Personally, I don't see taking a paycut or leaving a position of power to be "taking a responsibility". The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary. If you just reduce to the baseline, it's not really a punishment. Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.
> The baseline for ordinary people is not to be in the position of power or not to have a high salary.
This is quite funny, since the 'victims' we're talking about are some of the highest paid people in an already highly paying profession.
> Incompetent people shouldn't get the privileged position in the first place, so thinking of losing it as a punishment is absurd.
Also, we should not have error handling because we only hire competent developers and therefore our app doesn't crash, ever. This is clearly absurd.
Plus, the economic situation did change. Calling Satya incompetent for making mistakes while steering a trillion dollar company feels a bit like the management equivalent of "I could build StackOverflow in a weekend".
I am not sure you understood the argument I am making. At least I am confused what you're trying to argue.
All I am saying is this: If I am giving you a handsome reward for a job, and it turns out you are doing it badly, then giving you just half the reward is not a punishment. Even giving you no reward is not a punishment (because you got a chance to do a well-rewarded job). Punishment, to mean something, would be losing more than you would get for doing the acceptable job.
Your argument seems to be that punishment only exists on an absolute scale (or relative to the overall population, not relative to the individual). Am I understanding it correctly?
If so, I heavily disagree and hold the opposite opinion: Punishment (and reward for that matter) are heavily individual. E.g., Only playing with a playstation for 30 mins a day might be a punishment for one kid, as they were playing 2~8h a day before, and a reward for another, as they haven't had access to that before. It is relativ to their life situation and independent of general playstation playtime.
But there are cases where punishment is somewhat absolute, mostly for severe infractions like violent crime. Even then, the degree to what a sentence might feel as a punishment might heavily diverge based on the person receiving it. E.g., a homeless person without a job might feel very different about going to prison for 5 years than a highly paid investment manager.
Of course the punishment should be considered on absolute scale, based on typical (or perhaps even lowest status) people in the society, because it is ultimately administered by the society! Otherwise justice would lose any semblance of fairness.
