It seems fair. If executives were making the decisions that landed the company in a difficult situation, it's only fair they bear the consequences of their failure. Besides, it's difficult to empathize when their compensation packages are, while market rate, significantly higher than the engineers who do their bidding. I wouldn't be surprised if the fraction of executives that would be able to retire at this point was much higher than the one for engineers, which is likely much higher than the one for non-engineering individual contributors.
Also remember that since it's executives who set executive compensation, there is some incentive to inflate it.
The CEO is obsessed with the metaverse. Not sure the other executive had much say.
(They can, of course, walk away if they disagree. But so can every other employee.)
Executives are not employees, they have agency to decide the companies direction. More agency brings more responsibility
> And their careers have been more disrupted than some random software engineer's career.
Were they really? Did they just lose their jobs and are they now underwater on mortgages that their families can no longer afford without that income? How many executives lives were "disrupted" worse than that? Because I'm talking about a significant fraction of 11k people that you're dismissing as "some random software engineer."
And their careers have been more disrupted than some random software engineer's career.