[mycentstoo]

I wish I understood why so many options are granted in the first place. If they offered 10,000 fewer options, would performance be any worse? Wouldn't a lot of people be vying for that same position and couldn't the company use that to drive down compensation? Couldn't a company in fact, trade on the idea that the extra power and prestige offsets the need for additional stock compensation? And how much of the stock price change can be reduced to a CEO's impact anyways? If it can't be reduced, then why care so much as to overcompensate for their impact in the first place?

[opportune]

Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the responsibility and stress of a position he could just decline.

This will sound insane but $200mm at Google scale is not even that much. All in, it’s about the cost of having another 200 SWE org or increasing earnings by like 1%. If it’s enough to keep him happy it’s easily worth it

[Quarrelsome]

> it’s easily worth it

but is it really? How do we accurately measure CEO performance? We can barely measure developer productivity in any sort of meaningful fashion. Blowing $200m on what is effectively a faith based assessment seems a bit questionable.

[rubicon33]

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 on faith alone that if they don't, earnings will suffer.

[bushbaba]

A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google