Can someone explain how burning out your employees, freezing hirings, possibly laying off a large number of your employees, in a market where people are actively quitting en masse... is supposed to <i>increase</i> productivity? Or are company execs just under the impression that "the beatings will continue until morale improves" was seriously good leadership advice?
If your company truly has a bloated unproductive staff that lacks direction the problem is at the top of the organization. It sounds like what really needs to happen is the board step in and change senior leadership.
I remember this royally backfired with Microsoft in '08 and '09. They did some rounds of layoffs, froze raises, etc. whereas all the other major tech companies held off on doing the same. There was _massive_ attrition and Balmer had to do multiple emergency pay bumps to the entire company's engineering roles to keep people from jumping ship in the following years.
The fact that Google's execs only care about this now that the economy is turning indicates that the execs have been coasting too. This isn't a problem you want to solve once it hits the breaking point due to external factors. You want to constantly solving it at a cultural level.
This threat seems to be specifically about sales not meeting quota, and therefore the Google Cloud org not meeting its revenue goals. I suppose one interpretation is that the sales compensation structure is flawed, and not incentivizing sellers to do their best work. If so, sales leadership should be held partly accountable. However, I suspect sales is likely the scapegoat here for deeper issues with the product and how it compares with alternatives.
The quote from the article specifically mentions the Google Cloud sales org:<p>> Employees who work in the Google Cloud sales department said that senior leadership told them that there will be an “overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general.”
Alphabet has $170 billion in total current assets and they are threatening their employees with possible dismissal. Why don’t they spend some of that money to help the employees improve their productivity, if that is truly an issue.<p>Examples like this make me snicker when people talk about a corporate job being secure. Those days are long gone.
Obviously the end result of years of being evil - not answering the phone, lousy customer service, ruining people’s lives with no explanation or recourse, damaging privacy, disobeying world governments. Payment due.<p>Maybe they should go back to not being evil, it seemed to work better for them.<p>It’s very interesting that Google, Facebook (refuse to use the other name), and Twitter are all notorious for this and all being hit at the same time. I suspect Apple is under stress also but they won’t feel it for a while due to their massive cash hoard. Which unfortunately means Britain will have a king before I can buy another iPhone with Touch ID.
It should be emphasized that this was an exec in the sales division, talking to cloud sales people. My experience has been that this sort of Glengarry Glen Ross macho talk is much more expected in that universe. By contrast, the Google devs I know say that there has been vague talk of belt-tightening and sharpening focus but no one has been making these kinds of dire threats.
Executives of large corporations must really have a good understanding of the monetary system and the flow of money through the economy given how quickly and decisively they respond to changes in monetary policy.<p>Sometimes it seems like macroeconomics are a separate parallel universe and you need to be above a certain size to have access.
Is the real story that Google & Facebook have decided that their prior starve-off-possible-competition strategy - of paying "all" the top tech. talent sky-high salaries to mostly twiddle their thumbs - is not looking so smart anymore?