Earlier quoted context omitted.
What were they? Aren't most core Google products on rails, even getting slightly worse over time? And the non-core products just get buried in the desert.
Feel free to find this information on Wikipedia.
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
#242> 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
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're conflating two kinds of people: one type is very talented and perhaps overpaid, the other has connections and has never done a shred of actual productive work in their life.
Sundar Pichai managed many successful Google products before he became CEO.
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If only you actually knew that he was the reason for that increase in performance.
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feel free to find this information on Wikipedia.
Oh, sorry. I thought this was a discussion forum.
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. It's more accurate to say "we look at long term as long as the short term stock price also looks good".
Do you all not understand that the stock price reflects the long term prospects of the company? It’s literally priced in
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#247It's become tiresome, reading things that pretend this is not business as usual.
What's tiresome is that this is business as usual, not the fact that it's reported on. You can remain outraged to something profoundly unjust even if it's the systemic norm.
The English Detective - Miss Marple, Holmes, Poirot (Belgian, but he is an English Detective archetype) - exists within a stable and permanent social system, class-based, in which all are basically happy with their lot, aside from a few malcontents and neerdowells, who sometimes try to cheat their way into power or privilege that is not theirs to have.
It is the job of the English Detective to root out this degenerate from the ranks of the decent, expose him to the world and the nearby incorruptible agents of the law (funnier if read in an Inspector Clouseau accent), and restore the harmony and justice of the status quo, and perhaps attend a wedding of two young lovers that he has reunited through his genius efforts to expose the truth!
That's who this writer is.
We also have another kind of Literary Detective, that of the Hard Boiled genre from about the 30s-50s, approximately. The Hard Boiled detective, based in cheap pulp novels and most famously played onscreen by Bogart as characters like Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), is usually living in the USA or some even less lawful place, and exists in a world of inherent corruption all around him. Like the Victorian Detective, he is a creature of this world and fully adapted to its conventions, but he also retains some form of stripped-down basic integrity that he uses as his own yardstick of what is acceptable and what goes too far, even for him.
When someone goes too far over the line, the Hard Boiled detective takes it as a matter of necessity, and possibly honor or respect, to deal with it, but the most important thing about a Hard Boiled mystery is that he is not really trying to "fix" anything. In The Maltese Falcon, Spade sticks his neck out in the first place strictly because someone kills his business partner; murdering someone who has distanced themselves from the shenanigans of the establishment is a good example of something the Hard Boiled detective has no choice but to do something about, and that is why the story, a fantastic story by the way, exists.
It's not that I see myself as Hard Boiled here, don't get me wrong. I want a Douglas Adams future, not a Blade Runner future. But, to write about Capitalism - because what we're talking about is Capitalism, whether you like that fact or not - from the perspective of the English Detective, the defender of the established and perfect system of justice in society - is not the perspective that leads to action about anything. We are living in thoroughly Hard Boiled times, we all know it, and we have no use for a fucking Poirot just now.
The writer needs to point out that CEOs are murdering people this summer in Arizona, by sending their dogs to Washington to block action on Climate Change, which has tornadoes touching down up here in Canada now by the way, and subjecting the Southwest - which has a lot of poor people in it - to a summer of death for anyone who doesn't have AC or whose AC breaks down and cannot get outside to some shade.
He needs to point out that someone who has distanced themselves from the shenanigans of the establishment - an infirm grandmother living on a pension in downtown Phoenix, perhaps, with only a small fan to cool her, and no ability to get up and walk outside, and all her family in other cities - has been murdered for profit. Because none of the people who are going to die that death in America this summer, deserve that particular death. That is the sort of thing that the Hard Boiled detective cannot simply sit behind his desk and opine about, that's something that he has to get up and make something happen about.
Now, the Hard Boiled detective, after he has cracked the case, generally hands over the evidence whatever perpetrators are still alive to the authorities - the corrupt authorities, who because of his work have no choice but to prosecute them or face The Press - but it was never his goal to shore them up or help them to perpetuate their system; he was pursuing his own sense of honor, one that is at odds with the reigning hegemonic rhetoric, and which would not have been serviced if not for his sometimes-legally-questionable methods. This Poirot here is expecting the incorruptible agents of the law to swoop in and deal with this, and boyo, just shut up if that's all you got.
Cause what we need right now, is people with a sense of honor and justice that is completely at odds with the Capitalist system and ready to say murder when it's clearly murder, however many degrees of separation they put between their lobbying, their layoffs, their union squashing, their endless need to surveil us all, etc etc.
I know I'm not speaking to those people in this forum, but I am speaking for them.
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#248CEOs pay is tied to the stock price. They will do whatever it takes to boost the stock price, until they are out with a golden parachute. From their perspective, the business is all about boosting the stock price. It doesn't matter if the boost comes from innovation, or from polluting the planet, or from unscrupulous addictive practices, or from culling the employees. Employees are merely, an often undesired, side-ef…
I disagree with pretty much everything you say except this. >Employees are merely, an often undesired, side-effect in the business of boosting stock prices. Employees are worse than a side effect, they're a cost center to be avoided if possible. You want to achieve your goals with as few employees as possible.
At the least, don’t hire thousands of people over 1-2 years and then lay them all off. That shows poor ethical, leadership and management skills.
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, sorry. I thought this was a discussion forum.
Discussion requires modica of effort on both sides. Don't ask an easily googleable (hah) question on a discussion forum, they're not question and answer sites.
See, now we're just discussing a link to "go look this up elsewhere" rather than actually addressing my questions. You could answer most questions on the Internet by "go look this up in ".
Re: CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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..