Isn’t that a big part of the problem, the reward is “over time”. While the executive incentives are all short term. Most of the investor incentives are also short term, and the executive incentives have all been aligned with those. Hence, we should expect them to work to achieve those short term goals and ignore everything else.
If we had a company where the executive incentives were tied to the long term performance and ignored any short term up and down, then I would expect the reverse. Which is what the rest of us, as consumers would like.
As an employee who would prefer a nice long career without having to jump jobs, I would like the second too. I’ve got coworkers at 30+ years with the company.
Which nicely brings us back to Google and the topic at hand. Nicely done.
From the story:
CEO Sundar Pichai.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Sounds a whole lot like "During COVID digital demand spiked and we hired based on the 6 month outlook. Now that’s died down, back to the level before the spike. Might go lower in the next 6 month outlook. So, they’re firing people.
Sounds like a crappy way to run a company. What’s the outlook for the next 12, 36, or 60 months? Are they going to need to hire that many people back again? If not, have they stopped creating new products that require more staff? These are giant companies with huge profits, not small businesses with tight cash flow. They should be able to fund a bench team and use it to make aggressive new moves. It should make them stronger in the marketplace. Alas, someone’s incentives are tied to a 3 or 6 month metric and at that scale having an employee bench looks bad, so off they go.
I assume most people here read those the same way, that those leaders are doing a poor job. However, someone who is aligning their incentives, their boards of directors perhaps, probably sees this as willing to make the hard decisions and optimize the current environment. 
