As I keep saying: there’s nothing more dangerous than a company (or department in this case) that was once wildly profitable and is now merely profitable.
It’s absurd that even at places like Google, which has effectively infinite money, there’s still this present attitude of not being able to afford paying workers. Nuts.
It's not that they don't think they can afford to pay fairly. It's that the decision makers are incentivized to cut every possible cost and are rewarded for it with multimillion dollar bonuses.
Yes, you’re right. I worded my post for the sake of glibness and not clarity.
I think what’s particularly fascinating is not the relentless drive for more profits, that’s been hashed to death and I have nothing original to offer here, but how the internal narrative of “we can’t afford to pay them” holds in cases where it’s transparent bullshit. Of course Google can afford to pay its temp workers a fair wage, and of course they don’t want to. It’s just surprising that the story they tell themselves is so trivially falsifiable.
Wow, at what point do their profits balloon enough that Google's moat is no longer intimidating enough to fend off a gold rush of people willing to pour heaps of money and ingenuity into outdoing their search product? I've been searching with Google since the beginning and it definitely feels worse than in the days of yore, yet they make more money than ever...
Who has access to the amount of data that Google does? Microsoft and Apple come to mind, but they are already profitable for their own reasons so may not want to risk their current profit centers doing the "shady" work Google is known for (not necessarily saying Google is evil/shady, but their products have a reputation).
Profit is the difference between the cost to produce a good or service and the revenue generated from it. Cost of labour is just one aspect of the cost to produce a good or service.
Google is exploitative because they don't fully compensate the value of labour used in production. This is wrong and damnable and illegal in any reasonable jurisdiction. Google is profitable. This is not wrong and commendable in most places. The concepts should not be conflated.
Its not really "dangerous" only because that wording implies another state of possible affairs that could be safer.
unfortunately, ceteris paribus, the tendency of a rate of profit to ultimately slow is one of the costs of a free market, there is not really a way out of it long term!
> Its not really "dangerous" only because that wording implies another state of possible affairs that could be safer.
I generally use this phrase in the context of companies being willing to do anything to get back to being wildly profitable. And in that case, yes, there is quite a bit of danger towards basically everyone else.
It’s absurd that even at places like Google, which has effectively infinite money, there’s still this present attitude of not being able to afford paying workers. Nuts.