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The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

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Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#181

Post by spritefs »

komali2 wrote: post #91
idlewords wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good HL Mencken quote about the likelihood of people getting collectively smarter: "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "

I feel quite strongly about this. Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons). Therefore I believe that as our society reaches for further egalitarianism, this hi…

> Aligning society along a hierarchy of "intelligence" is really just aligning it on a hierarchy of access to education, which is just a function of economic class privilege (or racial class privilege really, these are tightly integrated even today in many societies for historical or otherwise reasons).

This is the claim: intelligence is just some combination of education, class, and race

Let's state the obvious here: genetics. Why did you conveniently leave that one out? Are you in denial about (inherently) stupid people existing or something? Can you prove that they don't exist?

Also, before you assume I'm being more specific: I'm not saying equal access to education is a wasted endeavor. Sure, make the public school system good in rich and poor areas

But we're talking about intelligence in general here, so leaving genetics out is just avoiding the obvious because it isn't politically satisfying

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#183

Post by dehrmann »

yehNaw wrote: post #24

My two cents; by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success. A general social trend to value tech in our lives seems lost on the genius CEOs. They really seem to think billions care they specifically exist, when really if they did not someone else would have been CEO. Some other company that came before Google would be Google big if…

> by picking a CEO who only knew Google, an environment full of self delusion that Google itself was responsible for Google’s success.

That would be Marissa Mayer.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#184

Post by coffeebeqn »

nugget wrote: post #118
analyst74 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very similar observation. My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.

Big companies are all about politics, all the time, in my experience. Smart business/product decisions require many quarters, sometimes years, of discipline and commitment to pay off. Whereas a shorter term focus results in less headache, possible promotion, and guaranteed bonuses. If/when the company craters, you can just bail. The sign of a great executive is somebody who empowers their organization to think ahead…

It’s also harder to attribute something you did 4 years ago as paying dividends now. Heck you probably won’t have any people with context on why that was a good decision on the team anymore.

I joined two years ago so that’s just how things are done here as far as I’m concerned!

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#185

Post by astrange »

jacknews wrote: post #113

Actually they're about the financial class trying to protect the value of their wealth by pressuring the companies they own to contain salaries, in order to curb inflation.

You get a better understanding of the US if you keep in mind that "the financial class" means retired homeowners who own Vanguard funds, not people who look like the Penguin.

But Google isn't owned by them, it's owned by Page and Brin.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#186

Post by astrange »

jurassic wrote: post #4
vsskanth wrote: post #2

> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law. Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share…

Whether it's law or not, the board will fire them if they don't make shareholders the top priority.

https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...

https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-versus-a-conservati...

How many of these people have been fired?

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#187

Post by astrange »

zaphar wrote: post #15
vsskanth wrote: post #2

> The Dodge brothers owned 10% of Ford and opposed this and took Ford to court because they wanted the payments to be able to start their own company. They won and Ford was not allowed to lower prices or raise salaries at the company thus enshrining maximising shareholder value into law. Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share…

Law in the sense that there is legal precedence from court cases, yes. Law in the sense that there are literal statutes saying so, no. Sadly, both matter.

There is not such precedence. There sort of is precedence that you have to say you're doing it, but you can implement that by basically doing anything you want.

It is true that you can sue a company for securities fraud if they do essentially anything that you can claim made the share value go down, but that doesn't mean you'll win.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#189

Post by astrange »

fatih-erikli wrote: post #139
komali2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how is that different from any other s Corp in a country without layoff protections?

So maybe their h-1b has just expired

It doesn't expire for 60 days because they're not "really" unemployed till then. Which is still extremely bad government policy; you don't want your best taxpayers to leave.

Re: The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership

#190

Post by ryandrake »

borroka wrote: post #135
abadger9 wrote: post #44

I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and…

To paraphrase, it is not that most leadership/high management is poorer than expected, it appears poorer even when it is expected to be poorer than expected. At some point between the ages of 20 and 30, you begin to believe that, although it is difficult to point out what they are better at than you or your peers, in order to be in the position they are in, "leaders" must be better in some way--say, in the technical…

Im convinced that a lot of leaders, especially in tech, are leaders not because they are smart or skilled, but simply because they were there early.
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