Pay rises all round for Googlers All Google staff are getting a $1,000 bonus for incidental Christmas expenses and can look forward to a ten per cent pay rise next year. On top of the ten per cent hike, from 1 January, Googlers can also expect a rise equivalent to their target bonus for the year, plus an additional "merit increase", Business Insider reports …
"Good" to people who are useful and increase the dictator's wealth/power. "Evil" to any who are of no use. "Incomprehensibly brutal" to any who dare oppose said dictator.
Should we rename the folks in charge of Google to "Ghengis Khan"and "Alexander the Great?"
Working for Google is obviously an awesome place to be. Life outside the castle walls however is a completely different story.
Re: "Google will also pay any tax due on the $1,000 bonus."
This is an established accounting practice called "Grossing Up". It's very common, widespread in the USofA and certainly not news worthy. My old corporation did it as a matter of course.
"Which do you want, a $1,500 bonus and you pay the taxes or a $1,000 bonus and we gross it up?"
Thanks (at least in part) to companies like Google the industry I work for is collapsing. We're looking at massive layoffs and having to come up with a completely different business model over the next few months. Easy to make snide comments I'm sure...but we're not an industry based upon ripping folks off (like some.) We manufacture goods. it used to be that copyright meant something; you couldn't just copy someone else's works and then duplicate yourself a poor-quality version at home.
Thanks in part to the destruction of copyright (and in larger part to the availability of cheap reproduction technology for the home) people don't pay for professional, licensed reproductions of intellectual property any more. More’s the pity; the crap they produce at home won’t last ten years. The stuff we make will last hundreds. Still, in the minds of the consumer so long as they have a low quality digital copy they can reproduce their low quality copies at home as many times as is required.
I realise that “this is life” and “the market has spoken” yet I can’t help but feel a great sadness. Not only because this shift will directly affect the lives of people I know, (some of them becoming unemployed, others taking huge pay cuts,) but because it signals the end of an appreciation for quality. We have become a society so obsessed with the “new” and owning technological gadgets of various descriptions (which we then throw away in a few years anyways) that we no longer create nor appreciate works of permanence.
I certainly can’t blame Google for all of this; but they have played their part. They have helped foster a society in which the transient is glorified. The new and the now are held up as “superior” and “necessary” even when in many cases they are (compared to their predecessors) quite lacking. We are become a world lacking in attention span; distracted by the next shiny thing and heartily encouraged to be so by our corporate masters.
So it is that I say: it must be nice to be a megacorporate. A large enough entity in the world to actually have influence not only to sell a good but to help shape the very fabric of society itself. To tear down your competition, the ma and pa’s and redefine the world to benefit you. It’s a grand thing indeed. If you work there.
I should go bust out that resume…
My Sympathies.
I can't help but think that what you are referring to was a digital product (though you have carefully avoided mentioning whatever it is your industry makes or made). Whatever it was must have a presence that can be expressed entirely in digital terms, which means it is art, music or software in nature.
The trick is not to work in an industry that requires it's product be hosted and/or distributed using cheap, powerful computer hardware. Home fab rigs aren't that sophisticated they can run off a canteen of cutlery or a motorcycle. Yet.
Cheap always beats quality. Always has, always will. It was what killed the machine tool industry I worked in back in the 70s. The UK machines would run forever (hell, ours were run-in for 200 hours before they left the factory and the cast iron components were left for ten years before machining to ensure warp-free lifetime use). But the Japanese plastic machine tools were cheaper. Quality is something people talk about wanting, but won't pay for unless they are rich as Coesus - when flaunting it is a status declaration.
The appreciation for quality for its own sake was never there to start with.
Of course, the rise in automated production has devalued actual hand craftsmanship to the point that people think it should be cheaper to make things by hand. Why someone thinks a master carpenter should make chairs by hand for less than NC machines that cut chipboard into flatpack DIY furniture is beyond me.
You think you are sad now? Wait until someone figures a way to automate the creation of whatever it is you made. Ask all those retired car workers from Coventry & Dagenham.
A rotten turn of events for all that, and I wish you well in your hunt for work.
Thank you for the kind words. What we produce has been a physical product for well over a hundred years. Only very recently (mid-90s) did it become possible for any business to own the means to create this product digitally rather than requiring a physical medium. Now in general people prefer to take their digital copy and have physical versions created. The issue is that during the early aughties the shift away from the old analogue way of doing things into the new digital way of doing things introduced a few generations of really, (REALLY) terrible capture devices.
These terrible capture devices lowered the general expectation of the finished physical media and…*paf*…noone gives two hoots about quality. That means that an industry which used to be very important to people’s lives is now being torn apart on dozens of fronts.
The first being Wal-Mart: they offer a really terrible, low-quality version of what we do to the masses for about half the cost we could possibly manage. The second is the move slowly away from desiring physical copies because everyone now has at least one doohicky (usually more) that can cheerfully house and allow access to multiple digital copies. Lastly, we are under siege because the means to produce one’s own physical copies (albeit in terribly low quality) are cheap and easy to set up in one’s own home.
So with the “consumerisation” of both the capture devices and the end physical production devices the entire industry is dying. The professionally who used to capture the media are going bankrupt: winking out one at a time like an entire galaxy of stars slowly going nova. With their end comes the end of companies like the one I work for which take their work and produce high quality physical reproductions. It’s literally watching an art form perish.
I sympathise with folks in any industry going through this. There are seven billion people on this planet, four billion of which are of working age. There are only two billion jobs on this planet and the number of individuals is steadily increasing whilst the number of jobs diminishes. Eventually, our shortsightedness will lead to a revolution of the masses; but I may not be around to see it. There is a great barrier or apathy to overcome first. Still; eventually the masses will become tired of being indentured servants to a wealthy class that is less than 0.01% of the population and something new will be born.
My only single regret about any of it is that I probably own’t live long enough to see it happen.
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