The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they'll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.

If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals' stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.

And, in the end, they'll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated "we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button" basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.

Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don't actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.

Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.

Source: I've done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).

That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they'll pay you every year is meaningless if they'll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.

They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we're a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.

Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how "fun" an office could be. They're now relegated to normal companies...and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP's move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?

IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They'll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.

You're missing the whole "growth starts to plateau so management looks for ways to cut costs"

And

"Product comparatively stable so it gets hired out to contractors who inevitably fuck it up because they're cheap and there was 0 knowledge transfer but it's too late you laid off the entire original team"

Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending

I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops "trending". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.

But also you're not just supporting the language. You're supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.

Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.

Also, the story of Boeing's planes-that-don't-fly-good. Decades of engineering out the door to save money in a single quarter means accumulating tail risk that you - a manager who will be up or out in another five years - never have to deal with.

This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing

Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That's the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm's bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.

CEOs. Name them. Shame them.

Personally I like seeing his name nailed to the worst era in Google’s history. The company has gone into the shitter since he arrived.

Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.

Could easily be that they have a bunch of people in Munich they can not fire since German labour laws are at least compared to a lot of places not that bad and they have to come up with some work for them. So having them work on this is still cheaper then having the people in the valley plus "useless" people in Munich.

It's like he looked at Carly Fiorina's run on HP and said "hold my beer".

While reporting record profits! lmao you can't make this shit up.

Compared to software developer compensation in California, Germany is waaaay cheaper.

Heck, Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any of their US offices. You would make more by working for Google in Raleigh, North Carolina than in Munich.

The only European city that pays as well as the US is Zürich. The pay is really good there, about the same as Seattle.

Even if he gets layed off or even fired, he will still receive a larger compensation package than either you or I will receive as compensation in the whole of our working lives, most likely both of ours together his compensation package will dwarf even ten times what we will make together our whole lives.

And this is if he does the shittiest job he can possibly do and gets fired.

You are only starting to think that NOW?

To be totally honest, i might be a sociopath too if i only have to work for a year and have enough money for a many generations

The irony is that they are moving to Germany, one of the most unionized countries in the entire world. Also not exactly "cheap" labor.

Compared to..... San Francisco?

For shareholders, he has increased the share price and dividends.

It seems he has done this via Boeing route of management, short term gain for long term decline.

Really dumb considering the recent FTC noncompete ruling lol