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Ask HN: Why isn’t Google cutting executive pay and bonuses?

25 points by more_corn ↗ HN
They clearly made a hash of the recent layoffs and release of their AI agent (what’s it called Bard?). Their reputation and stock both took massive hits. Shouldn’t the executives in charge take a hit?

39 comments

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ggm
"should" invites "what imperative, to whose purpose" as a question.

"should" the board demand senior executive pay cuts? Why? they're fam. They're part of the tribe. You cut the slaves, you cut the foreigners, why do you cut family?

"should" investors demand the senior executives get pay cuts? Why? They just executed thousands of slaves, and there will be a massive drop in costs, and the share prices will rise. Why would I punish them, when I am going to benefit?

"should" society at large demand Google and large corporates share the pain?

Well yes, but nobody is going to make them do anything. "should" is the wrong dynamic.

"we" should make them do it demands the question: "who is we here and what is our lever?"

simple-thoughts
Society doesn’t owe an obligation to support highly skilled engineers earning more than $50k per year, and in some cases earning more than $200k a year. These people are going to be fine, yeah they might have to cook their own food and move somewhere cheaper, but calling for society to bail out one of the most advantaged classes is ridiculous.
woodruffw
Nothing in the GP's comment implies a "bail out," or that they don't understand the immense privilege associated with tech wages.

Focusing on that talks past the point: a person can simultaneously be paid handsomely and still underpaid, if their productive output significantly outstrips their salary.

The last time I checked, Google's revenue-per-employee was around $1.6 million.

nickff
Revenue per employee is a very poor measure of productivity; it would imply that many people working at startups are completely unproductive (which rings false to me).
woodruffw
There is a very literal sense in which working at a early startup is less productive: you're trading current productive capacity for potential future productive capacity. The economics bear this out: early startups pay less, and offer equity to compensate.

That's a long way of saying that we shouldn't confuse economic productivity with effort.

kilgnad
Society owes engineers all of civilization. They built it. When I see engineers getting 200k what I see is society as it should be. The majority of wealth should be distributed to the most skilled workers on the bottom. But even at 200k, this is not what is happening in tech companies.

The thing that nobody owes anything to is execs. Execs just tell engineers what to build.

The injustice that's going on here is just power dynamics that lets executives have unfair safety and engineers get fucked. The irony is that Engineers as a group they are 100000x more powerful then any exec, the issue is engineers don't operate from a place of central authority.

This is what unions are for. In times like this it's worth considering.

pinewurst
Hardly the engineers of Google’s ad empire.
kilgnad
Google engineers changed the world.
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ryloric
What? That's like arguing which one of the four wheels a car relies on the most... It's nonsense.
kilgnad
Bad analogy. The engineers are the four wheels, the execs are car paint.

You remove the car paint, the car looks ugly. You remove the four wheels... you can't even call the thing a car anymore.

drewcoo
Paint doesn't drive a car. Execs do.

In this analogy the execs are autonomous humans and the engineers were just unthinking objects. I object!

kilgnad
Execs don't drive cars. They sit in the back of a limo driven by an engineer.
piva00
Solidarity among workers starts with... Solidarity.

Privileged or not, they are all salaried, the more we can all agree that if you depend on a salary you are part of the same class of people the more power to workers we get.

simple-thoughts
The economic, political, and social system advantages certain classes of workers over others. Personally, that doesn’t bother me as I am benefiting from the system myself. But to claim solidarity with workers who are not from our class and do not share our values is something I will never stoop to. Instead it’s better to recognize privilege and act in a way that recognizes your class obligations.
monero-xmr
Kind of a reach to call some of the highest paid employees on earth slaves
ggm
Yes, you're right. The correct term is (micro)serfs. They were serfs. The lord of the manor turned them off, to live in the less productive wasteland.
drewcoo
Owners aren't paid employees . . .
jmeister
>"should" investors demand the senior executives get pay cuts? Why? They just executed thousands of slaves, and there will be a massive drop in costs

Why not? Investors are after every additional cent, and they don’t have special charitable feelings towards execs.

kilgnad
They do. The higher you are up on the ladder the more likely you'll be communicating with board members. Communication implies relationship and all the buddy buddy politics required to even get an executive position.
ggm
This guy gets it.

You pay the board big bucks, to not have to worry about their conscience when they cut the labour force to make a short-term win. If you're in the set of people who are just along for the ride (make money, no other buy in to the outcome) then you don't ditch a board until the aircraft is within inches of crashing, and you have another one to jump onto.

Google isn't looking for Victor Kiam to replace Sundar. Mind you, it would be "extremely entertaining" if they did. Emphasis on extreme I guess.

gorbachev
Almost all the board members also former executives, so they're already in the same peer group as them.

It's also not uncommon, though less so in megacorps, for the board members to be family and friends, or a history of long mutually beneficial relationships.

flurly
They are in some sense since exec comp is heavily biased towards stock and their stock has been getting hammered recently.
charcircuit
I mean why would they? Their compensation is already heavily influenced by the performance of the company.
ghiculescu
They did take a pay cut. The stock price went down and most executive comp is stock.
kilgnad
We're talking cash here. The layoffs are supposedly for cash right.
richwater
When will congress take a pay cut? This is all their fault anyway. Why would you _not_ hire when the economy is (artificially) good?
kilgnad
Obviously it's not the politicians fault.

The issue here is that there is a theory that these companies are cutting things not because they need to but because of copycat behavior to get a slight improvement on the bottom line.

shadowgovt
If they did, they might lose executives.
rqtwteye
What’s the problem with that?
shadowgovt
You'd have to ask the executives. ;)
remote_phone
They are. The CEO already came out and said that execs would take a significant cut in bonus.
lordfrito
What's with all the class warfare stuff here recently?
analognoise
Tech workers have realized that they too are workers; temporarily privileged, but that it not only did not confer any real power, and that they could not insulate themselves such that the problems would not strike them.

Previously the thinking was "we're unique and special, and deserve all this high pay - it will continue in perpetuity, and as long as your output is good you will be fine. The system works and is just! If you fail, it's your fault". After being struck by algorithmic layoffs, they're no longer sure of their worldview.

They've been put in their place - highly paid, but utterly at the whim of the capital class. For the first time they realize they're as replaceable as the truck drivers they so want to automate out of existence.

Solidarity is in the zeitgeist; let's unionize! We have songs, and can march long; let's smash these chains of our oppression - together!

...would be my guess.

spacemadness
This is a pretty wide net you are casting. It sounds good, but I’d guess anyone thinking this trends younger as the industry hasn’t always been stable yet alone always kind to aging engineers. Most people understand the politics at play after some time in the industry unless they’re completely living in a bubble.
ryloric
I was thinking the same thing while watching google paris thing... how come nobody got axed for that screw up?

I thought the primary reason execs get paid so much more is because they're the last line of responsibility, it doesn't matter why the screw up happened, they get punished for it.

bigbee
They don't need to, because it's already tied to Google's stock performance! Over 90% of top executives' pay is in equity, so as the stock takes massive hits their pay takes a massive hit as well. Last December the board changed Sundar Pichai's compensation scheme so that most of his compensation is in PSUs (performance stock units) and not regular RSUs (restricted stock units). RSUs vest over time, no matter what. PSUs are only granted based on hitting some performance targets calculated as the stock's performance vs. the market. In other words, the stock not performing well means that the majority of Sundar's pay goes away.

BTW, this is true not just for top executives. The higher your level in big tech companies, the higher the proportion of your total compensation that is stock based. Even mid-senior levels get a majority of their compensation in RSUs.