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Comment by pokstad | Hacker News Reader

It’s amazing how much the industry leaders just copy each other. Google didn’t throw the towel in until Amazon did first.

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Relative company stock performance dominates executive compensation (iirc, 80% of Alphabet CEO pay is relative outperformance of S&P500), so copying other large public tech companies is an outcome of the incentives.

A compensation scheme like this encourage companies to take unnecessary risk to outperform the market.

It depends, owner-CEOs have true stock, not just options, so are balanced between upside and downside risk.

For-hire CEOs often are also paid in equity, not just stock options. But even with just call options (Which have no downside risk), there is the risk of the professional reputation of the CEO, if you just do middling for a few years and leave, still plenty of job opportunitiess. If you crash and burn the company down... Very tough to find another good exec position again.

That would be true if new products could make appreciable top line impact/growth during the horizon for CEO comp packages, which is typically 3 years, and if it was easier to make new revenue than slash headcount.

I'm fairly certain this one has been in the works and isn't a spur-of-the-moment decision. The fact that we didn't get our comp letters in December (like in 2022 before the big 2023 one) was a dead giveaway.

Everyone is constantly worried about missing out on the next smartphone. Apple and Google got in early, and others who tried to follow failed. Voice assistant and VR are both examples of strategic investment over what the market really supports in demand.

there were smartphones before iphone and android. Apple and google pushed tech to new level and out-competted opponents.

If one of google's working theories is they should hire people to keep them away from other organizations then it makes sense they don't fire until they see their competitors start.

They probably tried to move as many as possible to Bard or to backfill Ads / Android etc but some of these are people who wouldn’t / couldn’t move. It mainly signals that upper management is not up to task and made bad bets. Fitbit was a great product and for Google to axe the founders says “we care about monetizing users not serving them.”

> Fitbit was a great product and for Google to axe the founders says “we care about monetizing users not serving them.”

Is this really a surprise to anyone at this point?

No but there are a lot of Google employees who still believe e.g. Google makes the world a better place by owning all third party cookies.

That isn't an accurate characterization of these layoffs. They also laid people off in ads and just across all the orgs in general apparently. I'm hearing this from one of my friends in ads who got laid off.

> Fitbit was a great product and for Google to axe the founders says “we care about monetizing users not serving them.”

They weren't axed. They are choosing to leave. They probably reached the point where all the incentives to stay were earned and have no other reason to stay. The Fitbit acquisition was completed 3 years ago so it is quite likely they have reached full vestment.

I’m sure there are a handful of domain experts that Google would prefer to keep on staff even if they are working on pet projects, but Google is certainly not hiring thousands of extra engineers to keep them away from Microsoft and Meta.

Right. That was almost all about 18 years ago.

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