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Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

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Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#221

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

axlee wrote: post #145
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry and Sergey hired Sundar to do a job (make money for shareholders aka Larry and Sergey). If Sundar doesn’t want to do that job anymore they’ll find someone else to do it better. If I’m ignoring morality and just pretending I own the company and want to be richer, my opinion would be: if I think there is someone out there who will do a better job than my CEO and they are available, hire them no matter how much it…

Do you truly think there is no one on earth who could do a better job than Pinchai for, let's say, $80M a year? $40M a year? $30M a year? $10M a year? Why is there downward pressure on wages for everyone except for this particular position?

If that person who can do a better job exists and can be identified, we should hire them and not waste time worrying about how much they are paid. It’s more important somebody else doesn’t hire them first.

Btw if you have some repeatable mechanism for proving the suitability of CEO candidates, maybe you should be doing executive recruiting for a liking.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#222

Post by scarface74 »

jrockway wrote: post #107
Mistletoe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have much lower education and time costs, no? >In all, it takes about eight to ten years to become a professional engineer, depending on whether you decide to get a master's degree. >Doctors must complete a four-year undergraduate program, along with four years in medical school and three to seven years in a residency program to learn the specialty they chose to pursue. In other words, it takes between 10 to…

Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects? I don't think you could even pass an internship interview if all you did was go to class for 4 years. (Passing the classes is of course predicated on doing a lot of programming outside of class, if only to have some text files to turn in!) Most of the job training for this field comes from wit…

> Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects?

Despite the HN bubble, most developers go to work, do their jobs and go home and don’t think about “side projects”

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#223

Post by monero-xmr »

drewcon wrote: post #212

CEO pay is a market rate. This is not much different than complaining about the price point of gas, or milk, or eggs. You can describe it as being too high in your opinion, or not worth it in your opinion, but that's completely different than pretending that its not being set by the market (and approved by the board) weighing myriad inputs. And btw, one of those inputs is...the ability to successfully tighten the bel…

Very unpopular opinion sadly. The most common argument I’ve heard is, “Just hire me! I’d do it for way less!” As if running a company employing ~150k people into the ground to make a quick buck is morally better than letting a hyper-competent professional run the operation and make “too much” money.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#224

Post by SamReidHughes »

reaperducer wrote: post #121
sbierwagen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue Start a company then. Pay is not determined by value, it's determined by leverage. The CEO pays himself the most money because he controls the company, he's not going to pay anyone lower than him more than he makes.

>we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue Start a company then. Or go back in time 40 years. It used to be very common for companies to give a portion of the yearly profits to the employees. It was called "profit sharing." Somehow that perk evaporated in the tech industry.

It's publicly traded and they pay RSUs.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#225

Post by nostromo »

drewcon wrote: post #212

CEO pay is a market rate. This is not much different than complaining about the price point of gas, or milk, or eggs. You can describe it as being too high in your opinion, or not worth it in your opinion, but that's completely different than pretending that its not being set by the market (and approved by the board) weighing myriad inputs. And btw, one of those inputs is...the ability to successfully tighten the bel…

He is paid significantly more than better-performing CEOs like Cook and Nadella.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#226

Post by AlbertCory »

manicennui wrote: post #200
b112 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rich benefit and the workers are left exploited. Good grief. The highest paid workers on the planet, work for google. You should spread this communist blather at the proper place, coffee shops where workers aren't paid a living wage. Not people able to retire wealthy, is they invest their salary coreectly. Talk about entitlement.

They are still paid a tiny fraction of the value they generate while a handful of people receive most of the value generated. I don't think anyone here is advocating for cutting Pichai's pay to $500k or something, but nearly a quarter of a billion dollars? JFC

Hello, the 19th Century is calling and they want their economics back.

They "generate" the value by putting software on multi-billion dollar server farms, while sitting in buildings on top of billions worth of real estate. Did they pay for those and keep them running?

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#227

Post by runarberg »

chrischen wrote: post #216
manicennui wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still paid a tiny fraction of the value they generate while a handful of people receive most of the value generated. I don't think anyone here is advocating for cutting Pichai's pay to $500k or something, but nearly a quarter of a billion dollars? JFC

I don’t see any reason to suggest that the CEO’s pay here is some failing of the market. Google’s owners felt it was appropriate to pay the CEO that amount, and it doesn’t really affect the pay or well being of Google’s other employees, who are/were some of the highest paid already.

From a class perspective, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, they are all equally guilty of exploitation. Board of directors agree pay their CEOs excessive salary, and the CEO in turns keeps this money away from the workers and away from the customers. Stock prices remain high, bank accounts in Panama fill up, workers gets fired, bosses get rich.

For me “Market rate” is just something the owning class tells us to gaslight us into accepting our exploitation. They created this market, they control this market, and exploiters go on exploiting.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#228

Post by scarface74 »

dataangel wrote: post #41

So if they paid him 0$ they could have kept 500-1,000 out of those 12,000 employees? And that's assuming none of his pay was redistributed to any of the employees they kept. That's the thing with these gigantic numbers, they always look really impressive, but when you divide them by the actual number of employees involved it's not a huge per-employee benefit. Not saying it's fair, just that if you stare starry eyed a…

Seeing that Google has failed at every single initiative outside of ads, employees aren’t what they need. They need a vision.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#229

Post by siliconc0w »

sokoloff wrote: post #177
ammar2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the board would object to him saying "oh yeah this looks bad since we're cutting costs, let's lower my compensation a little." It's not like he doesn't have any agency in this.

There is no reasonable amount by which he could cut his compensation that wouldn't result in whiners complaining that "well, that wasn't enough of a cut!” If he's going to catch heat for it anyway, he might as well take what he's being offered.

They could set it to zero, which would be in-line with severity of laying off of 10+ year high performers or those who are pregnant or on medical leave. I'd like to see an automatic condition where layoffs trigger a requirement that the directors and officers compensation will be set to zero for the next three years. You're basically severely fucking with people's lives and this has very real consequences for those people and society in general who has to pick up the pieces.

Re: Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

#230

Post by bell-cot »

stuaxo wrote: post #207
loeg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Pichai]'s salary and bonuses are controlled by the board That is true of any CEO pay, though.

Who is on the board ? Often CEOs float around between boards, they are almost never going to decrease the pay or not raise it, unlike how it works for the rest of us.

Too often correct. But in a case where Founder1 and Founder2 have absolute majority voting control, the Board is extremely unlikely to play such "obviously we'll vote to give each other raises" games. They are sitting in those cushy Board seats - or not - at 1 & 2's whim.
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