6 ms·

Man worth $7.48B says Google should cut 28,000 more people after layoffs

43 points by stuaxo 4y ago

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
The "person worth $B" idiom has always bothered me. He isn't "worth" $7.48B. He "controls assets valued at $7.48B".
TwoNineA 4y ago
[flagged]
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  80% is a pretty even number.
stuaxo 4y ago
The fact he wants to go up to 20% layoffs as it's a "round number" is telling.
- sosuke 4y ago
  I do see that as odd given what he proports to be but what do you get out of it? I was thinking that this guy goes with his gut feeling and happens to get lucky from time to time.
  - jacknews 4y ago
    Indeed. https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=87 https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=87 It's a useful skill, but not worth 7.48B IMHO. They say hate the game, not the player. But then, the players have chosen this game, and often don't want it to change.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    He likely doesn't have a deep understanding of the numbers, just thinks it's overstaffed and 20% reduction sounds good cause it's nice and round.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  He believes that a major company is overstaffed and needs to cut 1/5th of its workforce in the current economic climate. He may be qualified to make that call or be as unqualified as any random person off the street. Apart from this, what is telling about it?
  - malfist 4y ago
    It's rich so of course he's qualified. /s Why do we listen to these people with no experience in the tech field and no knowledge of how google works internally?
  - zug_zug 4y ago
    When people pick numbers because they "look nice" it's apparent they didn't down hundreds of hours of analysis on the companies divisions and which bets seem viable, where things are redundant, and come up with any real signal (like Buffet would). If they had, they almost certainly wouldn't conclude "it's exactly 20.000% should be gotten rid of, pick whichever 20% you want"
    - epistemer 4y ago
      Personally, I am always more suspicious of 20.1% in this context when someone is obviously trying to bullshit with fake precision in a context that is inherently not that exact. 20% vs 21% is basically meaningless in this context. We can't run it a 1000X or see the counterfactual to know what figure would be more correct. I just take 20% to mean "a good chunk" and much preferable to a style of fake precision you seem to think is better here.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It's all just figures on a spreadsheet to him.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    Figures on a spreadsheet... set to round all numbers to 10% boundaries? I don't trust that any real analysis has gone into this. To do any real analysis you'd need an org chart, head counts, and a P/L with much more granularity than Google publishes. He has none of these. The people with all of those chose 6%, and even that seems to have been largely due to pressure. This guy is only pressuring, there's no data behind this, no reasoning, nothing smart or worth listening to.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Right, I mean a very simple spreadsheet that doesn't actually capture how the company works. Like, a toy spreadsheet. "20% looks nice—let's go with that".
- keyanp 4y ago
  He doesn't actually say that in the letter, that is just the journalist's phrasing: https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...
bitsavers 4y ago
"Sir Christopher Hohn A British hedge fund manager knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II says that Google and its parent company, headquartered in the Bay Area, should lay off more people after axing more than 12,000 people." Title should read: "Upper class hedge fund manager thinks engineers make too much money, wants it for himself".
- voisin 4y ago
  > wants it for himself “wants it for his investors” His job is to advocate on behalf of his investors to get the best return he can. For this service he is well paid. We need to stop demonizing people for doing their job, successfully. Just because he is rich doesn’t mean his argument is wrong.
  - nequo 4y ago
    > We need to stop demonizing people for doing their job, successfully. Even when their job is to actively hurt you, your family, and those around you?
    - chairmanwow1 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - bitsavers 4y ago
        It is long past time for people to consider that working for public companies might not be in their long-term personal best interest.
        nequo 4y ago
        Are private companies better?
      - joshuamorton 4y ago
        Whether or not it is my "right", firing me absolutely hurts me and my family, and and advocating for it does too. Nothing about that is a mischaracterization.
Proven 4y ago
[dead]
raxxorraxor 4y ago
Hohn is a German word that fits pretty well here
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Of FAANG, only one company hasn't had major layoffs this year. Apple has never in the last decade had any trouble recruiting top tier personnel, but now that advantage has significantly increased. To me, that's a great reason to be long AAPL and short whatever companies give into the nonsense this guy is peddling.
- hdesh 4y ago
  > Of FAANG, only one company hasn't had major layoffs this year. So far.
- voisin 4y ago
  Apple showed restraint in hiring over the pandemic to a greater degree than the others.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Time will tell what Apple will do here. Seems a bit too early to say "Apple won't be doing any layoffs", at least according to some sources. > first disclosed from an email to AppleInsider [...] says that some Apple retail channel employees who work in places like Best Buy stores have received a thirty-day notice about their rights as it pertains to a layoff > It's not clear what percentage of the workforce is affected. It's a notable enough volume of firings to be able to glean the information from multiple sources, however. > A second part of the initial email suggests that Retail Customer Care employees will be notified later on Friday, and over the weekend. We could not verify independently that this will happen, however. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/20/layoffs-in-some-of-apples-retail-channels-have-begun https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/20/layoffs-in-some-o... Seems like a very small layoff so far, hitting Apple retail employees working for Apple but in resellers (so not Apple Store employees, but Apple employees none-the-less), but maybe they are just starting small. Again, time will tell.
rr888 4y ago
Damn everyone here is a capitalist when wages are spiraling and employers are handing out RSUs and IPOs pop, but when the first recession comes suddenly we're all the proletariat.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I've spent the whole boom thinking big-tech workers were nuts for not organizing while times were good.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Everyone takes the weekend for granted because they were not the ones fighting for it to be available to them. They don't know how it was when you were forced to work every day of the week (maybe you got lucky and got Sundays off, maybe also Monday if you were very lucky but uncommon), without the weekend, so then you're bound to repeat history. Thank god for the modern invention of the weekend thanks to unions, labor movements and all the campaigns, I'm sure most people cannot imagine life without it. But it is a relatively recent invention.
- leet_thow 4y ago
  Seriously, I've read so many comments from 'comrades' here lately.
  - bitsavers 4y ago
    Sure, blame those nasty communists any time things appear in HN left of what is best for Fortune and the WSJ.
- atomicnumber3 4y ago
  You see though, if workers received the full value of their labor as wages instead of having it taken as profit, we would eat our cake and have it too.
  - rr888 4y ago
danpalmer 4y ago
Breaking: man with no experience building products concludes that he knows better than those who do it every day. This is of course a common bias people have, not understanding what others do, but it's also exacerbated by a) being a privileged white man, b) his paycheck depending on it, and c) that analysing a company's numbers gives some investors a false sense of understanding the company – because they "understand" their investment they think that translates to understanding internals.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  Thank you for bringing gender and race into the conversation. That's exactly what was missing here.
- twelve40 4y ago
  He's not claiming anything about product, there is something to be said for fiscal discipline and paying for 200,000 people with an unclear purpose (direct Pichai quote: "hired for a different economic reality", aka "unable to plan ahead for more than a few months"). But I still don't understand where were these smart frugal influential shareholders a year ago, when the overhiring could have been corrected without damaging the company's reputation and people's careers.
- boeingUH60 4y ago
  > This is of course a common bias people have, not understanding what others do, but it's also exacerbated by a) being a privileged white man What does his skin color have to do with this? You could have just simply said "privileged multi-billionaire".
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I was being a little facetious, but there’s some truth in it. White men have a lot of privilege, that’s fairly well accepted, and something I know from first hand experience. That privilege is what leads to things like mansplaining and overconfidence in one’s own opinions, or even deeming one’s own opinions to be facts. It leads there because the privileged are less likely to receive pushback on their ideas, more likely to receive praise, or even funding for their ideas, and society treats them as overall more correct. Huge generalisations of course, but so is most of this thread.
mellosouls 4y ago
There's a lot of ad-hominem attacks against this guy, including implied in the title. Not much analysis as to whether or not he's right...
duped 4y ago
Did he write a letter in 2021/2022 recommending not to hire so many people?
vlucas 4y ago
I hate takes like this, because his personal net worth has no bearing on whether or not he is right or wrong on this particular issue. He could be doing this only for selfish personal interest in his stake in Google, but that ALSO has no bearing on whether or not he is right about this. He could be both right about this AND have a selfish personal interest. Or he could be wrong about it, but either way this is a bad take that lacks critical thinking.
billyraejohnson 4y ago
[flagged]
DueDilligence 4y ago
.. yawn, next. these socio/psychopaths have zero relevance.
RONROC 4y ago
Watching WFH tech evangelists being sincerely stunned that GloboTechInc fired them over email (gasp) is not just ironic, but should be instructive. What did you guys think would happen? That the company who hired you to build a surveillance monopoly on the internet was going to look out for your best interests? On a long enough timeline, many SWEs will engineer their job out of existence. Those left over will have to compete with the mythical 10x engineer and the latest AGI shitbot that can debug code all day long without ever having to take a bathroom break, or maternity leave. To those affected: don’t capitulate to, or engage with the pity machine. It’s all cope. Those jobs, that headcount, is never coming back. Take your skills and go build something you actually have true equity in. Godspeed code monkey.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
That's not his decision to make. Google leadership decide how to allocate people and resources. Some areas are bloated, but others definitely aren't. Goog has 10x staff per capita (not linear scale) as a comparable MAAN_ I work at. They definitely don't have enough in GCP and have a track record of under-resourcing support and engineering. It should be high-status department that doesn't pinch pennies, but they do. AWS OTOH is high-status and rarely touched by layoffs because it's both critical to running the company and highly-profitable.

43 points by stuaxo 4y ago

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

The "person worth $B" idiom has always bothered me. He isn't "worth" $7.48B. He "controls assets valued at $7.48B".

TwoNineA 4y ago

[flagged]

raxxorraxor 4y ago
80% is a pretty even number.

stuaxo 4y ago

The fact he wants to go up to 20% layoffs as it's a "round number" is telling.

sosuke 4y ago
I do see that as odd given what he proports to be but what do you get out of it? I was thinking that this guy goes with his gut feeling and happens to get lucky from time to time.
- jacknews 4y ago
  Indeed. https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=87 https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=87 It's a useful skill, but not worth 7.48B IMHO. They say hate the game, not the player. But then, the players have chosen this game, and often don't want it to change.
- fullshark 4y ago
  He likely doesn't have a deep understanding of the numbers, just thinks it's overstaffed and 20% reduction sounds good cause it's nice and round.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
He believes that a major company is overstaffed and needs to cut 1/5th of its workforce in the current economic climate. He may be qualified to make that call or be as unqualified as any random person off the street. Apart from this, what is telling about it?
- malfist 4y ago
  It's rich so of course he's qualified. /s Why do we listen to these people with no experience in the tech field and no knowledge of how google works internally?
- zug_zug 4y ago
  When people pick numbers because they "look nice" it's apparent they didn't down hundreds of hours of analysis on the companies divisions and which bets seem viable, where things are redundant, and come up with any real signal (like Buffet would). If they had, they almost certainly wouldn't conclude "it's exactly 20.000% should be gotten rid of, pick whichever 20% you want"
  - epistemer 4y ago
    Personally, I am always more suspicious of 20.1% in this context when someone is obviously trying to bullshit with fake precision in a context that is inherently not that exact. 20% vs 21% is basically meaningless in this context. We can't run it a 1000X or see the counterfactual to know what figure would be more correct. I just take 20% to mean "a good chunk" and much preferable to a style of fake precision you seem to think is better here.
yamtaddle 4y ago
It's all just figures on a spreadsheet to him.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Figures on a spreadsheet... set to round all numbers to 10% boundaries? I don't trust that any real analysis has gone into this. To do any real analysis you'd need an org chart, head counts, and a P/L with much more granularity than Google publishes. He has none of these. The people with all of those chose 6%, and even that seems to have been largely due to pressure. This guy is only pressuring, there's no data behind this, no reasoning, nothing smart or worth listening to.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Right, I mean a very simple spreadsheet that doesn't actually capture how the company works. Like, a toy spreadsheet. "20% looks nice—let's go with that".
keyanp 4y ago
He doesn't actually say that in the letter, that is just the journalist's phrasing: https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...

bitsavers 4y ago

"Sir Christopher Hohn A British hedge fund manager knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II says that Google and its parent company, headquartered in the Bay Area, should lay off more people after axing more than 12,000 people." Title should read: "Upper class hedge fund manager thinks engineers make too much money, wants it for himself".

voisin 4y ago
> wants it for himself “wants it for his investors” His job is to advocate on behalf of his investors to get the best return he can. For this service he is well paid. We need to stop demonizing people for doing their job, successfully. Just because he is rich doesn’t mean his argument is wrong.
- nequo 4y ago
  > We need to stop demonizing people for doing their job, successfully. Even when their job is to actively hurt you, your family, and those around you?
  - chairmanwow1 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - bitsavers 4y ago
      It is long past time for people to consider that working for public companies might not be in their long-term personal best interest.
      - nequo 4y ago
        Are private companies better?
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      Whether or not it is my "right", firing me absolutely hurts me and my family, and and advocating for it does too. Nothing about that is a mischaracterization.

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

raxxorraxor 4y ago

Hohn is a German word that fits pretty well here

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Of FAANG, only one company hasn't had major layoffs this year. Apple has never in the last decade had any trouble recruiting top tier personnel, but now that advantage has significantly increased. To me, that's a great reason to be long AAPL and short whatever companies give into the nonsense this guy is peddling.

hdesh 4y ago
> Of FAANG, only one company hasn't had major layoffs this year. So far.
voisin 4y ago
Apple showed restraint in hiring over the pandemic to a greater degree than the others.
capableweb 4y ago
Time will tell what Apple will do here. Seems a bit too early to say "Apple won't be doing any layoffs", at least according to some sources. > first disclosed from an email to AppleInsider [...] says that some Apple retail channel employees who work in places like Best Buy stores have received a thirty-day notice about their rights as it pertains to a layoff > It's not clear what percentage of the workforce is affected. It's a notable enough volume of firings to be able to glean the information from multiple sources, however. > A second part of the initial email suggests that Retail Customer Care employees will be notified later on Friday, and over the weekend. We could not verify independently that this will happen, however. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/20/layoffs-in-some-of-apples-retail-channels-have-begun https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/20/layoffs-in-some-o... Seems like a very small layoff so far, hitting Apple retail employees working for Apple but in resellers (so not Apple Store employees, but Apple employees none-the-less), but maybe they are just starting small. Again, time will tell.

rr888 4y ago

Damn everyone here is a capitalist when wages are spiraling and employers are handing out RSUs and IPOs pop, but when the first recession comes suddenly we're all the proletariat.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I've spent the whole boom thinking big-tech workers were nuts for not organizing while times were good.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Everyone takes the weekend for granted because they were not the ones fighting for it to be available to them. They don't know how it was when you were forced to work every day of the week (maybe you got lucky and got Sundays off, maybe also Monday if you were very lucky but uncommon), without the weekend, so then you're bound to repeat history. Thank god for the modern invention of the weekend thanks to unions, labor movements and all the campaigns, I'm sure most people cannot imagine life without it. But it is a relatively recent invention.
leet_thow 4y ago
Seriously, I've read so many comments from 'comrades' here lately.
- bitsavers 4y ago
  Sure, blame those nasty communists any time things appear in HN left of what is best for Fortune and the WSJ.
atomicnumber3 4y ago
You see though, if workers received the full value of their labor as wages instead of having it taken as profit, we would eat our cake and have it too.
- rr888 4y ago

danpalmer 4y ago

Breaking: man with no experience building products concludes that he knows better than those who do it every day. This is of course a common bias people have, not understanding what others do, but it's also exacerbated by a) being a privileged white man, b) his paycheck depending on it, and c) that analysing a company's numbers gives some investors a false sense of understanding the company – because they "understand" their investment they think that translates to understanding internals.

jaywalk 4y ago
Thank you for bringing gender and race into the conversation. That's exactly what was missing here.
twelve40 4y ago
He's not claiming anything about product, there is something to be said for fiscal discipline and paying for 200,000 people with an unclear purpose (direct Pichai quote: "hired for a different economic reality", aka "unable to plan ahead for more than a few months"). But I still don't understand where were these smart frugal influential shareholders a year ago, when the overhiring could have been corrected without damaging the company's reputation and people's careers.
boeingUH60 4y ago
> This is of course a common bias people have, not understanding what others do, but it's also exacerbated by a) being a privileged white man What does his skin color have to do with this? You could have just simply said "privileged multi-billionaire".
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I was being a little facetious, but there’s some truth in it. White men have a lot of privilege, that’s fairly well accepted, and something I know from first hand experience. That privilege is what leads to things like mansplaining and overconfidence in one’s own opinions, or even deeming one’s own opinions to be facts. It leads there because the privileged are less likely to receive pushback on their ideas, more likely to receive praise, or even funding for their ideas, and society treats them as overall more correct. Huge generalisations of course, but so is most of this thread.

mellosouls 4y ago

There's a lot of ad-hominem attacks against this guy, including implied in the title. Not much analysis as to whether or not he's right...

duped 4y ago

Did he write a letter in 2021/2022 recommending not to hire so many people?

vlucas 4y ago

I hate takes like this, because his personal net worth has no bearing on whether or not he is right or wrong on this particular issue. He could be doing this only for selfish personal interest in his stake in Google, but that ALSO has no bearing on whether or not he is right about this. He could be both right about this AND have a selfish personal interest. Or he could be wrong about it, but either way this is a bad take that lacks critical thinking.

billyraejohnson 4y ago

[flagged]

DueDilligence 4y ago

.. yawn, next. these socio/psychopaths have zero relevance.

RONROC 4y ago

Watching WFH tech evangelists being sincerely stunned that GloboTechInc fired them over email (gasp) is not just ironic, but should be instructive. What did you guys think would happen? That the company who hired you to build a surveillance monopoly on the internet was going to look out for your best interests? On a long enough timeline, many SWEs will engineer their job out of existence. Those left over will have to compete with the mythical 10x engineer and the latest AGI shitbot that can debug code all day long without ever having to take a bathroom break, or maternity leave. To those affected: don’t capitulate to, or engage with the pity machine. It’s all cope. Those jobs, that headcount, is never coming back. Take your skills and go build something you actually have true equity in. Godspeed code monkey.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

That's not his decision to make. Google leadership decide how to allocate people and resources. Some areas are bloated, but others definitely aren't. Goog has 10x staff per capita (not linear scale) as a comparable MAAN_ I work at. They definitely don't have enough in GCP and have a track record of under-resourcing support and engineering. It should be high-status department that doesn't pinch pennies, but they do. AWS OTOH is high-status and rarely touched by layoffs because it's both critical to running the company and highly-profitable.