  'fun' so often means climbing the mountain. Something we will do no matter how poor we are. Google's goal is to harness that to use it against all their users. I'll tell you now I will never work for google; I will die destitute in the middle of the Atlantic on my boat before I contribute the whores you have brought. Of course I know that won't happen. Computer science has a lot in common with "so called magic" and those that understand it can conjure the spirit in the machine. Those at the top are jealous and confused and we know where we are and what we want. EDIT: well that's a lot to be downvoted on hackernews for that. We know who we are and we can see who we're not. Come after us and test this principle.
  • lordswork 4y ago
    I did not downvote you, but to give you some feedback, I really don't understand what you are trying to say.
• dhfbshfbu4u3 4y ago
  As a business customer of Google, I’d venture to say they could cut 20% of the non-engineering workforce without missing much of a beat. After years of of doing business, I have yet to run into an account manager that added any actual value. Most seem to know little about the product with only a tiny set showing even a passing knowledge of advertisers’ actual issues. This isn’t to say they aren’t nice. They sure are, but value? Nope. I’d also recommend giving the boot to whomever is coming up with new ad products in general. A great example is the rollout of Performance Max. The product is absolutely awful and the grand rollout is terrifying given how poorly campaigns tend to actually perform after a week or two of burn in. I get that in ad tech companies have to reinvent themselves every couple cycles in order to keep the money flowing in on speculation, but it’s really sad to see a company like Google become so bloated with that kind of overhead. It’s only going to fall back on the engineers like it always does.
• thewileyone 4y ago
  I can agree that money != fun but !money == !fun.