Miffed Googlers meme on CEO's $226M pay award amid cost-cutting campaign
- Reference: 1683207540
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/05/04/googlers_upset_with_ceos_226m/
- Source link:
The exec [1]scooped up $226 million for the year , it emerged last month, with the bulk comprising $218 million in triennial stock awards – although Pichai actually made more in 2019 when he was paid a total of $281 million.
To say the timing of the pay deal – made public on April 24 – was unfortunate is perhaps something of an understatement. A day later, however, Google followed that up by confirming the board of directors had rubber-stamped a whopping $70 billion in share repurchases in April 2022.
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All this follows some pretty hefty job losses at Google, with [3]12,000 being pushed out of the door . Google hired nearly 67,000 people from calendar Q1 of 2020 and headcount totaled nearly 187,000 by September last year.
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The business "hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today," the CEO said when announcing the redundancies in January.
Unsurprisingly, some Googlers are pretty pissed off and took to internal platforms at the company to voice their dissatisfaction, according to [6]CNBC , with upwards of a dozen memes doing the rounds.
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One contrasted Pichai with Apple CEO Tim Cook as the iBiz boss agreed to take a 40 percent reduction in his 2022 total compensation at the start of this year – note that Apple hasn't made mass job cuts. Other execs also agreed to reductions, including Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, who said he'd slash his salary by 98 percent after making job cuts, as did Twilio leader Jeff Lawson.
[8]Salesforce boss Benioff scores payday of nearly $30m amid cost cutting
[9]Meta's Zuckerberg paid $27M in 'other' compensation for 2022
[10]Average Adobe staffer makes $170k a year, and 185 of them = 1 CEO
[11]IBM boss Arvind 'kerching' Krishna paid more than $16m in 2022
Another was aimed at CFO Ruth Porat, who also didn't do badly last year at $15.7 million. Porat had talked of "multi-year" reductions to [12]staff services , namely asking employees to sweat their assets for longer, and making changes to subsidized food, gym, massage and transportation support for Googlers.
"Ruth's cost savings applied to everyone… Except our hardworking SVP and CEO," said the meme, liked by 1,200 people and seen by CNBC.
A third was based on Lord Farquaad from Shrek , an antagonistic sort known for banishing folk to the swamp in the 2001 film. The meme stated: "Sundar accepting $226 million while laying off 12k Googlers, cutting perks, and destroying morale and culture."
We have asked Google to comment. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/24/google_boss_paid_226_million/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZFPWo1bCESe4tVt0v7kiKwAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/20/google_to_chop_12000_employees/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZFPWo1bCESe4tVt0v7kiKwAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZFPWo1bCESe4tVt0v7kiKwAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-about-ceo-sundar-pichais-pay-raise.html
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZFPWo1bCESe4tVt0v7kiKwAAAM8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/salesforce_exec_pay_in_year_of_job_cuts/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/18/metas_zuckerberg_paid_27m_in/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/20/adobe_pay/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/10/ibm_arvind_krishna_pay/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/04/google_cost_cutting/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
In a normal business, a CEOs single job is to grow the business.
So they should be paid according to the value they have added to the business. Nothing more (perhaps a subsidence wage in-line with other employees).
Their wage should be based purely upon the stock price gains their policies have achieved.
Bad luck if the stock falls.
I might be generous and allow some form of adjustment for overall market movements.
Do not confuse Stock Price with Growth.
It's exceptionally easy to drive up Stock price whilst effectively killing a company, by simply selling off whole business units (the profitable ones because no one particularly wants the non-profitable ones), and then promising Shareholders will receive a massive dividend from the sales. And once the Shareholders and CEO have collected there bonuses, you're left with a company a quarter the size, with the least profitable business units remaining. Followed by a slow spiral to the realm of dead companies....
A CEO's pay should be linked to operating profit, not including any sales of business units, and before taking into account the costs of internal investment & R&D. That would actually reward a CEO for growing the business, whilst not incentivizing them to cut R&D in order to maximise their rewards. Also if profits go down, their pay should also go down. I'd also add in that any mass layoffs mean Zero bonuses for anyone in the C-Suite, as well as a cut in pay comensurate with the percentage of employees laid off, but then I'm a dreamer...
"he'd slash his salary by 98 percent after making job cuts"
But at that level the salaries tend to be tiny anyway. They make it up in dividends, bonuses, etc. Because it's far more tax efficient that way. I seem to recall that Larry and Sergey had salaries of $1, but they weren't poor.
So I imagine the corollary to the slashed salary remark is that the bonus received has increased by a similar dollar amount (actually, probably more).
Brin and Page built the company, whereas the current CEO is initiating the self destruct.
@Sykowasp
One way to push share prices up while doing absolutely nothing of value for the company is by doing a share buyback. Oh, just coincidentally, buybacks do increase the value of the shares of exec-level people who are compensated in shares. Oh and again it very coincidentally just so happens that the execs who are predominantly paid in shares are very much in favour of doing buybacks. Golly the coincidences just seem to pile up.
Oh, look
the execs get huge bonuses, the stockholders get the benefits...the peons don't even get the crumbs off the catered pastries while they're being kicked out on their rear.
But there's NOTHING wrong with our system, right??