Microsoft gives Satya Nadella a 66% raise, citing 'strategic leadership' | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft gives Satya Nadella a 66% raise, citing 'strategic leadership'

cnbc.com

37 pointsaloknnikhil27 comments

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If any CEO of recent times deserves it, it's Satya. He's brought Microsoft back from the depths of unsexy!

counts Lisa Su of AMD in as well.

And don't forget about the hard-working engineers of AMD who made that success possible.

Shower thought: AMD is the Lyft of CPUs.

How so?

Just watching the Microsoft Flight Sim pre-alpha the other day really shows how much Microsoft have changed their image and are still managing to do very cool stuff after all these years.

Agree, Microsoft has transformed itself recently in terms of great engineering and innovation, even though I still refuse to use Windows 10 and stick with Mac.

Well, to be honest, all the great engineering and innovation is in other products, either completely unrelated to, or utilizing but not dependent on, Windows 10 (i.e. all the cloud things, a lot of hardware, etc.) The only thing that they did with Windows 10 is WSL, which I give them credits for, but I do not use it.

In any case, Windows 10 is a pretty bad OS, ignoring the privacy violations and telemetry, update annoyances, etc., the reason I think it is a bad OS is because of how bad it runs on a lot of hardware, including really expensive desktop Ryzen PCs with 32GB of RAM and a NVMe SSD. It's sluggish, it takes ages to open Explorer, Calculator, etc., and the built-in apps such as Settings often crash or get stuck. It's not due to software, that happens on a lot of hardware on a fresh install of Windows 10 19H1/1903/May2019Update thing.

Isn't he chiefly responsible for turning MS into another Google - spying on its so-called customers for even more profit? He must have at least winked in through.

Yes, exactly. Windows 10 is seriously creepy in a way that Windows wasn't before.

He did push hard on open-source some neat products like PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, etc.

IMO, I would have never guessed 10 years ago that Microsoft would acquire GitHub.

VScode is not open-source.

And the open-source version (VScodium) does not support some of the most useful features like remote dev (https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/196)

"it appears to be a deliberate licensing choice by Microsoft to not allow use of the Remote Development extension pack with vscodium"

Microsoft is doing the same vicious trick as Google with Android, Fushia, etc. : "guys we're cool, we're open source blabla" which attracts lots of people & dev, but then it quickly becomes full of proprietary blobs, telemetry & spyware.

Sure there is still the open-source part (AOSP, VSCodium, etc.) but we all now how unusable AOSP is without all the proprietary stuff.

The same thing is happening to VSCode, MS is adding telemetry, proprietary parts and the most useful extensions are from MS and not compatible with the open-source version.

Microsoft is just using open-source as a marketing buzzword.

Without addressing related aspects, your statement is factually incorrect. VS Code is definitely open source (MIT licensed): https://github.com/microsoft/vscode.

VSCode is open-source except for 3 recently-introduced extensions, and your comparing it to Android is unfair.

VSCodium main claim to fame is that it is vscode with the telemetry removed, not that it is vscode with the proprietary parts removed. There are no proprietary parts to remove. My experience running VSCodium is that it feels just like running a vscode binary downloaded from Microsoft (namely, from https://code.visualstudio.com/download). For example, you can use VSCodium to install extensions from Microsoft's "extension store" -- with the sole exception of the 3 recently-introduced proprietary remote-development extensions. The fact that VSCodium has been hosted on a site owned by Microsoft (namely, Github) for many months is strong evidence that VSCodium is not violating Microsoft's copyright and that consequently any coder can get the MIT-licensed code at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and build his own vscode that works just like one of Microsoft's binaries in almost all ways.

The 3 aforementioned proprietary extensions are not included in the vscode binary you download from https://code.visualstudio.com/download: a user has to explicitly install one of the 3 (or the "extension pack" which causes all 3 to be installed) after installing the binary, so after reading this thread a user is not going to accidentally start using proprietary parts of vscode.

VSCodium describes itself as "binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing". That last word refers to the fact that the binaries at https://code.visualstudio.com/download have a more restrictive license than the source code at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. I don't understand why MS's lawyers felt the need for a separate licence for the binaries, but any coder can escape that license by building vscode from the source code, which is MIT-licensed.

I hope they also increase the pay of lower level individuals who contributed to Microsoft's success.

The fact that _they don't have to_ and you are resulting to _hope_ is just more evidence of his awesome performance – excepting that one of his stated goals is to "strengthen trust with customers"

I was chatting with a few recently former MS employees recently who had this exact gripe. They said the pay was below-market, and MS was attracting talent with its brand.

It's nearly impossible to get a 66% raise for individual performance at non-executive levels.

Yeah. At most companies, you have to move mountains to even get a 6% raise, unless you get a promotion.

Is that true? Increasing a level in a few companies on https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html is a similar magnitude increase

There are years of experience and salary adjustments + stock refreshes between those levels. You don't just make a quantum jump like that from year to year.

Getting a 66% raise is not impossible if you have offers in that range. Satya Nadella most likely had some extremely good offers from other companies wanting to make a similar transformation as Microsoft, and now he accepted the counteroffer.

Does it really work like this? I guess executives are poached like the rest of us, but I'd imagine if you decide to take a CEO role, you're more or less committed for a minimum X number of years (say, through some sort of contract) unless the board wants to oust you. Because the CEO role is so public-facing for companies, I imagine they want to keep the turnover to a minimum.

Also, I don't think Satya is that revolutionary. His shtick was "Historically, Microsoft hasn't been developer friendly. Consequently, we lost the development community. Let's win them back." It's a wise choice, but it isn't novel in the same way Steve Job's iPhone as a product was novel.

Satya’s big strategic idea was that Microsoft needed to deprioritize Windows and start making sure that Microsoft products interacted well with iOS, Android, Macs, and Linux-in-the-datacenter. This was exactly what Microsoft needed to do, and the strategy has been very successful for them.

To pay for it, they should clawback Steve Ballmer's pay. Useless.

Terry Semel at Yahoo! was useless. Steve Ballmer didn't sink Microsoft, so he had some value.

That's a bit too much dislike toward Steve Ballmer. The enterprise market is completely owned by MSFT today (huge part due to him). Azure wouldn't be Azure if all the enterprise products/contracts already in place. Sure, they missed an opportunity on mobile, but so did BlackBerry.

The stock market (stock price) just didn't love MSFT despite strong financials during Ballmer's tenure.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...

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