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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

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> You are a commodity.

If I am, then so are the execs. They aren't special. They just rewrite their institutional rules so it is heads they win, tails you lose.

They absolutely are. Companies spend huge amounts of time cutting out management fat, as they should.

It's Darwinian. You either evolve or die. It's a good thing.

Management fat? Sure. C-Suite level? Nah. Boeing's last two failed CEOs left with tens of millions of dollars worth of golden parachute; we've seen a massive upwards trend in CEO pay over the last few decades.

Musk got $44 billion for being a part-time CEO at Tesla, even.

CEO is the riskiest, high profile hire. Million dollar golden parachutes are a rounding error distraction. I'm not justifying them, but it's generally just contractual, and the cost of getting rid of a low performer (which is no different to the rank and file, just at a much lower unit cost).

> CEO is the riskiest, high profile hire.

How risky can it possibly be if three years of failure gets you $60M severance? What's the risk?

Adam Neumann is a billionaire!

Risky for the company, not for the individual. Hence why they are happy to pay what is, at the corporate level, a paltry sum to make a problem go away. It just happens to be a rather large sum at the individual level.

A bad CEO can easily ruin hundreds of billions or trillions in value. Some tens of millions to be rid of the problem is a no brainer.

> Some tens of millions to be rid of the problem is a no brainer.

But... they can just be fired. Like the rest of us.

I think you misunderstand what a golden parachute is, or more accurately in this instance, what severance is.

It's not some evil cabal gifting each other money. It's a contractual issue.

> It's not some evil cabal gifting each other money.

Oh, they absolutely sit on each others boards and rubber stamp such packages.

> It's a contractual issue.

Yes. They should stop adding multi-million dollar golden parachutes for failures to said contracts.

> If management believes it can source labor at a lower cost, they have a legal fiduciary duty to do so.

Only if that's the only variable, which it never is.

Exactly. Execs see the monthly spend, people actually doing the work see the long-term externalities and hidden costs. Many, many people I know would and do buy more expensive (often Made in USA but not always) products when doing so means that the products will last longer and need less maintenance. Treating labor as commodities implies that the labor is interchangeable. Everyone who's actually done the work knows that it's not. There's no shortcut to paying for good talent.

Sure, and they will quickly discover when the quality deteriorates unacceptably.

But that is no reason to stick your head in the sand and pretend there aren't alternatives.

Or they won't discover, because they'll be 5 years gone onto the next company, and the product will slowly decay under the cost of upkeep of its technical debt and the business fail.

The free market is not, in fact, perfectly frictionless. Executive decisions still matter and can make the difference between having, say, a photo sharing site that people like to use, and having one that's shut down because they can't pay to fix the legacy code.

You don't understand people being worried their lives and families are going to be destroyed?

You are describing the entire history of the human race.

It's not different this time. And yet, somehow, every century has been better than the last.

for sure so let's ignore any suffering or complaints and celebrate every tragedy because it's worth it in the end for someone else?

just hand wave anyones pain away because it works for you? I guess people are used to it

If you were to chart the pain and suffering of the human race over the last 10,000 years, or even over the last 100 years, it is steeply down and to the right.

I'm not hand waving anything away. It's unfortunately ruthlessly statistical.

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