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Comment by peanutz454 | Hacker News Reader

Wow!

$168M/(3800 employee / 100*23 layoff) = $192,219 per layed off employee

Not that I am suggesting he should pay the layed off employees from his personal kitty. Just trying to understand the numbers.

Edit: OP said CEO and COO each. So $192K x 2 ~= $384,000.

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Your math makes no sense. The fewer the employees laid off, the more the dollar per employee will be. What does that mean? If a company lays off only one employee, then all of the CEO's salary could have gone to one person?

Obviously they should have laid off more employees until the CEO salary per layoff drops below $1000.

I think it just shows that the CEO earned enough to give every laid off employee a whole annual salary, so you could argue that the layoff could have been prevented for at least a year.

Exactly.

Hate to go there on HN but there _is_ a moral side to this.

What is the cost of making the kind of mistakes this guy did? And who should pay for them?

> Hate to go there on HN but there _is_ a moral side to this.

No there isn’t. Wasting money to keep employing people isn’t good for anyone. The labor market is still tight right now so the employees are better off going to a company that actually wants them.

Ok. I see your point.

And if they'd over hired, their business could still be in the same place (or worse) next year. People should just say they don't think executives should earn that much money (in good times or bad) rather than making moral justifications like this.

Sure, but no doubt a Silicon Valley programmer could take a 50% pay cut, still have plenty to live on, and double the salary of 3 cleaning staff that work at their company.

Should we talk about that too?

Nah probably not since so many people on HN are programmers.

Maybe Robinhood wants to use this money to buy the dip.

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