Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

It does seem that executive compensation is just straight up broken. Even bad CEOs are paid enormous sums of money for their shoddy performance. Sundar Pichai is a poor performing CEO, he's very likely done permanent damage to Google's business. For this, he is going to be rewarded with generational wealth. It's hard to see what exactly we're paying CEOs for. Are we paying them to attract the best talent? No, you'd have a queue of fantastic candidates queueing around the block for 1/10th of what Sundar is being paid. Are we compensating them for performance? Again no, they get massive compensation packages up front whether they succeed or fail. Are we compensating them for the extra-ordinary responsibility they have? Well apparently not, because they don't face any consequences for fucking up.

So why are we paying them so much? Because the compensation committee says so. Why does the compensation committee say so? Well, because the compensation committee is formed of executives, so the whole thing is just a massive circle jerk.

At what point do the shareholders say "hold up a sec, why are we bleeding all this cash to a bunch of executives whose entire strategy is just to follow the market".

I think many things in the world would be better if executives had real personal liability. Reminds me, the executive of the company responsible for the huge port explosion in Tianjin, China was apparently personally liable (suspended death sentence!): https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...

Sadly that kind of thing seems to only happen in China. Most other countries have the perpetrators in charge of the state.

Family members tell me in Italy the plant managers are personally liable for worker injuries. A workplace death is a big deal, even if the executive in charge resides in another country.

can confirm

Maybe this is just the outside view talking, but it seems like a CEOs biggest function is to be the public face of the company. To take abuse and answer tough questions so the investors don't have to. This requires a fair bit of PR talent, and also the ability to withstand a lot of public hatred. Apparently that's worth a lot of money.

To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT

> To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT

You joke, but I'm almost positive this would work.

I had a colleague many years ago who, while in business school, would frequently use speeches or emails from our CEO as the backbone of his essays, sometimes using them almost verbatim. I asked him once if he was worried about getting caught for plagiarism. His response was something along the lines of, "All executive communication is so much meaningless boilerplate corporate-speak that it's next to impossible to tell once person's work from the next". He eventually got his MBA and never did get called out for plagiarism.

CEOs have an army of people at their disposal to do the said “PR talent” stuff. They absolutely do not deserve what they get and they are not tech gods as media paints them to be. I’m sick of media defending CEOs instead common workers.

Thee pay them for caste solidarity and not to ally with the employeomans or the actual company interests, but with those of the shareholders.

Caste solidarity is everywhere when you start looking for it.

Another example, go to court without a lawyer, make a minor procedural violation and the judge will rip your head off. Hire a attorney who does the same thing and all of the sudden it isn't a big deal, the judge may not even mention it. Judges tend to be former lawyers and the legal caste feels that one of them must be paid lavishly for you to receive a defence. Don't pay them? You should be punished!

I modestly propose that tech workers should join in on this game with similar solidarity, members of the executive caste like Sundar should suddenly find themselves without access to email for example, and then should be forced to pay a nerd tens of thousands of dollars to go talk to the guy who runs the email server to have his account reinstated. If he talks to the guy directly, without paying the requested fee and fails to use the correct IT Crowd reference or doesn't know what version of Python added type annotations off hand, his account should be permanently removed and all of his devices banned from the internet.

Not quite true: the pro se litigant will often get every possible consideration from the court.

As an example: the person who ran over all those people in Kenosha at that parade. Do you really think that if I went into a courtroom as an attorney and refused to wear a shirt, or made a fort out of boxes, that the judge would “not even mention it”?

If you do I encourage you to watch some in-court hearings. They are typically open to the public and you will surely find pro se litigants being extended every possible courtesy to their rights as Americans.

I have attended court proceedings and have witnessed what I have described on several occasions. I suspect high profile televised court cases are atypical in many ways.

Consider this for a moment, if a judge is merely a fact finder why would having a attorney alter the outcome of the case? It is known that people respond more positively to others with a similar background, is it all that crazy to think that bias may extend to judges?

Where do you see high profile televised court cases with pro se litigants? I would love to watch that channel.

There’s about three hundred billion hours of YouTube from that Kenosha parade murderer who just got sentenced. I think those search terms should get you there.

Beware, watching court is addictive (so many insane unpredictable moments) and time consuming (many, many more extremely boring trivial moments).

So one case? That's your example? I go to court all the time, I'm an attorney. Your experience watching the one case on TV isn't representative of how it normally goes. Judges, basically as a rule, provide insane levels of deference to pro se litigants that they do not provide to attorneys. I'd think that your smarmy comments would have implied this level of common sense on your part, but here we are!

> I go to court all the time, I'm an attorney.

I admit, I loled. :)

Hello, brother. I think you might want to read a little further into the thread, because I'm not saying what you think I am. I'm also an attorney and I have convicted a pro se litigant in addition to watching at least two handfuls of trials where self-represented defendants were involved. Every single time, the court provided "insane levels of deference to pro se litigants that they did not provide to attorneys." You are precisely correct except where you contradict me.

Also, my experience watching trials on youtube is in fact representative of how it normally goes: I have never seen a judge act in a poor manner toward a self-represented party, on youtube or elsewhere. In the Kenosha parade murder trial, the judge was able to sigh deeply and respect the rights of the defendant, but I suspect if you or I built a fort out of books and boxes on our counsel table, or declined to wear a shirt, we would be immediately disbarred.

I was only mentioning the youtube/Kenosha angle because you asked for an example.

High profile cases are atypical in some ways but the salient difference is that I can point you to an example and you can watch it. I can’t really point you at examples in your county courthouse but it is definitely great that you’ve seen some courtroom activity. It’s unfortunate though, that you’ve taken away some conclusions that aren’t quite apt.

The judge is the opposite of the fact finder. The judge is the law finder. The jury is the fact finder (unless you’ve forfeited your right to a jury and are undertaking a bench trial). But I get the general idea of the question and I can answer it in the context of attorneys influencing any party this way:

An attorney should not alter the final disposition of a dispute, meaning that if a person is guilty or liable and the attorney’s actions cause an outcome where they “get away with it” we can all agree the system failed. Lawyers are there so your rights don’t get trampled, so you don’t give anything away, and because they understand the terrain over which the parties will negotiate.

Sure, judges probably prefer drinking beers with lawyers than with indigent sovcits. But unlike a hyena presented with a decaying carcass, the judges I’ve encountered can suspend their baser instincts for a few minutes at a time in order to /do their job/ and part of that job is respecting the Constitution and the rights of the litigants.

> The judge is the law finder.

> Lawyers are there so your rights don’t get trampled

Aren't those rights all legal rights, or laws? What happened to our law finder between the second and third paragraph?

Edit: Also isn't that sort of admitting that if you don't go in with a lawyer your rights get trampled? It seems we agree.

> the judges I’ve encountered can suspend their baser instincts for a few minutes at a time in order to /do their job/ and part of that job is respecting the Constitution and the rights of the litigants.

Scientifically speaking the evidence is human begins are not capable of doing that. For example rulings of judges tend to heavily align with their political preferences, if they didn't nobody would care who is appointed to the supreme court and what party they favor. Another example litigants often wish to venue shop to find a court that is more likely to rule in their favor, if this perfect law finder actually existed that behavior wouldn't alter outcomes.

Former trial attorney here...

Pro se litigants are afforded more procedural allowances than lawyers are when they appear in court, even when they rail against the court and the proceedings.

Judges are more likely to rule in favor or pro se litigants on procedural matters (at least at the beginning) precisely to avoid letting the the litigants' lack of procedural knowledge bias the outcome of the case. I have seen many experienced "pro se" litigants take advantage of this.

if a judge is merely a fact finder why would having a attorney alter the outcome of the case?

It doesn't. Pro se litigants in civil cases usually lose their cases because they had shit cases to begin with (based on the substantive merits). It's almost always why they couldn't find any attorney willing to take their case.

In the relatively rare situation that a pro se litigant has a good case but no attorney willing to take it on (usually a low-value case), the judge will either coach them on procedure or assign a lawyer in the courtroom to assist them with that. (This happens a lot in LA County.)

>Another example, go to court without a lawyer, make a minor procedural violation and the judge will rip your head off

This is not even remotely true. Courts give tons of deference to pro se litigants that they do not afford to licensed attorneys

Who "we"? Larry & Sergey hired this dude to manage the company for them. Their criteria was: someone who is easy to control, but not dumb as rock.

The executives have to be paid large salaries by the shareholders so that they'll put shareholders interests well above those of company employees and customers. This allows them to justify overriding their normal human connection with their employees, and replacing any tendency towards co-worker loyalty with shareholder loyalty. Of course that also justifies treating customers as poorly as possible - just not so poorly that they stop coming back (although if they can monopolize an industry, customers will have nowhere else to go - see broadband providers, etc.).

This is a primary reason why investment capitalism is such a destructive economic system in the long run. Shareholders tend to want to extract as much profit from the company in a short a time as possible; the long-term health of the company and their customers is generally not their primary concern.

... doesn't that make the CEO place his compensation over the shareholders? Yes, they use things like stock options to try to align it, but practically that just gives an artificial target to cook the books/revenue for.

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