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I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make

I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing. Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strategic thinking”). “The job of Alphabet is to provide solid growth in share price Q on Q for investors, with minimal fluctuations to spook them”, seems a more likely thing for CEOs to be saying, after hearing this from their CFOs. The idea that Google would struggle as hard as it did to meet its aggressive hiring goals over the last few years, then axe strong engineers just to make others scared, really stretches my credulity.

kyleblarson 4y ago
This is the LA Times, what do you expect? This is the same paper that called a conservative black gubernatorial candidate in California "the black face of white supremacy".
jklinger410 4y ago
And I don't buy the coincidental timing of the fed trying to push us into a recession, which they were not being successful at, following shortly with public companies like Google suddenly finding a bunch of inessential staff to cut. It's not like Google is taking out loans for payroll, or that it was obvious that this move was necessary. These inessential employees have been inessential for years.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  The standard argument is that tech companies hired-up for 2021 lasting forever, but people spent less time shopping online in 2022. The poster child for this is Peloton. On top of the shift in demand, higher interest rates hit other companies that would otherwise advertise on Google. Did Google need to do layoffs? No. Did it over-hire for revenue that never materialized? Yes.
- gruez 4y ago
  >It's not like Google is taking out loans for payroll They might not be actively taking out loans, but that doesn't mean they're immune to interest rates. Higher interest rates means that a dollar in 10 or 20 years is suddenly worth less than a dollar today. That means investors suddenly care more about how many profits can be generated today, rather than whatever moonshot projects that google is working on.
superfrank 4y ago
Same. It sells papers right now to paint CEOs as these omniscient villains who's only goal is the crush their workers, but I just don't buy it. There are plenty of CEOs like Satya Nadella who seem like pretty decent people. I'm sure some companies see this as a way to drive down worker leverage, but I think a lot are just reacting to the market change and realizing they have more employees than they need in areas that they don't feel will be profitable in the future. I also think there's a bit of follow the leader going on, where, now that layoffs have started, no one wants to be left at a disadvantage. If you do layoffs that you may not actually need, at least you're staying on par with your competition. If you don't do layoffs and the market gets worse, you risk falling behind.
- olivermarks 4y ago
  Ironically the 4700 people at the NYT aren't the happiest bunch right now either. The bigger the company the weirder relationships with employees, 'associates' and consultants gets. In large orgs noisy, brown nosing people often do very well regardless of talent. In our era this seems to be a card to play against the firing squad selection algos. People who forcefully push for inclusion of trendy ideas and movements (DEI, Climate anxiety etc) into the core of the firm can be perceived as not in the best interests of the giant money making machine, which like a shark has to keep swimming forward to survive... and bean counter pseudo innovators like Satya Nadella quietly wield the mallet.. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-times-union-walkout.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-t...
bjornlouser 4y ago
"Not a problem [they are] facing" Not sure why you think that given that labor is their biggest expense. They have been known to collude https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-poaching-case-growing-debate-employee-mobility/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-...
yamtaddle 4y ago
> I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This would be a more credible claim if big tech companies, specifically, hadn't been caught doing basically exactly this, in the not-so-distant past.
azemetre 4y ago
You realize more than a decade ago a cartel of tech companies (two of which being Google and Apple) literally had no poach agreements in order to suppress salaries right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  But GP is incredulous about that, because a no-poach agreement would imply that they're sitting behind a desk and stroking a cat. That's an absurd thing to picture, so by the GP's logic, those no-poach agreements didn't exist. QED.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Conclusive evidence of a conspiracy does, indeed, strongly evidence a conspiracy. Alas, this hasn't much to do with the "no evidence of a conspiracy" case. All no evidence evidences is no evidence. A point which seems widely misunderstood.
    - SantalBlush 4y ago
      I agree, which is why "no evidence" would have been a stronger argument. The presence of evidence of a conspiracy doesn't suggest that CEOs are, in fact, petting cats from their desks. Even so, there is some evidence, though certainly not conclusive.
  - theptip 4y ago
    I'll clarify by saying I'm aware of the no-poach collusion, and I'm not claiming it didn't happen. I used the absurd image to highlight and undermine the conspiratorial tone of the OP. I don't think the no-poach case was, as the OP claims, about "cultivating an insecure workforce". It simply started with Jobs getting pissed off at Google (legally!) poaching his people, and other companies he emailed getting on board with a general "don't piss off Steve" policy that grew. While it's conspiratorial in that a bunch of execs were coordinating, I don't think it represents cultivation of insecurity or any explicitly anti-union intent.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bbor 4y ago
I think you’re applying a “conspiratorial” vibe that isn’t necessary - employers are naturally incentivized to keep employees insecure and underpaid (relative to what they’d be paid if they organized, at least). It sounds like you’re knowledgeable on these topics, so I’d be surprised if you disagreed with any of these assertions: 1. Big tech would be willing to burn billions of dollars to crush any chance of tech unions forming. 2. Big tech is known to collude (even to conspire! ) to keep tech wages depressed. 3. Big tech’s biggest cost, by a huge margin, is labor; any reductions there could easily dwarf other shareholder-appeasing cost cutting measures. 4. Tech worker salaries have skyrocketed since they lost their collusion lawsuit, and the general sense among big tech workers was (in most cases) “they need me more than I need them, I could find another amazing job no problem by just responding to one of the many recruiters badgering me on LinkedIn”. Speaking just for google, 6 months ago all the internal forums were obsessed with the idea that SWEs were underpaid, that google should give raises to match inflation, and that google no longer paid top of market. Today I’m pretty sure 100% of the top posts on the biggest internal forum are about layoffs - how random they seemed, how anxious people are to see if they’re going to be cut, and how vastly their perception of the company has changed. If this writer’s take is close, it seems like it kinda worked.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Employers are incentivised to retain the employment of their staff, which given the existence of other companies, means they're strongly incentivised NOT to have their employees "insecure".
  - malfist 4y ago
    That's only true if there's no cost to the employee of changing jobs. And that's not true. Changing jobs is expensive and costly to the employee, especially in terms of time and stress.
  - bbor 4y ago
    If an employee is insecure in their position as a “senior Big Tech dev” (read: top 1-2% income earner), they’ll be less likely to look for other jobs, slack off knowing they could get another job, or fight for raises / process improvements / anything, really. I guess the real point I’m making is that the “industry-wide” nature of these layoffs are an essential component.
godelski 4y ago
What frustrates me most is that a lot of people recognize that there are issues in the labor market but the conspiratorial belief makes things way harder to solve because we don't even know what the problem is. I see this happening in a lot of areas in both economics and politics. It does seem that people like this story of omniscient evil people better than incompetent selfish people. Like we've seen how inefficient bureaucrats are and it is well known, but while holding this belief people also hold a belief that they are led by super geniuses that have what is really impressive levels of collaboration. The two just can't true at the same time. So I'll give an addendum to Occam's. Godelski's Razor? Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily attributed to emergence.
- nkjnlknlk 4y ago
  It's because people are trained to think in terms of individual actors instead of systems. They're also trained to think their country's system is great if not for the X, Y, Z people ruining it. Of course, those who are educated and those with power often have to face the reality that we must focus on systems and processes. It's not "conspiratorial" to assume corporations are invested in extracting the highest labour power at the lowest cost. It's what they are designed to do in the system we have.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > It's not "conspiratorial" to assume corporations are invested in extracting the highest labour power at the lowest cost. This isn't what any of us (at least me) are calling conspiratorial. The conspiratorial nature involves the... conspiring part. That organizations are in fact not doing what I quotes but instead working together in back rooms to help maintain the elite statuses. While this happens to some extent, it is not this Bilderberg group type things. If individual elite companies and billionaires independently lobby for their personal self interests then others of that same group often benefit from the same things. This should be unsurprising. But it doesn't require collusion, it just requires statistics. It is not Dems and Reps plotting in back rooms to make Americans fight and hand over power to billionaires. You're watching too many movies. The easier explanation is that they all come from the same types of families and have gone to the same types of schools. They don't need to conspire because they already have the same reference frame of the world. They're not omniscient, they just have the same biases in their priors. But that's not conspiracy, that's emergence. A perfect example of the conspiracy we are talking about is the top comment. I am willing to bet that theater was closed (primarily) due to the pandemic rather than because they wanted to squash these performers' demands. But as the old saying goes: never let a tragedy go to waste. The judgement of intentions are being made based on the outcome, and in many of these cases could not have been predicted apriori. So either the owner got "lucky" or they were omniscient. If the latter, why the fuck are they running an theater? The same can be said about a lot of common beliefs. The outcomes might be similar or look the same as if these mega smart people planned all this, but that's a bias seeing the "successes" and ignoring the failures (a quite common human trait). The difference between these two views may not matter in terms of outcomes, but it sure does matter in terms of preventing the same things from happening in the future. Frankly this is the key failure point of many suggestions for how to resolve these issues and why we have decades or centuries of attempts that result in failures. Because we aren't looking at the complex causal chain of events (which we can't even know beyond a certain level of accuracy and is constantly changing).
notacoward 4y ago
> it really is just stock-price driven The two are not mutually exclusive. The infamous TCI letter even draws a line between out-of-control employee compensation and stock price. Rightly or wrongly (and in my personal opinion wrongly) the common view in finance is that employee power is bad for business.
eatsyourtacos 4y ago
> answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strategic thinking”). “The job of Alphabet is to provide solid growth in share price Q on Q for investors, with minimal fluctuations to spook them” Fair enough, but my view is that you've just described the largest problem with the modern world.
jeffwask 4y ago
You don't even need to be mustache twirly to price fix. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak... How many companies these days use some third party service for setting salaries? How many use the same SAAS service? If we are all using the same table of values, set by a third party, isn't that collusion with an extra step to launder the collusion.
sangnoir 4y ago
> The idea that Google would struggle as hard as it did to meet its aggressive hiring goals over the last few years, then axe strong engineers just to make others scared, really stretches my credulity. A bit of a morbid counter-example: does one worry about "strong T-cells" when undergoing chemo, or strong muscle fibers during a limb amputation? The assumption that the C-Suite inherently cares about individual engineers during layoffs seems like a slight case of main character syndrome. If your department is being excised, others departments are downsizing, and the company as a whole is not hiring for your role, nothing can save you. Layoffs are not perfectly planned and executed with surgical precision[1], they are messy and approximate. 1. I realize the irony of using "surgical precision" after my earlier counter-example of the imprecision of amputations.
ajmurmann 4y ago
There also might be other forces pushing for those on the background. There are several articles claiming that activist investors pushed for the layoffs: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-billionaire-google-owner-alphabet-needs-to-cut-more-than-12-000-overpaid-jobs-11674484497 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-billionaire-goo... Dynamics like this wouldn't be unheared of. I hear that part of the reason airlines don't frequently computer on price is that investors don't like it because they typically invest in multiple airlines and don't want their investments to compete for slices of a pie by shrinking the pie. Is it even collusion if I just do what my investors are asking me to?
mixmastamyk 4y ago
They don't think about "crushing..." they think, "how can I improve my bonus?" Result is the same.
analognoise 4y ago
They were already caught conspiring to keep wages down, found guilty and paid huge sums. We've ALREADY PROVED the conspiracy.

kyleblarson 4y ago

This is the LA Times, what do you expect? This is the same paper that called a conservative black gubernatorial candidate in California "the black face of white supremacy".

jklinger410 4y ago

And I don't buy the coincidental timing of the fed trying to push us into a recession, which they were not being successful at, following shortly with public companies like Google suddenly finding a bunch of inessential staff to cut. It's not like Google is taking out loans for payroll, or that it was obvious that this move was necessary. These inessential employees have been inessential for years.

dehrmann 4y ago
The standard argument is that tech companies hired-up for 2021 lasting forever, but people spent less time shopping online in 2022. The poster child for this is Peloton. On top of the shift in demand, higher interest rates hit other companies that would otherwise advertise on Google. Did Google need to do layoffs? No. Did it over-hire for revenue that never materialized? Yes.
gruez 4y ago
>It's not like Google is taking out loans for payroll They might not be actively taking out loans, but that doesn't mean they're immune to interest rates. Higher interest rates means that a dollar in 10 or 20 years is suddenly worth less than a dollar today. That means investors suddenly care more about how many profits can be generated today, rather than whatever moonshot projects that google is working on.

superfrank 4y ago

Same. It sells papers right now to paint CEOs as these omniscient villains who's only goal is the crush their workers, but I just don't buy it. There are plenty of CEOs like Satya Nadella who seem like pretty decent people. I'm sure some companies see this as a way to drive down worker leverage, but I think a lot are just reacting to the market change and realizing they have more employees than they need in areas that they don't feel will be profitable in the future. I also think there's a bit of follow the leader going on, where, now that layoffs have started, no one wants to be left at a disadvantage. If you do layoffs that you may not actually need, at least you're staying on par with your competition. If you don't do layoffs and the market gets worse, you risk falling behind.

olivermarks 4y ago
Ironically the 4700 people at the NYT aren't the happiest bunch right now either. The bigger the company the weirder relationships with employees, 'associates' and consultants gets. In large orgs noisy, brown nosing people often do very well regardless of talent. In our era this seems to be a card to play against the firing squad selection algos. People who forcefully push for inclusion of trendy ideas and movements (DEI, Climate anxiety etc) into the core of the firm can be perceived as not in the best interests of the giant money making machine, which like a shark has to keep swimming forward to survive... and bean counter pseudo innovators like Satya Nadella quietly wield the mallet.. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-times-union-walkout.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-t...

bjornlouser 4y ago

"Not a problem [they are] facing" Not sure why you think that given that labor is their biggest expense. They have been known to collude https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-poaching-case-growing-debate-employee-mobility/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-...

yamtaddle 4y ago

> I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”. This would be a more credible claim if big tech companies, specifically, hadn't been caught doing basically exactly this, in the not-so-distant past.

azemetre 4y ago

You realize more than a decade ago a cartel of tech companies (two of which being Google and Apple) literally had no poach agreements in order to suppress salaries right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

SantalBlush 4y ago
But GP is incredulous about that, because a no-poach agreement would imply that they're sitting behind a desk and stroking a cat. That's an absurd thing to picture, so by the GP's logic, those no-poach agreements didn't exist. QED.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Conclusive evidence of a conspiracy does, indeed, strongly evidence a conspiracy. Alas, this hasn't much to do with the "no evidence of a conspiracy" case. All no evidence evidences is no evidence. A point which seems widely misunderstood.
  - SantalBlush 4y ago
    I agree, which is why "no evidence" would have been a stronger argument. The presence of evidence of a conspiracy doesn't suggest that CEOs are, in fact, petting cats from their desks. Even so, there is some evidence, though certainly not conclusive.
- theptip 4y ago
  I'll clarify by saying I'm aware of the no-poach collusion, and I'm not claiming it didn't happen. I used the absurd image to highlight and undermine the conspiratorial tone of the OP. I don't think the no-poach case was, as the OP claims, about "cultivating an insecure workforce". It simply started with Jobs getting pissed off at Google (legally!) poaching his people, and other companies he emailed getting on board with a general "don't piss off Steve" policy that grew. While it's conspiratorial in that a bunch of execs were coordinating, I don't think it represents cultivation of insecurity or any explicitly anti-union intent.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bbor 4y ago

I think you’re applying a “conspiratorial” vibe that isn’t necessary - employers are naturally incentivized to keep employees insecure and underpaid (relative to what they’d be paid if they organized, at least). It sounds like you’re knowledgeable on these topics, so I’d be surprised if you disagreed with any of these assertions: 1. Big tech would be willing to burn billions of dollars to crush any chance of tech unions forming. 2. Big tech is known to collude (even to conspire! ) to keep tech wages depressed. 3. Big tech’s biggest cost, by a huge margin, is labor; any reductions there could easily dwarf other shareholder-appeasing cost cutting measures. 4. Tech worker salaries have skyrocketed since they lost their collusion lawsuit, and the general sense among big tech workers was (in most cases) “they need me more than I need them, I could find another amazing job no problem by just responding to one of the many recruiters badgering me on LinkedIn”. Speaking just for google, 6 months ago all the internal forums were obsessed with the idea that SWEs were underpaid, that google should give raises to match inflation, and that google no longer paid top of market. Today I’m pretty sure 100% of the top posts on the biggest internal forum are about layoffs - how random they seemed, how anxious people are to see if they’re going to be cut, and how vastly their perception of the company has changed. If this writer’s take is close, it seems like it kinda worked.

mjburgess 4y ago
Employers are incentivised to retain the employment of their staff, which given the existence of other companies, means they're strongly incentivised NOT to have their employees "insecure".
- malfist 4y ago
  That's only true if there's no cost to the employee of changing jobs. And that's not true. Changing jobs is expensive and costly to the employee, especially in terms of time and stress.
- bbor 4y ago
  If an employee is insecure in their position as a “senior Big Tech dev” (read: top 1-2% income earner), they’ll be less likely to look for other jobs, slack off knowing they could get another job, or fight for raises / process improvements / anything, really. I guess the real point I’m making is that the “industry-wide” nature of these layoffs are an essential component.

godelski 4y ago

What frustrates me most is that a lot of people recognize that there are issues in the labor market but the conspiratorial belief makes things way harder to solve because we don't even know what the problem is. I see this happening in a lot of areas in both economics and politics. It does seem that people like this story of omniscient evil people better than incompetent selfish people. Like we've seen how inefficient bureaucrats are and it is well known, but while holding this belief people also hold a belief that they are led by super geniuses that have what is really impressive levels of collaboration. The two just can't true at the same time. So I'll give an addendum to Occam's. Godelski's Razor? Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily attributed to emergence.

nkjnlknlk 4y ago
It's because people are trained to think in terms of individual actors instead of systems. They're also trained to think their country's system is great if not for the X, Y, Z people ruining it. Of course, those who are educated and those with power often have to face the reality that we must focus on systems and processes. It's not "conspiratorial" to assume corporations are invested in extracting the highest labour power at the lowest cost. It's what they are designed to do in the system we have.
- godelski 4y ago
  > It's not "conspiratorial" to assume corporations are invested in extracting the highest labour power at the lowest cost. This isn't what any of us (at least me) are calling conspiratorial. The conspiratorial nature involves the... conspiring part. That organizations are in fact not doing what I quotes but instead working together in back rooms to help maintain the elite statuses. While this happens to some extent, it is not this Bilderberg group type things. If individual elite companies and billionaires independently lobby for their personal self interests then others of that same group often benefit from the same things. This should be unsurprising. But it doesn't require collusion, it just requires statistics. It is not Dems and Reps plotting in back rooms to make Americans fight and hand over power to billionaires. You're watching too many movies. The easier explanation is that they all come from the same types of families and have gone to the same types of schools. They don't need to conspire because they already have the same reference frame of the world. They're not omniscient, they just have the same biases in their priors. But that's not conspiracy, that's emergence. A perfect example of the conspiracy we are talking about is the top comment. I am willing to bet that theater was closed (primarily) due to the pandemic rather than because they wanted to squash these performers' demands. But as the old saying goes: never let a tragedy go to waste. The judgement of intentions are being made based on the outcome, and in many of these cases could not have been predicted apriori. So either the owner got "lucky" or they were omniscient. If the latter, why the fuck are they running an theater? The same can be said about a lot of common beliefs. The outcomes might be similar or look the same as if these mega smart people planned all this, but that's a bias seeing the "successes" and ignoring the failures (a quite common human trait). The difference between these two views may not matter in terms of outcomes, but it sure does matter in terms of preventing the same things from happening in the future. Frankly this is the key failure point of many suggestions for how to resolve these issues and why we have decades or centuries of attempts that result in failures. Because we aren't looking at the complex causal chain of events (which we can't even know beyond a certain level of accuracy and is constantly changing).

notacoward 4y ago

> it really is just stock-price driven The two are not mutually exclusive. The infamous TCI letter even draws a line between out-of-control employee compensation and stock price. Rightly or wrongly (and in my personal opinion wrongly) the common view in finance is that employee power is bad for business.

eatsyourtacos 4y ago

> answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strategic thinking”). “The job of Alphabet is to provide solid growth in share price Q on Q for investors, with minimal fluctuations to spook them” Fair enough, but my view is that you've just described the largest problem with the modern world.

jeffwask 4y ago

You don't even need to be mustache twirly to price fix. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak... How many companies these days use some third party service for setting salaries? How many use the same SAAS service? If we are all using the same table of values, set by a third party, isn't that collusion with an extra step to launder the collusion.

sangnoir 4y ago

> The idea that Google would struggle as hard as it did to meet its aggressive hiring goals over the last few years, then axe strong engineers just to make others scared, really stretches my credulity. A bit of a morbid counter-example: does one worry about "strong T-cells" when undergoing chemo, or strong muscle fibers during a limb amputation? The assumption that the C-Suite inherently cares about individual engineers during layoffs seems like a slight case of main character syndrome. If your department is being excised, others departments are downsizing, and the company as a whole is not hiring for your role, nothing can save you. Layoffs are not perfectly planned and executed with surgical precision[1], they are messy and approximate. 1. I realize the irony of using "surgical precision" after my earlier counter-example of the imprecision of amputations.

ajmurmann 4y ago

There also might be other forces pushing for those on the background. There are several articles claiming that activist investors pushed for the layoffs: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-billionaire-google-owner-alphabet-needs-to-cut-more-than-12-000-overpaid-jobs-11674484497 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-billionaire-goo... Dynamics like this wouldn't be unheared of. I hear that part of the reason airlines don't frequently computer on price is that investors don't like it because they typically invest in multiple airlines and don't want their investments to compete for slices of a pie by shrinking the pie. Is it even collusion if I just do what my investors are asking me to?

mixmastamyk 4y ago

They don't think about "crushing..." they think, "how can I improve my bonus?" Result is the same.

analognoise 4y ago

They were already caught conspiring to keep wages down, found guilty and paid huge sums. We've ALREADY PROVED the conspiracy.