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?
Was he? What is the evidence that he succeeded? Or even had more positive influence than random decisions?
Does google have consensus over what it’s doing? Or is Sundar specifically a “safe,” milquetoast CEO chosen to not show up previous CEOs. I don’t know Sundar, but it seems he was picked because google leadership assumed supremacy and thought that they just needed a steady hand to coast for a few years.
I'm willing to presume Larry had bold visions, but if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same.
I think it's time to admit that google has been a conglomerate for decades and could no longer run with innovative management. The correct thing to do is to break it up so subdivisions of today can be innovative companies, or reliable dividend payers, or bankrupt.
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...
that's how market leaders die, btw.
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.
I think Satya Nadella is a counter example.
There can be 'mindlessly' ambitious people who are also great at being a CEO.
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 at ~10%...
Android is the only major product doing somewhat poorly, and this is mostly due to Apple just completely crushing it with the iPhone.
I get that Google is the company everyone loves to hate, but the sky isn't falling on this company yet.
This predates Sundar's stint. Reader was only the first one, but this culture of killing products is in Google's DNA itself.
“More wood behind fewer arrows” was Google’s direction from Larry Page starting in 2011, which was when they slaughtered a lot of existing and (from Google’s perspective) marginal projects and became a lot more prone to demanding that new efforts prove themselves adequately or be terminated, so Pichai isn’t responsible for starting it, at least.
Eric let a million products bloom, and Larry was too gutless to make the hard calls.
Sundar gets credit for heeding Wall Street (and his CFO's) call for fiscal responsibility, but the implementation has been poor.
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.
I don't like what Google has become but I can't deny them the amazing work that both DeepMind and Google Brain have done over the years.
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.
Edit: I was looking at the wrong numbers. Google's profit has roughly quadrupled in the 8 years Pichai has been CEO. His compensation makes a lot more sense in that light.
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.
GCP is not profitable, though. Or at least, was reported as not being during this calendar year.
"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.
Perhaps having a good reputation with developers won't be as important in the upcoming years.
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.
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.
For a $226M compensation, we should be able to demand a bit more don't you think?
Other CEO's though definitely have more impact in their respective companies.
Intel's recent re-invigoration once Pat Gelsinger took over seems like a reasonable example.
Not to mention hiring/promoting the right people.
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.
He might be a smart nerd but he’s not a leader.
Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"?
If the CEO of Google gets fired, he just ends up as the CEO of another Fortune 500 company.
If he can't even land that role, he can just go around pocketing $50k/event speaking fee. Of course, that's only if he doesn't want to degrade himself by taking on a VP-level role at another Fortune 500 company.
That's a fairytale almost as preposterous as the tooth fairy.
That right there is more evidence for the tooth fairy than you’ll ever find in favor of CEOs assuming risk.
Does anyone seriously believe this? I see it all the time as a "comeback" against CEOs, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone arguing that they actually are the ones that assume all the risk.
Though he isn't injecting his money back into the company.
Full responsibility, but not too much.
They are essentially celebrities with a personal brand that corporations will hire to have the celebrity’s name as head the org.
A good celebrity can bring fresh energy and new atmosphere to an organisation.
It’s unclear whether the average CEO is worth their compensation, but what is clear is that bad leadership can tank an organisation to zero.
I have never once heard anyone make this claim.
Who specifically said they assume "all the risk" that we are refuting here?
Where does Adobe fit into this, are they even competitors?
Notice how everyone in this thread is calling Sundar out and not other people in the org who may be at fault too? It's the buck stops here thing.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7241
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.
And it's not that Google doesn't have major problems, a lot of which can be laid at Sundar's feet, or that he's wildly overpaid.
It's that these types of reactionary missives just miss the point in every possible way.
> And the rank-and-file Googlers will defend this because they think they caught God by the ankles with their 150k/year salary
That’s closer to their intern salaries. Total comp is more like double or more
Much of the rank and file’s total compensation is also in stock
Add to that if you wanted to, you can do the minimum and just coast.
No one is going to unionize and it’s not for the reasons you’ve cited. Maybe you shouldn’t comment on something you know barely anything about?
"Coast" a.k.a. perform only the duties as agreed in your contract, without going above and beyond. A.k.a. "quiet quitting", or the preposterous idea that the company doesn't own the time they don't pay you for.
I'm a somewhat long-time Googler and really dislike this anti-labour narrative.
Very weak counterpoint, essentially ad personam, trying to insinuate my ignorance, telling me to shut up. Not impressive.
Google can't build products, they didn't build anything useful since Search and Docs, so they won't be able to compete. Add a couple of years for consumers to catch on and migrate.
So I would give it 5-7 years in which the employees will slowly be demotivated by waves of layoffs, morale will tank, and accelerate the process. In that time, the upper mgmt will scramble to increase their bonuses to get as much as they can out of the sinking ship. In the end the company will face restructuring and be left with maybe 10% of the current size, trending downward.
However what is the benefit of ultra high income FAANG employees unionizing?
They could negotiate higher salaries, more transparency around compensation, more benefits, longer parental leave, bigger budget for travel or education, longer paid vacation, some guarantees and rules for layoffs, etc.
In the end, I don't see why unions (IF done right) could only work for the lower class.
I know that the TikTok videos of FAANG companies make it all seem like there is no more place to grow, but that's just smoke and mirrors. I think anti union efforts in FAANG companies also play to the employees ego and make them believe that they can negotiate better on their own than together.
Same as for any other group that unionizes - maximizing the leverage they have in negotiations with the employer, utilizing this leverage as best they see fit.
For examples of two very-high income groups that are unionized, see the Writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA. Just because you make a lot, doesn't mean that having a union is not in your interest.
For one thing, unionization is nearly guaranteed to raise salaries.
For another, it will get them better benefits and working conditions.
Overall, it reduces inequality, which is one of the major structural problems in our society and economy today.
Having labor be more powerful can also help when execs push for morally questionable projects.
Lastly, FAANG employees are working class.
Unions can ensure that the employees get a fair share of the revenue in proportion to the upper mgmt. They also can remove artificial promotion hurdles, that at Google happens according to destructive internal dynamics.
Such dynamics result in deprecating useful and loved products and instead promoting parasitic internal interest groups that can stranglehold growth and innovation in the company.
Ultimately, unions give the employees a voice in shaping the company. Now they can walk out, write posts on internal mailing lists, but at the end of the day they're still in a dictatorship, and they have to accept the decisions of the higher ups, and they won't be asked about their opinion.
Especially SWEs at FAANG. Y’all absolutely minted money the last few years. You get months and months of severance. Do you realize that most of us make “only” $130k as seniors and don’t get any stock bonuses or severance? If I made $300k/year I’d have YEARS of expenses in an emergency fund. Unionizing would be a win-win. Either I become a unionized employee or I take a 1-year sabbatical.
You guys blew it.
But I happen to think your right that the employer/worker balance has tipped way too far in favor of the employer in the last half-Century.
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.
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
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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?
@sine_break, [1],
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
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
While correcting for the mistake of inflated bloat from recruiting? Industry wide pattern is emerging useless hires.
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.
Now note that Google has a mostly positive reputation in society at large.
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...
> 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...
- 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.
I mean a tad overly cynical but vaguely true. Is this really such an epiphany for people? I never understood where does the idea that your employer is your friend even come from? Wait until you find out the etymology of the word salary!
These structures exist to make money. If they stop making money they die and all the jobs go with them and nobody gets paid anymore. If they stop growing they die.
Companies need money like you need oxygen. And if they don't die, if they figure it out and grow big, it is like the goose that layed the golden egg. All it has to do, all it can do, is waddle around and keep on laying golden eggs and shitting everywhere.
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.
A decent number of them are able to retire at 35-40.
That's awesome for individuals.
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)
If they don't need some employees, should they be forced to keep them?
[As far as I know, many people agree income inequality is the widest it's ever been, and is a bad thing for society]
Google has killed their search with advertising and promotion to the point where results are useless.
Product management has been terrible for the things I use over a 10+ year period.
Based on recent employee accounts of the culture and mindset there it's a mess.
I don't know who this guy is, maybe he's just been a caretaker of a place that was already on this path but he doesn't seem to have done anything to improve it. And he's getting paid over $200M? No wonder working people get angry.
We all have different jobs. I guess he did OK enough to receive whatever they agreed upon in advance.
Let's be honest, a 15 million compensation won't make a difference between 225 million..
It would be better to take the 225 million and make it a potential 1 million bonus to 225 engineers, I guarantee you would have better results.
I'd have fired harder and double cleaned the house
The comment about sociopathic almost-CEO's is spot on. Tony, Andy, Anthony, and Vic all would have been terrible CEO's.
On the other hand, Bill Coughran, Alan Eustace, Udi Manber, or Patrick Pichette would have been decent, at the very least. Maybe even very good.
There are two parts to this conversation 1) Should CEOs be paid like this? and 2) Should Sundar have received the compensation? There should be no doubt about 2). That's a commitment made to Sundar. Part 1) of the conversation is a different one.
More information on p49 of the filing says this below
> 2022 CEO Equity Award for Sundar
> The Compensation Committee currently follows a triennial grant cadence for CEO equity awards. Sundar’s last equity award was granted in December 2019, and fully vested at the end of December 2022. In December 2022, the Compensation Committee granted a new equity award to Sundar to recognize his strong performance as our CEO.
> As with the 2019 award, the 2022 award consisted of both GSUs and PSUs. The on-target value of the award was unchanged from the 2019 award. However, relative to the 2019 award, the Compensation Committee made two design changes such that more of the award’s vesting is dependent on performance: (1) increased the proportion of PSUs to 60% of the total award from 43%; and (2) increased the performance requirement for on-target PSU payout to the 55th percentile from the 50th percentile of Alphabet’s relative total shareholder return (TSR). These changes further align Sundar’s compensation to long-term shareholder value creation and Alphabet’s stock performance relative to the S&P 100 over the applicable performance periods.
> The GSU portion of the award vests quarterly over three years in 12 equal installments beginning March 25, 2023. The PSU portion of the award includes two tranches. The PSUs will vest, if at all, based on Alphabet’s TSR performance relative to the companies comprising the S&P 100 over a 2023-2024 performance period for the first tranche (2022 Tranche A) and over a 2023-2025 performance period for the second tranche (2022 Tranche B), subject to continued employment on each applicable vesting date. The number of PSUs vesting will be determined after the end of each performance period based on the payout curve illustrated below. Depending upon performance, the number of PSUs that vest will range from 0%-200% of the target number of PSUs. Upon vesting, each PSU and GSU will entitle Sundar to receive one share of Alphabet’s Class C capital stock.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923...
Consider the selection bias of people posting on social media. Also consider people would want to be positive on social media to keep their future employment prospects.
Why is this even considered news?
How does paying a CEO so much money benefit the shareholders? Do you honestly feel there aren’t millions of people that could do his job (and likely better) for a fraction of what he was paid?
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
CEO not being penalised for over-hiring and bad decision making in the first place?
Turkeys are never going to vote for Xmas/Thanksgiving. CEOs and the board are never going to be punished or fire themselves for being awful.
I would be extremely grateful to have worked at Google and be laid off. That's almost a non-problem.
It’s like the tech community suffers has some daddy issues with Google. Somehow it has to be this magical company that does everything right.
They have to not squeeze search ads for money. but at the same time they’ve been just been doing research into AI and not releasing profitable products.
I guess what other CEOs realize is perhaps the fact that reality doesn’t matter as long as you inject your personality into every conversation and distract people from reality