Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around

https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-paying-matthew-mcconaughey-10-million-to-sit-around

by ppjim • 3 years ago

190 187 3 years ago

This is just a natural reality of capitalism. Some "workers" produce much more value than others. A coder making 150-200k is completely replaceable, a widely recognized public figure is not. Shouldn't be shocking, whats shocking is that people don't understand this and arent honest with themselves about the value they bring to the workplace

nordsieck• 3 years ago

whats shocking is that people don't understand this and arent honest with themselves about the value they bring to the workplace

The labor theory of value[1] is still a very popular belief. Even though it doesn't work very well if you poke it at all.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

satellites• 3 years ago

Yes, I’m sure an actor adds more real value to a SaaS company than engineers do. Recognizable talking heads who read lines into a camera are famously hard to find.

adamwong246• 3 years ago

given the hype-driven nature of our industry, that may well be the case.

notmindthegap3• 3 years ago

"Real value" is an attempt to draw a distinction where there isn't one.

Kim Kardashian brings in more "real value" to a clothing company than any one seamstress.

Welcome to marketing.

paxys8• 3 years ago

If an actor can directly bring more revenue to the business than an engineer then yes, they are adding more real value.

tekla• 3 years ago

Probably does. Most engineers are fungible

amitrip• 3 years ago

what does a public recognized figure produce?

ethbr0• 3 years ago

Sales.

alexfromapex3• 3 years ago

Capitalism creates these situations but what should be talked about is disincentivizing them not that we should accept them. That is enough money for 100 workers to not be laid off for an entire year. Merits a discussion on how much value he’s actually creating. Same goes for CEOs getting paid many millions.

erulabs3• 3 years ago

It's not possible to predict if this is a good call or not. At the end of the day, it will come out in the wash, and you can make a pretty penny betting correctly.

I'm going to assume no one here thinks this decision is so foolish that it will single handedly bring about the fall of Salesforce.

As soon as you stray into the land of "we should make this decision on Salesforce's behalf", you're straying into a "known-unknown", and acting as if it's obvious what the correct decision is is always the downfall of those who seek to plan society according to their morality.

If you said "I accept that I don't know if this was a good move for generating profit or not, but I still don't think it should be allowed", I might be more inclined to entertain the idea!

banannaise• 3 years ago

"That's capitalism, guess y'all gotta suffer while ten people add to their hoards, nothing we can do"

fdgsdfogijq2• 3 years ago

I'm not condoning it, just pointing out how society works

anonymouskimmer10• 3 years ago

I think people understand it, I just think they rightfully don't care that much. They care about their income, not the particular set of justifications the powers-that-be have for their organizational schemes.

jwilber2• 3 years ago

Ah yes, anyone upset that their employer’s layoffs cite financial reasons while objectively wasting money is “shockingly” ignorant to capitalism! Luckily the enlightened fdsg has brought it to our attention!

Without knowing what any of them did, it’s obvious that none of them, nor in aggregate, brought any near the value to Salesforce as did one aging celebrity.

Anecdotally, I’ve never seen anything associating the actor with Salesforce in any capacity. Even those I know at the company didn’t know he advertised for them. (But capitalism!)

nickpeterson3• 3 years ago

I think another lens to view this through, is a company that mismanaged their budget has two more glaring examples of mismanaging their budget.

titzer• 3 years ago

Ah yes, the smoke-and-mirrors part of capitalism, the style-but-no-substance, image-above-competence, the elitism and cronyism part straight out of Adam Smith.

ben7799• 3 years ago

I think why this rings false to many is that McConaughey is definitely extremely replaceable.

If that is already sunk money and they paid it to him before the layoffs than the article is off base.

But why is he at $10M not replaceable by some other celebrity who might do the work for 10x or 100x less? He has no special credibility around anything to do with Salesforce, CRM, or anything in tech.

It's more likely Benioff has a man crush on him and like the fact he gets to hang out with a famous movie star and pretend he's friends with him or something and can conveniently ignore that he's kind of buying a famous friend for $10M.

A really well executed ad campaign with a less famous, less expensive star might be far more effective.

gkoberger• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, this deal was almost definitely signed long before the economy crashed. And he was paid to create / star in ads (I'd assume the money went to his production company, not him specifically), which I don't think is particularly unique... a lot of large billion dollar businesses hire celebrity spokespeople.

EDIT: Okay, economy hasn't technically crashed, but valuations are down, funding is down, and layoffs are up. Tech companies have a very different view of money now than they did 8 months ago.

j_walter3• 3 years ago

Exactly this. Financial situtions change but you still haven't to honor contracts that were signed. The 8K employees didn't have the same contracts as a long term spokesperson...that is not unusual at all...

runesofdoom• 3 years ago

"But we had to do <terrible thing> because it's the law" isn't an excuse, just a different form of condemnation.

mola4• 3 years ago

So what? Can a company not take responsibility for the lives of thousands of employees? Either don't be a headcount glut, or take responsibility for the damage you'll inflict on these real life people and their families. Why is the expectation from managers to be decent human beings is so unreasonable? Do we need a contract for that?

soperj• 3 years ago

The economy hasn't crashed yet.

JackFr2• 3 years ago

But money's not free anymore

acdha3• 3 years ago

The economy hasn’t crashed and their earnings and profits are both up by double digits as of yesterday’s report:

https://investor.salesforce.com/press-releases/press-release...

This is businesses reacting to activist investors and trying to quash workers asking for better compensation. To the extent that the economy lags it’ll be due to layoffs affecting people who circulate their income more effectively than shareholders.

quickthrowman• 3 years ago

their earnings and profits are both up by double digit

To be more specific, their adjusted non-GAAP profits are higher than expected. By GAAP measures they posted a loss for the previous quarter.

Invictus0• 3 years ago

This is businesses reacting to activist investors and trying to quash workers asking for better compensation.

I feel like you're saying this with a negative connotation. Isn't that what the business is supposed to do? Run more efficiently, cut excess bureaucracy, make more profits?

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

Inflation is up by double digits, too, so profits going up by double digits may just be running in place.

ztrww4• 3 years ago

it seems a bit bizarre to me that a company like Salesforce would need 60k people though

namaria4• 3 years ago

The economy has crashed? That's news to me. Last I heard we had record low unemployment across the board and widespread, if modest, growth.

sremani4• 3 years ago

unemployment is a lagging indicator of economic malice. also, we have boomers a large generation retiring from work force, so even if the economic pie is not expanding or stagnant, there are labor pressures and these are not evenly distributed in the economy.

Trades is seeing phenomenal demand for labor, where as white collar people are going to get pink slips esp. in the fields (finance, tech, commercial real estate management, refinancing/mortgage) that have boomed during last decade.

specialist• 3 years ago

Market cap bubble popped. See also: SPACs imploded.

It'll take a while for a consensus narrative to emerge explaining the widespread tech layoffs.

Usual suspects are: post-pandemic hangover (over hiring), C-level & boards are feckless lemmings (copycats, groupthink), another round of revanchist Capital sticking it to Labor, profit taking by institutional investors, and macroeconomic stuff (end of cheap capital, blah blah blah consumer confidence, and so forth).

My personal theory: The MBAs couldn't think of anything else to do. They're admitting their growth has ended.

Cost cutting, including layoffs, happens in the absence of strategery [sic], plans for the future. So there's nothing to invest in. So they "return monies to their investors".

What's Meta's plans? Social networking and digital advertising have entered the top plateau of the S-curve. And it's not yet clear they can monetize their pivot to 3D porn (the Zuck's "megaverse").

What's Amazon's plans? It's now "Day 2". AWS is on autopilot and will continue to print money. If the rest of the conglomerate disappeared tomorrow, the share price would increase. There's nothing left in the B2C space to do.

As a counter point, Apple definitely has plans. IIRC They keep increasing their R&D. (And they didn't over staff.) So no layoffs.

r00fus• 3 years ago

The major reason was ZIRP going away.

All of this is downstream of that.

notmindthegap3• 3 years ago

Is it so crazy to assume McConaughey may enable more business through his influence than 8,000 employees combined?

If true, then it is justified by the argument Benioff put forward and that this article seems to also agree with.

brianwawok• 3 years ago

People really hate that. Also the secretary is not a fan that their CEO does indeed provide 4000x the value.

NineStarPoint• 3 years ago

CEO is in the unique position of being capable of providing 4000X the value, due to being a force multiplier on the entire company (It’s the job they hold, not skill, that makes it impossible for a random secretary to have as much value to a company). On one hand, this means it is indeed worth paying a lot of money to get the best CEO you can, as small differences in skill have outsized influences on the end result. On the other hand, even the CEOs who are of neutral or negative value compared to someone you could pay 10X less still get paid 4000X more than the secretary.

Anyway, long way of saying than general salaries are a race to paying as low an amount as you can to get someone of the needed skill, while CEO salaries are about paying more than strictly necessary due to the effect even a small difference has from your biggest productivity multiplier. And given that most people will never have the opportunity to enter a role where their pay starts being calculated that way, it’s unsurprising they find it unfair (even if it’s logical).

CharlieDigital2• 3 years ago

To put this into perspective, assuming the average salary of the 8k employees is $125,000, that would only save 80 jobs.

loeg2• 3 years ago

Keep in mind fully loaded cost is approximately 2x salary. So maybe 40 jobs.

robotresearcher2• 3 years ago

The cost of employing someone is roughly double their salary, once bonuses, benefits, payroll taxes and overheads are considered.

Plus for many companies, RSUs can be an additional significant fraction or even multiple of base salary.

So it's a lot of money, but would pay for fewer jobs than you might think.

It's also possible - I have no idea - that the marketing featuring McConaughy made more money in new sales than it cost. I assume this was the expectation for the deal.

screamingninja• 3 years ago

that would only save 80 jobs

for one year

version_five• 3 years ago

I think that's a good point. I also think another way to look at it would be to actually understand their marketing and sales spend and look at what this cost represents.

If they've ceased all marketing and just hope MM will take up the slack, it might be a dumb move. If they have too many software or back office or whatever people, the decision to let them go is completely decoupled from what they spend on marketing. It's not an either / or, it's different part of the business entirely.

birdyrooster• 3 years ago

Should change title to Mark Benioff is not Hawaiian because I felt that point most well argued.

vuln• 3 years ago

I agree. Seems like more words spent on the Hawaiian thing than the actual story.

PragmaticPulp2• 3 years ago

Bad optics, but even if they could break the contract (which presumably includes work/performance already done) and reallocate the funds to save jobs they’d still be laying off about 7,950 people to reach budget parity.

s1artibartfast4• 3 years ago

The purpose of advertising is to bring in Revenue, and presumably Salesforce thinks this ad will bring in more than it cost.

mdasen• 3 years ago

This was my reaction as well (though it might be closer to 100-200 jobs depending on what kind of jobs were laid off; not all of Salesforce is software engineers).

Though I think there is something to be said about companies spending money imprudently. It's never just that they're giving McConaughey $10M/year. Often times there's a slew of vanity expenses that aren't justifiable. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case with Salesforce, but companies spend a lot of money on things that have dubious ROI.

For example, GE advertised their smart electric grid technology during the Super Bowl and licensed the Wizard of Oz for it. That's a lot of money for an ad with very dubious ROI. Who is buying smart electric grid technology? A very small handful of companies who are going to have a competitive bidding process and are already going to be aware of their options. What was the point of this commercial? To me, the most likely explanation is executive vanity. They want their friends and peers to be impressed by their company and by extension themselves. If they're working on something invisible and behind the scenes, they aren't going to get the same recognition and acclaim.

Companies sponsor sports stadiums and sometimes you can't even really buy their product. Highmark sponsors the Buffalo Bills stadium, but most people get their insurance via their employer and don't have a choice. Xcel Energy sponsors the NHL stadium of the Minnesota Wild and most of their business is as the monopoly electric/natural-gas transmission provider in the area. Are they trying to convince people "you don't want to live off the grid! Life is better with electricity and heating!" And yes, these companies do have some amount of business that is consumer choice, but given how much of their business has zero consumer decision-making, it seems like their ROI on advertising and sponsorships would be terribly low. Consumers do decide on many things - what soda brand to buy, what smartphone to use, what clothes to wear, what car insurance to get, etc. However, we see companies spending lots of money on things that have really dubious justification - beyond the vanity of executives.

I don't know much about Salesforce and what they're spending money on, but I do think there's a reasonable question of whether McConaughey's $10M is part of a larger trend of imprudent, potentially vanity-driven spending.

JackFr2• 3 years ago

Who is buying smart electric grid technology?
They want their friends and peers to be impressed by their company

You answered your own question.

paxys8• 3 years ago

"Company" = Salesforce, which is a name I'm sure people over here recognize, so we can swap it out in the title.

There's also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.

First of all, it is objectively incorrect:

Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce

The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.

Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to "sit around" but to do a set of commercials (one of which aired at the Superbowl). Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it's safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don't like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.

The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.

eunoia• 3 years ago

Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it's safe to say that some of their effort is working.
The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant

Kinda odd how you attribute them "beating the street" more to Mathew McConaughey's presence than the work output of 8 thousand employees. Can you elaborate on why this is so clear to you?

deltree76• 3 years ago

They have better metrics than random anti-corporate HNer who is typically clueless about accounting, marketing, lead-gen?

paxys8• 3 years ago

Is it very hard to believe that (1) some single digit % of employees (and even entire divisions) at a massive corporation – one that nearly doubled in size during the pandemic – aren't adding a lot of value and (2) a flashy marketing campaign can bring a company new customers?

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

The old joke is the marketing manager saying: "Half of all our marketing expenditures are wasted. The problem is we don't know which half."

In my years in business, it's nearly impossible to draw an accurate cause and effect line between marketing and sales. Too many other factors at work.

kermatt• 3 years ago

It does seem odd that companies would pay for services from Salesforce because of a celebrity quip, instead of a determination that said services would improve the company's operations.

Or perhaps these Marketing departments are just really good at internal marketing of budget usage?

bombcar• 3 years ago

And whilst $10m sounds like a lot (and it is!) that's only about ~50 (Bay Area) employees.

paxys8• 3 years ago

Probably fewer than that. Cost of an employee to the company is on average 2x their salary. Plus such mass layoffs don't just target entry level employees but an entire vertical slice including senior ICs, managers and executives. A lot of them at companies like Salesforce, Google, Meta get $1M+/yr in comp.

wootland5• 3 years ago

The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.

That's not true. They announced 8,000 layoffs in January but they haven't executed all of that yet. As per the quoted WSJ article:

In January, the company said 8,000 workers had to go. “It’s an unfortunate part that you have to say goodbye to folks who, in many cases, are your friends and you have relationships with,” Mr. Benioff said in an interview. “But, ultimately, the success of the business has to be paramount.”
After an executive retreat in February, he proposed in a draft of a year-ahead strategy plan that the company rank employees based on metrics, including how much money salespeople bring in. Those in the bottom 5% would be routinely dismissed, according to a draft of the policy posted on the company’s Slack channel and described to The Wall Street Journal.

paxys8• 3 years ago

The two aren't connected. They announced 10% layoffs in January and executed it. Then they announced that they would be rolling out stack ranking and PIP quotas for managers, but both of those decisions were later reversed (https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-plans-ranking-emp...).

airstrike• 3 years ago

The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.

Like everyone else in Tech, they over-hired because they were objectively in a different state of the world in 2021, which was possibly everyone's best year in 1-2 decades. Then 2022 rolled in, shit hit the fan on inflation, Ukraine war and a seemingly overnight massive hike in rates after being in negative yield territory for a while... guess what? Companies went back to the drawing board, stared at lower revenue expectations, higher costs, worse margins given operating leverage and decided they could do without X% employees to favor profitability over growth, since there's nowhere near the same growth to be had in 2022-23 as there was in 2020-21

Conceptually, I dislike layoffs as much as the next person... but keeping the same cost structure against deteriorating topline growth is just Bad Business, and that's how CEOs get fired and companies go under. Ask the owner of the pizza joint nearest to you and they're likely to agree.

All in all, unemployment is still at record lows so I'm incline to believe that laid-off workers are finding employment elsewhere, which is the good side of Capitalism.

It could have been worse, John... a lot worse

bink• 3 years ago

Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it's safe to say that some of their effort is working.

Didn't the layoffs happen in January (the end of their fiscal quarter) and wouldn't they have taken the costs of those layoffs and subsequent severance in that quarter? So they recorded record revenue and profits _despite_ laying off people, not because they laid them off.

chank• 3 years ago

marketing budget

Do people who would be in a place to make the decision about their companies choice of CRMP really need to be marketed to in order to know about Salesforce? Seems like a wasted budget IMO.

rayiner• 3 years ago

Maggie Harrison (who is definitely not Hawaiian) appropriating Hawaiians’ prerogative to define the bounds of acceptable cross-cultural interaction with their group is actual, destructive appropriation. It’s a white person with a platform co-opting a minority group’s ability to decide how it interacts with the majority group.

tptacek• 3 years ago

I agree with you. But:

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The article isn't really about Hawaiian culture, nor is the complaint it is making about how Salesforce prioritizes its expenditures.

dayyan• 3 years ago

The real travesty is dropping the fun Island vibe.

robertlagrant• 3 years ago

This title makes it sound as though the $10M would pay for all those employees. It might pay for 40-50 of them, which is basically a rounding error of 8000.

So the question is: can 40-50 people bring more value than one person who can get the attention (for whatever reason) of large customers' CFOs?

time_to_smile2• 3 years ago

Their profits and stock price are both up. Seem like they're making fairly sane financial decisions.

I'm not one to defend the actions of corporate leadership most times, but it does look like Salesforce is doing what the market is asking for: bringing up profits.

And if we assume an average TC of around 250k per engineer, that's 40 employees of 8,000 laid or half a percent of the employees could have been spared by letting go of McConaughey instead. In case they're mistaken it seems a lot easier to hire 40 $250k engineers again then get McConaughey back after breaking a contract.

Meanwhile the company I'm at is just learning that publicly traded companies can't live off runway alone and that they need to become profitable (something they've never done) and please investors. The "leadership"'s failure to act is causing increasing stress in the company, and personally I'm finding it more and more clear they don't really know how to run a public company.

There are so many companies that look like what I described I'm not remotely worried about anyone de-anonymizing me over this info.

I would much rather be at a company like Salesforce right now. At least there's some evidence the layoffs were effective and anyone surviving, after the recent earnings, is probably already starting to feel more assured about their job. When layoffs do eventually hit me where I'm at now, even if I survive I'm not going to have much confidence in the future.

lazyasciiart3• 3 years ago

Nobody at salesforce was worried about their job except for layoffs, and all of us who remain are far more worried about our jobs today than we were on Jan 1. Those layoffs were poorly executed and arbitrarily distributed, and execs will make zero commitments to not continue doing so. Not even a pretense of “if you work hard, you’ll be ok”. Just try and make sure you picked a team and project where you personally look essential to some exec and their personal future at the company.

time_to_smile2• 3 years ago

I appreciate the insight from the other side, and am sorry to hear that the situation remains so stressful there.

I guess this situation just universally sucks.

ameister14• 3 years ago

Is Matthew McConaughey worth 40-50 laid off salesforce employees in terms of value provided to Salesforce? No idea. Totally possible, though.

s1artibartfast4• 3 years ago

Weird thinking all around. The point of advertising is to grow sales. You don't have more money to employ people by selling less product.

roody15• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Domino's talking about supporting local businesses, fixing roads and deploying electrical vehicles. Long story short Domino's spent exponetially more on commercials advertising their "good" deeds than on the deeds themselves.

For example spent 54 million on commercials talking about supporting local businesses... provided local businesses 100,000.

https://i.redd.it/3vks4w3nddh81.jpg

Seems like so much in our society is smoke and mirrors these days.

fourseventy• 3 years ago

Such stupid clickbait. Yes, Salesforce spends millions on advertising. That advertising brings in revenue. Thats how business works.

jdminhbg• 3 years ago

$10M / 8k = $1250, so I guess they could have kept each of those employees on another day and a half without the McConaughey contract.

filmgirlcw4• 3 years ago

The framing here is off. I understand the impulse, but it's different business decisions and conflating them just isn't reasonable. It is certainly reasonable for employees to question why one area of business was prioritized over others, but framing this as "paying someone $10m to sit around vs 8,000 people who did real work" is still disingenuous.

I'm not defending the layoffs -- though I think all of us have known that the ever-increasing TC wars amongst big companies was unsustainable and that tech companies over-hired. And none of that is the people who were laid off's fault. At all. These were bad decisions on the part of management. But framing it as "chose to layoff X people instead of paying out a contract to Matthew McConaughey" is misguided.

The bottom line is that Matthew McConaughey did a better job of negotiating his contract than rank and file employees did and that's why he still has a contract. Obviously, he is in a position to argue better terms than rank and file engineers, but that's how this works. If his contract was renewed or reupped on, that would be one thing (and ultimately, that would be something for the board or shareholders to weigh in on), but we don't know the details about how long the contract was for and what the deliverables are, or what the ROI is.

Framing this in "this versus that" terms just doesn't make sense.

ravivooda2• 3 years ago

though I think all of us have known that the ever-increasing TC wars amongst big companies was unsustainable

Just wow! What about ever increasing stocks? ever increasing returns on VC funds? You've gotta be kidding.

ravivooda2• 3 years ago

Okay, I understand that came across pointing, but I hope you know I'm not pointing at you. I'm pointing at "Market Rate" salary fixing, etc.

filmgirlcw4• 3 years ago

Watching FAANG offers nearly double over two years was not sustainable and anyone who thought that it was is delusional.

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

They should have hired me instead. I'd have done it for $9M.

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

I don’t get this line of argument.

Sales force believed their business will do better with Matthew Mcconaughey as opposed to those 8k employees. They may be wrong, but it’s for them to figure out if they’re wrong.

I understand the argument that workers should not be disposable, and workers shouldn’t be fired at will, even with at-will contracts, and companies have responsibilities towards their workers. In fact, that argument is popular enough that most countries, including the U.S. until recently, gave workers and their unions privileges that wouldn’t be afforded in a different scenario. And if you want to argue that workers rights have been diluted far too much in with you.

My problem is instead of making this straightforward argument, when you’re trying to compare the firing of workers to spending on a completely different situation. There’s no possible way for an outsider to know what the value of having McConaughey sit around is, what the contractual details are, what the cost, both monetary and otherwise of splitting from him, etc is.

My response to this headline isn’t to be more sympathetic to the workers. It’s to wonder what the hell McConaughey getting contractually paid has anything to do with the poor treatment of workers by Salesforce.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

They may be wrong, but it’s for them to figure out if they’re wrong.

You clearly buy into the idea that because salesforce has, within our current economic system, managed to gather to itself substantial economic resources, then it should be the entity that gets to decide how to deploy those resources.

If Salesforce is wrong (and there's a very, very good chance that they are), they have mis-allocated resources, but will face little if any penalty for it other than some opportunity costs that are of their own making.

There’s no possible way for an outsider to know what the value of having McConaughey sit around is, what the contractual details are, what the cost, both monetary and otherwise of splitting from him, etc is.

The actual question is whether there is actually any way for an insider to know this either, and what penalties would be face if they make a mistake.

I'm fine with companies making a profit (I think). But I want them taxed in a way that removes their control over the bulk of these resource allocation decisions. Salesforce might (or might not) be very good at what they do, but they, like every other corporation (and essentially all individuals) have no demonstrated competence at resource allocation that benefits all of us. US$10M might not seem like a lot if it is roughly your annual salary, but there are huge numbers of people and communities that would be substantially aided via US$10M.

danaris3• 3 years ago

Even $1M would be a genuinely life-changing amount of money for me and my family. That's well over a decade's worth of my salary. Working where I work now, I wouldn't be able to make an aggregate of $10M over my lifetime even if I lived to be over 100.

tedunangst2• 3 years ago

Why not penalize the people who gave these resources to salesforce to misallocate?

rcoveson2• 3 years ago

Just making sure: You've propose that the state should control the bulk of resource allocation decisions?

mmcgaha• 3 years ago

The tech hiring build up in 2021 and 2022 was all about political appeasement.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

"Big Tech" could not maintain that forever.

randyrand• 3 years ago

Alternate title: I don’t understand why businesses have marketing budgets

Would at least not be objectively false, unlike the current title.

I’m surprised this got upvoted on HN.

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

8000 people could cost over $1B /yr. That's a totally different scale from paying an A-list celebrity $10M to do some commercials.

stcroixx• 3 years ago

Gross. If your company uses sales force, try to encourage them to use something else. Don’t recommend it for anything new. Don’t go work for them. Don’t do anything that would be good for salesforce. Do your best to bring them down any way you can.

m3drano• 3 years ago

You Gotta Pump Those Numbers Up, Those Are Rookie Numbers.

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

After Federal and California taxes, what's it net to McConaughey? $4 million?

frankreyes• 3 years ago

Assuming an average wage of $50k a year, 8k x $50k is $400m a year. Math checks out

Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around

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