211–220 of 357 posts
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And frankly layoffs had almost no effect on their stock prices. Announcing new products, even if quite half-baked AI efforts, had much bigger impact on stock prices than layoffs.
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I'm tired of capitalism. The less it's regulated, the more it opens the road to planned economy or tightly managed socialism. I'm glad I live in Europe. At least I can just retreat from this system with welfare and still eat and have a roof. Every time alternatives to capitalism are brought up, every time people come and say Stalin was worst than Hitler. It's impossible to discuss change or alternatives.
I'm tired of Free Market capitalism.
The problem is companies have become too large and command too much political influence. We need proactive laws that break up companies if they grow beyond a certain size criteria. Ideally, the criteria would be aggressive enough to kill the corporation leaving behind mostly small businesses with a low barrier of entry for new competitors.
Increased competition would mean lower prices, more product variety, more opportunities for employees to find quality employers or become small business owners themselves, and the elimination of Big Corp's big money political influence.
Companies are their "best" when small and nimble so why not force them to remain that way? If this came to pass there might be less need for socialism.
I'm tired of capitalism. The less it's regulated, the more it opens the road to planned economy or tightly managed socialism. I'm glad I live in Europe. At least I can just retreat from this system with welfare and still eat and have a roof. Every time alternatives to capitalism are brought up, every time people come and say Stalin was worst than Hitler. It's impossible to discuss change or alternatives.
Why did these CEOs get huge pay bumps? They improved their primary product: shares of the company. So many of these publicly traded companies don't have the product or service they claim to sell as their highest-priority market. Instead it is the stock market that has become their primary concern which incentivizes short term "value" extraction over everything else, including viability of the company's goods sold in consumer markets.
I don't know how we put the genie back in the bottle. Perhaps taxing capital gains from securities as income?
Were these companies private, they wouldn't have hired to trend, and fired to trend. They would have ensured their focus on their actual product, and their ability to continue to compete and deliver it.
I don't know why Apple seems able to do this. Perhaps they've just hit escape velocity.
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Just to be fair, for 90% of the world, the kinds of compensation many hacker news readers have (a Silicon Valley engineer who gets a high base plus bonus plus equity) would also be considered “holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it … does not make any f_ing sense”
If you look at the cost of living in SF and what you get, it starts to make sense. What is the equivalent argument for hundreds of millions?
Strangely, why aren't we doing the same for actors and sports stars?
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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? You can argue even a mediocre CEO could do ok, and I’d agree, but at the same time you could easily justify paying huge amounts of money to get a CEO who will only perform better by 1%/year. To me it’s really the size of the big tech companies that’s mind boggling. The fact companies t…
>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.
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A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google
In the highest comp regions (where new revenue generating projects almost always get staffed) it’s a common ballpark estimate of the allin cost of a SWE including all benefits, office, hiring, infra costs, ancillary roles. Consider that a senior SWE alone is pulling about $400k in direct comp. Also consider Google’s total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm and many of those are not engineers or i…
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Just to be fair, for 90% of the world, the kinds of compensation many hacker news readers have (a Silicon Valley engineer who gets a high base plus bonus plus equity) would also be considered “holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it … does not make any f_ing sense”
That is a fair critique and overall true. But it also highlights the pay of these CEOs to be so absurd as to be barely comprehensible. It makes me wonder what types of personalities these people are. If I even had that salary for a year, max three, I'd retire and spend time learning and doing non-profit and foundation work.
A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something.
Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year instead? That's how much you need to pay them next year.
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Why is that trash? I would love to drive and shoot a real tank as a civilian.
His ranch is on the MX/TX border and he owns domains (to resell) such as roaches.com, illegal.com, molest.com, etc. Take with those what you will of the sort of person he is. That's just the few I remember otoh. He has hundreds.
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Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the res…
Honest to god, how hard do you think his job really is? How much of it simply comes down to just brokering connections afforded to him by his position? It's not like he's responsible himself for generating truly novel and useful engineering deliverables. I seriously struggle to see how he possesses some talent that warrants his pay, vs. just being a lucky sob in a world where boards will shell out ridiculous checks o…
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> 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,…
I 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.