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Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

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Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#451

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

__pache__ wrote: post #432
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money isn't everything. Time is. For someone currently earning $225,000 this would save them a thousand years of hard work. A thousand years. You don't have to think money is everything to understand how earning $225 million in a short time will help you with all the things you do care about, whether it's retiring early, spending time with kids, supporting charity, pursuing hobbies, doing independent research, or tak…

Lol, you can spend plenty of time on what you want without millions .. come on! Especially if you have a cozy 200k 40hr/wk 6 weeks of vacation blah blah blah gig

I don't have a cozy 200k 40hr/wk 6 weeks of vacation gig. Would be nice! I'm at about a sixth of that myself, on much longer hours, but I don't work at Google. But even if I did, it wouldn't let me retire within 5 years and still have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my life, work on whatever I feel like without ever worrying about making money from it, put my kids through university, buy a house next to my aging parents, with a nice garden space for my wife, have a garage, build a machine shop in the garage just to tinker on the things I've always wanted to, spend my weekday hours going on walks and reading books and camping in the countryside, being a stay-at-home dad, hire a tutor for myself, maybe run a high-risk hardware startup without spending my time pleading with investors or worrying about my family's future in the case of inevitable failure, hire people to help with tasks I struggle to do and pay them well to do it, and still have leftover change to maybe buy a new MRI machine for my local hospital or fund a homeless shelter.

Even $200k would be awesome and get rid of a lot of major stresses and uncertainties like being able to afford my own place to live and a spare bedroom for the kid and worrying out about finding my next paying contract. It would give me "plenty" of time, but not all of my time, not even half of it. I'd still need to keep working most of my daylight hours for most of my healthy years.

Honestly, with a $225 million compensation package, I don't see how someone like Sundar could have any long-term incentives whatsoever. He's set for life and won't be hungry for anything, regardless of how Google performs.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#452

Post by 1024core »

andrewstuart wrote: post #67
s1k3s wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he make them money?

The only thing he has done is not destroy the Google cash firehose. The advertising cash firehose is perhaps the only thing that matters at Google. But, having been severely caned by ChatGPT and left flat footed on AI i think it’s reasonable to say even that firehose is now at risk.

> The only thing he has done is not destroy the Google cash firehose.

Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.

Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#454

Post by paulsutter »

oblio wrote: post #138
paulsutter wrote: post #113

If anything the issue is that Google remains vastly overbloated. The large tech companies have been hoarding very skilled people and letting their abilities atrophy, trapped by high pay. It’s bad for Silicon Valley, bad for the individuals, and bad for progress.

Bad for individuals? A decent number of them are able to retire at 35-40. That's awesome for individuals.

Yes because the majority are working on nothing useful and they know it

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#455

Post by jimsimmons »

oezi wrote: post #346
jimsimmons wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m baffled to see comments like this here. To the point that I wonder if HN is basically Twitter at this point. How can you trust a single thing the model says? I ask GPT4 for PPO code, it gives me basic actor critic with a loss with constants added. I ask it about a data filtering technique and it hallucinates concepts, libraries, papers and even companies. It’s good as a fallback to search. Also maybe for judgemen…

I found that GPT-4 is surprisingly trustworthy for my queries which are mostly programming related and focused on common libraries (nothing too esoteric). The reason why instead of having 60 google searches in a day, I now have frequently less than 30 is that ChatGPT is much quicker when I don't exactely know how to search for something. For instance I recently looked for an easy way to have a Rails app inline CSS wh…

I can see that. It can implement a basic transformer in JAX/PyTorch just fine.

Anything else it breaks

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#456

Post by jimsimmons »

amscanne wrote: post #428
jimsimmons wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be your preferred time to receive an email about your layoff?

I’m not sure if you are being intentionally obtuse, but the obvious answer is that rather than being locked out in the middle of the night, people would prefer to be told directly by a human (ideally their manager), and given the opportunity to say goodbye to their colleagues.

There’s a reason they don’t don that: what if a rogue employee among the thousands laid off decides to leak PII or trade secrets

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#457

Post by roncesvalles »

bmcquade wrote: post #153
andrewstuart wrote: post #59

I simply don’t see what good this CEO has done. He’s destroyed googles reputation with developers. Destroyed customer trust in Google products. Done nothing to fix googles reputation for terrible customer service. Led Google to third place in cloud computing. AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk. Why is this guy CEO?

Sundar became CEO at a time when Google needed a leader who could build consensus across different product areas. Sundar was the right person for this role. Unfortunately Sundar is also relatively weak at setting a bold vision to ensure the company continues to grow and innovate, as Larry had done. So under Sundar the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivising not making…

>the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivizing not making mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value

This is in large part due to Ruth Porat's relentless multiyear campaign of cracking down on employee perks and salaries at Google, at a time when VCs were throwing blank checks at startups who in turn were poaching the best people with whole-number multiples of their current compensation. This destroyed arguably Google's single greatest asset — its public image as a "dream employer".

The lack of innovation and risk aversion are just second-order effects of losing the ability to execute (especially in the context of its ambitions) by being known as a second-rate employer in an industry primarily limited by the cost and ability to attract quality labor.

This doesn't excuse Sundar of course, because he was ultimately the CEO through all of this.

"The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free" https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#458

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

ohashi wrote: post #338
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is sitting near all-time highs in market share: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-i... . Search hovers around ~90% for the last several years: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Google Cloud is growing faster than Azure & AWS for the last few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i... . Cloud was at ~4% market share 5 years ago, now it's a…

Except how profitable is Google's cloud? It lost 480 million last quarter. AWS made 5.2B last quarter. Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. Th…

> Except how profitable is Google's cloud? It lost 480 million last quarter.

If growth rates continue, in 5 years, it's on pace to be one of the most hundred profitable companies in the world...

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#459

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

tedivm wrote: post #363
ohashi wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except how profitable is Google's cloud? It lost 480 million last quarter. AWS made 5.2B last quarter. Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. Th…

Google also shoves the google business suite into the cloud service numbers to inflate them.

As does MS with Azure and Office 365.

Re: Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

#460

Post by pb7 »

d23 wrote: post #308
kubb wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't provide a "relevant data point". The base salary for an L3 (rank-and-file) SWE in the Bay Area (which is one of the highest paid areas in the US) is 140K on levels.fyi. You've compared this to the total comp which includes stock (that tanked recently), and a bonus (which isn't guaranteed). You're asserting that you're right and I have no idea what I'm talking about baselessly and being agressive and rude.…

> bonus (which isn't guaranteed) You're again showing that you're uninformed. The bonus is guaranteed for everyone that doesn't get the lowest level of performance evaluation.

>the lowest level of performance evaluation

The level that's synonymous with "this was your notice that you should start looking elsewhere because you will be let go in 6 months or less".

The bonuses are as guaranteed as your next paycheck.

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