5 ms·

That's the least of anyone's concern, though. If Google's CEO took a big pay cut and gave raises to his employees: no one would switch from iPhone to Android.

by timmg 4y ago

Apreche 4y ago
You are correct. That certainly will not happen immediately, and not as a direct result of that action. However, it could theoretically result in employees preferring to work for Google instead of Apple. And employees at Google being happier. And happier employees doing better work. And then Android eventually being significantly better than iOS. And then consumers switching. Whether that chain of logic pans out in reality, I can't say.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Also if Google's CEO took a big pay cut and distributed the cut to all the employees, they might not even notice it. The CEO is one guy, and there are over 100 thousand employees. People wildly overestimate the amount that CEO pay has any bearing on employee pay. It's all just emotional appeals to "fairness."
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Also if Google's CEO took a big pay cut and distributed the cut to all the employees, they might not even notice it Google's CEO distributing his bonus would have worked out to an extra $3,000/each in 2018 (the easiest recent numbers to find). That's assuming that all employees got an even share. > emotional appeals to "fairness." There's reasons to want fairness that have nothing to do with emotion.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    > There's reasons to want fairness that have nothing to do with emotion. Such as? The whole basis of fairness is emotion, mostly rooted in jealousy and envy. It ignores that people have different skills, abilities, intellect, drive, tenacity, etc. and says that everyone deserves the same outcomes.
    - DragonStrength 4y ago
      Fairness is precisely about putting aside things which would bias one to things which are not related to performance. My experience is people who are used to relying on privilege view fairness unfavorably because the alternative is admitting they don't measure up to others.
    - mantas 4y ago
      Fairness does not mean same pay. Maybe it's my ex-USSR background, but fairness involves paying according to skills/abilities/etc. But it's rare that skills/abilities/whatever differs 100x.
    - happytoexplain 4y ago
      This seems like a simple semantic disagreement (and a kind of baffling one, frankly). Particularly cartoonish CEOs might think the word "fair" is code for "everybody in the world gets exactly the same of everything", but the vast majority of people use the word colloquially to include some degree of intuition and rationality and holism (like most words in normal conversation). E.g. almost nobody believes that all human beings should be paid the same salary no matter what they do, yet most people believe that everybody should get "what's fair", for whatever they subjectively believe is fair.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    That assumes that a CEO with this bonus incentive removed would perform as well and bring in the profit that enables that $3000 /ea . Perhaps that's correct but that would be quite the claim that demands proof. I'm no economist but I would indeed be interested in seeing the studies that show CEOs performance is just as good or better when his/her bonus is taken and then redistributed to everyone else. It's certainly an interesting incentive model.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      I have no idea why my claim would demand proof. In fact, I'll start by demanding proof from you that CEO performance is in any way correlated to compensation.
    - danaris 4y ago
      And how, exactly, would you be able to tell? Isn't the standard measure of CEO performance "did the stock price meet expectations for the quarter"? A measure which has a myriad of different factors far outside the CEO's control affecting it—as well as a number of factors in the CEO's control that have very little to do with the actual health of the company. Furthermore, it's not at all uncommon for a very good leader to leave (dies, retires, steps down to go do something more fun, forced out by someone who wants to be their successor, whatever), and their successor to inherit a very healthy company with strong fundamentals and good people at various levels...and proceed to do bugger-all for several years and still be hailed as a great leader because the health of a company is very often a trailing indicator of leadership competence.
      - notch656a 4y ago
        That's exactly my point. There's no way, I don't think, we can say if we redistributed the CEOs bonus that that $3,000 would still be there. We need some evidence to show the factors leading up to the availability of those $3,000 would still be intact with the bonus incentive removed. One could make the completely unfounded conjecture that perhaps everyone would make $3,000 LESS if the CEO didn't have a bonus incentive. Now that would not be supported by any facts, but then again neither is the suggestion you can just nix the CEO bonus incentive and expect the performance to support that $3000/ea extra money still being there. Remember wealth doesn't have to be zero-sum.
- danaris 4y ago
  If Google felt it needed to save, say, $500k, and it did so by firing 10 people who each made $50k, that would be devastating to those 10 people. On the other hand, if it did so by reducing the collective paychecks of the C-suite by $500k, they definitely wouldn't even notice. Obviously this doesn't scale infinitely, but it's not about whether you can make 100k people wealthy by giving them all of Pichai's money. It's about what's more important to Google when it believes it needs to spend less: keeping its executives' compensation from dropping by even a penny, despite the fact that any of them could probably retire in comparative luxury right now, or treating its employees with dignity and respect. Once Pichai's paycheck is no higher than, say, 3-5x the company median, then come back and say you actually need to start laying people off.
SideQuark 4y ago
If Google CEO Sundar Pichai split his entire 2021 $6,322,599 [1] compensation among their 156,000 employees [2], each would get ~$40. If he split his entire stock worth of $280M among them they'd each get under $2000. Not life changing when the median pay at Alphabet is already ~295k. So the massive CEO pay, even if completely taken away and given to employees, does not change incomes much at all. [1] https://www1.salary.com/ALPHABET-INC-Executive-Salaries.html https://www1.salary.com/ALPHABET-INC-Executive-Salaries.html [2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/alphabet-meta-had-highest-paid-median-workers-in-2021-says-report-122060300275_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/alph...
- mistrial9 4y ago
  low-relevance scenario - there are hundreds of thousands of companies serving consumers, with millions of employees, across the Western system. The vastly disproportional reward of C-Suite versus employees since the 1990s is very well documented. Google Inc is not any of those companies, and their economics do not apply.
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    I was replying to the person above me that specifically mentioned the results of Google CEO giving money to employees, so it was high relevance. As to the "since the 1990s," all of those are quite oddly cherry picked. The actual facts on CEO pay in those stories forgets that actual CEO pay is the following: in May 2021, there were 200,480 CEOs, with mean annual wages of $213,020 [1]. Mean annual pay across all workers is $58,260 [2]. So, if you were honest about understanding >there are hundreds of thousands of companies serving consumers all these companies, then your claim is wrong. CEOs across these hundreds of thousands of companies make less than 4x the median wage, which I just demonstrated. To get the ridiculous numbers people rage over, that you're likely thinking apply to CEOs in general (and certainly not the "hundreds of thousands of companies" that you mention), you must only take a tiny handful of top paid CEOs (who change positions from year to year as pay bonuses and such vest, making it yet more bad stats, but good for headlines) and compare this tiny fraction to all workers (with annual mean pay of $58260[2]). Why not be fair and compare the top 0.01% (around 20 of them as is usual in the articles that you claim are "very well documented") of highest paid CEOs to the top 0.01% of highest paid workers? Because that won't generate enough outrage. Yet it's vastly a better metric, statistically defensible. If someone did this type of shoddy comparison on nearly any other topic people would rightfully call foul for bad statistics. As a good example, comparing the wages of all CEOs ($200K) to the top tiny fraction of workers (say, top silicon valley programmers for example, all well over $400k), would make the headline that "Workers earn over twice what CEOs do!". And of course you would (and should) call this dishonest. Because comparing outliers of one set to the median of another is dishonest. So why would you accept the same bad reasoning when it suits your world view? [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

That's the least of anyone's concern, though. If Google's CEO took a big pay cut and gave raises to his employees: no one would switch from iPhone to Android.

by timmg 4y ago

That's the least of anyone's concern, though. If Google's CEO took a big pay cut and gave raises to his employees: no one would switch from iPhone to Android.

Apreche 4y ago

You are correct. That certainly will not happen immediately, and not as a direct result of that action. However, it could theoretically result in employees preferring to work for Google instead of Apple. And employees at Google being happier. And happier employees doing better work. And then Android eventually being significantly better than iOS. And then consumers switching. Whether that chain of logic pans out in reality, I can't say.

SoftTalker 4y ago

Also if Google's CEO took a big pay cut and distributed the cut to all the employees, they might not even notice it. The CEO is one guy, and there are over 100 thousand employees. People wildly overestimate the amount that CEO pay has any bearing on employee pay. It's all just emotional appeals to "fairness."

HWR_14 4y ago
> Also if Google's CEO took a big pay cut and distributed the cut to all the employees, they might not even notice it Google's CEO distributing his bonus would have worked out to an extra $3,000/each in 2018 (the easiest recent numbers to find). That's assuming that all employees got an even share. > emotional appeals to "fairness." There's reasons to want fairness that have nothing to do with emotion.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  > There's reasons to want fairness that have nothing to do with emotion. Such as? The whole basis of fairness is emotion, mostly rooted in jealousy and envy. It ignores that people have different skills, abilities, intellect, drive, tenacity, etc. and says that everyone deserves the same outcomes.
  - DragonStrength 4y ago
    Fairness is precisely about putting aside things which would bias one to things which are not related to performance. My experience is people who are used to relying on privilege view fairness unfavorably because the alternative is admitting they don't measure up to others.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Fairness does not mean same pay. Maybe it's my ex-USSR background, but fairness involves paying according to skills/abilities/etc. But it's rare that skills/abilities/whatever differs 100x.
  - happytoexplain 4y ago
    This seems like a simple semantic disagreement (and a kind of baffling one, frankly). Particularly cartoonish CEOs might think the word "fair" is code for "everybody in the world gets exactly the same of everything", but the vast majority of people use the word colloquially to include some degree of intuition and rationality and holism (like most words in normal conversation). E.g. almost nobody believes that all human beings should be paid the same salary no matter what they do, yet most people believe that everybody should get "what's fair", for whatever they subjectively believe is fair.
- notch656a 4y ago
  That assumes that a CEO with this bonus incentive removed would perform as well and bring in the profit that enables that $3000 /ea . Perhaps that's correct but that would be quite the claim that demands proof. I'm no economist but I would indeed be interested in seeing the studies that show CEOs performance is just as good or better when his/her bonus is taken and then redistributed to everyone else. It's certainly an interesting incentive model.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    I have no idea why my claim would demand proof. In fact, I'll start by demanding proof from you that CEO performance is in any way correlated to compensation.
  - danaris 4y ago
    And how, exactly, would you be able to tell? Isn't the standard measure of CEO performance "did the stock price meet expectations for the quarter"? A measure which has a myriad of different factors far outside the CEO's control affecting it—as well as a number of factors in the CEO's control that have very little to do with the actual health of the company. Furthermore, it's not at all uncommon for a very good leader to leave (dies, retires, steps down to go do something more fun, forced out by someone who wants to be their successor, whatever), and their successor to inherit a very healthy company with strong fundamentals and good people at various levels...and proceed to do bugger-all for several years and still be hailed as a great leader because the health of a company is very often a trailing indicator of leadership competence.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      That's exactly my point. There's no way, I don't think, we can say if we redistributed the CEOs bonus that that $3,000 would still be there. We need some evidence to show the factors leading up to the availability of those $3,000 would still be intact with the bonus incentive removed. One could make the completely unfounded conjecture that perhaps everyone would make $3,000 LESS if the CEO didn't have a bonus incentive. Now that would not be supported by any facts, but then again neither is the suggestion you can just nix the CEO bonus incentive and expect the performance to support that $3000/ea extra money still being there. Remember wealth doesn't have to be zero-sum.
danaris 4y ago
If Google felt it needed to save, say, $500k, and it did so by firing 10 people who each made $50k, that would be devastating to those 10 people. On the other hand, if it did so by reducing the collective paychecks of the C-suite by $500k, they definitely wouldn't even notice. Obviously this doesn't scale infinitely, but it's not about whether you can make 100k people wealthy by giving them all of Pichai's money. It's about what's more important to Google when it believes it needs to spend less: keeping its executives' compensation from dropping by even a penny, despite the fact that any of them could probably retire in comparative luxury right now, or treating its employees with dignity and respect. Once Pichai's paycheck is no higher than, say, 3-5x the company median, then come back and say you actually need to start laying people off.

SideQuark 4y ago

If Google CEO Sundar Pichai split his entire 2021 $6,322,599 [1] compensation among their 156,000 employees [2], each would get ~$40. If he split his entire stock worth of $280M among them they'd each get under $2000. Not life changing when the median pay at Alphabet is already ~295k. So the massive CEO pay, even if completely taken away and given to employees, does not change incomes much at all. [1] https://www1.salary.com/ALPHABET-INC-Executive-Salaries.html https://www1.salary.com/ALPHABET-INC-Executive-Salaries.html [2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/alphabet-meta-had-highest-paid-median-workers-in-2021-says-report-122060300275_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/alph...

mistrial9 4y ago
low-relevance scenario - there are hundreds of thousands of companies serving consumers, with millions of employees, across the Western system. The vastly disproportional reward of C-Suite versus employees since the 1990s is very well documented. Google Inc is not any of those companies, and their economics do not apply.
- SideQuark 4y ago
  I was replying to the person above me that specifically mentioned the results of Google CEO giving money to employees, so it was high relevance. As to the "since the 1990s," all of those are quite oddly cherry picked. The actual facts on CEO pay in those stories forgets that actual CEO pay is the following: in May 2021, there were 200,480 CEOs, with mean annual wages of $213,020 [1]. Mean annual pay across all workers is $58,260 [2]. So, if you were honest about understanding >there are hundreds of thousands of companies serving consumers all these companies, then your claim is wrong. CEOs across these hundreds of thousands of companies make less than 4x the median wage, which I just demonstrated. To get the ridiculous numbers people rage over, that you're likely thinking apply to CEOs in general (and certainly not the "hundreds of thousands of companies" that you mention), you must only take a tiny handful of top paid CEOs (who change positions from year to year as pay bonuses and such vest, making it yet more bad stats, but good for headlines) and compare this tiny fraction to all workers (with annual mean pay of $58260[2]). Why not be fair and compare the top 0.01% (around 20 of them as is usual in the articles that you claim are "very well documented") of highest paid CEOs to the top 0.01% of highest paid workers? Because that won't generate enough outrage. Yet it's vastly a better metric, statistically defensible. If someone did this type of shoddy comparison on nearly any other topic people would rightfully call foul for bad statistics. As a good example, comparing the wages of all CEOs ($200K) to the top tiny fraction of workers (say, top silicon valley programmers for example, all well over $400k), would make the headline that "Workers earn over twice what CEOs do!". And of course you would (and should) call this dishonest. Because comparing outliers of one set to the median of another is dishonest. So why would you accept the same bad reasoning when it suits your world view? [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]