• hades
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    4 months ago

    […] Sundar Pichai defended the layoffs and claimed that workers sometimes reach out to express gratitude for the cuts.

    “It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week.”

    • 1984@lemmy.todayOP
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      4 months ago

      Those workers are kissing ass to make their careers.

      Sundar is a complete idiot if he believes what those guys say. And he probably doesn’t, but it sounds good to the press I guess.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Even the press isn’t fooled. Sundar isn’t fooled. The other employees aren’t fooled. We, the outside observers, aren’t fooled. You have to wonder what the point of all this was.

        • No_
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          4 months ago

          Shareholders are fooled…

      • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
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        4 months ago

        Yeah, I thought his clueless reaction not only didn’t dispel but just confirmed the problem.

        He’s in a bubble, clueless that Google is now staffed by up-managing promo-seekers and not people who care about solving problems in a “googly” way like it was 10 years ago. His toadying to Wall Street and corporate culture shift did that, and now he doesn’t even notice that people are telling him what he wants to hear and complimenting his policies even when they don’t work.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Google employs, what, hundreds of thosuands of people now? All of them have stock options, many are millionaires from their Google stock. They also have big egos, and are often engineers (i.e. not very empathetic).

        I can imagine a few people not caring about co-workers they never met being let go, and believing management’s story that they were letting go people who weren’t needed and were just a drag on the company. Some, especially right-wingers, probably look at their options, see the share price going up, and are happy about the layoffs. They mistakenly believe it wouldn’t happen to them because they’re much more valuable, and they see themselves more as Google stockholders rather than employees.

        Still, a competent CEO knows that those kinds of employees are terrible for the culture of the organization. Rather than admitting that some employees like it their fellow employees are let go, he’d be smarter to say “it’s tough for us because we’re a family, so nobody likes it when we have to lay people off, but sometimes business realities make it necessary.”