You have to love the cold calculating thought process of fund managers. That statement basically translates to "Your engineers are better than everyone else and can keep their salary, but your other employees are grossly overpaid".
Past the shock of the statement though, that's likely true. Recruiters at Google aren't 63% better than recruiters elsewhere, if anything their job is easier because engineers want to work at Google so they always drown in resume.
A company like Google with a strong reputation and generous compensation can attract the best sales/recruiting/marketing professionals. There is no reason to think that these people are not at the top of their fields. Even within a company having your top sales people make 63% above the average is common. There is no reason to think that this trend should not hold across firms.
> There is no reason to think that these people are not at the top of their fields.
I'd flip that statement around though, people are at the top of their fields when they outperform competitors. If Google's sales team is paid 63% more than Microsoft's (and likely 100% more than Amazon's) then their sales numbers should justify that. Yet GCP is behind Azure and AWS.
Your employees aren't great because they have a great salary. They have a great salary because they are great. If the financials don't confirm that idea (i.e. your sales numbers are not higher than your competitors) then your team is not great. Pretending otherwise means you are just drinking the kool-aid of "everyone working here is nice, good and competent" and that just opens the door to a lot of abuse.
To be clear I'm not arguing against high wages, justifying layoffs or anything like that, but I take issue with the idea of that recruiters at Google are making 63% above Microsoft and 150% against other tech companies because they recruit really well.
This isn't because of the sales team. It's because of the flawed leadership strategy that was App Engine. They squandered precious years attempting to build a walled garden for cloud and GCP has been having to play catch up ever since.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I wouldn't say "drowning in resumes" makes a recruiter's job easier... it may actually be harder, since they have to sift through all the applications to figure out who's really qualified.
Past the shock of the statement though, that's likely true. Recruiters at Google aren't 63% better than recruiters elsewhere, if anything their job is easier because engineers want to work at Google so they always drown in resume.