And Pichai gets that yearly...
To me it just looks like parent is cherry-picking some domains to try and put words in their mouth.
If the person owns roaches.com out of hundreds of domains then you're going to try to make it racist so the owner looks racist?
I never understood why trying to make innocent things racist isn't considered racist itself.
It's totally normal to own a domain like molest.com. Totes normal every day stuff. I'm totally crazy for cherrypicking a few! hehe!
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/john-leguizamo-latinos...
I first heard that joke in a 1990’s standup routine, fwiw. It could have been the same person telling the joke, I guess.
Anyway, it used to actually be used by white american racists; it’s been weakened to just self deprecating humor, kind of like jewish comedians like to tell jew jokes.
Will HN ever let us block people?
Yeah, we've got a guy with essentially a right wing militia fortress on the border of TX who owns blatantly illegal-immigrant racist trope domains and it's not related at all. Some engineer who commonly talks infrastructure is just making all of this up because he's bored on HN this weekend. Who wouldn't squat on such gems as "molest.com" to keep them from being used?
Well, it is the internet after all.
- finances that could feed/house/treat people
- reinforces militant/gun culture
- wear on roads
Am I being sarcastic? Not even I am sure. The arguments are truthful. But the fairest way to organise things is that people who made a big economic contribution (represented by money) should be allowed to waste a similar-magnitude-but-smaller amount of resources. That is, ironically, the path to prosperity.
Imma call for a citation from ya
You literally added it after I posted my own response. I hope you're proud answering the $10mil question when I clearly wasn't going to.
People have their reasons for disclosing or not disclosing things. You aren't entitled to know why, by any means. You're a 32point 2 month old HN account who has literally nothing personal listed about yourself, whilst people like me do have personal things listed. Move off, bud. I owe you absolutely nothing and I have my reasons for whatever I say. And you are not entitled to a how, why or anything else about my reasoning.
I'm not going to ban you because fortunately it doesn't look like you've made a habit of this in the past. That's good—but please go back to posting substantive, respectful things and don't veer in this direction again. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Do you feel your hands are dirty or something?
I'm looking at your previous posts and trying to find things that aren't "zero to hero" type javascript messages.
There's a gem 4 months ago that is "Why would you be hiring? Writing a backend is really not that hard if you already know the front end.." " and anyway it's good to be able able to do both sides" ..
Are you trying to learn, prove yourself, or what? What's the end goal here? Most of us write code to pay rent and buy cars. What are you trying to do?
You are so out of your element and just absolutely lost. I'm obviously not a HG employee. You challenged my comment? You weren't even part of the conversation. Your challenge was not understanding a modicum of politeness when someone is referring to an old business they worked for and might not want to be associated with so they give vague references that make it blatantly clear they don't want bring it up? This is easy in your stead because you have literally worked for no one that anyone cares about or has any interest in whatsoever.
If you were on hn throwing some spicy tea out for people to read, if you had EVER worked for anywhere that actually MADE spicy tea- you'd get my drift.
"This is a weird response, it's not like it's not public information, there's nothing "impolite" about it."
This is literally one of the most ignorant responses I've ever, ever seen on HN. Nothing I said was public information. and I clearly didn't want to expound. Take the fucking hint.
Anyway, take it easy bud.
Half a billion seems fair. After that the tax bracket needs to be taxed at 100%
If throwing them down a well would solve it, then can you think of a less extreme solution, like for example, sitting them down to let them know that they have to give up their political power?
Companies need to be taxed correctly. They need to give back to the societies that built the social structures that allowed them to be created and thrive.
Let's make it $500,000. Nobody needs more than that.
Right? I'm being serious. You can live a luxurious life on $500,000 per year.
Oh wait, well compensated tech people make more than that, so let's pick a higher number!
"A rich person is someone who makes more than me"
That's absolutely awesome
> which marked a staggering 3,474% increase from the previous year
For whatever reason, Google pays their CEO using a "triennial" stock award. It vests over 3 years.
So just to be accurate, his yearly compensation is more like $75 MM. Still obviously a lot of money for anyone, but now a number that actually makes sense to compare with other CEO's.
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.
That's the approach with rank-and-file employees, but not with the Google CEO, for whatever reason.
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
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.
It’s circular dependency if ever there was one.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where did you get this figure? It doesn’t sound right at all..
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.
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_W._McGuire#UnitedHea...
To me it’s really the size of the big tech companies that’s mind boggling. The fact companies that didn’t, or barely, even existed 25 years ago can make hundreds of billions of dollars is just insane.
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.
Yes, I can't tell you that because CEO isn't about labor.
I can tell you that impact of decisions of the CEO that I work for is at least 1000x bigger than mine.
If you don't believe that I don't know what to tell you.
CEO is not about writing lines of code, he doesn't write 1000x more LoC than I do, but he has at least 1000x more impact than I do.
You think great CEOs like Satya of MSFT or Dr. Lisa Su of AMD aren't at least 1000x average employee?
I've said this before but it bears repeating: CEO's aren't special. Bob Iger came back to Disney to finish it off. Shit, look at Elizabeth Holmes.
No one deserves that much of a multiple over the people actually creating products or value.
When CEO's fail they get golden parachutes. When they get lucky they are praised as some sort of rare superhuman.
The cult of CEO and HR needs to wither and die
> CEO's aren't special
some CEOs are terrible, a lot are mediocre and a few are indeed special and worth every penny they get and much more (from the utilitarian/rational point of the company’s shareholders). The problem is that it’s very hard to tell in advance..
Not many people can actually perform this job.
This kind of job requires really solid skillset across various domains.
It feels like you not only need to be great at managing people, doing business, having vision, but also do not be bullshitter, so your employees believe in you.
Meanwhile, CEOs strategies aren't something you can test within a month or two and fire CEO and get a new one.
In some industries you need at least a few years in order to see whether specific "bet" was good, so you aren't going to fire your CEO after half of the year.
Meanwhile CEOs decision can have very very costly impact on the company, so the risk is huge.
So rewards and consequences are not at all proportional like you are trying to imply.
It’s not about the time it takes him to make these decisions so much as the quality of his decisions having potentially massive $ impacts on the company’s performance.
Yet Google doesn’t seem to be doing all that well at all in this area. At least relatively…
The difference was Jobs made much better decisions.
Probably not.
Jobs takes a lot of the credit, and some of it is due, but there were many other people involved in bringing him back on board & the transition back to profitability/dominance.
It literally had to be Jobs and Gates making that deal, and it worked. Apple got enough money to launch its iMac which made it enough money to then launch its store, which gave it enough money to finally turn real profits.
I know a lot of people were involved in that happening, but Steve Jobs was literally the only person in the world who had the cult following to execute on his vision. Any other leader would have been met with resistance and skepticism every step of the way.
Am I suggesting that SJ should make $200mil for that effort, no, but I am suggesting that if you're making an argument against CEO impact, SJ is probably the worst example as I'm 100% sure that man was the only one who could have turned Apple around.
That said it's hard to argue that Jobs didn't have vision, or wasn't at least able to find people who had vision & talent, even if he was a polarizing figure.
That is a great question. The answer is complicated, but the primary reason is he screwed up. The machine was way too costly for its target market. By then, he'd run out of money. But he'd learned a great deal. He then bought control of Pixar, and turned that from failure into a massive powerhouse. Then he went back to Apple.
There's a book about it, "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs".
Jobs made three fortunes: Apple II, Pixar, and then Apple again. Just one of those would be a spectacular achievement, but he did it 3 times.
Whenever a company starts, its not like the salary is auto set at 225M. The salary of the CEO is tied to the stock price to incentivize growth. Initially CEOs make way, way lower amounts (ignoring bullshit VC capital and inflated salaries).
If it so happens that the stock goes up with growth, 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.
Whenever you have market upswings that cause these ridiculously high 225M, its in a weird way the people saying the CEO wants to get paid that much. People spend more money that they have due to wfh and stimulus (granted by the people and who they vote for), causing revenues to go up, causing investment capital to go up (with a tieback to people putting money in things like 401k that depend on this as well), causing the market to go up, and so on.
TLDR, its not optimal, but it makes sense.
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
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?
SF engineer salaries are still insane to these people. And they need to deal with the cost of living in SF.
Strangely, why aren't we doing the same for actors and sports stars?
How many movies do people attend solely based on the actors in the movie? Or sporting events due to a player on a team? Many
A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).
By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.
The sporting events can't take place soley due to the star. Do you think the star built the stadium or did all the background work for a movie? By this logic, movies with novice actors should always do bad.
> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company?
Not explicitly.
What about founder CEOs who built v1 on their own?
Founder CEOs are founders of the company and of course they will receive large payouts. The gripe is with non-founder executive vp sliding into CEO jobs and going from making $1 million a year to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year practically guaranteed with all sorts of golden parachutes attached.
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.
Certainly there’s a vast range of FIRE styles and even what constitutes retirement but at some level it’s a combination of keeping score, feeling valued relative to peers (see also sports), and the industry recognition.
Most people have egos. Some more than others. And public recognition via titles matters a lot for future opportunities. (Though maybe you don't care much about that so long as you make enough money.)
A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something.
Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year instead? That's how much you need to pay them next year.
4k a month is way more than the average person makes in my country, that's 3.84M for 80 years.
225 / 3.84 = 58.59 people
there is no fucking way you can justify that number but oh well, what can you do about it?
If CEO pay is supposed to have any relationship to actual outcome, dude should be long gone, not be getting salary increases.
Sure, shareholders have gotten some short term gains, but the company no longer has a positive long-term outlook.
Who cares about future shareholders or consequences for that matter when you earn 225MM ? Go move to some country that doesn't tax capital gains, sell it all, and live on 4% of it, which is 9MM per year; live like a kind, buy absurd amounts of land and multiply your passive income. Obscene is an understatement.
To see the insanity, Selipsky in Q1 AWS all hands was talking about growth of the rate of growth, i.e. second order. Not steady income, not income increasing (which is already exponential across years), but super-exponential; i.e. 20% , then 25%, then 30% growth.
Who cares about sustainable and organic growth! We have to milk those pesky engineers and all our customers!
Not sure on details myself. It has to be done just right.
I believe Ireland and the Netherlands are often host countries.
Now this is different than money laundering, which is big time illegal, of course.
As a US individual you get taxed no matter where in the world you live, and you must pay capital gains on all of your assets before giving up citizenship
That has nothing to do with individual taxes.
I am fairly certain the US is different, but I know that I can do that in Europe.
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.
While startups use options, most large public tech companies typically do not.
just like everyone with net worths over something like 10 million. Like I say, almost nobody has cash/fully liquid assets in those amounts. Doesn't stop them from commanding vast amounts of resources on lavish lifstyles, not to mention foolhardy projects and follies on the regular.
The point of this article isn’t to argue that $200M is a large proportion of $1.6T. The point is that one person is taking home the equivalent share of 1000s of workers, in exchange for totally eliminating their jobs.
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.
And athletes usually have no right to fire people (at least not a lot of people at once).
Tom Brady famously got Gronk out of retirement and Brown was on the team because of Brady despite having a horrible reputation and being essentially blacklisted from the NFL.
Star players are a dime a dozen in professional sports and I don't think their influence on the team makeup is as rare as you think. In fact, a big name star might have _more_ hiring power than a typical CEO in a public company.
Maybe that analogy is more apt than you intended though, in that the valuations are made for shallow human/society reasons that are quite decoupled from reality.
Do you have examples? The ticket sales alone that big name players drive to home games make far more than 100MM over the course of their contacts.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/294166/toronto-blue-jays...
That doesn't even include all the merchandise and the food/drink sales and all the other benefits that come from signing big name stars. The CEO of a company doesn't have the same "star" power a pro athlete, musician, or actor has.
In other words one can pretty clearly attribute the performance of an athlete to said athletes talents and ability. In the case of the CEO making the same money, it's much harder to measure their performance, and even harder to attribute the success of the company to their direct performance. This point becomes even more true as companies grow in scale, such as Google has done.
That doesn’t mean that their performance can’t significantly affect their companies stock price to a much higher degree than similarly paid athletes could.
> Physicality is far more measurable
Who cares. Do you believe that only people whose output could be precisely measured should be highly compensated?
Of course there is a lot of inefficiency considering Pichai seems to be a very poor CEO who’s quite replaceable.
Only on average over long term of course. There is quite a lot of variance considering how useless someone like Pichai seems to be.
Like, run the clock forward and imagine Google monopolizes half of GDP. Should the CEO be compensated as a percentage of that? It's a fallacious view - how many super hard working and ultra educated people could be recruited to that post for, oh, say a cool 1M per year with a good retirement plan and no stock nonsense. Tons - a huge list of people who don't have the right connections to sit atop the money pyramid.
Both attributes seem to be somewhat tangentially related to being a highly successful CEO.
There are plenty of examples of “super hard working” and educated CEOs running their companies to the ground and costing much, much more than just $200 million..
Obviously this system is very inefficient but nobody can deny that some CEO are better than others and that the best ones can make decisions which bring 10-100x or more money to the company than whatever they are paid.
So if the board of 100 billion company believes that a CEO they can hire for 100 million will increase growth/profits by more than 10 million CEO would it seems perfectly rational to pay him as much (they might be awful at picking the ’best’ person but that does not invalidate the core principle)
There's nothing obvious about this to me - how would you distinguish that from survivorship bias? Why then do shareholders and boards often come into conflict on this issue?
Claiming that someone is worth paying 100m per year is an outrageous claim that requires commensurate evidence, not a wishy-washy statement about boards thinking its worthwhile. Boards are made of people in a very small oligarchic circle - their behavior is more easily explained by remembering that they're social animals in a hierarchical context than pretending this is all perfect economic rationality.
So success of companies is entirely random? That seems statistically unlikely…
I mean are you really saying that there are no decisions that CEOs regularly take due to which a company might lose/gains up to millions to billions of dollars? Why wouldn’t you pay a CEO whose actions can bring the company billions a 100m or so? Seems like a good deal..
e.g. if you put a random highly competent, educated and very hardworking person in charge of Apple back in 1997 is it more or less likely that he would have done better than Jobs?
I mean, yeah I agree with you in part. In most cases it’s hard to distinguish real impact (even after a few years) from survivorship bias which is why this whole process is so inefficient. I’m sure that quite a few companies are just as likely (if not more likely) to hire a 100+ mil CEO who’ll be a net negative on as one who’s action will bring 10x+ in additional revenue compared to what most other candidates would have.
You're claiming that it's worth paying CEOs 100M+, and my point is that whatever level of competence/skills/judgement/character you desire for performance should be achievable at an order of magnitude lower salary offering. My point is that this astronomical compensations represents a really outrageously strong market claim about someone's performance, but the only evidence you're offering is that some companies do better than others. That is exactly what we'd expect in a market with many companies trying different things - aka, survivorship bias.
This is super common in tech, where people assume that successful entrepreneurs (for example) are visionaries, when in fact they had to be BOTH visionaries and ALSO incredibly lucky, and any structural advantages they had to acquire capital also help a lot.
> I mean are you really saying that there are no decisions that CEOs regularly take due to which a company might lose/gains up to millions to billions of dollars? Why wouldn’t you pay a CEO whose actions can bring the company billions a 100m or so? Seems like a good deal..
This is disconnected - that does indeed happen, and it's been interesting to watch e.g. Elon Musk set fire to several billion dollars along with his reputation over the past few years. My argument though isn't about whether or not CEOs are important, but whether or not their compensation is actually tied to their real value, or whether it reflects their membership in an oligarch class and their skill/luck in navigating that socioeconomic environment. This is a question about opportunity cost. Note - I would also be willing to believe that the perception of having a genius CEO who is "appropriately" compensated on a cosmological pay scale is valuable as a social signal in and of itself, and I would also object that this is irrational. In an economic system that capped CEO pay, that social signal could still exist unmodified at much lower absolute levels of compensation.
> e.g. if you put a random highly competent, educated and very hardworking person in charge of Apple back in 1997 is it more or less likely that he would have done better than Jobs?
Weird example, since Jobs took a salary of $1 during that time.
> I mean, yeah I agree with you in part. In most cases it’s hard to distinguish real impact (even after a few years) from survivorship bias which is why this whole process is so inefficient.
Couple that problem with ANY reasonable prior on the distribution of abilities in human populations and the distribution of salaries, and you end up with exactly what I'm proposing - CEO salaries are easier to explain by looking at human societies than any possible collection of individual attributes that such a CEO could possess.
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.
Hard disagree - capitalism is great up to a point, but a functioning market and vibrant tech sector doesn't require that we allow individuals to become this obscenely wealthy. Answering the question of how extreme we want income/wealth inequality to be allowed to become is a valid economic question to be answered societally.
Also, keep in mind that the terms are determined well in advance if these payouts, and tied to stock price or performance. So if the stock does well the amount can be very high, or if the stock does poorly then it can be (relatively) much lower.
And since layoffs hopefully mean that society is getting equivalent output (ads, I guess?) with correspondingly less input (labor), it’s not a sign of weakness or mistake when they are implemented.
Think about it like they are paying based on the question of: how much does it cost to keep this person protecting all of our Crown Jewels AND will never support unionization or anything that gives meaningful power to employees?
The bigger the risk to shareholders if something goes wrong with the stock, or if the CEO defected to a competitor, the more pay they offer.
I know this has been discussed here and 225MM is like the salary of 1000 employees making 200K for only one year, it is stock which is volatoile, that the salary of a CEO is impossible to measure, bla bla bla. But holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it 225MM pear year does not make any f_ing sense to me and it is simply obscene for the 99.99% of the world population as would be enough to retire 5 or 6 generations of regular people.