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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

* shrug *

If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet.

They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up.

Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.

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> If the… customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO.

Do you think their customers are happy?

Google’s thought leader customers are extremely unhappy with pretty much all of their products to the point that Google is ripe for disruption.

The main thing Google has going for them is their incredibly massive moat that limits viable competitors. IMHO, that moat will only protect them for so long if they don’t reorient themselves.

The only people I know who like Google products are relatively unsophisticated consumers. I realize that this is a large part of the market and is also a very lucrative segment of the market, but they will follow the thought leaders when the thought leaders move on to something else.

Sure, marketing for a great new search engine would be pretty easy.

But the demands of the regular user and the power user are very different. So before ChatGPT, I'm not sure that also catering to the power users would have helped Google with their regular users.

Since employees, (many) customers, and investors aren't happy, seems like time for a change. It's the layers between the puppet and army that cause the most issues IMO, but vision starts at the top. And it isn't there these days.

And I totally agree on the botched demo; it's just like the stock's unfair punishment after recent great quarters. Expecting that pandemic growth would continue forever just shows the irrationality of markets.

+1 to your comment that it's time for new Googles to rise up.

[edit to fix typo]

Other than the pay and the residual prestige from "this is the coolest place to work if you pretend it's still 2004" -- I'm not so sure I'd describe the average Google employee as "happy." "Begrudgingly willing to tolerate it" seems more common.

> it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work.

An army of ten thousand people marching in the wrong direction is what you get with bad leadership.

There is a lot of "real" work going on at a company like Google. Leadership really does matter, and there are a number of examples of bad CEOs running a company into the ground (e.g. HP) and good CEOs completely turning failing companies around (e.g. Steve Jobs coming back to Apple). None of those things would have happened if the CEO was just a figurehead.

Some engineers, notably junior ones without a lot of life experience, seem to believe that engineering teams could run the company by themselves and that leadership and other orgs don't provide any value. It's an immature world view that doesn't even work very well at startups, and certainly doesn't make any sense at large companies.

Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.

A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.

This is an extremely flawed way to structure a society. In what messed up world does the CEO of a company have more responsibility to some armchair drugged suit-people eating Michelin food on high-rises in Manhattan than the actual billions of people who use the product on a day to day basis, and the tens of thousands of people who work half of their lives to deliver that?

this is kinda true, but only if you say, "In the short term". In the long term, things are recursive - poor employee morale loses productivity and product quality suffers and customers leave and shareholders lose. And that is only one of many loops.

A CEO may appear to be rewarded in the short term, and may make short term choices, but, rest assured that they must please all 3 constituencies or they will not have a long run timeframe to worry about. (of course, boards and ceos make mistakes and act poorly and suffer the consequences, too).

"Deliver value to the shareholders" is an outcome, not an action.

How a CEO delivers value is generally by running the company well, making the right decisions, hiring the right people, making sure the company has the right product vision, etc.

If the customers aren't happy, they will buy fewer products and revenue will decline. Since a large portion of a company's stock price is connected to expectations about future earnings, that will put downward pressure on the stock and hurt the shareholders.

Excellent point

> Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.

Nonsense. Customer happiness, employee happiness and company performance are all related.

I used to be a Google shareholder. I got a good return for a while, but eventually I got annoyed enough as a Google customer that I decided that I didn't want to hold Google stock. This was partly emotional, and partly a prediction that their stock price was going to plateau or fall given that they were alienating their users. This seems to have been the correct decision.

> A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.

It literally does matter, because shareholders are not automatons. A lot of the economy runs on confidence. Investments aren't just made on short-term economic performance.

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