Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets.
Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.
Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?
Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience.
This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP).
See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.
Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.
The question is who’s a competitor now, right? It’s not “Who will be a competitor in n years”
Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?
These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.
I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.
No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.
It probably was the right decision to lay everyone off. What was not the right decision, and this should have been obvious, was hiring 10+k more employees than you actually need because you assume that this free money will last forever. He was almost certainly aware and signed off on this mass hiring. Other companies didn't make this mistake; Tim Cook didn't take a bonus that year to avoid mass layoffs.
> he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.
He probably did, because he's a bad CEO. He was right to lose goodwill.
> No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google.
No, there isn't a legal promise or anything, but people go to these BigCos primarily for stability. If you want an exciting job with lots of interesting new things, it's much easier to find that in a startup, but startups can be frustrating because they're inherently unstable. This is partly why startups tend to be made up of very young people; it's much easier to deal with volatility if you don't have a family.
You're obviously not "entitled" to a job, but the people who run Google aren't complete idiots; they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable. They depended on that in order to do all this overhiring.
And after all this, people will think twice whether BigCo is stable. Just as well! If you want stability, look into small family-run companies.
I'm not trying to "absolve" Google, nor do I think they're guilty. They used their reputation to hire people. It turns out that needs to be updated. Perhaps in the future they will do things to improve their reputation again? Who knows...
If you're agreeing that they misled people by using their reputation in a way that's dishonest, how are they "not guilty"?
To give a somewhat contorted example: If people believe you give 1 Bitcoin to anyone who can recite the whole Beowulf, they will perhaps spend a lot of time learning Beowulf, forgoing other things. Then they find out you in fact have not promised them that and that you have no such obligation. I don't think you've misled them! Do they have a right to be angry with you? Or should they have checked with you what the precise conditions were before upending their life?
Google knew that people would join based on a perception of stability. Did they hire 10,000 people knowing that they would fire them six months later? If so, they are jerks. If not, then they are so categorically idiotic as to think that they will just have free money for forever and interest rates would never ever go up. In either situation they are bad.
Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?
Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.
Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
Like they removed the youtube dislike button
what else?
Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.
I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.
Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term
That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.
- Google will be #1 because of sher data amount
- Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future)
- Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow
And non-western and non-Mandarin language support (the only other competitors are Indian, Emirati, and Saudi sovereign models).
2. Commercial Datacenters (theyre ahead at least)
3. Chip production (Google is manufactoring proprietary chips)
4. Consumer OS (Chrome, Andriod)
5. Consumer Hardware (Pixel)
Basically google has access to data that OpenAI will never have access to, can lower costs below what OpenAI can, and is already a leader in all the places OpenAI will need massive capex to catch up.
So it matters less than one would think. Also, ChatGPT can do 'internet search' as a tool already, so it already has access to say Google maps POI database of SMBs.
And ChatGPT also gets a lot of proprietary data of its own as well. People use it as a Google replacement.
If this is your only criteria I think you have a misunderstanding of what proprietary data is and ways companies can mitigate the situation in the inference stage.
If that's going to decide who wins, Zuckerberg will be the winner. He's been hiring researchers for $100 Million a piece. We'll see soon.
Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.
Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.
That's how innovation works in this industry. If companies didn't allow researchers to publish their work it would set us back decades. Researchers building on each other's work is how this industry was built.
> It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
So Google executed. Ability to execute is one of the things that makes a good CEO. Other CEOs have additional qualities such as vision, and getting others to believe in the vision. But not every CEO needs to be a Steve Jobs!
Plenty of innovations are coming out of Google, just look at Nano Banana Pro for example.
Lmao I love this. "Hey, engineers. Make something like that but better here's money, but only a fraction of what I'll make off it!"
Yeah, being a CEO is reeeally hard. Even when they fail they still walk out with >10m.
I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.
Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.
What next? Are you going to say look at where Apple was pre Jobs as evidence? So all they have to do is resurrect Jobs from the dead and let him take over Waymo?
There is a reason that “look at Amazon!” is meaningless
Upper management isn't paid based on how smart or productive they are. Google has like 400 billion yearly revenue. A CEOs decisions have enormous consequences, if a CEO can make slightly better decisions than another, it'd be easy to justify $692m in pay.
That said, I don't believe Sundar Pichai is a great CEO. He's might be an ok bean-counter, not sure, but I'm pretty sure one can get cheaper bean-counters.
> they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.
Yes and pray what would they do with them?
Giving him 700m in stock to keep him around is worth it for both the investors and employees.
I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score.
All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?
I think the confusion stems from mapping normal people money usage on people, that have much more money than they can use on themselves: They don't do that. You can use excess money to make things happen as you see fit.
Money enables you to do things in the world, and if you want to do things in the world, a few hundred million are very easily spent. I am sure most people around here would have no trouble allocating that amount of money towards something they would like to see happen or improved, and that's how a lot of money, that someone does not feel they need, is used.
This type of concentration makes it so that there’s no working competition element to the economy. Mega corps should be broken up and also charged absurdly high tax rates to fix this.
They have the people, the models and the chips. And Sundar helped achieve that.
That's what he said on some podcast.
I don't think Demis wants to be CEO of all of Google. He wants to focus on DeepMind and AI. He has a life goal of inventing AGI and using that to solve the world's biggest problems. Leading Google gets him further not closer. He doesn't give a shit about ads and ads is Google's biggest money maker.
Bring back experimental culture.
We should be grateful for funding of the research, and that it didn't pay off in market results. More of this!
Experimental culture is inherently risky though, and risk is not something you want too much of as a public company as your shareholders can and will be very loud.
They do still experiment but in their R&D divisions so as to shield their cash cows from risk as well as to be able to better conceal how much money they’re pouring into moonshots so as not to spook investors.
Waymo is the most recent moonshot I can remember going out of Google X, and they’re arguably a leader in the space. There are other projects in the works, and many more failed ones.
Unfortunately, most people seem incapable of attacking what actually needs to be attacked, instead of getting hung up on things that are perfectly legitimate.
They are a public company
We need to find alternatives to Google - that giant is out of control now.
Kagi is great if you need great customizability and filters and if you wish to support the future of Kagi/products like these.
And Duckduckgo is great if you need a Google alternative which "just works" without costing money* if you are frugal.
Either way, both options are good and its best to leave Google if/when possible.
The best feature of both of these and brave-search to some degree is that all three support bangs. !yt leads to youtube and !hn leads to hn.algolia.com :) and !sr and so so many more. Bangs might be the best feature that google users might be missing. It just saves so much time.
1. DDG (Duckduckgo) 2. Kagi 3. Brave (Independent) 4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future) 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN) 7. Mojeek (Independent) 8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent)
I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great.
> Evil pays well.
It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well.
Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine.
These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care.
[0]: what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986
Right?
Elon is the CEO of like four or five companies I think, while also ostensibly heading a government agency. If you can have four or five full time jobs, then they are not full time jobs.
Given that, I suspect that they're able to find plenty of time for themselves.
2: Space for activities, such as being able to host large parties, friends, family, etc..
3: Convenience and time saving from having a lot of things in-house: gym, pool, tennis courts, etc.
4: Security. When everyone knows who you are, they begin to make up excuses to get close to you and yours. Even if you don't want seclusion, you may be forced into it.
5: The people who you hang out with most have big mansions too - you want them to be just as comfortable visiting you as when you are when you visit them.
If you have many shares concentrated in a particular company that you can't or don't want to sell for legal or tax reasons, you can borrow money to buy a house. As long as you service the interest you get a house without having to sell too many shares and trigger tax obligations.
Home loans are also nice because they are a form of leverage that is secured against an asset but is not subject to margin calls if the value of that asset falls.
99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.
It's not disconnected from its value in the market, I don't think. I think the great scam is telling people that capitalist values are in any way attached to human values.
There is no common currency.
I just want people to stop pretending they're related.
Executives are not workers, no