Spotify CFO cashes in £7.2M in shares after value surges on news of job cuts

The difference is in the magnitude, not kind.

I'm not talking about who is doing the evaluation. That's an obviously flawed process because the board has a stake in the company making unethical decisions for short term profit.

I'm just describing what good decision making actually is. If you take an option with 20% chance of success, but few downsides if it fails and large returns if it succeeds, that's usually a good decision. If, however, the downsides are catastrophic, that's probably a bad decision.

The situation here is that the downsides were arguably catastrophic, but completely externalized. The C-suite selfishly made bad decisions because it didn't affect them negatively. Doing so should reasonably have repercussions for them, but where's the incentive? An organization that places profit above all is intrinsically immoral and/or corrupt. This is obvious, we've just been allowing it for generations because we keep telling those who get hurt that things should probably work out on their own, eventually, or in the aggregate. And we convince people that an organization that places not being evil (not even martyring itself, just not doing horrible shit) just above profit can't exist. Would it be competitive? Maybe not, which is why regulation is actually useful - it can change the playing field so a company doesn't have to make that decision. (Of course, we already do this exact thing, but for extremely limited definitions of evil, and we also don't punish those evils very badly when they're committed.)

400k TC, 200k base. That's pretty average for most experienced engineers.

You can't attack another user like this on HN, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: could you please stop posting flamewar comments generally? We've had to ask you this repeatedly over the years, and your account is still doing it - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38529405 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38528691. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep posting like this, we won't have much choice—so if you'd please stop, that would be good.

>I haven't denied any such thing. I'm literally just saying it's a gamble.

Well, you said it was "at best a gamble". I don't know how else I'm supposed to interpret that besides you saying there was "at best" a 50/50 shot of either outcome happening from the perspective of the ones that announced it. I'm going to assume this is not what you meant.

Anyway, since it's established that we're in agreement (maybe? It's not easy to figure out your point of view) that executives are generally able to know with some degree of certainty >50% that their actions will create a specific effect on their stock price. And we also can agree that it is their decision when to announce and execute these actions. It's clearly and obviously a problem that they also are aware of when the stock that they hold in large quantities will be bought and sold.

> Is it a problem? It seems unsolvable if so, unless we should ban CEOs from receiving stock compensation?

If we can agree on the previous bit, then I have no idea why we should throw up our hands and be like "well I guess this is an impossible problem to solve". It's really not. Just be more restrictive with the windows in which executives are allowed to sell. Better yet spread their entire buy/sell order over the course of the year. Or even better still, don't allow them to sell stock AT ALL until they are not in charge or aware of high level decisions at the company.

CEO pay is on average 399x their average employee(https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/). Then, we also allow them to pump their portfolio on a whim at the expense of their employees. I would say personally I don't really care if their compensation suffers, since they've probably already 10x'd my lifetime earnings in their last year of work, and I'd happily switch places with them financially if they're so hard done by.