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 mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value. The effect of these changes is finally becoming more apparent.
Mainly cause no one smart wants that job. It's just mindless politics 24*7.
It's left to the mindlessly ambitious or ppl who are placeholders to prevent the mindlessly ambitious from sitting in the chair.
We have passed the point of org complexity where the CEO does anything beyond ensuring no on totally insane takes over.
There are lot of such ppl who dieing to charge you for every search query or email you send. Think Larry Ellison or Rupert Murdoch types taking over Google.
Literally, nothing good, the chore of Google business is losing ground, Chrome losing more and more users in favor of Edge, Google search taking a hit since OpenAI and Microsoft partnered together to bring AI to search, serial acquisition and sunsetting of products, worse bureaucracy in the whole tech industry, and the list goes on!
He has been CEO since 2015. Would it be a stretch to blame him for the current company culture of nurturing new products left and right just to kill them off after 3-5 years?
He's done great good: for himself, stuffing his wallet. He's played the game well, squirrelling his way to the top, and siphoning off his fill.
For all the Alphabet stuff, and hiring the smartest engineers on the planet, I've yet to hear of a single Google breakthrough beyond their search. They're still just ad salesmen.
Only other useful things they've done that most people would be aware of is refining Microsoft's email/office software into the SaaS age, and making a popular map app. That's great, but no breakthrough.
Now OpenAI's going to kneecap them. Who searches for lists of potential sources of answers when ChatGPT just gives you them? They're fucked.
Under his leadership (2015 to now), Google revenues have gone from $75B to $279B, a 272% increase. Google stock was a $30/share and is now at $105/share (250% increase).
That's what he's done.
Just in 2022, revenues were up $23B, so his cut was 1.2% of that.
Have you seen the ad load (the amount of realestate used by ads) in a search results page? It has gone through the roof.
It used to be a typical Google search ad was: title, 2 lines of text at most, and a URL.
Now you have 10 or more lines in the top ad. Of course as you use more space for ads, revenue will go up. Even an idiot can see that. It's no magic. But yet the leadership in Google acts as if they've done something magical by continuing to grow revenue. Well, d'uh!! Show more ads, get more money!!! This isn't some magical AI thing; it's pure greed at the cost of UX.
> He’s destroyed googles reputation with developers.
He has? How did he do that? Literally, curious, first I've heard of it.
> Led Google to third place in cloud computing.
You don't need to be number 1 to make a profit.
> AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.
I suspect you think google search is their core business. When it's ads.
Also, just because Microsoft is ahead just now doesn't mean they will be in the future. OpenAI I believe is only so far ahead because they take what others gave and didn't give back. This resulted in others to stop sharing. Since OpenAI is going to stop getting that boost from others, it could be that others start catching up with advancements they discover but don't share.
"We need to be real thoughtful about this", followed by strictly no decision / action will be the hallmark of Sundar's tenure which I hope will end real soon.
Google was already on a trajectory to do all these things. It doesn't matter who the CEO is.
The big tech co lifecycle includes decline. More than 10 years ago, I figured that Google was a few years behind Microsoft on that trajectory. Edit: and a lot of comments here are saying Satya turned MS around; i find that dubious.
Well said. In my eyes, Google is basically a zombie company like MySpace already.
I fully expect the recent advancements in AI to bring to the surface more disruptive startups than Google can possibly gobble up, ultimately sealing its fate.
... And getting caught flat-footed against Microsoft (and Adobe, but but not as loudly) in the precise field Alphabet is supposedly the insurmountable leader.
Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"?
The upper management at Google are so lucky that the company is filled with timid people who are averse to change and didn't unionize.
Now they can safely siphon the profits for another several years until they inevitably drive the company into the ground when the ad revenue dries up, and they move to similar positions at other places with healthy revenue streams.
And the rank-and-file Googlers will defend this because they think they caught God by the ankles with their 150k/year salary, that they feel they don't deserve because of their impostor syndrome.
Same story at Meta where people in the C-suite got very high bonus and equity refresher based on outstanding individual performance. You'd expect them to be somehow accountable. The common answer there was that they did well at their job, and aren't responsible for decisions leading to the layoffs. And nobody is responsible. Basically, it was right to hire so many employees (good economic prospects) and then it was right to fire them (bad economic prospect).
This view is acceptable if you consider people are disposable and the human cost to be zero. Which of course is the case from the corporation point of view since this human cost isn't tracked by any metrics meaningful for the company.
These layoffs feel wrong. I know people who were devoting their life to their job, were working in very profitable companies, were exceeding expectation for their level, were working on project that were sold to them as critical by management.... and they were fired overnight without notice (and some of them continue to lick ass on Linkedin on how great was their company).
I know it's not a popular idea in American business-centered culture, but there should be restrictions as to why you can layoff employees.
What I don't get about CEO compensations is, do they even work?
Like I get that you're a high impact person and you should have the proper incentives to lead the company in the right direction, but do the crazy compensations actually achieve that? Like is there any difference between $100M and $200M? Both of those numbers are way higher than anyone and their children can use in their entire lifetimes, why do you even care which sum you get? Does Sundar Pichai actually look at his paycheck and say "Oh boy, I got $226M instead of the measly $150M [0] I got last year, hard work sure is paying off, I better keep at it."
There’s been a bunch of studies that track CEO performance when the CEO has gone on to lead multiple orgs.
No surprise, CEO performance has no persistence and is statistically random. Also higher compensation does not lead to faster EPS growth for investors over time.
Average comp for execs has skyrocketed 10x the past few decades due to equity compensation - yet companies aren’t growing 10x faster than they were before equity comp became so en-vogue.
My personal opinion: all execs should be paid in cash and incentivized purely with fixed cash bonuses. That’s basically how corporate America worked pre-1980s.
Gifting a big percentage of a company to someone who was employee #3076 is just plain theft from public investors.
There's a "rachet effect" - BigCorp needs a new CEO, the committee looks for a replacement. Are they looking for an "average" CEO or an above average CEO? Compensation gets decided by a separate committee who use consultants who want to get re-hired. Buffett wrote about this in his 2005 letter to shareholders:
"Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won’t change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO’s pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO – aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo – all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.
Take, for instance, ten year, fixed-price options (and who wouldn’t?). If Fred Futile, CEO of Stagnant, Inc., receives a bundle of these – let’s say enough to give him an option on 1% of the company – his self-interest is clear: He should skip dividends entirely and instead use all of the company’s earnings to repurchase stock.
Let’s assume that under Fred’s leadership Stagnant lives up to its name. In each of the ten years after the option grant, it earns $1 billion on $10 billion of net worth, which initially comes to $10 per share on the 100 million shares then outstanding. Fred eschews dividends and regularly uses all earnings to repurchase shares. If the stock constantly sells at ten times earnings per share, it will have appreciated 158% by the end of the option period. That’s because repurchases would reduce the number of shares to 38.7 million by that time, and earnings per share would thereby increase to $25.80. Simply by withholding earnings from owners, Fred gets very rich, making a cool $158 million, despite the business itself improving not at all. Astonishingly, Fred could have made more than $100 million if Stagnant’s earnings had declined by 20% during the ten-year period.
Fred can also get a splendid result for himself by paying no dividends and deploying the earnings he withholds from shareholders into a variety of disappointing projects and acquisitions. Even if these initiatives deliver a paltry 5% return, Fred will still make a bundle. Specifically – with Stagnant’s p/e ratio remaining unchanged at ten – Fred’s option will deliver him $63 million. Meanwhile, his shareholders will wonder what happened to the “alignment of interests"
This hypothesis is testable in the market, and there are any number of investors—including private equity firms and activist investors—on the lookout for feathered-nest C-suites and other misaligned executive incentives.
There was a great little aside a couple months ago on the Odd Lots podcast[1] about investors forcing a radical change in oil company executive incentive compensation that had been draining shareholder value for decades.
It's about status, not money. If the CEO of a $T company like google doesn't get a lot of money AND doesn't have a charitable reason not to, he's going to lose respect and it's likely he won't be able to make the deals he should've otherwise been able to. When you're in upper management your salary and perks make your position and are responsible for effective output.
At least, this is how people that make all that money think. Yes, it's a huge waste, but who's instituting the other kind of social structure that doesn't reward socio / psychopathy anyway?
The paragraph above is an easy way to discount any and all criticisms. It could be worse, ya kno?
I'll come back to what I always come back to with these compensation issues. You can make the claim you need to pay exceptional amounts to get the best people. You cannot claim that applies to a CEO who is in the middle of an incredibly costly round of layoffs because instead of being exceptional, he followed the herd and over-hired during the pandemic. It is extremely clear at this point that the attitude of the big tech companies during the pandemic was stupid (with some minor exceptions), and that their attitude today is gutless.
As I can't read the article, I searched around a bit and read [1] on frobes.
> Pichai's compensation included stock awards of about $218 million and a basic salary of $2 million, the filing showed. Pichai's stock award is paid every three years.
(The additional 6million were security spent by the company.)
His compensation next year will be much lower, the same as the last two years:
> The 2022 pay is compared to $6.3 million in 2021 when he didn’t receive the grant.
So he effectively got 73million per year in stocks. Or around ($73mil/$106stockprice=) 690k stock / year.
He's compensate to maximize shareholder returns, not to keep people in a job. The people are employed for the same reason and when their RoI is below the threshold then you need to right the ship. This is what a CEO is partly there to do.
12,000 Googler’s fired this year and somehow the Googler with the lowest skills/bills ratio remains. At least he took full responsibility for his failures as a leader while handing out pink slips.
Haha, man I had a 35 year finance plan to save enough for retirement and children's education, with a target value amounting to just north of a week of working as Pichai.
Why do we even have a C suite? Can we have a company run with direct democracy instead of monarchy? A true Borg hive mind company. No appointments, no stack rankings, no levels. People get paid by the scope of work they do.
I don't like those titles. What his salary has to do with firing people? That is what CEOs in such companies make (there aren't many Googles out there). It's reasonable to question why a single employee in a company should make so much money, but it has nothing to do with firing people.
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.
The (editorialised) title [0] is classic Anchoring [1], me thinks.
Google did not fire folks because they were making losses. At some level, they got rid to appease Wall Street given their shrinking profit margins. I mean, here's a business that brings in revenues of £500M / day (over £150M / day net); an astonishing amount. Anchor against that? Never let the less spectacular get in the way of a click bait, I guess.
[0] The original title was something along the lines of, Sundar earned $226M while laying off thousands
[+] [-] ms512|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bmcquade|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsatic|2 years ago|reply
It's left to the mindlessly ambitious or ppl who are placeholders to prevent the mindlessly ambitious from sitting in the chair.
We have passed the point of org complexity where the CEO does anything beyond ensuring no on totally insane takes over.
There are lot of such ppl who dieing to charge you for every search query or email you send. Think Larry Ellison or Rupert Murdoch types taking over Google.
[+] [-] serverlessmania|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juujian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jalapenos|2 years ago|reply
For all the Alphabet stuff, and hiring the smartest engineers on the planet, I've yet to hear of a single Google breakthrough beyond their search. They're still just ad salesmen.
Only other useful things they've done that most people would be aware of is refining Microsoft's email/office software into the SaaS age, and making a popular map app. That's great, but no breakthrough.
Now OpenAI's going to kneecap them. Who searches for lists of potential sources of answers when ChatGPT just gives you them? They're fucked.
[+] [-] refurb|2 years ago|reply
That's what he's done.
Just in 2022, revenues were up $23B, so his cut was 1.2% of that.
[+] [-] 1024core|2 years ago|reply
Have you seen the ad load (the amount of realestate used by ads) in a search results page? It has gone through the roof.
It used to be a typical Google search ad was: title, 2 lines of text at most, and a URL.
Now you have 10 or more lines in the top ad. Of course as you use more space for ads, revenue will go up. Even an idiot can see that. It's no magic. But yet the leadership in Google acts as if they've done something magical by continuing to grow revenue. Well, d'uh!! Show more ads, get more money!!! This isn't some magical AI thing; it's pure greed at the cost of UX.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] that_guy_iain|2 years ago|reply
He has? How did he do that? Literally, curious, first I've heard of it.
> Led Google to third place in cloud computing.
You don't need to be number 1 to make a profit.
> AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.
I suspect you think google search is their core business. When it's ads.
Also, just because Microsoft is ahead just now doesn't mean they will be in the future. OpenAI I believe is only so far ahead because they take what others gave and didn't give back. This resulted in others to stop sharing. Since OpenAI is going to stop getting that boost from others, it could be that others start catching up with advancements they discover but don't share.
[+] [-] ur-whale|2 years ago|reply
"We need to be real thoughtful about this", followed by strictly no decision / action will be the hallmark of Sundar's tenure which I hope will end real soon.
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps having a good reputation with developers won't be as important in the upcoming years.
[+] [-] asveikau|2 years ago|reply
The big tech co lifecycle includes decline. More than 10 years ago, I figured that Google was a few years behind Microsoft on that trajectory. Edit: and a lot of comments here are saying Satya turned MS around; i find that dubious.
[+] [-] s1k3s|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin82|2 years ago|reply
I fully expect the recent advancements in AI to bring to the surface more disruptive startups than Google can possibly gobble up, ultimately sealing its fate.
[+] [-] HyperSane|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|2 years ago|reply
He might be a smart nerd but he’s not a leader.
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themitigating|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intelVISA|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] passwordoops|2 years ago|reply
Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"?
[+] [-] kubb|2 years ago|reply
Now they can safely siphon the profits for another several years until they inevitably drive the company into the ground when the ad revenue dries up, and they move to similar positions at other places with healthy revenue streams.
And the rank-and-file Googlers will defend this because they think they caught God by the ankles with their 150k/year salary, that they feel they don't deserve because of their impostor syndrome.
[+] [-] yodsanklai|2 years ago|reply
This view is acceptable if you consider people are disposable and the human cost to be zero. Which of course is the case from the corporation point of view since this human cost isn't tracked by any metrics meaningful for the company.
These layoffs feel wrong. I know people who were devoting their life to their job, were working in very profitable companies, were exceeding expectation for their level, were working on project that were sold to them as critical by management.... and they were fired overnight without notice (and some of them continue to lick ass on Linkedin on how great was their company).
I know it's not a popular idea in American business-centered culture, but there should be restrictions as to why you can layoff employees.
[+] [-] vjk800|2 years ago|reply
Like I get that you're a high impact person and you should have the proper incentives to lead the company in the right direction, but do the crazy compensations actually achieve that? Like is there any difference between $100M and $200M? Both of those numbers are way higher than anyone and their children can use in their entire lifetimes, why do you even care which sum you get? Does Sundar Pichai actually look at his paycheck and say "Oh boy, I got $226M instead of the measly $150M [0] I got last year, hard work sure is paying off, I better keep at it."
[0] I made that number up
[+] [-] pembrook|2 years ago|reply
No surprise, CEO performance has no persistence and is statistically random. Also higher compensation does not lead to faster EPS growth for investors over time.
Average comp for execs has skyrocketed 10x the past few decades due to equity compensation - yet companies aren’t growing 10x faster than they were before equity comp became so en-vogue.
My personal opinion: all execs should be paid in cash and incentivized purely with fixed cash bonuses. That’s basically how corporate America worked pre-1980s.
Gifting a big percentage of a company to someone who was employee #3076 is just plain theft from public investors.
[+] [-] bunabhucan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twoodfin|2 years ago|reply
There was a great little aside a couple months ago on the Odd Lots podcast[1] about investors forcing a radical change in oil company executive incentive compensation that had been draining shareholder value for decades.
[1] https://overcast.fm/+5AWMJLBNw
[+] [-] counttheforks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinmchugh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oblio|2 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
For them money and people are basically numbers, and more money means more power.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] precompute|2 years ago|reply
At least, this is how people that make all that money think. Yes, it's a huge waste, but who's instituting the other kind of social structure that doesn't reward socio / psychopathy anyway?
The paragraph above is an easy way to discount any and all criticisms. It could be worse, ya kno?
[+] [-] ksec|2 years ago|reply
@sine_break, [1],
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] haunter|2 years ago|reply
That’s not the original title just added by OP for drama. It’s an editorialized title.
“Alphabet CEO’s Pay Soars to $226 Million on Huge Stock Award”
It’s a Bloomberg article not the Guardian
[+] [-] bombardier6789|2 years ago|reply
This is just business as usual for these roles and a lot of people shy away from these roles due to "responsibilities" such as this.
[+] [-] SilverBirch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|2 years ago|reply
Annual Revenue of Google from 2002 to 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...
Annual Net Income Generated by Google from 2001 to 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266472/googles-net-incom...
Under metrics of leadership and fending competition there is no reason to keep the CEO:
"Killed by Google" - https://killedby.tech/google/
"Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad" - https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-ai-chatbot-bard-of...
"Google Cloud still operating at a loss despite revenue, client wins" - https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022/62...
[+] [-] ketzu|2 years ago|reply
> Pichai's compensation included stock awards of about $218 million and a basic salary of $2 million, the filing showed. Pichai's stock award is paid every three years.
(The additional 6million were security spent by the company.)
His compensation next year will be much lower, the same as the last two years:
> The 2022 pay is compared to $6.3 million in 2021 when he didn’t receive the grant.
So he effectively got 73million per year in stocks. Or around ($73mil/$106stockprice=) 690k stock / year.
[1] https://www.forbesmiddleeast.com/innovation/technology/googl...
[+] [-] sys_64738|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|2 years ago|reply
- Meritocracy is a myth;
- There is no value without labor;
- The only risk CEOs are assuming is the nightmare scenario of becoming a worker;
- The company is not your friend. There is no loyalty; and
- The people paying the price for any bad decisions of a company (eg The metaverse) are rarely the people responsible.
[+] [-] blululu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabs3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dumpster_fire|2 years ago|reply
Why do we even have a C suite? Can we have a company run with direct democracy instead of monarchy? A true Borg hive mind company. No appointments, no stack rankings, no levels. People get paid by the scope of work they do.
[+] [-] tinyhouse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|2 years ago|reply
Google did not fire folks because they were making losses. At some level, they got rid to appease Wall Street given their shrinking profit margins. I mean, here's a business that brings in revenues of £500M / day (over £150M / day net); an astonishing amount. Anchor against that? Never let the less spectacular get in the way of a click bait, I guess.
[0] The original title was something along the lines of, Sundar earned $226M while laying off thousands
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)