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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Every time a company is one day telling the employees that they need to take a pay cut to keep the company "competitive" (and this pay freeze is actually a pay cut), and the next day they're doing a stock buyback and the C-Suite is giving themselves enormous performance bonuses they need to worry about unionization.

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Dividends should be a sign that a company has excess cash and can't find a good place to invest it. Paying a dividend while asking workers to take a pay freeze signals they don't believe the workers are returning enough value to justify paying them more.

What are stock buybacks, then? They're more employee hostile than dividends, that's for sure.

> They're more employee hostile than dividends, that's for sure

Why are buybacks more employee hostile than dividends?

Because I have to sell the shares and I get a bunch of cash. Dividends could happen yearly and for significant amounts, considering how cash rich these companies are.

For the whales, sure, they're great, since they do the whole "borrow against the share price and extend forever".

Buybacks are actually better for employees with unvested grants. If you have 100k in unvested stock and a dividend is issued, you get nothing. But an equivalent buyback raises the price and now you vest a higher amount.

Or they turn around and buy a company for a half a billion dollars.

oh Zebra.. never change.

https://chainstoreage.com/zebra-acquires-reflexis-575-millio...

Not to sound too much like a libertarian, and I'm not against unions, but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere? It's not like Microsoft has anywhere near a monopoly on the software engineering space anymore, and most of the engineers there can probably adjust to remote work without too much of an issue.

Then we get the cycle of Microsoft complaining that they can't hire enough people, and then they bump salaries up again to be competitive.

> isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?

In the long run sure. But in the short run, employment is sticky. Especially in the professional world.

> but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?

In this market? I'm skeptical. I'm sure some fraction of them can do so at equivalent or higher pay, but the tech market at the moment is quite soft and I wouldn't be surprised this was taken into account and served as another motivation for this move from MS.

That's fair, I was a victim of the layoffs of 2022 (well, sort of), and it took months to find a job paying well enough to cover my mortgage. I did find one, and I really like it, but it took a lot of time and effort to find...certainly harder than it was early last year.

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