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Comment by ScottBev | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what they accomplish during their tenure.

I've seen non-founder CEOs take a $100M business to $4B, and others take a $4B to $500M. $100M to $4B deserves the reward.

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The whole problem is that CEO pay is not correlated to performance, and performance metrics can be gamed if they are not long-term.

That's not true, CEOs are increasingly compensated in stock options, which are at least theoretically correlated with performance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/02...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-21/key-quest...

share buy backs...

That's where stock instead of cash makes sense. If you are solely responsible for the direction of the company and overseeing the execution of that direction like a c-level executive, you should get paid in stock. If you do your job right, your stock value goes up and you become richer as a reward for doing a good job. If you do poorly, you lose money as a punishment.

If a CEO is making $100m per year in cash, there is no incentive to do a good job. Especially if they do so poorly they get fired, which means they get a $500m bonus as a reward for being fired.

Yeah, so CEO just single-handedly drove company from $100M business to $4B and the rest of company workers had nothing to do with it? Or did they all received multi-million compensation for that? Nobody denies that CEOs have huge impact on company as they make strategical decisions, but their compensation is vastly exaggerated just because they are first in the line after money, can see how much company really makes and accurately measure their actions in monetary value imho. The last part is especially important, because every time I've asked for a raise the first question is: "what did you do for a company and what positive impact it has had?". Answering that question in lines of: "oh, I made that decision which increased every worker's efficiency by 300% doing this operation thus saving company X millions, here's a chart to prove it" is much stronger than saying: "I wrote a tool that saves my co-workers extra few clicks, nothing fancy actually", even though when talking about the same thing.

There are exceptions, but even then they're not only few and far between, but also occupy a vague area where it's all one big counterfactual argument about whether someone else could've done the same thing and whether the die was largely cast anyway.

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