Median salary in Madrid is about £17.5k, so it’s somewhat comparable cost of living/salary (not quite as crazy as London but not far off).
Now, programmers are definitely relatively well paid here. Junior positions at big companies will be significantly higher than that median. the kind of guy who in the US would land a Google position (excellent resume and good job hunting and interview skills) here will probably land 25-30k€ on a first job (we are talking top of the class, the average CS graduate is likely closer to 19-20k€).
TCI have no leverage against google, because they don’t really move the market themselves, and Larry and Sergey have a controlling interest so typical activist investor attempts to bring multiple fund managers on board won’t work. Sure they wrote a letter, but I doubt much attention was paid to it.
Indeed, big tech in general is set up in a way that’s hard for activist investors to influence. Facebook and Alphabet have golden shares for the founders, Apple and Amazon have such brand strength that it’s going to be really hard for activists to build a coalition. Only Microsoft could be influenced, but even there the sheer amounts of money involved mean that theres no way for the activist to obtain an outsize voting representation.
It’s not that hedge funds can’t influence leadership - they absolutely can. It’s that the big 5 is the last place I’d expect them to get traction.
The real story here is probably that we should expect to see hedge funds pushing smaller tech firms to do layoffs as well, if they haven’t already.
Yeah, that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory with very little evidence. That one letter doesn’t prove that they have any sort of influence. I bet they write all kinds of letters trying to get companies they’re invested in to do what they want.
Yep, I just checked, and the apartments I used to live at on the edge of the suburbs(the edge that touches rural land) outside Grand Rapids, MI have their cheapest option at $950 a month now. Most apartments are well over that. Looks like the apartment I had would cost about double what I was paying 10 years ago and basically matches what we pay on the mortgage for our house.
The sad thing what i’ve found now is, at least at this moment, the not-valueless value of renting vs owning is being closer to work. You’re basically forfeiting quality of life in the future for quality of life today.
And people still think everything is ok, when billionaires routinely and publicly call for the firing of people who are in the main doing their jobs and doing them well, simply because they want to make more money.
Just got promoted at the beginning of the year here. We haven’t been hit with layoffs the entire time I’ve been at Red Hat. We have slowed hiring quite a bit, but there are still reqs open.
Prior to Red Hat, and Oracle, the I worked on a team that went Stratus Computer → Ascend Communications → Lucent Technologies → some private equity thing → Stratus Technologies in the span of about 6 or 7 years. I arrived in late 2000 when it was part of Lucent, and Lucent was in the middle of its fall. I was laid off when it was merged back with Stratus in 2003, and then brought back later that year. From then until I left in 2012 to go to Oracle it was a constant stream of layoffs as revenue evaporated from their previous juicy Telco business. It has been nice being at Red Hat the past almost 9 years now, with decent pay and bonuses.
I’m remote in Arizona. I’ve been out to Raleigh a couple times. The team I work with is based in the Boston area. We have a lot of people that are remote, which is fairly normal for Linux kernel work.
Whether it’s hedge funds, these layoffs have very little to do with actual business costs, etc. It’s all to make the stock market happy, with a side-order of facilitating internal reorganization. Shows an appearance of doing something about it right before they report poor financials.
In Microsoft’s case, it let them sunset a bunch of businesses they were losing interest in (MR, Hololens, and probably a chunk of the Surface business) and also outsource other internal FTE positions to vendors. But the news cycle becomes more about the layoffs than focusing on them deprecating products and business lines this way.
Also, MS last had big layoffs 14 years ago, but they’ve regularly had smaller ones ever since. It just doesn’t make the news when they, say, lay off the 90% of the European Xbox teams and consolidate that work in the US because a couple hundred people isn’t newsworthy.
