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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

#201

Post by opportune »

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…

Pay is not about how hard any job is. My job is not nearly as hard as many people who make much less than me. It’s about the supply and demand of the role and how much value someone in the role can generate (which you can think of as an upper bound on pay). When you’re making decisions for >100k people earning >$100B/year it’s easy to argue that the person trusted with that much responsibility provides that much value.

I personally don’t think Sundar is an amazing CEO. He is very conservative and boring. But at the same time Google has tended to be too reckless and fund many projects with speculative ROI, or with no cohesive strategy. Google is making the shift to selling to enterprise and government where a level-headed conservative CEO inspires a lot more confidence than an ambitious reckless one. Also, they have one of the greatest businesses ever to exist (search ads) which, compared to any other >$100bb business, is a lot more precarious: it’s not contingent on long term enterprise contracts or lock-in or a physical moat (supply chain, brick and mortar presence).

His job is to keep the golden goose laying eggs and to make sure Google succeeds the transition to enterprise software. Believe it or not he’s more qualified for the job than all the other SVPs at Google and because he’s well connected with the founders he’s not a wildcard like an outsider would be.

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

#202

Post by mkarrmann »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #188
mkarrmann wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's it so hard to believe that a worse CEO for one year would result in a 0.01% lower market cap? Given that framing, 200m is a very drastic under estimation.

It's not hard to believe. What's hard to believe is that you couldn't possibly find a better CEO for a much more modest compensation package.

I share that intuition, although I don't see any reason to trust the intuition of an outside (either myself or presumably yourself) making 2 second back-of-envelope calculations of that of the Alphabet board.

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

#203

Post by swozey »

Forgotthepass8 wrote: post #198
swozey wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You literally just read my previous comment and went "hmm, lets ask him to expound?" My god, some people.

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

#204

Post by ghaff »

bmitc wrote: post #177
sinatra wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be fair, for 90% of the world, the kinds of compensation many hacker news readers have (a Silicon Valley engineer who gets a high base plus bonus plus equity) would also be considered “holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it … does not make any f_ing sense”

That is a fair critique and overall true. But it also highlights the pay of these CEOs to be so absurd as to be barely comprehensible. It makes me wonder what types of personalities these people are. If I even had that salary for a year, max three, I'd retire and spend time learning and doing non-profit and foundation work.

People for whom being an important executive is at least almost as important as having as much money as they can reasonably consume.

Certainly there’s a vast range of FIRE styles and even what constitutes retirement but at some level it’s a combination of keeping score, feeling valued relative to peers (see also sports), and the industry recognition.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

swozey wrote: post #131
jvmfjvfjvf wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that trash? I would love to drive and shoot a real tank as a civilian.

His ranch is on the MX/TX border and he owns domains (to resell) such as roaches.com, illegal.com, molest.com, etc. Take with those what you will of the sort of person he is. That's just the few I remember otoh. He has hundreds.

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by satvikpendem »

melenaboija wrote: post #26

> Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded compensation worth more than $225 million in 2022 I know this has been discussed here and 225MM is like the salary of 1000 employees making 200K for only one year, it is stock which is volatoile, that the salary of a CEO is impossible to measure, bla bla bla. But holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it 225MM pear year does not make any f_ing sense to me and it is si…

To shareholders (including many of us on HN, even), it's an investment of 225 million to receive profits of billions, thereby increasing the stock price for us. It makes perfect sense from that lens. If I could pay 1 dollar to turn it into 1000 dollars, I'd take that deal every time.

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

#207

Post by hedora »

_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.

I’ve only heard of hispanic comedians using it in recent years:

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/john-leguizamo-latinos...

I first heard that joke in a 1990’s standup routine, fwiw. It could have been the same person telling the joke, I guess.

Anyway, it used to actually be used by white american racists; it’s been weakened to just self deprecating humor, kind of like jewish comedians like to tell jew jokes.

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

#208

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

This is a weird response, it's not like it's not public information, there's nothing "impolite" about it.

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

#209

Post by satvikpendem »

rpastuszak wrote: post #173
tester756 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee. Yes, I can't tell you that because CEO isn't about labor. I can tell you that impact of decisions of the CEO that I work for is at least 1000x bigger than mine. If you don't believe that I don't know what to tell you. CEO is not about writing lines of code, he doesn't write 1000x more LoC than I do,…

I think this misses one important point though: why would any human being need this amount of money and could these resources be allocated better? If we look more broadly than a single employee or a single business entity fwiw, this feels like a huge waste of resources.

Compensation is not about need, it's about supply and demand. If I as a Google shareholder could pay 225 million to receive billions in profit and thereby drive up the stock price and my stock value, then I'll take that deal, and that's how every other shareholder thinks, too. Because if not, then they could simply vote to not pay for the CEO's compensation.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

satvikpendem wrote: post #208
swozey wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a weird response, it's not like it's not public information, there's nothing "impolite" about it.

[deleted]
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