Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google CEO Salary

littlebitofeverything.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Google CEO Salary

#21

Post by dclowd9901 »

retrocryptid wrote: post #2

I like that someone said this, but I really Grit my teeth when someone says "learnings." I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying "chestfeeding" instead of "breastfeeding." I don't understand it, but if it's making you uncomfortable, I'm totally fine with changing that part of my vocabulary. But "ask" and "learn" are verbs. You "ask questions" or "make requests" and you "learn lessons." You do not "h…

Passive voice writing often grits in the teeth. Just like that.

Most writings that feel fresh or novel have an active voice that asserts something. In journalism, you’re taught to write in an active voice. If you can’t assert someone did something, then you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.

In any case, I think this is why I like noir writing so much. It doesn’t fiddle faddle with getting something across. It either happens or it doesn’t.

Re: Google CEO Salary

#23

Post by balaji1 »

Sundar is not coming up with all the product ideas. Nor is he vetting all the ideas. Ideas come up from product leaders under him. Surely he must have vetoed dozens of bad ideas every year. There is latent talent in these giants and experiments fail.

Could Sundar be more ruthless? Yes; Does this and other articles have valid criticisms? 100%;

These articles going after Zuck, Sundar, etc are needed. But we do not see the other side.

Re: Google CEO Salary

#24

Post by jamestimmins »

The "failed decisions" list is bizarre and does a terrible job supporting the argument.

  - Gmail Inbox
  - Directing company’s resources towards messaging apps. (Remember Allo, Duo. Exactly)
  - Virtual assistants
  - Now LLMs
None of these were large bets, nor do they relate to the major cash cow that is search. Further, LLMs are in their verrrrrry early days. We don't know how much impact they'll have or how they'll impact Google's business, but not exploring them would be a truly insane choice for the CEO of Google.

Re: Google CEO Salary

#25

Post by jimsimmons »

xiphias2 wrote: post #4

None of these were bad ideas. Sundar can't execute because he doesn't know how to do programming and doesn't understand the details. He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).

Is OpenAI interview considered particularly hard?

Re: Google CEO Salary

#26

Post by DiscourseFan »

retrocryptid wrote: post #2

I like that someone said this, but I really Grit my teeth when someone says "learnings." I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying "chestfeeding" instead of "breastfeeding." I don't understand it, but if it's making you uncomfortable, I'm totally fine with changing that part of my vocabulary. But "ask" and "learn" are verbs. You "ask questions" or "make requests" and you "learn lessons." You do not "h…

You think you're a pedant, but you haven't yet encountered someone with such a thorough knowledge of Indo-European grammar that could tell you that not only is nominalizing participles common in our family of languages, it is so common you see it in practically every language in the family and it doesn't violate any rules of grammar. "beating" is a present participle, like "learning." It would be fine to say, "the beatings of the man," but you may be confused about whether it is a subjective or objective genitive--is it the man who is being beaten, or the man doing the beatings. Likewise, I think what makes you uncomfortable about the term "learnings" is not whether it conforms to any grammatical or syntactic rules, but that it is rather ambiguous--it can be taken as transitive or intransitive. You "learn" something, but you also learn by being taught by someone. To say, then, the "learnings of the man," could refer both to his education, and to his teachings (and you see there, "teachings," is no different from "learnings" grammatically, except that "to teach" is definitively transative).

>And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."

You might be shocked to learn that such expressions are extraordinarily common in say ancient Greek (which uses participles in a very similar way to English--they are related after all!) People "look a looking," an expression used to mean someone holds a particular countenance. If someone can teach teachings, why can't someone learn learnings? I don't think there is anything wrong with using intransative verbs in this way.

Re: Google CEO Salary

#27

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

almost_usual wrote: post #22

What was the last big successful product Google released that’s still around? I honestly don’t know. Search, Gmail, Maps, GCP, and Android is all before 2010.

I would kill for 2010-era search. I suspect it's now intentionally bad, but I don't think I understand the business strategy behind it being so awful.

There was a time when I could remember two uncommon words in the same reddit post from 5 years prior, and searching those would bring it up as result #1.

The scary thing is, I suspect that search is still their most recent successful product. Just that it's not meant to help any of us.

Re: Google CEO Salary

#28

Post by TrackerFF »

Unrelated, but I was researching executive salaries the other day. The CEO of the Norwegian Pension fund, which has $1.39 trillion in AUM, earns a $660k annual salary - no extra compensation as far as I could find. Alphabet has a £1.36 trillion market cap, with a $200m+ CEO comp.

Makes one wonder if you really need to pay CEOs astronomical comp packages to attract the "best talent".

Re: Google CEO Salary

#29

Post by mnsc »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #12
retrocryptid wrote: post #2

I like that someone said this, but I really Grit my teeth when someone says "learnings." I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying "chestfeeding" instead of "breastfeeding." I don't understand it, but if it's making you uncomfortable, I'm totally fine with changing that part of my vocabulary. But "ask" and "learn" are verbs. You "ask questions" or "make requests" and you "learn lessons." You do not "h…

I think the problem with “lesson” is that it sounds like you started out in the wrong. An important part of corpspeak is never directly accusing anyone of being wrong or directly admitting having been wrong yourself. Acquiring learnings does not have this connotation (possibly because it is a nonsense word).

Thank you for making me realize what I don't like about "lessons learnt". I don't care about corpspeak but when you are an agile team involved in continous learning it's very important to be able to tell someone that they are in the wrong. They might have put in two weeks of hard work devolving a poc in a area the team know little about only to present it wider and get the feedback that this won't work because of x, u and z. Then you haven't "learned your lessons" because we don't yet have the right answer. BUT we got some very good learnings from this failed work that we need to remember/use in the next attempt.

Re: Google CEO Salary

#30

Post by starky »

xiphias2 wrote: post #4

None of these were bad ideas. Sundar can't execute because he doesn't know how to do programming and doesn't understand the details. He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).

It has nothing to do with coding. His failings are that Google's product management is horrendous. Sundar has completely failed to set a clear long term product strategy for the company and doesn't seem to be making any moves to fix it.
Post reply on HN