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> 200x is over the top I guess; I cannot see how you bring that much more value than your employees.

Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy and turned it into the most valuable company in the world. Apple had a series of CEOs before Jobs that didn't.

Essentially, the CEO decides which hill to climb. The right hill, the company makes $$$. The wrong hill, the company languishes. That's worth a heckuva lot of money. Nobody else in the company has that kind of influence over its fortunes.

Like said, that's about one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the most successful. There are many examples where the CEO doesn't manage this (IBM, Boeing and many more for instance), the company doesn't languish and yet the CEO gets rewarded. Makes no sense then right? In your example, if you don't manage growth like Steve Jobs, how are you worth heckuva lot of money? You managed to not go broke? That's not worth so much... It's worth more than the top employees, but not 100x.

I'm talking about a lot smaller. Most mid-sized companies (nor the larger ones, but I specifically am not talking about those) are not this binary; they are just steady growth, not hockeysticks and for years/decades.

The CEO generally is the top employee. Jobs was worth more because he also had a significant ownership percentage.

That's just cherry-picking one particular case with a positive outcome. The last few Boeing CEOs were also paid tens of millions per year and ended up running the company (and two planes) into the ground.

Yes, but this is in response to "nobody should make 200x their employees".

But it's really not that simple. Some CEOs are that valuable. Some are not. You need to figure out if they're a Boeing CEO or a Steve Jobs and compensate them accordingly.

> Some CEOs are that valuable.

The question isn't "are they valuable" though. The question was "how much should they be paid". There are people in labs, technical committees and various other key institiutions who create untold billions of dollars in value far in excess of what Jobs did. I doubt Alexander Fleming made money in proportion to the value of his contribution.

I don't necessarily disagree with how CEOs are paid. But I do disagree with the idea that value factors into the conversation somehow. Nobody is paid based on their value except by accident.

People in the free market are paid based on the value they are expected to contribute.

The reason is pretty simple - supply & demand.

Yes, some are probably. Steve Jobs, Nadella probably but it's maybe 10 in the world? The rest really are not.

How do you figure that out? If someone is genius looking 20 years into the future like a time machine, they may look like an idiot today.

I have no idea. But that’s not the point. The point is that Apple and Apples shareholders (and probably Apple customers) would probably trade 1000 existing Apple employees if they could just get Jobs back.

Some leaders are worth it. This is why blanket statements like “no CEO should make 200x another employee” or (in the same vein) “nobody should have $1B” are silly.

Constructive conversations don’t start with highly subjective absolutes.

Yeah I agree and with Jobs, Bezos etc. I mean they have all the power right? Is someone going to cap their pay at their height. It’s like not feeding the golden goose. I’m not sure how this fairs for the “average” ceo though.

That's true, but these compensation packages are determined in advance. Every company takes a risk that it is hiring the right CEO. As Boeing's case illustrates, getting it wrong can be VERY expensive.

In fact, Boeing's case proves that a good CEO is worth 200x, because look what a bad one costs.

> The wrong hill, the company languishes

Is it the team captain which wins the football match?

Loaded question. Without the team captain, the team loses.

It also does without it's star players which is what I mean. A company needs a lot of people, but has a pool of star players who are redundant only on paper. If they really drop away, it's a massive issue. And if they drop away all at the same time, the company will stall or worse depending on size and cash position.

Ofcourse the large enterprises have (ISO etc) processes in place to make everything as process-driven as possible, but you can see that even in teams within MS / Google / Facebook there are superstars who are simply very hard to replace (and in these companies they are well compensated; but outside tech that might not be the case). Obviously it never happens that they leave all at the same time, so that's why it looks redundant.

You were also downplaying the importance of a good team captain. This conversation can only take place earnestly if we are fair about our language and not selectively ignorant of all the moving pieces involved in a successful company.

In a business with < 50 employees, the CEO is not getting paid 200x.

Many CEOs who aren't famous because they failed still got paid at that 200x rate.

Yes, but the solution is not "nobody should get paid at that rate", it's "pay people in accordance with their actual performance".

If you are the CEO and your company does terribly, you should probably get paid 0 that year.

> If you are the CEO and your company does terribly, you should probably get paid 0 that year.

Imagine you are an amazing developer, and a company with a terrible codebase and a high risk of technical problems wants to hire you, precisely because it is aware it has problems and needs you. Then the company says "oh, and if we have any technical problems your pay will be zero." You would be extremely unlikely to take that role, regardless of the salary they were promising in the event of technical success. Every hire, including CEO's who work for the board of directors, is subject to that same calculus. If a company is at risk of doing terribly, it will often seek to bring in a new CEO or retain an existing CEO. If that CEO knows they will receive no compensation in the not-unlikely to expected scenario of the company doing poorly, they will walk away from the offer, even if they are the best candidate to potentially solve the company's woes, precisely because anyone who is the best candidate to solve the company's woes is good enough to obtain another better offer that doesn't contain a punitive no salary for you clause.

> you should probably get paid 0 that year.

Most CEOs in the USA can demand contracts that give them a massive golden umbrella, fail or not. Why would any CEO accept less than that?

But to answer the harder question, I don't think anyone should get paid at that rate. No one is worth that much once you take into account negative externalities. As an extreme example, Exxon executives might be worth a negative number to society at this point.

Getting more nuanced, huge wage gaps are highly correlated with lots of costly things like increased crimes rates, and less costly but important things like happiness.

I think the world is increasingly becoming aware that the USA is nowhere near #1 in many measures, and that a handful of other countries have managed to make a measurably better society. And in all those countries you see far smaller wage gaps. Could be correlation, but I think with enough time we will see that it is causation. Humans instinctively know that kings are not God-like and CEOs are not worth 200x more than the thousands of employees who work just as hard. Leaders with benefits are fine. Leaders with excessive benefits have never ended well in all of human history. The fact that it is happening now due to "market forces" instead of royal lineage. perhaps makes it a bit more tolerable temporarily. But I think those huge wage gaps are increasingly becoming less tolerable even to Americans. Other countries have already arrived.

> No one is worth that much

The shareholders disagree and the CEO compensation comes out of the shareholders' pockets.

> who work just as hard

It's not about working hard. It's about making the right decisions.

> Other countries have already arrived.

On the other hand, US companies are the most prosperous in the world, and contribute enormously to the US economy. All the FAANG companies are in the US, for example.

The shareholders do not all agree. Some of us want to see wage gaps narrowed. Some of us have been looking at how companies impact all stakeholders, including the local community. Sustainability is no longer a strange word.

The average employee makes decisions all the time.

And yes, the companies are prosperous. A few benefit. Society at large not so much. The US is behind by many measures.

> The shareholders do not all agree.

They can sell their shares if they don't accept it. Presumably whoever buys it accepts it.

> Society at large not so much

Nobody has been able to connect high CEO pay with detriments to society at large.

Shareholders do not expect companies to be perfect. One of the reasons to be part owner is to push for improvements and to have influence.

You are wrong about detriments to society, and a simple search would have saved you. Just as one example, large income gaps are highly correlated with higher crime rates [1]. This has been shown in many studies, and across cultures. There are other negative effects as well, including both the rich and the poor being less happy. I suggest you do the work of trying to prove yourself wrong and you'll find even more.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...

There aren't enough CEOs to make any sort of difference.

Source? Because each CEO affects many people. So it sounds like you just made that up. Meanwhile, I provided a source that shows higher crime rates when there are higher wage gaps. Where are those wage gaps coming from? Please provide sources, not your own reasoning.

I might ask the same of you. Please provide evidence that CEO pay is statistically relevant to "higher wage gaps"?

Amazon employs 50,000 highly paid people in Seattle alone, but only 1 CEO. Bezos' CEO pay is hardly responsible for income inequality in Seattle.

You made the claim that "there aren't enough CEOs to make any sort of difference" so the burden of proof is on you to back up that claim. Lacking any evidence to back up your claim, the convo can end here or you can have the last word as you wish.

The SF law like most of these laws includes all forms of compensation, not just salary. Bezos total compensation over the years including bonuses and stock options is indeed responsible for the huge wage gap of almost a million Amazon employees, along with the other people Bezos encounters in his life.

And he is just one CEO. Pretty easy to see where this would lead. CEOs are indeed responsible for many of the daily wage gaps most workers experience.

Agreed. They can still end up 'getting' more than 200x that year by selling shares, but that's not really related imho.

Do you think they're going to get another CEO position at that rate?

"I do see why CEO's (and all c-level if they are founders, have board seats, are early investors, have a high amount of %) should be compensated well over employees; they take the risks. Or rather; they should take the risks"

What risks do they or should they take to deserve higher salaries?

These people typically have golden parachutes from which they'll make out rather well if the company does poorly, and they typically have no problem finding other jobs should they get fired.

That's not the case for low-level employees, for whom losing a job can be absolutely catastrophic. Low-level employees are the ones who typically live paycheck to paycheck and risk everything every day they go to work, for should they fail to perform they and their families may go hungry, and may struggle for a long time to find another job, especially in this economy.

On the other hand, many CEOs don't need to work another day in their life, so getting fired from their job would actually have absolutely no impact on them whatsoever.

You are a CEO of your house.

You bought a house for $100k in SF in 2000.

You hire a maid to clean it every week. The maid basically upkeep your asset.

It's 2020 now. You sold the house for $2m.

Should you pay your maid much more since your didn't do much and you earned profit?

Should you give equity to your maid?

Yes. And I would (and do).

I can only speak from where I live and have lived, but low-level, well actually all employees outside the people with significant shareholding, when they get fired, get 75% of their last earnings for 2 months and after that 70% from the state. The company has to pay a part of that IF they can.

You work 8 hours a day for your survival. They work 8 hours a day for their survival. Somehow we justify giving them 200 times the share of the output regardless of individual effort because they had some good ideas.

I'm not saying these ideas aren't worth anything. Are these ideas really worth a continual system where someone else is always getting 200 times the extracted benefit than you?

The problem is that at that rate of pay they can rapidly accumulate a financial engine that moves that multiplier externally from say 200-1000 while you can only move your multiplier from 1 to maybe 1.1. How often do you get a 10% raise and how much utility did Bezos get out of his recent billions stock windfall?

It's weird that you know more about what a CEO is worth to a business than the business' owners do.

What risks are they taking? If your general argument is that the job has downsides, it's bullshit. Even if CEOs had the same salary as fast food workers, people would overwhelmingly prefer to be CEOs because of social status, meaning, power to improve and change things, freedom and perhaps most importantly, you don't have to actually physically work, you basically just talk to people, think and make decisions.

> people would overwhelmingly prefer to be CEOs

Really? How many people with a steady job you know who want to be CEO? Of a company with more than 10 people that is and that's even a bit pretentious to call that a CEO, but let's say; 10+ company. How many people do you personally know that would say; 'hell yeah, that sounds great'. I know 0 who are not CEO's already; the rest do not want the responsibility, the insecurity, the vagueness, the long hours, the decision making. They like to make 100k/year following whatever their manager says 9-5.

Maybe you move in different circles, but I find that very unlikely. Most people definitely do not want to lead.

The preceding part of the quote is important:

> Even if CEOs had the same salary as fast food workers, people would overwhelmingly prefer to be CEOs

Yes, I think most people would prefer to be CEOs if all things except salary were unchanged. Being a fast food worker is not something people enjoy to do 5 day in a week and it's a boring, low status, manual job.

200x SALARY is never OK.

Give them stocks. If they do a good job, they get a lot of money.

But not in salary; that's simply mad.