Like what? Over-hiring? Many other companies avoided? Like which big ones? Amazon, Microsoft etc.?
> CEO panicked
Sounds like hyperbole
> fired thousands unprofessionally
How do you fire thousands professionally? I thought ensuring market and shareholder satisfaction was the top priority for CEOs and they get paid to make those unpopular decisions as/when deemed fit?
Can't we do a bit better than tabloid outrage fueled by just raw emotions? He did correct the course which was right thing to do. Hiring previously was also the right decision at that time, properly nobody knew covid scare would taper off so quickly and people would revert some of the newly found (and often wrong and unhealthy) habits. No panic anywhere, this is business as usual in every sense of that phrase. He received normal compensation, just its done every 3 years - before getting headfirst into outrage, maybe first read some facts?
I don't even get the outrage in this specific case - some, often under-performing (within given group) folks earning 300k + massive bonuses in stocks got fired, and either they 1) found immediately another well paid job; or 2) got already so rich they took 6/12 months sabbatical, plenty of HN posts about exactly this.
I mean good for them, heck good for everybody. Why the envy, desire for CEO to burn in hell or at least end up bankrupt homeless on streets? Nothing good ever comes from such an approach, just stupid short term populist moves for the simpler minds who don't think much ahead or in complex fashion.
Employees are irrelevant in this scenario, replaceable units whose purpose is to produce.
Are either of the two relevant parties mad at the CEO?
If you want employees to matter beyond the cold calculus of dollars per beating heart per quarter, Alphabet ain't inside that kinda system.
Unions could help (because they explicitly acknowledge the $ per soul metric and seek to exploit it for the souls' benefit) but the U-word is a bad word to libertarian techbros.
i don't think sundar is a good ceo, but this absolutely false. most big tech companies also had layovers.
CEO not being penalised for over-hiring and bad decision making in the first place?
Turkeys are never going to vote for Xmas/Thanksgiving. CEOs and the board are never going to be punished or fire themselves for being awful.
I didn't use to abandon thread so much. Now I'm tired of skipping greyed-out blocks.
I would be extremely grateful to have worked at Google and be laid off. That's almost a non-problem.
Being a Google employee for any amount of time is a huge privilege
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.
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.
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
We all have different jobs. I guess he did OK enough to receive whatever they agreed upon in advance.
Let's be honest, a 15 million compensation won't make a difference between 225 million..
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.
I'd have fired harder and double cleaned the house
The comment about sociopathic almost-CEO's is spot on. Tony, Andy, Anthony, and Vic all would have been terrible CEO's.
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.
Here he is, introducing Bob Mankoff, the longtime cartoon editor of the New Yorker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kogikw3InpY
I helped out on this talk, but Udi apparently knew Bob somehow, so he introduced him.
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's a commitment made to Sundar. Part 1) of the conversation is a different one.
More information on p49 of the filing says this below
> 2022 CEO Equity Award for Sundar
> 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.
> 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&P 100 over the applicable performance periods.
> 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&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.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817923...
Consider the selection bias of people posting on social media. Also consider people would want to be positive on social media to keep their future employment prospects.
If they were mad about it, they would have posted, wouldn't they? Silence is violence and all that.
Why is this even considered news?
How does paying a CEO so much money benefit the shareholders? Do you honestly feel there aren’t millions of people that could do his job (and likely better) for a fraction of what he was paid?
https://www.barrons.com/articles/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-se...
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
you are entitled to freedom, which everyone should have, but not other peoples enterprises
Surely it was stupid to not realize that the last few years were temporarily fueled by Covid work from home trends and huge fiscal and monetary stimulus. If anything, the CEO making the same mistakes as all the other tech CEO’s indicates poor performance or at least average performance - not protection from criticism.
If anything, it is easy to see an incentive not to post negative things online, as you can see on LinkedIn everyday.
While true, it's fairly obvious that the Google firings have been badly mishandled. There are stories of SREs getting fired/locked out while still on duty. And in general, sending firing emails at 4am in the morning is very bad class in a company that claims where "don't be evil" and "trust your employees" are pillars of the company is, ... well, not good for PR.
They ended up rolling back the France layoffs when they realized they goofed, but Germany and the UK are still pending.
If that's not an example of rushed, I don't know what is.
Or how about sending that "Cloud had the best year ever" hours before the Canadian layoffs were announced.
He’s destroyed googles reputation with developers.
Destroyed customer trust in Google products.
Done nothing to fix googles reputation for terrible customer service.
Led Google to third place in cloud computing.
AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.
Why is this guy CEO?
Was he? What is the evidence that he succeeded? Or even had more positive influence than random decisions?
Does google have consensus over what it’s doing? Or is Sundar specifically a “safe,” milquetoast CEO chosen to not show up previous CEOs. I don’t know Sundar, but it seems he was picked because google leadership assumed supremacy and thought that they just needed a steady hand to coast for a few years.
I'm willing to presume Larry had bold visions, but if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same.
I think it's time to admit that google has been a conglomerate for decades and could no longer run with innovative management. The correct thing to do is to break it up so subdivisions of today can be innovative companies, or reliable dividend payers, or bankrupt.
This is in large part due to Ruth Porat's relentless multiyear campaign of cracking down on employee perks and salaries at Google, at a time when VCs were throwing blank checks at startups who in turn were poaching the best people with whole-number multiples of their current compensation. This destroyed arguably Google's single greatest asset — its public image as a "dream employer".
The lack of innovation and risk aversion are just second-order effects of losing the ability to execute (especially in the context of its ambitions) by being known as a second-rate employer in an industry primarily limited by the cost and ability to attract quality labor.
This doesn't excuse Sundar of course, because he was ultimately the CEO through all of this.
"The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free" https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
that's how market leaders die, btw.
It's left to the mindlessly ambitious or ppl who are placeholders to prevent the mindlessly ambitious from sitting in the chair.
We have passed the point of org complexity where the CEO does anything beyond ensuring no on totally insane takes over.
There are lot of such ppl who dieing to charge you for every search query or email you send. Think Larry Ellison or Rupert Murdoch types taking over Google.
I think Satya Nadella is a counter example.
There can be 'mindlessly' ambitious people who are also great at being a CEO.
Search hovers around ~90% for the last several years: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Google Cloud is growing faster than Azure & AWS for the last few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i....
Cloud was at ~4% market share 5 years ago, now it's at ~10%...
Android is the only major product doing somewhat poorly, and this is mostly due to Apple just completely crushing it with the iPhone.
I get that Google is the company everyone loves to hate, but the sky isn't falling on this company yet.
This predates Sundar's stint. Reader was only the first one, but this culture of killing products is in Google's DNA itself.
“More wood behind fewer arrows” was Google’s direction from Larry Page starting in 2011, which was when they slaughtered a lot of existing and (from Google’s perspective) marginal projects and became a lot more prone to demanding that new efforts prove themselves adequately or be terminated, so Pichai isn’t responsible for starting it, at least.
Eric let a million products bloom, and Larry was too gutless to make the hard calls.
Sundar gets credit for heeding Wall Street (and his CFO's) call for fiscal responsibility, but the implementation has been poor.
For all the Alphabet stuff, and hiring the smartest engineers on the planet, I've yet to hear of a single Google breakthrough beyond their search. They're still just ad salesmen.
Only other useful things they've done that most people would be aware of is refining Microsoft's email/office software into the SaaS age, and making a popular map app. That's great, but no breakthrough.
Now OpenAI's going to kneecap them. Who searches for lists of potential sources of answers when ChatGPT just gives you them? They're fucked.
I don't like what Google has become but I can't deny them the amazing work that both DeepMind and Google Brain have done over the years.
That's what he's done.
Just in 2022, revenues were up $23B, so his cut was 1.2% of that.
Have you seen the ad load (the amount of realestate used by ads) in a search results page? It has gone through the roof.
It used to be a typical Google search ad was: title, 2 lines of text at most, and a URL.
Now you have 10 or more lines in the top ad. Of course as you use more space for ads, revenue will go up. Even an idiot can see that. It's no magic. But yet the leadership in Google acts as if they've done something magical by continuing to grow revenue. Well, d'uh!! Show more ads, get more money!!! This isn't some magical AI thing; it's pure greed at the cost of UX.
Edit: I was looking at the wrong numbers. Google's profit has roughly quadrupled in the 8 years Pichai has been CEO. His compensation makes a lot more sense in that light.
He has? How did he do that? Literally, curious, first I've heard of it.
> Led Google to third place in cloud computing.
You don't need to be number 1 to make a profit.
> AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.
I suspect you think google search is their core business. When it's ads.
Also, just because Microsoft is ahead just now doesn't mean they will be in the future. OpenAI I believe is only so far ahead because they take what others gave and didn't give back. This resulted in others to stop sharing. Since OpenAI is going to stop getting that boost from others, it could be that others start catching up with advancements they discover but don't share.
GCP is not profitable, though. Or at least, was reported as not being during this calendar year.
"We need to be real thoughtful about this", followed by strictly no decision / action will be the hallmark of Sundar's tenure which I hope will end real soon.
Perhaps having a good reputation with developers won't be as important in the upcoming years.
The big tech co lifecycle includes decline. More than 10 years ago, I figured that Google was a few years behind Microsoft on that trajectory. Edit: and a lot of comments here are saying Satya turned MS around; i find that dubious.
The advertising cash firehose is perhaps the only thing that matters at Google.
But, having been severely caned by ChatGPT and left flat footed on AI i think it’s reasonable to say even that firehose is now at risk.
For a $226M compensation, we should be able to demand a bit more don't you think?
Android and YouTube are doing great.
Other CEO's though definitely have more impact in their respective companies.
Intel's recent re-invigoration once Pat Gelsinger took over seems like a reasonable example.
Not to mention hiring/promoting the right people.
I fully expect the recent advancements in AI to bring to the surface more disruptive startups than Google can possibly gobble up, ultimately sealing its fate.
Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"?
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.
And the rank-and-file Googlers will defend this because they think they caught God by the ankles with their 150k/year salary, that they feel they don't deserve because of their impostor syndrome.
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't tracked by any metrics meaningful for the company.
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).
I know it's not a popular idea in American business-centered culture, but there should be restrictions as to why you can layoff employees.
Like I get that you'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 "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."
[0] I made that number up
@sine_break, [1],
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
That’s not the original title just added by OP for drama. It’s an editorialized title.
“Alphabet CEO’s Pay Soars to $226 Million on Huge Stock Award”
It’s a Bloomberg article not the Guardian
While correcting for the mistake of inflated bloat from recruiting? Industry wide pattern is emerging useless hires.
This is just business as usual for these roles and a lot of people shy away from these roles due to "responsibilities" such as this.
Now note that Google has a mostly positive reputation in society at large.
Annual Revenue of Google from 2002 to 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...
Annual Net Income Generated by Google from 2001 to 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266472/googles-net-incom...
Under metrics of leadership and fending competition there is no reason to keep the CEO:
"Killed by Google" - https://killedby.tech/google/
"Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad" - https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-ai-chatbot-bard-of...
"Google Cloud still operating at a loss despite revenue, client wins" - https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022/62...
> Pichai's compensation included stock awards of about $218 million and a basic salary of $2 million, the filing showed. Pichai's stock award is paid every three years.
(The additional 6million were security spent by the company.)
His compensation next year will be much lower, the same as the last two years:
> The 2022 pay is compared to $6.3 million in 2021 when he didn’t receive the grant.
So he effectively got 73million per year in stocks. Or around ($73mil/$106stockprice=) 690k stock / year.
[1] https://www.forbesmiddleeast.com/innovation/technology/googl...
- Meritocracy is a myth;
- There is no value without labor;
- The only risk CEOs are assuming is the nightmare scenario of becoming a worker;
- The company is not your friend. There is no loyalty; and
- The people paying the price for any bad decisions of a company (eg The metaverse) are rarely the people responsible.
I mean a tad overly cynical but vaguely true. Is this really such an epiphany for people? I never understood where does the idea that your employer is your friend even come from? Wait until you find out the etymology of the word salary!
These structures exist to make money. If they stop making money they die and all the jobs go with them and nobody gets paid anymore. If they stop growing they die.
Companies need money like you need oxygen. And if they don't die, if they figure it out and grow big, it is like the goose that layed the golden egg. All it has to do, all it can do, is waddle around and keep on laying golden eggs and shitting everywhere.
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.
A decent number of them are able to retire at 35-40.
That's awesome for individuals.
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's a business that brings in revenues of £500M / day (over £150M / day net); an astonishing amount. Anchor against that? Never let the less spectacular get in the way of a click bait, I guess.
[0] The original title was something along the lines of, Sundar earned $226M while laying off thousands
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
If they don't need some employees, should they be forced to keep them?
[As far as I know, many people agree income inequality is the widest it's ever been, and is a bad thing for society]
Google has killed their search with advertising and promotion to the point where results are useless.
Product management has been terrible for the things I use over a 10+ year period.
Based on recent employee accounts of the culture and mindset there it's a mess.
I don't know who this guy is, maybe he's just been a caretaker of a place that was already on this path but he doesn't seem to have done anything to improve it. And he's getting paid over $200M? No wonder working people get angry.
He might be a smart nerd but he’s not a leader.
If the CEO of Google gets fired, he just ends up as the CEO of another Fortune 500 company.
If he can't even land that role, he can just go around pocketing $50k/event speaking fee. Of course, that's only if he doesn't want to degrade himself by taking on a VP-level role at another Fortune 500 company.
That's a fairytale almost as preposterous as the tooth fairy.
That right there is more evidence for the tooth fairy than you’ll ever find in favor of CEOs assuming risk.
Does anyone seriously believe this? I see it all the time as a "comeback" against CEOs, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone arguing that they actually are the ones that assume all the risk.
Though he isn't injecting his money back into the company.
Full responsibility, but not too much.
They are essentially celebrities with a personal brand that corporations will hire to have the celebrity’s name as head the org.
A good celebrity can bring fresh energy and new atmosphere to an organisation.
It’s unclear whether the average CEO is worth their compensation, but what is clear is that bad leadership can tank an organisation to zero.
I have never once heard anyone make this claim.
Who specifically said they assume "all the risk" that we are refuting here?
Where does Adobe fit into this, are they even competitors?
Notice how everyone in this thread is calling Sundar out and not other people in the org who may be at fault too? It's the buck stops here thing.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7241
And it's not that Google doesn't have major problems, a lot of which can be laid at Sundar's feet, or that he's wildly overpaid.
It's that these types of reactionary missives just miss the point in every possible way.
> And the rank-and-file Googlers will defend this because they think they caught God by the ankles with their 150k/year salary
That’s closer to their intern salaries. Total comp is more like double or more
Much of the rank and file’s total compensation is also in stock
Add to that if you wanted to, you can do the minimum and just coast.
No one is going to unionize and it’s not for the reasons you’ve cited. Maybe you shouldn’t comment on something you know barely anything about?
"Coast" a.k.a. perform only the duties as agreed in your contract, without going above and beyond. A.k.a. "quiet quitting", or the preposterous idea that the company doesn't own the time they don't pay you for.
I'm a somewhat long-time Googler and really dislike this anti-labour narrative.
Very weak counterpoint, essentially ad personam, trying to insinuate my ignorance, telling me to shut up. Not impressive.
Google can't build products, they didn't build anything useful since Search and Docs, so they won't be able to compete. Add a couple of years for consumers to catch on and migrate.
So I would give it 5-7 years in which the employees will slowly be demotivated by waves of layoffs, morale will tank, and accelerate the process. In that time, the upper mgmt will scramble to increase their bonuses to get as much as they can out of the sinking ship. In the end the company will face restructuring and be left with maybe 10% of the current size, trending downward.
However what is the benefit of ultra high income FAANG employees unionizing?
They could negotiate higher salaries, more transparency around compensation, more benefits, longer parental leave, bigger budget for travel or education, longer paid vacation, some guarantees and rules for layoffs, etc.
In the end, I don't see why unions (IF done right) could only work for the lower class.
I know that the TikTok videos of FAANG companies make it all seem like there is no more place to grow, but that's just smoke and mirrors. I think anti union efforts in FAANG companies also play to the employees ego and make them believe that they can negotiate better on their own than together.
Same as for any other group that unionizes - maximizing the leverage they have in negotiations with the employer, utilizing this leverage as best they see fit.
For examples of two very-high income groups that are unionized, see the Writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA. Just because you make a lot, doesn't mean that having a union is not in your interest.
For one thing, unionization is nearly guaranteed to raise salaries.
For another, it will get them better benefits and working conditions.
Overall, it reduces inequality, which is one of the major structural problems in our society and economy today.
Having labor be more powerful can also help when execs push for morally questionable projects.
Lastly, FAANG employees are working class.
Unions can ensure that the employees get a fair share of the revenue in proportion to the upper mgmt. They also can remove artificial promotion hurdles, that at Google happens according to destructive internal dynamics.
Such dynamics result in deprecating useful and loved products and instead promoting parasitic internal interest groups that can stranglehold growth and innovation in the company.
Ultimately, unions give the employees a voice in shaping the company. Now they can walk out, write posts on internal mailing lists, but at the end of the day they're still in a dictatorship, and they have to accept the decisions of the higher ups, and they won't be asked about their opinion.
Especially SWEs at FAANG. Y’all absolutely minted money the last few years. You get months and months of severance. Do you realize that most of us make “only” $130k as seniors and don’t get any stock bonuses or severance? If I made $300k/year I’d have YEARS of expenses in an emergency fund. Unionizing would be a win-win. Either I become a unionized employee or I take a 1-year sabbatical.
You guys blew it.
But I happen to think your right that the employer/worker balance has tipped way too far in favor of the employer in the last half-Century.
No surprise, CEO performance has no persistence and is statistically random. Also higher compensation does not lead to faster EPS growth for investors over time.
Average comp for execs has skyrocketed 10x the past few decades due to equity compensation - yet companies aren’t growing 10x faster than they were before equity comp became so en-vogue.
My personal opinion: all execs should be paid in cash and incentivized purely with fixed cash bonuses. That’s basically how corporate America worked pre-1980s.
Gifting a big percentage of a company to someone who was employee #3076 is just plain theft from public investors.
"Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won’t change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO’s pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO – aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo – all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.
Take, for instance, ten year, fixed-price options (and who wouldn’t?). If Fred Futile, CEO of Stagnant, Inc., receives a bundle of these – let’s say enough to give him an option on 1% of the company – his self-interest is clear: He should skip dividends entirely and instead use all of the company’s earnings to repurchase stock.
Let’s assume that under Fred’s leadership Stagnant lives up to its name. In each of the ten years after the option grant, it earns $1 billion on $10 billion of net worth, which initially comes to $10 per share on the 100 million shares then outstanding. Fred eschews dividends and regularly uses all earnings to repurchase shares. If the stock constantly sells at ten times earnings per share, it will have appreciated 158% by the end of the option period. That’s because repurchases would reduce the number of shares to 38.7 million by that time, and earnings per share would thereby increase to $25.80. Simply by withholding earnings from owners, Fred gets very rich, making a cool $158 million, despite the business itself improving not at all. Astonishingly, Fred could have made more than $100 million if Stagnant’s earnings had declined by 20% during the ten-year period.
Fred can also get a splendid result for himself by paying no dividends and deploying the earnings he withholds from shareholders into a variety of disappointing projects and acquisitions. Even if these initiatives deliver a paltry 5% return, Fred will still make a bundle. Specifically – with Stagnant’s p/e ratio remaining unchanged at ten – Fred’s option will deliver him $63 million. Meanwhile, his shareholders will wonder what happened to the “alignment of interests"
There was a great little aside a couple months ago on the Odd Lots podcast[1] about investors forcing a radical change in oil company executive incentive compensation that had been draining shareholder value for decades.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
For them money and people are basically numbers, and more money means more power.
At least, this is how people that make all that money think. Yes, it's a huge waste, but who's instituting the other kind of social structure that doesn't reward socio / psychopathy anyway?
The paragraph above is an easy way to discount any and all criticisms. It could be worse, ya kno?
They are holding at a healthy 25% of the mobile market: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263517/market-share-held...
There are no real other exchanges.
This is freeing up resources for stuff like this stock grant.
Point is, it shouldn't be.
looks over at Europe
...wait a sec...
How can you trust a single thing the model says? I ask GPT4 for PPO code, it gives me basic actor critic with a loss with constants added. I ask it about a data filtering technique and it hallucinates concepts, libraries, papers and even companies.
It’s good as a fallback to search. Also maybe for judgement free brainstorming. But I don’t see how it can replace Google for serious queries.
Are you sure you’re not just chatting with it? Do you mind sharing your recent 10 queries with us
The reason why instead of having 60 google searches in a day, I now have frequently less than 30 is that ChatGPT is much quicker when I don't exactely know how to search for something.
For instance I recently looked for an easy way to have a Rails app inline CSS when creating a Mailer template. I wasted 5 Google searches which showed various stackoverflow questions which quite didn't match what I wanted (reuse exisiting CSS from a controller). Asking this as a question to ChatGPT has directly led me to the premailer gem. In hindsight, my search terms were too generic, but ChatGPT was the expert programmer who just pointed me to the right gem based on what I was rambling about.
I am also getting turned off Stackoverflow in general now. Grasping the random adjacent question/answer of SO is often more mental work than checking if ChatGPT is hallucinating. Joel and company did well in selling SO just before ChatGPT hit.
Anything else it breaks
That’s the standard we’re talking here.
It's not a big surprise that a Google backed product could suffer to bleed money the longest over other streaming services.. in other words their longevity in the field isn't an indicator of quality or customer happiness, just circumstance.
It's somewhat amazing how many failed, some nearly sociopathic, almost-CEOs Google had.
Overly opinionated people like that could thrive under Jobs, who was the biggest opinion setter, which made them fight for the most important things while getting a pushback on the most controversial areas and not waste time with minor stuff
Take that and they start going crazy (yes I'm talking about Johnny Ive)
Sundar is like Neville Chamberlain. Maybe ok during peacetime. But now Google is at war, and needs a Churchill.
War is sort of the opposite of "business as usual." The normal rules are abandoned. You still have the same high level strategic objectives, but the tactics are radically changed.
I would love to see Google go to war. Wake me up when they figure out how to do that.
No one is perfect.
So you're saying that all these people who were mistakenly hired by Google and were now let go, shouldn't have been let go?
you come home from the grocery store, you bought frozen goods. you are unpacking, and think you're done, so you sit down in your couch to relax, a couple of minutes later you realize you forgot to put the frozen stuff in the freezer, do you just go "oh well i dun fucked up, nothing to be done here, i'd best just admit defeat and let my wife fire me from grocery duty"
What is a fair share of revenue? Is a google SE earning 300K an exploited worker because Pichai earns many times that?
> They also can remove artificial promotion hurdles, that at Google happens according to destructive internal dynamics.
What is the correct (non-artificial) way to handle promotions? Union workplaces tend to overvalue seniority which isn't a great situation.
Live in Copenhagen and you can more than get by without knowing the language, although obviously you start picking up some functional words.
i.e. a lead surgeon can and should take "full responsibility" for what happens in the OR, but they obviously neither can nor will (and I also don't think should) shoulder "all the risk" for what happens in the OR (or even most of it).
This is not what we're talking about. This is about risk to the company, not risk to the CEO.
"Essentially CEOs are able to hold the board hostage."
Exactly. There is no risk to the CEO. They hold all the cards.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/03/10/google-...
I quit my $400k/yr fintech job to be CEO of a company whose primary customers use our tool to make Trump and Biden video game memes on TikTok.
In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.[11]
Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2]
These are the last 2 Google products I use
Search got replaced by DDG then Ecosia Chrome by Firefox Gmail by my own mail server My Pixel 2 ran out of security coverage and sick of buying a new phone every 2 years I went to an iphone xs
Youtube and Maps are the only two sticky products left and both came about when I was in high school
He kept getting told to stop working on it and he kept doing it anyway. Eventually resorting to back-channeling to Larry in order to get him to champion the project.
He tells the story in an episode of the podcast "The Social Radars."
Pretty good listen.
This is hardly reproductible. I guess that the standard place people go after gmail is fastmail.
But getting a free equivalent is hard (at least I do not know any). I could host my mail but this is hard work and monitoring.
Revenue 2019: $160bn Revenue 2022: $280bn
Net income 2019: $34bn Net income 2022: $60bn
Google hasn't done antything like that. Their product discontinuations have mostly been for niche applications.
$218M of it is a stock grant on a 3 year schedule, so no, it is not.
I'd argue that most human beings never do anything worth even a million dollars, let alone hundreds of millions, especially execs.
The shareholders decide on the compensation of the CEO, that's literally it.
These responses asking who "we" are feels like (bad) attempts at justifying the hilariously inefficient salary, as if "it's none of your business" is the best counterargument to why they should be paid so much but provide so little.
Also, I and I'm sure many others here are shareholders, if that matters.
Are you a major shareholder?
The real people who “take all the risk” are the investors (and they obviously don’t take “all” the risk). Somehow this platitude started getting applied to executives, but that has always been based on a misunderstanding of how executive comp is typically structured.
Execution is more important than being the first. MS and OpenAI did an excellent move, and now Google needs catch up. It doesn’t matter if they invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT, they are not the ones capitalizing it.
Case in point, 2017 Google Brain released the "Attention Is All You Need" paper however haven't done anything proactively to deliver it to mass users like OpenAI have done (among others) - perhaps this is the kick that Google needs to remind them that research alone isn't enough, it needs practical applications and the question could be whether Pichai is the right CEO to deliver that
etc.
history is littered with the dominant player getting shellacked by an upstart
And it usually is for political reasons not technical reasons.
Bard is a piece of shit. It's probably being held back so that it doesn't compete internally with google search
This pattern plays out all the time in the tech industry. You think google didn't know how to make a website like facebook? Of course, but they couldn't beat a much smaller weaker opponent even then. Google now is about 8 times larger than Google 2011 and much slower.
Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.
Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.
Does he "care deeply" about this? If we look at the direction they've taken in recent years, and the products they've launched (and/or killed) - how many of them demonstrate a "deep care" about this mission? How many of them are even tangentially related to this mission?
(The projects that Google undertook in the early days --Earth, Maps, Mail, digitising whole libraries, photographing the world for StreetView-- definitely showed a dedication to this mission statement.)
Google’s mission is to display ads on everything. Organizing information is just an optional side quest when it enables the former.
Gmail works much better. It does, indeed, organize the world’s information, the world’s private and corporate information.
But the only who can really search through it is the CIA. Maybe we’re not the real customers ;)
No, he isn't. However misguided and ridiculous Balmer was, he at least showed that he was fully alive [1]
Sundar wouldn't be caught dead wearing a sweaty shirt or yelling on a stage. The dude is a fucking wax puppet.
Have you considered what an increase to employment costs might do to broader employment?
A good illustration of this: https://old.reddit.com//r/recruitinghell/comments/qhg5jo/thi...
The reality is that having passed an interview at a FAANG company, having any work experience at a FAANG company on your resume opens a lot of doors while looking for a new job, even if it's a few months. Being laid off from a FAANG company is still bad, but if it was part of a broad layoff for cost reasons then it's not bad.
You can argue till you're blue in the face about how this is a bad thing but that does not change reality that those laid off from Google are better off in a job search than people laid off from random companies that no one heard of.
By G+ leadership - Vic Gundotra.
It is the one that works best for concurrent editing IMO (but it is markdown which can be a problem for some)
I'm not trying to make an argument; instead, I was:
1) Checking what Google's mission is these days (as I'm not clear if the mission statement I found is indeed still their mission, and/or the one that the previous poster said that he cares deeply about)
2) If that is the correct mission statement, testing the premise that he cares deeply about it, by exploring the direction the company under his leadership has taken.
Companies however also have some responsibility to not make themselves too dependent on individual employees, to the extent practical. The responsibility for the harm caused to the company by an employee quitting is therefore shared. This is in contrast to a layoff, where the employee usually shares very little responsibility for the harm caused to them by the layoff, because it’s largely out of their control.
It is possible that the suboptimal decision of overhearing was made in such a manner such that indicates the decision maker may not be beneficial to the organization, but not necessarily.
A hiring decision is a huge change in an employee's life. People uproot their lives, may have to move away from friends and family. They might need visas.
For a big company CEO, getting fired changes basically nothing material. They still have millions of dollars, they most definitely aren't on a work visa.
A rich, profitable company for sure can afford and should try to salvage every suboptimal hiring decision, at least once.
Except for the CEO, that basically gets all the money and no real risk. A CEO will never starve, will never get kicked out of the country, etc.
Not sure I buy that.
They're clearly ignoring the already existing human-race scale negative impact of their do-anything-to-capture-peoples-attention advertising business.
Frankly, Google is like the guy who invented a thing early in life and has been living off the royalties that just flood in, but has absolutely no touch with reality and is convinced of his own greatness as an illusion of that single act so many decades ago. And his kids are even worse and more rotten and spoiled.
They all just don’t know it yet.
Where in the world are you getting this from?
Again: “short term, sure”
Unless you have a convincing case for why “never” evaluating switching will last forever.
You don't have to think money is everything to understand how earning $225 million in a short time will help you with all the things you do care about, whether it's retiring early, spending time with kids, supporting charity, pursuing hobbies, doing independent research, or taking care of aging parents.
Especially if you have a cozy 200k 40hr/wk 6 weeks of vacation blah blah blah gig
you are ignorant, making your argument weak and just plain wrong. Should people no longer point out when comments are really wrong? You’re also over generalizing while being completely incorrect ie making shit up
You guys are just continuing to help prove my point
L3’s are newbies. They’re one step above interns. It’s easy to become an L4. L4 - L5 are rank and file.
You’re still really wrong and very ignorant on the subject.
As for being aggressive, I’m not the one over generalizing and calling the rank and file at Google spineless
You're again showing that you're uninformed. The bonus is guaranteed for everyone that doesn't get the lowest level of performance evaluation.
Other guy is right, you're misinformed and continuing to argue when you're wrong makes you ignorant and foolish.
The premise does not make sense to me. See:
>No one is perfect.
Specifically being able to predict the future a few years during and after an unprecedented pandemic.
Incredibly well-paid working class, but working class all the same.
Everything else is an implementation detail.
My point had nothing to do with either argument as it not interesting to me. My criticism was in the statement regarding the interview process validating the value of an ex FAANG employee over their experience from working at FAANG.
Why is that not worth discussing? Because there aren't any or are pretty weak?
What were you thinking the answer would be?
What we actually have here and with CEO pay in general at large organizations is what’s pretty well known as a principal/agent problem, where the manager class sets the rules for themselves in a way that results in the transfer of assets from shareholders to themselves.
1. Not all incentive packages are tied to share price. Many of them are tied to other metrics that the (shareholder elected) board decide are appropriate. This is where the bulk of Pichai’s comp comes from.
2. When they are tied to share price, they tend to be benchmarked. In this case Pichai’s share price incentives have been benchmarked against the S&P100, against which Google has been doing perfectly well. The reason for this is because directors generally don’t task CEOs with preventing economic downturns, and they typically want any incentives they create to be as effective under those conditions as they would be at any other time.
The shareholders are absolutely setting the rules for the executives here.
Riding the wave of market alpha is not an accomplishment.
The level that's synonymous with "this was your notice that you should start looking elsewhere because you will be let go in 6 months or less".
The bonuses are as guaranteed as your next paycheck.
These are very simple concepts, and while you can be forgiven for not already knowing them, aspiring to retain your ignorance certainly isn’t admirable.
AWS made 5.2B last quarter.
Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. The support is non existent. Why tie yourself to such an unreliable partner?
I guess this site could be of interest to some, to have a look at some of the products: https://killedby.tech/
Google has a separate site here as well: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Microsoft also has a site like that: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
I tried looking up one for Amazon or AWS projects, but only unrelated news articles came up.
I don't really have a horse in the race, though, since all three of the big platforms (and others like Oracle Cloud) are outside of my price point and all my personal projects run on smaller simple VPS providers. From what I can tell, there is not a single large corporation out there with the commitment to never kill a product of theirs and support everything in perpetuity.
If growth rates continue, in 5 years, it's on pace to be one of the most hundred profitable companies in the world...
The fasting growing cloud? 6% in five years after pouring in billions now they need to start charging what it costs. The more unprofitable of the cloud vendors.
Chrome is still the most popular free browser. Not sure that matters as much as it once did.
The data they collect via Chrome, plus their ad network, makes Chrome part of their money printing machine.
So market share I think helps them here.
I think the change in sentiment is that the sky is no longer the limit for Alphabet. Meta lost that notion big time, and Amazon is so so too. Apple and Microsoft might still be in the "sky is the limit" category, or at least in another category than the other 3.
Microsoft successfully transitioned into cloud computing with Azure, Office 365, and Teams. They dramatically improved their image among developers/open source with WSL, Typescript, VS Code, and their GitHub acquisition. Now it seems they caught Google completely off guard with respect to AI productization.
Also it doesn't matter what any of us think, it matters what the market thinks as in where does the stock price go.
At least a migrant has the option of returning to their home country with a network of family and old friends; natives are stuck jobless and with high cost of living or choosing to uproot and migrate to a new country with lower cost of living, becoming migrants themselves. There is no stress-free ride for anyone.
I'm not anti-union generally, and I'm glad to see a revival of unionization where it makes sense, e.g. places like Starbucks and Amazon, where workers are largely treated like interchangeable cogs by management already, and so a union improves employee bargaining power. And I also think it would make sense for certain areas of tech, and certain software companies, to want to unionize.
But this is Google. As others have commented, many software engineers at Google easily make hundreds of thousands annually in stock awards alone. I can't imagine any highly competent software engineer there wanting a union, because it means that their bargaining power is no better than the "average" software dev, which is obviously false.
I think Sundar's compensation is absurd, but I also think layoffs were warranted given the obscene levels of overhiring many of these tech companies did during the pandemic. And when you say "compensation is way down", at big FAANGs that is largely due to the value of stock awards, but many people would rather get compensated in stock to begin with - Google employees especially reaped gargantuan rewards up until 2022 based on stock.
Google’s origins can be traced back to really smart people innovating through brilliant new algorithms. So it’s understandable why people at Google believe that being brilliant is an irreplaceable asset. If only enough Jeff Deans could be brought together, something amazing would surely happen. But how accurately does this belief match reality? Most successful companies today innovate on product, not raw technology. 99% of product work really can be done by anyone. There are now plenty of multi-billion dollar companies that had original products engineered by total amateurs. Raw technical ability just isn’t that important anymore. And you see this in Google’s business. For how self-proclaimedly smart Googlers are, they sure have a hard time growing the business through new products.
And when I say total comp is down, I’m not talking about existing employees (although their comp is down too for the reason you mention). Go look at job openings near you. More likely than not, base salaries and equity packages will be much lower than before.
LOL
It's true that raw technical brilliance doesn't automatically translate to good products, but it's painfully obvious with Google's non-ability to create compelling products in recent years that product work can't be done by just anyone...
People who own stock are shareholders
Do you have an actual argument, or do you just plan on name-calling until people shut up and fall in line?
> A large chunk of techie compensation is in stock.
Oh ok, I guess they can fire Sundar Pichai/Mark Zuckerberg when he underperforms, then? What? They don't own enough stocks to do that?
There you go. That's your problem.
It’s literally the 2nd sentence.
An ignorant person is someone who is lacking in knowledge. It’s pretty accurate in this case
> Oh ok, I guess they can fire Sundar Pichai/Mark Zuckerberg when he underperforms, then? What? They don't own enough stocks to do that?
What are you even trying to say?
Even $200k would be awesome and get rid of a lot of major stresses and uncertainties like being able to afford my own place to live and a spare bedroom for the kid and worrying out about finding my next paying contract. It would give me "plenty" of time, but not all of my time, not even half of it. I'd still need to keep working most of my daylight hours for most of my healthy years.
Honestly, with a $225 million compensation package, I don't see how someone like Sundar could have any long-term incentives whatsoever. He's set for life and won't be hungry for anything, regardless of how Google performs.
At the current pace of savings and earnings I won’t be able to retire in the next 25years, whilst mentally I am already ready to retire to do all the things you listed and more. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just go for it and start living the life as if I had all the millions laying around and making the most out of my relatively healthy body. But I’m afraid it would be quite stressful to burn through savings and be forced to go back to a corporate job all over again…
Take it from a multi millionaire: it's not that cool. You already have everything you need and more, probably. Start appreciating it..
You sound jealous?
No you can’t argue that because it’s stupid. A typical google software engineer will have made enough that in their early 30s they can quit/retire and live the rest of their life at at least the same standard of living as that cleaning lady (almost none of them find that an acceptable standard but that’s far beyond food and a place to sleep)
These are not similar circumstances by any means.
Of course, that affects the cleaning lady more, but the core theft and the exploitative power dynamics they both are affected by are the same.
One of the tricks capital uses to keep control is to pit us against each other. Only through solidarity throughout the entire working class we can affect real change.
Is this the driver?
Microsoft as IBM is a horribly outdated take.
Because of MS, they helped me love desktop apps again: VSCode, Outlook, Edge, and the ever so controversial Teams.
Shares generally give you two benefits, one is a share of the up/downsides, and another is a right of governance in the company. The way employee share distributions are done right now means employees get a tiny fraction of the first and none of the second, even though they are a large stakeholder in the company's future.
Yes, and the goal of communism is to "share the resources and maximize everybody's potential", wonderful if you are incredibly naive and believe that these systems always do exactly what it says on the sticker, and just an empty platitude if you've lived at least two days in the real world.
Here's an example [1] of pro capitalists fucking over 49% of the shareholders to favor 51% of them, and you can find plenty more examples of you look through recent financial news. So tell me once again how being a 1e-7th shareholder of a trillion dollar tech company is guaranteed to "benefit you no matter what"?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-02/merger...
You’re conflating two things: earning a decent salary and having power with management. Current Google engineers have good salaries, but they hold no power with management. Their positions could eliminated without them having a say.
I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
Probably you’ll answer with something like: “software has 0 marginal cost so software engineers have extreme productivity numbers.” That’s true, but your wage, absent a union or scarcity of skill, is not tied to your productivity. Take construction nail production. Nails used to be made by hand. Now someone with some rolls of steel wire and a machine can make hundreds of thousands of nails in the time it took to make a few by hand. Yet the person making nails probably earns less than the person who made them by hand. The surplus value is captured by the owner of the machine.
You, as an engineer, are not special. You have no moat. From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
I have no idea what you guys (esp sibling comment) are arguing about. Larry and Sergey control the company and no other shareholders, no matter how many millions of shares they hold, would be able to block a decision that Larry and Sergey approved of.
Employees at Google are made shareholders because its cheaper for the company than paying cash. Employees form an absolutely tiny minority. The point of unionizing is to increase the leverage of the workers at a company. Workers would benefit much more from unionization than they would from holding the stock at a company without a union.
Maybe this would work if the employees have some sort of monopoly like the people who work at the ports. However, with knowledge workers there’s a threshold when it’s simply cheaper to move states or even countries.
Employees who are well compensated also do not have an incentive to form a union.
You’re still wrong. What’s your next proposal? Investment bankers should unionize?
Software engineers are primarily manufacturers. They make products. The barrier to entry is extremely low for this line of work. I get that you think you’re really smart, but there are tens to hundreds of millions of people in the world who could do your job adequately. Your only leverage is to band together with others doing your work and demand your fair share from the business’ owners.
Life can still be great. How much money you make isn't really all that important, I'm happy to inform you. No need to be jealous, count your own blessings!
No one sane wants the responsibility: that's why it's so valuable. It's not evil.
Glad you're counting you're blessings, now you can stop worrying about CEOs!
It doesn't matter. Compared to the average person, they will still reap a lot of the benefits of rising stock value. Given that stock is a major part of compensation, owning $1 million or more dollars worth of shares is more common than you think, but how should you know? You haven't worked in tech, and judging from your comments it doesn't seem like you've even joined the work force yet.
> I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
We are talking about circumstances in the past and present ie right now, and not in the far off future of 10-20 years from now. It is nonsensical to unionize when both the pay and benefits are decent. When this changes, then behaviour will naturally change.
> From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
Given all of the convoluted logic from your comments, that applies more to the person you see in the mirror rather than myself. You live in an ivory tower; you need to experience the real world first before you double down on a subject that you're not very familiar with.
You're also too overconfident. It's not merited.
The fact that most of the CEOs are still working after receiving such a compensation package shows their different mindset which is probably essential to becoming a CEO in the first place… personally I’d gladly take 1/100th of that and never have to worry about money ever again. Doesn’t mean I would stop working. I’d just stop working for money trying to hack my way into early retirement which probably won’t come anyways.
They all keep working from the few I know, it's a certain kind of person. Almost a curse. Even with hundreds of millions. One is doing django alongside me almost 12hr/day... lol...
I know some retired policemen/public workers and they're doing handsomely. Went hunting one time and this guy was decked out, asked him "what do you do?!" Turns out he's retired police...
> I get that you think you’re really smart, but there are tens to hundreds of millions of people in the world who could do your job adequately.
This is my point, and you’ve just bolstered it. If knowledge workers ”band together”, the company will just hire elsewhere. Your arguments are terrible
If the reason not to unionize is that the company will just move, how much job security do you have without the union? As soon as it’s cheaper to do your job elsewhere, your job will be gone. At least with a union, you have a hope of protecting your livelihood.
This makes sense for factories, but it’s a weak argument for knowledge workers. There’s a lot less physical infrastructure and we’ve literally just proven that remote work is effective for entire organizations within the last 3 years.
> As soon as it’s cheaper to do your job elsewhere, your job will be gone
Did you not read my previous comments? The second a union is created is the same second it’s cheaper to move elsewhere for knowledge workers. You’ve even validated this argument with your “engineers from other places are good enough” line
You haven’t thought this through given your terrible logic, and your comments make it seem like you still haven't graduated and started work yet.
This is so laughably insane when it comes to Google-caliber software engineers.
20yrs gets you 50% of your salary for the rest of your life on top of whatever else you saved. 3% more every year you stay on.
The guy I met hunting was in his 50s and has 30+ years in the force. He's getting like 70k/yr lol
Same with my highschool gf's dad.
I did read your comment. If the company is perfectly free to close up shop and move, then what is applying upward pressure on your wage? Nothing. You can expect your wage to continually fall until it is inline with other college-educated professionals. You don't even need to be licensed to be a software engineer, and many influential engineers aren't even college educated. It's just not that hard of a job. Median college educated salary is $80,000, which is in-line with mechanical and civil engineering salaries. You can expect software engineering salaries to settle around there absent any intervention from labor.
One issue I have with your argument is that you are providing hypotheticals. "Hypothetically, software businesses will relocate when faced with unionization." But software companies are already paying an extreme premium for labor. That premium implies it's not possible to find the required talent elsewhere. There also are unionized software shops, e.g. game developers, so it's not a given that businesses will automatically be relocated.
Essentially my argument is one along the lines of preparing for a rainy day. The best time to save is when times are good so you can spend when times are bad. Times have been good for software engineers. Now the times are changing. Those who haven't saved are in for a rough ride.
Keeping in my that we are talking about Google and companies like it; historically, investors such as angels and VCs want to minimize risk when investing in volatile startups. How do you do this when investing in knowledge based companies? One way is by past accomplishments of the founders, but a more common method is by looking at their credentials. You invest based on an individual’s university alma mater and previous employers. The institutions matter. The more exclusive the better. There’s less criticism on your judgement if you hire from Stanford and MIT. Fast forward. When a company matures, this mentality of hiring stays within its cultural DNA whether or not they admit it. There are a finite number of those graduates from those schools with those majors.
> It's just not that hard of a job.
It’s a much harder job than being an armchair economist. This is not accurate at all. You should just stop being very wrong with overconfidence. The only thing you’re achieving is constantly reminding me that economics isn’t a real science that it pretends to be. It has no repeatable theoretical model, hence all of the contradictory conclusions.
> You can expect software engineering salaries to settle around there absent any intervention from labor.
It may happen in the next 10 - 20 years, but that’s not reality at the moment or in the past.
> One issue I have with your argument is that you are providing hypotheticals. "
Wow, the kettle likes calling the pot black. Most if not all your arguments are also hypotheticals.
> That premium implies it's not possible to find the required talent elsewhere.
See my first paragraph for the reason
> Essentially my argument is one along the lines of preparing for a rainy day.
If we remember the original argument being that Google engineers should unionize, this is just stupid. Time and effort are finite resources. By the time the day of reckoning comes, and I agree that it will one day, our generation will be either retired or transitioned because we have a half life. Most engineers transition to other positions like management and other job functions by their early to mid 40s, or even much sooner. Unionizing now isn’t logical because it interferes with maximizing our gains now and in the immediate future ie promotions and immediate job stability. Seriously, before you double down on theory, maybe you should start a career first in the tech industry before you keep making terrible assumptions.