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Google employees complain about CEO's pay raise as cost cuts hit company
- yalogin 3y agoWhat prompted the pay rise? I thought he wasn’t doing a good job over the last few years
- paxys 3y agoIgnore HN commenters and look at the performance of Google stock since the day Sundar took over. He is doing a fantastic job for shareholders.
- zoiksmeboiks 3y agoOh please; you have no way to prove Google’s stock price is due to Sundar or a global trend to pivot into exploration of technology. Billions are spent each year marketing the value of tech. Fiat economics are not immutable laws of reality but populist memes. Valuations have no real tether to reality except what a bunch of apes can be convinced to believe in. Religious memes of high fathers and endless human expansion seem deeply rooted into the human condition after centuries of being forced to drink such kool aid.
- dilyevsky 3y agoPretty silly metric to judge ceo on. Also in last 5y their stock is only up ~100% which is not that great compared to competition
- paxys 3y agoThat is literally the top metric CEOs are judged on. And Google has outperformed S&P 500 (aka the competition) by ~300% in his tenure.
- dilyevsky 3y ago> That is literally the top metric CEOs are judged on Says you. On his watch they completely squandered their ai lead (despite rebranding as AI company or whatever), didn’t gain much share in the cloud and, botched gaming and messaging, am I missing something? Oh right, also continued to burn user trust and alienating employees it seems Look at apple and microsoft for comparison, not rando s&p companies.
- jart 3y agoGoogle could have conquered the whole world. But instead they settled for growing 14% each year since 2015 while the average enterprise charnel house grew 9%. Worst part is they had to decimate their workers and burn most of their social capital just to get that. Meanwhile their core product search has become a legacy technology used by people who haven't heard of OpenAI, a company that's capitalizing on Google's inventions and discoveries which it didn't have the cojones to productionize itself.
- prepend 3y agoNo, that’s not correct. He’s slightly ahead of nasdaq during his tenure [0] [0] https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/NDAQ/interactive-chart https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/NDAQ/interactive-char...
- govg 3y agoDid you mean to link to some index? You linked to the stock of Nasdaq the stock exchange. I'm not sure what the point of comparing the stock price of a stock exchange with Google is, why not Tesla or Walmart or GE?
- prepend 3y agoI meant to link to the comparison of nasdaq vs goog. But the link didn’t come across with the way I cut and pasted. An error on my part. If you click compare and put in goog, you’ll see two price lines. The point of this comparison is that any random stock on nasdaq is likely to follow the index. So good managers should be able to outperform an index of similar stocks. So, I as an investor am interested in companies that outperform their peers. I think it would be better to compare goog to a better, more tech index but I don’t know one. But this link answers “is google better to invest in than a random Nasdaq stock?” And infers that the stock performance is influenced by the CEO. So evaluating Goog’s CEO based on stock price seems to show that he didn’t do that well.
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- morepork 3y agoThe Google stock price has matched the NASDAQ100 since then, it's underperformed when you take dividends into account. He's made a lot of money for shareholders, but you'd have to say his performance is average or slightly below.
- chickenpotpie 3y ago> The Google stock price has matched the NASDAQ100 since then Google is in the NASDAQ100 and it's the third largest company in it. Google matches the NASDAQ100's performance because the NASDAQ100 is largely a measure of Google's performance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- morepork 3y agoI don't get your point. The index is mostly non Google companies, and has returns matching Google's share price. Hence the other index components have had share price movements comparable to Google. So judged by share price alone Sundar has had a performance on par with the average CEO of the other companies in that index.
- andsoitis 3y ago> What prompted the pay rise? I thought he wasn’t doing a good job over the last few years If the board / shareholders thought that, they would vote/advocate for his ouster. In 2015, when he became CEO, Google's annual revenue was just over $74B. In 2022, it was just shy of $280B. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... You can look at other metrics too to understand why shareholders, the board, and Larry & Sergey think he's the best person to lead Google.
- yalogin 3y agoIf the board is just looking at stock and shareholder returns, they are doing a disservice to google. The company is at a critical juncture, it has matured and no longer that young/hip company it used to be. Employee morale is low, GCP is underperforming and Microsoft is eating their lunch. Search has plateaued and their devices are just average. What is going to give them the next 20yrs of growth? All I see is ade about google certified courses for people. I am not even talking about AI or their utter incapacity to productize either AI or self driving tech. Sundar has failed on all fronts if he has just maintained the status quo
- geodel 3y agoPerhaps because that's what you thought. Google's shareholder/board thought CEO is doing great job.
- charcircuit 3y agoThe article says otherwise. He still has a $2M salary and the stock grant he got was worth less than the last stock grant he got.
- falcolas 3y agoWorth more now that they’re doing 70 billion in stock buybacks.
- renewiltord 3y agoApplies to employees who held their RSUs too!
- falcolas 3y agoCertainly should be a great comfort for the 12,000 people they laid off.
- renewiltord 3y agoI know people who were laid off from there. Very generous severance. Layoff had a target date many months away, and from that date onwards 3 months. $86/share -> $105/share? 22% gain in that wealth with that severance is a good outcome considering the company needed to downsize.
- falcolas 3y agoFrankly I haven’t really seen evidence supporting the phrase “needed to downsize”. The only need I’ve seen demonstrated was the “need” to bump stock price at any cost to the company. Doesn’t really matter, though. The board has cast its die.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoIt sounds like he got a $226M stock award last year, and is forgoing his bonus this year, but the stock award appears to be given every 3 years, which is convenient.
- moate 3y agoGet bonus in stock, cut staffing, use savings for stock buyback. Seems like capital doing capitalism
- vineyardmike 3y agoActually the stock buyback (70B) is basically 30x the savings (2.5B).
- falcolas 3y agoYeah, I’d complain if I were a Google employee too. 70B in wasted potential for new and improved products, plus a CEO who admitted to overhiring getting a big stock grant (in addition to a bonus, err, stock price bump from buybacks). It feels like the board has said, “We don’t care about the company or it’s future, just the price of our stock.”
- edgefield 3y agoThis is basically every public company —- Prioritize short term stock price gains over long term growth and sustainability. The only exception are founder run companies and perhaps a few public companies with strong culture/mission (e.g., Costco comes to mind). Google is no longer founder led and it threw out its mission several years ago.
- falcolas 3y agoI guess one bonus is that no companies will survive intact to become Cyberpunkesque monopolies with such shortsighted planning. Instead the stock market and its adherents will be (are now?) our overlord.
- darkwizard42 3y agoI don't know, giving Google/randomBigCo leadership too much credit here on even being able to plan long term enough to do that.
- pitched 3y agoThe way biology evolves to adapt is also very shortsighted! Even without long-term planning, it can still make spiders!
- paxys 3y ago"Why is he getting a raise while we are getting cost cuts and layoffs?" He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price. Also: > More than a dozen memes from employees have filled Google’s internal discussion forums, many with several hundred likes, according to posts viewed by CNBC This is the worst form of journalism. Cool, someone made a few memes. So what? You can make up any narrative if you scroll Twitter (or in this case memegen) long enough. That doesn't make it a real problem that you have to report on.
- archsurface 3y ago/his reward for saving the company money/ By getting rid of people he shouldn't have hired - where's the penalty for that money wasting and poor judgement?
- asdfman123 3y agoIf you don’t like articles like this, don’t click them, don’t read them, and don’t comment on them.
- paxys 3y agoHow exactly does one find out what articles are like without clicking on them and reading them?
- asdfman123 3y agoYou can’t with complete accuracy, but you can get a pretty good idea of what’s outrage bait.
- ToxicMegacolon 3y agoSomeone is probably working on an ai bot for this
- omoikane 3y agoVia comments like these, probably. Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/
- Kapura 3y agoIf only there were some sort of way for the employees to withhold their labour to force management to heel. too bad there is no precedent for such thing throughout human history.
- elkos 3y agoAre you talking about a strike? Has it happened in Google before?
- kevingadd 3y agoThere have been a few walk-outs but they weren't really much to write home about. Any attempts at unionization in Google (not that there have been many serious ones) seem to have been sabotaged, either internally or externally. I would be very surprised (albeit pleasantly surprised) if we ever saw any serious labor actions there.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agothe problem with this assertion is that for this to work....there would need to be something to "withhold" twitter seems to have shown -so far- that the emperor has no clothes...
- Panzer04 3y agoI really don't understand the outrageous compensation. Seems to me like a lot of CEOs just play the game of "don't fuck things up" and collect a massive paycheck because the board and shareholders are too scared of hiring someone shit. They'll accept a mediocre leader, and pay ludicrous amounts of money for some imagined assurance of reduced downside.
- andsoitis 3y ago> I really don't understand the outrageous compensation. Labor is a market (supply/demand). There aren't that many people in the world who can successfully lead a large company like Alphabet.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI bet there are many people.
- Mistletoe 3y agoWhat does he even do? If we have determined kings aren’t a good way to govern why do we continue it in business? Under his reign, Google has gotten their ass kicked in AI when they should have been leading the pack. Doesn’t seem like pay raise material to me. https://observer.com/2023/02/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-bard-chatbot/ https://observer.com/2023/02/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-bard-c...
- ChatGTP 3y agoThe main product, which is search is completely wrecked too.
- gnulinux 3y ago> There aren't that many people in the world who can successfully lead a large company like Alphabet. What evidence do we have for this? How many times CEOs failed Alphabet level companies? What's your dataset? Are you just making things up because it supports your bias that CEOs are highly skilled and it's not like almost any educated and privileged person can do their job?
- soup10 3y agoReads like an onion headline: Employees of large corporation shocked and angered to learn they were hired to make money for owners and senior management.
- ggm 3y agoHere is a theoretical: "if you don't sack 10% of the workforce we will cut your pay by 50% but if you do sack 10% of the workforce we will only cut your pay by 25%" Its win-win because if he refused, they could sack for the penalty payout, and re-hire on a CEO pay of 1/4 or less, and still have good competent people to run the company. The failure here, is believing the stake a CEO needs has to be this astronomical to validate their role. After the first 10 million PA of renumeration, what do they do with it? What does he do with $225+ million PA? A 1% annuity on that pays for a lot of pixel phones, and flights. Remember that Warren Buffet is on $100,000 effective pay, and does not really spend very much.
- LegitShady 3y ago"If you cut my pay I'll resign and tell the world why, and your stock price will drop as you're embroiled in controversy, at the same time as microsoft is challenging google over search ai, and the US government is investigating google for illegal and unethical actions in the ad market" "carry on"
- ggm 3y agoYes, but Pichai is dead to any rehire after. Farting in the elevator is not OK, talking about it is worse. If Google has underperformed on his watch, it's his fault: no? "Corleone crime boss comes clean about Cosa Nostra" doesn't happen very often. He could live very happily on less than $225m. The problem is twofold: doesn't want to, and probably would look weak being made to.
- prepend 3y agoIf every one of the 13,000 employees made $300k in compensation then that’s $3.9B/year in expenses saved. Instead of the $70B stock buyback they could have employed those 13,000 people for 17.9 years. Google is basically comcast or Nike in terms of caring about their employees and customers.
- andsoitis 3y agoa) what would you have them work on? b) total cost to company per employee is more than their cash compensation.
- voxl 3y agoa) future innovation (at a 300k price point, these are tech workers) b) 300k was total comp, never have I heard of 300k salary. According to levels.fyi, a L5 makes ~350k total comp
- seattle_spring 3y agoL6 should be approaching $300k base, and the floor of the L7 band likely exceeds it.
- voxl 3y agoAh yes, let's just pretend we're firing all staff engineers
- seattle_spring 3y agoThe hell are you talking about. All I said was that there are plenty of engineering roles with $300k+ salaries, for which you had apparently “never heard of.”
- prepend 3y agoWho said cash compensation? I’m using $300k as a total compensation amount. Feel free to adjust the numbers. Even at $600k that’s 9 freakin years of 13,000 knowledge workers doing something. I’m not the CEO. The CEO’s job is to allocate resources effectively. So develop new products. Personally, I’d have them work on Google Reader, making GCP competitive, fixing search, fixing Bard, and monetizing Bard.
- hayst4ck 3y agoWages represent relative power and have very little to do with the labor involved. Unskilled labor has no power at all and that's why there is a minimum wage. If you want to increase your pay, then getting more power is the way to do it. This can be through increasing personal power, such as getting an education or experience, or it can be through collective power: unionization. Entities with power will not give up their power willingly, and entities with power have captured the tool of regulation. Regulation works on behalf of those with power. You can't collectively bargain while following the law because the law exists to protect rich people. Look at how Joe Biden shut down the railway unions. Until businesses are shown that people are serious, we can expect them to continue to coerce us and laugh in our faces. Sundar is probably sitting there on his pile of money thinking "what are you gonna do about it?!" Nancy pelosi said she has a right to the free market, she said it so brazenly because "what are you gonna do about it?!" Trump actively shows contempt for the legal system, because as long as republicans control 50% of the government "what are you gonna do about it?!" Clarence Thomas takes bribes while the rest of the justices support him. "what are you gonna do about it?" The law as it is, prevents you from doing something about it. The law has no semblance of justice and is not functioning in our country. The purpose of law is to prevent arbitrary exercises of power and the power in this country certainly doesn't seem restrained. If CEO's getting pay raises while thousands are laid off upsets you, that will never change until you are willing to personally sacrifice to fight oppression.
- m00x 3y agoApart from the employee part, Sundar has driven next to no innovation, and has made Google manager-heaven. I was a huge Google fan, but I'm finding it harder and harder to fool myself that they have a bright future. While Microsoft is becoming a developer haven, Google is moving into their Steve Ballmer era.
- bagacrap 3y agoNothing about the way Microsoft treats their employees makes me wanna work there.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> While Microsoft is becoming a developer haven How so? Windows 11 and Edge are “desperate”. I hate .NET/C#. Mac OS X/iOS/Apple rule.
- jamies 3y agoGitHub, Visual Studio Code, Copilot, Azure. Need I go on?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- richbell 3y agoGitHub. Azure. Windows Terminal. Windows Subsystem for Linux. Cross-platform .Net. Visual Studio Code (and the other one) WinGet Packafe Manager. Rust for Windows. Etc.
- rkho 3y agoWSL and Powertoys (specifically Fancyzones) has gotten me over the hump of transitioning to Windows at my desk. I still love my Macbook Pro, but I no longer feel the need to plug it into an external display. The only thing I consistently miss is iMessage.
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- windex 3y agoHow long before we can have a rule based engine acting as a CEO?
- karmasimida 3y agoSo now they understand who is in control of the company? Shocker
- arunabha 3y ago>> "Why is he getting a raise while we are getting cost cuts and layoffs?" Many other commenters have articulated the real world reason for this, but honestly, in this environment it feels like a Latin phrase captures it best "Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi". What is permitted to gods(Jupiter) is not permitted to cattle :-)
- the-grump 3y agoPoetic, succinct, and it's all you need to understand this situation. There's a reason Latin and its descendants are called the romantic languages. (I know that's backward and romance comes from Roman... there is a reason still!)
- passion__desire 3y ago“A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinion of a sheep.” - Sundar probably
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- irrational 3y agoI got mine. Screw the rest of you.
- rhaway84773 3y agoIs Pichai trying to get fired.
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- nblgbg 3y agoSundar is a total failure for Google. I don't remember Google doing anything great after he becoming CEO. Just compare him with Satya !
- croatan 3y agoAnd 80% of those that were fired probably does not even need to be there. Same was with the Twitter. There is always 5-6% of employees that would not need to be there at all because their impact on the product is not significant (read they are not doing anything). Also, Sundar Pichai did not give himself raise but board members did. And if the investors that invested their own money into this company (not just traded time and skill for money) do not complain, why should anyone else in this group or from employees. His actions were good, cutting 12,000 employees isn't a cause, it's an effect. Only the timing might not be the best. Don't always look at the situation from the lowest possible point (as worker) but also see it from the other angle. Btw. I do not work for Google, I?m not an investor in it, I work regular job but trying to make something out of my life. And yes, that means, becoming an entrepreneur and founder. My dad always disagree with me when we talk about such topics or pension system. He is 50+ now and worked as blacksmith entire life. His mindset is totally wrong because he lived in country where 'everyone should be the same', those that put in effort and those that do not. Those that risk something in their life and those that did not. There will always be people that have unique situations and can not take big risk in their life and even try to reach higher level in community, and that is totally normal. But if you are reading HN, I would say you are on a good way with your mindset. Those are just my 2 cents. Cheers.
- vivegi 3y agoCustomers, Business (i.e., Investors), People - of this trio of stakeholder categories, choose any two to satisfy. There are relatively very brief periods in any company's lifecyle when they are able to choose all three and keep them all satisfied. In a mature business, it is almost impossible to choose all three. For big-tech, that era has ended and you see traditional CEO behavior making a comeback (i.e., regression to the mean). That is coming as a rude shock for many. That is probably what is happening with Google too.
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- i386 3y agoGCP support is absolutely disgusting. Even got $30 it is incredibly bad.
- breatheoften 3y agoIt's hard to imagine how anyone can view collocation of stock buybacks, employee layoffs/comp reductions and ceo pay raise as evidence of "good management". So far there's a lot of talk about how ai will end lower-level jobs -- but the real opportunity for labor savings will be to evolve new company structures which don't have the modern form of centralized leadership with more or less fraud-driven leverage over company profits. New companies modeled after teams that are assembled more like movies, with crediting processes for everyone involved that tie to broad-base profit sharing mechanisms will be the new way. The c-suite can go away/be dramatically consolidated into real leadership roles -- more hands on and direct leadership -- more like the director of a movie than a ceo of a mega cap, more like an Andrew Kelley than a Sundar Pichai) More collaborations, more loosely affiliated, and more transparent profit sharing structures will be possible as more and more of the business and legal structural bullshit (which significantly over-determine modern business outcomes) can be automated away.
- rognjen 3y agoHe did his job and is getting rewarded for it.
- known 3y ago[dead]