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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

considering the $14 million dollars Barnes and Noble executives have siphoned off already

I don't know, $14mm for the executive team of a company with tens of thousands of employees and 600+ stores doesn't seem crazy to me. Maybe you think that smart, capable, experienced executives grow on trees, but you're wrong. And what smart, capable, experienced executive would ever want to take this job when they probably have much better options with companies who aren't dying?

Would you want to go be lead developer on the Nook team right now, knowing that you probably won't have a job for long, that your equity will be declining in value, that it'll be miserable unless you can miraculously figure out a way to turn things around? Would it be unreasonable for you to only be interested in doing that if you were getting paid very well?

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They'd probably be better off finding an executive who works for 100k/yr but believes in the company.

I doubt it. Belief and passion may be necessary, but they're not sufficient. How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief? Because if it's based on their experience and track record, you're back to where you started: this person likely has better alternatives and is smart enough to want to be compensated for the opportunity cost they're incurring.

Also, it's all well and good to say this when it's not your money on the line, but the board is responsible to the shareholders, and I doubt they're interested in taking a chance on some unproven person who has "belief in the company" as their primary qualification.

I've done a lot of hiring, and have found that salary demands are weakly inversely proportional to performance.

That is to say, people whose salary demands are at the lower end of the salary range for that career have outperformed those whose demands are at the higher end.

My sample size is small but significant. Food for thought.

That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies?

Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

Because those tech companies were found to have been illegally colluding to suppress wages of their workers.

It’s easier to hire cheap workers when your actions are keeping wages lower than they otherwise would’ve been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

This is a classic red herring, totally unrelated.

If anything, that undermines the point I'm arguing against: why would these companies feel any need to collude to suppress wages if they could get better performance just by hiring cheaper workers?

Also, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc. weren't part of this suit, so again, not relevant.

I think it's more like:

person who really wants the job but is kind of underqualified > person who is highly qualified, but doesn't really want the job (unless the money is right)

edit: I'll add that, for CEOs who should all look amazing on paper and know how to sell themselves, maybe willingness to do the job for less than market is a better signal than most

> Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

Because a) at their scale they need to hire in bulk b) their business (advertising, "media"...) simply don't inspire that level of passion in anyone, so money is all they can do.

The five biggest companies in the US by revenue or profit are not data-driven tech companies.

None of the top ten US companies, by revenue, fit that description.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/

Ranked by profit, only Alphabet squeaks into the top ten at number five.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/list/filtered?sortBy=profits&f...

I’m not seeing much correlation here between rank of CEO compensation and company performance.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

The fame of the high salaries at tech companies relates primarily to technical staff, not executive pay. These companies are also located in some of the most expensive areas to live.

The top 5 in the S&P 500 are 4 tech companies and JP Morgan Chase. The top 5 by market cap are all tech companies.

S&P 500 is primarily a ranking by market cap. It’s a measure of how much the market values a stock. I can see it being a component of size (how “big”). There’s no doubt that the big tech companies are colossal entities.

The market cap of a company is largely based on a bet of the “size” of a company in the future.

Tesla is the most “valuable” US auto maker, by market capitalization. This illustrates that market cap is inherently related to predictions which have a large speculative component, which can be influenced by pure market phenomena.

Meh. The older and more experienced I get the more I realize I work to put food in the table and to pay for my life outside. Working for “passion” is for suckers. As the dude in that one YouTube video about consulting says, fuck you. Pay me.

Pay me what market rate is and don’t give me sob stories about passion or making sacrifices to work on some life changing BS. Pay me.

Pay you for what? I don’t think many red blooded Americans resent leaders of companies that are kicking ass, reaping the rewards.

What’s eating away the civic fabric are those who put their own self interest above everyone else.

Once you get up into the millions in compensation, I don’t think the concern is that the poor naive CEO is being exploited by working for less than the absolute most they can get. Especially when the level of pay is so high, that it disproportionately impacts the bottom line.

I’m sorry, this primacy of market and money above all is sickening.

The ability to command market salary often depends on your willingness to move for a job. The labor market is not like the stock market.

So if you're supporting a family you may want a new approach for thinking about your career.

I'm supporting a family on a semi-remote job (work from anywhere, employer covers my airfare to our offices as needed), and when I unexpectedly parted ways with my previous employer last year, I doubled my compensation in 2 weeks. "F* you, pay me" is a legitimate operating philosophy as an employee when your skills are in demand. Also important to live below your means and have a 1+ year runway of savings to enable you to negotiate from a position of power, but that's a conversation for another thread.

Better said above, "Working for “passion” is for suckers."

Actually, I wonder if this is really true. The thing is, a company like Barnes and Noble needs to roll a hard six. Hiring an experienced, competent executive they can afford who wants to work there and ticks off all the boxes etc.. might not be in the cards for them.

B&N needs to think like a Startup again. Vision and dreams might be more important than a Harvard MBA and 10 years of experience at BigCo, Inc. Remember, Barnes and Noble is default bankrupt right now. Their situation in some ways is more like that of a startup that needs to raise capital fast or die than Amazon or Google. That means that barring drastic changes, their trajectory intersects with the ground. Why not take a big chance? Who's more likely to bet big, a young dreamer who wants $100K and a ton of stock, or the experienced executive who wants $5M a year and is going to get majorly paid no matter what happens? They're going to lose everything as it stands anyway.

Well, these fancy pants CEOs didn’t really succeed, did they.

I’m sure their individual point of view, their self interest, it’s perfectly reasonable. But from the outside it’s disgraceful. How do you justify taking a $4m payout after working less than a year? Especially when you know the axe is going to fall on the lowest paid employees.

Maybe you could, you know, skip your bonus, so the people laid off might have a little breathing room.

Frankly, this kind of stuff looks borderline close to fraud. Maybe not a legal fraud, but the fraud of management who wave their hands around to act like they know what they are doing, while they loot the company before it goes down.

> How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief?

Apparently the qualification that they care about is "Willing to take $10 million in payments while laying off 1800 to save $40 million". Competence at the CEO level doesn't always have to look like malevolence.

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