"should" the board demand senior executive pay cuts? Why? they're fam. They're part of the tribe. You cut the slaves, you cut the foreigners, why do you cut family?
"should" investors demand the senior executives get pay cuts? Why? They just executed thousands of slaves, and there will be a massive drop in costs, and the share prices will rise. Why would I punish them, when I am going to benefit?
"should" society at large demand Google and large corporates share the pain?
Well yes, but nobody is going to make them do anything. "should" is the wrong dynamic.
"we" should make them do it demands the question: "who is we here and what is our lever?"
Focusing on that talks past the point: a person can simultaneously be paid handsomely and still underpaid, if their productive output significantly outstrips their salary.
The last time I checked, Google's revenue-per-employee was around $1.6 million.
That's a long way of saying that we shouldn't confuse economic productivity with effort.
The thing that nobody owes anything to is execs. Execs just tell engineers what to build.
The injustice that's going on here is just power dynamics that lets executives have unfair safety and engineers get fucked. The irony is that Engineers as a group they are 100000x more powerful then any exec, the issue is engineers don't operate from a place of central authority.
This is what unions are for. In times like this it's worth considering.
You remove the car paint, the car looks ugly. You remove the four wheels... you can't even call the thing a car anymore.
In this analogy the execs are autonomous humans and the engineers were just unthinking objects. I object!
Privileged or not, they are all salaried, the more we can all agree that if you depend on a salary you are part of the same class of people the more power to workers we get.
Why not? Investors are after every additional cent, and they don’t have special charitable feelings towards execs.
You pay the board big bucks, to not have to worry about their conscience when they cut the labour force to make a short-term win. If you're in the set of people who are just along for the ride (make money, no other buy in to the outcome) then you don't ditch a board until the aircraft is within inches of crashing, and you have another one to jump onto.
Google isn't looking for Victor Kiam to replace Sundar. Mind you, it would be "extremely entertaining" if they did. Emphasis on extreme I guess.
It's also not uncommon, though less so in megacorps, for the board members to be family and friends, or a history of long mutually beneficial relationships.
BTW, this is true not just for top executives. The higher your level in big tech companies, the higher the proportion of your total compensation that is stock based. Even mid-senior levels get a majority of their compensation in RSUs.
Previously the thinking was "we're unique and special, and deserve all this high pay - it will continue in perpetuity, and as long as your output is good you will be fine. The system works and is just! If you fail, it's your fault". After being struck by algorithmic layoffs, they're no longer sure of their worldview.
They've been put in their place - highly paid, but utterly at the whim of the capital class. For the first time they realize they're as replaceable as the truck drivers they so want to automate out of existence.
Solidarity is in the zeitgeist; let's unionize! We have songs, and can march long; let's smash these chains of our oppression - together!
...would be my guess.
The issue here is that there is a theory that these companies are cutting things not because they need to but because of copycat behavior to get a slight improvement on the bottom line.
I thought the primary reason execs get paid so much more is because they're the last line of responsibility, it doesn't matter why the screw up happened, they get punished for it.