Microsoft CEO's pay rises 63% to $79M, despite devastating year for layoffs
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
On the other hand barely anyone complains about SEs making 400, 600, 800+ TCs - and it's OK, why would anyone complain about it?
If company performance and CEO pay raises had risen together, few would care.
You could pay 300 employees with just his pay rise.
Some people seem to have the idea that Companies are supposed to run as a charity operation, maintaining employees they dont want or need on staff.
Companies use excuses like "times are tough" or "we just don’t have the cash" because most people have fragile emotions that cant handle the truth "market value for your work has not gone up" or "We arent worried about your retention".
The faster you learn it, the better you'll prepare for painful scenarios like layoffs and you'll switch for fancier jobs easier.
Is it genuinely feasible to believe that some human's impact in a company can be 1000X that of another?
I read about this "conundrum" that a CEO doesn't work 1000 times more than a regular employee, so why should he get paid that much, in the book "The Winner- Take-All Society" by Frank and Cook. At the time the argument sounded reasonable.
But it's not. A CEO doesn't work 1000 times harder, but his work is for sure 1000 times more impactful that the work of a regular employee.
Just compare Nadella with Ballmer. Ballmer was running the company into the ground, so much so that Paul Graham wrote an essay declaring the death of Microsoft [1]. One way or another Nadella found a way to turn the ship around and bring it back to be one of the top 3 companies in the US, and maybe in the world.
Now, take a random sample of 1000 regular employees at Microsoft. They work hard, but if they leave tomorrow and are replaced, and sometimes even if they are not replaced, Microsoft will be just fine. If Nadella leaves tomorrow, it's not at all clear that Microsoft will be fine, because we know of times before him when it wasn't fine.
Occam’s razor; simplest explanation is a lot of people are just stupid
99% of devs at worst could drop database, but other bugs usually have marginal impact on revenue, or are caught by validation/QA (if missed by tests)
>The power a single well placed programmer has in a company is devastating
"Well placed" does a very heavy lifting here, because in compare to CEOs, a lot of them have very significant impact on the company.
Lucking out on AI? didnt they spend a lot of years working on CUDA, working with researchers to enable them to use parallel compute with CUDA, to create and define ecosystem and now the bet just paid off?
They also have locked up stock that can lose millions with poor performance.
The board cant whip or kill them if they underperform.
Make a bad decision that looses company 100 million. Now you owe company 100 million. And that would not be dischargeable.
Seems fair deal, you do well you earn a lot. You do badly well you will make up for it with your own money. Board should be able to make them pay with their body.
So this way CEOs would pick safer strategies rather than innovative?
They already are stock based compensated, so if company tanks, then they lose money too.
__________
Also, I don't really understand why rational adults try to enforce some not-so-attractive rules about
how companies should negotiate contracts with people, who are supposed to drive their them to the growth.
After all, it is their $$, right?
That already happens. People usually hear about the exceptions where someone has such good connections they fail upwards or sideways, but mostly if you fail at being CEO that's the last job you'll ever have. You can't really drop back down to being an IC at that level, and if you get fired from the CEO role then it's very hard to get another one. You're basically self employed or retired from that point on, which is why CEOs demand such high compensation.
Examples of CEOs who failed and then never got another real job:
- Marissa Mayer. Not even clear Yahoo!'s failure was her fault, but after she stopped being their CEO she had to make her own no-name startup and has been there ever since.
- Carly Fiorina. Fired from HP in 2005, never worked in a corporate executive role again. Had a few board memberships but switched into non-profit and politics.
- Steve Ballmer. Early retirement in 2013 aged 58 after saying he planned to stay until at least 2018. Post-MS he did some philanthropy but hasn't worked.
- John Sculley. Fired from Apple in 1993, never worked as a corporate executive again although he did have a good career as a tech investor, board member and the like.
- Ellen Pao. After being exited from Reddit she never worked as a corporate executive again, instead spending time on non-profit feminist advocacy.
- Tony Hayward. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster he was fired from BP and has had no executive positions since.
There are lots more examples like this. Failure at the CEO level is usually failure for life, so like in professional sports that pushes up the comp people demand to take the job, as if they get booted out they need enough saved resources to last a long time.
Imagine you offer a scaled down version for an office job. Do you think you will get better candidates and performance? Candidates would avoid it like the plague and you would be left with crazy gamblers or those with nothing to lose.
You compete for talent with making good offers, not terrible ones.
If you have a problem with the board's goals, then you have another bone to pick.
CEOs aren't fungible.
If all value comes exclusively from labor, then you wouldn't need anything else!
I know it’s probably covered already but I never got deep into topic.
For very large projects then, like chip-making or space exploration, the State needs to step in; its way too complexe for "casual" workers to start. But then this institution will be very likely under indirect (through parliament) democratic control.
And 30% stock increase in last 12 months. Isn't layoff positive for the company if it is not hurting stock.
Compared to S&P500 38.78% in the very same period.
Simple economics goes pretty far explaining these simple mysteries.
But yeah, MSFT closed few game studios and this news is from a website about gaming industry, so it has to be bad, it is evil, people are losing jobs...
He solved the OpenAI "crisis" in an afternoon, I'll always lmao at that.