HACKER Q&A
📣 more_corn

Why isn’t Google cutting executive pay and bonuses?


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?


  👤 ggm Accepted Answer ✓
"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?"


👤 flurly
They are in some sense since exec comp is heavily biased towards stock and their stock has been getting hammered recently.

👤 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.


👤 lordfrito
What's with all the class warfare stuff here recently?

👤 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?

👤 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.


👤 charcircuit
I mean why would they? Their compensation is already heavily influenced by the performance of the company.

👤 remote_phone
They are. The CEO already came out and said that execs would take a significant cut in bonus.

👤 ghiculescu
They did take a pay cut. The stock price went down and most executive comp is stock.

👤 shadowgovt
If they did, they might lose executives.