Google’s Pichai has firmly put down an employee rebellion
It can’t afford disruption over crucial defence-sector opportunities
20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0
Australia
Canada UK
All values are approximate and for 2021-22
Source: Authors’ calculations using ministry of external affairs data and other publicly available sources is gone. Indeed, the prosperity of local businesses in such towns is closely linked to the presence and activities of a student community.
But these discussions are anecdotal. The more important question is: Have we recognized the full potential of a university as a growth engine for a town?
Western countries have recognized the significance of hosting both local and international students. According to 2022 data from India’s ministry of external affairs, there are 1.33 million Indian students pursuing education abroad and 60% of them study in English-speaking countries. The US has about 465,000 Indian students, followed by Canada, with around 183,000. Australia and the UK have roughly 100,000 and 55,000 Indian students, respectively. When we estimate the total amount of money pumped into these countries’ economies (assuming the average fee structure and living expenses mentioned earlier), the numbers are telling. For instance, the US earns around $19 billion from Indian students alone. Measured per head, this is like saying every American earns an average of $57 annually from Indian students alone. The aggregate value of income from all foreign students per capita would be much higher. According to estimates, the per capita annual inflow from international students ranges from $43 in the UK to $237 in Canada. In rupee terms, this implies that Indian students are putting some ₹1,600 into every Canadian’s pocket every month.
This is not simply a positive externality. This is direct earning. Universities need to be seen as a powerful engine of economic growth locally. It is no surprise that in most parts of the world, fees for international students are significantly higher than that for local students. Attracting foreign students, or even local ones, can therefore be seen as an effort in generating greater opportunities for local businesses.
In India, we only see such benefits in the form of
stalls and other small eateries near our campuses that are sustained by students. What we don’t see is the huge underexploited opportunity.
India suffers from what we can call a sizable international student deficit. While we sent 1.33 million students abroad in 2021, we received only around 47,000 (and mainly from countries with lower per capita income). To unlock the potential of our universities and revitalize local economies, we need world-class institutions, with substantial investments in human capital (higher salary for faculty), infrastructure (where learning spaces flourish), and interdisciplinary collaboration (for large research projects).
India’s budget allocation for education is about 3%, with only one-third of it for higher education. In countries with far lower international student deficits, the share is much higher. The solution lies in high public investment in higher education. As they say, build it and they will come. Only, this time, we must build excellent universities.
It has become clear over the last year that Silicon Valley companies, which could keep Wall Street happy with enormous growth alone, finally had to embrace the real world. This meant layoffs, cost savings and doubling down on profit. It also meant trimming wild moonshot ideas that sounded cool but burnt cash. And it meant ending the myth that these companies cared about employees bringing their “whole selves” to work. That was the stern message from Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent memo to workers, sent amid the latest round of discontent at the company—this time over its $1.2 billion contract (shared with Amazon) to provide cloud services to Israel. At least 50 Google employees have been fired for involvement in protests at its offices.
Pichai’s tone was a stark departure from the company’s old touchy-feely approach to employee activism. Not now. Pichai wrote: “This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.”
For most of his tenure, Pichai has been described in many quarters as a “peacetime CEO,” a highly capable executive steering a ship whose course had already been set by the visionaries who came before him — in his case, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
That changed when OpenAI fired the first salvo in the artificial intelligence wars in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, beating Google to that breakthrough. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who quickly invested in OpenAI, laid down the battle lines after that, making it clear he thought Google’s business model was now at risk. “They have to defend it all,” he said.
With a fight on Alphabet’s hands, the pressure is on the mild-mannered Pichai to get things in order. This hasn’t been going altogether well. The company’s rollout of AI has been confused, controversial and suffering from the perception it is lagging behind competitors. Its cloud business remains a distant third in market share behind Microsoft and Amazon. It’s telling that Brin has recently returned to Google, like a retired old general “back in the trenches,” as the put it.
So when Google employees held sit-ins and other protests against the company’s involvement in Project Nimbus, the company did not hesitate to force out the unruly. “Every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings,” Google said in a memo to employees. The ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ group disputes this, saying some “non-participating bystanders” were also let go.
Would things have been handled differently had it been several years ago?
It’s difficult to say. Sit-ins are an egregious form of business disruption. And it’s not the first time Google has fired workers who have become outspoken on company ethics, offered poorly researched treatises on the differences between male and female engineers or claimed that the company’s AI had become sentient.
What seems certain, however, is that Google is not considering heeding the protestors’ demands, unlike in 2018 when it decided to back away from Project Maven, a Pentagon contract involving the use of AI. That episode provoked a fresh debate on what role American tech companies should play, or perhaps be obliged to play, in bolstering the tech capabilities of the US and its allies. Google erred on keeping its employees happy and the “don’t be evil” culture intact.
Jeff Bezos’ Amazon took a different approach: “This is a great country and it does need to be defended,” he said at the time as the company was jostling with Microsoft for a lucrative Pentagon cloud contract. Employees not on board with that could work somewhere else. Google is now directing its employees to consider the same. Defence money is flowing to technology companies. “America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley,” concluded a recent report from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. From 2018 to 2022, Alphabet received $4.3 billion from US defence spending compared with $13.5 billion for Microsoft and $10.2 billion for Amazon. As the defence sector, like every other industry, works to integrate cutting-edge AI, venture capital is pouring into defence tech startups: $100 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to more than the amount in the previous seven years combined.
There’s opportunity on the table. Google wants it and fears missing out. There is no time for employees to spend work time talking about “disruptive issues” or “debate politics,” Pichai has decreed.
Looking at Google’s predicament, he’s probably right.