Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai

It does seem that executive compensation is just straight up broken. Even bad CEOs are paid enormous sums of money for their shoddy performance. Sundar Pichai is a poor performing CEO, he's very likely done permanent damage to Google's business. For this, he is going to be rewarded with generational wealth. It's hard to see what exactly we're paying CEOs for. Are we paying them to attract the best talent? No, you'd have a queue of fantastic candidates queueing around the block for 1/10th of what Sundar is being paid. Are we compensating them for performance? Again no, they get massive compensation packages up front whether they succeed or fail. Are we compensating them for the extra-ordinary responsibility they have? Well apparently not, because they don't face any consequences for fucking up.

So why are we paying them so much? Because the compensation committee says so. Why does the compensation committee say so? Well, because the compensation committee is formed of executives, so the whole thing is just a massive circle jerk.

At what point do the shareholders say "hold up a sec, why are we bleeding all this cash to a bunch of executives whose entire strategy is just to follow the market".

Pichai is simply a poor performer. Google's core businesses have gone markedly downhill just over the past few years:

- A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

- Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.

- There have been a dozen threads here lately -- just over the past few months -- about Gmail's SPAM filters going haywire.

- AI is poised to eat Google's lunch, and there are rumors that they're lobbying Congress for AI research bans/restrictions, "because it's unsafe."

Honestly, with Pichai at the helm, they're going to go the way of DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory.

The kneejerk reactions to the Google layoff are quite interesting in comparison to other layoffs. Meta laid off 2x the % and there was less news or general backlash, and several well known startups have laid off 15-20% of their workforce to mostly normal reactions.

I understand that Google is a sort of indicator for the tech sector as a whole and people viewed it as a sort of "safehaven" prior to layoffs, but to me it shows how entitled tech workers are, especially those in insular cultures like Google.

I guess it also shows the immense brand value Google has, though this seems to be eroding slowly among SWEs, at least in my circles.

This is just part of life. The private sector particularly tech has always had far worse job security compensated by far better pay.

Being cut off in the night is unfortunately a necessity in the era of people airing their grievances on social media.

Seems to me all these tweets about how company X stabbed you in the back is just making it harder for the individual to find a new job.

Yes you might need to access your savings and push back the early retirement plan, yes you'll need to look at expenses and rationalise. Yes you might not be as employable as you thought.

I don't mean to be callous but if you've just lost your job or will find it harder to find your next one you need to wake up to this reality asap. This too shall pass and we will be back to boom but until then get your life in order.

This is a good place to remind tech workers that they should not get comfy in big tech.

Older workers are a massive liability. They will try to get rid of you and they will prefer foreign replacements on the younger side.

They will also claim that they need to increase diversity while doing it.

Everyone is celebrating the fact that most big tech companies are no longer run by Americans. It’s because the system is designed to discriminate against you and get rid of you.

My personal theory is highly liberal tech workers are going to turn into the new “Dey Terk Ur Jerbs” flyover country citizens they spent the last 20 years laughing at.

“Look at the racist losers who hate immigrants! What morons voting for repuvlicans.”

Look in the mirror at 45, it’s you now. And watch how you get laughed at next.

It’s hard to fathom how the upper management of these companies couldn’t see this coming when they were binging on hiring.

Did they really believe we were in some new era of pandemic-fueled hyper-growth and that they would be less competitive if they didn’t grow by tens-of-thousands of employees?

My boss at my previous job made $40 million a year, and he was literally single-handedly tanking the company. He got fired and so he went to work for Sundar Pichai at Google ... making even more.

People who are on the low rungs of the ladder assume that the people way above them must have been intelligent to get up there. It's not always a great assumption.

Apple did not have mass layoffs (yet) and Tim Cook asked for a 40% pay cut. Go figure

>Corporations - and in particular tech companies - have consciously colluded with each other to push a false narrative about how they are the victims of an economy that continues to enrich them. And that’s because their leadership isn’t judged by how well they treat their employees, but rather by how they protect the interests of their shareholders.

This is the core of it, and, contrary to many, not something that we have accept as inevitable or immutable.

When 80+% of GOOG's revenue comes from advertising, it is bound to cause pressures to cut costs especially when the leading indicators are showing a broad recession across the board.

If Sundar had just kept the headcount betting that the recession won't impact GOOG, and was proved wrong, the investors and employees would be out with pitchforks.

If the recession does hit, at least Sundar has cut costs before the fact and his rational investors should be happy with that outcome.

If the recession doesn't pan out as deep as they have estimated, they could just restart hiring.

It is terrible for the people impacted by this decision and I empathaize with them. But when heads of peer group companies are also doing similar cuts (some even deeper than GOOG), I see it as a broader economic trend and not something specific to GOOG.

(The problems related to GOOG's service mix, cash cows and innovation impact are a separate issue and the CEO should be judged on that separately. All things considered, the current headcount reduction decision is a rational one, imo.)

He's the CEO,he's there at the wishes of the board who in turn are accountable to shareholders. The metrics he's judged by unfortunately are not long term but rather quarterly reporting, as long as these numbers look good and the share price reflects it, they'll keep him there. This year we've obviously seen a decline from the frothy peaks and this mass layoff is likely the consequencenof that. It's a common occurrence in that share price growth is conflated with CEO performance when in fact the general market is responsible for it.

So let's say the board fires Pichai (won't happen).

This dude's a CEO of the most profitable tech company on the planet. So what will happen?

He will probably definitely get a multi-hundred-million dollar stock grant.

He could also be "demoted" to chairman of the board, making millions to do even less work.

He can start literally any startup and have a very high chance of securing massive funding.

Or he can just live off of his massive wealth until his end o of days while his next in line takes over and makes mostly the same moves that he did.

So why should Pichai be fired?

> My answer is that it shouldn’t be, and that if we had a culture where the Chief Executive feared for their job, they might take a different tact with the company.

It would probably be worse for the company. The biggest problem with layoffs for a company is that it creates a culture where employees fear for their jobs, which leads them to perform worse, and quit the moment they have any leverage, making the company far more inefficient.

One of the major reasons tech companies are blaming the layoffs on pandemic hiring is not because that’s the truth or that the execs believe it’s the truth (although it might be) is that they can use the pandemic to present the layoffs as a one time thing extraordinary event, to prevent fear of being fired from setting into the company culture.

bruv y’all we work willingly for big tech companies. they answer to shareholders. they use their money and connections to work with governments and shitty actors, and y’all don’t complain then. in fact you go along with it.

it’s hard to feel bad for millionaire employees who don’t understand this basic fact.

especially when regular people are suffering, it’s cringe to see people making way more than most people cry about how things are not fair. you’re getting many months of full pay and health insurance extensions.

we choose willingly to play the game when we sign offer letters and it’s not like employees are loyal (no reason to be) to companies. accept it and move on.

start a co op b corp now and run it your way with your millions. don’t play the game and still complain expecting things to change.

tired of these layoff news.

I hope this teaches everyone a lesson that all these glorified CEOs can be as dumb as rocks. Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk, Nadella have proven this in last few months. We need to stop glorifying these people as demigods. Their only job is to exploit workers as much as they legally can to produce maximum value for shareholders. The people who actually create this value are the ones who always get the short end of the stick. Meritocracy is such a lie, I’m sick of it.

The article does have some solid points. But I am not sure firing is the way. It should impact the compensation.

> fire any executive that has to lay off hundreds or thousands of people because they got too excited about making their shareholders money.

As a shareholder I'd be upset about the huge amount of value that these CEOs are destroying.

Oh dear...suddenly all the Silicon Valley people are concerned about the impact of retrenchments.

CEOs work for the shareholders not for the employees.

Over the past 2 years, GOOGL is up 3% while QQQ (benchmark) is down 11%.

Why would the shareholders want to fire Sundar Pinchai?

It's weird to me that people don't take the slightest amount of time to think about who can fire Sundar before writing a whole article about firing Sundar.

If you want to fight for worker's rights - advocate for unions or something, this is just clickbait.