Is this unethical though? Maybe it’s just not clear to me. I feel like we collectively view it negatively, but that’s also built on the premise that we search users consume a free utility that Google provides to us and is now some ethical requirement for them to maintain. They have no ethical obligation to do that.
It’s also pretty common for public companies to try to shift volume to higher revenue or margin products when they’re pacing short of consensus.
That said, you can always override a bonus plan and pay even when they fall short of their sales plan. It seemed like that was the entire catalyst of this conversation, wanting the ads team to hit their bonus.
If y’all think this is unethical, you should hear the conversations I was privy to about how hospitals execs were considering halting patient admissions during the pandemic because nursing labor got expensive and breaking even was deemed unacceptable. The government upped reimbursements and same hospital execs made massive windfall bonuses
User value and company revenue, in general, form a [pareto frontier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front). The company can pick an "angle" (trade off some user value for more profits and vice-versa) but both extremes are bad in the long term. They need to strike a balance.
A company that continuously invests their efforts on maximum revenue subtraction eventually pushes their users out. Similarly, a company that invests too much into research and present user satisfaction, particularly when users don't pay for the product, is set to have some financial and economical problems in the future.
I think this is borderline ethical. For sure it's over 9000 in the Maquiavellian scale (I mean the gymnastics behind "please don't say that this is us pushing for worse results, that's a very negative message" are genius and I can see that working really well under certain circumstances in a corporate setup), but that doesn't mean that it's unethical _necessarily_.
It’s also pretty common for public companies to try to shift volume to higher revenue or margin products when they’re pacing short of consensus.
That said, you can always override a bonus plan and pay even when they fall short of their sales plan. It seemed like that was the entire catalyst of this conversation, wanting the ads team to hit their bonus.
If y’all think this is unethical, you should hear the conversations I was privy to about how hospitals execs were considering halting patient admissions during the pandemic because nursing labor got expensive and breaking even was deemed unacceptable. The government upped reimbursements and same hospital execs made massive windfall bonuses