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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

#271

Post by WalterBright »

nerdponx wrote: post #219
WalterBright wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has ever found a better way. What you're willing to pay for something determines its value to you.

The assumption that price paid == utility is only valid in the economic equivalent of "assume no friction" from intro-level physics. The equivalence isn't guaranteed to hold once you bring individuals' budget sets and various market distortions into play (information problems, sticky prices, et alia). You see the same thing on the supply side, with the assumption that price sold == marginal cost breaking down in gene…

Bottom line: you're still only valuing something by what you are willing to pay for it. That is its value to you. (Others assign a different value, but that's how the market works.)

Supply + Demand determine the value.

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

#272

Post by WalterBright »

komali2 wrote: post #226
WalterBright wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what labor did they contribute? I.e. you're positing the "Labor Theory of Value", which is the basis of Marxism. The LToV errs in assigning zero value to risk-taking and the fact that some people are far more productive than others.

Ok, so then, I'm doing a labor theory of value. What actual risk does an investor take? Loss of capital? Compared to an employee who, in the situation where capital is lost, loses the means by which they feed and house themselves, and in the USA, provide healthcare for themselves? On top of which, right now, investors aren't really taking much loss. This action by Google is done for shareholder value. So not only is…

> I just don't see why what an investor does has any value at all compared to an employee

Without investors, the employee does not get paid, as there is no money to pay him.

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

#273

Post by WalterBright »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #171
csomar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism. The theory is cute and some people in Europe thought it would work. It didn't and that's how we ended up with capitalism. Humans are capitalist traders by instinct. Marxism makes logical sense, however.

> Humans are capitalist traders by instinct. Humans are Feudal creatures by instict - thats why feudalism lasted thousands of yeats. Democracy and freedom are fragile and unnatural, they must be cherished. > There is a dangerous path in this rationalization that will lead you to Marxism. This is the brain disease of American politics, anyone pointing out injustice of any kind is accused of Marxism. The only acceptabl…

> Then we will arrive at feudalism

Feudalism failed when capitalism competed with it.

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

#274

Post by alasdair_ »

fnfjfk wrote: post #173
alasdair_ wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Levels are public at Google, unlike Meta, or Netflix that (formerly) did not have them at all. Well, yes, before they had levels, they did not have levels. I'm not sure this is much a a statement however - Meta has had levels for many, many years.

Meta does not have public levels. Everyone’s title is Software Engineer, from IC3 to IC10. Some senior ICs do have a view into levels, since they are involved in performance reviews. At Google, you can see other people’s levels, and they have titles: “Senior”, “Staff”, and so on.

When I was there, I knew peoples levels and we were encouraged to tell people “I’m a staff engineer working on foo” for interviews etc.

Plus, almost everyone E5 and above posts their titles on linkedin.

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

#275

Post by gretch »

mediaman wrote: post #267
gretch wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just a recognition of fact It's literally not a fact, it's an opinion. Hey what's your job? You don't need to tell me. But I'm gonna go ahead and say you're privileged compared to a rural chinese farmer that has never held a phone.

Privilege is necessarily a comparative concept. Most people in America are privileged compared to a rural Chinese farmer. The median Google employee is privileged compared to average American citizens. It's healthy to acknowledge this.

I didn’t deny it actually.

The real healthy thing is to acknowledge what are facts and what are not facts.

A ball is moving 15 mph. Is the ball moving fast or slow?

Btw, you're whole framework for 'privileged' is broken because it's a binary condition and 1 dimsenional.

Check out this incident where a profession NBA player was harassed by the policy simply for being black: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/us/sterling-brown-milwaukee-s...

He makes millions every year playing basketball. Is he privileged?

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

#276

Post by dasil003 »

borroka wrote: post #268
dasil003 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason executives talk the way they do is because when you’re speaking to thousands of people everyone has different base context and interprets things a little different. Messages need to be coarse grained and contain little nuance. This is at the heart of all politics. It’s easy to assume therefore that the words are intellectual garbage, but that’s not always the case. In fact there’s no way to tell competent…

I think that "messages need to be coarse-grained and contain little nuance," as stated in the comment, is a comforting thought, but it has little truth to it. I just have observations, many of them anyway, and not any proper experimental or observation study, but reflecting on them has changed the lens through which I look at leadership and management. When you say in the previous comment that "it's easy to assume th…

You’re conflating competence with the realities of messaging at scale. In reality they are not related as both competent and incompetent leaders at large corporations have to speak in a somewhat wishy-washy way to account for the widely varying contexts that a broad audience holds.

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

#277

Post by jujube3 »

pas wrote: post #238
jujube3 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would lose that wager.

can you provide some data for those who are absolutely not "in" the stock market? how did you interpret that wager? what starting date and what sell price?

The wager wasn't about the stock market, but about base salary being within 10%-20% for all companies for the same position. This is absolutely not the case. Check levels.fyi for more information

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

#278

Post by bikeshaving »

kerblang wrote: post #259
bikeshaving wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many rats would you say you fight in a typical fiscal year, if you don’t mind me asking?

Sorry for the late answer: Thousands, sometimes hundreds. There is an ebb & flow, if you will.

The data must flow.

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

#279

Post by jongjong »

spritefs wrote: post #157
jongjong wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. It's not about education anymore but pure credentialism. Did you study at MIT, Harvard or Yale? Did you work at FAANG? No? Then surely you must be an idiot. Nevermind all these difficult projects you worked on. Nevermind that your ex colleagues gave you glowing references. Nevermind all your open source projects. Nevermind that the project you led and worked on has never been hacked in 3 years i…

> It's all worthless because I don't see any fancy branding in your resume. According to who exactly? Some stupid person somewhere? Why should anyone here care?

According to people (especially HR people) who work at any large company... Or just about any company which has any money at all to hire people.

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

#280

Post by CydeWeys »

metadat wrote: post #170
riknos314 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company can make an official statement making it public at any time. Releasing information to the public is not restricted to earnings calls, but they generally don't have incentive to do otherwise.

Regardless, the lawyers will never sign off on it.

Yes, this is what I was getting at. You see this information released once per quarter in a very regimented and tightly controlled way, with lawyers triple-checking everything first. You're just not gonna materially significant numbers released off-cycle. You would simply wait for the end of the quarter.
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