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Google CEO Salary

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26 pointscurrio54 comments

Unrelated, but I was researching executive salaries the other day. The CEO of the Norwegian Pension fund, which has $1.39 trillion in AUM, earns a $660k annual salary - no extra compensation as far as I could find. Alphabet has a £1.36 trillion market cap, with a $200m+ CEO comp.

Makes one wonder if you really need to pay CEOs astronomical comp packages to attract the "best talent".

Despite the huge AUM, I'd think being CEO of Norwegian Pension Fund has much less degrees of freedom (and therefore actual success/failure responsibilities) than being CEO of Google.

Yes, they have certain guidelines to follow - both ethical (can't invest in certain types of governments), and related to responsible management. He obviously can't liquidate the whole portfolio, and say fuck it, let's go all in on crypto.

Perhaps, at the same time if they DO fail badly, they would likely be replaced. Not as much in Google's case, where the highly paid visionary CEO has missed the greatest trend of the decade and still makes 200M. I could have equally missed the same trend myself for only 20M if they had given me the opportunity.

The first job of the CEO is to transfer as much wealth from the company to themselves as they can get away with.

The "failed decisions" list is bizarre and does a terrible job supporting the argument.

  - Gmail Inbox
  - Directing company’s resources towards messaging apps. (Remember Allo, Duo. Exactly)
  - Virtual assistants
  - Now LLMs

None of these were large bets, nor do they relate to the major cash cow that is search. Further, LLMs are in their verrrrrry early days. We don't know how much impact they'll have or how they'll impact Google's business, but not exploring them would be a truly insane choice for the CEO of Google.

The point I think is that they _could_ and _should_ have been large bets and this makes them missed opportunities. At least most of those could have been massive cash cows (see Slack, Teams, Superhuman but 100x, etc). And they just failed to have a consistent product vision top-down, having all the pieces needed. Who to blame if not the CEO?

Maybe, but hard to argue that any of these except LLMs have potential to be huge moneymakers. Teams is only huge because it's free and bundled with other Microsoft products, not because it's a huge product in its own right.

I like that someone said this, but I really Grit my teeth when someone says "learnings."

I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying "chestfeeding" instead of "breastfeeding." I don't understand it, but if it's making you uncomfortable, I'm totally fine with changing that part of my vocabulary.

But "ask" and "learn" are verbs. You "ask questions" or "make requests" and you "learn lessons." You do not "have asks," you "have questions." And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."

It's sad that this is what I'm taking away from this discussion, but it's Saturday night and I'm posting a comment on HN instead of dating a hot European super-model, so I'm sort of used to sad.

Thanks! s/learnings/lessons learnt/

I think the problem with “lesson” is that it sounds like you started out in the wrong. An important part of corpspeak is never directly accusing anyone of being wrong or directly admitting having been wrong yourself. Acquiring learnings does not have this connotation (possibly because it is a nonsense word).

Thank you for making me realize what I don't like about "lessons learnt". I don't care about corpspeak but when you are an agile team involved in continous learning it's very important to be able to tell someone that they are in the wrong. They might have put in two weeks of hard work devolving a poc in a area the team know little about only to present it wider and get the feedback that this won't work because of x, u and z. Then you haven't "learned your lessons" because we don't yet have the right answer. BUT we got some very good learnings from this failed work that we need to remember/use in the next attempt.

You would think we would have a word that better expresses something like: "you did some quality work, but it was insufficient to relieve us of our collective ignorance."

And in a way that your manager won't say something like "but this violates our corporate principal: 'be right, often.'"

Maybe there's a word for this in German. They have a number of words for seemingly specific situations. And I'm not above Introducing a few more foreign words to our corporate lexicon. We're already using Fingerspitzengefühl, Schwerpunkt and Feierabend.

That sounds legit. The last thing we want in corp-speak is to establish culpability. "Experiences" might work instead, but it sounds very Californian.

Making a noun from a verb is called nominalization. Old school writing guides would advise writers to generally avoid it.

You don't "learn learnings" I agree but in my mind you _get_ learnings from the process of learning stuff. The same way you get findings from the process of finding stuff out. I'm a Swedish speaker and we have a dedicated word "lärdom" that we use like "learning" so that usage is very natural to me. "lessons learnt" is clunky to me and there we have another saying, "lära sig en läxa" that has the school connotations.

Passive voice writing often grits in the teeth. Just like that.

Most writings that feel fresh or novel have an active voice that asserts something. In journalism, you’re taught to write in an active voice. If you can’t assert someone did something, then you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.

In any case, I think this is why I like noir writing so much. It doesn’t fiddle faddle with getting something across. It either happens or it doesn’t.

You think you're a pedant, but you haven't yet encountered someone with such a thorough knowledge of Indo-European grammar that could tell you that not only is nominalizing participles common in our family of languages, it is so common you see it in practically every language in the family and it doesn't violate any rules of grammar. "beating" is a present participle, like "learning." It would be fine to say, "the beatings of the man," but you may be confused about whether it is a subjective or objective genitive--is it the man who is being beaten, or the man doing the beatings. Likewise, I think what makes you uncomfortable about the term "learnings" is not whether it conforms to any grammatical or syntactic rules, but that it is rather ambiguous--it can be taken as transitive or intransitive. You "learn" something, but you also learn by being taught by someone. To say, then, the "learnings of the man," could refer both to his education, and to his teachings (and you see there, "teachings," is no different from "learnings" grammatically, except that "to teach" is definitively transative).

>And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."

You might be shocked to learn that such expressions are extraordinarily common in say ancient Greek (which uses participles in a very similar way to English--they are related after all!) People "look a looking," an expression used to mean someone holds a particular countenance. If someone can teach teachings, why can't someone learn learnings? I don't think there is anything wrong with using intransative verbs in this way.

Sure, ask the person who understands indo-european languages to join us.

I honestly miss Inbox every time I open gmail.

It was great, killing it was the bad idea.

What was the last big successful product Google released that’s still around?

I honestly don’t know. Search, Gmail, Maps, GCP, and Android is all before 2010.

I would kill for 2010-era search. I suspect it's now intentionally bad, but I don't think I understand the business strategy behind it being so awful.

There was a time when I could remember two uncommon words in the same reddit post from 5 years prior, and searching those would bring it up as result #1.

The scary thing is, I suspect that search is still their most recent successful product. Just that it's not meant to help any of us.

It wasn't necessarily Google's search that got worse.. it's that SEO became better and better leading to an arms race situtation.

The same thing will happen with the internet and LLMs. The next 5 years will probably be the golden age of LLMs followed by a flood of copyright protectionism and regulation.

I believe Sundar will be remembered as one of the weakest CEOs of his generation, and a person who caused actual harm to humankind by wasting one of the highest concentrations of talent (Google circa mid-2010s) that has ever existed. Imagine what these people could have achieved elsewhere if not lured by Google to be subjected to Sundar's incompetence.

This assumes that Google is able to identify the highest talent. Given the poor performance of the company (relative to its size and funding) and your point that they chose one of the weakest leaders to lead them, are they truly effective at choosing talent?

I recall digg.com, way back when. It basically collapsed one day. Gone. Documented on Reddit [0].

Sundar's "failures" must be considered relative to the risk - he has the power to destroy Google completely in a matter of weeks with a bold and headstrong call. There are idiots out there who would do that for whatever reason (obvious threat in Silicon Valley - maybe the search results don't promote enough Diversity, Equity and Inclusion when someone searches for "buy an [thing]"). Sundar being a known quantity who won't do anything bold is quite possibly worth $200 million.

Bud Light has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons - it happens. Mobs of angry consumers get triggered for the weirdest things.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxdqu/what_i...

Google (and the dominant adtech mode of financing tech development) has long entered the cash cow period.

Discussing the minutiae of decision making and compensation of individuals who's primary job is to keep that stale show running is not particularly interesting from the perspective of tech development and any positive impact on peoples lives. (BTW What is the last time Google surprised you positively?)

It may be interesting to discuss this though in the context of broader corporate governance and market structure / competition and incentives. Is that extra × 100 factor in compensation that accrues only to oversized entities really necessary to incentivise individuals to work in private for-profit enterprize?

I give it to you that if you had 10 mini-Googles competing and 10 mini-Sundars receiving 1/10 in compensation at least one of them would be worth the money.

I loved Inbox and was so disappointed when they killed it, honestly

Sundar is not coming up with all the product ideas. Nor is he vetting all the ideas. Ideas come up from product leaders under him. Surely he must have vetoed dozens of bad ideas every year. There is latent talent in these giants and experiments fail.

Could Sundar be more ruthless? Yes; Does this and other articles have valid criticisms? 100%;

These articles going after Zuck, Sundar, etc are needed. But we do not see the other side.

At least Google cloud was not a bad idea.

This was a case when following a trend was the good thing to do. But you don't make great companies by only following trends.

That’s how Apple became great: following trends and executing them better.

Why is tech thought to be so innocent/benevolent? Blows my mind.

If everybody earned the same amount, money would be pointless. Therefore differentiation in income is related to the complexity of economy. Putting artificial caps in place is well... artificial.

None of these were bad ideas.

Sundar can't execute because he doesn't know how to do programming and doesn't understand the details.

He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).

I don't think CEOs of software companies should be programming experts. It sounds cliche but I think what is missing with him is he is not visionary. Follower and not a leader.

Can’t be both cozy and risky. Need someone not afraid to lose a nine digit pay package. Innovator’s Dilemma and all that jazz.

I doubt any CEO can pass software engineering interview questions. That's a pointless interview. No CEO is writing their own app. What he lacks is vision to convert random sparkly ideas into actual practical products and to control his company to focus on one variant of one product.

Google often has 2 of same ideas competing internally, which might sound like it encourages a healthy competition but most of their competitions have failed. Gmail can use dozens of new features which would be useful but they launched Inbox instead, an app with a confusion interface and nothing more. Duo has great video compression but that's it. They never used that in Meet or Hangouts.

Seems like they have gold but would rather use bronze.

The one thing that’s distinguished the place during my tenure is ever-decreasing norms and shared respect and ever-increasing distance, here, you see enabling jealous empire-building and subsequent directionless empire-defending, not engineering problems per se

How were Allo and Duo not bad ideas, considering Google already had multiple duplicates of those?

Allo was basically an early (and of course much worse) version of what ChatGPT is now, it was a really cool chat bot, but most of the stuff was dumbed down totally and taken out by legal.

What you saw was not the original project that the engineers were trying to launch.

Allo was instant messaging with users identified by phone numbers rather than accounts. That was something a lot of consumers clearly found compelling (Whatsapp, iMessage), Google had no product for, and would not have been something that could be retrofit as a feature in their existing chat app.

Duo was two person video calls optimized for mobile phones, and allowing calling via phone number. Basically Facetime and Whatsapp. Again, a hugely popular product category that they did not have a product in, and with a paradigm that was not compatible with their existing video call app.

That's not to say these were good ideas, or that the projects were well executed. They were me-too copies of other companies' products, and possibly without enough understanding of what made those products popular. But the "duplicates" criticism is just lazy, and makes it seem that you're just parroting memes and did not know anything about the apps other than their names.

Their stupid names and simultaneous introduction killed them.

This is classic Google culture where Director A and B decide to get into the same category of product and refuse to work together. Unfortunately there is no adult in the room to put them in the place.

Tbf every company suffers from this. Look at multi tasking on iPad as an example. Classic Jobs might have been the only one who could cut this out

but surely it would have been easier to add "call contact" to Hangout/Meetings than create a separate app for the specific feature? It's not like you have separate contact lists, and I mean, that is how it works now[0].

So, no I don't think this is a lazy criticism, the fact that a new app was created instead of adding a feature to something that already existed is a managerial mistake because it creates extra confusion for users weakening the existing products[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVFda0I8uW0&t=1s

[1] Sometimes it makes sense to extract a smaller app from a big one, but this is not the case.

Marissa Mayer could code and I don't think it had a particularly helpful impact on her job as CEO. CEOs do not need to be technical experts, and most highly technical people, at least in my experience, do not excel in management positions and tend to micromanage too much.

Whatever problems Google has, Sundar's technical background has nothing to do with it. Which either way with an engineering and science background and 20 years at the company is in itself more than decent.

Might be the exception to the rule, but bill gates, extremely technically proficient and an amazing leader. I've read multiple accounts of staff who worked with him saying it was astonishing the level of detail he knew about their projects.

Could probably add Eric Schmidt to that list.

That's a good point, I think he wrote lex?

Is OpenAI interview considered particularly hard?

It has nothing to do with coding. His failings are that Google's product management is horrendous. Sundar has completely failed to set a clear long term product strategy for the company and doesn't seem to be making any moves to fix it.

To all of the downvoters and naysayers replying to the parent:

it's the difference between technical, engineering leadership and bean-counters or MBAs.

It used to be that we expected the leaders of tech companies to be technical (old time HP or even Microsoft. At some point that transitioned into non-technical people running software companies and I agree that does not sit well with me either.

That said, Google is not a software company or a tech company. It's an advertising company.

That's funny, Google Cloud Platform sure doesn't seem like advertising. I haven't done super extensive research on the subject or anything, but at first glance it seems closer to something like AWS, which I think is also not an advertising platform.

My company pays its monthly Google cloud bill using a Chase credit card, and we get maximal credit card points because Chase classifies Google as an advertising company. Go figure.

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