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wow. the hubris and inhumanity. How can someone who isn't running the company day-to-day purport to know exactly what staffing levels ought to be. Also why is

wow. the hubris and inhumanity. How can someone who isn't running the company day-to-day purport to know exactly what staffing levels ought to be. Also why is a billionaire begrudging people for making 300k/ year. wow hopefully this letter is fake

cloutchaser 4y ago
The headcount in tech recently grew way faster than the rest of the economy, and faster than the companies growth as well. As you get bigger headcount shouldn’t necessarily rise by more than the company is growing, which is what happened. In a full blown recession going back to the headcount of 2 years ago isn’t exactly some Gordon gecko capitalist evil. It’s pretty reasonable. Especially as it seems most tech companies are culling admin and hr staff, which is not where value is being created.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I disagree. I think that companies should have a strong obligation to back their employees during downturns otherwise it is just another form of externalization: make the profits when you can and saddle society with the costs when you can't. That leads to more and more wealth inequality.
  - cloutchaser 4y ago
    You could argue your point the other way round. When times were good these companies clearly overemployed staff. That is very unfair to investors. Cutting back at this time finally prioritizes investor goals, and it’s pretty minimal anyway. Not to mention the insane benefits these employees get, these are the best employers in the world. It’s clear employee happiness was much more important during good times than any investor sentiment. Investors just shut up as the business was still growing.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      There is very little that a CEO can do that is unfair to investors short of defrauding them on purpose. Investors are a rule are smart enough to realize that they - by virtue of being 'passive' - allow people that know more about the business to run it. Back seat drivers are hardly ever welcome as investors, if you're that good you should go and run another company, surely that's a better use of your talent then than to try to run a diversified fund.
  - auggierose 4y ago
    If you don't want wealth inequality, let everybody from birth on start at the same zero, or rather, the same 1 million, or whatever is possible. Otherwise, what kind of equality are we talking about here? With AI, capital will dominate everything. Crass inequality will be the norm. The only path out of this will be paved with blood. Except if humanity is much smarter than I think it is.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      We're talking about the difference between the billionaires that are the subject of the article and the people who end up being laid off (who are still pretty rich compared to many people). This guy is utterly isolated from the consequences of the decisions that he is asking for and effectively wants society to pay for his results. That's mismatched at many levels.
      - auggierose 4y ago
        So what? All people in power are utterly isolated from the consequences of the decisions they make. I don't see any mismatch here. I feel it is quite pointless to talk about the morality of billionaires. They are amoral pretty much by the definition of a billion.
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Apologies for being rude but this is a discussion forum and I'll determine for myself what it is pointless to talk about and if you feel that you don't care then don't bother entering the discussion. FWIW I don't think that it is pointless to talk about the effect that billionaires are having on our lives precisely because their billions insulate them from the consequences which effectively makes them our new kings with their own dynasty. And the kings of old were at least somewhat accountable to their population in times of hardship and their influence was limited to the countries that they governed (or decided to go to war with). I sincerely believe that if we don't find a way to reign this in that it will come back to haunt us.
        4y ago
  - NhanH 4y ago
    I might buy this argument for privately owned company, but for public traded company, wouldn’t they acting against their interest saddle the society with the costs (as the public, or in other words, society, is their owner) I understand the follow up argument about a majority of people might not hold ownership in any public company at all, but that feels like a separate topic.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      The public is not in general the public that is active on the stockmarket, in spite of the name 'public company' you are looking at very large amounts of institutional capital and a relatively small part owned by the guy in the street. Of course in times of a perceived downturn all of those institutional investors will be trying to offload their holdings onto the guy in the street before the music stops and that is one way in which the 'public' then participates in the market: they lose their shirt.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > The headcount in tech recently grew way faster than the rest of the economy I am confused - are you saying did google management made an incompetent decision to hire them and now firing them is the rifgt decision? Of decision 1 was incompetent, why do you believe decision 2, by same management, is competent? What if they fire all the wrong people? What if you need to fire the management? Has anyone even checked if management needs to be fired?
  - naijaboiler 4y ago
    thank you. either they were incompentent before or they are incompetent now. you can't have it both ways
KyeRussell 4y ago
Ask Elon :)
noisy_boy 4y ago
> hopefully this letter is fake The letter is published on TCI's own website[0]. He is salty about his winning streak ending[1]: > Billionaire Chris Hohn’s 13-Year Winning Streak at TCI Ends With Fund Slumping 18%. Sell off in equities hurt bets such as Alphabet and Microsoft. Last year’s loss was the second since the fund started in 2004. He moaned about cost reduction to Sundar Pichai in Nov 2022 too[2]. I wonder whether these sentiments were echo'd by other such investors too and how much all that contributed to Google's recent layoffs[3]. His fund has done activist moves in the past too so this sort of advocating isn't new to them[4]: > In 2008 the US railroad company CSX won a court case against the Children’s Investment Fund and 3G Capital Partners, another hedge fund, after the funds announced that they had acquired about 20% of CSX’s stock.[9] TCI succeeded in electing four of its five directors to the CSX board, but CSX shares declined by about 50 percent after the meeting. TCI declared defeat and sold its shares, taking its directors off the board. Chris Hohn, the founder of TCI vowed to abandon shareholder activism as an investing strategy. Apparently he hasn't exactly abandoned it. [0]: https://www.tcifund.com/CorporateEngagements/Alphabet https://www.tcifund.com/CorporateEngagements/Alphabet [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fund-manager-chris-hohn-s-13-year-winning-streak-ends-as-fund-drops-18 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fun... [2]: https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/15th%20November%202022.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/... [3]: https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/ https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Investment_Fund_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Investment_Fu...
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Why would it matter how much Hohn moans? He is small fry next to Alphabet. It does not look like he even has a seat on the board. Makes for nice clickbait though, I guess. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/15/alphabet-must-cut-headcount-and-trim-costs-activist-investor-tci-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/15/alphabet-must-cut-headcount-... >TCI’s stake represents 0.27% of outstanding Alphabet shares, according to Factset data, a position that the hedge fund has steadily accumulated since 2017. >However, the company has three classes of shares, and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin still have solid voting control thanks to their nearly exclusive ownership of Class B shares, according to the firm’s 2022 proxy report. That makes an activist takeover effectively impossible.
refurb 4y ago
I mean when you take on a big investor, they get their say on how the company is run.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  We're talking about a publicly traded company. They don't "take on" investors.
  - refurb 4y ago
    An investor who holds enough equity to get Sundar on the phone? You think they took a $6B position without chatting with the company about it?
    - unmole 4y ago
      A 0.27% stake.
    - greenthrow 4y ago
      You are moving the goalpost. The prior comment said "taking on an investor." Public trading doesn't work that way. That's a concept for privately held companies. Those are just facts.
      - refurb 4y ago
        They absolutely do “take on investors” of that size. There are usually conversations about the investment and business strategy. Not always (like in a hostile takeover), but if you think TCI just punches “$5,000,000,000 of GOOG” into their trading platform you’re wrong.
valdiorn 4y ago
> wow. the hubris and inhumanity It's a business, not a charity. They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll. It's not like we're talking about abused minimum-wage workers with no alternatives here either. And they're getting some pretty big severance packages, too. I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet, and would apply anyone working at any company that needs to lay off people.
- camgunz 4y ago
  > I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet If Google had even 10% of the resources working on lobbying the US to fix the immigration system as it did lobbying the US to not antitrust it to death, I would buy this.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  > They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll. Who says they are "overpaid"? It always baffles me how worker solidarity ends at the slightest sign of someone making good money.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I can feel bad for tens of thousands of overpaid people because being laid off sucks. Choosing Alphabet is also choosing for presumed job security. Among tens of thousands, I can bet 100% that among them will be visa holders, people paying off huge medical debt, people with disabled dependents, people with huge student debt, people who are trying to get their children through school, people with complex medical conditions that now risk changing their medical support system due to insurance changes, people who will struggle to do the interview grind because of being a single parent, etc.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  We decide what businesses are. The "of course businesses need to be ruthless sociopathic monsters that care only about profit for investors, even at the expense of their employees and customers" is a choice that society made. IMO, an ethical system would have employers really consider themselves obliged to their employees. At the very least, if we want to go in this direction then we need to retire the term "job creator" from our lexicon permanently. Employers can't get credit for being oh so generous in granting jobs when the response to cutting jobs is "well what did you expect, your employer hates you."
psKama 4y ago
I find it either so naive or just to be a self-relaxing attempt to blame the gamer instead the game itself. Attacking and blaming those individuals or those patciular campanies which play the game as the rules are set, have always been easier than criticising corny capitalism we are living in. Virtue signaling over individuals or particular companies like this have always been a comfortable spot to be rather than trying go for the real reasons such as crony capitalism indeed is incentivizing everyone in the game to drop everything else but just what's written in the law related to morals or anything about being a human and just focus on the profit. In most of the times those individuals know all the rules they are given so good that they even calculate the penalties if they break them and they do so if breaking them is more profitable than paying for them. Yet we the people working under this rule feeling so accomplished pointing at fingers to those while all we do is distracting ourselves and everyone else from the real reasons not realizing doing so is just the same thing as sending "thought and prayers" to the ones who lost their jobs and mostly lost about their future, at least for a while.
mishu2 4y ago
Reminds me of the Fifth Element scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg

cloutchaser 4y ago

The headcount in tech recently grew way faster than the rest of the economy, and faster than the companies growth as well. As you get bigger headcount shouldn’t necessarily rise by more than the company is growing, which is what happened. In a full blown recession going back to the headcount of 2 years ago isn’t exactly some Gordon gecko capitalist evil. It’s pretty reasonable. Especially as it seems most tech companies are culling admin and hr staff, which is not where value is being created.

jacquesm 4y ago
I disagree. I think that companies should have a strong obligation to back their employees during downturns otherwise it is just another form of externalization: make the profits when you can and saddle society with the costs when you can't. That leads to more and more wealth inequality.
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  You could argue your point the other way round. When times were good these companies clearly overemployed staff. That is very unfair to investors. Cutting back at this time finally prioritizes investor goals, and it’s pretty minimal anyway. Not to mention the insane benefits these employees get, these are the best employers in the world. It’s clear employee happiness was much more important during good times than any investor sentiment. Investors just shut up as the business was still growing.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    There is very little that a CEO can do that is unfair to investors short of defrauding them on purpose. Investors are a rule are smart enough to realize that they - by virtue of being 'passive' - allow people that know more about the business to run it. Back seat drivers are hardly ever welcome as investors, if you're that good you should go and run another company, surely that's a better use of your talent then than to try to run a diversified fund.
- auggierose 4y ago
  If you don't want wealth inequality, let everybody from birth on start at the same zero, or rather, the same 1 million, or whatever is possible. Otherwise, what kind of equality are we talking about here? With AI, capital will dominate everything. Crass inequality will be the norm. The only path out of this will be paved with blood. Except if humanity is much smarter than I think it is.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    We're talking about the difference between the billionaires that are the subject of the article and the people who end up being laid off (who are still pretty rich compared to many people). This guy is utterly isolated from the consequences of the decisions that he is asking for and effectively wants society to pay for his results. That's mismatched at many levels.
    - auggierose 4y ago
      So what? All people in power are utterly isolated from the consequences of the decisions they make. I don't see any mismatch here. I feel it is quite pointless to talk about the morality of billionaires. They are amoral pretty much by the definition of a billion.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Apologies for being rude but this is a discussion forum and I'll determine for myself what it is pointless to talk about and if you feel that you don't care then don't bother entering the discussion. FWIW I don't think that it is pointless to talk about the effect that billionaires are having on our lives precisely because their billions insulate them from the consequences which effectively makes them our new kings with their own dynasty. And the kings of old were at least somewhat accountable to their population in times of hardship and their influence was limited to the countries that they governed (or decided to go to war with). I sincerely believe that if we don't find a way to reign this in that it will come back to haunt us.
        4y ago
- NhanH 4y ago
  I might buy this argument for privately owned company, but for public traded company, wouldn’t they acting against their interest saddle the society with the costs (as the public, or in other words, society, is their owner) I understand the follow up argument about a majority of people might not hold ownership in any public company at all, but that feels like a separate topic.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    The public is not in general the public that is active on the stockmarket, in spite of the name 'public company' you are looking at very large amounts of institutional capital and a relatively small part owned by the guy in the street. Of course in times of a perceived downturn all of those institutional investors will be trying to offload their holdings onto the guy in the street before the music stops and that is one way in which the 'public' then participates in the market: they lose their shirt.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> The headcount in tech recently grew way faster than the rest of the economy I am confused - are you saying did google management made an incompetent decision to hire them and now firing them is the rifgt decision? Of decision 1 was incompetent, why do you believe decision 2, by same management, is competent? What if they fire all the wrong people? What if you need to fire the management? Has anyone even checked if management needs to be fired?
- naijaboiler 4y ago
  thank you. either they were incompentent before or they are incompetent now. you can't have it both ways

KyeRussell 4y ago

Ask Elon :)

noisy_boy 4y ago

> hopefully this letter is fake The letter is published on TCI's own website[0]. He is salty about his winning streak ending[1]: > Billionaire Chris Hohn’s 13-Year Winning Streak at TCI Ends With Fund Slumping 18%. Sell off in equities hurt bets such as Alphabet and Microsoft. Last year’s loss was the second since the fund started in 2004. He moaned about cost reduction to Sundar Pichai in Nov 2022 too[2]. I wonder whether these sentiments were echo'd by other such investors too and how much all that contributed to Google's recent layoffs[3]. His fund has done activist moves in the past too so this sort of advocating isn't new to them[4]: > In 2008 the US railroad company CSX won a court case against the Children’s Investment Fund and 3G Capital Partners, another hedge fund, after the funds announced that they had acquired about 20% of CSX’s stock.[9] TCI succeeded in electing four of its five directors to the CSX board, but CSX shares declined by about 50 percent after the meeting. TCI declared defeat and sold its shares, taking its directors off the board. Chris Hohn, the founder of TCI vowed to abandon shareholder activism as an investing strategy. Apparently he hasn't exactly abandoned it. [0]: https://www.tcifund.com/CorporateEngagements/Alphabet https://www.tcifund.com/CorporateEngagements/Alphabet [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fund-manager-chris-hohn-s-13-year-winning-streak-ends-as-fund-drops-18 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fun... [2]: https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/15th%20November%202022.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/... [3]: https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/ https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Investment_Fund_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Investment_Fu...

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Why would it matter how much Hohn moans? He is small fry next to Alphabet. It does not look like he even has a seat on the board. Makes for nice clickbait though, I guess. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/15/alphabet-must-cut-headcount-and-trim-costs-activist-investor-tci-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/15/alphabet-must-cut-headcount-... >TCI’s stake represents 0.27% of outstanding Alphabet shares, according to Factset data, a position that the hedge fund has steadily accumulated since 2017. >However, the company has three classes of shares, and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin still have solid voting control thanks to their nearly exclusive ownership of Class B shares, according to the firm’s 2022 proxy report. That makes an activist takeover effectively impossible.

refurb 4y ago

I mean when you take on a big investor, they get their say on how the company is run.

greenthrow 4y ago
We're talking about a publicly traded company. They don't "take on" investors.
- refurb 4y ago
  An investor who holds enough equity to get Sundar on the phone? You think they took a $6B position without chatting with the company about it?
  - unmole 4y ago
    A 0.27% stake.
  - greenthrow 4y ago
    You are moving the goalpost. The prior comment said "taking on an investor." Public trading doesn't work that way. That's a concept for privately held companies. Those are just facts.
    - refurb 4y ago
      They absolutely do “take on investors” of that size. There are usually conversations about the investment and business strategy. Not always (like in a hostile takeover), but if you think TCI just punches “$5,000,000,000 of GOOG” into their trading platform you’re wrong.

valdiorn 4y ago

> wow. the hubris and inhumanity It's a business, not a charity. They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll. It's not like we're talking about abused minimum-wage workers with no alternatives here either. And they're getting some pretty big severance packages, too. I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet, and would apply anyone working at any company that needs to lay off people.

camgunz 4y ago
> I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet If Google had even 10% of the resources working on lobbying the US to fix the immigration system as it did lobbying the US to not antitrust it to death, I would buy this.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
> They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll. Who says they are "overpaid"? It always baffles me how worker solidarity ends at the slightest sign of someone making good money.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I can feel bad for tens of thousands of overpaid people because being laid off sucks. Choosing Alphabet is also choosing for presumed job security. Among tens of thousands, I can bet 100% that among them will be visa holders, people paying off huge medical debt, people with disabled dependents, people with huge student debt, people who are trying to get their children through school, people with complex medical conditions that now risk changing their medical support system due to insurance changes, people who will struggle to do the interview grind because of being a single parent, etc.
UncleMeat 4y ago
We decide what businesses are. The "of course businesses need to be ruthless sociopathic monsters that care only about profit for investors, even at the expense of their employees and customers" is a choice that society made. IMO, an ethical system would have employers really consider themselves obliged to their employees. At the very least, if we want to go in this direction then we need to retire the term "job creator" from our lexicon permanently. Employers can't get credit for being oh so generous in granting jobs when the response to cutting jobs is "well what did you expect, your employer hates you."

psKama 4y ago

I find it either so naive or just to be a self-relaxing attempt to blame the gamer instead the game itself. Attacking and blaming those individuals or those patciular campanies which play the game as the rules are set, have always been easier than criticising corny capitalism we are living in. Virtue signaling over individuals or particular companies like this have always been a comfortable spot to be rather than trying go for the real reasons such as crony capitalism indeed is incentivizing everyone in the game to drop everything else but just what's written in the law related to morals or anything about being a human and just focus on the profit. In most of the times those individuals know all the rules they are given so good that they even calculate the penalties if they break them and they do so if breaking them is more profitable than paying for them. Yet we the people working under this rule feeling so accomplished pointing at fingers to those while all we do is distracting ourselves and everyone else from the real reasons not realizing doing so is just the same thing as sending "thought and prayers" to the ones who lost their jobs and mostly lost about their future, at least for a while.

mishu2 4y ago

Reminds me of the Fifth Element scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg