Yeah, I’d complain if I were a Google employee too. 70B in wasted potential for new and improved products, plus a CEO who admitted to overhiring getting a big stock grant (in addition to a bonus, err, stock price bump from buybacks).
It feels like the board has said, “We don’t care about the company or it’s future, just the price of our stock.”
This is basically every public company —- Prioritize short term stock price gains over long term growth and sustainability. The only exception are founder run companies and perhaps a few public companies with strong culture/mission (e.g., Costco comes to mind). Google is no longer founder led and it threw out its mission several years ago.
Owning it and running it are hardly the same though. Their priority is probably also "whatever makes money" at this point, other than occasionally grunting in the direction of AI and other moonshot projects.
It’s not founder run though. They have a level of separation from the running of the business.
(And even if they were running it, it’s no guarantee that it would stick to any respectable values… just “more likely”… but in their case… still very unlikely.)
The survival of the monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, oligopsonists is down to whether or not they can defend, protect and retain their monopolies (etc.)
> This is basically every public company —- Prioritize short term stock price gains over long term growth and sustainability.
Berkshire Hathaway invests in public companies exactly not like you describe, generally seeking companies whose priorities are evident in dividends not share price.
> We don’t care about the company or it’s future, just the price of our stock.
Yeah board doesn't care, founders don't care, investors don't care, CEO doesn't care. Who cares then? Google employees because they are taking the biggest risk by being employed there.
I completely disagree. The pure fact is that Google throws off more money than anyone knows what to do with. It's smart to return some of that to share holders.
Google needs to be innovative, build new products and invest in them.
But they basically have a massive money hose and that isn't going to make their products better. It's going to bloat projects, bog them down in too many people with too many ideas, delay the need to find product market fit and remove any financial constraints in the development process. It's very hard to run lean when you've got all that cash. Take a look at what went on at Meta. They took the money they could've returned to investors and lit it on fire. They've got a mediocre product, no product market fit, and now they're pivoting.
You're more likely to see a team of 5-6 people somewhere within Google come up with a great idea and get it to market than you are going to see a team of 500-600 people. And even if the 500-600 person team does ship, the economics mean that they need to have one of the most successful product launches in history for it to be economically viable.
> Google needs to be innovative, build new products and invest in them.
and then
> Take a look at what went on at Meta. They took the money they could've returned to investors and lit it on fire.
You're criticizing Zuck for doing exactly what you said Google should do. Granted the price tag was huge, but you can't innovate without building and testing something first.
"Google needs to be innovative, build new products and invest in them."
What has Google really built? Seems to me they try, fail ,and then buy something when their attempts fail (when something is available to buy). Nest? Android? Google is not innovative and they never really were, nor are they actually capable of building any viable new products.
i laughed out loud browsing https://about.google/intl/en_us/products/ as a result of your comment, and the first random one i clicked on (cloud print) has a big banner at the top saying it was discontinued in 2020.
a second laugh when I went to the "migration options" link and it says
"We recommend that you find another way to meet your printing needs."
You don’t need any court rulings to understand this. The owners of a company decide how it will be run. The shareholders own the company, they elect a board to represent them. The board hires a CEO and defines their compensation package (along with its performance incentives). The decisions of the shareholders and their board may prove to be unwise in retrospect, but this doesn’t change how the governance structure works. The board (and thus the CEO) can only do what the shareholders want them to do.
All of the ruminating over short term thinking is also nonsensical. A company that has no future has very little value. Perhaps the share holders, or the board, or their CEO have a long-term vision that you disagree with. But this isn’t anything close to an objective fact, it’s just your own self-aggrandising opinion that if you were running the 4th largest company in the world, that you’d be doing a better job.
Google always hired more people than needed to run existing services. So overhiring is a standard procedure for them and would likely be repeated if the market becomes good again. In almost all the cases in the past it worked in their favor.
He did go through a lot of struggle having to cut so many jobs and actually keep the company remarkably profitable. That's why he deserves a raise. He cut costs instead of being like the previous leaders who frequent burned money. And played with shareholders the entire time.
I'm not saying the ceo is right for what he did. I like the previous ceo who kept products alive even when they did not make money. But like IBM, companies do grow up and start acting like adults. This is one of those times.
The job cuts had nothing to do with keeping the company profitable. In fact, the company was significantly less profitable in Q1 than it could have been due to not yet realizing any savings but additionally having billions in charges from the layoffs.
It's possible that Google becomes a significantly more profitable company as a result of this, but it seems equally plausible that in three months they'll go on another hiring binge. That's what weak leadership like Sundar's gets you: no vision and no consistency.
He should have given no severances. That would have kept Q1 up. And he should have just kept it within the senior level to start laying off and let them decide. No sudden movements.
> In January, PIchai said he took “full responsibility” for conditions that led to the companywide layoffs.
According to his own words - if he is taking "full responsibility" for layoff conditions, he should be fined or docked his pay right ? Or just resign ?
If you're responsible for thousands of employees, your performance report should be (with very limited sensitive redactions) open source. You're getting paid millions and everyone deserves to know what "full responsibility" means. This isn't "acting like schoolchildren", it's part of getting people to buy into the system.
I don't buy into your hero worship. Sundar took a crazily profitable company with tens of billions in raw cash and did a messy disorganized layoff where, unlike Alphabet's biggest competitors such as MS, Meta, and even freaking Amazon, Googlers woke up to no access, no chance to transition or hand off, and no chance to say goodbye. It was a disgrace and not something worthy of praise or pay increase.
I hate sundar. Took a great company and made it boring. Like I have less hope for the future now because of the one company that inspired me to break the corporate norms, is itself broken.
But I despite hate more. And there is nothing that says hjs penalty needs to be open. Large organizations like democratic govts need openness. Dictatorships need secrecy. And companies are in a category between the two.
Lol at your hate statement and that he received any penalty. His annual salary massively jumped up to $242 million as Google fired tens of thousands of employees, many with no notice. He has now >800 times the median employee's pay. Anyone would love to take those penalties. You might want to take a small step back and objectively evaluate your shining bias.
I'm not going to be judgemental of someone's salary. Or that he was given a raise.
Unfortunately ceo salaries are not based on how happy the employees are. Or how justly they have dealt with them. They are just indicators on how happy investors are.
I really don't understand the outrageous compensation. Seems to me like a lot of CEOs just play the game of "don't fuck things up" and collect a massive paycheck because the board and shareholders are too scared of hiring someone shit.
They'll accept a mediocre leader, and pay ludicrous amounts of money for some imagined assurance of reduced downside.
It's far more complicated than that, and pro-CEO, as ultimately even a very bad CEO is going to get paid outrageously. See good old Steve Ballmer, who was basically running Microsoft into the ground. He was still very well paid, even though the minute he announced he was leaving, without naming the replacement, Microsoft stock shot up: The expected value of a random, unknown replacement for shareholders was enormous.
So this isn't really about expected value, supply and demand. It's not as if a 10% cut would make Pichai quit, or that you'd not be able to find a comparable replacement at that price: I suspect that, not unlike Ballmer was, Pichai is worse than a random viable candidate. But there really is minimal pressure in saving money with top executives like this. CEO is not a random position, and it's basically never filled by a person the board doesn't have personal connections to. So ultimately CEOs get either raises, or get fired.
When a CEO gets a cut in compensation, it's often because their own pay sends a message to investors and employees. Here, what we are seeing is that Pichai sees no need whatsoever to send any message, because he doesn't care in the slightest about this. It's modeling behavior for executives and other employees. And I don't think it's a good example we'd like them to follow.
> There aren't that many people in the world who can successfully lead a large company like Alphabet.
What evidence do we have for this? How many times CEOs failed Alphabet level companies? What's your dataset?
Are you just making things up because it supports your bias that CEOs are highly skilled and it's not like almost any educated and privileged person can do their job?
> What evidence do we have for this? How many times CEOs failed Alphabet level companies? What's your dataset?
Logic. It is clearly way more complicated to run a large business that operates across multiple regulatory regions and that is growing through a transition from hyper growth, than it is to do many many other types of work.
I see, so you're saying you have no evidence? It's cute to have a theory in your mind, an abstraction, but you have to verify it regardless of how convincing it sounds to you. For example, my "logic" says that you're wrong. I observe what CEOs do, I observe what other managers do, and it seems to me like most good managers I'm familiar with would be good CEOs as well because I see no complex, spectacular decision that CEOs tend to make that other managers don't. The bias you put into your reasoning is that good CEOs are somehow special, talented people and therefore in order for CEOs to be successful in their job, they need to be special and talented. But I have no observation that matches with that. CEOs I'm familiar with tend to be average people who were born rich, or got lucky and ended up being privileged. So who is correct? There is no way to know without getting data and verifying it.
> There aren't that many people in the world who can successfully lead a large company like Alphabet.
At that size, it's perfectly possible that there are zero people who can truly lead it.
Imagine it like a marching band. You run in and knock the drum major out of the way. You don't know much about it, so you just march in front of the band, smiling and waving to the crowd. The band keeps on doing their thing. But the crowd sees you apparently in charge, so they congratulate you on the band's performance.
This is a very naive misunderstanding of how the labor market for executives actually works. Executive compensation is set by the Board. Who is the Board? They’re all CEOs of other companies, who have no interest in seeing executive pay tied to performance. This is all a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours situation, from people all in the Good Old Boys network of Harvard and Stanford MBAs. Tying compensation to performance is in nobody’s interest in this network.
Frances Arnold - Chemical Engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Arnold)
R. Martin “Marty” Chávez - Investment banker
L. John Doerr - Investor and VC. He backed the Google founders.
Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. - economist, attorney and corporate executive who served as the 17th vice chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1999 to 2006. Prior to his term as vice chairman, Ferguson served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Ann Mather - Technology and Media Board Member Ann Mather is an English business executive. She serves on the boards of directors of Alphabet, Netflix, Bumble and Blend. Her prior board experience includes Airbnb, Arista Networks, MGM Studios and Zappos.
K. Ram Shriram - Indian-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is a founding board member and one of the first investors in Google. He worked earlier in Amazon.
Robin L. Washington - Has served as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gilead Sciences, Inc.
You’ll be happy to see that I included hyperlinks to their Wikipedia pages for deeper context.
The thing you should take away is that, contrary to the GP’s assertion, the Google board is in fact not composed of juts a bunch of CEOs from other companies.
It’s true, some of them are former CEOs of other companies. Some held other executive positions in Alphabet and non-Alphabet companies in the past or present.
They still have a vested interest in perpetuating high levels of executive pay.
I think the labor market model is a poor fit to extremely high level executives. Theoretically, they work for the board and shareholders but in practice they have a lot of power over their own terms of employment.
Pichai for example is both CEO and one of the directors. He was groomed by Page into his current role and maintains it more by dint of internal politics than by lack of alternatives.
If a company is so fragile that it cannot handle an incompetent CEO, it will likely fail anyway.
Many people could lead Alphabet just fine. But if a top CEO is just 5% better than the average candidate, that 5% is a lot of money, and the CEO can claim some of it as compensation.
What does he even do? If we have determined kings aren’t a good way to govern why do we continue it in business? Under his reign, Google has gotten their ass kicked in AI when they should have been leading the pack. Doesn’t seem like pay raise material to me.
That’s a cope. At that level you’re basically doing nothing except signing the pieces of paper. Outside of exceptions like Jobs and Musk, CEOs rarely have any sort of plan beyond seeing how things go.
It’s more that there’s nobody they deem of suitable social standing for filling the position.
As a GCP customer? How about fixing a whole bunch of long-standing bugs and missing features? How about not having an entire region go down due to a flood in a single DC?
As a Google Workspace user? How about making the search in Drive not be an embarrassment? How about creating an actual backup and restore function (DLP is not that).
How about making ChromeOS not suck? How about making it possible to do zero touch deployments without involving some shitty third party reseller that wants to take over your Admin Console with their insecure and crappy “plug-in”? How about not forcing people to work with shitty resellers at all?
There are so many things Google could be working on, that it is not. Having them eliminate staff, raise prices, defer and delay new features that have been missing for years, or leaving bugs on the table, while doing a stock buyback and lavishing money on the leadership that let OpenAI eat their lunch, or that is letting Microsoft embrace and extend his supposed wheelhouse, Chrome, or who shutdown Stadia and literally returned everyone’s money, …
The list goes on. I get that it’s popular to dump on Google employees as overpaid and underperforming, but the fact of the matter is that that is only true because Google ‘s CEO is a crappy as fuck leader. I’ve never worked at Google, have no desire to, but I fail to see how he doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the litany of strategic and operational blunders that this company can continue to pave over with massive cash from their supposedly failing ads business.
Honestly, why does he even still have a job there?
This exactly. A stock buyback combined with layoffs are a signal that Google doesn't have enough good ideas to work on. Google thinks the money is just better spent being given back to investors. This is very different than the Google 10 years ago, which was arguably throwing minds/money at bad ideas.
In other words, Google is now a mature company whose CEO can't make it grow anymore.
Hey, I'm not judging. I have no better idea either. But the question stands, if the CEO can't do anything more than your average joe, why the big salary?
Who said cash compensation? I’m using $300k as a total compensation amount. Feel free to adjust the numbers. Even at $600k that’s 9 freakin years of 13,000 knowledge workers doing something.
I’m not the CEO. The CEO’s job is to allocate resources effectively. So develop new products.
Personally, I’d have them work on Google Reader, making GCP competitive, fixing search, fixing Bard, and monetizing Bard.
> I'm not the CEO. The CEO’s job is to allocate resources effectively. So develop new products.
How is Google developing new products an effective use of resources? Most often they spend a lot of resources on it, figure out it doesn't hit their metrics and abandon it. It would have been a better use of resources to return it to shareholders who can use it for something else.
> How is Google developing new products an effective use of resources?
Generally, new products means new revenue streams and new profit, preferably improved profit margins.
The complaint is that they can’t develop new products so are returning money to investors so investors can earn better returns. So that’s a sign of lack of innovation.
I’d expect a company with the “worlds best programmers and AI” to be able to innovate and create new products. Google is showing they are just the new IBM, or worse, clear channel or some advertising company.
Hopefully they can get leadership that has some new ideas other than giving their cash cow some vitamins.
Apple and Microsoft get mentioned frequently as tech behemoths. They aren’t the height of innovation but they are still able to grow markets (Apple with AirPods and stuff and Microsoft with azure). Google should be cranking out new billion dollar products and inventing markets.
If the company is so out of ideas and cares so little about maintaining/expanding existing products that they have to lay off upwards of 10k people, it's in pretty bad shape. Why were they hired in the first place?
The hell are you talking about. All I said was that there are plenty of engineering roles with $300k+ salaries, for which you had apparently “never heard of.”
Apart from the employee part, Sundar has driven next to no innovation, and has made Google manager-heaven. I was a huge Google fan, but I'm finding it harder and harder to fool myself that they have a bright future.
While Microsoft is becoming a developer haven, Google is moving into their Steve Ballmer era.
Everyone burned by everything that was touched by WinRT/UAP/UWP/WinAPPSDK migration, .NET Native deprecation, C++/CX deprecation, Xamarin to MAUI migration, .NET Framework to .NET Core migration,...doesn't feel like being in developer heaven.
Developer heaven on modern Microsoft is only anything that relates to Azure or XBox.
First they were promising haven. Now heaven. I admit, I haven't lost my suspicion of Microsoft since the browser wars, but these statements do more to put me at unease. Xbox is the _latest_ product by Microsoft to be accused of anti-compeitive behavior. It's also significantly less open than even Windows.
WSL and Powertoys (specifically Fancyzones) has gotten me over the hump of transitioning to Windows at my desk. I still love my Macbook Pro, but I no longer feel the need to plug it into an external display. The only thing I consistently miss is iMessage.
.NET is great, for those doing Azure workloads, those suffering the GUI civil wars, or the .NET Framework features/libraries that aren't available on .NET Core reboot, or the .NET Native missing features from Native AOT, not so much.
With that, I doubt you are seriously here looking for answers...
Windows 11 and Edge are aggressively pushing ads and are bad, but I have to point out that Windows 11 has a ton of improvements otherwise, so much that I joined a pilot of Windows 11 at work (most machines are still on Windows 11 currently).
It sounds like he got a $226M stock award last year, and is forgoing his bonus this year, but the stock award appears to be given every 3 years, which is convenient.
"Why is he getting a raise while we are getting cost cuts and layoffs?"
He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
Also:
> More than a dozen memes from employees have filled Google’s internal discussion forums, many with several hundred likes, according to posts viewed by CNBC
This is the worst form of journalism. Cool, someone made a few memes. So what? You can make up any narrative if you scroll Twitter (or in this case memegen) long enough. That doesn't make it a real problem that you have to report on.
Journalistic integrity gets continuously eroded with stories like this. Like your source is a high level director with a few hundred reports... nope, it is a meme post on an internal tool. Just feels lazy.
A well-researched article on the benefits being cut, maybe some analysis on how much it could be saving the company or what the impact of 12,000 jobs might be worth would make this much more readable.
Verge churns out an “article” every few hours that is just a bunch of Twitter embeds sandwiched between a few sentences of fluff. Sometimes they even retype what’s in the Tweets, to fill up space, or presumably if the embeds break. (Or maybe it’s some desperate SEO play). Truly atrocious content.
> This is the new baseline of quality, because they can’t afford talent.
This is at best an incomplete statement.
Advertising moved to a more lucrative technology and if good journalism comes to depend on subscription revenue, readers are not willing to pay in sufficient number.
We are now at least two generations removed from the faint echo of grammar being taught by somewhat informed personnel. Neither the people writing nor the people reading are adequately equipped.
ChatGPT now impresses people, for pity's sake.
Talent is hard to find in all domains, for money or love.
Bloomberg and Reuters for financial stories that are relevant to the markets. They have a major financial incentive to not mess it up i.e. their customers will cancel their 10,20k/yr/person subscriptions.
Even if memegen is only used by 5% of the company (it's probably much more?) it's an important enough part of the company culture that some developers were allowed to maintain/expand it on company time. It was always very active during all-hands meetings and individual posts would get hundreds or thousands of interactions from what I saw.
The question is basically 'are these memes representative of feelings within a larger subset of the company' and these sorts of takes don't really address that question at all. Memegen is not twitter.
These are literally the Google-internal-social-media version of "meaningless article about something happening on Twitter". I'm sure these articles are easy money though or we wouldn't keep seeing them.
Wait, you're telling me that more than a dozen memes have "filled" Google's discussion forums? Google, with its ~175,000 employees? And "many" of these 13 or so memes have been liked?
To quote Sterling Archer... "oh, my stars!"
I don't know if it's just this reporter that's the joke or if it's CNBC as a whole.
> He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs.
He is getting a raise because the relative power of his position gives him coercive power over employees.
If any particular employee is upset with the decision he can make them feel pain, while it would take a lot of employees working together to cause him any pain at all. He can arbitrarily exercise his power because there is little to stop him or hold him back.
This would be true if Sundar chose his own compensation, but he does not. It is decided by the board.
I'm not saying it's the right thing for the board to do (if I were on the board, I would've suggested he keep his pay even or take a cut), but it's not right to say that Sundar gets paid more because he has "coercive power" over employees.
You’re focusing on the wrong party here, the employees are getting cost cuts rather than a raise because they lack negotiating power. Him getting a raise is a result of employees losing.
> Him getting a raise is a result of employees losing.
it's not a direct relationship.
The CEO gets a pay rise if the board believes it to be something worth doing - for example, rewarding the CEO for doing something unpopular (and taking flak for it).
The employees "losing" isn't a cause, it's an effect. The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable. And if a company is more profitable, the CEO is doing it's job. A company doesn't look out for employees; at least only up to the extend where the employees make them money.
Again you’re ignore the root cause for the proximate cause. A companies looks after their employees when they are forced to do so by market forces, unions, laws etc. None of which applied here.
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
That doesn’t explain timing as companies always want to be more profitable and Google was profitable before and after these cuts. So what prevented those cuts from happening sooner? It would have backfired if attempted sooner.
Thus the CEO’s decision to shaft these people is the result of those employees lack of economic, political etc power. If everyone would say quit for a better offer then he wouldn’t make that decision and thus wouldn’t get rewarded for the decision.
I think they're presenting a more accurate description of how the world actually works, which is useful. When people make a claim that X happens because of Y, that is a claim of causality which can be true or false or missing important factors.
Just like in physics where you can choose a point of origin to make calculations easier. Choosing the frame from which to analyze the situation can often determine the conclusion with presuppositions encoded into the language of the frame.
Here is the truth: Wage measures power, not usefulness, not productivity. Productivity puts a cap on wages because you can't pay a person more than they produce, but it does not determine the wage.
So when someone says:
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
This denies the idea that labor could be powerful enough to hurt the bottom line of the company enough that layoffs are not profitable.
The frame (more profit good) hid that for labor more wage and less layoffs are good. What is best for the company is being confused for what is best for everyone or what is best for labor, and labor cannot get what is best for themselves because they have no power.
You presupposed that what is best for the company is what is best with your choice of frame.
> What is best for the company is being confused for what is best for everyone
and there we have it - the difference in point of view. No company (nor anyone really) is making decisions that is "best for everyone", because that would imply altruism. And i am a stern believer that altruism does not exist.
Except he didn’t actually explain why and more specifically when just what.
The question isn’t why the CEO got rewarded for doing X, but what changed to allow him to make this now vs those same cuts happening 10 years ago. It’s not like Google was in an unprofitable downward spiral and needed cuts to turn things around the only change is how wildly profitable they are.
lots changed, but mainly the economic environment. Google is still wildly profitable of course.
The relevant question is could those workers generate more than %5 returns on that $70B google is using for stock buybacks. The company leadership and investors seem to think the answer is NO.
Therefore you fire the workers, Give cash to investors, and the investors park it with the fed getting >5% interest, with zero risk, and no need to worry about workers, products, or customers.
This is the entire point of the FED rate raises. Hoover up all of the money floating around being invested in company growth and new product development.
Once you get enough layoffs and paycuts, eventually inflation will go down because people cant buy shit.
> Once you get enough layoffs and paycuts, eventually inflation will go down because people cant buy shit.
If people can't buy stuff why wouldn't you expect marginal cost to go up?
More people buying more stuff means economies of scale. Less people buying less stuff means the loss of economies of scale.
If people are less able to buy stuff, I don't see any reason to believe that prices would go down. If anything it seems like it creates an incredibly negative feedback loop.
A company might firesale their inventory resulting a temporary reduction of inflation, but it seems like production would decrease because demand decreased, which would result in more layoffs and stagnation.
I am not an economist, so I guess I am curious why stagflation is not the expected result.
> I don't see any reason to believe that prices would go down.
and they won't. Lowering inflation is not the same as ensuring prices drop (it might happen, but it would be an unintended effect of the Fed's policies).
prices will remain high (compared to pre-covid) but be stable after inflation drops down. And i would imagine that the Fed's policies would change if they start seeing deflation (which is when prices drop).
It depends on the ppint of view, and the goals of that point of view.
From an employee point of view the primary goal is to keep your job. Pay raises, perks, wfh etc are all secondary to that. If you are laid off that is a failure. If your colleague is laid off you start getting worried. You see the failure and respond to that.
Since the laid off person failed, both the laid-off and the remaining consider the company to have failed, and by extension the company bosses to have failed, and expect pain at management level.
This is a point of view, and it's shared by many employees, but its not the only point of view.
Another group of people are the shareholders. They couldn't care less about staffing being up or down. They care about the share price. Staff, and costs, being cut means more profit. More profit means higher dividends or higher stock price. [1]
So this is a successful action. From the point of view of the board (which are a proxy for the shareholders), this is a good-job and the management is rewarded accordingly.
Now most people are employees, and the press wants most people to click on the headline, so most people consider layoffs to be bad. Even if you hold a few Google shares, and directly benefit, you don't consider your good fortune, you see 12000 failures, and naturally feel compassion for them.
(By the end of the week/month/year the compassion will have faded, and you'll be back checking your share prices.)
There could have been an article on how well Google stock price is doing, and will do, but no-one would read that.
Now as to your assertion that we're focusing on the "wrong thing". From one point of view, yes, 12000 people directly failed. If each had 3 friends remain that's 36000 who are very nervous. Let's describe the next 100 000 people as "startled".
From the other point of view its all upside.
Personally I'm neither a Google employee nor a shareholder so I'm neutral. Of course I feel compassion for the laid off, I'm not a monster. But I also understand the rules of the capitalism game the US has chosen to play. The rules the US has chosen, and I suspect the rules those 12000 will staunchly defend, is that ultimately its about the money point of view, not the labor point of view.
Google is playing the game. If you care enough then go somewhere else, or work to change the game[2]. But at the very least acknowledge the game itself, and learn the rules.
[1] a share buy-back is just a dividend disguised for tax purposes, and for employee compensation purposes.
[2] changing the rules is hard because the game is bipartisan at grass-roots level. The American-Dream is literally to be the direct benefit of capitalism. The money-talks ethic is fundamental to the American way-of-life.
It’s because the journalist isn’t a journalist, they’re just a writer filling a need. There’s already public sentiment that google sucks, so they just find the simplest story to support it. People rage read like they scroll forever on social media.
I think the confusion is bad journalism. It’s not that at all.
This is why he’s compensated so much, so that he can choose to do other things than care about the plight of the employees that the board wanted to lose.
I love kale and porridge but this seems like the porridge scene in the matrix: does a body good. They should send the latency committee to study the neurochemical signalling in the nerve pathways to understand how fast the brain decides it tastes like chickenfeed. Then fire the decider because it was too fast.
I can remember when the name collision on the internet was rare, now it's all day, every day. Given that my grandfather was David Smith, this leaves me with Smith and Watson, meaning that all roads lead to Ireland or Scotland, even if they involve swimming the English Channel.
> He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
The mechanics of that maneuver make it seem that staff are being laid off for the sake of creating resources that make compensation possible.
Would there be less layoffs if the compensation package was not as much?
Layoffs reduce operating expenses and increase the company's stock price. This means shareholders and board members get richer. And they reward the CEO for it by giving him a large stock grant. So yes, the two have a direct causal relationship.
I can tell you point blank that I have participated in layoffs where freeing up opex by LRing people was done _explictly_ to fund increasing the compensation of other team members including higher level manager promotions (and associated pay packages).
He's been CEO for what, close to a decade now? Why should he get a raise for a situation that he put the company in? Or is the logic that anything a CEO does deserves to be justified by paying them more?
It may not be a “real” problem, but reporting on the excessive comp of public company executives is valuable and sourced from employees, no less. The ratio of CEO to employee salary is at a major imbalance.
I doubt that it is the worst form of journalism, Lots of people on social media eat this kind of stuff up. Clickbait journalism but it gets eyeballs and likes.
I think it’s the other way around, journalists are reporting on the real sentiment that the employees feel. The business reasoning can help us understand what things happen, but the employees can experience their feelings regardless.
Well, the Google campus is basically Software Engineer Employee Disney World. I'm sure a few of them took "The Internship" at face value and are convinced that they're doing something other than just selling ads. They can't just be elite mercenaries, that would shatter their noble, pioneering egos.
Seriously, everything Google touches that doesn't bring in ad revenue does one or both of the following:
1. Is canceled after several years regardless of quality or impact
It's hard to imagine how anyone can view collocation of stock buybacks, employee layoffs/comp reductions and ceo pay raise as evidence of "good management".
So far there's a lot of talk about how ai will end lower-level jobs -- but the real opportunity for labor savings will be to evolve new company structures which don't have the modern form of centralized leadership with more or less fraud-driven leverage over company profits.
New companies modeled after teams that are assembled more like movies, with crediting processes for everyone involved that tie to broad-base profit sharing mechanisms will be the new way. The c-suite can go away/be dramatically consolidated into real leadership roles -- more hands on and direct leadership -- more like the director of a movie than a ceo of a mega cap, more like an Andrew Kelley than a Sundar Pichai)
More collaborations, more loosely affiliated, and more transparent profit sharing structures will be possible as more and more of the business and legal structural bullshit (which significantly over-determine modern business outcomes) can be automated away.
Wages represent relative power and have very little to do with the labor involved. Unskilled labor has no power at all and that's why there is a minimum wage.
If you want to increase your pay, then getting more power is the way to do it. This can be through increasing personal power, such as getting an education or experience, or it can be through collective power: unionization.
Entities with power will not give up their power willingly, and entities with power have captured the tool of regulation. Regulation works on behalf of those with power. You can't collectively bargain while following the law because the law exists to protect rich people. Look at how Joe Biden shut down the railway unions. Until businesses are shown that people are serious, we can expect them to continue to coerce us and laugh in our faces.
Sundar is probably sitting there on his pile of money thinking "what are you gonna do about it?!" Nancy pelosi said she has a right to the free market, she said it so brazenly because "what are you gonna do about it?!" Trump actively shows contempt for the legal system, because as long as republicans control 50% of the government "what are you gonna do about it?!" Clarence Thomas takes bribes while the rest of the justices support him. "what are you gonna do about it?"
The law as it is, prevents you from doing something about it. The law has no semblance of justice and is not functioning in our country. The purpose of law is to prevent arbitrary exercises of power and the power in this country certainly doesn't seem restrained.
If CEO's getting pay raises while thousands are laid off upsets you, that will never change until you are willing to personally sacrifice to fight oppression.
If the board is just looking at stock and shareholder returns, they are doing a disservice to google. The company is at a critical juncture, it has matured and no longer that young/hip company it used to be. Employee morale is low, GCP is underperforming and Microsoft is eating their lunch. Search has plateaued and their devices are just average. What is going to give them the next 20yrs of growth? All I see is ade about google certified courses for people. I am not even talking about AI or their utter incapacity to productize either AI or self driving tech. Sundar has failed on all fronts if he has just maintained the status quo
The Google stock price has matched the NASDAQ100 since then, it's underperformed when you take dividends into account. He's made a lot of money for shareholders, but you'd have to say his performance is average or slightly below.
> The Google stock price has matched the NASDAQ100 since then
Google is in the NASDAQ100 and it's the third largest company in it. Google matches the NASDAQ100's performance because the NASDAQ100 is largely a measure of Google's performance.
I don't get your point. The index is mostly non Google companies, and has returns matching Google's share price. Hence the other index components have had share price movements comparable to Google. So judged by share price alone Sundar has had a performance on par with the average CEO of the other companies in that index.
Google could have conquered the whole world. But instead they settled for growing 14% each year since 2015 while the average enterprise charnel house grew 9%. Worst part is they had to decimate their workers and burn most of their social capital just to get that. Meanwhile their core product search has become a legacy technology used by people who haven't heard of OpenAI, a company that's capitalizing on Google's inventions and discoveries which it didn't have the cojones to productionize itself.
Did you mean to link to some index? You linked to the stock of Nasdaq the stock exchange. I'm not sure what the point of comparing the stock price of a stock exchange with Google is, why not Tesla or Walmart or GE?
I meant to link to the comparison of nasdaq vs goog. But the link didn’t come across with the way I cut and pasted. An error on my part.
If you click compare and put in goog, you’ll see two price lines.
The point of this comparison is that any random stock on nasdaq is likely to follow the index. So good managers should be able to outperform an index of similar stocks.
So, I as an investor am interested in companies that outperform their peers.
I think it would be better to compare goog to a better, more tech index but I don’t know one.
But this link answers “is google better to invest in than a random Nasdaq stock?” And infers that the stock performance is influenced by the CEO. So evaluating Goog’s CEO based on stock price seems to show that he didn’t do that well.
FWIW, GP was saying you linked to the stock price of Nasdaq Inc, the company (yes, Nasdaq is a company that hosts a stock exchange!), instead of the Nasdaq Index, which is what this thread was discussing.
> That is literally the top metric CEOs are judged on
Says you. On his watch they completely squandered their ai lead (despite rebranding as AI company or whatever), didn’t gain much share in the cloud and, botched gaming and messaging, am I missing something? Oh right, also continued to burn user trust and alienating employees it seems
Look at apple and microsoft for comparison, not rando s&p companies.
Oh please; you have no way to prove Google’s stock price is due to Sundar or a global trend to pivot into exploration of technology.
Billions are spent each year marketing the value of tech. Fiat economics are not immutable laws of reality but populist memes. Valuations have no real tether to reality except what a bunch of apes can be convinced to believe in.
Religious memes of high fathers and endless human expansion seem deeply rooted into the human condition after centuries of being forced to drink such kool aid.
Customers, Business (i.e., Investors), People - of this trio of stakeholder categories, choose any two to satisfy.
There are relatively very brief periods in any company's lifecyle when they are able to choose all three and keep them all satisfied.
In a mature business, it is almost impossible to choose all three.
For big-tech, that era has ended and you see traditional CEO behavior making a comeback (i.e., regression to the mean). That is coming as a rude shock for many. That is probably what is happening with Google too.
And 80% of those that were fired probably does not even need to be there. Same was with the Twitter. There is always 5-6% of employees that would not need to be there at all because their impact on the product is not significant (read they are not doing anything).
Also, Sundar Pichai did not give himself raise but board members did. And if the investors that invested their own money into this company (not just traded time and skill for money) do not complain, why should anyone else in this group or from employees. His actions were good, cutting 12,000 employees isn't a cause, it's an effect. Only the timing might not be the best.
Don't always look at the situation from the lowest possible point (as worker) but also see it from the other angle.
Btw. I do not work for Google, I?m not an investor in it, I work regular job but trying to make something out of my life. And yes, that means, becoming an entrepreneur and founder.
My dad always disagree with me when we talk about such topics or pension system. He is 50+ now and worked as blacksmith entire life. His mindset is totally wrong because he lived in country where 'everyone should be the same', those that put in effort and those that do not. Those that risk something in their life and those that did not.
There will always be people that have unique situations and can not take big risk in their life and even try to reach higher level in community, and that is totally normal. But if you are reading HN, I would say you are on a good way with your mindset.
I know people who were laid off from there. Very generous severance. Layoff had a target date many months away, and from that date onwards 3 months. $86/share -> $105/share? 22% gain in that wealth with that severance is a good outcome considering the company needed to downsize.
If only there were some sort of way for the employees to withhold their labour to force management to heel. too bad there is no precedent for such thing throughout human history.
There have been a few walk-outs but they weren't really much to write home about. Any attempts at unionization in Google (not that there have been many serious ones) seem to have been sabotaged, either internally or externally. I would be very surprised (albeit pleasantly surprised) if we ever saw any serious labor actions there.
Reads like an onion headline: Employees of large corporation shocked and angered to learn they were hired to make money for owners and senior management.
"if you don't sack 10% of the workforce we will cut your pay by 50% but if you do sack 10% of the workforce we will only cut your pay by 25%"
Its win-win because if he refused, they could sack for the penalty payout, and re-hire on a CEO pay of 1/4 or less, and still have good competent people to run the company.
The failure here, is believing the stake a CEO needs has to be this astronomical to validate their role. After the first 10 million PA of renumeration, what do they do with it? What does he do with $225+ million PA?
A 1% annuity on that pays for a lot of pixel phones, and flights.
Remember that Warren Buffet is on $100,000 effective pay, and does not really spend very much.
"If you cut my pay I'll resign and tell the world why, and your stock price will drop as you're embroiled in controversy, at the same time as microsoft is challenging google over search ai, and the US government is investigating google for illegal and unethical actions in the ad market"
Yes, but Pichai is dead to any rehire after. Farting in the elevator is not OK, talking about it is worse. If Google has underperformed on his watch, it's his fault: no?
"Corleone crime boss comes clean about Cosa Nostra" doesn't happen very often.
He could live very happily on less than $225m. The problem is twofold: doesn't want to, and probably would look weak being made to.
It feels like the board has said, “We don’t care about the company or it’s future, just the price of our stock.”