Google employees complain about CEO's pay raise as cost cuts hit company
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It feels like the board has said, “We don’t care about the company or it’s future, just the price of our stock.”
Instead the stock market and its adherents will be (are now?) our overlord.
Something akin to venture capital, where it makes many, many tries most of which fail and the occasional success moves the field forward.
Presumably investors want more reliable returns from mature companies.
Page and Brin collectively own 51.2% of Google's voting power. They seem to be happy with the company direction and its leadership.
While they do not run day to day operations, both are on the board https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35810965
(And even if they were running it, it’s no guarantee that it would stick to any respectable values… just “more likely”… but in their case… still very unlikely.)
With their voting shares, what stakeholders, maybe besides the government, could really exert leverage over them?
Berkshire Hathaway invests in public companies exactly not like you describe, generally seeking companies whose priorities are evident in dividends not share price.
Well since the board is hired to represent the stockholders...
Of course courts have also upheld the duty to increase stock value too, but still…
All of the ruminating over short term thinking is also nonsensical. A company that has no future has very little value. Perhaps the share holders, or the board, or their CEO have a long-term vision that you disagree with. But this isn’t anything close to an objective fact, it’s just your own self-aggrandising opinion that if you were running the 4th largest company in the world, that you’d be doing a better job.
Yeah board doesn't care, founders don't care, investors don't care, CEO doesn't care. Who cares then? Google employees because they are taking the biggest risk by being employed there.
I'm not saying the ceo is right for what he did. I like the previous ceo who kept products alive even when they did not make money. But like IBM, companies do grow up and start acting like adults. This is one of those times.
Poor Sundar. That’s quite some mental gymnastics here.
It's possible that Google becomes a significantly more profitable company as a result of this, but it seems equally plausible that in three months they'll go on another hiring binge. That's what weak leadership like Sundar's gets you: no vision and no consistency.
According to his own words - if he is taking "full responsibility" for layoff conditions, he should be fined or docked his pay right ? Or just resign ?
It's his problem. He will take the consequences. And it's not for everyone to be aware of.
We need to stop acting like schoolchildren where everyone is eager to know how the bad kid gets punished.
I don't buy into your hero worship. Sundar took a crazily profitable company with tens of billions in raw cash and did a messy disorganized layoff where, unlike Alphabet's biggest competitors such as MS, Meta, and even freaking Amazon, Googlers woke up to no access, no chance to transition or hand off, and no chance to say goodbye. It was a disgrace and not something worthy of praise or pay increase.
But I despite hate more. And there is nothing that says hjs penalty needs to be open. Large organizations like democratic govts need openness. Dictatorships need secrecy. And companies are in a category between the two.
Lol at your hate statement and that he received any penalty. His annual salary massively jumped up to $242 million as Google fired tens of thousands of employees, many with no notice. He has now >800 times the median employee's pay. Anyone would love to take those penalties. You might want to take a small step back and objectively evaluate your shining bias.
Unfortunately ceo salaries are not based on how happy the employees are. Or how justly they have dealt with them. They are just indicators on how happy investors are.
Google needs to be innovative, build new products and invest in them.
But they basically have a massive money hose and that isn't going to make their products better. It's going to bloat projects, bog them down in too many people with too many ideas, delay the need to find product market fit and remove any financial constraints in the development process. It's very hard to run lean when you've got all that cash. Take a look at what went on at Meta. They took the money they could've returned to investors and lit it on fire. They've got a mediocre product, no product market fit, and now they're pivoting.
You're more likely to see a team of 5-6 people somewhere within Google come up with a great idea and get it to market than you are going to see a team of 500-600 people. And even if the 500-600 person team does ship, the economics mean that they need to have one of the most successful product launches in history for it to be economically viable.
What has Google really built? Seems to me they try, fail ,and then buy something when their attempts fail (when something is available to buy). Nest? Android? Google is not innovative and they never really were, nor are they actually capable of building any viable new products.
a second laugh when I went to the "migration options" link and it says
"We recommend that you find another way to meet your printing needs."
never change, google
> Google needs to be innovative, build new products and invest in them.
and then
> Take a look at what went on at Meta. They took the money they could've returned to investors and lit it on fire.
You're criticizing Zuck for doing exactly what you said Google should do. Granted the price tag was huge, but you can't innovate without building and testing something first.
Again, why is tech (in this day and age) expected to be different than big tobacco or big pharma? It's about money at the end of the day. Period.
They'll accept a mediocre leader, and pay ludicrous amounts of money for some imagined assurance of reduced downside.
Labor is a market (supply/demand). There aren't that many people in the world who can successfully lead a large company like Alphabet.
https://observer.com/2023/02/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-bard-c...
What evidence do we have for this? How many times CEOs failed Alphabet level companies? What's your dataset?
Are you just making things up because it supports your bias that CEOs are highly skilled and it's not like almost any educated and privileged person can do their job?
Logic. It is clearly way more complicated to run a large business that operates across multiple regulatory regions and that is growing through a transition from hyper growth, than it is to do many many other types of work.
Many people could lead Alphabet just fine. But if a top CEO is just 5% better than the average candidate, that 5% is a lot of money, and the CEO can claim some of it as compensation.
Pichai for example is both CEO and one of the directors. He was groomed by Page into his current role and maintains it more by dint of internal politics than by lack of alternatives.
The board of Google are:
Larry Page - founder of Google
Sergey Brin - founder of Google
Sundar Pichai - CEO of Alphabet
John L. Hennessy - Computer Scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy)
Frances Arnold - Chemical Engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Arnold)
R. Martin “Marty” Chávez - Investment banker
L. John Doerr - Investor and VC. He backed the Google founders.
Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. - economist, attorney and corporate executive who served as the 17th vice chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1999 to 2006. Prior to his term as vice chairman, Ferguson served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Ann Mather - Technology and Media Board Member Ann Mather is an English business executive. She serves on the boards of directors of Alphabet, Netflix, Bumble and Blend. Her prior board experience includes Airbnb, Arista Networks, MGM Studios and Zappos.
K. Ram Shriram - Indian-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is a founding board member and one of the first investors in Google. He worked earlier in Amazon.
Robin L. Washington - Has served as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gilead Sciences, Inc.
The thing you should take away is that, contrary to the GP’s assertion, the Google board is in fact not composed of juts a bunch of CEOs from other companies.
They still have a vested interest in perpetuating high levels of executive pay.
Only two people on the board count. They hold >50% of the voting shares of Alphabet.
At that size, it's perfectly possible that there are zero people who can truly lead it.
Imagine it like a marching band. You run in and knock the drum major out of the way. You don't know much about it, so you just march in front of the band, smiling and waving to the crowd. The band keeps on doing their thing. But the crowd sees you apparently in charge, so they congratulate you on the band's performance.
So this isn't really about expected value, supply and demand. It's not as if a 10% cut would make Pichai quit, or that you'd not be able to find a comparable replacement at that price: I suspect that, not unlike Ballmer was, Pichai is worse than a random viable candidate. But there really is minimal pressure in saving money with top executives like this. CEO is not a random position, and it's basically never filled by a person the board doesn't have personal connections to. So ultimately CEOs get either raises, or get fired.
When a CEO gets a cut in compensation, it's often because their own pay sends a message to investors and employees. Here, what we are seeing is that Pichai sees no need whatsoever to send any message, because he doesn't care in the slightest about this. It's modeling behavior for executives and other employees. And I don't think it's a good example we'd like them to follow.
It’s more that there’s nobody they deem of suitable social standing for filling the position.
Instead of the $70B stock buyback they could have employed those 13,000 people for 17.9 years.
Google is basically comcast or Nike in terms of caring about their employees and customers.
b) total cost to company per employee is more than their cash compensation.
b) 300k was total comp, never have I heard of 300k salary. According to levels.fyi, a L5 makes ~350k total comp
I’m not the CEO. The CEO’s job is to allocate resources effectively. So develop new products.
Personally, I’d have them work on Google Reader, making GCP competitive, fixing search, fixing Bard, and monetizing Bard.
If investors, the board, and Leadership thought there was more money to be in made by developing new products they would do that.
Everybody wants to make more money. Nobody wants to make less money just so they can lay people off
How is Google developing new products an effective use of resources? Most often they spend a lot of resources on it, figure out it doesn't hit their metrics and abandon it. It would have been a better use of resources to return it to shareholders who can use it for something else.
Generally, new products means new revenue streams and new profit, preferably improved profit margins.
The complaint is that they can’t develop new products so are returning money to investors so investors can earn better returns. So that’s a sign of lack of innovation.
I’d expect a company with the “worlds best programmers and AI” to be able to innovate and create new products. Google is showing they are just the new IBM, or worse, clear channel or some advertising company.
Hopefully they can get leadership that has some new ideas other than giving their cash cow some vitamins.
Apple and Microsoft get mentioned frequently as tech behemoths. They aren’t the height of innovation but they are still able to grow markets (Apple with AirPods and stuff and Microsoft with azure). Google should be cranking out new billion dollar products and inventing markets.
This exactly. A stock buyback combined with layoffs are a signal that Google doesn't have enough good ideas to work on. Google thinks the money is just better spent being given back to investors. This is very different than the Google 10 years ago, which was arguably throwing minds/money at bad ideas.
In other words, Google is now a mature company whose CEO can't make it grow anymore.
Hey, I'm not judging. I have no better idea either. But the question stands, if the CEO can't do anything more than your average joe, why the big salary?
As a Google Workspace user? How about making the search in Drive not be an embarrassment? How about creating an actual backup and restore function (DLP is not that).
How about making ChromeOS not suck? How about making it possible to do zero touch deployments without involving some shitty third party reseller that wants to take over your Admin Console with their insecure and crappy “plug-in”? How about not forcing people to work with shitty resellers at all?
There are so many things Google could be working on, that it is not. Having them eliminate staff, raise prices, defer and delay new features that have been missing for years, or leaving bugs on the table, while doing a stock buyback and lavishing money on the leadership that let OpenAI eat their lunch, or that is letting Microsoft embrace and extend his supposed wheelhouse, Chrome, or who shutdown Stadia and literally returned everyone’s money, …
The list goes on. I get that it’s popular to dump on Google employees as overpaid and underperforming, but the fact of the matter is that that is only true because Google ‘s CEO is a crappy as fuck leader. I’ve never worked at Google, have no desire to, but I fail to see how he doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the litany of strategic and operational blunders that this company can continue to pave over with massive cash from their supposedly failing ads business.
Honestly, why does he even still have a job there?
Many other commenters have articulated the real world reason for this, but honestly, in this environment it feels like a Latin phrase captures it best
"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi". What is permitted to gods(Jupiter) is not permitted to cattle :-)
There's a reason Latin and its descendants are called the romantic languages.
(I know that's backward and romance comes from Roman... there is a reason still!)
While Microsoft is becoming a developer haven, Google is moving into their Steve Ballmer era.
How so? Windows 11 and Edge are “desperate”. I hate .NET/C#. Mac OS X/iOS/Apple rule.
Azure.
Windows Terminal.
Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Cross-platform .Net.
Visual Studio Code (and the other one)
WinGet Packafe Manager.
Rust for Windows.
Etc.
azure is less good/playing catchup/copying the innovation of AWS
WSL is a glorified Linux VM
.NET is a zoo
VS Code is Atom++ which is Electron
Rust is good, cargo and rustc working on Windows has nothing to do with Microsoft
Also C++/WinRT team nowadays seems to have lost interest on it, and is having lots of fun in Rust/WinRT instead.
With that, I doubt you are seriously here looking for answers...
Windows 11 and Edge are aggressively pushing ads and are bad, but I have to point out that Windows 11 has a ton of improvements otherwise, so much that I joined a pilot of Windows 11 at work (most machines are still on Windows 11 currently).
I've never heard anyone describe Microsoft as a developer haven. Is this because Redmond is soaking up South Lake Union layoffs?
They made VS Code, TS, etc. Most of us are using MSFT tools for daily development.
Developer heaven on modern Microsoft is only anything that relates to Azure or XBox.
Microsoft has vscode, github, copilot, GPT integrations, Typescript, etc.
He is getting a raise because you are getting cost cuts and layoffs. That's literally his reward for saving the company money and pumping up the stock price.
Also:
> More than a dozen memes from employees have filled Google’s internal discussion forums, many with several hundred likes, according to posts viewed by CNBC
This is the worst form of journalism. Cool, someone made a few memes. So what? You can make up any narrative if you scroll Twitter (or in this case memegen) long enough. That doesn't make it a real problem that you have to report on.
A well-researched article on the benefits being cut, maybe some analysis on how much it could be saving the company or what the impact of 12,000 jobs might be worth would make this much more readable.
This is at best an incomplete statement.
Advertising moved to a more lucrative technology and if good journalism comes to depend on subscription revenue, readers are not willing to pay in sufficient number.
We are now at least two generations removed from the faint echo of grammar being taught by somewhat informed personnel. Neither the people writing nor the people reading are adequately equipped.
ChatGPT now impresses people, for pity's sake.
Talent is hard to find in all domains, for money or love.
The question is basically 'are these memes representative of feelings within a larger subset of the company' and these sorts of takes don't really address that question at all. Memegen is not twitter.
the press is supposed to bring added value to things like Reddit, not copy it
I never met a guy named Dave I didn't like.
I can remember when the name collision on the internet was rare, now it's all day, every day. Given that my grandfather was David Smith, this leaves me with Smith and Watson, meaning that all roads lead to Ireland or Scotland, even if they involve swimming the English Channel.
The mechanics of that maneuver make it seem that staff are being laid off for the sake of creating resources that make compensation possible.
Would there be less layoffs if the compensation package was not as much?
I think the confusion is bad journalism. It’s not that at all.
Seriously, everything Google touches that doesn't bring in ad revenue does one or both of the following:
1. Is canceled after several years regardless of quality or impact
2. Fails to change the world
This is why he’s compensated so much, so that he can choose to do other things than care about the plight of the employees that the board wanted to lose.
To quote Sterling Archer... "oh, my stars!"
I don't know if it's just this reporter that's the joke or if it's CNBC as a whole.
He is getting a raise because the relative power of his position gives him coercive power over employees.
If any particular employee is upset with the decision he can make them feel pain, while it would take a lot of employees working together to cause him any pain at all. He can arbitrarily exercise his power because there is little to stop him or hold him back.
I'm not saying it's the right thing for the board to do (if I were on the board, I would've suggested he keep his pay even or take a cut), but it's not right to say that Sundar gets paid more because he has "coercive power" over employees.
it's not a direct relationship.
The CEO gets a pay rise if the board believes it to be something worth doing - for example, rewarding the CEO for doing something unpopular (and taking flak for it).
The employees "losing" isn't a cause, it's an effect. The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable. And if a company is more profitable, the CEO is doing it's job. A company doesn't look out for employees; at least only up to the extend where the employees make them money.
The question isn’t why the CEO got rewarded for doing X, but what changed to allow him to make this now vs those same cuts happening 10 years ago. It’s not like Google was in an unprofitable downward spiral and needed cuts to turn things around the only change is how wildly profitable they are.
The relevant question is could those workers generate more than %5 returns on that $70B google is using for stock buybacks. The company leadership and investors seem to think the answer is NO.
Therefore you fire the workers, Give cash to investors, and the investors park it with the fed getting >5% interest, with zero risk, and no need to worry about workers, products, or customers.
This is the entire point of the FED rate raises. Hoover up all of the money floating around being invested in company growth and new product development.
Once you get enough layoffs and paycuts, eventually inflation will go down because people cant buy shit.
Thats the "long answer why".
If people can't buy stuff why wouldn't you expect marginal cost to go up?
More people buying more stuff means economies of scale. Less people buying less stuff means the loss of economies of scale.
If people are less able to buy stuff, I don't see any reason to believe that prices would go down. If anything it seems like it creates an incredibly negative feedback loop.
A company might firesale their inventory resulting a temporary reduction of inflation, but it seems like production would decrease because demand decreased, which would result in more layoffs and stagnation.
I am not an economist, so I guess I am curious why stagflation is not the expected result.
and they won't. Lowering inflation is not the same as ensuring prices drop (it might happen, but it would be an unintended effect of the Fed's policies).
prices will remain high (compared to pre-covid) but be stable after inflation drops down. And i would imagine that the Fed's policies would change if they start seeing deflation (which is when prices drop).
Here is the truth: Wage measures power, not usefulness, not productivity. Productivity puts a cap on wages because you can't pay a person more than they produce, but it does not determine the wage.
So when someone says:
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
This denies the idea that labor could be powerful enough to hurt the bottom line of the company enough that layoffs are not profitable.
The frame (more profit good) hid that for labor more wage and less layoffs are good. What is best for the company is being confused for what is best for everyone or what is best for labor, and labor cannot get what is best for themselves because they have no power.
You presupposed that what is best for the company is what is best with your choice of frame.
and there we have it - the difference in point of view. No company (nor anyone really) is making decisions that is "best for everyone", because that would imply altruism. And i am a stern believer that altruism does not exist.
From an employee point of view the primary goal is to keep your job. Pay raises, perks, wfh etc are all secondary to that. If you are laid off that is a failure. If your colleague is laid off you start getting worried. You see the failure and respond to that.
Since the laid off person failed, both the laid-off and the remaining consider the company to have failed, and by extension the company bosses to have failed, and expect pain at management level.
This is a point of view, and it's shared by many employees, but its not the only point of view.
Another group of people are the shareholders. They couldn't care less about staffing being up or down. They care about the share price. Staff, and costs, being cut means more profit. More profit means higher dividends or higher stock price. [1]
So this is a successful action. From the point of view of the board (which are a proxy for the shareholders), this is a good-job and the management is rewarded accordingly.
Now most people are employees, and the press wants most people to click on the headline, so most people consider layoffs to be bad. Even if you hold a few Google shares, and directly benefit, you don't consider your good fortune, you see 12000 failures, and naturally feel compassion for them.
(By the end of the week/month/year the compassion will have faded, and you'll be back checking your share prices.)
There could have been an article on how well Google stock price is doing, and will do, but no-one would read that.
Now as to your assertion that we're focusing on the "wrong thing". From one point of view, yes, 12000 people directly failed. If each had 3 friends remain that's 36000 who are very nervous. Let's describe the next 100 000 people as "startled".
From the other point of view its all upside.
Personally I'm neither a Google employee nor a shareholder so I'm neutral. Of course I feel compassion for the laid off, I'm not a monster. But I also understand the rules of the capitalism game the US has chosen to play. The rules the US has chosen, and I suspect the rules those 12000 will staunchly defend, is that ultimately its about the money point of view, not the labor point of view.
Google is playing the game. If you care enough then go somewhere else, or work to change the game[2]. But at the very least acknowledge the game itself, and learn the rules.
[1] a share buy-back is just a dividend disguised for tax purposes, and for employee compensation purposes.
[2] changing the rules is hard because the game is bipartisan at grass-roots level. The American-Dream is literally to be the direct benefit of capitalism. The money-talks ethic is fundamental to the American way-of-life.
> The company needs to lower costs, and do some layoffs, in order to make it more profitable.
That doesn’t explain timing as companies always want to be more profitable and Google was profitable before and after these cuts. So what prevented those cuts from happening sooner? It would have backfired if attempted sooner.
Thus the CEO’s decision to shaft these people is the result of those employees lack of economic, political etc power. If everyone would say quit for a better offer then he wouldn’t make that decision and thus wouldn’t get rewarded for the decision.
Employees are getting cost cuts rather than a raise because they lack power. He’s getting a raise because employees are getting shafted.
By getting rid of people he shouldn't have hired - where's the penalty for that money wasting and poor judgement?
So far there's a lot of talk about how ai will end lower-level jobs -- but the real opportunity for labor savings will be to evolve new company structures which don't have the modern form of centralized leadership with more or less fraud-driven leverage over company profits.
New companies modeled after teams that are assembled more like movies, with crediting processes for everyone involved that tie to broad-base profit sharing mechanisms will be the new way. The c-suite can go away/be dramatically consolidated into real leadership roles -- more hands on and direct leadership -- more like the director of a movie than a ceo of a mega cap, more like an Andrew Kelley than a Sundar Pichai)
More collaborations, more loosely affiliated, and more transparent profit sharing structures will be possible as more and more of the business and legal structural bullshit (which significantly over-determine modern business outcomes) can be automated away.
If you want to increase your pay, then getting more power is the way to do it. This can be through increasing personal power, such as getting an education or experience, or it can be through collective power: unionization.
Entities with power will not give up their power willingly, and entities with power have captured the tool of regulation. Regulation works on behalf of those with power. You can't collectively bargain while following the law because the law exists to protect rich people. Look at how Joe Biden shut down the railway unions. Until businesses are shown that people are serious, we can expect them to continue to coerce us and laugh in our faces.
Sundar is probably sitting there on his pile of money thinking "what are you gonna do about it?!" Nancy pelosi said she has a right to the free market, she said it so brazenly because "what are you gonna do about it?!" Trump actively shows contempt for the legal system, because as long as republicans control 50% of the government "what are you gonna do about it?!" Clarence Thomas takes bribes while the rest of the justices support him. "what are you gonna do about it?"
The law as it is, prevents you from doing something about it. The law has no semblance of justice and is not functioning in our country. The purpose of law is to prevent arbitrary exercises of power and the power in this country certainly doesn't seem restrained.
If CEO's getting pay raises while thousands are laid off upsets you, that will never change until you are willing to personally sacrifice to fight oppression.
Billions are spent each year marketing the value of tech. Fiat economics are not immutable laws of reality but populist memes. Valuations have no real tether to reality except what a bunch of apes can be convinced to believe in.
Religious memes of high fathers and endless human expansion seem deeply rooted into the human condition after centuries of being forced to drink such kool aid.
Says you. On his watch they completely squandered their ai lead (despite rebranding as AI company or whatever), didn’t gain much share in the cloud and, botched gaming and messaging, am I missing something? Oh right, also continued to burn user trust and alienating employees it seems
Look at apple and microsoft for comparison, not rando s&p companies.
[0] https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/NDAQ/interactive-char...
If you click compare and put in goog, you’ll see two price lines.
The point of this comparison is that any random stock on nasdaq is likely to follow the index. So good managers should be able to outperform an index of similar stocks.
So, I as an investor am interested in companies that outperform their peers.
I think it would be better to compare goog to a better, more tech index but I don’t know one.
But this link answers “is google better to invest in than a random Nasdaq stock?” And infers that the stock performance is influenced by the CEO. So evaluating Goog’s CEO based on stock price seems to show that he didn’t do that well.
Google is in the NASDAQ100 and it's the third largest company in it. Google matches the NASDAQ100's performance because the NASDAQ100 is largely a measure of Google's performance.
If the board / shareholders thought that, they would vote/advocate for his ouster.
In 2015, when he became CEO, Google's annual revenue was just over $74B. In 2022, it was just shy of $280B. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...
You can look at other metrics too to understand why shareholders, the board, and Larry & Sergey think he's the best person to lead Google.
There are relatively very brief periods in any company's lifecyle when they are able to choose all three and keep them all satisfied.
In a mature business, it is almost impossible to choose all three.
For big-tech, that era has ended and you see traditional CEO behavior making a comeback (i.e., regression to the mean). That is coming as a rude shock for many. That is probably what is happening with Google too.
Also, Sundar Pichai did not give himself raise but board members did. And if the investors that invested their own money into this company (not just traded time and skill for money) do not complain, why should anyone else in this group or from employees. His actions were good, cutting 12,000 employees isn't a cause, it's an effect. Only the timing might not be the best.
Don't always look at the situation from the lowest possible point (as worker) but also see it from the other angle.
Btw. I do not work for Google, I?m not an investor in it, I work regular job but trying to make something out of my life. And yes, that means, becoming an entrepreneur and founder.
My dad always disagree with me when we talk about such topics or pension system. He is 50+ now and worked as blacksmith entire life. His mindset is totally wrong because he lived in country where 'everyone should be the same', those that put in effort and those that do not. Those that risk something in their life and those that did not.
There will always be people that have unique situations and can not take big risk in their life and even try to reach higher level in community, and that is totally normal. But if you are reading HN, I would say you are on a good way with your mindset.
Those are just my 2 cents.
Cheers.
The only need I’ve seen demonstrated was the “need” to bump stock price at any cost to the company.
Doesn’t really matter, though. The board has cast its die.
twitter seems to have shown -so far- that the emperor has no clothes...
Shocker
"if you don't sack 10% of the workforce we will cut your pay by 50% but if you do sack 10% of the workforce we will only cut your pay by 25%"
Its win-win because if he refused, they could sack for the penalty payout, and re-hire on a CEO pay of 1/4 or less, and still have good competent people to run the company.
The failure here, is believing the stake a CEO needs has to be this astronomical to validate their role. After the first 10 million PA of renumeration, what do they do with it? What does he do with $225+ million PA?
A 1% annuity on that pays for a lot of pixel phones, and flights.
Remember that Warren Buffet is on $100,000 effective pay, and does not really spend very much.
"carry on"
"Corleone crime boss comes clean about Cosa Nostra" doesn't happen very often.
He could live very happily on less than $225m. The problem is twofold: doesn't want to, and probably would look weak being made to.