> Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.
What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.
As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.
The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.
It’s fine to say the best engineers want to work on the most interesting problems, and that’s totally valid, but truthfully Google and other big tech companies need an army of highly skilled engineers to turn the red button blue. A simple fact is that maintaining the behemoth requires lots of skill and relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale to the army that Google would need to employ (even if it reduced its current headcount).
I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing. It's not much different than compiler optimizations that squeeze out tiny efficiencies that are not noticeable and irrelevant to 99.9% of use cases. If you can make red button blue and quantify its effects in terms of UX (people being able to find the button or make reality more aligned with expectations of the user), I think that could be interesting. But I would love to hear from someone that has labored over such a task.
If I were hiring someone to figure out which buttons to turn from red to blue, I would at least try to find people curious and serious about the task. I wouldn't just accept that its monkey work, throw some money at it and hope for the best.
It is not monkey work. But A/B testing can often be more a trapping of scientific than the real thing. Google UXR is hit or miss. They have done a number of poorly run studies on what shade of blue to color buttons without thinking about multiple comparison corrections, seasonality or evolution in display technologies. I am increasingly unconvinced that these efficiencies are meaningful for UX. Compilers are different and those optimizations are real and matter for both the bottom line and UX.
I was using the phrase “turning the red button blue” as a description of the fundamental toil that goes into maintaining complex systems. There might be thousands of people who find that work interesting, but there are millions of buttons.
> I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing.
I agree with this 100%. I don't work in the gaming industry, but always used to be the "passionate/caring/agreeable" person in my team, until I realised that being so agreeable made me work more for less.
The place I work is actually nice, but since that realisation, I managed to get an offer from a different place, to make my current company to counter with a massive salary increase.
I know and also share the salary numbers with most of my closer friends in the company, so I know how good I'm doing. If they stop giving me the fair regular salary increases, then I'll leave without any regrets.
Lesson for me that blind loyalty - even in nice places - will give you nothing but frustration and exploitation.
Airline pilots are also exploited for their passion (most people don't rack up the needed flying hours by accident).
It's also a false dichotomy: I am both passionate about my work and could do it for free (which I do with F/OSS contributions), but I also care about my compensation.
The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems for a pay that is high enough to cover quality of life.
If your company shows a slowdown in growth--not loss: less growth--the idea that you're suffering from macroeconomic effects and need to cut spending makes very little sense. You're still making a profit quarter after quarter, where's the financial hardship?
(You might go "what about that 4 billion dollar fine from the EU??" To which the response is "did you look at their earnings report? Google made just shy of 20 billion in operating income last quarter alone, on a 30+% profit margin. $4b is literally still a trivial amount as a fine, constituting less than a month's worth of earnings)
The unfortunate truth with any publicly-traded company is that the CEO's job depends on that growth.
The simplistic relationship is as follows:
- The share price is (theoretically) a reflection of the future earnings expectations of that company
- Slowing growth means lower share price/lower dividends
- Lower share price/lower dividends means reduced profits or losses for shareholders
- 80% of stock is likely owned by institutional investors that have automatic triggers for sale of stock based on certain performance thresholds (think pensions like CALPERS) which further incurs losses for shareholders in the event of sustained periods of lesser growth
So when the shareholders band together and demand growth, they will expect the CEO to deliver it or they will replace that CEO with someone who they think will deliver that growth, simply because the system is structured such that growth is expected/required with some minimal level of risk.
Personally, I think there are better systems we could come up with that would ensure better stability for employees and shareholders even in the face of temporary slowdowns in growth that are caused by structural economics, but any of them would likely lower shareholder returns by some small amount, and the institutional investment plans would balk at that. (That small amount would translate to billions of dollars in projected future equity and would likely make the institutions insolvent at some point in the future.)
The fun thing about Google, though, is that Page and Brin still have majority stockholder voting power because even though they own less than 15% of the shares, they also own pretty much all the super-vote stocks. The shareholders can't vote out the CEO (or really, vote for anything to pass) unless Brin and Page are on board (or don't care). So really, the only threat a Google CEO has is from the board.
While your argument might work when it comes to regular publicly traded companies, Google is nothing like a regular company. As a tech giant LLC, the general public can buy shares, but those shares buy them nothing except for a cut of the profits.
> The unfortunate truth with any publicly-traded company is that the CEO's job depends on that growth.
Well, boo hoo for him. That's what he gets the comically outsized paycheck for.
We as an industry need to stop accepting that as an excuse for CEOs cutting wages, hiring, and perks for regular employees (not talking about the executives here) when the company is still making massive profits. If there's a genuine cash-flow problem, then yeah; it sucks but it happens. But screw this "We've got record profits, so now we need to shaft the lot of you that got us there so that we can juice those numbers even higher in order to further increase our high scores!"
The CEO's stock is tied to that performance. The better the company is doing profit-wise, the more payout the CEO gets. That's why it doesn't make sense for us, the ground employees. But makes perfect sense when you look at it from who calls the shots. Always follow the money!
I wonder whether the mention of swag in the reporting was a red herring.
I would've liked to see the full question, and all the other questions, and whatever could be learned from their absolute and relative votings.
Questions on my mind:
1. How many people are concerned about loss of swag, and if so, why? (Is it because they want the swag, or see it as a canary, or because they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?)
2. If some people are concerned about travel, is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
3. How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
4. Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to? (For example, were some people already feeling like they were overextending themselves, or stressed over pursuing a promotion, and now they're wondering whether changes will make make that situation harder?)
(I'd like to understand how different organizations are feeling, and how that changes with circumstances, and the news article's mention of swag might be confusing things. And also, I've always had a soft spot for Google, and I want it to be its best self.)
It sounds like a gas lighting attempt to paint employees as selfish and entitled children worried about losing their toys. Most people don't care about that stuff, it's all superficial anyway. Things like this usually means employees asking about why benefits are cut for them and not for executives.
Further down in in the article, if readers made it that far, it implies just that:
> Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. Pichai brought in total pay last year of $6.3 million, while other top executives made more than $28 million.
The later on:
> Bret Hill, Google's vice president of "total rewards," fielded a question about raises, equity and bonuses and how they will be affected by the changes. He said the company doesn't plan to deviate from paying workers “at the top end of the market so we can be competitive.”
Which leads me to believe employees know what they're talking about, and the swag question near the top is just clickbait. Employees actually want real answers, and they got none.
can't speak for everyone else, but it seems like a canary. They grew really fast the last few years, so many people joined google recently, with all their reputation for tons of perks. Their new perks are going away, that they just joined for. That's probably a bit of a shock as well.
> they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?
When you make a median of $300k, being told you need to cut a $50 sweatshirt this year out of the budget, its pretty confusing and concerning.
> is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
Probably all of the above. With COVID, lots of teams (at lots of companies) became more distributed, and meeting in person is important occasionally (IMO). Travel is fun, and google tends to be in the fun cities with fun offices (SF, NYC, etc) so traveling to those cities is probably an enjoyable trip compared to flying to eg. Milwaukee. With a "fun budget" even if you have to work, you'll probably enjoy those trips beyond the work.
> How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
I imagine considering the the earlier claims of "20% productivity increase", product cuts and stalled hiring, layoffs probably feel around the corner for many people. Having to output 20% more is no easy feat unless you really weren't working very hard.
> Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to?
I think its just that lots of people are new to this lucrative perk-filled rich company and its an affront to their expectations and potentially reason for joining.
I'm not a googler, but I'd see this as a canary. Steve Blank's[1] The Elves leave Middle earth - The sodas are no longer free explains why auch "small" changes portend larger cultural shifts
In a distributed company travel becomes essential to keep team coherence: anything from team activities to meeting up to decide on the direction of big projects (no online tool can beat a single room with a single whiteboard and a single marker in terms of usability and speed).
There are also meetings and travel to partners, to industry conferences and forums etc. (depends on teams).
In "tough times" all that is suddenly cut off, and only "essential travel" is allowed. But then some teams get to spend two weeks in Malibu on an "essential travel spa retreat" while their teams cannot even send engineers to a high stakes technical discussions with external party integrations. And of course "essential travel" somehow doesn't include various levels of sales, management and marketing.
1. Some people are excessively (IMO) attracted to swag and taking away any benefit, however minor, often attracts outsized opposition.
2. Especially people who aren't on the road most of the time, find a trip to an event a nice change of pace and an opportunity to develop professional connections both within your own company and elsewhere. There is business value but it's also often viewed as a significant perk.
3. Well, Pichai has made statements at least suggestive of staffing cuts. And even if there's some trueing up going on with RSUs, I expect a lot of employees used to getting a lot of their comp in stock in a rising market are looking at effectively significant cuts to their TC.
It isn't like the trade is that we get to work on interesting problems because the travel budget is slashed. Because of headcount clawbacks and concerns about backfill what I'm seeing is teams becoming more conservative and focused on keeping core customers happy rather than focusing on exciting new problems.
Sure. I think that Google can and should prioritize this more. But when the above argument is something resembling "good people like working on flashy and interesting technical problems so why worry about the travel budget" then it becomes relevant to talk about how there also isn't going to be an unlimited amount of flashy and interesting technical problems.
Maybe they don't get to deprecate another chat service and have to support it longer this time or someone has to work on making Google Drive as fast as competitors.
>For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
It is funny how people always consider their own politics as neutral. This is an inherently political statement as it sets up "advancing politics" as opposition to "meaningful work".
For some people the "meaningful work" they "just want to do" is to make the world a better place and that often isn't possible without "advancing politics". Maybe the "interesting product space" is to get one of the world's largest companies to reduce carbon emissions. People like that might view building adtech as the chore they endure for the opportunity to do "meaningful work" of fighting climate change.
What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.
As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.
The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.