Sundar Pichai received $226M compensation, boosted by a triennial stock grant

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;CiFqr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;CiFqr</a>

I simply don’t see what good this CEO has done.<p>He’s destroyed googles reputation with developers.<p>Destroyed customer trust in Google products.<p>Done nothing to fix googles reputation for terrible customer service.<p>Led Google to third place in cloud computing.<p>AND been thrashed by Microsoft &#x2F; ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.<p>Why is this guy CEO?

... And getting caught flat-footed against Microsoft (and Adobe, but but not as loudly) in the precise field Alphabet is supposedly the insurmountable leader.<p>Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume &quot;all the risk&quot;?

The upper management at Google are so lucky that the company is filled with timid people who are averse to change and didn&#x27;t unionize.<p>Now they can safely siphon the profits for another several years until they inevitably drive the company into the ground when the ad revenue dries up, and they move to similar positions at other places with healthy revenue streams.<p>And the rank-and-file Googlers will defend this because they think they caught God by the ankles with their 150k&#x2F;year salary, that they feel they don&#x27;t deserve because of their impostor syndrome.

Same story at Meta where people in the C-suite got very high bonus and equity refresher based on outstanding individual performance. You&#x27;d expect them to be somehow accountable. The common answer there was that they did well at their job, and aren&#x27;t responsible for decisions leading to the layoffs. And nobody is responsible. Basically, it was right to hire so many employees (good economic prospects) and then it was right to fire them (bad economic prospect).<p>This view is acceptable if you consider people are disposable and the human cost to be zero. Which of course is the case from the corporation point of view since this human cost isn&#x27;t tracked by any metrics meaningful for the company.<p>These layoffs feel wrong. I know people who were devoting their life to their job, were working in very profitable companies, were exceeding expectation for their level, were working on project that were sold to them as critical by management.... and they were fired overnight without notice (and some of them continue to lick ass on Linkedin on how great was their company).<p>I know it&#x27;s not a popular idea in American business-centered culture, but there should be restrictions as to why you can layoff employees.

What I don&#x27;t get about CEO compensations is, do they even work?<p>Like I get that you&#x27;re a high impact person and you should have the proper incentives to lead the company in the right direction, but do the crazy compensations actually achieve that? Like is there any difference between $100M and $200M? Both of those numbers are way higher than anyone and their children can use in their entire lifetimes, why do you even care which sum you get? Does Sundar Pichai actually look at his paycheck and say &quot;Oh boy, I got $226M instead of the measly $150M [0] I got last year, hard work sure is paying off, I better keep at it.&quot;<p>[0] I made that number up

Actual Title: Alphabet CEO’s Pay Soars to $226 Million on Huge Stock Award.<p>@sine_break, [1],<p>&gt; <i>please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don&#x27;t editorialize.</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

“While Firing Thousands”<p>That’s not the original title just added by OP for drama. It’s an editorialized title.<p>“Alphabet CEO’s Pay Soars to $226 Million on Huge Stock Award”<p>It’s a Bloomberg article not the Guardian

If you ever have been in leadership interviews then you will know that firing people is one of the quality one needs to evaluate or prove.<p>This is just business as usual for these roles and a lot of people shy away from these roles due to &quot;responsibilities&quot; such as this.

I&#x27;ll come back to what I always come back to with these compensation issues. You can make the claim you need to pay exceptional amounts to get the best people. You cannot claim that applies to a CEO who is in the middle of an incredibly costly round of layoffs because <i>instead</i> of being exceptional, he followed the herd and over-hired during the pandemic. It is extremely clear at this point that the attitude of the big tech companies during the pandemic was stupid (with some minor exceptions), and that their attitude today is gutless.

Under metrics of revenue and profit there is no reason to change the CEO:<p>Annual Revenue of Google from 2002 to 2022: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;266206&#x2F;googles-annual-global-revenue&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;266206&#x2F;googles-annual-gl...</a><p>Annual Net Income Generated by Google from 2001 to 2015: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;266472&#x2F;googles-net-income&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;266472&#x2F;googles-net-incom...</a><p>Under metrics of leadership and fending competition there is no reason to keep the CEO:<p>&quot;Killed by Google&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedby.tech&#x2F;google&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedby.tech&#x2F;google&#x2F;</a><p>&quot;Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-ai-chatbot-bard-offers-inaccurate-information-company-ad-2023-02-08&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-ai-chatbot-bard-of...</a><p>&quot;Google Cloud still operating at a loss despite revenue, client wins&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ciodive.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022&#x2F;628283&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ciodive.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022&#x2F;62...</a>

As I can&#x27;t read the article, I searched around a bit and read [1] on frobes.<p>&gt; Pichai&#x27;s compensation included stock awards of about $218 million and a basic salary of $2 million, the filing showed. Pichai&#x27;s stock award is paid every three years.<p>(The additional 6million were security spent by the company.)<p>His compensation next year will be much lower, the same as the last two years:<p>&gt; The 2022 pay is compared to $6.3 million in 2021 when he didn’t receive the grant.<p>So he effectively got 73million per year in stocks. Or around ($73mil&#x2F;$106stockprice=) 690k stock &#x2F; year.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbesmiddleeast.com&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-ceo-sundar-pichai-gets-over-%24200m-in-2022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbesmiddleeast.com&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;technology&#x2F;googl...</a>

He&#x27;s compensate to maximize shareholder returns, not to keep people in a job. The people are employed for the same reason and when their RoI is below the threshold then you need to right the ship. This is what a CEO is partly there to do.

Never forget:<p>- Meritocracy is a myth;<p>- There is no value without labor;<p>- The only risk CEOs are assuming is the nightmare scenario of becoming a worker;<p>- The company is not your friend. There is no loyalty; and<p>- The people paying the price for any bad decisions of a company (eg The metaverse) are rarely the people responsible.

12,000 Googler’s fired this year and somehow the Googler with the lowest skills&#x2F;bills ratio remains. At least he took full responsibility for his failures as a leader while handing out pink slips.

The world needs more companies structured as worker-owned co-operatives.

Haha, man I had a 35 year finance plan to save enough for retirement and children&#x27;s education, with a target value amounting to just north of a week of working as Pichai.<p>Why do we even have a C suite? Can we have a company run with direct democracy instead of monarchy? A true Borg hive mind company. No appointments, no stack rankings, no levels. People get paid by the scope of work they do.

I don&#x27;t like those titles. What his salary has to do with firing people? That is what CEOs in such companies make (there aren&#x27;t many Googles out there). It&#x27;s reasonable to question why a single employee in a company should make so much money, but it has nothing to do with firing people.

If anything the issue is that Google remains vastly overbloated. The large tech companies have been hoarding very skilled people and letting their abilities atrophy, trapped by high pay. It’s bad for Silicon Valley, bad for the individuals, and bad for progress.

The (editorialised) title [0] is classic Anchoring [1], me thinks.<p>Google did not fire folks because they were making losses. At some level, they got rid to appease Wall Street given their shrinking profit margins. I mean, here&#x27;s a business that brings in revenues of £500M &#x2F; day (over £150M &#x2F; day net); an astonishing amount. Anchor against that? Never let the less spectacular get in the way of a click bait, I guess.<p>[0] The original title was something along the lines of, <i>Sundar earned $226M while laying off thousands</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)</a>

Can society thrive with more equitable compensation for all citizens, and workers alike or would that damage the incentive to produce &quot;more or better&quot; products which is said to inevitably boost productivity&#x2F;GDP, etc? Especially with AI coming forward, the case for UBI seems strong. But is it a fundamental desire for humans to be self-serving or selfish, or would UBI just add a base safety net for people, and we could still continue with unequal total comps, and that at least seems like a good first step.<p>[As far as I know, many people agree income inequality is the widest it&#x27;s ever been, and is a bad thing for society]

Echos of Steve Ballmer who alienated many whiffed on cloud and mobile (!).<p>Google has killed their search with advertising and promotion to the point where results are useless.<p>Product management has been terrible for the things I use over a 10+ year period.<p>Based on recent employee accounts of the culture and mindset there it&#x27;s a mess.<p>I don&#x27;t know who this guy is, maybe he&#x27;s just been a caretaker of a place that was already on this path but he doesn&#x27;t seem to have done anything to improve it. And he&#x27;s getting paid over $200M? No wonder working people get angry.

I have a crazy theory that CEO salaries must be high because evolutionary forces favors companies with high CEO salaries. Rich people prefer to hang out with other rich people, so if you don&#x27;t pay your CEO enough, they won&#x27;t get invited to hang out with potential big investors. In a sense, you could say that CEOs are professional rich actors, given a stipend by the corporation to go play rich and infiltrate the rich world, and bring back loot.

I&#x27;ve lost respect for him completely now. I feel like the only ones who would still respect him are his fellow IIT&#x2F;Stanford&#x2F;Wharton grads but there&#x27;s just nothing to like about the guy. Ask yourself if he has ever done anything useful in this field, and the answer will always be no. He&#x27;s never founded anything, innovated anything technical and has just been a yes man to Larry and Sergey.

His comp should have been negative the salaries of those he over-hired and subsequently had to fire. Like that comp is roughly 1000 employees worth...

C-Level comp should take a hit if they have to do layoffs for any reason. These people should definitly reap it when business is good, but not when it&#x27;s doing poorly regardless of why. C-Level incentives have tunnel vision to few metrics. Screw 10x developers, these people need to be a 100x and be accountable considering the comp packages they get.

“Programmer got a raise while support staff was fired”<p>We all have different jobs. I guess he did OK enough to receive whatever they agreed upon in advance.

I still don&#x27;t understand why do Boards continue giving these kind of compensation levels for C level execs...<p>Let&#x27;s be honest, a 15 million compensation won&#x27;t make a difference between 225 million..<p>It would be better to take the 225 million and make it a potential 1 million bonus to 225 engineers, I guarantee you would have better results.

And this is why the economy is a meme. Google is doing terribly and he’s getting paid 226m for what?

Pichai has absolutely deserved the money. He invested so much efford to destory Google!

Google, FB, MSFT all have the same problem - way too many overpaid, under-working employees who either give no shits or are in systems where giving a shit doesn&#x27;t work<p>I&#x27;d have fired harder and double cleaned the house

If he had taken a pay cut like Tim Cook, he would still be filthy rich and well compensated and thousand of google employees had kept their job. But we all know how he&#x27;s &quot;entitled&quot; to it.

If your company over-hired while you were CEO and then performed layoffs to correct for the over-hiring, your compensation should be *0* and you should be put on a PIP.

It is interesting, founders that are able to create billion dollar companies are extremely rare. Rarer still it seems are non-founder CEOs that are able to make an impact.

I wonder how much less his compensation would be had they only laid off 11,000 employees instead of 12,000. Or how much less had they not fired anyone ?

Most annoying part of the $226M is that he’ll pay a lot less taxes percentage-wise than the average Google employee.

There is no human being on God’s green earth that could possibly provide enough value to deserve $226M compensation.

So he got the stick, where is the carrot?

Sundar&#x27;s #1 job has been to keep the FTC at bay. He&#x27;s done a pretty good job at that.

I&#x27;m surprised that Bloomberg is getting less and less pro-business and more mainstream.

Sundar is an example of what happens when you promote from within and rule out anyone with enemies. You get nice guys whom everyone &quot;likes.&quot;<p>The comment about sociopathic almost-CEO&#x27;s is spot on. Tony, Andy, Anthony, and Vic all would have been terrible CEO&#x27;s.<p>On the other hand, Bill Coughran, Alan Eustace, Udi Manber, or Patrick Pichette would have been decent, at the very least. Maybe even very good.

Pichai&#x27;s Compensation from SEC Filing (p54) [0] is as follows - 1) Base Salary $ 2M, 2) Stock Awards $ 218M, 3) Miscellaneous $ 5.9M. The stock awards are based on Class C Google Stock Unit (GSU) and PSU (Performance Based Units). These are awarded if Google hits some targets which it did. It&#x27;s basically a future looking contract which says &quot;If you do X, we will pay X&quot;.<p>There are two parts to this conversation 1) Should CEOs be paid like this? and 2) Should Sundar have received the compensation? There should be no doubt about 2). That&#x27;s a commitment made to Sundar. Part 1) of the conversation is a different one.<p>More information on p49 of the filing says this below<p>&gt; 2022 CEO Equity Award for Sundar<p>&gt; The Compensation Committee currently follows a triennial grant cadence for CEO equity awards. Sundar’s last equity award was granted in December 2019, and fully vested at the end of December 2022. In December 2022, the Compensation Committee granted a new equity award to Sundar to recognize his strong performance as our CEO.<p>&gt; As with the 2019 award, the 2022 award consisted of both GSUs and PSUs. The on-target value of the award was unchanged from the 2019 award. However, relative to the 2019 award, the Compensation Committee made two design changes such that more of the award’s vesting is dependent on performance: (1) increased the proportion of PSUs to 60% of the total award from 43%; and (2) increased the performance requirement for on-target PSU payout to the 55th percentile from the 50th percentile of Alphabet’s relative total shareholder return (TSR). These changes further align Sundar’s compensation to long-term shareholder value creation and Alphabet’s stock performance relative to the S&amp;P 100 over the applicable performance periods.<p>&gt; The GSU portion of the award vests quarterly over three years in 12 equal installments beginning March 25, 2023. The PSU portion of the award includes two tranches. The PSUs will vest, if at all, based on Alphabet’s TSR performance relative to the companies comprising the S&amp;P 100 over a 2023-2024 performance period for the first tranche (2022 Tranche A) and over a 2023-2025 performance period for the second tranche (2022 Tranche B), subject to continued employment on each applicable vesting date. The number of PSUs vesting will be determined after the end of each performance period based on the payout curve illustrated below. Depending upon performance, the number of PSUs that vest will range from 0%-200% of the target number of PSUs. Upon vesting, each PSU and GSU will entitle Sundar to receive one share of Alphabet’s Class C capital stock.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1652044&#x2F;000130817923000736&#x2F;lgoog2023_def14a.htm#lgooga023" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1652044&#x2F;000130817923...</a>

Funny how everyone here assumes they could do a better job than Sundar.

All the fired xooglers seemed to praise their former employeer on social media, so they seem to accept that they deserved to be fired. It&#x27;s hard to be mad at the CEO, when the people who lost their jobs displayed no anger.

Unless you&#x27;re a Google investor, who cares?

Entrepreneurial reward for managerial risk.

I mean are you surprised by this? Companies do not exist for the benefit of labor, they exist for the benefit of shareholders.<p>Why is this even considered news?

Ah! A McKinsey alum.

Ah! A McKinsey alum

Is there a chance these sociopaths will run out of obedient desperate employees? At some point they will employ exclusively timid dependables, run by rigid ruthless procedures and the whole thing will be like a fortress with all gates unlocked.

Am argument or system taken to its extreme falls flat. Where are the limits of capitalism?

Yes, but _he_ worked really hard.

CEO received compensation for good cost-cutting measures? What am I missing here?

Someone please call Ja Rule so he can make sense of this man’s salary…

This title implies that Pichai is greedy and disenfranchising the employees. This is true, but at the same time:<p>I would be extremely grateful to have worked at Google and be laid off. That&#x27;s almost a non-problem.

Classic HN shitting on a mild mannered exec who doesn’t speak BS every interview<p>It’s like the tech community suffers has some daddy issues with Google. Somehow it has to be this magical company that does everything right.<p>They have to not squeeze search ads for money. but at the same time they’ve been just been doing research into AI and not releasing profitable products.<p>I guess what other CEOs realize is perhaps the fact that reality doesn’t matter as long as you inject your personality into every conversation and distract people from reality