I know multiple people who did 15+ years at Google or other big tech cos, and got let go despite having consistently good performance reviews. Those companies figured they could be replaced with younger and much cheaper people (or not replaced at all since the companies overhired during the pandemic).
Fortunately, most of these people managed to find new jobs relatively quickly, albeit with somewhat lower comp packages.
Those jobs have always had inflated salaries anyway imo. I've worked with brilliant people at small companies and complete idiots at global behemoths (contracting). Working at a famous company just means you passed some litmus tests and the correlation to brilliance or a 10x type of person is weak at best. Paying someone 5-10x industry standard isn't going to get you 5-10x output. 2 people at 2x the standard is generally going to be a better bang for your buck than 1 person at 5x. Unless it's some super specialized field like genetically evolving PHP code or some shit.
Ive thought about this a bunch, and I design the comp plan for the company I am at, and I haven't seen any specific research on this but my conjecture is this: The comp plans at places like google are designed not to stack superstars, but rather to make it so that everyone at the company is at least 1x productive and not being constantly poached. Its attractive enough that the interview pool is filled with plenty of 1x+ engineers, people who are median or above in performance. Its enough so that they're not really worried about you jumping to the next highest payer.
Isn't it just that when borrowed cash is free the real risk to your oligopoly is startups doing something dramatically better and stealing your lunch? In that environment the strategy is not about limiting the pay rung jump among the established players, it's about keeping the people talented enough to successfully do a startup from actively looking at that much harder path because buying successful startups is way more expensive than moderately overpaying a few tens of thousands of people.
In a higher interest environment the startup money dries up a lot so the risk to your oligopoly is much lower and the demand for yield on your stock increases dramatically so you worry less about a startup and more about maximizing value from your work force (which leads to lower pay on average and layoffs to rightsize), plus the cost of buying a successful startup will be lower because the discount factor from the higher interest rate caps price expansion.
And a $100,000/year MBA with a basic grasp of reality and the willingness to listen to people smarter than him could run Twitter better than Elon Musk.
In backpacking when we're trying to lighten our packs, we have a saying, "don't cut ounces when you can cut pounds." Yet the highest-paid people involved in a company always look at the lowest paid workers to see where they can cut costs, because after all, they can't possibly pay themselves less.
How has Musk owning twitter changed it in a bad way? And cutting 80% of your ounces in backpacking makes a difference.
If cutting 80% of your ounces changes so little about your backpacking trip that you don't notice a decline in enjoyment you didn't need that 80%.
> How has Musk owning twitter changed it in a bad way?
Troll elsewhere.
> And cutting 80% of your ounces in backpacking makes a difference. If cutting 80% of your ounces changes so little about your backpacking trip that you don't notice a decline in enjoyment you didn't need that 80%.
>And a $100,000/year MBA with a basic grasp of reality and the willingness to listen to people smarter than him could run Twitter better than Elon Musk.
This is certainly true, but that $100k MBA doesn't have enough money to buy the company, so he can't run it as a private company like Elon does. A Twitter owned by someone far less narcissistic (or publicly owned) could hire the MBA to run it, but that won't happen because that's not how companies choose their CEOs: the $100k MBA doesn't have the social connections and resume to get the job in the first place.
It's almost as if we need to make changes to the system so that the best and brightest bubble to the top instead of whatever idiot inherits their dad's slave-operated emerald mine money.
Fortunately, most of these people managed to find new jobs relatively quickly, albeit with somewhat lower comp packages.