I'm giving him plenty of credit, he's the first competent CEO of Microsoft in a decade. Does that mean he deserves $40million/year while his company is laying off people to save on employee salaries? No, simple as that.
CEOs aren't some great superhumans that everything happens because of. They have a very important positions, and many CEOs have ruined or bankrupted companies through sheer incompetence, while many others have created amazing value (both societal and economic). They are not deities, they deserve prison and for their money to be seized when they commit crimes, and they don't deserve to be paid thousands of times more than the median employees that actually do the work and execute on the CEO's vision.
> I find this resentful envy here on HN extremely sad and also very dishonest.
It's disdain for sociopathy more than anything else. I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.
The guy who bungled smartphones while having the unimaginable advantage of the business ecosystem? And the guy who was years late on cloud computing and SaaS more widely?
IMO if Ballmer had stayed on until present day, Microsoft would have become something like Oracle. Technically growing revenue, but very little substance or relevance, no new customers or new business from them, only jacking up prices.
Also, he left in 2014, a decade ago, so it was ambiguous if I'm covering him or not.
I’m kinda glad that the actual definition of “deserved” is determined by the market and not individuals, and this is a good example of why. Your argument is essentially capitalism vs. anti-capitalism. While I’m all for supporting various alternative models, usually anti-capitalist folks don’t suggest anything specific, except maybe government interventions to cap CEO salaries or something like that – which is clearly just a bandaid and still leaves a bunch of loopholes.
> I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.
No shareholders in their right mind would hire such a CEO, so your chances are pretty slim.
I'm giving him plenty of credit, he's the first competent CEO of Microsoft in a decade. Does that mean he deserves $40million/year while his company is laying off people to save on employee salaries? No, simple as that.
CEOs aren't some great superhumans that everything happens because of. They have a very important positions, and many CEOs have ruined or bankrupted companies through sheer incompetence, while many others have created amazing value (both societal and economic). They are not deities, they deserve prison and for their money to be seized when they commit crimes, and they don't deserve to be paid thousands of times more than the median employees that actually do the work and execute on the CEO's vision.
> I find this resentful envy here on HN extremely sad and also very dishonest.
It's disdain for sociopathy more than anything else. I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.