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CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

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Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#191

Post by kibwen »

jvmfjvfjvf wrote: post #97
empyrrhicist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (and, actually, he's worth much more). Bullshit. Fucking nonsense, bullshit. I fail to understand how thinking people could ever believe that this is true - it's got to be innumeracy and a healthy dose of propaganda. Would Google lose the now-equivalent of 200m annual if any one of the top 100 leaders within the corp ascended to the goddamned throne? Fuck no. It's nonsense to believe any one person is worth compens…

What are your thoughts on NFL player Josh Allen having a $250MM contract? I fail to understand why there is more controversy over CEO pay than athletes.

Attempting to change the subject doesn't change the fact that this obscene compensation amounts to stealing from the pockets of his own employees. Rather than structuring Google as a dictatorship, how about we structure it as a democracy and ask Googlers what they think the CEO should be paid, at their own expense. Do you think they would come up with a number that is less or more than the current figure?

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#192

Post by QuarterReptile »

rubicon33 wrote: post #178
opportune wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the res…

Honest to god, how hard do you think his job really is? How much of it simply comes down to just brokering connections afforded to him by his position? It's not like he's responsible himself for generating truly novel and useful engineering deliverables. I seriously struggle to see how he possesses some talent that warrants his pay, vs. just being a lucky sob in a world where boards will shell out ridiculous checks o…

The correct analogy is sports, so if you're comparing CEO pay to salaried SWEs rather than European football stars, you're going to distract yourself.

Team Google is a juggernaut with the funds to match, so they see value in putting up the money to get the top performer. They don't care how much luck the guy had to get where he is or how fair the pay is. They operate at a scale where small performance gains mean huge impact, so getting the guy who can make things go well (or who is less likely to drive the whole org off a cliff) is a bargain at any price. And let's not pretend we all know how to be CEOs of giant companies.

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#193

Post by bushbaba »

opportune wrote: post #111
mycentstoo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I understood why so many options are granted in the first place. If they offered 10,000 fewer options, would performance be any worse? Wouldn't a lot of people be vying for that same position and couldn't the company use that to drive down compensation? Couldn't a company in fact, trade on the idea that the extra power and prestige offsets the need for additional stock compensation? And how much of the stock p…

Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the res…

A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#194

Post by swozey »

_a9 wrote: post #190
durumu wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard that before either, but personally, I would prefer not to travel to wherever immigrants are called roaches.

I haven't heard that word being used in years living around there and also being hispanic. To me it just looks like parent is cherry-picking some domains to try and put words in their mouth. If the person owns roaches.com out of hundreds of domains then you're going to try to make it racist so the owner looks racist? I never understood why trying to make innocent things racist isn't considered racist itself.

[flagged]

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#195

Post by opportune »

bushbaba wrote: post #193
opportune wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the res…

A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google

In the highest comp regions (where new revenue generating projects almost always get staffed) it’s a common ballpark estimate of the allin cost of a SWE including all benefits, office, hiring, infra costs, ancillary roles. Consider that a senior SWE alone is pulling about $400k in direct comp. Also consider Google’s total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm and many of those are not engineers or in high comp regions. Of course a new org with no big sales/marketing/compute costs will have different cost structure vs search ads but it really is a workable ballpark.

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#196

Post by ultrasaurus »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #48
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim is that you want the CEO to be aligned with the shareholders, and therefore you incentivize them with high salaries. Who cares about future shareholders or consequences for that matter when you earn 225MM ? Go move to some country that doesn't tax capital gains, sell it all, and live on 4% of it, which is 9MM per year; live like a king, buy absurd amounts of land and multiply your passive income. Obscene is…

You can't move countries to avoid capital gains.

In the US, different states have different rates. At X00,000,000 he's basically all in the top bracket so ~13.3% in California (it's taxed as income), other states have lower, some states have 0%.

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#197

Post by zmnd »

jokoon wrote: post #56

I'm tired of capitalism. The less it's regulated, the more it opens the road to planned economy or tightly managed socialism. I'm glad I live in Europe. At least I can just retreat from this system with welfare and still eat and have a roof. Every time alternatives to capitalism are brought up, every time people come and say Stalin was worst than Hitler. It's impossible to discuss change or alternatives.

You are saying like it's any different in Europe. Dassault Systèmes CEO Bernard Charlès makes €20.6m with company revenue of $6.05 billion. For reference, Google CEO made $226 million (~10x) with company revenue of $279.8 billions (~46x).

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#198

Post by Forgotthepass8 »

swozey wrote: post #189
bratao wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HostGator

That's incredibly impolite but I don't really care. In the future there might be reasons people don't directly name call something that should be a huge hint for you to not do it yourself to them. You aren't swooping in like a white knight answering some searing question, you're potentially throwing someone under the bus, CTO guy. You should know better. You literally added it after I posted my own response. I hope y…

Why are you afraid to name companies?

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#199

Post by rubicon33 »

jvmfjvfjvf wrote: post #136
empyrrhicist wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow sports, but at least those people are doing actual, physically comparable things with clear connections to revenue (more like music artists than CEOs). Maybe that analogy is more apt than you intended though, in that the valuations are made for shallow human/society reasons that are quite decoupled from reality.

There are many players who don't live up to their $100MM+ contracts. I fail to understand why physicality should be relevant to high compensation.

Physicality is far more measurable in its results than the product of a thousands strong multi-national company.

In other words one can pretty clearly attribute the performance of an athlete to said athletes talents and ability. In the case of the CEO making the same money, it's much harder to measure their performance, and even harder to attribute the success of the company to their direct performance. This point becomes even more true as companies grow in scale, such as Google has done.

Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

#200

Post by baazaa »

I don't mind inequality but I hate this is always framed as 'the market' at work. There is no market here, there's no price discovery, and the people actually paying Pinchai's salary (shareholders) have incredibly little say in the matter. No economist would ever assume governments exclusively act in the public's best interest, but it's bizarrely common to assume boards and senior executives act in the shareholders' best interest.
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