Doesn’t even question what employees are possibly doing. Just says there are too many and they must be put out on the street. Says the people who are left are making too much money.
I say this a lot but…seriously…when do we start burning things?
I’m not for people only interested in benefiting themselves being the ones rewarded most by society, let alone being the ones effectively in charge of society as they are.
It isn’t heroic, benevolent, or even minimally pro-social to spend your life trying to accrue private profit for the sake of private profit. It just makes you greedy and selfish. Or as they call it with their orwellian language manipulation, “rational self-interest.” being greedy, selfish, and unconcerned with the effects your actions have on others makes you a vile, broken, contemptible person, and humanity seems to have forgotten that entirely, or at least we’ve been propagandized to forget it by the owner class.
We punish people that dare to pursue vocations that benefit society, like teachers and paramedics, and reward selfishness.
I can’t root for my own species in this state. Slitting eachother’s throats when there’s another dollar to be had by it. If this is truly what our species has chosen as it’s most practiced purpose and meaning, I want no part of it, and I will be grateful when it’s time to leave it.
I’ve heard humanity described as being composed of “self-interested, rational economic actors” to help us understand economics.
Like, we all want the eggs from the farmers’ market that were laid by the happiest hens. A farmer can assume we’re rational & self-interested when pricing her eggs so she can try to sell enough of them to make a living. $2/egg won’t fly because stores sell them so much cheaper.
Think I’m saying morally bankrupt, anti-social hoarders have rational self-interest but so do normal people like you & me. I’m fizzling out here but either way hoarding’s bad :)
Right, but there’s no term for being greedy, sociopathic, or engaging in hoarding in economics.
They fall under Orwellian double speak terms that make them complimentary, “rational self-interest, creating externalities, curtailing redundancies” etc. Language designed to turn their sins into their achievements.
Considering the central prominence of greed in our economy, it’s a glaring ommission that the capitalists and economists themselves seem to have forgotten that word, or to create an economic term for greed that isn’t complimentary.
They are driven almost entirely by insatiable greed, yet the term is never uttered in their earnings reports or economic news.
They seem to want the concept of greed as the pejorative it is to be forgotten entirely, despite it demonstrably being their core value.
Greed is the best descriptive word and incredibly negative as you’ve said. No reason to make a more negatively charged word. The tale of Midas, and others, demonstrate how destructive and harmful greed is.
Midas has always stuck with me since I first heard the tale and in a way informed who I am today, especially my political leanings.
I own a little Google stock. I don’t mind they pay their employees a shit ton. I want them make good products. I’m not a fan of most their products but that’s just me
My hatred of the owner class is matched only by my disappointment in my fellow humans for not only taking it, but often defending it.
The people we struggle for have abandoned their humanity. That’s what it takes to be one of society’s supposed winners or be in their good graces: practiced sociopathy.
And half of the peasants fantasize about being the sociopaths instead of ending their reign and this despicable con game of an economy.
Summed up concisely. I’ve unfortunately given up hope that anything can be done or can improve. It feels the fight, whatever fight there ever was, has been lost.
Yeah, I’m not sure I really get this whole “reduce employment” logic. Like if some product just isn’t profitable and you lay off the employees you hired to work on it, that’s not surprising, but if the employees are doing something profitable, and you actually needed to hire that many to get whatever it was you hired them for done, shouldn’t it be more profitable to a company to keep them, even if one had a large number?
Moreover, if all the oligarchs are doing it, and they are, who will be left to buy their products/services?
They’re breaking their own ponzi scheme economy for a few more quarterly profit boosts because there’s nowhere else to grow/metastasize. Media companies are making less media. Food makers are making less product types. Their profit is coming out of gutting workers and their ability to produce what their economic sector produced in the first place.
This is a terminal stage market capitalism fire sale. The snake is eating its own tail having conquered the board.
Because this is the End of the Line. The snake has found its tail and Oroborous awakens to transform the end into the beginning. An ideology of everlasting consumption will eventually consume itself.
Bold of you to assume the stock market has anything to do with finite resources.
When the ultra wealthy and their companies run the system into the ground they will buy up the failed stocks and cheap land that nobody else can afford then come out ahead when the economy recovers like they have in the previous economic crashes. They can afford to buy low and cash out when it is high because they have zero pressure to act at any given point in time due to their ridiculous wealth and zero legal repercussions.
But even then there reaches a point where they run out of things to buy, and people to buy them from.
Eventually they poison the one thing they worship: the sanctity of private property rights. It has to serve at least some portion of the populace if it’s going to remain tenable, but they’re doomed to discover and undershoot that number.
The Western world spent a century demonising socialism with “they’ll take your home and car” but it rings hollow when you have neither.
The stock market is the reason for chasing quarterly profits and a massive part of what gets counted as the economy. It is the main driver of all the shitty late stage capitalism practices we are discussing.
Most of them are not. That’s the beauty of a cash cow like Google. They’re working on things that may be profitable in the future. By cutting the future, you’re cutting future growth.
It’s why I dislike hedge funds. They’re stripping value instead of creating value.
He says they aren’t needed “operationally” but Alphabet is not supposed to be merely operating anything. They are supposed to be inventing and experimenting and pushing the envelope. This discontented billionaire just wants ever-increasing rent on existing IP and should be called out as a simple landlord and not called an investor at all.
The rich person only cares about short term profits. They want to liquidate any good will and long term preparedness. Once the host corporation has been sufficiently bled of value, the parasite will move on to the next source of value it can find.
Correct. R&D only creates future value. Usually in the VC model, R&D is done by individuals or small groups and then funded (bought) by VC to get it to market. So even though the R&D do-er can cash out their future profits for immediate profits, the value of that R&D can’t be realized immediately.
I personally think the VC and legacy models are currently competing, and VC is winning out. As we see here, even large, established companies aren’t immune to impinging VCs.
I’m genuinely not super revolutionary but I didn’t get halfway through this letter before coming to the realization that this person needed to not exist anymore and same for anybody else of the same ilk.
Because he doesn’t care. He’s looking out for himself.
“Hey Googs, you have too many employees and that’s cutting in my investments. Shitcan 150,000 so my investments go up and I make more billions kthxbye”
The source matters, too. This is a dude exploiting people and hoarding so much needed wealth. To an obscene amount. Like, he has more than enough to do everything he could possibly dream of, for the rest of his life. And long after he’s gone, all his descendants will be set and will never have to worry about money for their entire lives…
So what does this psychopath obsess about? “Please kick people out into the street and reduce the pay of anyone who remains. Number go up… Fuck em, got mine lol”
I think the comments are cutting Alphabet too much slack. Yes the billionaire is heartless, but he isn’t wrong. Alphabet was careless. They binged on talent because they did not, and do not, place significant weight on the consequences of their hubris. Why? Because ultimately it is the workers that have to pay the price, not the executives that hired carelessly. If you do not force management to care, they won’t.
I always think of Indeed and their CEO. They too hired too many too quickly and were forced to fire. What did the CEO do? Not only did the company make sure the severance package was generous, the CEO took a pay cut too.
All well and good, but the thing is… Even the narrative that workers now have to pay for the CEO’s mistakes gives the CEO an unjustified excuse.
Nope. Alphabet is insanely, embarrassingly profitable and was during their first layoffs. There is no reason why they needed to fire anyone. If they committed to their workers a fraction of they level they demand their workers commit to them, they would not have done the layoffs.
I have heard that sometimes they hire talents just so the competitors don’t get them, so talented people end up doing bullshit jobs and the salary discourages them from moving to more interesting but risky endeavors.
"This thing employs people who produce AMAZINGLY profitable and world famous stuff."
"It also has way too many people working on producing stuff, based on my analysis which began and ended with counting up how many people and what it costs to pay them."
"Time to kill the people. Then it'll only be the profitable stuff, and none of the cost of the people. I'm amazed no one has realized this yet."
Edit: Honestly, he's not exactly wrong. My fairly-uninformed impression is that the structure of Google is that a relatively small search-and-Youtube advertising department brings in an absolutely unending river of money which can be used to fund pretty much whatever the rest of the company feels like working on. I still feel that it's pretty unlikely that his assessment is based on a full understanding of how the company got to its present dominant position and how to properly steward the whole thing along in a stable fashion. I think he wants to wring it for any dislodgeable pennies like a swollen udder in the hands of a meth addict.
What these big giants were trying to do is scoop up as much talent as possible so they don’t end up at a competitor, even if that meant some employees would be getting very light workloads. that’s one of the many reasons too Google keeps starting new projects and killing them a few years later.
Most of us without meaningful capital are either forced to do it in practice with our labor, or be cast out to serve the owners in another way: as capitalist scarecrows. Our homeless exist on purpose, it wouldn’t be that expensive to provide minimal shelter. They exist to die slowly and publicly of exposure, and constant police capital defense force harassment, to terrify the capital batteries into continuing to show up to their jobs to produce value for their owners.
One way or another, those without capital are forced to serve the owners. Nothing “voluntary” about modern market capitalism, short of slitting one’s own throat.
You will serve the owner’s insatiable greed directly, or you will serve as an example and threat to the others.
Our homeless exist on purpose, it wouldn’t be that expensive to provide minimal shelter.
This is literally the truth. The state of California spent billions on serving the homeless over the past several years, and studies found that it would have been cheaper to simply pay their rent. At market rates.
“But I go to work so it isn’t faiiiiiiir if they don’t die in the gutter!”
-Someone struggling to make rent/mortgage, and having 95% of the value they produce extracted to run up the ego scores of our con-men owners.
They propagandize us through the media they own, and the curriculum they influence, to look down and to the side for who to blame, because our benevolent job creators would never work against us, would they? It’s in-fucking-sane.
It's ironic because the cost of labor would be cheaper if the economic conditions that cause homelessness didn't exist. I wouldn't have to demand a six-digit salary if I could maintain my standard of living on five digits.
our society just rewards capitalism. it’s a simple economics problem, really. same product being made with fewer people to pay means company stock value goes up. if we really want to change, we need to flip that model over or heavily regulate it. things like increased hiring, pay raises, and societal contribution should be things that dictate the worth of a company to society, but we don’t speculate on stocks based on non monetary things like that. we just care about the bottom line at the end of the day…
Sundar Pichai getting roasted by his peers for not being hardcore enough lmao.
“You barely emaciated the livelihoods of any workers this year, Sundar. Lookit how happy your employees are, it’s a fuckin disgrace, mate. Take a look at the stock price. It’s fookin depressed mate!”
They’ve written one like that to every tech company. It’s probably just so they can repeat the conditions from before they got sued for colluding to depress employee wages. This has the same effect, except this time it’s not collusion, it’s doing their fiduciary duty because shareholders are demanding it.
they can fire and change who governs the board by using their majority share holder votes (which has been selecting short term max profit guys) but it’s a myth that they have a legal responsibility to return anything to shareholders
Fiduciary duty is real, in many jurisdictions at least. It means that the executives of a company are required to act in the best interest of the shareholders. In 99% of the cases what shareholders want is maximum profit.
But really, in almost every case where someone is found to be guilty of breaching this duty, it’s because they actually actively did something fraudulent. Otherwise it’s much easier for the shareholders or board to just fire the problematic people and get new ones. It’s not like being incompetent is a crime.
And that’s how the owners control us in perpetuity.
Blue collar vs white collar.
The homed vs the homeless for lowering their property values.
Red vs blue and the race wars too.
Etc.
There are only 3,000 billionaires on Earth. Extrapolate that down to people with triple digit millions in net worth, about 28,000 people on Earth worth more than 100 million, and you’ve found humanity’s common enemies manipulating us into beating one another down when not making them more money.
Our common enemies are tiny in number, a few tens of thousands lording over billions, but they manipulate us into fighting each other.
I don’t disagree, but they are a symptom, not the root issue.
But hey, nevermind. I think they stole a few of our cookies. Some guy in a suit sitting on a mountain of cookies yelled down to warn me about them. Great guy, think his name was Warren.
I think if you realized how out of touch it is for somebody in the top 2% of income earners in the world to state that they are exploiting themselves sounds to other people, you probably wouldn’t have said it.
Haha 1) I don't care, 2) I'm not even close to the top 2%. I'm a broke college student who would be skipping meals if it weren't for the SAVE plan. I ended that business because $100/hr didn't leave enough for me to live on after covering my business expenses, so it wasn't worth my time (which it shared with classes and an internship). For a consulting fee in a Western country, $150/hr is pretty much par and hardly excessive.
A person who makes $300,000 per year (which is roughly $150 an hour) is in the top 2% of world income.
A small side business owner who bills clients $100 an hour is a completely separate conversation that I have to wonder why you would even bring it up unless obfuscation of my original point was the intent.
You’re fixated on the hourly cost and not taking into account expenses. Also, in the US freelancers have to buy their own health insurance and equipment which is insanely expensive.
Freelancers also don’t get full billing because they are not working all the time, so that 150/hour has tom over all the down time when work is not available. Freelancers also pay their own taxes and pension plans.
You’re just out of touch with operating costs for freelancers so maybe stop before you do some homework.
… This discussion is about former google employees not the contract work a commentor here used to do.
You are the second person attempting to make it about being a freelancer. I’m not interested. I would however be interested if you are going to discuss what I said in the context of the discussion.
Yeah I see what you mean. My bad. I did get fixated on the guy’s freelance thing. That being said, you should take COL into consideration when talking pay. I haven’t lived in the US in quite a while so I’m not sure what 300k gets you in some places like the west coast.
Irish immigrants and African free men were dangerously close to joining forces against the “captains of industry” in New England. Solution? They made the Irishmen into cops.
Those people are the best argument for increasing wages and conditions across the board.
Say whatever about big tech, it’s undeniable that they have been immensely successful - financially, in innovation and cultural significance. We can then go, “see if you treat your employees well and pay them well they give a shit about your company and perform well”. That’s how we leverage the good conditions of one group to fight for all groups. Divided, we fall.
Lol there’s a stub titled “investor activism” under which this letter falls under. Jesus fucking christ, when you’re a billionaire it’s not “activism” it’s just straight up human manipulation
