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Comment by mycentstoo | Hacker News Reader

I wish I understood why so many options are granted in the first place. If they offered 10,000 fewer options, would performance be any worse? Wouldn't a lot of people be vying for that same position and couldn't the company use that to drive down compensation? Couldn't a company in fact, trade on the idea that the extra power and prestige offsets the need for additional stock compensation? And how much of the stock price change can be reduced to a CEO's impact anyways? If it can't be reduced, then why care so much as to overcompensate for their impact in the first place?

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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

> it’s easily worth it

but is it really? How do we accurately measure CEO performance? We can barely measure developer productivity in any sort of meaningful fashion. Blowing $200m on what is effectively a faith based assessment seems a bit questionable.

when dealing with 1%, what is the need for accurate measurements? they calibrate his pay to other CEOs in tech and other industries, and that is good enough.

> calibrate his pay

It’s circular dependency if ever there was one.

definitely. this is often the cause of overinflated CEO pay.

I'm pretty a lot of CEO compensation is in options? Company does poorly and they take a massive compensation hit.

Seems like incentives are pretty aligned?

If Sundar leads a company that goes from being worth $340B to $1,500B today (+$1.2T dollars), him getting $1B of that doesn't seem that out of place?

I'd argue that us rank-and-file employees should receive profit sharing if our company is overperforming.

It's impossible for any one of us to compete for that CEO position on any realistic grounds. So, we're left at the mercy that the board has decided this person deserves this compensation.

A CEO can help guide an organization, but it's everyone under that CEO who pulls all the strings.

Plenty of Google "rank-and-file" employees have been made millionaires by profit sharing.

Honest to god, how hard do you think his job really is? How much of it simply comes down to just brokering connections afforded to him by his position? It's not like he's responsible himself for generating truly novel and useful engineering deliverables. I seriously struggle to see how he possesses some talent that warrants his pay, vs. just being a lucky sob in a world where boards will shell out ridiculous checks on faith alone that if they don't, earnings will suffer.

The correct analogy is sports, so if you're comparing CEO pay to salaried SWEs rather than European football stars, you're going to distract yourself.

Team Google is a juggernaut with the funds to match, so they see value in putting up the money to get the top performer. They don't care how much luck the guy had to get where he is or how fair the pay is. They operate at a scale where small performance gains mean huge impact, so getting the guy who can make things go well (or who is less likely to drive the whole org off a cliff) is a bargain at any price. And let's not pretend we all know how to be CEOs of giant companies.

No one knows how to be CEO of a giant company until they do it, but there are many better qualified people that could perform that job for a whole lot less money. One could argue that taking such a huge pay increase immediately before laying off thousands of people is an example of poor CEO decision making skills, resulting in a loss of goodwill to the employees and potential future hires. The temporary $99 a night hotel deal for employees is an equally vivid middle finger to employees.

Pay is not about how hard any job is. My job is not nearly as hard as many people who make much less than me. It’s about the supply and demand of the role and how much value someone in the role can generate (which you can think of as an upper bound on pay). When you’re making decisions for >100k people earning >$100B/year it’s easy to argue that the person trusted with that much responsibility provides that much value.

I personally don’t think Sundar is an amazing CEO. He is very conservative and boring. But at the same time Google has tended to be too reckless and fund many projects with speculative ROI, or with no cohesive strategy. Google is making the shift to selling to enterprise and government where a level-headed conservative CEO inspires a lot more confidence than an ambitious reckless one. Also, they have one of the greatest businesses ever to exist (search ads) which, compared to any other >$100bb business, is a lot more precarious: it’s not contingent on long term enterprise contracts or lock-in or a physical moat (supply chain, brick and mortar presence).

His job is to keep the golden goose laying eggs and to make sure Google succeeds the transition to enterprise software. Believe it or not he’s more qualified for the job than all the other SVPs at Google and because he’s well connected with the founders he’s not a wildcard like an outsider would be.

Honest to god, how hard do you think his job really is?

It's like a plumber coming over and hitting a pipe with a hammer and charging you $300. You paid $5 for the effort and $295 for the knowledge of where to hit the pipe.

I mean how hard is software engineering? Should people be paid $500k? Garbage collectors work harder than most FAANG engineers I know.

A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google

In the highest comp regions (where new revenue generating projects almost always get staffed) it’s a common ballpark estimate of the allin cost of a SWE including all benefits, office, hiring, infra costs, ancillary roles. Consider that a senior SWE alone is pulling about $400k in direct comp. Also consider Google’s total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm and many of those are not engineers or in high comp regions. Of course a new org with no big sales/marketing/compute costs will have different cost structure vs search ads but it really is a workable ballpark.

Google isn’t spending 1M on an employee making 400k.

> total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm

Where did you get this figure? It doesn’t sound right at all..

Anyone can sound confident on the internet, but you don't seem to have anything to back it up. In my experience, 1 million per SWE in the Bay Area is actually about right across the industry.

You can look at public numbers to see that Google's revenue per __global__ employee is about 1.5 M and of that about 400 k is net income. SWEs in California make a lot more than the average global employee.

Costs also include server/DC/sales/marketing etc. you can’t include the server cost of say google maps as part of the people-headcount costs of google maps.

aren’t Google’s payouts for ads to websites/content creators/etc. included in their costs?

and of course all the other stuff the other comments mentioned and also including paying various contractors hired through other companies..

> Anyone can sound confident on the internet,

I’m not that sure about that

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