Google Employees Are Fighting with Executives Over Pay | Hacker News Reader

Google Employees Are Fighting with Executives Over Pay

wired.com

29 pointsLogicRiver7 comments

Not knowing anything about this other than what’s in the article, I’m a bit skeptical of how big of an issue there really is inside google and how much of this is just the media blowing something they heard out of proportion. Would love to hear someone who works there share their thoughts.

Source: I’m a senior engineer at another large tech company that’s had media articles posted about employee/management disagreements that were blown up several orders of magnitude.

Cost cutting at Google is definitely a real thing and people who’ve been there have been feeling the downward slope for a while now (on a relative basis to Google itself in the past, and doesn’t say much about Google relative to the market), so it’s natural that some people are unhappier and some have left and will leave for various reasons including compensation. However, what’s media reporting here is the result of annual employee survey and the answer to a question along the lines of I’m happy with my comp at Google, which may or may not be a reliable predictor for actual attrition due to comp.

That said it’s amazing that the CEO pay at Google LLC is so high. He’s paid higher than say, Tim Cook, who runs a real public company with significant operations that need to run on time that require management and operation skills, not merely a LLC subsidiary whose operations are nowhere close to Apple. It’s not clear that the company gets enough bang for the buck.

Google is the jewel in the crown for Alphabet, the only real source of profit in the whole operation. Whether that justifies his salary is another issue.

The point is Google LLC CEO is much more isolated from accountability to public shareholders of Alphabet Inc. than CEOs of public companies.

Bullshit. Who's been on the investor calls for the last few years? Sundar. It's not just that - Sundar is the public face of Alphabet (as it should be when Google revenues are 99.5% of Alphabet revenues).

the suggestion to reduce the number of people promoted by 2 percent—which meant that some qualified people

Wasn’t it from 10% to 8%? That 2% is misleading there, it makes it look far less significant than it was.

Google’s human-resources department presents potential ways to cut the company’s $20 billion compensation budget

I guarantee there are cost savings to be had in the HR department, but I bet there was no slide on that

Remember when Facebook busted the wage fixing cartel fueled by Steve Jobs tantrums.

Somehow Google had enough money to give the entire engineering staff a 10% raise. I'm sure they'd like to bring that back.

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