To be fair, Google is a global company and as a result has employees in other countries. Do those people in other countries, like India or China, make decent salaries for their location? Yes, absolutely... But for an entry-level engineer at Google in India or China my guess is that it would take a few weeks salary to pay for a Pixel phone.
It's kind of like paying income taxes vs giving to charities. I'd probably vote for my taxes to go up more than I would increase tomorrow my private donations, it's psychologically easier.
And I mean, heck, I don't work at a Fortune 500, but my company gave me a Christmas gift worth more than a Google Home.
And is either of those different than the write-off for business-related costs? In other words, do corporate taxes look at more than "total revenue - total costs"?
As an additional note, all the schools Google have these Google-tied products to will be bound to Google's service products, so, it benefits them in that way as well.
The Pixel phone supply chain is really tight considering you can't even get a 128GB phone right now.
Google Homes seemed to have sold quite well this holiday season as well so the prospect of conjuring 68000 Google Homes and dispersing them across the world to the 100+ offices at Google was probably a bit logistically taxing.
Employees don't depend on Christmas gifts, but they are certainly nice. It's a great time for the company to say, with a simple little gesture, "Thanks, we really appreciate you."
The company can also give money to charity... not like Google has a shortage of money.
But yeah, this... it comes off as telling the Google Employees, "You're a bunch of ungrateful, over-privileged, spoiled brats... so I gave your gifts to people who would appreciate them more."
