<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>numbsafari</author><text>As a GCP customer? How about fixing a whole bunch of long-standing bugs and missing features? How about not having an entire region go down due to a flood in a single DC?&lt;p&gt;As a Google Workspace user? How about making the search in Drive not be an embarrassment? How about creating an actual backup and restore function (DLP is not that).&lt;p&gt;How about making ChromeOS not suck? How about making it possible to do zero touch deployments without involving some shitty third party reseller that wants to take over your Admin Console with their insecure and crappy “plug-in”? How about not forcing people to work with shitty resellers at all?&lt;p&gt;There are so many things Google could be working on, that it is not. Having them eliminate staff, raise prices, defer and delay new features that have been missing for years, or leaving bugs on the table, while doing a stock buyback and lavishing money on the leadership that let OpenAI eat their lunch, or that is letting Microsoft embrace and extend his supposed wheelhouse, Chrome, or who shutdown Stadia and literally returned everyone’s money, …&lt;p&gt;The list goes on. I get that it’s popular to dump on Google employees as overpaid and underperforming, but the fact of the matter is that that is only true because Google ‘s CEO is a crappy as fuck leader. I’ve never worked at Google, have no desire to, but I fail to see how he doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the litany of strategic and operational blunders that this company can continue to pave over with massive cash from their supposedly failing ads business.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, why does he even still have a job there?</text><parent_chain><item><author>andsoitis</author><text>a) what would you have them work on?&lt;p&gt;b) total cost to company per employee is more than their cash compensation.</text></item><item><author>prepend</author><text>If every one of the 13,000 employees made $300k in compensation then that’s $3.9B&amp;#x2F;year in expenses saved.&lt;p&gt;Instead of the $70B stock buyback they could have employed those 13,000 people for 17.9 years.&lt;p&gt;Google is basically comcast or Nike in terms of caring about their employees and customers.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Google employees complain about CEO&apos;s pay raise as cost cuts hit company</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-about-ceo-sundar-pichais-pay-raise.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>htag</author><text>&amp;gt; a) what would you have them work on?&lt;p&gt;This exactly.  A stock buyback combined with layoffs are a signal that Google doesn&amp;#x27;t have enough good ideas to work on.  Google thinks the money is just better spent being given back to investors.  This is very different than the Google 10 years ago, which was arguably throwing minds&amp;#x2F;money at bad ideas.</text><parent_chain><item><author>andsoitis</author><text>a) what would you have them work on?&lt;p&gt;b) total cost to company per employee is more than their cash compensation.</text></item><item><author>prepend</author><text>If every one of the 13,000 employees made $300k in compensation then that’s $3.9B&amp;#x2F;year in expenses saved.&lt;p&gt;Instead of the $70B stock buyback they could have employed those 13,000 people for 17.9 years.&lt;p&gt;Google is basically comcast or Nike in terms of caring about their employees and customers.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Google employees complain about CEO&apos;s pay raise as cost cuts hit company</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-about-ceo-sundar-pichais-pay-raise.html</url></story>