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It does seem that executive compensation is just straight up broken. Even bad CEOs are paid enormous sums of money for their shoddy performance. Sundar Pichai i

It does seem that executive compensation is just straight up broken. Even bad CEOs are paid enormous sums of money for their shoddy performance. Sundar Pichai is a poor performing CEO, he's very likely done permanent damage to Google's business. For this, he is going to be rewarded with generational wealth. It's hard to see what exactly we're paying CEOs for. Are we paying them to attract the best talent? No, you'd have a queue of fantastic candidates queueing around the block for 1/10th of what Sundar is being paid. Are we compensating them for performance? Again no, they get massive compensation packages up front whether they succeed or fail. Are we compensating them for the extra-ordinary responsibility they have? Well apparently not, because they don't face any consequences for fucking up. So why are we paying them so much? Because the compensation committee says so. Why does the compensation committee say so? Well, because the compensation committee is formed of executives, so the whole thing is just a massive circle jerk. At what point do the shareholders say "hold up a sec, why are we bleeding all this cash to a bunch of executives whose entire strategy is just to follow the market".

DonsDiscountGas 4y ago
Maybe this is just the outside view talking, but it seems like a CEOs biggest function is to be the public face of the company. To take abuse and answer tough questions so the investors don't have to. This requires a fair bit of PR talent, and also the ability to withstand a lot of public hatred. Apparently that's worth a lot of money.
- throw93 4y ago
  CEOs have an army of people at their disposal to do the said “PR talent” stuff. They absolutely do not deserve what they get and they are not tech gods as media paints them to be. I’m sick of media defending CEOs instead common workers.
- penguinvondoom 4y ago
  To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT
  - tharne 4y ago
    > To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT You joke, but I'm almost positive this would work. I had a colleague many years ago who, while in business school, would frequently use speeches or emails from our CEO as the backbone of his essays, sometimes using them almost verbatim. I asked him once if he was worried about getting caught for plagiarism. His response was something along the lines of, "All executive communication is so much meaningless boilerplate corporate-speak that it's next to impossible to tell once person's work from the next". He eventually got his MBA and never did get called out for plagiarism.
Laaas 4y ago
I think many things in the world would be better if executives had real personal liability. Reminds me, the executive of the company responsible for the huge port explosion in Tianjin, China was apparently personally liable (suspended death sentence!): https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2044719/chinese-businessman-receives-suspended-death-sentence https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Sadly that kind of thing seems to only happen in China. Most other countries have the perpetrators in charge of the state.
  - whitemary 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      Reading Marx and Lenin helps a great deal to understand that relationship, although the material conditions of some (especially in exploited nations) may already provide an intuitive understanding. I doubt I’m the only communist on HN, despite the site’s clear pro-capitalist bias.
      - whitemary 4y ago
        Well, I know you aren’t the only communist here ;) Cheers!
        blackflame7000 4y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 4y ago
        You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. If you do it again, we'll have to ban you again, so please don't do it again. Please stop with flamebait/battle comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523506 too. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Thee pay them for caste solidarity and not to ally with the employeomans or the actual company interests, but with those of the shareholders.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Caste solidarity is everywhere when you start looking for it. Another example, go to court without a lawyer, make a minor procedural violation and the judge will rip your head off. Hire a attorney who does the same thing and all of the sudden it isn't a big deal, the judge may not even mention it. Judges tend to be former lawyers and the legal caste feels that one of them must be paid lavishly for you to receive a defence. Don't pay them? You should be punished! I modestly propose that tech workers should join in on this game with similar solidarity, members of the executive caste like Sundar should suddenly find themselves without access to email for example, and then should be forced to pay a nerd tens of thousands of dollars to go talk to the guy who runs the email server to have his account reinstated. If he talks to the guy directly, without paying the requested fee and fails to use the correct IT Crowd reference or doesn't know what version of Python added type annotations off hand, his account should be permanently removed and all of his devices banned from the internet.
  - singleshot_ 4y ago
    Not quite true: the pro se litigant will often get every possible consideration from the court. As an example: the person who ran over all those people in Kenosha at that parade. Do you really think that if I went into a courtroom as an attorney and refused to wear a shirt, or made a fort out of boxes, that the judge would “not even mention it”? If you do I encourage you to watch some in-court hearings. They are typically open to the public and you will surely find pro se litigants being extended every possible courtesy to their rights as Americans.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      I have attended court proceedings and have witnessed what I have described on several occasions. I suspect high profile televised court cases are atypical in many ways. Consider this for a moment, if a judge is merely a fact finder why would having a attorney alter the outcome of the case? It is known that people respond more positively to others with a similar background, is it all that crazy to think that bias may extend to judges?
photochemsyn 4y ago
The executives have to be paid large salaries by the shareholders so that they'll put shareholders interests well above those of company employees and customers. This allows them to justify overriding their normal human connection with their employees, and replacing any tendency towards co-worker loyalty with shareholder loyalty. Of course that also justifies treating customers as poorly as possible - just not so poorly that they stop coming back (although if they can monopolize an industry, customers will have nowhere else to go - see broadband providers, etc.). This is a primary reason why investment capitalism is such a destructive economic system in the long run. Shareholders tend to want to extract as much profit from the company in a short a time as possible; the long-term health of the company and their customers is generally not their primary concern.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  ... doesn't that make the CEO place his compensation over the shareholders? Yes, they use things like stock options to try to align it, but practically that just gives an artificial target to cook the books/revenue for.
akomtu 4y ago
Who "we"? Larry & Sergey hired this dude to manage the company for them. Their criteria was: someone who is easy to control, but not dumb as rock.

DonsDiscountGas 4y ago

Maybe this is just the outside view talking, but it seems like a CEOs biggest function is to be the public face of the company. To take abuse and answer tough questions so the investors don't have to. This requires a fair bit of PR talent, and also the ability to withstand a lot of public hatred. Apparently that's worth a lot of money.

throw93 4y ago
CEOs have an army of people at their disposal to do the said “PR talent” stuff. They absolutely do not deserve what they get and they are not tech gods as media paints them to be. I’m sick of media defending CEOs instead common workers.
penguinvondoom 4y ago
To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT
- tharne 4y ago
  > To be fair, we can probably replace most of these with ChatGPT You joke, but I'm almost positive this would work. I had a colleague many years ago who, while in business school, would frequently use speeches or emails from our CEO as the backbone of his essays, sometimes using them almost verbatim. I asked him once if he was worried about getting caught for plagiarism. His response was something along the lines of, "All executive communication is so much meaningless boilerplate corporate-speak that it's next to impossible to tell once person's work from the next". He eventually got his MBA and never did get called out for plagiarism.

Laaas 4y ago

I think many things in the world would be better if executives had real personal liability. Reminds me, the executive of the company responsible for the huge port explosion in Tianjin, China was apparently personally liable (suspended death sentence!): https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2044719/chinese-businessman-receives-suspended-death-sentence https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/20...

dontlaugh 4y ago
Sadly that kind of thing seems to only happen in China. Most other countries have the perpetrators in charge of the state.
- whitemary 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Reading Marx and Lenin helps a great deal to understand that relationship, although the material conditions of some (especially in exploited nations) may already provide an intuitive understanding. I doubt I’m the only communist on HN, despite the site’s clear pro-capitalist bias.
    - whitemary 4y ago
      Well, I know you aren’t the only communist here ;) Cheers!
      - blackflame7000 4y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 4y ago
        You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. If you do it again, we'll have to ban you again, so please don't do it again. Please stop with flamebait/battle comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523506 too. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Thee pay them for caste solidarity and not to ally with the employeomans or the actual company interests, but with those of the shareholders.

willcipriano 4y ago
Caste solidarity is everywhere when you start looking for it. Another example, go to court without a lawyer, make a minor procedural violation and the judge will rip your head off. Hire a attorney who does the same thing and all of the sudden it isn't a big deal, the judge may not even mention it. Judges tend to be former lawyers and the legal caste feels that one of them must be paid lavishly for you to receive a defence. Don't pay them? You should be punished! I modestly propose that tech workers should join in on this game with similar solidarity, members of the executive caste like Sundar should suddenly find themselves without access to email for example, and then should be forced to pay a nerd tens of thousands of dollars to go talk to the guy who runs the email server to have his account reinstated. If he talks to the guy directly, without paying the requested fee and fails to use the correct IT Crowd reference or doesn't know what version of Python added type annotations off hand, his account should be permanently removed and all of his devices banned from the internet.
- singleshot_ 4y ago
  Not quite true: the pro se litigant will often get every possible consideration from the court. As an example: the person who ran over all those people in Kenosha at that parade. Do you really think that if I went into a courtroom as an attorney and refused to wear a shirt, or made a fort out of boxes, that the judge would “not even mention it”? If you do I encourage you to watch some in-court hearings. They are typically open to the public and you will surely find pro se litigants being extended every possible courtesy to their rights as Americans.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    I have attended court proceedings and have witnessed what I have described on several occasions. I suspect high profile televised court cases are atypical in many ways. Consider this for a moment, if a judge is merely a fact finder why would having a attorney alter the outcome of the case? It is known that people respond more positively to others with a similar background, is it all that crazy to think that bias may extend to judges?

photochemsyn 4y ago

The executives have to be paid large salaries by the shareholders so that they'll put shareholders interests well above those of company employees and customers. This allows them to justify overriding their normal human connection with their employees, and replacing any tendency towards co-worker loyalty with shareholder loyalty. Of course that also justifies treating customers as poorly as possible - just not so poorly that they stop coming back (although if they can monopolize an industry, customers will have nowhere else to go - see broadband providers, etc.). This is a primary reason why investment capitalism is such a destructive economic system in the long run. Shareholders tend to want to extract as much profit from the company in a short a time as possible; the long-term health of the company and their customers is generally not their primary concern.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
... doesn't that make the CEO place his compensation over the shareholders? Yes, they use things like stock options to try to align it, but practically that just gives an artificial target to cook the books/revenue for.

akomtu 4y ago

Who "we"? Larry & Sergey hired this dude to manage the company for them. Their criteria was: someone who is easy to control, but not dumb as rock.