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Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

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Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#21

Regular IT workers should be grateful they earn substantially more than a teacher or a nurse /s. The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates is probably one of the greatest scams pulled on working class. 99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.

Isn't Sundar a worker? We are talking about his pay from negotiation with capital owners

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#22
post #13

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

>> Pichai has been a very poor CEO and then immediately follows with "but Google's position was so strong". Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?

I believe that the parent comment is saying Google was in a strong position before Pichal took over.

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#23
post #12

[flagged]

Where else would they park their wealth? Stock market is all imaginary money. Maybe gold/silver. But housing works as an easy way to park wealth in a tangible way that's guarded against inflation. This fact is probably also why housing prices keep going up.

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#24

Can we please, please move past this generation of bean-counter CEOs. Google and Apple have done great things under Pichai and Cook, and yet I couldn't been less excited for what either is doing. Bring back experimental culture.

Say what you will about Zuckerberg, but at least he tried to burn untold billions on something that was potentially slightly exciting.

We should be grateful for funding of the research, and that it didn't pay off in market results. More of this!

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#26

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

Pichai has been a terrible CEO, he almost lost the AI race before it started because he was too focused on Google’s consumer products.

I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.

Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pichai has been a very poor CEO Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?

I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#29
post #17

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime. Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.

Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.

Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).

Re: Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

#30

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.
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