Google is profitable. They are not losing money, and they are in no danger of becoming unprofitable because of payroll. If we lived in world where folks measured things in a normal light, Google would not have frozen hiring, rescinded offers, and laid-off thousands. We live in the upside down world. We have to stop accepting the crazy, upside-down values of the modern world. The world would be better if Google just wanted to be an awesome search engine that made money by being great, instead of trying to grow quarter after quarter (unsustainable in the long run).
eh... Google, more than your average publicly traded company, does rely on external investment by way of the stock in order to conduct its operations. In particular, a very large percent of compensation, especially for the most valued employees, is equity-based.
Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up. Hence, profits were down. The C-suite's insight into the future seems to be that future revenues are not going to make up for the current cost structure. The stock price is roughly correlated with profits (let's ignore NVDA for a moment). So to keep the stock price afloat, profits must be propped up. If the stock price drops, all employees are suddenly paid less, especially the ones you value most. So not doing layoffs is equivalent to giving everyone a pay cut. Pay cuts are even worse for morale and long-term company performance than layoffs. The choice seems clear to me.
On top of that, when you're a publicly traded company, your obligation to your shareholders is at least as great as your obligation to employees. If you don't like that agreement, don't go public (as a worker, don't agree to work for a for-profit company). Google is a for-profit, not a cooperative.
> Google's revenues were flat last year but costs were up.
Wrong. Google made 181.69 billion in 2020, 256.74B in 2021 [1] and 283B in 2022 [2]. A 10% YoY increase [2] is better than most of the years they have been public. They possibly made more money in last 2.5 years than all the years they have been public combined.
> Are you saying most employees would prefer losing their job or living without job security over a pay cut with job security?
Pay cuts don’t come with job security. You can get laid off after a pay cut as easily as without one.
Employees prefer not having their pay cut. The ones that are dismissed aren’t employees any more, so from the narrow perspective of the organization dismissing them, their morale doesn’t matter. Pay cuts impact the morale of the people still working more than lay offs do.
Now, where pay cuts – especially explicitly and enforceably temporary ones – come with some real measure of job security as a way of avoiding layoffs, that can be different, but that usually only happens where there is a specific contractual arrangement, usually via a preexisting union and labor-management negotiation (and even there its tricky, especially in the private sector, because firm guarantees are hard.)
