Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as “cheaper” labour, the report claimed.
Lot of knowledge to just throw out there, Sundar.
Let’s hope your documentation can handle it, or a whole lot of important stuff is going to take forever to fix if/when it breaks
Sundar Pichai-led company
Is that really a better description than just saying Google?
The board of directors probably plays bigger roles when it comes to layoffs than the C-Suites.
Folks need to start naming Prabhakar Raghavan, he’s the mother fucker that fucked up the search side to increase ad revenue, which is what Pacai hired him to do like a good little McKinsey alum
he’s also the guy who wrecked yahoo search. fuck Prabhakar Raghavan.
It’s not Google technically: it’s alphabet. Which is why they phrased it like that.
Microsoft and Google have indian CEOs so they can penetrate the billion people market (indians are deeply patriotic, and it plays into overall brand loyalty) and these companies plan lower costs while doing so.
What’s a few million dollar paid for a (specifically chosen for the purpose) CEO, when you can make billions by using it to gain grounds in a emerging market.
Win-Win
For a blissful moment I thought the headline was saying “Google Lays Off Sundar Pichai”
Before I got the hyphen I was starting to get down on the floor.
Even if he gets layed off or even fired, he will still receive a larger compensation package than either you or I will receive as compensation in the whole of our working lives, most likely both of ours together his compensation package will dwarf even ten times what we will make together our whole lives.
And this is if he does the shittiest job he can possibly do and gets fired.
Cheaper labour in the most expensive town in a country that is well known for high labour costs?
Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.
When you have a much better social safety net, work-life balance and in general can expect to be treated like a human and not a work-battery to be used up and discarded, people are satisfied with much less money.
Should they maybe instead just try that in the US? Nah, of course not.
Even doubling the salary is far less than what you’d pay in the US, and as a rule of thumb, German labour, including all the indirect costs, is about twice the gross salary.
Yeah, but you still have to pay social taxes on top for every worker. That’s why salary and labour cost are two different things. And boy is it a difference in Germany.
And as far as I’ve been led to believe, workers in the USA will be bullied into not taking any time off. Germans will take their entitled holidays and use sick leave when they are sick.
Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap.
So is West Virginia or Oklahoma.
True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.
You know where there is also cheaper labor? Other places in the US that are not in Bay Area CA.
Could easily be that they have a bunch of people in Munich they can not fire since German labour laws are at least compared to a lot of places not that bad and they have to come up with some work for them. So having them work on this is still cheaper then having the people in the valley plus “useless” people in Munich.
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/san-francisco-bay-area
vs
https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/munich-metro-region
Even if you assume that additional labour costs are a bit higher in Germany, there’s no way on earth that it could explain the difference of the Bay Area-median being over 3 times higher.
CEOs are sociopaths.
To be totally honest, i might be a sociopath too if i only have to work for a year and have enough money for a many generations
Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not
Money isn’t quite zero sum, but you don’t need to zoom in very far for it certainly look like it.
Then you start trying to think about better solutions. If you’ve got a decent understanding of human history you can see the solutions you come up with played out over the last 5,000 years of human civilization with various levels of success or massive failures resulting in war, slavery, or famine.
Then you think about what would happen if we all return to subsistence farming to avoid all that where our entire world be what we see with our eyes in the morning when we get out of bed. Then again you realize you’re back to war, slavery, or famine except on a micro scale with just yourself and your neighbor instead of on a nation-state sized version.
The least-worse (not the best, because there is no best) solution I can think of at the moment is a nation that jumpstarts on war, slavery, and/or famine, and transitions to an egalitarian socialist society when its powerful and rich enough. That still doesn’t remove the very human element of corruption or exploitation that just want more than that ‘perfect society’ would produce.
