Microsoft's statement was the opposite, "Our D&I commitments remain unchanged [...]".
Interesting they call it D&I now. I guess the E was always a bit awkward considering the CEO earns $40 million.
First of all, Nadella has created a trillion dollars of value over his leadership. His pay packet of $40m is nothing.
Second, the E was never about equality of pay, or fairness. It’s equity. It was about quotas in hiring and equality of outcome, meaning active discrimination against certain groups. Which does cross a very dangerous line.
Or you? You do realise you are saying, if you haven’t done it, you are less than an untrained chimp yourself, just by the logic of your statement?
Because I didnt take over Microsoft, a 40 year old company, with monopolies firmly entrenched in 2014.
Nokia, another company which was very strong a decade ago, is de facto gone.
Achieving "equity" means they need/want to treat people unequally.
You might tell me here why in fact it does not actually apply here because reasons, if so fine I'm not an expert on DEI matters. But that would not be so relevant to my point, which is common understanding and concepts people have around that word potentially having difficulty coexisting with highly stratified company like MS.
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
Nadella may not be carrying rocks but he's the one figuring out which rocks and where they should go.
Was this a collective decision by thousands of Microsoft employees, to go in this direction?
Is it thousands of google employees fault they missed it?
By your logic it is absolutely google employees fault, not executives… really??
The bullshit culture is actually thinking executives don’t do anything. Yet even a tiny bit of critical thinking would show you it has massive impact.
> By your logic it is absolutely google employees fault, not executives… really??
My logic is that placing an outsized importance on executives is just a way to justify inequality, when in truth they risk nothing. Even if their bets fail, it is the peons who pay the price.
Anyone who is physically healthy can carry a stone, but few places in the world built the pyramids.
Analogically, anyone with two hands can type something on a keyboard, the hard part is getting a useful software product out of this typing.
Even outside the commercial sphere, leaders of such complicated projects are famous, such as Linus Torvalds.
There is survivorship bias embedded in your reply. Pyramids are extremely durable, so we can still see them and judge them. Cultures that didn't build them could well spend their money and effort on some other status symbols, which were more transient. Like huge events (balls etc.) held for the royalty.
Ancient people were superstitious to the highest degree, and knew that victory always goes to whoever is favoured by the Gods. So, seeing these immense structures, Egypt's enemies knew that any raid on Egypt would be futile, as Egyptian gods would surely help their faithful followers who made them such magnificent gift.
Unless he was going to pay out of his pocket if he bankrupted Microsoft, that argument doesn't pass the sniff test.
Also, he has created a trillion dollars of valuation. That's not the same thing as value, just ask the Japanese property market in the 1990s. Current stock price can also entirely disconnected from reality and mid to long term future, just ask GE and Boeing.
If the AI/LLM hype dies down, a big chunk of that valuation will disappear, without anything meaningfully changing.
Azure, office 365, cloud, these were all massive to Microsoft and had created loads of value and revenue.
That isn’t a bubble.
Also AI might be hype, but it might not. Microsoft managed to get in at the right time with the right company, and is doing better than google, apple, amazon and many others.
To give no credit to Nadella is ridiculous there are so many other companies waiting to take Microsoft’s place. I find this resentful envy here on HN extremely sad and also very dishonest.
I'm giving him plenty of credit, he's the first competent CEO of Microsoft in a decade. Does that mean he deserves $40million/year while his company is laying off people to save on employee salaries? No, simple as that.
CEOs aren't some great superhumans that everything happens because of. They have a very important positions, and many CEOs have ruined or bankrupted companies through sheer incompetence, while many others have created amazing value (both societal and economic). They are not deities, they deserve prison and for their money to be seized when they commit crimes, and they don't deserve to be paid thousands of times more than the median employees that actually do the work and execute on the CEO's vision.
> I find this resentful envy here on HN extremely sad and also very dishonest.
It's disdain for sociopathy more than anything else. I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.
> I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.
No shareholders in their right mind would hire such a CEO, so your chances are pretty slim.
Are you seriously trying to say that Steve Ballmer was incompetent?!
IMO if Ballmer had stayed on until present day, Microsoft would have become something like Oracle. Technically growing revenue, but very little substance or relevance, no new customers or new business from them, only jacking up prices.
Also, he left in 2014, a decade ago, so it was ambiguous if I'm covering him or not.
Hence I really think the pay gap is ethically questionable.
that is my point. „Getting laid off“ means millions for him anyway.
You mean that he happened to be CEO during a period when market value increased due to a number of factors beyond his control or influence.
as always. e.g. the "C: drive" or the Virtual Memory instead of swap, etc.
I've worked with a lot of Ex-MSFT, and almost all do it!
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/wh...
An interesting test is whether you can state this opinion openly and still remain an employee of $big_corp.