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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

#231

Post by ztrww »

kibwen wrote: post #191
jvmfjvfjvf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which would likely end with only being able to hire significantly less competent CEOs than other companies.

Only on average over long term of course. There is quite a lot of variance considering how useless someone like Pichai seems to be.

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

#232

Post by ztrww »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #187
Aunche wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind Google executive compensation appears to be biannual (his compensation in 2021 was 6M). Overall, his compensation for the past 2 years is less than .05% of Google's revenue during the same period. If the performance of a Google CEO even slightly better or worse Pichai going to have a much larger impact on Google than 225M. I'm sure plenty of the top 100 leaders at Google would be better than Pichai, but…

You've inadvertently highlighted the actual problem - our economic system allows for megaliths like Google to exist and dominate, and we can't help but measure everything against them. Like, run the clock forward and imagine Google monopolizes half of GDP. Should the CEO be compensated as a percentage of that? It's a fallacious view - how many super hard working and ultra educated people could be recruited to that po…

> how many super hard working and ultra educated people

Both attributes seem to be somewhat tangentially related to being a highly successful CEO.

There are plenty of examples of “super hard working” and educated CEOs running their companies to the ground and costing much, much more than just $200 million..

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

#233

Post by effingwewt »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #220
rpastuszak wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We want our best decision makers launching and backing companies, not retiring because that's all they're able to do. Musk and Bezos need more competition.

JFC, stop putting them on a pedestal.

I've said this before but it bears repeating: CEO's aren't special. Bob Iger came back to Disney to finish it off. Shit, look at Elizabeth Holmes.

No one deserves that much of a multiple over the people actually creating products or value.

When CEO's fail they get golden parachutes. When they get lucky they are praised as some sort of rare superhuman.

The cult of CEO and HR needs to wither and die

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

#234

Post by cudgy »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #192
rubicon33 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No one knows how to be CEO of a giant company until they do it, but there are many better qualified people that could perform that job for a whole lot less money. One could argue that taking such a huge pay increase immediately before laying off thousands of people is an example of poor CEO decision making skills, resulting in a loss of goodwill to the employees and potential future hires. The temporary $99 a night hotel deal for employees is an equally vivid middle finger to employees.

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

#235

Post by cudgy »

opportune wrote: post #126
pravus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are running something worth over $1 trillion that makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year it makes sense though, right? But he isn't running it. He has legal control over it, but in terms of sweat equity he only gets 24 hours in the day like everyone else and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee.

Sure, but he decides how to allocate resources, make acquisitions, etc. across over 100k employees. If he decided to pull another Google+ he could easily destroy many tens of thousands of engineers’ worth of labor. And it’d only take him a few hundred hours to make that decision, set up the org to lead the project and delegate the execution to them. Putting those engineers on something that actually makes money and i…

Any moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful. I’d expect more interesting ideas than the old tried and true “get some lucrative government and enterprise contracts”, “guess we better dust off our AI tech and react to OpenAI”, etc. He seems to be a reactionary not a visionary.

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

#236

Post by bmitc »

welshwelsh wrote: post #217
bmitc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why you'll never make CEO pay. Most people, myself included, will happily retire with a couple million. A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something. Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year…

Has there ever been a case of a CEO singularly or even collectively achieving said ambitions? No. A lot of these people are cut throat, near sociopaths in personality. I guess we should be lucky they're just CEOs. If they're not of that personality, it's often largely due to luck. James Simons, who has had a large impact via his foundation work, in which he ensures funding for people to drive their own ideas versus his, readily and humbly admits that luck is very underappreciated in success.

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

#237

Post by bmitc »

ghaff wrote: post #204
bmitc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In other words: ego. Executives exist to play a game of ego.

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

#238

Post by cudgy »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #214
jayd16 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the cost of living in SF and what you get, it starts to make sense. What is the equivalent argument for hundreds of millions?

Why should there be a justification? The only argument should be between Google and Pichai. Strangely, why aren't we doing the same for actors and sports stars?

Poor example. How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

How many movies do people attend solely based on the actors in the movie? Or sporting events due to a player on a team? Many

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

#239

Post by bmitc »

welshwelsh wrote: post #217
bmitc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why you'll never make CEO pay. Most people, myself included, will happily retire with a couple million. A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something. Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year…

And it's honestly not really anything to do with retirement. It's about doing something with my life that isn't just following someone else's ideas, who just happens to be higher in the pecking order than me.

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

#240

Post by cudgy »

ActorNightly wrote: post #87
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…

>whatever is the angle I look at it 225MM pear year does not make any f_ing sense to me Whenever a company starts, its not like the salary is auto set at 225M. The salary of the CEO is tied to the stock price to incentivize growth. Initially CEOs make way, way lower amounts (ignoring bullshit VC capital and inflated salaries). If it so happens that the stock goes up with growth, then the increase in salary represents…

“ then the increase in salary represents the responsibility amount that the CEO has, as bad decisions can cost lots of peoples jobs and so on.”

He made bad decisions that caused people to lose jobs and they knew this well before the layoffs were announced. So he gets a raise and continued support?

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