"By 5 p.m., I'm like, 'I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10 a.m,'" he told the Economic Club of Washington, DC.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-daily-routine-201...
It's kind of like how people think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs just accidentally became some of the most successful people on earth...
Trying to justify exorbitant C-suite salaries because they often work hard (in conditions significantly easing working hard due to having a litany of assistants to handle boring stuff, private jets, drivers, Michelin starred meals with regulators, lawyers an executives counting as "work") is silly when you look at how hard so many working class people work. But I know you know this, so it seems you're just blaming them for being born poor, unconnected and not having the "big business brain" that all C-suite executives must have.
Why? Why is it that CEO pay reflects company performance but not the line workers? It seems incoherent. How does the collective performance of line workers, which we can predict somewhat from salary, not impact company performance? Where did this idea that only in upper management does salary correspond to company performance? What research was done?
Aside from the rare company built by the CEO wholly or largely, CEOs just seem to come from wealthy families, are tall handsome men, and have all the right connections. These are not brilliant geniuses.
Compensation is not a function of their performance, it’s a function of their ability to hold their businesses hostage and threaten to tank their companies unless they’re paid high salaries. Rotating out the c-suite will at least temporarily tank company profits. So why uh, doesn’t the union do the same thing and also hold the business hostage? 40% is not wild at all, it’s a drop in the bucket for shareholders because salaries are so low to begin with.
I’m not saying SREs are poorly paid, but they often are keeping entire companies afloat, and their pay is nowhere near that of the C-Suite.
If the entire SRE team quit / went on strike, there is a non-zero chance the next incident would utterly break the company.
If the entire C-Suite quit, uh… what exactly would happen? People would continue doing what they had already been doing?
Executives are overpaid. Period.
Ah, and the SRE team assembled themselves, hired themselves, decided what to work on, direction, technology, plans, etc all on their own?
Or is there a C-Suite running the SRE team, even if indirectly?
> If the entire C-Suite quit, uh… what exactly would happen? People would continue doing what they had already been doing?
This is beyond naïve, I'm not sure what to call it. Yes, things hum along for some duration... and then what?
C-Suite are not laborers, as you've queued into. They provide direction, guidance, goals, identify problems, etc.
Take a human being without any of that in their personal life. What becomes of them? Nothing good... it's similar for a company. The wrong leadership dooms a company before any of the line workers even notice.
And you think the CEO did this? No - hiring managers and directors decided it was necessary.
> This is beyond naïve
Not at all. Who decides what the product needs? Product Managers, or sometimes Engineers directly. “Setting company direction” is vague at best, and can easily be replaced by people in more direct contact with customers.
And in any case, you made my point by agreeing things would hum along for some time. Executives are not critical to a company. Workers are. Without workers, profit immediately goes to $0 (modulo automated factories / SaaS, but as mentioned once something breaks, you again need people).
You seem to believe that workers are incapable of autonomy, of seeing needs and meeting them, etc. This is why Scrum exists, because people like you don’t think people like me can be trusted to do what’s necessary to keep things running.
Where did the hiring managers come from? Poofed out of nowhere?
How did they know what to hire? Just made up their own direction?
This would be like if a McDonald's line cook could just decide the company no longer will offer the Big Mac because they don't like making it.
This line of thinking is so typical for a developer. You even reference Scrum like that means anything in the areas we're discussing. But even in that setting, how do you think Product Owners know what things to prioritize? They're just making it up as they go?
Now you're talking about founders, which is !=== CEO. I have respect for founders - they built something. If the founder happens to still be the CEO, then same. If instead it's just yet another suit, then no, they had nothing to do with the hiring manager.
> How did they know what to hire? Just made up their own direction?
I mean, yeah? Do you think that everyone under the CEO is a helpless infant, incapable of independent thought?
> You even reference Scrum like that means anything in the areas we're discussing.
Because they stem from the same line of thinking - that workers must be managed, lest they wander aimlessly and destroy the company.
> This line of thinking is so typical for a developer.
Two fun facts: I'm not a dev (SRE/DBRE), and tech is not where I gained this line of thinking. I spent a decade as a nuclear reactor operator on a fast-attack submarine. Submariners in general are taught to be independent, and fully capable of taking over someone else's duties when necessary. Nuclear-trained personnel, even more so, and those who actually operate the reactor (me) yet more.
Could a submarine leave port without the Captain? Ideally not (and the Navy would never let it happen if they had a choice), but we are absolutely trained to do so. Hurricane prep during in-port periods mostly consists of making sure the duty section are the good ones, because if it hits, whoever is on the boat is going to start her up _real fast_, take her out, and submerge. A $2 billion warship is entrusted to a skeleton crew of personnel because we know what we're doing.
It's worth noting that Google - who invented SRE - heavily borrowed from the Nuclear Navy [0].
For everything besides growth rate I can see arguing that they can't be compared—I don't agree, but I can understand where you're coming from—but why should a CEO's salary go up dramatically faster as a percentage than line workers'? Is the CEO somehow working 40% more hours than they did last year? Working 40% harder? What is that 40% tied to that line worker salaries shouldn't be tied to?
Your average line worker cannot impact the entire business like this. They alone cannot be responsible for huge growth or periods of rapid shrinkage.
They just happen to be the most visible...
No, you're right, so raises on the order of hundreds of thousands might not make sense, but why not raises that are comparable as a percentage of pay? A single front line worker making (for easy math) $50k a year in 2022 can absolutely contribute more than $20k to a year's growth.
That's not the standard, though. The criteria is cost above replacement, and quite frankly modern executives show up extremely mediocre on that measure. Companies flip executives all the time, and it almost never results in significant changes to revenue (and when it does, it's down as often as up). In fact there's almost no measurable meritocracy among salaried executives.
The reason executive salaries got so high is simply that the class the makes up the C-suite residents (the major investors and board members) got jealous that the outgoing founders of these companies got so rich, and wanted to play in the same sandbox. It's only fair, right?
But that's exactly the moral argument UAW is making: these companies got fabulously wealthy over recent decades owing to GDP growth and stock market booms, and they should share that wealth with their employees and not just keep it for the owners. The only difference is in how you define "employee".
1) You cite cost of replacement - yet these companies are unable to replace their C-Suite with anyone costing less. Therefore, they can command the compensation levels they do (not to mention compensation != in pocket pay).
2) UAW employees are indeed readily replicable with little or no training on average. Offshoring is very realistic, and there is no shortage of high-school educated folks willing to work in a factory/plant for current levels of pay.
Inflation is putting a squeeze on everyone, and it just so happens your average worker is feeling it the most. It's no coincidence all these labor issues and strikes are happening right now.
They can replace their C-suite with me. The fact they don’t want to because I’m not some rich, well-connected, historical CEO does not mean they don’t have the option.
I’d do the job for just the basic pay package.
Simply stating they can hire you and they don't because you're not already well-connected clearly demonstrates you haven't an idea what these people actually do.
My point is that there are a lot of people that would make perfectly fine CEO’s skipped over because they’re not already a CEO/born into connections.
The strongest signal people use for determining whether they would be any good is whether they’re already one. Which is how people that torpedo a company get re-hired anyway.
Unlike for example, engineers, where we assume they can’t program their way out of a pack of butter even when they come in as a principal.
It's not. The moral ground has been ceded. Now it's just about "I got mine".
Other benefit: less environmental impact, more time for people to improve themselves and their mental health, etc.
Citation needed.
There is no hard evidence for this belief. In fact, and especially for creative jobs, employees that are well rested and happy will contribute more than stressed out plebe barely getting by.
If met with the 40% pay increase it's another huge pay raise. There is no reality where line workers screwing in the same 3 door bolts all day long are getting what amounts to an effective ~70% pay increase in one year.
Additionally, the 4 day work week is yet unproven in an industrial setting, such as are UAW member's jobs.
> There is no reality where line workers screwing in the same 3 door bolts all day long are getting what amounts to an effective ~70% pay increase in one year.
Please align your own comments. They are looking for a 40% hourly pay increase over 4 years, and a reduction to a 32 hour work week. These combined work out to an increase of 12% in annual pay, over four years. No UAW hired since 2007 makes more than $17/hour.
If you're looking for more details of what the UAW wants, they are in this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/13/where-uaw-negotations-stand-...
In four year's time, will their pay be 70% higher than it is today if all demands are met?
Yes.
Are you hopeful about a 70% pay increase in four years? I sure am not...
No? If a given employee is making $17/hr, and working the union agreed 40 hours a week, they are making $35360. If they get a 40% raise over four years, they will be making $23.80/hr, and working 32 hours a week, giving an annual wage of $39,603.20. This is an increase in annual wage of 12% over four years. The hourly wage is an increase of 40% over four years. No one is getting close to 70%.
> Are you hopeful about a 70% pay increase in four years?
Honestly yes, I think that is in the realm of possibility, as I'm currently pretty underwaged for my industry and experience level. Currently interviewing for a job at a 45% increase. Regardless, as I demonstrated above, your 70% number is, as you put it, propagandha. I certainly feel that the post-2007 UAW hires aren't being compensated adequately for any industry, and the 40% hourly increase they're seeking is quite reasonable.
This is getting into weasel word territory; you completely ignored the GP observing the contradictions within your own rhetoric, and responded with more rhetoric and a fallacious premise. Being rude isn't helping your unpopular argument to gain more traction.
You led out your initial comment warning about propaganda—it might be worth considering if you fell for propaganda on the other side.
CEOs make big decisions... but they get paid more money than they'll ever need even if they do doom the company. In fact, many CEOs against union workers are torching their own companies to avoid a fair deal which would cost their businesses less.
The only way CEOs would justify their high pay is if we were able to hold them responsible for their company's misdeeds and throw them in jail. But since Sundar Pichai is still a free man, we clearly definitely don't do that either.
CEO is a completely zero-risk, massive return job that you get largely for knowing the right people and having a deeply flawed moral fiber that enables you to sleep at night after doing unusually cruel things to everyone else. That's really all there is to it.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. You might just be really good at lying to yourself.
Their demands are only unreasonable if they lose. This is a strike. It's fight, not a discussion. The goal is to give the company no choice but to give in. The strikers are under no obligation to be fair. They can make whatever demands they want. They don't have to give an inch if they don't want to.
>They cannot be compared, nor should they.
Comparing them is pretty simple, actually.
$ units
You have: 21 million USD / year
You want: (28 USD / hour) * (40 hours / week)
* 359.35059
/ 0.0027827977
"Yes, but the C-suite is responsible for $zillions"...
Are they personally responsible? If they fail in their job do they get to reimburse the investors for money they lost? Hardly, they tend to get a golden handshake and move on to another company whereas that vet, the farmer or the mechanic tend to be punished for failure in some way - by loosing their accreditation, livestock or livelihood.
C-suite remuneration has far outgrown its justification.
> Comparing C-Suite compensation, pay scale, growth rate and disparity from line workers is disingenuous at best. They cannot be compared, nor should they.
Why should they not be compared? Why should it not be discussed whether an hour of a systems engineer's life is worth far less than an hour of a CFO's life? What great sacrifice does the CFO make which the farmer does not to explain the disparity in remuneration? An hour in a life is an hour in a life no matter your profession, you won't get it back when it is gone.
you're ignoring the contributions of people in the company that make the C-suites job possible. Why should the C-suite be entitled to this just because they work long hours?
I work long hours. I've had jobs - salaried, mind you - where I worked past 5 PM, well into the evening, and no stock options are not the same. At any rate, one of those jobs the stock options weren't worth anything anyway.
CEOs get golden parachutes and gobs of money and for what all, exactly? What do they actually contribute?
I'd love for there to be an experiment where you take a senior operations person, for instance, and put them in the CEO role, and see, if given the same support and onboarding, if they can't make good or possibly better decisions than the someone with "CEO experience"
I've met alot of CEOs, and they don't tend to be very in touch with their workforce, they simply see what they want to see, most of the time, few exceptions.
Between UAW Strike, SWG Strike, barely avoided UPS Strike, and probably a few I'm leaving out, we're going to be inundated with half truths, misdirection, selective statistics and even the occasional outright lie.
UAW opening demand isn't just a 40% pay hike - but also a four day workweek (when combined is ~70% increase in pay). Nobody expects for UAW to get everything they demand (that's not how negotiations work of course) but still, it's a particularly unreasonable starting position and is likely demonstrating just how far apart both parties are.
It's become a sort of meme to bag on C-Suite salaries - with a lot of folks fundamentally believing C-Suiters don't earn their pay or at the very least don't earn the extreme pay gap between them an your average line worker.
Anyone thinking a C-Suiter clocks out at 5pm and doesn't work after hours has no experience in the C-Suite (or even upper management for the matter). There isn't really a such thing as "off hours" for these folks on average. Correspondingly, decisions made by your C-Suite can earn a company huge returns, or doom the company and all of it's employees and stake holders.
Comparing C-Suite compensation, pay scale, growth rate and disparity from line workers is disingenuous at best. They cannot be compared, nor should they.