For the quarter that ended on March 31, Microsoft posted revenue of $52.9 billion (up 7%) and a profit of $18.3 billion (up 9%). Microsoft had $26.5 billion in cash and equivalents as of March 31. Despite the rosy results, Microsoft employees are not getting pay increases. Nadella's own pay increased 10% from 2021 to 2022, rising to $55 million. This comes off as shortsighted. If I wanted to optimize value, I would o…
It’s because they can. Decency and fairness are immaterial in the context of profit. The only correcting force in my opinion would be a strong union. But unionizing is quite risky and legitimately scary for highly paid employees. Thus, divided we fall.
People clearly play the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma even in contexts where they’ve been intentionally isolated and freed from context (eg, psychology experiments) because we’ve evolved a group mentality — one that encodes game theory optima as a primal impulse.
Corporate leaders who forget that tend to blow their own company up, when humans instinctually repay defection with defection — as cold, hard math dictates they should.
We’ve seen many examples, in different context - from pay withholding to marketing campaigns that denigrate customers.
Fighting human nature is stupidity.