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Comment by blahi | Hacker News Reader

Compensation has nothing to do with whether somebody works harder or is smarter than everybody else.

Perhaps you would like to step in Satya Nadella's shoes for a couple of weeks?

A common complaint (At least from my mouth as well) is that I would _love to_ but even achieving the chance to prove yourself is as much luck as it is personal direction. You might not believe the number of times I've asked to be given greater purview, more leadership opportunities, even asking for no "promotion" and offering to put my money where my mouth is re: being punished if I fail, but being told "do your time" or "you're not a high enough rank" to even try. (The insult to the injury is that I've been in industry longer than some of those with "sufficient" rank who have been 1 company tenants.)

I would not look as askew at executive comp if I didn't have a nagging doubt that large portions of it are smoke and mirrors, obscured by extremely high and socio/political barriers to entry by which if you're the sort to pass, you're the sort to not "rock the boat"/"call the bluff" so to say.

If you're such an amazing leader then why not start your own company?

For your own benefit, please understand that suggestion sounds idiotic in context.

You don't say? Well perhaps then maybe not every employee is capable of doing the same quality work of their leadership.

I intend to, and do as much to that end as my current situation allows. The barriers currently are largely wanting to be sure I have enough saved up that my family won't suffer if I end up failing. I market side projects during my personal time, and am constantly looking for opportunities on my own outside of a formal work career progression.

Do not take my earlier comment to mean I simply complain and languish; merely why there might be a natural frustration to some of the judgments/environment/deifying surrounding leadership positions (notably for my argument, bigCo leadership)

(To add another point I was nervous to say since it sounds arrogant; but I've ostensibly managed at a comparable scale to what some of the positions I'm aiming for would require, but in situations that don't hold the same level of credential-ism/tenure focus. This just adds to the open question in my mind of why those teams were able to find success with less rigid progression while others offer so much resistance. I mention this not to humble-brag but again, to point out mental dissonance.)

You might be facing very byzantine leaderships. But you might also be severely overestimating your skills. Not only your technical ones but your political ones. A key requirement for a leadership position is being convincing. Social intelligence is of paramount importance. Leadership is not about technical acumen. It's about managing people. Getting them to trust you. You can't get people above to trust you and you think you will be able to make people bellow do?

That would be fun and at least I wouldn't shoot my self in the foot when asked an easy softball Q about diversity.

MS should have gone with Alan Mulally.

The point is, executive pay is entirely out of whack with the value (most) provide. Orders of magnitude out of whack. Sure I might not fill a good CEO's shoes but you or I can likely do the same job as a lot of lackluster CEOs that get paid insane multiples of our salaries.

So how much compensation do you think executives should get?

I have no idea, but if you run a company into the ground you probably shouldn't be making more in a year than I will in a lifetime.

Yes, please. In 3 weeks, I can do whatever and still earn enough money to retire before the end of October 2016.

And while we're talking about shoes, a good shoe-seller could do the job of about any CEO in those huge companies. Would be harder in a small one, though.

How would you feel if somebody who saw what programmers do only on TV tells you "A very highly trained monkey can do what you do - type on a keyboard." Because that's what programmers do, isn't it?

One might offer to sit them down at the computer for a while and see what they accomplish. The skeptic can probably even provide his own computer. Most people don't have a large corporation they can just casually make themselves CEO of in order to prove a point.

Clearly it does not. However, it should.

I could probably do a better job - many people here could. However one of the perks of getting out of the corporate game is getting out of the corporate game.

No. But I get the feeling almost anybody could have filled Balmer's ...

Do you have any knowledge about what Balmer's initiatives at Microsoft were? What his goals and objectives were?

No. But I know their stock was pretty much flat for 14 years.

The growth during those 14 years was factored in the stock... This exact thing was actually discussed on Martin Shkreli's stream a couple of weeks ago.

Maybe you shouldn't have such strong opinions about things you perhaps don't understand? And not even attempting to understand according to your own admission.

It is known he didnt successfully lead microsoft into the mobile computing industry, and its known he didnt successfully lead microsoft into the cloud computing industry... so whatever his initiatives, goals and objectives were, they were wrong.

I disagree. Under Ballmer, Microsoft more than doubled its revenue, profits, and employee base. By standard measurements of CEOs, he did great. (Although the stock price didn't grow, but that may have had to do with the 2001 crash and timing more than anything)

In contrast to all of Microsoft's rivals: IBM left the PC Business. Sun literally died and got bought out. Oracle's products were eaten alive by Open Source.

Under Balmer, Windows 7, XBox and XBox 360, Kinect. Do remember that Windows Mobile 6 was a major competitor vs Blackberry through the early 2000s.

Ballmer tripped up in his final years with Windows8 and failing to bring the success of Windows Mobile 6 to post-iPhone markets. But I think he did good from 2001 through 2011 overall.

Microsoft stock was essentially flat across his entire 14 year tenure, despite being the dominate OS and Office suite that entire time. By standard measurements he was not a success.

Double the revenue, double the profits, double the employees.

The CEO doesn't control the stock price. He controls employees, revenues and profits. Lets not blame Ballmer for having the unfortunate luck to become CEO at the height of the 2001 stock bubble, and instead look at the things he actually could control.

Wait. I was EXCLUDING the stock bubble. If you include that he's DOWN over his tenure.

Ballmer did a terrible job. Basically stalled the company for 15 years and put them far behind Google and Apple. "he did great" and "the stock price didn't grow" are the opposite of one another.

Ballmer ran the company after the fat part of the Windows rollouts was done. Microsoft was then an incumbent firm, not a growth company. He could have done great and the stock was flat at the same time.

The problem is Ballmer point blank completely utterly failed to successfully transition Microsoft in the single biggest revolution in the Computing Industry in the last twenty years. He also utterly failed to successfully transition Microsoft in the second biggest revolution in the Computing Industry in the last twenty years.

Ask microsoft right now, they would probably trade 50% of their windows and office business to have a strong 25% share in the mobile market. They would also probably trade the other 50% of their windows an office business for 50% of the worlds cloud computing business.

He had no CEO vision, he was an excellent COO who streamlined and improved margins, but absolutely failed to make any of the moves necessary for Microsoft to continue to be at the top of the software industry over the long term.

CEOs need the vision to recognize, and the cajones to go after the big 'bet the company' moments...

Compare Microsoft with their 90s peers: IBM, Sun, and Oracle.

Tell me who you'd rather be among the major forces of the 90s. My bet? I'd rather be Microsoft.

The responsibilities of an enterprise-level deployment mean that Microsoft was ill-suited for the changes that occurred in the mid-2000s, just like its other enterprise competitors.

Still, despite being handicapped by Enterprise customers, Microsoft performed okay in the transition to cloud. I mean, Azure actually exists and arguably is a bigger platform than Google's Compute Engine.

Microsoft's track record is that it's 2nd best at a lot of things. Microsoft is 2nd best at cloud (Azure), 2nd best at Bing (remember: Yahoo uses Bing as a backend), 3rd best at web browsers (Edge / IE). 2nd best at gaming (PS4 > Xbox > Wii U in terms of this generation's sales).

They're not really in a bad position at all. They're just not a dominant giant.

sounds like a true comment from someone who's only seen some memes about "developers" and assumed he was smarter than Balmer. There's a reason Microsoft was used by every IT department in the world when he left. He may have had some weaknesses on the consumer front but he made MS into a juggernaut on the business side. I still don't see any other company come even close.

Not at all. I believe the largest thing Nadella did was get out of the way of the individual organizational units and let them do their job; that's why he had so much success in his first few months as he simply unstoppered a blocked up product flow.

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