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Comment by fdgsdfogijq | Hacker News Reader

This is just a natural reality of capitalism. Some "workers" produce much more value than others. A coder making 150-200k is completely replaceable, a widely recognized public figure is not. Shouldn't be shocking, whats shocking is that people don't understand this and arent honest with themselves about the value they bring to the workplace

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I think why this rings false to many is that McConaughey is definitely extremely replaceable.

If that is already sunk money and they paid it to him before the layoffs than the article is off base.

But why is he at $10M not replaceable by some other celebrity who might do the work for 10x or 100x less? He has no special credibility around anything to do with Salesforce, CRM, or anything in tech.

It's more likely Benioff has a man crush on him and like the fact he gets to hang out with a famous movie star and pretend he's friends with him or something and can conveniently ignore that he's kind of buying a famous friend for $10M.

A really well executed ad campaign with a less famous, less expensive star might be far more effective.

Yes, I’m sure an actor adds more real value to a SaaS company than engineers do. Recognizable talking heads who read lines into a camera are famously hard to find.

given the hype-driven nature of our industry, that may well be the case.

"Real value" is an attempt to draw a distinction where there isn't one.

Kim Kardashian brings in more "real value" to a clothing company than any one seamstress.

Welcome to marketing.

And yet a bad seamstress can tank a clothing company if a single bad article of clothing gets into the wrong hands.

This kind of makes Kim K a safer play than a bad seamstress. As unless you go full Kanye a spokesmodel isn't going to tank a company.

A single bad seamstress causing bad clothing to be delivered to customers is a process failure, the same way no single engineer should be responsible for Saleforce's production systems going down. And in most ways, implementing quality control on your product is a lot easier than controlling the personal life of your spokespeople.

Any company that's paying $10M to a spokesperson will have (maybe I should say "should have") a lot of employees dedicated to that spokesperson and the campaign. They might have a clawback clause if the spokesperson shows bad judgement, and can also get some additional good marketing if they are proactive in distancing themselves from their Kanye-esque spokesperson.

So I guess, like you say, there is a quality control process regardless.

I think the larger issues are probably the decisions of the pre-seamstress process employees. Bad choices in materials or cost-savings measures can turn off customers.

If an actor can directly bring more revenue to the business than an engineer then yes, they are adding more real value.

Probably does. Most engineers are fungible

> whats shocking is that people don't understand this and arent honest with themselves about the value they bring to the workplace

The labor theory of value[1] is still a very popular belief. Even though it doesn't work very well if you poke it at all.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

what does a public recognized figure produce?

Sales.

Force.

I think people understand it, I just think they rightfully don't care that much. They care about their income, not the particular set of justifications the powers-that-be have for their organizational schemes.

Capitalism creates these situations but what should be talked about is disincentivizing them not that we should accept them. That is enough money for 100 workers to not be laid off for an entire year. Merits a discussion on how much value he’s actually creating. Same goes for CEOs getting paid many millions.

It's not possible to predict if this is a good call or not. At the end of the day, it will come out in the wash, and you can make a pretty penny betting correctly.

I'm going to assume no one here thinks this decision is so foolish that it will single handedly bring about the fall of Salesforce.

As soon as you stray into the land of "we should make this decision on Salesforce's behalf", you're straying into a "known-unknown", and acting as if it's obvious what the correct decision is is always the downfall of those who seek to plan society according to their morality.

If you said "I accept that I don't know if this was a good move for generating profit or not, but I still don't think it should be allowed", I might be more inclined to entertain the idea!

You are having a straw man argument I think. I said it merits a discussion and seems highly unethical. I have to disagree that there are appropriate situations where society should allow unethical situations to occur, unless they are extremely necessary, as that creates an unethical society which is dystopian. My way of phrasing that is that society should highly disincentivize unethical situations.

If it turns out that his being a spokesman provides enough sales to employ 1000 people would that also be unethical?

I have no insider knowledge of the inner working of salesforce but I can reasonably surmise that they aren’t paying him to literally sit around.

No that would be great but I think it’s very difficult to quantify, in an objective way, how much value a spokesperson or CEO brings. That’s the real head scratcher.

Maybe they can employ people to track metrics to determine the effectiveness of sales campaigns and CEO?

This was my entire point - it's actually exceptionally easy to quantify, in an objective way. CRM stock price! If the distributed decision making system that is the market decides this was or was not worth it, based on all available information, then we will know!

You can wax philosophical all day, but nobody is mentioning the downfall of Salesforce.

People aren’t arguing against the merit of advertising. The argument is against the specific case of a massive, already well-recognized and widely-integrated SaaS company paying a specific actor 10 million, while doing layoffs, and the benefit that actor brings versus those laid off.

If Salesforce just started, maybe the name recognition would make sense. My personal belief is that the company is too big already for it to matter. I also don’t think middle-aged CEO’s understand marketing as well as they think: every A-list celebrity advertising campaign I can think of has, from the outside looking in, appeared to go poorly (eg Coinbase).

Either you're wrong, or you're a marketing genius who's perspective and ideas can change the industry. If it's the former, a lot of highly paid people aren't idiots. If it's the latter, you should probably go out there and change the world!

Ah yes, anyone upset that their employer’s layoffs cite financial reasons while objectively wasting money is “shockingly” ignorant to capitalism! Luckily the enlightened fdsg has brought it to our attention!

Without knowing what any of them did, it’s obvious that none of them, nor in aggregate, brought any near the value to Salesforce as did one aging celebrity.

Anecdotally, I’ve never seen anything associating the actor with Salesforce in any capacity. Even those I know at the company didn’t know he advertised for them. (But capitalism!)

I think another lens to view this through, is a company that mismanaged their budget has two more glaring examples of mismanaging their budget.

Ah yes, the smoke-and-mirrors part of capitalism, the style-but-no-substance, image-above-competence, the elitism and cronyism part straight out of Adam Smith.

"That's capitalism, guess y'all gotta suffer while ten people add to their hoards, nothing we can do"

I'm not condoning it, just pointing out how society works

I’d also point out that non-capitalist systems don’t actually correct this problem in practice, they just change the means by which wealth is acquired (usually violence).

It's ultimately violence in a capitalist society too (what do you think the police are for?). It's certainly possible to achieve a fairer distribution of wealth than capitalist societies produce.

And before the inevitable replies: no, I'm not advocating for communism. I'm advocating for non-capitalist variants on market economies.

Sure, all things can be improved, and I know we don’t live in anywhere near a utopia (education, retirement ,healthcare, tort reform, all needed), but I get uncomfortable with the tone that we’re consciously choosing a bad system when the reality is that peacefully refactoring power structures and society is just hard.

> I'm advocating for non-capitalist variants on market economies.

I'm struggling to think of a good example of a current non-capitalist market economy. Do you have one in mind? Or are you advocating for something not yet successfully created?

Some people argue that social democracy (eg Sweden), as a real welfare state, is distinct from capitalism.

As the sibling suggests, somewhere like Sweden is probably closest. But yes, I'm advocating for something not yet successfully created (or even attempted as far as I'm aware).

That is interesting, thanks for sharing your viewpoint. In that case, I agree with you, at least insofar as I very much want to see more social democracy in the US than we currently have. But I think it would require the citizens to have a great deal more trust in gov't than we currently have, so not anytime soon.

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