Oracle Hires Mark Hurd As Co-President

Maybe I can shed some light - this isn't a morality judgment either way, but perhaps it will explain the reasoning of people involved.

Every competent executive team or board that authorizes compensation pays attention to a person's "fully loaded cost" - that includes everything from their pay to their benefits to their expenses to the taxes they pay on the person. They do math on that number.

Typically, if an important team member wants to shift compensation from one area (salary) to a lower tax area (expense account, retirement account, benefits, whatever), the board will authorize that. They factor it into his fully loaded costs, there's just different taxes and accounting on it.

This doesn't get into rightness/wrongness, just people's decisionmaking. Companies know roughly what people spend on their expense accounts and have policies for it. Some companies make it only for "real" expenses, whereas other companies will let people accept lower salary but expense more benefits.

This isn't just for executives, by the way - companies that offer free food on-site tend to do the same kind of math, for instance. 401k investment plan matching, same kind of math again. Actually, moving $10k from salary to benefits might lower fully loaded costs, due to the way the taxes and accounting works. This doesn't get into rightness/wrongness, just the practical aspects of it.

Of course, if there are Oracle employees who have a problem working for people with Hurd's attitude, they haven't been paying attention.

I just recently quit working at an IT managerish job, and I hope the one thing I left them with is "never, ever buy an HP printer."

Larry and Sergey are co-presidents of Google.

Of course this could be a cunning plan to avoid the costs of redundancy payments - hire Hurd and watch all your best engineers resign for free.