CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft

Not to mention you can keep CEOs “aligned with shareholders” by firing them if they behave in ways that are misaligned.

You can't move countries to avoid capital gains.

That makes sense to you and me but...if the world were only populated by people who were happy to just have enough to live a comfortable life as soon as they could, or even a very rich life as soon as they could cash out, then we would not have half the insanity we do today. And Sundar Pinchai and other CEOs could have quit a long time ago if they wanted to do that. If I were in the place of ANY CEO today of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, of course I would quit immediately with far LESS money and do something else....but they don't, speaking of the incredible pathology that lies within them.

I guess the counterargument would be that the $225MM is imaginary money - he doesn’t actually make that much until he cashes out and cashing out at the wrong times is what we should actually condemn.

That said, the rules for stock, stock ownership, and splits are all made up on the fly anyway so I don’t want to defend any of this. Stock dilution in particular seems like legal theft.

Each generation can have more than one person

He did not get a golden parachute. He was compensated that amount over time. He grew a company from $400MM in revenues to $70Bn and was rewarded $1.6Bn for it. I fail to see any issue with this.

> (and, actually, he's worth much more).

Bullshit. Fucking nonsense, bullshit.

I fail to understand how thinking people could ever believe that this is true - it's got to be innumeracy and a healthy dose of propaganda. Would Google lose the now-equivalent of 200m annual if any one of the top 100 leaders within the corp ascended to the goddamned throne? Fuck no. It's nonsense to believe any one person is worth compensating at that level.

That “he runs” it is entirely made up as well. It’s a $1.6T company - one person doesn’t run the show.

Is he worth more? Is he worth less? Literally all of this stuff is not anyone’s business outside of their company and their stakeholders. We can’t truly have a clue what doing a “good job” is with them, or what the compensation should be.

They want to ruthlessly hire-fire talent - it’s all entirely on them as a company. Being outraged about any of it is just as naïve as buying into the idea that their monopolies are built on merit and not on elite credentials and pedigree required to join the club.

For what it’s worth, I think the enormous payouts are there so that these guys’ judgement and decision making is 100% directed only on the company’s value and well-bring. They’re supposed to be in-bribeable.

A distinction without a difference. Nobody is getting cash in that amount

Aren't there too many variables to reduce stock movement to a single individual?

If you look at the cost of living in SF and what you get, it starts to make sense. What is the equivalent argument for hundreds of millions?

Honestly, I get that.

I work at a company with engineers mostly in the US and in an EU country, and my understanding is that, though our salaries in that EU country are top of the range, they are still meaningfully lower than for US engineers. The international talent pool is very good, and available at considerable savings. While I am glad I have my job, and that companies still seem willing to pay Bay Area salaries, I don't fully get why.

That is a fair critique and overall true. But it also highlights the pay of these CEOs to be so absurd as to be barely comprehensible. It makes me wonder what types of personalities these people are. If I even had that salary for a year, max three, I'd retire and spend time learning and doing non-profit and foundation work.

> So just to be accurate, his yearly compensation is more like $75 MM.

But do you know he doesn't get a new "3 year vesting stock award" every year? It seems like he was paid 3% less the year before.

That's normally the approach with vesting schedules like this, to stagger them, so there's never a "good time point" for him to leave.

>If you are running something worth over $1 trillion that makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year it makes sense though, right?

But he isn't running it. He has legal control over it, but in terms of sweat equity he only gets 24 hours in the day like everyone else and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee.

Its not like the individuals actually need the money like, perhaps, a new product line would. Its just about getting paid the most. If you look at it that way, we would do well to deepen the progressive tax.

Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the responsibility and stress of a position he could just decline.

This will sound insane but $200mm at Google scale is not even that much. All in, it’s about the cost of having another 200 SWE org or increasing earnings by like 1%. If it’s enough to keep him happy it’s easily worth it

Why is that trash? I would love to drive and shoot a real tank as a civilian.

that tank thing isn't a great example, even blue collar folk could pretty easily afford some of them. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a Disneyland hotel!

what was this company he sold for so much?

There really needs to be an upper limit on how much wealth a person is allowed to amass.

Half a billion seems fair. After that the tax bracket needs to be taxed at 100%

Drive a tank?

That's absolutely awesome

Wow, the address of that Tank website is Uvalde Texas where that horrendous shooting happened

can you divulge any info on the company in question?

> The salary of the CEO is tied to the stock price to incentivize growth

If it were a more reasonable amount I would agree, but with the amount they're given they could do a piss poor job, tank the stock value 90%, and still come out with $22M.... not much of an incentive

“ then the increase in salary represents the responsibility amount that the CEO has, as bad decisions can cost lots of peoples jobs and so on.”

He made bad decisions that caused people to lose jobs and they knew this well before the layoffs were announced. So he gets a raise and continued support?

The shareholders have all delegated their voting rights to money managers who don’t care as long as they keep getting a percentage of assets under management and the board members are all obscenely paid executives at other companies who don’t care as long they keep the executive pay cartel going.

If only you actually knew that he was the reason for that increase in performance.

Do you think he “actually” earned less than one million in 2021? Because that’s what accepting this framing means.

Did his pay actually increase? We don’t know.

Maybe I’m an odd duck, but I expect journalists to journalist.

why should he be better than replacement level CEO? why can't we assume 225 million is what an average CEO running a Google sized company deserves? Like how we accept 300-500K is what an average Google SWE deserves?

You know how the USA has a President? Switzerland has 7.

What is the role of the CEO? Is it to make decision? Is it to be a public facing role, a representative of the company as a whole? These can all be replaced with collective bodies coming from the firm itself.

There's a lot of structures of governance that decentralise the power of the firm and they work pretty well. But the current system is not really viewed as a problem for the people who participate in it. The boards, the CEOs, etc. these are not positions that truly need talent and shrewdness these are positions that exist for people to aspire to. This way, the bulk of the people in the firm have a clear structure to look up to. It's not that Sundar Pichai does work worth 225M a year, it's simply that he happens to be in the position of the CEO of Alphabet. It can be anyone (anyone in those upper circles).

are you saying that it was not proportional and thus unfair or that it was too much because he likely was just doing his job as an accountant?

I’m not that sure that a higher proportion of profits going to the shareholders would be a better outcome. Sure the money saved by paying the CEO less might result in lower prices or go to lower ranked employees but it’s not obvious to me that that’s necessarily what would happen.

Right, I understand the justifications for CEO pay. I am just saying that I absolutely do not believe that for large public companies he is 1% better than the second choice.

The answer is actually antitrust and to break up Google (and other Tech giants) into smaller pieces. That should lower his compensation by a bit, since his individual power would be lower.

Yes, we would lose some synergies, but we would gain in terms of a more equitable society. Sometimes more stuff is not better.

please stop using "MM" it's not in line with decimal prefixes and unnecessarily confusing

That would certainly be one way of attaining long term vision.

But who will enforce this requirement? Only pension funds and other large shareholders have any (and often impractical) leverage over the board C-suite. Wall-street shareholders demand faster growth until they themselves can exit out. They don't care about the business or the services or the employees. They want a high growth return, year-over-year until their own investment carry continues to exist.

Some companies such as Toyota supposedly have 100 year business plans:

http://www.gongol.com/research/economics/100yearplans/

Ask facebook

> And frankly layoffs had almost no effect on their stock prices. Announcing new products, even if quite half-baked AI efforts, had much bigger impact on stock prices than layoffs.

This is true but you know what? Every action of the CEO is meant for the investors and large shareholders. The layoff is merely a signal that says

"I am willing to do what it takes to give you your return. Buy more shares"

Concurred but...

Let's imagine that shareholders agree on a 5 year return on capital plan. Now let's say some missteps/economic circumstances make revenue go down in the 4th year. The CEO will get heat from the investors. This is especially true if the board contains an investor representative who can vote the CEO out.

What choice does the CEO have at that time but to boost short term?

Look at the same story from an employee perspective. Imagine that employee worked for 4 years and the downturn arrives. They invested a lot of time of their precious life, much like the shareholders invested their precious money.

In the downturn, the CEO gets to make a choice and the choice ALWAYS is to boost the stock price for shareholders (and for themselves). Often, at the expense of employees.

>Very long term

>5 years

That is so laughably short sighted that you could not have given a better example as to why CEOs are all the same.

Are you a CEO of a public company or still private? There is a huge difference in incentives from institutional shareholder pressure.

> compensation is considered regular income for the year it is awarded based on the difference between the strike price and the market price

Isn't that exactly how it works? Your grant price just determines your number of your shares. When your shares vest they get taxed as regular income for the entirety of the vest amount.

it is truly a product of the computer age, to come up with self-centered ego BS like this.

You do not acknowledge different industries or business models, distribution of physical goods or market brand activity, let along "things that take more that one person to do" .. This is a rote recital of an inner dialog of an ill "investor" CEO who might as soon throw his secretary off of a bridge than give a bonus for winter holidays.

There are not enough words to scourge this infantile, Ayn Randian nonesense from the page.

If you're a middle manager, what is your goal? Is it to have as few reports below you, or as many?

So you are not interested or see any value in providing jobs for your fellow citizens?

At the least, don’t hire thousands of people over 1-2 years and then lay them all off. That shows poor ethical, leadership and management skills.

Why is it ridiculous when NFL and NBA players have $500MM contracts? Why shouldn't Google be allowed to pay these large contracts too?

Do you also find it reprehensible if people eat meat? Much worse things than just kicking of animals happens in the delivery of that food to us.

What we have here is a case of "English Detective" style journalism, when what this particular epoch requires is more "Hard Boiled Detective" journalism.

The English Detective - Miss Marple, Holmes, Poirot (Belgian, but he is an English Detective archetype) - exists within a stable and permanent social system, class-based, in which all are basically happy with their lot, aside from a few malcontents and neerdowells, who sometimes try to cheat their way into power or privilege that is not theirs to have.

It is the job of the English Detective to root out this degenerate from the ranks of the decent, expose him to the world and the nearby incorruptible agents of the law (funnier if read in an Inspector Clouseau accent), and restore the harmony and justice of the status quo, and perhaps attend a wedding of two young lovers that he has reunited through his genius efforts to expose the truth!

That's who this writer is.

We also have another kind of Literary Detective, that of the Hard Boiled genre from about the 30s-50s, approximately. The Hard Boiled detective, based in cheap pulp novels and most famously played onscreen by Bogart as characters like Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), is usually living in the USA or some even less lawful place, and exists in a world of inherent corruption all around him. Like the Victorian Detective, he is a creature of this world and fully adapted to its conventions, but he also retains some form of stripped-down basic integrity that he uses as his own yardstick of what is acceptable and what goes too far, even for him.

When someone goes too far over the line, the Hard Boiled detective takes it as a matter of necessity, and possibly honor or respect, to deal with it, but the most important thing about a Hard Boiled mystery is that he is not really trying to "fix" anything. In The Maltese Falcon, Spade sticks his neck out in the first place strictly because someone kills his business partner; murdering someone who has distanced themselves from the shenanigans of the establishment is a good example of something the Hard Boiled detective has no choice but to do something about, and that is why the story, a fantastic story by the way, exists.

It's not that I see myself as Hard Boiled here, don't get me wrong. I want a Douglas Adams future, not a Blade Runner future. But, to write about Capitalism - because what we're talking about is Capitalism, whether you like that fact or not - from the perspective of the English Detective, the defender of the established and perfect system of justice in society - is not the perspective that leads to action about anything. We are living in thoroughly Hard Boiled times, we all know it, and we have no use for a fucking Poirot just now.

The writer needs to point out that CEOs are murdering people this summer in Arizona, by sending their dogs to Washington to block action on Climate Change, which has tornadoes touching down up here in Canada now by the way, and subjecting the Southwest - which has a lot of poor people in it - to a summer of death for anyone who doesn't have AC or whose AC breaks down and cannot get outside to some shade.

He needs to point out that someone who has distanced themselves from the shenanigans of the establishment - an infirm grandmother living on a pension in downtown Phoenix, perhaps, with only a small fan to cool her, and no ability to get up and walk outside, and all her family in other cities - has been murdered for profit. Because none of the people who are going to die that death in America this summer, deserve that particular death. That is the sort of thing that the Hard Boiled detective cannot simply sit behind his desk and opine about, that's something that he has to get up and make something happen about.

Now, the Hard Boiled detective, after he has cracked the case, generally hands over the evidence whatever perpetrators are still alive to the authorities - the corrupt authorities, who because of his work have no choice but to prosecute them or face The Press - but it was never his goal to shore them up or help them to perpetuate their system; he was pursuing his own sense of honor, one that is at odds with the reigning hegemonic rhetoric, and which would not have been serviced if not for his sometimes-legally-questionable methods. This Poirot here is expecting the incorruptible agents of the law to swoop in and deal with this, and boyo, just shut up if that's all you got.

Cause what we need right now, is people with a sense of honor and justice that is completely at odds with the Capitalist system and ready to say murder when it's clearly murder, however many degrees of separation they put between their lobbying, their layoffs, their union squashing, their endless need to surveil us all, etc etc.

I know I'm not speaking to those people in this forum, but I am speaking for them.

That one is about employees that were vesting before the company went public, but other outrageous paychecks: because this is how leadership teams are paid, and their contracts often include a year of salary if they leave the company.

I think this is somewhat naive. The growth mindset pervades the entire economy, and virtually everyone's interests are bound into it one way or another.

Yes, of course there are people who prioritize lifestyle over chasing money. No one will debate that. But if those people's retirement plans are dependent on a 401k or drawing payments from a pension fund and not just cash savings, then they are amongst the growth-obsessed shareholders, whether they realize it or not.

I think one of the challenges is that if a society gets richer around you, and you don’t, then normal services get more expensive as people demand higher salaries to do the same things, and houses get more expensive.

Because you can both participate in society and be critical of it at the same time. I am a founder, but we've worked hard to focus on profitability and staying healthy. I started a company because I wanted a place where people could feel safe, do good work, and as much as possible not worry about the things I detailed.

(I also don't think it's opt-in. If everyone around you makes more money and you don't, you have decreasing buying power. You need to grow just to stay neutral.)

In the case of FOSS the reputation for old being worse has something to do with ever evolving platforms.

You can still use unchanged GNU utilities and apps from the mid 90's. But you'd have to run it with layers of emulation or shims. And it couldn't handle newer formats or protocols.

"The problem is not capitalism"... Proceeds to describe capitalism.