41–50 of 203 posts
The methodology "lists the 25 most overpaid CEOs, identifying the company, the CEO and his pay as reported at the annual shareholder meeting, and the pay of the company’s median employee."
Activision Blizzard's Kotick's $25M comes in at 306:1; Electronic Arts' Andrew Wilson's $35M is 371:1 .
Ronald F. Clarke of Fleetcor Technologies Inc is a generous 1517:1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that if unions actually do make inroads into the software development world, the gaming industry will likely be the last to unionize. The reason that the gaming industry is worse off for developers is not because the game development shops are inherently greedy. They have horrible conditions for those workers because they can. So many people want to develop games rather than do any other kind of software deve…
"so the game dev shops know that most/all inhumane treatment will be accepted by the next person who will gladly endure it to be working in the industry." This is precisely the environment where unions emerged. If individual workers had a lot of leverage, there would never be a need for unions.
For a game developer, the options are horrible companies, unionization, or a development job in any other field.
The CEO (and upper management in general) pay scale is total BS when viewed through normal compensation lenses, unlike normal people who are paid for their time, upper management is usually compensated on performance -but- they are compensated on the performance of their company (or division) and they get all the pie. Since nobody else's pay is scaling with performance (outside of bonuses which in my experience usual…
I just want to point out a mathematical error in your post. You said, "nobody is 100x more efficient than anyone else". This is a reasonable (though not strictly true) statement by itself. But the implication is wrong - nobody needs to be 100x more efficient/effective to justify a 100x pay differential. Consider an example: * Company earns 1 billion per year. * Normal-Person will increase profits 5%. * Super-Exec wil…
This is a conflation between an important position (being able to resolve disputes and push decisions and direction) and being an important person. CEOs have skills, and have invested heavily in training those skills (if they aren't terrible) but those skills are not skills unattainable to the normal person, society just doesn't need very many people with those skills and the apparent value those skills create via business decisions appear to pay off handsomely. But that $50 million the exec's decision has made for the company isn't solely due to their work, if the company didn't have programmers and labourers and marketing and manufacturing to support the decision and deliver on the decision then that $50 million wouldn't have been earned.
Their decision is important, but their involvement isn't worth the full value the company receives based on making that decision, because without the supporting labour their decision may have been genius, but it would have netted no profit to the company. I think this sort of highlights what I consider to be a real issue with how we evaluate personal value in the modern world and why assets are becoming so concentrated in the hands of so few.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that if unions actually do make inroads into the software development world, the gaming industry will likely be the last to unionize. The reason that the gaming industry is worse off for developers is not because the game development shops are inherently greedy. They have horrible conditions for those workers because they can. So many people want to develop games rather than do any other kind of software deve…
Uh, you are aware that game developers are actively talking about unionizing, while most software developers aren’t? The shitty conditions are what’s making them decide to start talking about banding together to demand a bigger piece of the profits. Every discussion of game unions I see here tends to have a lot of people talking about how they are quite happy with their financial compensation at their non-game job, a…
Software engineer unions are coming, and it will start with the games industry. Attitudes within our field are changing! Used to be you couldn't mention the U-word without a dozen engineers jumping down your throat bellowing about "efficiency" (for whom and what?) but engineers are smart and you can only fool them with the same old anti-union propaganda for so long.
The CEO (and upper management in general) pay scale is total BS when viewed through normal compensation lenses, unlike normal people who are paid for their time, upper management is usually compensated on performance -but- they are compensated on the performance of their company (or division) and they get all the pie. Since nobody else's pay is scaling with performance (outside of bonuses which in my experience usual…
And yet, if you took Blizzard CEO's total pay (from the article, I think around $28 mil) and spread that over the nearly 10k employees, everyone gets an extra $3k, which wouldn't do diddly squat for retention. Also, losing 40% of growth would be pretty awful for anyone who has company stock (employees, 401ks, investors) especially if that's year over year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, if you took Blizzard CEO's total pay (from the article, I think around $28 mil) and spread that over the nearly 10k employees, everyone gets an extra $3k, which wouldn't do diddly squat for retention. Also, losing 40% of growth would be pretty awful for anyone who has company stock (employees, 401ks, investors) especially if that's year over year.
A better question, and one that gets to the heart of why Blizzard's CEO is overpaid, is why do they need 10k people to make, distribute, and support a few video games? There are far, far more effecient video game studios/publishers out there. Nintendo manufactures and ships millions of hardware units in addition to producing/publishing games and they have fewer employees.
I'd expect Nintento to have some ODM/CM like Foxconn deal with all that.
I feel like CEO pay is one of these emergent problems with our current system. We have this group of people whose salaries are just astronomical compared to the average person in the company, and whilst it's true their job could technically make more of a difference these payouts are totally asymmetrical and completely independent of how effective a CEO is.
The CEO is the only person in the company who can really negotiate for what they're worth (instead of the commodity price for their labor) because business people don't usually have specialized irreplaceable positions and technical people are not usually negotiation experts.
The CEO (and upper management in general) pay scale is total BS when viewed through normal compensation lenses, unlike normal people who are paid for their time, upper management is usually compensated on performance -but- they are compensated on the performance of their company (or division) and they get all the pie. Since nobody else's pay is scaling with performance (outside of bonuses which in my experience usual…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that if unions actually do make inroads into the software development world, the gaming industry will likely be the last to unionize. The reason that the gaming industry is worse off for developers is not because the game development shops are inherently greedy. They have horrible conditions for those workers because they can. So many people want to develop games rather than do any other kind of software deve…
Uh, you are aware that game developers are actively talking about unionizing, while most software developers aren’t? The shitty conditions are what’s making them decide to start talking about banding together to demand a bigger piece of the profits. Every discussion of game unions I see here tends to have a lot of people talking about how they are quite happy with their financial compensation at their non-game job, a…