[BlackNitrogen]

That's just such an example of how it works. "Our employees are in high cost of living areas, missing earnings will be demoralizing". If you worked in a large corp for a while, you notice this happening. Everyone is incentivized to hit short term goals.

[einpoklum]

These days, I work for (some part of) a large corporation. In my anecdotal experience, the people who get upset about missing earnings are managers, not regular employees nor even tech leads. And even that is at the annual level or longer-term; quarterly results are considered quite ephemeral.

[ethanbond]

Regular employees definitely notice when they don’t get raises or bonuses. Whether they draw the line to quarterly results…

[einpoklum]

1. "noticing" and "caring" is not the same thing. They notice it like they notice the rain.

2. Our (*) raises are only very partially affected by company results, and probably not by the quarterly ones.

3. Our bonuses are affected by annual results, nor quarterly ones. Also, they're not so large as to corrupt professional-ethical motivation ("if we cripple the product then the company would make money and we'd get a larger bonus"). AFAICT of course, I'm not a mind reader and only know a small part of the thousands and thousands of employees.

4. There are no result targets with some kind of discontinuous effect on bonuses and raises. At least not that employees know about.

Of course, this could be very different at Google.

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(*) - I actually work for a subcontractor so I should probably not even use the first person plural, but let's not complicate the anecdote even further.

[yunwal]

At google, a substantial amount of employee comp is in equity so any drop in share price would lower morale.

[lazide]

Usually corporate is more than happy to draw the connection, hah.

[zeruch]

This is basically the entire industry now. Even firms that aren't public operate as if they are.