Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai

https://ez.substack.com/p/google-should-fire-sundar-pichai

133 99 3 years ago

ez.substack.com

It’s hard to fathom how the upper management of these companies couldn’t see this coming when they were binging on hiring.

Did they really believe we were in some new era of pandemic-fueled hyper-growth and that they would be less competitive if they didn’t grow by tens-of-thousands of employees?

voytec• 3 years ago

Why would you assume they didn't see it coming? Big tech CEOs aren't dumbasses, they only act so, when it suits the agenda.

hnfong• 3 years ago

It's probably some kind of prisoner's dilemma. If you managed a department of a company which is expanding too fast, and you predict there's going to be layoffs in 1-2 years, the optimal game theoretic move (for yourself) might be to hire even more aggressively, so that when you're asked to do a x% layoff, your department is buffed up ready to shed the low performers.

psychphysic5• 3 years ago

It's also a resource problem. What if there isn't a belt tightening in 1-2 years?

Now you are resource short compared to competitors and hiring in an even more adverse environment.

theonlybutlet2• 3 years ago

Some say it may have been defensive, prevent your competition from acquiring talent.

halotrope• 3 years ago

Apple did not have mass layoffs (yet) and Tim Cook asked for a 40% pay cut. Go figure

vivegi2• 3 years ago

In the press release they mentioned that it was a proactive response to investor concerns about the recent decline in stock price.

themadturk• 3 years ago

Cook asked for, and was granted, that pay cut in response to 60% of shareholders not being happy with his level of compensation. Good on him for doing so, but $49m is still a lot.

neural_thing• 3 years ago

CEOs work for the shareholders not for the employees.

Over the past 2 years, GOOGL is up 3% while QQQ (benchmark) is down 11%.

Why would the shareholders want to fire Sundar Pinchai?

It's weird to me that people don't take the slightest amount of time to think about who can fire Sundar before writing a whole article about firing Sundar.

If you want to fight for worker's rights - advocate for unions or something, this is just clickbait.

meltyness• 3 years ago

Find the clip of him on the hill, hesitating to unequivocally reject slave labor.

"Yeah, have your people call my people." Haunting stuff.

lazyeye• 3 years ago

Oh dear...suddenly all the Silicon Valley people are concerned about the impact of retrenchments.

psychphysic5• 3 years ago

This is just part of life. The private sector particularly tech has always had far worse job security compensated by far better pay.

Being cut off in the night is unfortunately a necessity in the era of people airing their grievances on social media.

Seems to me all these tweets about how company X stabbed you in the back is just making it harder for the individual to find a new job.

Yes you might need to access your savings and push back the early retirement plan, yes you'll need to look at expenses and rationalise. Yes you might not be as employable as you thought.

I don't mean to be callous but if you've just lost your job or will find it harder to find your next one you need to wake up to this reality asap. This too shall pass and we will be back to boom but until then get your life in order.

boshalfoshal2• 3 years ago

It would be a pretty bold move to announce layoffs in advance and to do it at some convenient time. You are basically asking ip to get stolen by people who think/know they will be laid off, especially if it is out of spite.

I think its more of a precaution than anything.

penguinvondoom5• 3 years ago

Or maybe we need some kind of worker protections, where you can't just get people fired in the middle of the night. Unions and shit...

psychphysic5• 3 years ago

That works, it's just that total compensation is likely to be lower.

It's very likely this guy got a package that's far superior to what many people would have in more secure jobs.

That's been Netflix, Spotify and twitter's play.

sinuhe69• 3 years ago

I understand the psychological effect of termination during the night. But rationally thinking, I don’t find any difference to other forms of termination. For the company though, the prompt termination has a much better security prospect.

boshalfoshal2• 3 years ago

The kneejerk reactions to the Google layoff are quite interesting in comparison to other layoffs. Meta laid off 2x the % and there was less news or general backlash, and several well known startups have laid off 15-20% of their workforce to mostly normal reactions.

I understand that Google is a sort of indicator for the tech sector as a whole and people viewed it as a sort of "safehaven" prior to layoffs, but to me it shows how entitled tech workers are, especially those in insular cultures like Google.

I guess it also shows the immense brand value Google has, though this seems to be eroding slowly among SWEs, at least in my circles.

gloryjulio• 3 years ago

Exactly. Google laid off like what, 5%? That's less than annual piped from Amazon. It's a tiny dent. In the meantime Amazon is doing massive layoffs on top of pip.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

I read that as “piped” rather than “pipped” (long vs short i) and it was even more amusing that way.

vineyardmike• 3 years ago

1. Like you said, google is sorta an indicator for the industry, and a safe haven. It is a bellwether for the 21st century of Silicon Valley and it defined software engineering and tech for a while. Its buses, food, and perks were famous enough to get movies about its interns.

2. You can't fire Zuck, its not possible without his consent, since he is the majority shareholder. You could fire Sundar. Other tech CEOs that did layoffs (eg. MSFT) have generally well-liked CEOs or already are experiencing leadership changes (salesforce).

3. To build on (2), people don't really seem to like Sundar. He isn't a technical guy, just an MBA from McKinsey (he has an unrelated-to-software engineering degree). There has been a lot of ink spilled on if he has a vision at Google, which I won't take an opinion on, but he was CEO for a lot of the time where people thought Google was getting worse. People complained about quality of search, bureaucracy in the company, inability to diversify income (although they still make a lot of money), etc. The only good thing I've heard anyone say about his was an (Indian) Uber driver who said that he represented the dream for Indian immigrants - going to IIT, moving to America, and getting put in charge of a major global corp.

4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.

5. Cynically, most companies time bad press to news cycles, google didn't do this. Meta did layoffs near the election, which was a much bigger news event.

Panini_Jones2• 3 years ago

4. Meta did layoffs early, and 'honorably'. They got a lot more news coverage being early, but they didn't lock people out in the middle of the night. That causes a lot more complaints from those laid off. If google didn't lock people out in the middle of the night without warning, and discussed why and who was going to be affected, then they may have gotten better press, especially from ex-employees. I've definite seen less news about google layoffs that don't include google in a list of the industry, while earlier layoffs had their own news cycle.

Meta did lock people out overnight all systems except e-mail. For some reason, some employees had access to workplace until ~10:XXAM EST, which doesn't seem intentional. No one at Meta really uses email.

They didn't explain why people were let go. The Q&As afterwards were brutal. Many high performers or people on high priority projects (e.g. ads) were let go.

Ex-meta employees seem to be overall more demoralized by the company already. Why complain about how you were let go when it seems in line with how the company was treating you anyway?

quitit• 3 years ago

There may also be an element of self-selection here.

I follow the tech news loosely and from my experience Meta have received significantly more high-level news coverage, including a lot of doom-sayer pieces.

The Google news tends to be localised to tech-related news sites. There's no talk of doom, but rather that Google may be preparing for a wider downturn across all industry (i.e. recession.)

cpurdy2• 3 years ago

My mom uses Facebook.

I use Google.

That's the difference.

bsg75• 3 years ago

Meta laid off 2x the % and there was less news or general backlash

Google has tools that people use to get stuff done.

I doubt many HN readers give a rat's rear end what Meta does.

A_D_E_P_T• 3 years ago

Pichai is simply a poor performer. Google's core businesses have gone markedly downhill just over the past few years:

- A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

- Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.

- There have been a dozen threads here lately -- just over the past few months -- about Gmail's SPAM filters going haywire.

- AI is poised to eat Google's lunch, and there are rumors that they're lobbying Congress for AI research bans/restrictions, "because it's unsafe."

Honestly, with Pichai at the helm, they're going to go the way of DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory.

dunno7456• 3 years ago

YouTube is now full of garbage too.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

I've had crypto scams in my recommendations everyday for more than a year now. It's like they just don't care anymore.

mindentropy2• 3 years ago

Search is a joke. Whenever I want to search some conference videos on a topic I get trash after 2-3 results which is totally unrelated with "You may like" nonsense.

unsupp0rted2• 3 years ago

I, for one, appreciate all the video recommendations for local news stations in a country I don't live in.

mindentropy2• 3 years ago

A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

I thought something happened to my browser session or something when it started giving useless results. Youtube is giving me nonsense after a certain set of results. I am shocked because search is THE tech of Google and wondered how they could screw this so badly. Sundar has caused the downfall of Google.

Panini_Jones2• 3 years ago

Google A/B tests their recommendations. Either these recommendations improve their topline metrics or you're in some exotic test group for some in-flight experiment.

Either way, these are deliberate choices whose results likely show that showing bad recommendations is good for business.

tremere• 3 years ago

- A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

Not to mention malware redirect sites which Google, previously excellent at detecting, is seemingly clueless about and ranks them as high as Page 1 at times.

linhns• 3 years ago

I've been saying this for years. He simply doesn't have what it takes.

A regular Google search typically returns unrelated products for sale, 15 pages of corporate media and broken English SEO articles, and random videos.

I just searched for HackerNews and have to scroll down to find HN because of ads.

viridian2• 3 years ago

Reverse image search has been gimped, no longer performs as well as it used to, and even Yandex always returns better results.

I'm actually finding that aside from programming related queries or searching for reddit threads, Yandex is now the best general search engine, beating out Google, Bing, the bing derivatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave search, and I imagine Yahoo.

It's insane to me that the quality of search has slipped so low, and it also makes me wonder what it is about Yandex that allows it to avoid the modern hellscape of SEO optimized websites that spend 10,000 words saying nothing. It feels like it's got to be something to do with the fact that they have some large bias towards the age of a website.

yucky3• 3 years ago

  > the bing derivatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave search

Brave search is not a Bing derivative.

chewz• 3 years ago

But Pichai is doing tremendous job. He had been hired to keep the lights on at Google for as long as possible and this is what he is doing.

You can mine Google for next 5-10 years but it is basically a dead end company. The goal is to give back as much as possible to shareholder so they an allocate capital to better performing ventures they choose. Google is irreparable and sinking.

unsupp0rted2• 3 years ago

And there's that thing about losing access to one's Google account being irrevocable.

I know my password- Google admits it's correct. But I'm in the wrong geography now with a new phone, years later, and therefore can't login.

hbrn• 3 years ago

I don't think you should blame Pichai for that. With or without him, Google was already going downhill. You can say he did not reverse course, but doing that means taking risks and I imagine investors of multi-billion dollar companies don't want CEOs to do that.

sidcool• 3 years ago

The article does have some solid points. But I am not sure firing is the way. It should impact the compensation.

moomoo114• 3 years ago

bruv y’all we work willingly for big tech companies. they answer to shareholders. they use their money and connections to work with governments and shitty actors, and y’all don’t complain then. in fact you go along with it.

it’s hard to feel bad for millionaire employees who don’t understand this basic fact.

especially when regular people are suffering, it’s cringe to see people making way more than most people cry about how things are not fair. you’re getting many months of full pay and health insurance extensions.

we choose willingly to play the game when we sign offer letters and it’s not like employees are loyal (no reason to be) to companies. accept it and move on.

start a co op b corp now and run it your way with your millions. don’t play the game and still complain expecting things to change.

tired of these layoff news.

penguinvondoom5• 3 years ago

it’s cringe to see people making way more than most people cry about how things are not fair. you’re getting many months of full pay and health insurance extensions.

Far from it. What is cringe however is that not all employees get these, like in normal countries, and that we create artificial division between highly paid devs and "normal people", cause newsflash - they are normal. And they are much closer to you than to their bosses. Only difference is they may have a few more months before homelessness hits, and maybe more brainwashed into thinking they're different. What we all need is solidarity.

moomoo114• 3 years ago

Yeah I actually feel bad for the regular people who have no support.

It’s hard to feel bad for people who make 300k plus tc because I know what’s it like to have money and savings after having no money prior to getting into tech. I was living with my parents til 25 for example and when I got a tech job suddenly I could afford a car and my own place. And savings.

I’m sure google pays even more, so I feel cringe there. I don’t feel solidarity with most tech workers who barely work and goof off (personal experience) while maybe 20% actually do the heavy lifting.

Workers should actually you know.. work.

anonreeeeplor• 3 years ago

This is a good place to remind tech workers that they should not get comfy in big tech.

Older workers are a massive liability. They will try to get rid of you and they will prefer foreign replacements on the younger side.

They will also claim that they need to increase diversity while doing it.

Everyone is celebrating the fact that most big tech companies are no longer run by Americans. It’s because the system is designed to discriminate against you and get rid of you.

My personal theory is highly liberal tech workers are going to turn into the new “Dey Terk Ur Jerbs” flyover country citizens they spent the last 20 years laughing at.

“Look at the racist losers who hate immigrants! What morons voting for repuvlicans.”

Look in the mirror at 45, it’s you now. And watch how you get laughed at next.

psychphysic5• 3 years ago

That job you can't be fired from, that ensures employment as long as you want? It's in the public sector.

But Republicans especially and Americans generally are allergic to the public sector.

So really you want that lucrative highly competitive job without the competition.

If after 20 years at a company at 45 years old some kid from a developing countries is better than you at your job that's on you.

ok_coo• 3 years ago

Agreed, I see plenty of tech jobs in the public and non-profit sectors.

Problem is that they're not paying what would be considered acceptable to a big tech worker.

I saw a 20-something on TikTok saying that she feels like her compensation should be ~500K/year. That's a rate at our org where you're talking about multiple exec salaries combined. It's not based in reality for the vast majority of the country. This feels a bit like golden handcuffs.

yucky3• 3 years ago

  > That job you can't be fired from, that ensures employment as long as you want? It's in the public sector.

No wonder the public sector is known for inefficiency, incompetency and lower pay.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

That job you can't be fired from, that ensures employment as long as you want? It's in the public sector.

No, its not. You can be fired from public sector jobs. Many of them (outside of high level ones, e.g., where you are or serve at the pleasure of some elected official) have due process protections, but people can and do get fired from even those.

UncleMeat2• 3 years ago

US workers at Google have already been fired. Non-US haven't. The number of US workers is known. The number of intended firings is known. The ratio of US workers to Non-US is known.

Doing the math the conclusion is that non-US workers will be disproportionately affected by the layoff. I think the layoffs are foolish, but they aren't an offshoring plan.

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

It does seem that executive compensation is just straight up broken. Even bad CEOs are paid enormous sums of money for their shoddy performance. Sundar Pichai is a poor performing CEO, he's very likely done permanent damage to Google's business. For this, he is going to be rewarded with generational wealth. It's hard to see what exactly we're paying CEOs for. Are we paying them to attract the best talent? No, you'd have a queue of fantastic candidates queueing around the block for 1/10th of what Sundar is being paid. Are we compensating them for performance? Again no, they get massive compensation packages up front whether they succeed or fail. Are we compensating them for the extra-ordinary responsibility they have? Well apparently not, because they don't face any consequences for fucking up.

So why are we paying them so much? Because the compensation committee says so. Why does the compensation committee say so? Well, because the compensation committee is formed of executives, so the whole thing is just a massive circle jerk.

At what point do the shareholders say "hold up a sec, why are we bleeding all this cash to a bunch of executives whose entire strategy is just to follow the market".

DonsDiscountGas• 3 years ago

Maybe this is just the outside view talking, but it seems like a CEOs biggest function is to be the public face of the company. To take abuse and answer tough questions so the investors don't have to. This requires a fair bit of PR talent, and also the ability to withstand a lot of public hatred. Apparently that's worth a lot of money.

penguinvondoom5• 3 years ago

To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT

throw932• 3 years ago

CEOs have an army of people at their disposal to do the said “PR talent” stuff. They absolutely do not deserve what they get and they are not tech gods as media paints them to be. I’m sick of media defending CEOs instead common workers.

Laaas• 3 years ago

I think many things in the world would be better if executives had real personal liability. Reminds me, the executive of the company responsible for the huge port explosion in Tianjin, China was apparently personally liable (suspended death sentence!): https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...

dontlaugh• 3 years ago

Sadly that kind of thing seems to only happen in China. Most other countries have the perpetrators in charge of the state.

landemva• 3 years ago

Family members tell me in Italy the plant managers are personally liable for worker injuries. A workplace death is a big deal, even if the executive in charge resides in another country.

qikInNdOutReply• 3 years ago

Thee pay them for caste solidarity and not to ally with the employeomans or the actual company interests, but with those of the shareholders.

willcipriano3• 3 years ago

Caste solidarity is everywhere when you start looking for it.

Another example, go to court without a lawyer, make a minor procedural violation and the judge will rip your head off. Hire a attorney who does the same thing and all of the sudden it isn't a big deal, the judge may not even mention it. Judges tend to be former lawyers and the legal caste feels that one of them must be paid lavishly for you to receive a defence. Don't pay them? You should be punished!

I modestly propose that tech workers should join in on this game with similar solidarity, members of the executive caste like Sundar should suddenly find themselves without access to email for example, and then should be forced to pay a nerd tens of thousands of dollars to go talk to the guy who runs the email server to have his account reinstated. If he talks to the guy directly, without paying the requested fee and fails to use the correct IT Crowd reference or doesn't know what version of Python added type annotations off hand, his account should be permanently removed and all of his devices banned from the internet.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

The executives have to be paid large salaries by the shareholders so that they'll put shareholders interests well above those of company employees and customers. This allows them to justify overriding their normal human connection with their employees, and replacing any tendency towards co-worker loyalty with shareholder loyalty. Of course that also justifies treating customers as poorly as possible - just not so poorly that they stop coming back (although if they can monopolize an industry, customers will have nowhere else to go - see broadband providers, etc.).

This is a primary reason why investment capitalism is such a destructive economic system in the long run. Shareholders tend to want to extract as much profit from the company in a short a time as possible; the long-term health of the company and their customers is generally not their primary concern.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

... doesn't that make the CEO place his compensation over the shareholders? Yes, they use things like stock options to try to align it, but practically that just gives an artificial target to cook the books/revenue for.

akomtu• 3 years ago

Who "we"? Larry & Sergey hired this dude to manage the company for them. Their criteria was: someone who is easy to control, but not dumb as rock.

vivegi2• 3 years ago

When 80+% of GOOG's revenue comes from advertising, it is bound to cause pressures to cut costs especially when the leading indicators are showing a broad recession across the board.

If Sundar had just kept the headcount betting that the recession won't impact GOOG, and was proved wrong, the investors and employees would be out with pitchforks.

If the recession does hit, at least Sundar has cut costs before the fact and his rational investors should be happy with that outcome.

If the recession doesn't pan out as deep as they have estimated, they could just restart hiring.

It is terrible for the people impacted by this decision and I empathaize with them. But when heads of peer group companies are also doing similar cuts (some even deeper than GOOG), I see it as a broader economic trend and not something specific to GOOG.

(The problems related to GOOG's service mix, cash cows and innovation impact are a separate issue and the CEO should be judged on that separately. All things considered, the current headcount reduction decision is a rational one, imo.)

crystaldecanter• 3 years ago

Corporations - and in particular tech companies - have consciously colluded with each other to push a false narrative about how they are the victims of an economy that continues to enrich them. And that’s because their leadership isn’t judged by how well they treat their employees, but rather by how they protect the interests of their shareholders.

This is the core of it, and, contrary to many, not something that we have accept as inevitable or immutable.

nunez• 3 years ago

So let's say the board fires Pichai (won't happen).

This dude's a CEO of the most profitable tech company on the planet. So what will happen?

He will probably definitely get a multi-hundred-million dollar stock grant.

He could also be "demoted" to chairman of the board, making millions to do even less work.

He can start literally any startup and have a very high chance of securing massive funding.

Or he can just live off of his massive wealth until his end o of days while his next in line takes over and makes mostly the same moves that he did.

So why should Pichai be fired?

dvngnt_• 3 years ago

you don't fire people to make them suffer. it's to improve the company

cpurdy2• 3 years ago

My boss at my previous job made $40 million a year, and he was literally single-handedly tanking the company. He got fired and so he went to work for Sundar Pichai at Google ... making even more.

People who are on the low rungs of the ladder assume that the people way above them must have been intelligent to get up there. It's not always a great assumption.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 3 years ago

Maybe. I know why I am not pursuing any non-IC role these days, which seems to be THE way to ridiculous compensation packages. I am not willing to put up with the stresses involved if I am to do it well. And that is before you get to dealing with the backstabbers, yes-men and obligatory birthdays. It gets old fast.

theonlybutlet2• 3 years ago

He's the CEO,he's there at the wishes of the board who in turn are accountable to shareholders. The metrics he's judged by unfortunately are not long term but rather quarterly reporting, as long as these numbers look good and the share price reflects it, they'll keep him there. This year we've obviously seen a decline from the frothy peaks and this mass layoff is likely the consequencenof that. It's a common occurrence in that share price growth is conflated with CEO performance when in fact the general market is responsible for it.

musicale• 3 years ago

fire any executive that has to lay off hundreds or thousands of people because they got too excited about making their shareholders money.

As a shareholder I'd be upset about the huge amount of value that these CEOs are destroying.

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

My answer is that it shouldn’t be, and that if we had a culture where the Chief Executive feared for their job, they might take a different tact with the company.

It would probably be worse for the company. The biggest problem with layoffs for a company is that it creates a culture where employees fear for their jobs, which leads them to perform worse, and quit the moment they have any leverage, making the company far more inefficient.

One of the major reasons tech companies are blaming the layoffs on pandemic hiring is not because that’s the truth or that the execs believe it’s the truth (although it might be) is that they can use the pandemic to present the layoffs as a one time thing extraordinary event, to prevent fear of being fired from setting into the company culture.

throw932• 3 years ago

I hope this teaches everyone a lesson that all these glorified CEOs can be as dumb as rocks. Pichai, Zuckerberg, Musk, Nadella have proven this in last few months. We need to stop glorifying these people as demigods. Their only job is to exploit workers as much as they legally can to produce maximum value for shareholders. The people who actually create this value are the ones who always get the short end of the stick. Meritocracy is such a lie, I’m sick of it.

Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai

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