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Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

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411–420 of 543 posts

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#411
post #331
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft? They’ve been IBM for 20 years.

Microsoft would have become IBM, if not for Satya Nadella. He completely rejuvenated Microsoft after Ballmer's reign. Microsoft successfully transitioned into cloud computing with Azure, Office 365, and Teams. They dramatically improved their image among developers/open source with WSL, Typescript, VS Code, and their GitHub acquisition. Now it seems they caught Google completely off guard with respect to AI productiz…

Bingo.

Microsoft as IBM is a horribly outdated take.

Because of MS, they helped me love desktop apps again: VSCode, Outlook, Edge, and the ever so controversial Teams.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEO fucked up, get rid of him/her. Why'd you hire so many people if you don't need it? Sounds like C-suite made the wrong call, in that case.

Getting rid of someone because of a fuck up is amateur leadership (or politics to appease the mob). The relevant question is whether or not a decision was appropriate, given the information and parameters at the time of making the decision. No one is perfect.

> Getting rid of someone because of a fuck up is amateur leadership

So you're saying that all these people who were mistakenly hired by Google and were now let go, shouldn't have been let go?

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#413

I simply don’t see what good this CEO has done. He’s destroyed googles reputation with developers. Destroyed customer trust in Google products. Done nothing to fix googles reputation for terrible customer service. Led Google to third place in cloud computing. AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk. Why is this guy CEO?

He has been CEO since 2015. Would it be a stretch to blame him for the current company culture of nurturing new products left and right just to kill them off after 3-5 years?

Not a stretch. He's the only CEO that could be blamed for it.

Eric let a million products bloom, and Larry was too gutless to make the hard calls.

Sundar gets credit for heeding Wall Street (and his CFO's) call for fiscal responsibility, but the implementation has been poor.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#414
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference does it make what form the compensation is in? Is your argument that because employees receive stock that they somehow have enough voting power to influence company policy? That’s laughable.

Because the employees are shareholders? If the profits are going to shareholders then employees are directly benefiting

That's really irrelevant. Even if compensation was entirely in cash, they'd likely still be shareholders through index fund investing, e.g. most 401k options would invest in the company. Does that mean employees working at an S&P 500 company should never unionize because technically they're shareholders?

Employees at Google are made shareholders because its cheaper for the company than paying cash. Employees form an absolutely tiny minority. The point of unionizing is to increase the leverage of the workers at a company. Workers would benefit much more from unionization than they would from holding the stock at a company without a union.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#415
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference does it make what form the compensation is in? Is your argument that because employees receive stock that they somehow have enough voting power to influence company policy? That’s laughable.

Does employee owned stock magically not go up in value because "reasons"?

Of course the stock goes up. But the employees are an extreme minority shareholder, so they're totally beholden to the larger shareholders. If the company wants to layoff workers, they're powerless to stop it. Workers are also powerless to stop getting their pay cut. Go look at current job openings. Those cushy 500K total comp jobs are gone.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#416
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"? I have never once heard anyone make this claim.

It's a claim repeated very frequently around here when people criticize exorbitant compensation packages for execs. For instance, see [0] below by fallingknife. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35665329

"the massive risk and uncertainty of replacing a CEO"

This is not what we're talking about. This is about risk to the company, not risk to the CEO.

"Essentially CEOs are able to hold the board hostage."

Exactly. There is no risk to the CEO. They hold all the cards.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#417
post #396
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the success of Azure is really impressive give how technically poor it is.

There are stated costs, and real world costs. It wouldn't be hard for Azure to be far better than AWS on some metric, say better free support, or I guess better paid support too. Is this the driver?

My guess is the impact of the poor tech is quite low if your scale is small and you are not all that technical yourself. A good option for smaller less Eng focused customers.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#418
I have a crazy theory that CEO salaries must be high because evolutionary forces favors companies with high CEO salaries. Rich people prefer to hang out with other rich people, so if you don't pay your CEO enough, they won't get invited to hang out with potential big investors. In a sense, you could say that CEOs are professional rich actors, given a stipend by the corporation to go play rich and infiltrate the rich world, and bring back loot.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#419
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, and what responsibility do workers have? Should they be compelled to stay in jobs they no longer want? Have you considered what an increase to employment costs might do to broader employment?

The larger the company, the larger the power differential between employer and employee. Power comes with responsibility.

This doesn't answer my question at all. I asked about employees, not companies.

What responsibilities should employees have?

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, CEO fucked up, should he now fuck up more by not firing them? you come home from the grocery store, you bought frozen goods. you are unpacking, and think you're done, so you sit down in your couch to relax, a couple of minutes later you realize you forgot to put the frozen stuff in the freezer, do you just go "oh well i dun fucked up, nothing to be done here, i'd best just admit defeat and let my wife fire me fr…

Well, it depends, did you blow the budget on meat because of your mistake? If so, yeah I think the grocery budget should be coming out your fun money personally.

and if i didnt blow my budget?
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