9 ms·

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all e

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good for you if you're OK with that extreme imbalance. But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them.

matchagaucho 9y ago
If there's ever an Equifax scale breach at Dropbox, accountability will fall on the SVP of Eng.
- latch 9y ago
  So no consequences?
  - arbie 9y ago
    Other than a generous severance package?
- throwaway93192 9y ago
  Yes, he'd be fired. Perhaps have to testify in front of Congress, even. Accountability is worth $8M a year?
  - adventured 9y ago
    The average NBA player salary is $6 million per year. In the next few years all of the NBA players combined (~420 players) are set to make more in salary than all the S&P 500 CEOs earn in salary combined. Should top executives at $10 billion companies (7x the average value of an NBA team) receive compensation on par with professional athletes? How does that not make sense? The US will spend $10 billion per year compensating several thousand athletes. How much should be spent compensating the people directly responsible for operating businesses that represent trillions of dollars in GDP and tens of millions of employees? Mediocre middle relief baseball pitchers should make $8 million per year, but execs running billion dollar companies shouldn't? You can argue that baseball players are overpaid, but that's an absurd premise. It's directly representative of the value in the system - tens of trillions in wealth in the stock market, and vast profit generation - and the price of acquiring talent.
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      How many of those $10B companies are actually really worth that, not just an inflated result of funding rounds. The 420 or so players in the NBA can largely be considered to be the best 420 players in the world. NBA teams also have a pretty high revenue to value ratio. Points to you too for ignoring that in many cases the salary of a Fortune 500 CEO is, in many to most cases a much smaller fraction of their compensation packages. In many cases bonuses and other compensation is between 3 and 10 or more times the salary, so not exactly equitable, though it makes for a better sound bite.
      - cbr 9y ago
        How many of those $10B companies are actually really worth that, not just an inflated result of funding rounds? The parent is talking about S&P 500 companies, which means publicly traded ones. The thing where private companies have inflated valuations [1][2] doesn't apply here. [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/terms https://www.benkuhn.net/terms [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455
    - drieddust 9y ago
      Executive compensation and performance is negatively correlated. NBA stars make money by exposing themselves to downside. They have fan, they generate direct revenue and last but not the least they have their skin in the game. One injury and their playing career is over for good. What does these executives bring to table? Can 10 of them alone deliver the product and services to customer? And when they fail ,they simply take large severance and fade away to a beach only to come back fully rejuvenated to fuck again.
      - paloaltoasshole 9y ago
        I have seen some questionable research papers claiming that but I'm not convinced.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      NBA player salaries are also not sustainable, they're going to have to drop once ESPN will only be able to charge people who actually watch sports instead of getting paid per cable subscriber regardless.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rrcaptain 9y ago
  You realize Equifax has had pretty much no consequences for their gross negligence, right?
  - matchagaucho 9y ago
    Execs were forced to resign. Rank and file Engineers were not.
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      Once you've made $10M+, why would anyone care if they have to resign? Especially, when odds are they'll have another gig in no time.
- awj 9y ago
  "accountability", as in a golden parachute and maybe an uncomfortable congressional hearing or two? Yeah, huge responsibility there...
Quentin_Clark01 9y ago
Hey I used to drive a lamborghini, Aston martin and Ferrari to work when I headed up Sql Server at Microsoft. I didn't really need the money to be honest.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
austenallred 9y ago
You're telling me that executives get paid more than rank-and-file employees? Shocking.
- candiodari 9y ago
  Well, except of course that startups, like Dropbox, very often advertise to early non-exec hires that while their current pay is very low, they'll make out like bandits upon IPO or acquiring. Then the shares of the early employees get diluted like crazy to give those sorts of very late-hires ridiculous compensation, because "they're 'executive'". So the message is more about broken promises than it is about compensation per se.
lsc 9y ago
>Good for you if you're OK with that extreme imbalance. But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them. so personally? I don't care about the imbalance, I care about what I'm getting and how that compares to what I can get elsewhere. I understand I'm playing in a rich man's sandbox, and I'm okay with that. The fact that the man three levels up makes ridiculously more than I do doesn't diminish the fact that I'm getting treated better (mostly measured in getting paid better) than I would be at the next best job I could get. That said, if I was an investor in the company and not another beneficiary of investor largess, I'd be pissed.
- Frondo 9y ago
  Ok, personally, I do care about the imbalance, and I strongly encourage my fellow techies to care, too. Why? Because when enough of us care, we can change the sandbox itself. None of this stuff is set in stone. Great that you're content with crumbs, but I'm not, and I certainly don't want to see the next generation of technicians laboring under the same conditions as so many of ours has done. I'll do my part to leave the world a better place for my successors; not just the same status quo. What's the point of life otherwise?
  - lsc 9y ago
    >Great that you're content with crumbs, but I'm not, and I certainly don't want to see the next generation of technicians laboring under the same conditions as so many of ours has done. I'll do my part to leave the world a better place for my successors; not just the same status quo. What's the point of life otherwise? dude, I'm a silicon valley computer technician. I literally make 10x what the service people I see every day make, and on top of that, my employer cooks gourmet meals for me, 3x a day, and provides a luxury bus system. Yes, I'm at near the bottom of my local technical prestige hierarchy, but If you think these are crumbs, If you don't think that this is worth a little bit of bowing and scraping, I think you need to stop and look around... look at how normal people live. If you want to work to make the world a better place, If you want to alleviate suffering, work to raise the salaries of those who make 1/10th what we do.
lsc 9y ago
to follow up: > But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them. When I interview at pre-ipo companies, they usually tell me how many options they are giving me and a per-option strike price, but no idea of how many outstanding shares there are. In this case, I think it's deeply irrational to assume that you are getting anything at all; if a professional is offering you something of value as an inducement, they are going to make damn sure you know what that value is. The upshot is that when you interview at these companies, make them compete for you on salary, benefits and working conditions. If they also want to give you a mystery box, that's cool, but understand that it's a mystery box, and probably won't be worth much at all even if there is an exit.
nathan_f77 9y ago
Sometimes I think about starting a tech co-op where every member has an equal stake, and we just build SaaS services and mobile apps or games until something works. I've been doing that by myself, so it would be nice to diversify and get a stake in a number of other projects. Similar to an angel investor who invests in a lot of startups, but we'd be investing time and effort instead of money. I'm thinking we could have a group of 10 people working on 10+ different projects, and we would each own 10% of the parent company. Then we could try a bunch of different ideas and focus on the ones that work. I would want to build passive "lifestyle businesses" that make 4-5 figures per month, and we wouldn't need to aim for an exit. We could just take a salary and retire, or keep making apps and games because it's a lot of fun. It would be awesome to share a lot of boilerplate code, so it's super fast to get started on a new idea. We'd also have a single kubernetes cluster on AWS that runs all of the backend services, maybe with something like Deis Workflow. And who knows, maybe we turn that into a business as well, and provide hosting to other companies. Sorry for the tangent, but that could be one way to solve the imbalance. Here's another discussion about tech coops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634152 EDIT: I decided to put together an application form to see if anyone is interested: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiKe920sTOV_Y2FAmaY/edit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiK... There will be a lot of challenges, but I think it could work. Just need to find the right people.
- labso 9y ago
  I have been thinking the same idea for a while now. Not in a place that would be able to commit, but if you really try this I would like to follow up.
- asmithmd1 9y ago
  Once you are established, have applicants work long hours for entry level wages as "associates" in the hopes they could become "partner" one day. This is obviously the law firm model. I have also wondered why it hasn't been (to my knowledge) replicated in tech. The cynical answer is that once you have a suite of profitable applications bringing in money, why share that with new employees when you can get the same work done for "crumbs"
Kiro 9y ago
Where do you see that?
- sb8244 9y ago
  @ https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518055809/d451946ds1.htm#toc451946_13 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518...
dragonwriter 9y ago
> When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Well, it'll mostly pay off for major capital holders (which founders are likely but not certain to be, depending on the course of business before then, and top executives at the time may or may not.) Top executives as such (outside of their role, if any, as capital holders) may get more benefit than you, but even if so it will be much less than the capital holders.
- varenc 9y ago
  For one data point, Sequoia owns 25% of Dropbox. They led the seed and series A. That investment is going to pay off marvelously...
- throwaway289348 9y ago
  For better or worse, I think most of us have made peace with the fact that capital holders can put their money at risk, wait several years, and earn a large return with some probability. For some guy to waltz in a couple months before an IPO and make $35m out of thin air... it's a bit much. Especially when many of us have seen how hard early employees work, staying til late hours and thinking someone will compensate them for their extra effort.
- beatpanda 9y ago
  The Techies Are Finally Reading Marx
  - java_script 9y ago
    patio11's salary negotiation blog post is our Das Kapital.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    I doubt it, but a nuanced debate of his ideas on the part of those who purport to be so open to unconventional ideas would be refreshing. We love to promote learning from iteration but still remain amazingly averse to doing so in practice. I think this is just another example of that. The moonshot of UBI is an acrobatic avoidance of Marx, relatable if you were raised with the American indoctrination of Marx == Hitler (yeah I know but the lack of ideological overlap, or any overlap at all, hasn’t mattered because patriotism). We are due some maturity in this area. And on another hand, one should be forgiven for mistaking the open source movement for Marxism.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
It never was and never will be. We like to pretend that employees are so fairly compensated, and yet I had to fight tooth and nail to get a mere 2% equity. The thought of an equity stake closer to 10% was almost unheard of. But you bet I'd have had an impact large enough to justify those returns, in the sense of http://paulgraham.com/equity.html http://paulgraham.com/equity.html Except... It's not quite that simple. Most people don't care. The vast majority of programmers simply do not care enough to band together and force employers to give you a higher stake. I'm not even insinuating that a union would be a good idea. I'm saying, in a free market society, you can't be surprised to find out you just aren't worth making rich.
- drieddust 9y ago
  Business owners form all sort cahoots and lobby for themselves so it's not a free market. Its just sold to us that ways.
- Frondo 9y ago
  I'm soon moving into management and I still think unions would be a fantastic idea all across the tech sector. The whole of a business is already a collectively organized unit, by its nature. When each of us, each individual technician, goes into negotiations, we're already up against the entirety of the business. Banding together is literally the only way to balance that scale. The Screen Actors Guild would be a good model for a tech union--they obviously reward top box office draws richly, but the low end of the scale is still well cared for.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rdlecler1 9y ago
  Or you could try to start your own company. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
  - fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago
    you're an expert in your field, you do the real work that makes money but you're not good at business, now what ?
stanfordkid 9y ago
The guy majored in physics and computer science. There's nothing wrong with compensating people who have proven they can scale things (organizations) commensurate to their record.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maxaf 9y ago
  I find it difficult to believe that any sort of scaling of the org could have occurred in the span of six months thanks to the efforts of a single individual.
  - ryanburk 9y ago
    not saying value is right or wrong. but that is the present value of a stock award that vests over time. this is valuing his expected contribution and whatever it took to get him to join versus previous company / other opportunities. to be paid out over 4 years.
    - maxaf 9y ago
      Good point: considering the time frame, the comp does look like a forward looking statement.
      - throwaway93192 9y ago
        Every employee's stock package is forward looking in that same way, no?
        rockinghigh 9y ago
        Yes. CEOs also often have to hit performance targets in terms of revenues to unlock stock packages.
  - stanfordkid 9y ago
ulfw 9y ago
This isn't even jealousy speaking, really. I don't even know the gentleman. But I fail to see how someone would be worth this kind of money as, what's mostly a people manager of a (late) startup. His own rank and file have to work 30 years to make what he makes in a year. Sorry but ... that makes me want to drop my (paid) Dropbox account.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago." I am curious what contributions can a single executive make to a company that justify $34 million dollars in compensation? More so what contributions did that individual make in less than 6 months that can justify this obscene level of compensation? Did they create 3x or 5x of this compensation in value? Remember this the next time a recruiter at some startup tries to tell they offer options in lieu of cash because the company wants you "to have skin in the game."
- nnain 9y ago
  I would guess that he was hired so he can bring in some multi million clients from his network. Such hires can sometimes bring a lot of value to the company or just be a big drain at other times (the more severe effect though can be a dip in motivation for other techies).
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    "Clients"? It's not a customer facing role.
- paloaltoasshole 9y ago
  > Remember this the next time a recruiter at some startup tries to tell they offer options in lieu of cash because the company wants you "to have skin in the game." The SVP got $130k in cash and $34m in stocks
tzhenghao 9y ago
My personal opinion on this topic has to do with the skill and requirements of the job, given the time and stage the company is at. Sure, I'm fine with executives that come much later to be paid more than many that come before him/her. Should a number as high as $34m justify the kind of value he/she puts into the company? I dunno if I can agree with that, and in an early employee's perspective, I'd like to be proven otherwise. Then again, I don't work for Dropbox and do not know the scale of the problem in which this exec has been brought in to solve. Ultimately, my core principles/values have to do with loyalty and being nice. As founder(s), you must not forget those who brought the company this far. They did unglamorous work and put in crazy hours to help the company achieve product market fit. Founder(s) risk breaking the trust of their employees < no.100 when they see people coming after them being compensated / valued 100x more than they do, not because they are just paid higher. That scale is the root cause for frustration. The counterpoint to this is when the company scales, all other numbers will scale with it too (revenue numbers, employee headcount etc.), and sometimes hiring a key person who can, in the long term, cut costs by $100m might justify his/her salary. Capitalism works like that. UPDATE: Curious to hear what thoughts founder(s) active in the HN community have about this though. Open to hear decisions on your end. I struggle to come up with a good answer myself.
- z3t4 9y ago
  In an early upstart the employees might actually make more money then the founders. When the ship is in motion the founders might not need those people any longer, and there will be many more knocking on the doors wanting a job. The founders hires the execs to hopefully do a better job then the founders themselves are currently doing. And if the founders are making millions it will also be easy for them to pay the execs millions. And they don't want to hire just anyone to take care of their baby.

matchagaucho 9y ago

If there's ever an Equifax scale breach at Dropbox, accountability will fall on the SVP of Eng.

latch 9y ago
So no consequences?
- arbie 9y ago
  Other than a generous severance package?
throwaway93192 9y ago
Yes, he'd be fired. Perhaps have to testify in front of Congress, even. Accountability is worth $8M a year?
- adventured 9y ago
  The average NBA player salary is $6 million per year. In the next few years all of the NBA players combined (~420 players) are set to make more in salary than all the S&P 500 CEOs earn in salary combined. Should top executives at $10 billion companies (7x the average value of an NBA team) receive compensation on par with professional athletes? How does that not make sense? The US will spend $10 billion per year compensating several thousand athletes. How much should be spent compensating the people directly responsible for operating businesses that represent trillions of dollars in GDP and tens of millions of employees? Mediocre middle relief baseball pitchers should make $8 million per year, but execs running billion dollar companies shouldn't? You can argue that baseball players are overpaid, but that's an absurd premise. It's directly representative of the value in the system - tens of trillions in wealth in the stock market, and vast profit generation - and the price of acquiring talent.
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    How many of those $10B companies are actually really worth that, not just an inflated result of funding rounds. The 420 or so players in the NBA can largely be considered to be the best 420 players in the world. NBA teams also have a pretty high revenue to value ratio. Points to you too for ignoring that in many cases the salary of a Fortune 500 CEO is, in many to most cases a much smaller fraction of their compensation packages. In many cases bonuses and other compensation is between 3 and 10 or more times the salary, so not exactly equitable, though it makes for a better sound bite.
    - cbr 9y ago
      How many of those $10B companies are actually really worth that, not just an inflated result of funding rounds? The parent is talking about S&P 500 companies, which means publicly traded ones. The thing where private companies have inflated valuations [1][2] doesn't apply here. [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/terms https://www.benkuhn.net/terms [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455
  - drieddust 9y ago
    Executive compensation and performance is negatively correlated. NBA stars make money by exposing themselves to downside. They have fan, they generate direct revenue and last but not the least they have their skin in the game. One injury and their playing career is over for good. What does these executives bring to table? Can 10 of them alone deliver the product and services to customer? And when they fail ,they simply take large severance and fade away to a beach only to come back fully rejuvenated to fuck again.
    - paloaltoasshole 9y ago
      I have seen some questionable research papers claiming that but I'm not convinced.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    NBA player salaries are also not sustainable, they're going to have to drop once ESPN will only be able to charge people who actually watch sports instead of getting paid per cable subscriber regardless.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rrcaptain 9y ago
You realize Equifax has had pretty much no consequences for their gross negligence, right?
- matchagaucho 9y ago
  Execs were forced to resign. Rank and file Engineers were not.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    Once you've made $10M+, why would anyone care if they have to resign? Especially, when odds are they'll have another gig in no time.
awj 9y ago
"accountability", as in a golden parachute and maybe an uncomfortable congressional hearing or two? Yeah, huge responsibility there...

Quentin_Clark01 9y ago

Hey I used to drive a lamborghini, Aston martin and Ferrari to work when I headed up Sql Server at Microsoft. I didn't really need the money to be honest.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

austenallred 9y ago

You're telling me that executives get paid more than rank-and-file employees? Shocking.

candiodari 9y ago
Well, except of course that startups, like Dropbox, very often advertise to early non-exec hires that while their current pay is very low, they'll make out like bandits upon IPO or acquiring. Then the shares of the early employees get diluted like crazy to give those sorts of very late-hires ridiculous compensation, because "they're 'executive'". So the message is more about broken promises than it is about compensation per se.

lsc 9y ago

>Good for you if you're OK with that extreme imbalance. But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them. so personally? I don't care about the imbalance, I care about what I'm getting and how that compares to what I can get elsewhere. I understand I'm playing in a rich man's sandbox, and I'm okay with that. The fact that the man three levels up makes ridiculously more than I do doesn't diminish the fact that I'm getting treated better (mostly measured in getting paid better) than I would be at the next best job I could get. That said, if I was an investor in the company and not another beneficiary of investor largess, I'd be pissed.

Frondo 9y ago
Ok, personally, I do care about the imbalance, and I strongly encourage my fellow techies to care, too. Why? Because when enough of us care, we can change the sandbox itself. None of this stuff is set in stone. Great that you're content with crumbs, but I'm not, and I certainly don't want to see the next generation of technicians laboring under the same conditions as so many of ours has done. I'll do my part to leave the world a better place for my successors; not just the same status quo. What's the point of life otherwise?
- lsc 9y ago
  >Great that you're content with crumbs, but I'm not, and I certainly don't want to see the next generation of technicians laboring under the same conditions as so many of ours has done. I'll do my part to leave the world a better place for my successors; not just the same status quo. What's the point of life otherwise? dude, I'm a silicon valley computer technician. I literally make 10x what the service people I see every day make, and on top of that, my employer cooks gourmet meals for me, 3x a day, and provides a luxury bus system. Yes, I'm at near the bottom of my local technical prestige hierarchy, but If you think these are crumbs, If you don't think that this is worth a little bit of bowing and scraping, I think you need to stop and look around... look at how normal people live. If you want to work to make the world a better place, If you want to alleviate suffering, work to raise the salaries of those who make 1/10th what we do.

lsc 9y ago

to follow up: > But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them. When I interview at pre-ipo companies, they usually tell me how many options they are giving me and a per-option strike price, but no idea of how many outstanding shares there are. In this case, I think it's deeply irrational to assume that you are getting anything at all; if a professional is offering you something of value as an inducement, they are going to make damn sure you know what that value is. The upshot is that when you interview at these companies, make them compete for you on salary, benefits and working conditions. If they also want to give you a mystery box, that's cool, but understand that it's a mystery box, and probably won't be worth much at all even if there is an exit.

nathan_f77 9y ago

Sometimes I think about starting a tech co-op where every member has an equal stake, and we just build SaaS services and mobile apps or games until something works. I've been doing that by myself, so it would be nice to diversify and get a stake in a number of other projects. Similar to an angel investor who invests in a lot of startups, but we'd be investing time and effort instead of money. I'm thinking we could have a group of 10 people working on 10+ different projects, and we would each own 10% of the parent company. Then we could try a bunch of different ideas and focus on the ones that work. I would want to build passive "lifestyle businesses" that make 4-5 figures per month, and we wouldn't need to aim for an exit. We could just take a salary and retire, or keep making apps and games because it's a lot of fun. It would be awesome to share a lot of boilerplate code, so it's super fast to get started on a new idea. We'd also have a single kubernetes cluster on AWS that runs all of the backend services, maybe with something like Deis Workflow. And who knows, maybe we turn that into a business as well, and provide hosting to other companies. Sorry for the tangent, but that could be one way to solve the imbalance. Here's another discussion about tech coops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634152 EDIT: I decided to put together an application form to see if anyone is interested: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiKe920sTOV_Y2FAmaY/edit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiK... There will be a lot of challenges, but I think it could work. Just need to find the right people.

labso 9y ago
I have been thinking the same idea for a while now. Not in a place that would be able to commit, but if you really try this I would like to follow up.
asmithmd1 9y ago
Once you are established, have applicants work long hours for entry level wages as "associates" in the hopes they could become "partner" one day. This is obviously the law firm model. I have also wondered why it hasn't been (to my knowledge) replicated in tech. The cynical answer is that once you have a suite of profitable applications bringing in money, why share that with new employees when you can get the same work done for "crumbs"

Kiro 9y ago

Where do you see that?

sb8244 9y ago
@ https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518055809/d451946ds1.htm#toc451946_13 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518...

dragonwriter 9y ago

> When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Well, it'll mostly pay off for major capital holders (which founders are likely but not certain to be, depending on the course of business before then, and top executives at the time may or may not.) Top executives as such (outside of their role, if any, as capital holders) may get more benefit than you, but even if so it will be much less than the capital holders.

varenc 9y ago
For one data point, Sequoia owns 25% of Dropbox. They led the seed and series A. That investment is going to pay off marvelously...
throwaway289348 9y ago
For better or worse, I think most of us have made peace with the fact that capital holders can put their money at risk, wait several years, and earn a large return with some probability. For some guy to waltz in a couple months before an IPO and make $35m out of thin air... it's a bit much. Especially when many of us have seen how hard early employees work, staying til late hours and thinking someone will compensate them for their extra effort.
beatpanda 9y ago
The Techies Are Finally Reading Marx
- java_script 9y ago
  patio11's salary negotiation blog post is our Das Kapital.
- gt_ 9y ago
  I doubt it, but a nuanced debate of his ideas on the part of those who purport to be so open to unconventional ideas would be refreshing. We love to promote learning from iteration but still remain amazingly averse to doing so in practice. I think this is just another example of that. The moonshot of UBI is an acrobatic avoidance of Marx, relatable if you were raised with the American indoctrination of Marx == Hitler (yeah I know but the lack of ideological overlap, or any overlap at all, hasn’t mattered because patriotism). We are due some maturity in this area. And on another hand, one should be forgiven for mistaking the open source movement for Marxism.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

It never was and never will be. We like to pretend that employees are so fairly compensated, and yet I had to fight tooth and nail to get a mere 2% equity. The thought of an equity stake closer to 10% was almost unheard of. But you bet I'd have had an impact large enough to justify those returns, in the sense of http://paulgraham.com/equity.html http://paulgraham.com/equity.html Except... It's not quite that simple. Most people don't care. The vast majority of programmers simply do not care enough to band together and force employers to give you a higher stake. I'm not even insinuating that a union would be a good idea. I'm saying, in a free market society, you can't be surprised to find out you just aren't worth making rich.

drieddust 9y ago
Business owners form all sort cahoots and lobby for themselves so it's not a free market. Its just sold to us that ways.
Frondo 9y ago
I'm soon moving into management and I still think unions would be a fantastic idea all across the tech sector. The whole of a business is already a collectively organized unit, by its nature. When each of us, each individual technician, goes into negotiations, we're already up against the entirety of the business. Banding together is literally the only way to balance that scale. The Screen Actors Guild would be a good model for a tech union--they obviously reward top box office draws richly, but the low end of the scale is still well cared for.
deleted 9y ago
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rdlecler1 9y ago
Or you could try to start your own company. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
- fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago
  you're an expert in your field, you do the real work that makes money but you're not good at business, now what ?

stanfordkid 9y ago

The guy majored in physics and computer science. There's nothing wrong with compensating people who have proven they can scale things (organizations) commensurate to their record.

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maxaf 9y ago
I find it difficult to believe that any sort of scaling of the org could have occurred in the span of six months thanks to the efforts of a single individual.
- ryanburk 9y ago
  not saying value is right or wrong. but that is the present value of a stock award that vests over time. this is valuing his expected contribution and whatever it took to get him to join versus previous company / other opportunities. to be paid out over 4 years.
  - maxaf 9y ago
    Good point: considering the time frame, the comp does look like a forward looking statement.
    - throwaway93192 9y ago
      Every employee's stock package is forward looking in that same way, no?
      - rockinghigh 9y ago
        Yes. CEOs also often have to hit performance targets in terms of revenues to unlock stock packages.
- stanfordkid 9y ago

ulfw 9y ago

This isn't even jealousy speaking, really. I don't even know the gentleman. But I fail to see how someone would be worth this kind of money as, what's mostly a people manager of a (late) startup. His own rank and file have to work 30 years to make what he makes in a year. Sorry but ... that makes me want to drop my (paid) Dropbox account.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago." I am curious what contributions can a single executive make to a company that justify $34 million dollars in compensation? More so what contributions did that individual make in less than 6 months that can justify this obscene level of compensation? Did they create 3x or 5x of this compensation in value? Remember this the next time a recruiter at some startup tries to tell they offer options in lieu of cash because the company wants you "to have skin in the game."

nnain 9y ago
I would guess that he was hired so he can bring in some multi million clients from his network. Such hires can sometimes bring a lot of value to the company or just be a big drain at other times (the more severe effect though can be a dip in motivation for other techies).
- bogomipz 9y ago
  "Clients"? It's not a customer facing role.
paloaltoasshole 9y ago
> Remember this the next time a recruiter at some startup tries to tell they offer options in lieu of cash because the company wants you "to have skin in the game." The SVP got $130k in cash and $34m in stocks

tzhenghao 9y ago

My personal opinion on this topic has to do with the skill and requirements of the job, given the time and stage the company is at. Sure, I'm fine with executives that come much later to be paid more than many that come before him/her. Should a number as high as $34m justify the kind of value he/she puts into the company? I dunno if I can agree with that, and in an early employee's perspective, I'd like to be proven otherwise. Then again, I don't work for Dropbox and do not know the scale of the problem in which this exec has been brought in to solve. Ultimately, my core principles/values have to do with loyalty and being nice. As founder(s), you must not forget those who brought the company this far. They did unglamorous work and put in crazy hours to help the company achieve product market fit. Founder(s) risk breaking the trust of their employees < no.100 when they see people coming after them being compensated / valued 100x more than they do, not because they are just paid higher. That scale is the root cause for frustration. The counterpoint to this is when the company scales, all other numbers will scale with it too (revenue numbers, employee headcount etc.), and sometimes hiring a key person who can, in the long term, cut costs by $100m might justify his/her salary. Capitalism works like that. UPDATE: Curious to hear what thoughts founder(s) active in the HN community have about this though. Open to hear decisions on your end. I struggle to come up with a good answer myself.

z3t4 9y ago
In an early upstart the employees might actually make more money then the founders. When the ship is in motion the founders might not need those people any longer, and there will be many more knocking on the doors wanting a job. The founders hires the execs to hopefully do a better job then the founders themselves are currently doing. And if the founders are making millions it will also be easy for them to pay the execs millions. And they don't want to hire just anyone to take care of their baby.