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Ex-SAP CTO walks away with €7.1M payout after scandal
- swarnie 2y ago38 years old, 7.1M in the bank. If he can keep his hands to himself that should be enough for a nice early retirement.
- weaksauce 2y agoif you make 100k a year that payout is 71 years worth of your wages. absurd.
- vuln 2y agoBefore Uncle Sam gets his cut. Much less after the robbery. How much of the 7 million be sucked up by Germany’s taxes?
- Keyframe 2y agoIf structured properly, Onkel Franz takes equally or less than Uncle Sam.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoRegular folks on payroll would have to pay half of it, but boys in cashmere sweaters probably somehow pay 0%.
- Keyframe 2y agoUniversal truth
- rozap 2y agono you need to pay taxes on the 100k. The 7.1M payout can easily pay a tax lawyer to find some convenient loophole to keep most of it.
- dachworker 2y agoNah, chances are the guy was born rich. These kind of management positions in Germany are reserved for rich people. In fact according to his bio it appears that he went from doing a PhD in IT to being head of a department at SAP and then a few years later he is CTO. That's connections and nepotism, and you don't get those connections without being already rich.
- guywithahat 2y agoI mean it could also be exceptional competence among key customers. This certainly doesn’t have to be nepotism
- dachworker 2y agoGoing from PhD, not even PostDoc with zero industry experience, to being Head of Department at SAP without connections is unlikely.
- eunos 2y agoHe probably already started working for SAP during his PhD or even his PhD is a project from SAP itself.
- guywithahat 2y agoI mean postdoc isn't necessarily a good thing, arguably it's a bad thing. You do postdocs while you wait for something better to come up.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eunos 2y agoHe did his PhD on the Hasso Plattner Institute under Hasso Plattner himself (SAP co-founder). That secured on the connection part.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
- MangoCoffee 2y agoaverage worker will never reach that kind of retirement payout. early or late CxO get way too much
- pc86 2y ago"Should be" is a joke, right? You can pull off over $200k/yr and never touch the principal. If you can let it sit for a decade it will ~double in terms of purchasing to just a hair under $14M. Another ten years on top of that and you're retiring at 58 (still "early") with $27.5M in today's-dollars purchasing power. Personally I'd probably just live off $200k starting today but there's a hell of an argument for retiring before 50 and still having ~$350k/yr in purchasing power.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hipinspire 2y agoWhat would you do with that amount of money at that age?
- SpaceL10n 2y agoWhen things like this happen, it just shows me how little I actually know about the world and how it works.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoThe world rewards exactly the opposite character features you were teached to develop and cultivate. Including women who select a partner.
- daseiner1 2y agoA wholly unnecessary addendum with your second sentence that is irrelevant to the matter at hand.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoCharacter features which make one refrain from such addendums also don't pay in life.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago> Including women who select a partner. What does this even mean? That women don't select for the traits common people are taught (kindness, generosity, grit, honesty)?
- daseiner1 2y agoYes, that's what the oh-so-wise commenter above us insinuated. He evidently is late to receive the message that "being unoffensive" ranks remarkably low on the measure of a man.
- jmclnx 2y agoIf the abused person did not get the same, something big is wrong here
- barbazoo 2y agoThey 'll be lucky if they get to keep their job.
- hankman86 2y agoYou would not want to. After a high-profile scandal like that, there are too many people in the know. Not all of whom may be sympathetic to you for taking down a top executive. Your career is effectively finished. Negotiate a decent severance payout in exchange for keeping quiet about the details. The bonus payout for the misbehaving former CTO may perversely help you here. Start with that figure in how much you want and let the company explain why the victim deserves less.
- this_user 2y agoSeven figure plus payouts for something like that are not a thing in Germany. At best, you might get a low four figure number.
- ugh123 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jisnsm 2y agoThis sounds like some platitude out of a facebooks comment section.
- artistic_regard 2y ago[dead]
- MrMcCall 2y agoIsn't that really just "hush money", i.e. non-disclosure and non-compete? And yes, to my fellow commenters, "something big is (indeed) wrong" not just there but all over the world, because most everyone has the same corporate mechanisms, filled with the same corporate mules, slinging the same corporate "economic slavery", as Bob Marley so eloquently and beautifully put it so long ago.
- marban 2y agoThe SAP abbreviation proves itself once again.
- stavros 2y agoSexual Assault Payout?
- gaptoothclan 2y agorebrand lolz
- recursivecaveat 2y ago> I recognize my behavior at that moment did not reflect our values at SAP. This line in corporate apology statements is so weird, like SAP had some unique higher ethical code that opposed sexual harassment, which only one called to the service of humanity as a SAP executive would understand. I guess whoever writes these things always throws it in to try to subtly reassure people that it's not systemic?
- lazide 2y agoIt’s a condition of the payout (along with a huge NDA I’m sure) for exactly that reason. Otherwise, in theory the CTO would be free to make a giant mess with ‘everyone was fucking each other’s wives, and I got confused which one I was doing today so here we are’. I’m sure whatever group cut the check feels it was worth it.
- akudha 2y agoWhat “value” does any for profit company have, except ya know, profits? Especially multinational corporations and especially Silicon Valley bro-companies? I wish we could somehow ban words like values, family, standards etc from corporate lingo. Why can’t this dude just take the money and go quietly? Does he really think that someone is going to read his statement and think “ah, poor guy, it was an honest mistake”? The level of fakery in the corporate world … yikes
- tmpz22 2y agoThat’s crap. Organizations reflect the individuals within them. An organization can have a value if the actual people there uphold it. If an organization is hollow then the people within it are hollow. If a corporation is greedy then the people within it are greedy.
- cyanydeez 2y agoOrganizations reflect the values of who gets paid the most to manage them
- 2y ago
- gsibble 2y agoMan.....I'm all for good executive pay usually, but this is absurd.
- alberth 2y agoMost people don't realize that many CxOs have employment contracts with a set term (that has to be renewed), pay schedules and pre-negotiated departure payout. I'm not saying whether or not this payout is right. What I'm saying is, it was probably required due to contractual employment terms negotiated years ago.
- philjohn 2y agoSeems there's a case to be made for SAP to alter any future contracts of that nature to contain a clause that if you're leaving for a serious breach you get nothing. Willy Wonka style.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lazide 2y agoMeh, seems unlikely this would really count as a serious breach.
- csours 2y ago"Don't go away angry, just go away" It's entirely possible that it's cheaper than a lawsuit and potential further reputational harm. Perverse incentive alert: If you want to fire an exec cheaply, just do an internal honey pot.
- Horffupolde 2y agoOr better: external, and make him resign.
- chowells 2y agoAny competent exec should be able to logically weigh the consequences of their actions. If something will get them fired and they choose to do it anyway, they deserve to be fired. That's not a perverse incentive, it's weeding out incompetents.
- fetzu 2y agoI guess that’s just the price of good software..
- martinsnow 2y agoIs this piece supposed to make me feel bad for SAP and their terrible businessess dealings? Lol. You reap what you sow.
- com2kid 2y agoReading the article my biggest take away is how low executive compensations are in Germany compared to the US. The top ranking ICs at US tech companies can hit low 7 figures!
- jschoe 2y agoYour take away does not go far enough. It's not executive compensations. It's compensation generally, it's all much much much lower than in the US. Many Germans consider 70-90k as already making bank and a high salary that you can ride out until retirement. And the COL isn't low either and quite similar to the US. Europe is just far behind the US when it comes to salaries. Which shows that there is a lot to lose for US engineers.
- com2kid 2y agoThe only reason US engineering salaries are high is because of broken housing policies in US coastal cities. IMHO this will be the downfall of US engineering, the high salaries will make US engineers too uncompetitive.
- wbl 2y agoSalaries are not set according to how much you need the money. The reason US salaries are high is that US software companies can make staggering amounts of money.
- com2kid 2y ago> Salaries are not set according to how much you need the money. This is not true at all. When I started working at Microsoft in 2007, Microsoft was one of the most profitable tech companies of all time. (They still are!) Salaries in the Pacific Northwest were around 1/2 to 2/3rds what they were in the bay area, and total comp was a lot less, since MS's stock was flatlined at the time. But do you know what we all told each other? "Housing here is cheap, traffic isn't bad, it isn't worth it to move to the Bay Area." A senior engineer is happy earning 130K a year if they can get a good house for 500 or 600k! Once housing prices started exploding, salaries had to go up. (The other counterpoint would be that many companies have location specific CoL adjustment to their salary bands) > The reason US salaries are high is that US software companies can make staggering amounts of money. SAP makes staggering amounts of money! For knowledge workers, salaries are very disconnected from how much value the employee brings to the company.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoYou've got to hand it to white collar criminals/executives. They are stunningly effective at robbery, corruption and abuse with no consequences.
- jadayesnaamsi 2y agoHis last transaction had to match the size of his ego.
- nimish 2y agoMany such cases. Sad!
- tomcam 2y agoI am perfectly willing to get involved in a scandal for under €5 million
- reverendsteveii 2y ago>Criminal probe understood to have ended following settlement over 'inconsiderate' behavior Is it me or is this open corruption?
- lifestyleguru 2y agoThe income tax on such income must had been like 80%. Assuming CxO's pay income tax in Germany.
- maverwa 2y agoShould be closer to 50%. You hit a lot of limits way before that (sadly). A simple run of napkin math gives 3.7M net from 7M gross. 70k gross nets 43k, 700k gross nets 380k. I would assume 7M gives you more motivation to invest into reducing taxes than 70k do, though.
- hankman86 2y agoSAP has had its fair share of bad executives. Mostly incompetent people, but occasionally also flawed characters. Their problem is that Europe has no IT industry that is equally mature as the one in the US. Among other things, this leads to dysfunctional talent development where people end up in managerial roles (or outright make it to executive level) without the necessary character traits or personal development to support their responsibilities.
- salimmahboubi 2y ago"Staatsanwaltschaft Heidelberg" is not the name of a prosecuter, it just means Heidelberg's State Attorney Office, lol