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>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic

>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase. How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in contractions. That’s exactly what they said they have done.

agluszak 4y ago
> That’s exactly what they said they have done. But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about employees than profits.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  They're framing it that way because framing it that way is a strategy to maximize profits.
- nebolo 4y ago
  I don't think so: they say explicitly that they hired to "match and fuel [...] growth".
- kgwgk 4y ago
  Would they be more “caring about employees” if the didn’t fire anyone now but they had not hired tens of thousands in the last couple of years?
boplicity 4y ago
> The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms. And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional. And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company. As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain. Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.
- vixen99 4y ago
  Successful and well-regarded companies will indeed arithmetically maximize profits if they're around in the long term while they are likely to see short term profiteers fail. Maximizing profits entails rather more than making a quick buck.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pirate787 4y ago
  Companies exist to maximize profits with existing legal rules and social norms.
- Lyngbakr 4y ago
  I think this is aligns with Simon Sinek's philosophy in The Infinite Game[0], which I really enjoyed reading. I totally agree with your point: business mindset is a choice. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Game
- pc86 4y ago
  You are free to believe something else and go off and do whatever you want with your life. Nobody is stopping you, and more importantly, nobody is calling you a villain for believing differently. And yet here you are, painting everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of maniacal evil-doer because what they believe is different than what you believe.
  - barneygale 4y ago
    Mindless accumulation of wealth is evil. All major world religions and ethics systems acknowledge this.
  - MSFT_Edging 4y ago
    "Help, my quest to maximize profit at the cost of human misery has people painting me as an un-empathetic, maniacal evil-doer! Why can't people understand that its actually just like, my opinion that causing societal harm for short term quarterly gains is good, is just like my opinion and every opinion is valid!"
nkozyra 4y ago
The argument is that the explanation is disingenuous. Which, I get that it's corporate speak, but when nobody buys it why bother with the lie?
ericpauley 4y ago
Agreed. In this case, google isn’t even claiming this change was unexpected, just that the reality has changed. Seems way more honest than the other corporate-doublespeak layoffs we’ve seen.
JasonFruit 4y ago
First, just because we understand that Google wants to maximize profit doesn't mean they need to lie about it — it means they have no need to lie about it, because nobody's fooled. Either they consider at least some of us fools who would believe such an obvious lie, or they're engaging in a ritual of futile lying whose purpose I cannot grasp. Second, why must the point of a company be to maximize profit? Why can't it be to make enough profit to remain stable in the long term, instead of growing rapidly to a size where it will eventually either have to engage in monopolistic behavior to survive or else, having extracted all available profit in its sphere, die?
lumost 4y ago
This approach doesn't make sense when it comes to software. Expanding your dev team during a boom year to only contract it in the future bust year - will leave you moving slower in the bust years. While tech has never been known for it's stable job market, seeing the most profitable corporations in the world conducting layoffs doesn't sit well.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Not only that, but layoffs are not precise. People on my team were fired today. They weren't my lowest performers.
  - riku_iki 4y ago
    any idea what was the selection criteria?
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      No. We are still finalizing annual reviews. It couldn't have been current performance ratings. I know of some low performers on nearby teams who weren't laid off. Some (many?) teams were entirely unaffected, so somebody up in my management chain decided my team was less critical. No clue how the individual people decisions were made.
- bumby 4y ago
  >will leave you moving slower in the bust years How is this any different than any other industry? In manufacturing, slowing reduces the risk that supply will outstrip demand. In software, slowing down means reducing the risk that time is spent producing software that won't have an economic payoff. The effort is focused on the business lines that add to the bottom line and less on the speculative ones. If you look at where a lot of the tech industry layoffs are coming from, they tend to be the not-yet-viable moonshot ideas.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers busy themselves adding new production lines and creating more complex manufacturing processes to support products. 2 years later you sack the engineers. You are left with more complex product and extra assembly lines. You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue - so you run them all.
specialist 4y ago
Firstly, the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value is a recent myth. Before that, it was understood that corporations are chartered to serve the public interest. A few may argue that corporations are super-persons imbued with super-rights which outweigh the rights of actual persons. Please note that's a minority viewpoint. Secondly, corporations are not the only cast members with agency in this narrative. Our government, the source of all that free money, acting on the goals of full employment and bountiful future tax revenue, probably has some agency. Us individuals, whose blood and entrails lubricate the gears of the machine built from our bone and sinew, also have agency. Stuff like get fat and happy and watch our grandkids grow up, have enough excess wealth and time to travel a bit, to not bleed out in a ditch, cold and haggard, after a lifetime of toil. And most of us aren't particularly invested in further enriching the latest cohort of robber barons.
- subradios 4y ago
  It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context. Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise. You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth". The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970. Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.
AYBABTME 4y ago
They're taking me for a fool in that they say BS with a straight face, pretending that either they couldn't have foreseen or that I couldn't. If they'd phrase all this as "we surged in a hiring race to the bottom, with the intention of scaling back" that'd be the plain truth and no faked stupidity would be required. Also it's beaten down that the purpose of companies is to make profits. Perhaps in some specific legal context or interpretation it might be, but the purpose of a company is mostly to do whatever the people in charge of it want it to do. A ton of companies' purpose is to principally do other things than just money. People running Apple and making phones like to make money & design beautiful consumer devices. People making rockets like mostly to go to space and hope they can also make some money. People running machine shops like to make moneys and they like to cut metal. People running industrial machinery like to make money and building CNC machines. People making cars like to make money and making cars. People running biotech companies like to advance life sciences and make money. And so on.

agluszak 4y ago

> That’s exactly what they said they have done. But they're trying to frame it as if they cared more about employees than profits.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
They're framing it that way because framing it that way is a strategy to maximize profits.
nebolo 4y ago
I don't think so: they say explicitly that they hired to "match and fuel [...] growth".
kgwgk 4y ago
Would they be more “caring about employees” if the didn’t fire anyone now but they had not hired tens of thousands in the last couple of years?

boplicity 4y ago

> The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit. Rant: If most people in our society simply decided this wasn't true -- and that, no, the point of a company is not to maximize profit, we could solve so many harms. And frankly, believing this is optional. It's like saying the point of a person is to live as long as possible. Sure, you can choose to think that, but if you do, it would be easy to paint you as a villain. And, of course, thinking that way is completely optional. And...just because many people do think that way doesn't mean we have to. We can choose to apply a different meaning to the idea of a company. As someone that helps run a company, I very much think our company exists to serve our customers in a very specific way. Most of our economic success, actually, comes from many of the choices that would seem to fly in the face of short-term monetary gain. Companies don't exist to maximize profit. Villains do.

vixen99 4y ago
Successful and well-regarded companies will indeed arithmetically maximize profits if they're around in the long term while they are likely to see short term profiteers fail. Maximizing profits entails rather more than making a quick buck.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pirate787 4y ago
Companies exist to maximize profits with existing legal rules and social norms.
Lyngbakr 4y ago
I think this is aligns with Simon Sinek's philosophy in The Infinite Game[0], which I really enjoyed reading. I totally agree with your point: business mindset is a choice. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Game
pc86 4y ago
You are free to believe something else and go off and do whatever you want with your life. Nobody is stopping you, and more importantly, nobody is calling you a villain for believing differently. And yet here you are, painting everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of maniacal evil-doer because what they believe is different than what you believe.
- barneygale 4y ago
  Mindless accumulation of wealth is evil. All major world religions and ethics systems acknowledge this.
- MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  "Help, my quest to maximize profit at the cost of human misery has people painting me as an un-empathetic, maniacal evil-doer! Why can't people understand that its actually just like, my opinion that causing societal harm for short term quarterly gains is good, is just like my opinion and every opinion is valid!"

nkozyra 4y ago

The argument is that the explanation is disingenuous. Which, I get that it's corporate speak, but when nobody buys it why bother with the lie?

ericpauley 4y ago

Agreed. In this case, google isn’t even claiming this change was unexpected, just that the reality has changed. Seems way more honest than the other corporate-doublespeak layoffs we’ve seen.

JasonFruit 4y ago

First, just because we understand that Google wants to maximize profit doesn't mean they need to lie about it — it means they have no need to lie about it, because nobody's fooled. Either they consider at least some of us fools who would believe such an obvious lie, or they're engaging in a ritual of futile lying whose purpose I cannot grasp. Second, why must the point of a company be to maximize profit? Why can't it be to make enough profit to remain stable in the long term, instead of growing rapidly to a size where it will eventually either have to engage in monopolistic behavior to survive or else, having extracted all available profit in its sphere, die?

lumost 4y ago

This approach doesn't make sense when it comes to software. Expanding your dev team during a boom year to only contract it in the future bust year - will leave you moving slower in the bust years. While tech has never been known for it's stable job market, seeing the most profitable corporations in the world conducting layoffs doesn't sit well.

UncleMeat 4y ago
Not only that, but layoffs are not precise. People on my team were fired today. They weren't my lowest performers.
- riku_iki 4y ago
  any idea what was the selection criteria?
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    No. We are still finalizing annual reviews. It couldn't have been current performance ratings. I know of some low performers on nearby teams who weren't laid off. Some (many?) teams were entirely unaffected, so somebody up in my management chain decided my team was less critical. No clue how the individual people decisions were made.
bumby 4y ago
>will leave you moving slower in the bust years How is this any different than any other industry? In manufacturing, slowing reduces the risk that supply will outstrip demand. In software, slowing down means reducing the risk that time is spent producing software that won't have an economic payoff. The effort is focused on the business lines that add to the bottom line and less on the speculative ones. If you look at where a lot of the tech industry layoffs are coming from, they tend to be the not-yet-viable moonshot ideas.
- lumost 4y ago
  Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers busy themselves adding new production lines and creating more complex manufacturing processes to support products. 2 years later you sack the engineers. You are left with more complex product and extra assembly lines. You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue - so you run them all.

specialist 4y ago

Firstly, the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value is a recent myth. Before that, it was understood that corporations are chartered to serve the public interest. A few may argue that corporations are super-persons imbued with super-rights which outweigh the rights of actual persons. Please note that's a minority viewpoint. Secondly, corporations are not the only cast members with agency in this narrative. Our government, the source of all that free money, acting on the goals of full employment and bountiful future tax revenue, probably has some agency. Us individuals, whose blood and entrails lubricate the gears of the machine built from our bone and sinew, also have agency. Stuff like get fat and happy and watch our grandkids grow up, have enough excess wealth and time to travel a bit, to not bleed out in a ditch, cold and haggard, after a lifetime of toil. And most of us aren't particularly invested in further enriching the latest cohort of robber barons.

subradios 4y ago
It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context. Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise. You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth". The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970. Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.

AYBABTME 4y ago

They're taking me for a fool in that they say BS with a straight face, pretending that either they couldn't have foreseen or that I couldn't. If they'd phrase all this as "we surged in a hiring race to the bottom, with the intention of scaling back" that'd be the plain truth and no faked stupidity would be required. Also it's beaten down that the purpose of companies is to make profits. Perhaps in some specific legal context or interpretation it might be, but the purpose of a company is mostly to do whatever the people in charge of it want it to do. A ton of companies' purpose is to principally do other things than just money. People running Apple and making phones like to make money & design beautiful consumer devices. People making rockets like mostly to go to space and hope they can also make some money. People running machine shops like to make moneys and they like to cut metal. People running industrial machinery like to make money and building CNC machines. People making cars like to make money and making cars. People running biotech companies like to advance life sciences and make money. And so on.