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.
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.
Sundar was chosen following a series of failures by megalomaniacal executives Larry had appointed/approved to head various departments, including Andy Rubin, Tony Fadell, and Anthony Levandwoski. Sundar was a move in the opposite direction.
Ironically, Vic was was empowered to counter a similar panic an upstart more formidable than OpenAI. He brought a bold vision alright, but that's not sufficient to be a good leader.
Overly opinionated people like that could thrive under Jobs, who was the biggest opinion setter, which made them fight for the most important things while getting a pushback on the most controversial areas and not waste time with minor stuff
Take that and they start going crazy (yes I'm talking about Johnny Ive)
War is sort of the opposite of "business as usual." The normal rules are abandoned. You still have the same high level strategic objectives, but the tactics are radically changed.
I would love to see Google go to war. Wake me up when they figure out how to do that.
> Unfortunately Sundar is also relatively weak at setting a bold vision to ensure the company continues to grow and innovate, as Larry had done.
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.
> if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same
In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.[11]
Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2]
These are the last 2 Google products I use
Search got replaced by DDG then Ecosia
Chrome by Firefox
Gmail by my own mail server
My Pixel 2 ran out of security coverage and sick of buying a new phone every 2 years I went to an iphone xs
Youtube and Maps are the only two sticky products left and both came about when I was in high school
The creation of Google Photos was basically an act of mutiny by David Lieb.
He kept getting told to stop working on it and he kept doing it anyway. Eventually resorting to back-channeling to Larry in order to get him to champion the project.
He tells the story in an episode of the podcast "The Social Radars."
>the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivizing not making mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value
This is in large part due to Ruth Porat's relentless multiyear campaign of cracking down on employee perks and salaries at Google, at a time when VCs were throwing blank checks at startups who in turn were poaching the best people with whole-number multiples of their current compensation. This destroyed arguably Google's single greatest asset — its public image as a "dream employer".
The lack of innovation and risk aversion are just second-order effects of losing the ability to execute (especially in the context of its ambitions) by being known as a second-rate employer in an industry primarily limited by the cost and ability to attract quality labor.
This doesn't excuse Sundar of course, because he was ultimately the CEO through all of this.
I think he cares deeply about the company and its mission, he just lacks the ability to be a bold and decisive leader. This can be a good thing in some cases (he is good at building consensus for example), but can also be harmful.
A quick Google (natch!) suggests that the company mission is: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Does he "care deeply" about this? If we look at the direction they've taken in recent years, and the products they've launched (and/or killed) - how many of them demonstrate a "deep care" about this mission? How many of them are even tangentially related to this mission?
(The projects that Google undertook in the early days --Earth, Maps, Mail, digitising whole libraries, photographing the world for StreetView-- definitely showed a dedication to this mission statement.)
The notion of organizing private information (VS the public internet) helped me shift my perspective a bit, thank you. It also dramatically amplified my feelings about other Google products, like Drive, which do an absolutely terrible job organizing and making private information accessible. It's almost maliciously bad.
What argument are you trying to make here? This feels very “I’m going to logic you into my view”. Google is a large, nuanced organisation. The measure of Sundar “caring deeply” doesn’t have to be filtered through a marketing slogan.
The previous poster wrote (of Sundar): "I think he cares deeply about the company and its mission..."
I'm not trying to make an argument; instead, I was:
1) Checking what Google's mission is these days (as I'm not clear if the mission statement I found is indeed still their mission, and/or the one that the previous poster said that he cares deeply about)
2) If that is the correct mission statement, testing the premise that he cares deeply about it, by exploring the direction the company under his leadership has taken.
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.
Satya Nadella is the counterexample to almost every excuse people make for Sundar's impotence. He took a larger, more inert desktop software company known for being monopolistic and greedy and turned it into the innovative backing of almost everybody's technical and knowledge infrastructure in one way or another. In contrast, Sundar has taken an innovative, creative company with a money printer, massive user engagement, and an incredible brand, and turned it into a monopolistic ad sales company.
Money isn't everything. Time is. For someone currently earning $225,000 this would save them a thousand years of hard work. A thousand years.
You don't have to think money is everything to understand how earning $225 million in a short time will help you with all the things you do care about, whether it's retiring early, spending time with kids, supporting charity, pursuing hobbies, doing independent research, or taking care of aging parents.
I don't have a cozy 200k 40hr/wk 6 weeks of vacation gig. Would be nice! I'm at about a sixth of that myself, on much longer hours, but I don't work at Google. But even if I did, it wouldn't let me retire within 5 years and still have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my life, work on whatever I feel like without ever worrying about making money from it, put my kids through university, buy a house next to my aging parents, with a nice garden space for my wife, have a garage, build a machine shop in the garage just to tinker on the things I've always wanted to, spend my weekday hours going on walks and reading books and camping in the countryside, being a stay-at-home dad, hire a tutor for myself, maybe run a high-risk hardware startup without spending my time pleading with investors or worrying about my family's future in the case of inevitable failure, hire people to help with tasks I struggle to do and pay them well to do it, and still have leftover change to maybe buy a new MRI machine for my local hospital or fund a homeless shelter.
Even $200k would be awesome and get rid of a lot of major stresses and uncertainties like being able to afford my own place to live and a spare bedroom for the kid and worrying out about finding my next paying contract. It would give me "plenty" of time, but not all of my time, not even half of it. I'd still need to keep working most of my daylight hours for most of my healthy years.
Honestly, with a $225 million compensation package, I don't see how someone like Sundar could have any long-term incentives whatsoever. He's set for life and won't be hungry for anything, regardless of how Google performs.
I have a similar sentiment towards ‘what would I be doing if I had this much money on the side’ aka totally risk free life (from the financial perspective) as you do. There is just so much stuff to explore and tinker around and yet most of the millionaires shown in the tv don’t do any of that, instead pursue more money or status. What a waste of time.
At the current pace of savings and earnings I won’t be able to retire in the next 25years, whilst mentally I am already ready to retire to do all the things you listed and more.
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just go for it and start living the life as if I had all the millions laying around and making the most out of my relatively healthy body. But I’m afraid it would be quite stressful to burn through savings and be forced to go back to a corporate job all over again…
>> You don't have to think money is everything to understand how earning $225 million in a short time will help you with all the things you do care about, whether it's [list of options]
Well yeah? So will 225k as an engineer vs 25k as a bus boy.
Life can still be great. How much money you make isn't really all that important, I'm happy to inform you. No need to be jealous, count your own blessings!
I'm very happy, because my wife is a wonderful person and I love my family, and that's what matters most. Wish we could provide our kids with their own bedroom, but still, life is good. But sorry, wait, that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. I was answering why money, despite not being everything, enables one to spend their time much more freely, and I would gladly invest a few years playing CEO of Alphabet to get back far more time than that over the remaining 40 years of my lifespan, and you are arguing in favour of... declining that job, because money isn't everything?
Yes indeed a job of a CEO is not an easy peasy one if you are not into politics and power games but IMHO it’s a small price to pay if you are compensated like that and after such a stint you won’t need to work ever again.
The fact that most of the CEOs are still working after receiving such a compensation package shows their different mindset which is probably essential to becoming a CEO in the first place… personally I’d gladly take 1/100th of that and never have to worry about money ever again. Doesn’t mean I would stop working. I’d just stop working for money trying to hack my way into early retirement which probably won’t come anyways.
Oh, I don't. Definitely don't envy their lives, after working with them.
They all keep working from the few I know, it's a certain kind of person. Almost a curse. Even with hundreds of millions. One is doing django alongside me almost 12hr/day... lol...
I know some retired policemen/public workers and they're doing handsomely. Went hunting one time and this guy was decked out, asked him "what do you do?!" Turns out he's retired police...
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!
Except how profitable is Google's cloud? It lost 480 million last quarter.
AWS made 5.2B last quarter.
Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. The support is non existent. Why tie yourself to such an unreliable partner?
I tried looking up one for Amazon or AWS projects, but only unrelated news articles came up.
I don't really have a horse in the race, though, since all three of the big platforms (and others like Oracle Cloud) are outside of my price point and all my personal projects run on smaller simple VPS providers. From what I can tell, there is not a single large corporation out there with the commitment to never kill a product of theirs and support everything in perpetuity.
These are weak reasons. They may have been at 90% over the last few years but things are quickly changing.
The fasting growing cloud? 6% in five years after pouring in billions now they need to start charging what it costs. The more unprofitable of the cloud vendors.
Chrome is still the most popular free browser. Not sure that matters as much as it once did.
I think the change in sentiment is that the sky is no longer the limit for Alphabet. Meta lost that notion big time, and Amazon is so so too. Apple and Microsoft might still be in the "sky is the limit" category, or at least in another category than the other 3.
Microsoft would have become IBM, if not for Satya Nadella. He completely rejuvenated Microsoft after Ballmer's reign.
Microsoft successfully transitioned into cloud computing with Azure, Office 365, and Teams. They dramatically improved their image among developers/open source with WSL, Typescript, VS Code, and their GitHub acquisition. Now it seems they caught Google completely off guard with respect to AI productization.
There are stated costs, and real world costs. It wouldn't be hard for Azure to be far better than AWS on some metric, say better free support, or I guess better paid support too.
My guess is the impact of the poor tech is quite low if your scale is small and you are not all that technical yourself. A good option for smaller less Eng focused customers.
Steve Ballmer stepped down in 2014. If we're giving credit to CEOs for things that happened while they were CEO (which isn't really valid), Azure was launched in 2010 and Office 365 was launched in 2011, both during Ballmer's tenure.
The statista statistics are almost immediately covered by a subscribe for access popup. Search seems to be doing as you say in general, but also is loosing share on desktop to bing, where edge would be the most relevant competing browser.
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?
As much as I hate Google killing off its products, I think the alternatives are worse, i.e., either launching fewer new products or supporting products that are not sustainable (which would ultimately lead to launching fewer products).
Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft in 2014, right after Ballmer and basically brought the company back from the brink of irrelevancy. Even if we can't point to Pichai as the person responsible for Google's dysfunction, he had time to steer the ship.
My impression is, Sundar has perfected it? I remember the post the other day that listed all the products that were killed over the years, that has been going on for a while. It would be interesting to see products launched vs. products killed, and average lifetime of products.
> 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?
“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.
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.
Yes they have done great work and discovered some really cool stuff, but they have not been able to commercialize it. That's what a CEO/management chain should ultimately be measured by, not whether they've built a great Xerox style research PARC.
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.
You can’t look at this stuff in a vacuum. How did Google fare compare to the broader tech market? If they were outperforming before and matching/underperforming after, that’s a wholly different picture.
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.
Over the past 4 years, GOOG's net income and earnings per share have fallen quite a bit. Revenue has been pretty flat. I don't get why Pichai is so well paid. Ballmer actually did preside over some impressive growth when he was CEO of MSFT. Pichai has not.
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.
The macrotrends list of net income by year below the charts is correct. The trailing 12 month chart at the top you may have been looking at is not a chart of annual net income.
Ballmer made bets on the windows phone, Zune, Bing (ads) etc in a bid to strengthen the moat around windows/Office. Most of these bets didn't pay, the strategy to build stuff to protect your core business does stymie company growth. I think Google has gotten itself into a similar position that Microsoft was in circa 2012.
Ballmer focused more on short term growth - pushing Windows, Office and related tools. The board was happy because revenues were up. They shouldn't have been happy. Tech companies have two choices: innovate or become irrelevant.
How is Google in a Microsoft position? Ballmer made wasteful acquisitions like Skype and Nokia, and wasted 3 years trying to compete with the iOS by building 2 separate ARM operating system (Windows RT, Windows Phone) only to kill them both and revert focus to the x86 Surface line.
Google hasn't done antything like that. Their product discontinuations have mostly been for niche applications.
> 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.
I think you may underestimate how much ads is dependent on search. Google ads is an attractive place to buy ads (as opposed to the n + 1 other web ad exchanges) because of the ability to place ads on Google search through that platform. If search and YouTube weren't dominant in their market, there would be no reason to choose to use Google ads as opposed to a cheaper ad exchange.
"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.
It’s really funny to read this over and over from so many people. You are saying google can’t match and surpass chatGPT? You know, google the people who invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT… the people who wrote the first ML training frameworks and the subsequent most popular one… the ones who designed hardware accelerators to minimize training and inference… the people with enough excess compute to probably train a model with even more parameters? Come on.
Disruptions like this happen: Sun the main driver of the Web in the 90s, who partnered with Netscape to create JavaScript, who led the workstation industry with the Spark microprocessors, and created Java (at that time a lot of people thought that Java was the future platform to build software, including Steve Jobs)… doesn’t exists anymore.
Execution is more important than being the first.
MS and OpenAI did an excellent move, and now Google needs catch up. It doesn’t matter if they invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT, they are not the ones capitalizing it.
I've heard this countless times as well and I wonder if the root cause comes from Google's inability to turn its research into practical applications.
Case in point, 2017 Google Brain released the "Attention Is All You Need" paper however haven't done anything proactively to deliver it to mass users like OpenAI have done (among others) - perhaps this is the kick that Google needs to remind them that research alone isn't enough, it needs practical applications and the question could be whether Pichai is the right CEO to deliver that
TBH no I don’t think that’s the case. I think they are actually approaching this space with care. Whether it’s social media, search, or ChatGPT there is an obvious human-race scale impact that I believe google recognizes that the “disrupters” disregard.
Google may indeed have the research knowledge that surpasses everyone one in the industry - but they have very little to show in terms of using that knowledge to build actual products. For example - Google home, which does a far better job at voice recognition and understanding context than Amazon’s Alexa. Yet, GH still lags far behind Amazon.
It's not about ability though, they can do all that and some more. It's about focus, they're so large, they might not focus and react and change quick enough like the smaller players with inferior technology might.
This pattern plays out all the time in the tech industry. You think google didn't know how to make a website like facebook? Of course, but they couldn't beat a much smaller weaker opponent even then. Google now is about 8 times larger than Google 2011 and much slower.
Maybe not in legal terms. However a 90% market share in a market where the majority of consumers never evaluates switching to a competitor, gives you so much leeway in execution, that there isn't much difference to a monopoly.
> The only thing he has done is not destroy the Google cash firehose.
Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.
Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.
And yet here we are, on the front-page of HN discussing exactly this.
These responses asking who "we" are feels like (bad) attempts at justifying the hilariously inefficient salary, as if "it's none of your business" is the best counterargument to why they should be paid so much but provide so little.
Also, I and I'm sure many others here are shareholders, if that matters.
YouTube is yet another echo chamber and that is clearly toxic and only becoming more so as is being transformed with tiktok like functionality and content. It is becoming what is essentially the mainstream model; get people addicted to watching so you can feed their minds with mind drugs, aka ads.
YouTube gets away with numerous anti-user tactics because they're in-effect the only show in town, not because the experience is great.
It's not a big surprise that a Google backed product could suffer to bleed money the longest over other streaming services.. in other words their longevity in the field isn't an indicator of quality or customer happiness, just circumstance.
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.
Google was previously known for being engineering-oriented and was respected for that by the developers. Now it seems that all it is known for is empire-building, dropping products, and features for the sake of features.
... 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"?
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.
Oh, it's even better than that. This is just his compensation for last year. Add all previous years to it, plus stock he owns. Plus, the ability to get low interest loans which he can spend acquiring more assets.
> Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the 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.
How did you get from "taking all the risk" to "taking full responsibility"? Both mean entirely different things and you can easily have one without the other.
i.e. a lead surgeon can and should take "full responsibility" for what happens in the OR, but they obviously neither can nor will (and I also don't think should) shoulder "all the risk" for what happens in the OR (or even most of it).
Is this a serious question? Pichai will not experience hardship in any circumstance. His access to a roof, food, healthcare, quality of life, etc. are not in danger, now or in the future. The worst possible outcome for him still leaves many more zeroes in his personal finances than the vast majority of employees will ever see at any point in their life.
Reputational risk does affect the supply of viable CEO candidates (here we are deriding Pichai for perceived Google failures), but it’s far from the only factor. The main reason CEO total comp is so high in big companies is to align the CEO with the interests of shareholders. Something the layoffs with likely also aligned with.
The risk is that all google failures, whether simply perceived or real, are publicly attributed to him. This is real and is one of many factors that influences the willingness of qualified candidates to seek CEO roles in the first place, let alone of very large, very well known companies. But it is certainly not the only factor, and it’s not even a very significant factor in most cases, when it comes to determining CEO comp.
The real people who “take all the risk” are the investors (and they obviously don’t take “all” the risk). Somehow this platitude started getting applied to executives, but that has always been based on a misunderstanding of how executive comp is typically structured.
Comp doesn't have to be high to be aligned. The reason it is so high is because of the massive risk and uncertainty of replacing a CEO. There are thousands of people at Google who would be perfectly fine CEOs and be willing to do it for small fraction of what Sundar Pichai costs, but how do you find them? Hiring is such an inexact process that there's a large chance that the guy you chose won't be one of those competent people. And a bad CEO at a company the size of Google can cost hundreds of billions of dollars. So this gives a competent CEO leverage to raise his comp to very high levels. When Pichai asks for $200 million, he knows that the board will give it to him because it just makes financial sense. They're not going to risk hundreds of billions of dollars on a potential bad CEO when they can pay their current CEO 0.1% of that to stay. Essentially CEOs are able to hold the board hostage.
This explanation you’ve cooked up is basically just a fan fiction. Any CEO who tried to “hold their board hostage” would be saying goodbye to their job, and likely their career, in short order. Pichai’s salary is $2 million. The rest of his compensation is incentives. Almost all of his compensation comes from incentive packages designed to align his interests with the interests of shareholders.
So he could perform so poorly he gets $0 in incentives, collects his $2,000,000 salary, gets fired, and still make in one year more than the average US household will in the next ~25 years.
Everything I’ve said is 100% factually correct. The bulk of his pay comes from performance incentives (defined by internal, non-share-price-related performance metrics). In the past he’s had a seperate incentive package based on how google stock did benchmarked against the S&P100 index. I don’t know if he still has that, but he’d still be performing well against that metric if he did. Google stock is up about 100% from early 2020. Hope this helps you understand how these incentive packages work a bit better.
No it’s not. It was in the 70 something range in early 2020 and lately it’s been 90 something. And regardless you still have to demonstrate support for your conclusion, which is that his compensation is aligned with shareholders. It’s not.
What we actually have here and with CEO pay in general at large organizations is what’s pretty well known as a principal/agent problem, where the manager class sets the rules for themselves in a way that results in the transfer of assets from shareholders to themselves.
It was ~$55 in March 2020, and most recently closed at $105. But the two key points you seem to be missing are:
1. Not all incentive packages are tied to share price. Many of them are tied to other metrics that the (shareholder elected) board decide are appropriate. This is where the bulk of Pichai’s comp comes from.
2. When they are tied to share price, they tend to be benchmarked. In this case Pichai’s share price incentives have been benchmarked against the S&P100, against which Google has been doing perfectly well. The reason for this is because directors generally don’t task CEOs with preventing economic downturns, and they typically want any incentives they create to be as effective under those conditions as they would be at any other time.
The shareholders are absolutely setting the rules for the executives here.
It’s no worse than picking a market high preceding an ongoing recession as a reference, as the parent commenter did. The point is that his stock performance incentives are not tied to the absolute value of the stock, as the parent commenter is mistakenly claiming. Most of his performance based incentives don’t even relate to stock price, as the parent commenter is also mistakenly claiming. But the ones that do are tied to the stock’s performance against a benchmark. That benchmark has had the same ups and downs as the rest of the market, and Google’s stock has been tracking against it very well. Something that is an achievement, and that’s what google’s shareholder elected directors decided to reward him for with performance based incentives.
These are very simple concepts, and while you can be forgiven for not already knowing them, aspiring to retain your ignorance certainly isn’t admirable.
I get your point, but to be precise, it’s more that the impact is greater, because the very nature of being an employee is the willingness to trade supposed and perceived security and ease for the potential of gains.
That’s just a story told by employers. The reality is the very nature of being an employee in most cases is to be exploited and expendable, last in line and first on the chopping block.
When the CEO and CFO sign off on the financial statements, they assume an extraordinary amount of risk. If there is fraud occurring in the financial reporting of their company, they will be severely disciplined. I suggest reading up on Sarbanes-Oxley Section 302[0] and the Enron[1] and WorldCom[2] accounting scandals. Sarbanes-Oxley was issued as a response to the aforementioned scandals and lays out the bulk of the risk that a CEO and other executives take on.
At Enron and Worldcom the CEOs were committing fraud. They brought that in themselves. It wasn't a "risk" they assumed. This is a bit of a ridiculous statement.
I’m not discussing the CEOs from those scandals. I’m discussing the ramifications of the scandals that have been passed onto present day CEOs. The GP asked what risk current CEOs assume. I linked them directly to Section 302 of Sarbanes-Oxley, which is the authoritative body on risk that a CEO assumes for a publicly-traded company in the US.
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.
The fact that this is currently the third highest voted comment is just sad. As other sibling commenters have said virtually every sentence here contains ridiculous falsehoods or is just "r/antiwork" levels of nonsense.
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.
I disagree. The entire tech sector had one of the strongest labor positions in the country for the last decade. It was short sighted not to unionize. Now, layoffs are widespread, compensation is way down, while all the profits go to shareholders. This applies to Google and many other profitable tech companies.
Many, many people in the software industry, especially at a place like Google, absolutely do not want to unionize, and for excellent reasons. Pretty much every union in existence assigns value to union members based on tenure, and it pretty much assumes members are "interchangeable cogs" in most other respects. A lot of people reasonably hate that idea, because they know that they can negotiate for more based on their personal value to a company.
I'm not anti-union generally, and I'm glad to see a revival of unionization where it makes sense, e.g. places like Starbucks and Amazon, where workers are largely treated like interchangeable cogs by management already, and so a union improves employee bargaining power. And I also think it would make sense for certain areas of tech, and certain software companies, to want to unionize.
But this is Google. As others have commented, many software engineers at Google easily make hundreds of thousands annually in stock awards alone. I can't imagine any highly competent software engineer there wanting a union, because it means that their bargaining power is no better than the "average" software dev, which is obviously false.
I think Sundar's compensation is absurd, but I also think layoffs were warranted given the obscene levels of overhiring many of these tech companies did during the pandemic. And when you say "compensation is way down", at big FAANGs that is largely due to the value of stock awards, but many people would rather get compensated in stock to begin with - Google employees especially reaped gargantuan rewards up until 2022 based on stock.
I understand this argument, and there are definitely many Google engineers who believe this, but I believe this belief to be mistaken. Unfortunately, most engineers really are replaceable cogs.
Google’s origins can be traced back to really smart people innovating through brilliant new algorithms. So it’s understandable why people at Google believe that being brilliant is an irreplaceable asset. If only enough Jeff Deans could be brought together, something amazing would surely happen. But how accurately does this belief match reality? Most successful companies today innovate on product, not raw technology. 99% of product work really can be done by anyone. There are now plenty of multi-billion dollar companies that had original products engineered by total amateurs. Raw technical ability just isn’t that important anymore. And you see this in Google’s business. For how self-proclaimedly smart Googlers are, they sure have a hard time growing the business through new products.
And when I say total comp is down, I’m not talking about existing employees (although their comp is down too for the reason you mention). Go look at job openings near you. More likely than not, base salaries and equity packages will be much lower than before.
> 99% of product work really can be done by anyone.
LOL
It's true that raw technical brilliance doesn't automatically translate to good products, but it's painfully obvious with Google's non-ability to create compelling products in recent years that product work can't be done by just anyone...
What difference does it make what form the compensation is in? Is your argument that because employees receive stock that they somehow have enough voting power to influence company policy? That’s laughable.
That's really irrelevant. Even if compensation was entirely in cash, they'd likely still be shareholders through index fund investing, e.g. most 401k options would invest in the company. Does that mean employees working at an S&P 500 company should never unionize because technically they're shareholders?
Employees at Google are made shareholders because its cheaper for the company than paying cash. Employees form an absolutely tiny minority. The point of unionizing is to increase the leverage of the workers at a company. Workers would benefit much more from unionization than they would from holding the stock at a company without a union.
> Workers would benefit much more from unionization than they would from holding the stock at a company without a union.
Maybe this would work if the employees have some sort of monopoly like the people who work at the ports. However, with knowledge workers there’s a threshold when it’s simply cheaper to move states or even countries.
Employees who are well compensated also do not have an incentive to form a union.
You’re still wrong. What’s your next proposal? Investment bankers should unionize?
Investment bankers job is to deploy capital. How would unionizing help them? Will unionizing increase the amount of capital? No, so no sane person would suggest that.
Software engineers are primarily manufacturers. They make products. The barrier to entry is extremely low for this line of work. I get that you think you’re really smart, but there are tens to hundreds of millions of people in the world who could do your job adequately. Your only leverage is to band together with others doing your work and demand your fair share from the business’ owners.
> I get that you think you’re really smart, but there are tens to hundreds of millions of people in the world who could do your job adequately.
This is my point, and you’ve just bolstered it. If knowledge workers ”band together”, the company will just hire elsewhere. Your arguments are terrible
It’s very difficult to just up and move a company. When the employees are unionized, the company is not able to leverage the knowledge of some workers to facilitate the transition.
If the reason not to unionize is that the company will just move, how much job security do you have without the union? As soon as it’s cheaper to do your job elsewhere, your job will be gone. At least with a union, you have a hope of protecting your livelihood.
> It’s very difficult to just up and move a company.
This makes sense for factories, but it’s a weak argument for knowledge workers. There’s a lot less physical infrastructure and we’ve literally just proven that remote work is effective for entire organizations within the last 3 years.
> As soon as it’s cheaper to do your job elsewhere, your job will be gone
Did you not read my previous comments? The second a union is created is the same second it’s cheaper to move elsewhere for knowledge workers. You’ve even validated this argument with your “engineers from other places are good enough” line
You haven’t thought this through given your terrible logic, and your comments make it seem like you still haven't graduated and started work yet.
> Did you not read my previous comments? The second a union is created is the same second it’s cheaper to move elsewhere for knowledge workers. You’ve even validated this argument with your “engineers from other places are good enough” line
I did read your comment. If the company is perfectly free to close up shop and move, then what is applying upward pressure on your wage? Nothing. You can expect your wage to continually fall until it is inline with other college-educated professionals. You don't even need to be licensed to be a software engineer, and many influential engineers aren't even college educated. It's just not that hard of a job. Median college educated salary is $80,000, which is in-line with mechanical and civil engineering salaries. You can expect software engineering salaries to settle around there absent any intervention from labor.
One issue I have with your argument is that you are providing hypotheticals. "Hypothetically, software businesses will relocate when faced with unionization." But software companies are already paying an extreme premium for labor. That premium implies it's not possible to find the required talent elsewhere. There also are unionized software shops, e.g. game developers, so it's not a given that businesses will automatically be relocated.
Essentially my argument is one along the lines of preparing for a rainy day. The best time to save is when times are good so you can spend when times are bad. Times have been good for software engineers. Now the times are changing. Those who haven't saved are in for a rough ride.
> I did read your comment. If the company is perfectly free to close up shop and move, then what is applying upward pressure on your wage? Nothing.
Keeping in my that we are talking about Google and companies like it; historically, investors such as angels and VCs want to minimize risk when investing in volatile startups. How do you do this when investing in knowledge based companies? One way is by past accomplishments of the founders, but a more common method is by looking at their credentials. You invest based on an individual’s university alma mater and previous employers. The institutions matter. The more exclusive the better. There’s less criticism on your judgement if you hire from Stanford and MIT. Fast forward. When a company matures, this mentality of hiring stays within its cultural DNA whether or not they admit it. There are a finite number of those graduates from those schools with those majors.
> It's just not that hard of a job.
It’s a much harder job than being an armchair economist. This is not accurate at all. You should just stop being very wrong with overconfidence. The only thing you’re achieving is constantly reminding me that economics isn’t a real science that it pretends to be. It has no repeatable theoretical model, hence all of the contradictory conclusions.
> You can expect software engineering salaries to settle around there absent any intervention from labor.
It may happen in the next 10 - 20 years, but that’s not reality at the moment or in the past.
> One issue I have with your argument is that you are providing hypotheticals. "
Wow, the kettle likes calling the pot black. Most if not all your arguments are also hypotheticals.
> That premium implies it's not possible to find the required talent elsewhere.
See my first paragraph for the reason
> Essentially my argument is one along the lines of preparing for a rainy day.
If we remember the original argument being that Google engineers should unionize, this is just stupid. Time and effort are finite resources. By the time the day of reckoning comes, and I agree that it will one day, our generation will be either retired or transitioned because we have a half life. Most engineers transition to other positions like management and other job functions by their early to mid 40s, or even much sooner. Unionizing now isn’t logical because it interferes with maximizing our gains now and in the immediate future ie promotions and immediate job stability. Seriously, before you double down on theory, maybe you should start a career first in the tech industry before you keep making terrible assumptions.
> The barrier to entry is extremely low for this line of work. I get that you think you’re really smart, but there are tens to hundreds of millions of people in the world who could do your job adequately.
This is so laughably insane when it comes to Google-caliber software engineers.
The thesis of my argument is hiring that caliber of engineer provides little marginal value over a lesser engineer. The evidence is that Google has struggled to release successful products despite their supposed advantage in engineering quality.
Of course the stock goes up. But the employees are an extreme minority shareholder, so they're totally beholden to the larger shareholders. If the company wants to layoff workers, they're powerless to stop it. Workers are also powerless to stop getting their pay cut. Go look at current job openings. Those cushy 500K total comp jobs are gone.
Rank and file employees owning hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars of shares is not unheard of in companies like Google. It’s obvious that you havent worked in the tech industry because you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
1 million on 1.36T (Google’s market cap) is 0.00007%. Let’s say Google has 25,000 engineers and they each own 1 million. That’s less than 2% of the company. And obviously 1 million is unlikely to be the average engineer ownership stake.
You’re conflating two things: earning a decent salary and having power with management. Current Google engineers have good salaries, but they hold no power with management. Their positions could eliminated without them having a say.
I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
Probably you’ll answer with something like: “software has 0 marginal cost so software engineers have extreme productivity numbers.” That’s true, but your wage, absent a union or scarcity of skill, is not tied to your productivity. Take construction nail production. Nails used to be made by hand. Now someone with some rolls of steel wire and a machine can make hundreds of thousands of nails in the time it took to make a few by hand. Yet the person making nails probably earns less than the person who made them by hand. The surplus value is captured by the owner of the machine.
You, as an engineer, are not special. You have no moat. From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
> 1 million on 1.36T (Google’s market cap) is 0.00007%. Let’s say Google has 25,000 engineers and they each own 1 million. That’s less than 2% of the company. And obviously 1 million is unlikely to be the average engineer ownership stake.
It doesn't matter. Compared to the average person, they will still reap a lot of the benefits of rising stock value. Given that stock is a major part of compensation, owning $1 million or more dollars worth of shares is more common than you think, but how should you know? You haven't worked in tech, and judging from your comments it doesn't seem like you've even joined the work force yet.
> I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
We are talking about circumstances in the past and present ie right now, and not in the far off future of 10-20 years from now. It is nonsensical to unionize when both the pay and benefits are decent. When this changes, then behaviour will naturally change.
> From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
Given all of the convoluted logic from your comments, that applies more to the person you see in the mirror rather than myself. You live in an ivory tower; you need to experience the real world first before you double down on a subject that you're not very familiar with.
""" As of 31 December 2021, Larry Page and Sergey Brin owned 85.9% of the company’s Class B shares meaning that they controlled approximately 51.4% of the company’s voting power. """
I have no idea what you guys (esp sibling comment) are arguing about. Larry and Sergey control the company and no other shareholders, no matter how many millions of shares they hold, would be able to block a decision that Larry and Sergey approved of.
I wasn’t arguing about control. If you actually read the arguments the gist of it is that shareholders are the only financial benefactors at companies, implying that employees don’t own any shares. I just reminded people who weren’t familiar with Silicon Valley that it isn’t true since stock is a big part of compensation for rank and file employees
Shares generally give you two benefits, one is a share of the up/downsides, and another is a right of governance in the company. The way employee share distributions are done right now means employees get a tiny fraction of the first and none of the second, even though they are a large stakeholder in the company's future.
This is a moot point if you understand how capitalism works and the goal of corporate executives: ensuring maximum value for shareholders. As I’ve mentioned before, Google employees own a large amount of stock compare to the average person. Consequently, they will benefit no matter what
> This is a moot point if you understand how capitalism works and the goal of corporate executives: ensuring maximum value for shareholders.
Yes, and the goal of communism is to "share the resources and maximize everybody's potential", wonderful if you are incredibly naive and believe that these systems always do exactly what it says on the sticker, and just an empty platitude if you've lived at least two days in the real world.
Here's an example [1] of pro capitalists fucking over 49% of the shareholders to favor 51% of them, and you can find plenty more examples of you look through recent financial news. So tell me once again how being a 1e-7th shareholder of a trillion dollar tech company is guaranteed to "benefit you no matter what"?
Fair point (this is the best counterargument in this thread so far), but do you have actual evidence of Google c level executives fucking over employee owned shares?
If anything unions are pro work because they improve the workplace. Maybe you mean anti unchecked management class which, well, is not good for anyone.
> Add to that if you wanted to, you can do the minimum and just coast.
"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.
The whole idea of that being "quiet quitting" is preposterous. For many, many jobs that's just called a good work-life balance. They're buying your time in order to complete a task, they're not buying your soul. They want a task done, do the task. Doing just your job and no more is not a bad thing lol
It’s not an anti labor narrative. It’s reality. When you start having families, you slow down. Many googlers who want to keep pushing tend to leave Google
That might be possible in some medium-sized companies. In megacorps probably about 5-10% of your time goes into various flavours of performance management. To hide for any significant amount of time, you'd need to have your manager actively cover you.
Yes, having a counterpoint with a relevant data point that you missed is “weak”
you are ignorant, making your argument weak and just plain wrong. Should people no longer point out when comments are really wrong? You’re also over generalizing while being completely incorrect ie making shit up
You don't know if he's ignorant based on his one comment, seems you are also over generalizing, also this comment isn't really ignorant.
He did state issues that are conceptually accurate and generally describe the situation, regardless of whether the number in the yearly salary is a little different, this doesn't change the problem.
You didn't provide a "relevant data point". The base salary for an L3 (rank-and-file) SWE in the Bay Area (which is one of the highest paid areas in the US) is 140K on levels.fyi. You've compared this to the total comp which includes stock (that tanked recently), and a bonus (which isn't guaranteed). You're asserting that you're right and I have no idea what I'm talking about baselessly and being agressive and rude. I don't need to engage with that, nobody does.
In the article if you read it, most of Sundar’s criticized compensation came in the form of stock. Total comp is relevant. It might be down, but it’s still way more than 150k. It’s double or more
L3’s are newbies. They’re one step above interns. It’s easy to become an L4. L4 - L5 are rank and file.
You’re still really wrong and very ignorant on the subject.
As for being aggressive, I’m not the one over generalizing and calling the rank and file at Google spineless
Stock "tanked" 35% from the top after running up for years. It doesn't make the stock component of the compensation zero. Median compensation is >$300K. You could have made your point without making up numbers that are easily fact checked.
Other guy is right, you're misinformed and continuing to argue when you're wrong makes you ignorant and foolish.
He brought up that you are grossly off the mark on salary. And it’s a pretty broad brush to say everyone at google is “timid” and this is the only reason they don’t unionize.
Can you define "several years"? Google's revenues are at all-time highs, and still growing (albeit slowly). Seems pretty far from anything drying up...
Yes, as long as it takes for competitors to build products that are more useful in access to knowledge than Google Search (here GPT + Bing is the most visible threat, but it could be anyone), and that capture your attention better than YouTube (TikTok is the biggest competitor in this space, but again, it could be anyone).
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.
I agree with you. What people seem to forget is that Google simply did one thing even just marginally better back in the 90s and has been riding that heavy train ever since. All the other stuff, even YouTube is also essentially just dumb luck and a function of that initial success, not to mention that Google was going to shut YouTube down before someone made the case for making it an ad platform, which should have been obvious to Google of all organizations even at that time.
Frankly, Google is like the guy who invented a thing early in life and has been living off the royalties that just flood in, but has absolutely no touch with reality and is convinced of his own greatness as an illusion of that single act so many decades ago. And his kids are even worse and more rotten and spoiled.
> Google was going to shut YouTube down before someone made the case for making it an ad platform, which should have been obvious to Google of all organizations even at that time.
Nokia sold about $50Bn worth of phones in 2007, another $50Bn in 2008. They made an enormous amount of money long after it was obvious to everyone their business was in massive decline.
iPhone 3G came out in summer of 2008. While Blackberry was doing very well versus Nokia, it was certainly not obviously in massive decline long before summer 2008. Perhaps the original iPhone in summer 2007 alerted people in the business, but still, that is just 1 year before. Until then, Nokia's smartphones were still considered among the top of the line.
Just speculating: if we believe that the workers together are stronger than as individuals, they could force even more concessions.
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.
>However what is the benefit of ultra high income FAANG employees unionizing?
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.
The distinguishing factor for being working class/owner class is whether or not you make the majority of your income from your labour, or from your capital.
Incredibly well-paid working class, but working class all the same.
A regular family home with 4 bedrooms near the office is $3M or more. If you have to save aggressively for 10 or 20 years to own a home close to work, then you are at best working class.
Not if you have a visa to worry about. Doesn’t matter how much money you have then. You need another job in 30 days or you and your entire family are at risk.
Moving generally sucks. Moving is traumatic whether it is forced or not and whether a migrant or not. It can be almost the same trauma when moving to the other side of a large city as moving to another country. Kids still change schools; spouses still change jobs; housing and community changes; distance to friends and family changes interactions; etc
At least a migrant has the option of returning to their home country with a network of family and old friends; natives are stuck jobless and with high cost of living or choosing to uproot and migrate to a new country with lower cost of living, becoming migrants themselves. There is no stress-free ride for anyone.
It depends on how you define the boat. I think you can argue that in both cases continued servitude is the only way either of them can get food and a place to sleep indoors. There’s a big gulf of experience beyond that. But you can only form a coalition with someone on the basis of common ground. So while you’re both right, it’s not going to help either the cleaner or the engineer get better treatment if they don’t acknowledge similarities where they exist.
> I think you can argue that in both cases continued servitude is the only way either of them can get food and a place to sleep indoors.
No you can’t argue that because it’s stupid. A typical google software engineer will have made enough that in their early 30s they can quit/retire and live the rest of their life at at least the same standard of living as that cleaning lady (almost none of them find that an acceptable standard but that’s far beyond food and a place to sleep)
So what do you want then, a world where the engineer has the same standard of living as the cleaner or where the cleaner has the same standard of living as the engineer?
No one's saying they have exactly the same struggle to deal with. The cleaning lady definitely has more struggles, but this does not change the fundamental point that both the Google Staff engineer and the cleaning lady primarily derive their wealth by selling their labour, as opposed to deriving their wealth from their capital.
They both have the surplus value created by their labor stolen by the capitalist class.
Of course, that affects the cleaning lady more, but the core theft and the exploitative power dynamics they both are affected by are the same.
One of the tricks capital uses to keep control is to pit us against each other. Only through solidarity throughout the entire working class we can affect real change.
Good for you that you're from Denmark. It seems like an amazing country that I would love to visit and spend some time or even live in, but I'm afraid I couldn't fall in love with the language.
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.
> Good for you that you're from Denmark. It seems like an amazing country that I would love to visit and spend some time or even live in, but I'm afraid I couldn't fall in love with the language.
Live in Copenhagen and you can more than get by without knowing the language, although obviously you start picking up some functional words.
IMO: so they have a voice in matters. These companies are playing roles more impactful on the future of humanity than that played by modern nation states. And who is driving their directions? At best boards and at worst hyper-ambitious individuals looking to climb corporate ladders by any means necessary.
I don’t understand how Americans have been brainwashed into thinking getting fired is the end of the world and doing anything to “rock the boat” is being mean to the company.
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.
The other points weren't great but when it degrades to insults, there's no point in saying anything in response. I'm surprised this stayed up, I thought this kind of language is against HN policy.
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.
If a company hired me, provided for my healthcare and my retirement benefits, and paid me well, I would also lick ass publicly frankly. I’m incentivized towards being a sucker. This goes double if I’m disabled or have dependents who are disabled. Triple if I’m on a visa. I can’t afford to lose my healthcare benefits or a high paying job.
The power dynamics at play here distort reality so I wouldn't call them suckers but fooled. I don't know why every time this is brought up the default awnser is to assume they had any say in the matter. People (as a group not a person) can behave irrational which is what the call for protection is about.
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"
Really nice buffet selection, a perhaps more notably because he mostly seems to defend stock repurchases (presumably baring some outlandish ceo grant like in the quote) due to the tax deferred accumulation.
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?
If it were simply a correction for the recent hiring spree, then people with 10+ years of tenure on production-critical teams would not have been let go.
Interesting way to frame it. It would seem the position only attracts "hangmen"? I suppose that is (one of the many reasons) why I am not currently sailing in my yacht across the Pacific.
We don't celebrate CEOs when they are on hiring sprees – and we really, really shouldn't. I understand that people are emotional over job security. The downside weighs more heavily, as per usual. Alas.
Oh come on, you can always find someone who will do it. Try to think of a company that does something odious that somehow can't find candidates to be CEO.
Now note that Google has a mostly positive reputation in society at large.
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.
I’m baffled to see comments like this here. To the point that I wonder if HN is basically Twitter at this point.
How can you trust a single thing the model says? I ask GPT4 for PPO code, it gives me basic actor critic with a loss with constants added. I ask it about a data filtering technique and it hallucinates concepts, libraries, papers and even companies.
It’s good as a fallback to search. Also maybe for judgement free brainstorming. But I don’t see how it can replace Google for serious queries.
Are you sure you’re not just chatting with it? Do you mind sharing your recent 10 queries with us
I found that GPT-4 is surprisingly trustworthy for my queries which are mostly programming related and focused on common libraries (nothing too esoteric).
The reason why instead of having 60 google searches in a day, I now have frequently less than 30 is that ChatGPT is much quicker when I don't exactely know how to search for something.
For instance I recently looked for an easy way to have a Rails app inline CSS when creating a Mailer template. I wasted 5 Google searches which showed various stackoverflow questions which quite didn't match what I wanted (reuse exisiting CSS from a controller). Asking this as a question to ChatGPT has directly led me to the premailer gem. In hindsight, my search terms were too generic, but ChatGPT was the expert programmer who just pointed me to the right gem based on what I was rambling about.
I am also getting turned off Stackoverflow in general now. Grasping the random adjacent question/answer of SO is often more mental work than checking if ChatGPT is hallucinating. Joel and company did well in selling SO just before ChatGPT hit.
Maybe I'm missing something, but Google search (through Startpage) still is faster and more relevant for me, not to mention it does return results newer than 2021 ...
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.
No, there's certainly no possible modifications to the system that could make things more equitable, make people happier, make it less likely for people to be homeless on the street...
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.
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.
That’s pretty subjective to the person. Some folks are very happy working on something that may be perceived as useless but gets to retire at a really young age.
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
Maybe google didn't fire them because things didn't go well, but still, having to fire people (instead of reallocating them to better-fitting positions or not hiring intge first place) is a management failure for me, in a scale which a CEO resigning(or at least lowering their income/bonuses) would be justified. But maybe this is just a difference in opinion.
Getting rid of someone because of a fuck up is amateur leadership (or politics to appease the mob). The relevant question is whether or not a decision was appropriate, given the information and parameters at the time of making the decision.
Not at all. Ending someone's employment because they are predicted to be insufficiently beneficial to the organization is a different topic than terminating someone because they made a decision that turned out to be suboptimal, which may have been unreasonable to be able to forecast.
It is possible that the suboptimal decision of overhearing was made in such a manner such that indicates the decision maker may not be beneficial to the organization, but not necessarily.
The amount of self loathing in display here is astounding. Or I guess, "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome?
A hiring decision is a huge change in an employee's life. People uproot their lives, may have to move away from friends and family. They might need visas.
For a big company CEO, getting fired changes basically nothing material. They still have millions of dollars, they most definitely aren't on a work visa.
A rich, profitable company for sure can afford and should try to salvage every suboptimal hiring decision, at least once.
Except for the CEO, that basically gets all the money and no real risk. A CEO will never starve, will never get kicked out of the country, etc.
Ok. Can we agree that some people are expected to be more perfect than others? Say the janitor versus the brain surgeon? Or the CEO versus the staff software engineer?
Who’s job is it to predict the future hiring needs at companies? The staff software engineer or the CEO’s and executives? This is a primary role of a CEO and failure to predict this is a failure of their primary role.
yes, CEO fucked up, should he now fuck up more by not firing them?
you come home from the grocery store, you bought frozen goods. you are unpacking, and think you're done, so you sit down in your couch to relax, a couple of minutes later you realize you forgot to put the frozen stuff in the freezer, do you just go "oh well i dun fucked up, nothing to be done here, i'd best just admit defeat and let my wife fire me from grocery duty"
Well, it depends, did you blow the budget on meat because of your mistake? If so, yeah I think the grocery budget should be coming out your fun money personally.
First of all, we are talking about ethical responsibility here, not contractual or legal responsibilities. Generally, one’s responsibilities are related to the possible harm caused or contributed to by one’s actions that one is in control of. Concerning employees quitting their job, for example the tech lead of a small startup whose survival critically depends on their knowledge can be considered to have a bigger responsibility to not quit on short notice and without compelling reasons out of their control than, for example, a dispensable and easily replaceable entry-level dev in a big tech company.
Companies however also have some responsibility to not make themselves too dependent on individual employees, to the extent practical. The responsibility for the harm caused to the company by an employee quitting is therefore shared. This is in contrast to a layoff, where the employee usually shares very little responsibility for the harm caused to them by the layoff, because it’s largely out of their control.
Imposing that on companies by whatever means(legal, social) will lead to less hiring overall to make it low risk. As much as it sucks to get laid off, I am sure a lot of laid off folks who were hired in the last 2 years would be glad that they have Google on their resume. That will set them up for a good career, since Google is known for a rigorous interview process.
So, going through a rigorous interview process is indicative of expected performance on the job? Shouldn’t the work they did for two years matter more than the few hours of interviewing and solving puzzles?
The reality is that having passed an interview at a FAANG company, having any work experience at a FAANG company on your resume opens a lot of doors while looking for a new job, even if it's a few months. Being laid off from a FAANG company is still bad, but if it was part of a broad layoff for cost reasons then it's not bad.
You can argue till you're blue in the face about how this is a bad thing but that does not change reality that those laid off from Google are better off in a job search than people laid off from random companies that no one heard of.
You can argue till your blue in the face that it opens doors and another can just as easily argue that it closes doors for reasons not worth discussing.
My point had nothing to do with either argument as it not interesting to me. My criticism was in the statement regarding the interview process validating the value of an ex FAANG employee over their experience from working at FAANG.
Can society thrive with more equitable compensation for all citizens, and workers alike or would that damage the incentive to produce "more or better" products which is said to inevitably boost productivity/GDP, etc? Especially with AI coming forward, the case for UBI seems strong. But is it a fundamental desire for humans to be self-serving or selfish, or would UBI just add a base safety net for people, and we could still continue with unequal total comps, and that at least seems like a good first step.
[As far as I know, many people agree income inequality is the widest it's ever been, and is a bad thing for society]
Echos of Steve Ballmer who alienated many whiffed on cloud and mobile (!).
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.
I have a crazy theory that CEO salaries must be high because evolutionary forces favors companies with high CEO salaries. Rich people prefer to hang out with other rich people, so if you don't pay your CEO enough, they won't get invited to hang out with potential big investors. In a sense, you could say that CEOs are professional rich actors, given a stipend by the corporation to go play rich and infiltrate the rich world, and bring back loot.
I've lost respect for him completely now. I feel like the only ones who would still respect him are his fellow IIT/Stanford/Wharton grads but there's just nothing to like about the guy. Ask yourself if he has ever done anything useful in this field, and the answer will always be no. He's never founded anything, innovated anything technical and has just been a yes man to Larry and Sergey.
C-Level comp should take a hit if they have to do layoffs for any reason. These people should definitly reap it when business is good, but not when it's doing poorly regardless of why. C-Level incentives have tunnel vision to few metrics. Screw 10x developers, these people need to be a 100x and be accountable considering the comp packages they get.
Google, FB, MSFT all have the same problem - way too many overpaid, under-working employees who either give no shits or are in systems where giving a shit doesn't work
I'd have fired harder and double cleaned the house
If he had taken a pay cut like Tim Cook, he would still be filthy rich and well compensated and thousand of google employees had kept their job. But we all know how he's "entitled" to it.
If your company over-hired while you were CEO and then performed layoffs to correct for the over-hiring, your compensation should be *0* and you should be put on a PIP.
It is interesting, founders that are able to create billion dollar companies are extremely rare. Rarer still it seems are non-founder CEOs that are able to make an impact.
I wonder how much less his compensation would be had they only laid off 11,000 employees instead of 12,000. Or how much less had they not fired anyone ?
Nadella is a very good counter example for that. I think one difference is that Ballmer set up Nadella much better in his final years (both by removing alternative power centres like Sinofsky, and kick starting projects like Office on iOS which solely get credited to Nadella)
Pichai's Compensation from SEC Filing (p54) [0] is as follows - 1) Base Salary $ 2M, 2) Stock Awards $ 218M, 3) Miscellaneous $ 5.9M. The stock awards are based on Class C Google Stock Unit (GSU) and PSU (Performance Based Units). These are awarded if Google hits some targets which it did. It's basically a future looking contract which says "If you do X, we will pay X".
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.
All the fired xooglers seemed to praise their former employeer on social media, so they seem to accept that they deserved to be fired. It's hard to be mad at the CEO, when the people who lost their jobs displayed no anger.
The ones I know that did not post on social media did not want to be fired.
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.
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?
people are entitled to have their contracts honored. If you dont want to produce 100x value for the big bad company, then you must be free to not. I believe you do have that freedom. So go do something else? tend to your own crops, make your own software.
you are entitled to freedom, which everyone should have, but not other peoples enterprises
Is there a chance these sociopaths will run out of obedient desperate employees? At some point they will employ exclusively timid dependables, run by rigid ruthless procedures and the whole thing will be like a fortress with all gates unlocked.
> CEO made bad decisions that many other companies avoided.
Like what? Over-hiring? Many other companies avoided? Like which big ones? Amazon, Microsoft etc.?
> CEO panicked
Sounds like hyperbole
> fired thousands unprofessionally
How do you fire thousands professionally? I thought ensuring market and shareholder satisfaction was the top priority for CEOs and they get paid to make those unpopular decisions as/when deemed fit?
>> fired thousands unprofessionally
> How do you fire thousands professionally? I thought ensuring market and shareholder satisfaction was the top priority for CEOs and they get paid to make those unpopular decisions as/when deemed fit?
While true, it's fairly obvious that the Google firings have been badly mishandled. There are stories of SREs getting fired/locked out while still on duty. And in general, sending firing emails at 4am in the morning is very bad class in a company that claims where "don't be evil" and "trust your employees" are pillars of the company is, ... well, not good for PR.
I’m not sure if you are being intentionally obtuse, but the obvious answer is that rather than being locked out in the middle of the night, people would prefer to be told directly by a human (ideally their manager), and given the opportunity to say goodbye to their colleagues.
That’s a complete straw man. Microsoft, Meta and others managed to pull off safely laying off employees while still treating them respectfully and allowing them to say goodbye.
Basically all your words are incorrect and project some bad kind of emotions you are housing, all points addressed all around here.
Can't we do a bit better than tabloid outrage fueled by just raw emotions? He did correct the course which was right thing to do. Hiring previously was also the right decision at that time, properly nobody knew covid scare would taper off so quickly and people would revert some of the newly found (and often wrong and unhealthy) habits. No panic anywhere, this is business as usual in every sense of that phrase. He received normal compensation, just its done every 3 years - before getting headfirst into outrage, maybe first read some facts?
I don't even get the outrage in this specific case - some, often under-performing (within given group) folks earning 300k + massive bonuses in stocks got fired, and either they 1) found immediately another well paid job; or 2) got already so rich they took 6/12 months sabbatical, plenty of HN posts about exactly this.
I mean good for them, heck good for everybody. Why the envy, desire for CEO to burn in hell or at least end up bankrupt homeless on streets? Nothing good ever comes from such an approach, just stupid short term populist moves for the simpler minds who don't think much ahead or in complex fashion.
“just stupid short term populist moves for the simpler minds who don't think much ahead or in complex fashion”
Surely it was stupid to not realize that the last few years were temporarily fueled by Covid work from home trends and huge fiscal and monetary stimulus. If anything, the CEO making the same mistakes as all the other tech CEO’s indicates poor performance or at least average performance - not protection from criticism.
CEOs serve the board and the board serves the shareholders.
Employees are irrelevant in this scenario, replaceable units whose purpose is to produce.
Are either of the two relevant parties mad at the CEO?
If you want employees to matter beyond the cold calculus of dollars per beating heart per quarter, Alphabet ain't inside that kinda system.
Unions could help (because they explicitly acknowledge the $ per soul metric and seek to exploit it for the souls' benefit) but the U-word is a bad word to libertarian techbros.
Tons of tech companies were firing employees in 2022, so much so Apple was far and wide an exception in just keeping the same numbers. Feels more like an economic cycle / preparing for the worse rather than result of bad decisions on behalf of Pichai. And yes - firing employees to protect the efficiency of the company is (an unpopular) part of a CEOs job.
This feeling is often dismissed as illusion but I dare say that it is a reality.
I've been here 10+ years, first as a lurker. It is devolving. Some threads are still brilliant but the amount of low-effort replies has been steadily growing.
I didn't use to abandon thread so much. Now I'm tired of skipping greyed-out blocks.
Classic HN shitting on a mild mannered exec who doesn’t speak BS every interview
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
