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>If you are running something worth over $1 trillion that makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year it makes sense though, right? But he isn't running it.
by pravus 3y ago
>If you are running something worth over $1 trillion that makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year it makes sense though, right?
But he isn't running it. He has legal control over it, but in terms of sweat equity he only gets 24 hours in the day like everyone else and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee.
- opportune 3y agoSure, but he decides how to allocate resources, make acquisitions, etc. across over 100k employees. If he decided to pull another Google+ he could easily destroy many tens of thousands of engineers’ worth of labor. And it’d only take him a few hundred hours to make that decision, set up the org to lead the project and delegate the execution to them. Putting those engineers on something that actually makes money and is a viable business like Cloud could do the opposite. It’s not about the time it takes him to make these decisions so much as the quality of his decisions having potentially massive $ impacts on the company’s performance.
- Klinky 3y agoNone of that is really his call to make alone, upper management & the board also has influence & burdens much of the load. This idea that he's the only man in the room or on the planet that could do this position seems pretty absurd.
- cudgy 3y agoAny moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful. I’d expect more interesting ideas than the old tried and true “get some lucrative government and enterprise contracts”, “guess we better dust off our AI tech and react to OpenAI”, etc. He seems to be a reactionary not a visionary.
- ztrww 3y ago> Any moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful. Yet Google doesn’t seem to be doing all that well at all in this area. At least relatively…
- cudgy 3y agoYes, he was late and executed poorly. Generally Google is operationally deficient, but technically rich. That is a management problem. The best thing for Google is to split up into parts so they can become more focused and lean within each business category: social media, ads, search, cloud services, etc
- WalterBright 3y agoJobs and Nadella certainly did contribute more than 1000x the labor of a [...] employee.
- Klinky 3y agoHow? Jobs did have some original ideas, but it's not like NeXT was a resounding success on its own that toppled Apple & Microsoft. Being the ideas guy is different than the implementation guy, and in some cases he was neither.
- WalterBright 3y agoJobs turned 90-days-bankruptcy Apple into the wealthiest company in the world.
- Klinky 3y agoWhy couldn't he just turn NeXT into the wealthiest company in the world? Perhaps you could say that's what he did by getting bought out by Apple, but Ives was an Amelio hire, and hard to say Ives wasn't as pivotal to Apple's future success as Jobs. Jobs takes a lot of the credit, and some of it is due, but there were many other people involved in bringing him back on board & the transition back to profitability/dominance.
- jarjoura 3y agoWell, that's not entirely fair, Jobs was credited for making a huge partnership with Microsoft that saved Apple. That deal would never have happened if any other person in the world tried to make it happen. It literally had to be Jobs and Gates making that deal, and it worked. Apple got enough money to launch its iMac which made it enough money to then launch its store, which gave it enough money to finally turn real profits. I know a lot of people were involved in that happening, but Steve Jobs was literally the only person in the world who had the cult following to execute on his vision. Any other leader would have been met with resistance and skepticism every step of the way. Am I suggesting that SJ should make $200mil for that effort, no, but I am suggesting that if you're making an argument against CEO impact, SJ is probably the worst example as I'm 100% sure that man was the only one who could have turned Apple around.
- tester756 3y ago> and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee. Yes, I can't tell you that because CEO isn't about labor. I can tell you that impact of decisions of the CEO that I work for is at least 1000x bigger than mine. If you don't believe that I don't know what to tell you. CEO is not about writing lines of code, he doesn't write 1000x more LoC than I do, but he has at least 1000x more impact than I do. You think great CEOs like Satya of MSFT or Dr. Lisa Su of AMD aren't at least 1000x average employee?
- rpastuszak 3y agoI think this misses one important point though: why would any human being need this amount of money and could these resources be allocated better? If we look more broadly than a single employee or a single business entity fwiw, this feels like a huge waste of resources.
- satvikpendem 3y agoCompensation is not about need, it's about supply and demand. If I as a Google shareholder could pay 225 million to receive billions in profit and thereby drive up the stock price and my stock value, then I'll take that deal, and that's how every other shareholder thinks, too. Because if not, then they could simply vote to not pay for the CEO's compensation.
- erik_seaberg 3y agoWe want our best decision makers launching and backing companies, not retiring because that's all they're able to do. Musk and Bezos need more competition.
- effingwewt 3y agoJFC, stop putting them on a pedestal. I've said this before but it bears repeating: CEO's aren't special. Bob Iger came back to Disney to finish it off. Shit, look at Elizabeth Holmes. No one deserves that much of a multiple over the people actually creating products or value. When CEO's fail they get golden parachutes. When they get lucky they are praised as some sort of rare superhuman. The cult of CEO and HR needs to wither and die
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoHe pays 1000x taxes too, does he use 1000x more resources of the country?