[yuzi]

But maybe she did a great job responding to the crises and swerved the ship in the right direction, out of harms way, but just not enough to prevent the crash. Maybe she did a better job than many others would have done. What would you expect them to do... give up?

I don't understand the engineer comparison at all. Every person in her role adopts much more responsibility, takes on a huge risk of failure that can be career ending and they can face a media frenzy that attempts to bash them into the ground. Why would anyone try to compare her salary to an engineers?

[nihonde]

"adopts much more responsibility"

Bleeding a failing company dry with a huge comp package is the complete opposite of taking responsibility. If Mayer stood to lose $300MM of her own money (i.e., money that she had before she joined Yahoo), then we could talk about leadership with consequences.

[yuzi]

The comment has context. So read: adopts much more responsibility than an engineer. On a day by day basis she makes decisions that have a more significant impact. She has to cover much more territory for understanding aspects over the whole organization.

[drauh]

But never has to personally take a hit for a bad decision, whereas an engineer could be fired (without a $55 million severance).

[yuzi]

Her severance would be due to a sale. There are lots of regular employees that get severance packages when they're let go due to a sale.

What's her severance in proportion to her annual salary along with tenure? The norm for my area/role, as an engineer, is 4 weeks per year of service. So 6 years would get me half a years salary, but you know what - it's only two weeks per year for "lesser" roles in my company such as support.

[base698]

Skin in the game, lack of it being the biggest problem in modern society--at least according to Nassim Taleb.

[afterburner]

You think CEOs fall on hard times when they fail?

[yuzi]

I agree they are paid generously and even overpaid, but they deserve to be paid more than an engineer. How much is debatable, but that's really established by the market. I just don't get the engineer comparison.

[nikcub]

> but that's really established by the market.

It isn't really, tho. It's established by the compensation committee that is convened by the board and comprises of board members.

Starboard bitched about the compensation committee since it only had 2 members on it, and they were favorable to Mayer (giving her credit for what is effectively a rise in Alibaba).

Starboard got 3 of it's own board members onto that committee now, so the fun times are over.

The conflict of interest in the process has always been that you have your own board members, some of whom you bought into the board, deciding compensation. A lot of these directors are themselves the subject of compensation committees at other public companies - so there is a quid pro quo amongst those who serve on each others boards.

It takes an outside activist investor to break up these friendly and circular compensation cliques.

I like Mayer, but it is really difficult to justify these compensation packages when the core business she is running is performing so poorly. I don't think many people would have any problem with her earnings hundreds of millions of dollars - but only as a portion of gains made by rescuing Yahoo's decline.

[yuzi]

I agree people should get rewarded for performance and that there are people often taking advantage, but still the entire ballpark area of pay that she gets is guided by market comparisons. There are other comparable compensation packages out there, she's just getting hammered for hers because of the fall. I don't think it's uncommon for failures to result in compensation packages that cause a public outcry.

[egwor]

If they get sued then potentially yes. Think about Fred Goodwin, ex leader at RBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Goodwin I think there are legal cases coming against him that would need to be paid for, and it is questionable who pays those fees.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Fred Goodwin didn't fall on hard times. He seems to have been directly responsible for some very questionable dealings.

But the bottom line problem with CEO pay is that you get a huge pay packet just for getting out of bed, no matter how badly you do; pay is completely decoupled from performance.

When Leo Apotheker was at HP for just under a year he received $13m in comp, severance of $7.2m, shares worth $3.56m, and a performance bonus of $2.4m - all while losing $30bn in value.

Developers like to speculate about 10X programmers. But ahere's no industry acknowledgement at all that the 0.001X CEO or manager is a real phenomenon. Anyone working at that level seems to be completely protected from business consequences.

[takno]

In what sense is it questionable who pays the fees? That is exactly what directors insurance is for

[egwor]

I'm not sure how it works; does that insurance still cover you after the event? And if you have made a stupid mistake(not defending or even giving a view about Fred here) you are personally liable, aren't you?

[kitsune_]

Responsibility is nothing in this context without accountability. Accountability is usually pushed down the chain.

[serge2k]

Boo fucking hoo, failure is rewarded with 10s of millions.

Meanwhile the engineers who get fired walk away with nothing.

[phamilton]

If you are referring to engineers getting let go in a sale, I would guess that many senior level or higher engineer would get 2-3x salary on the way out the door due to things like accelerated stock vesting plus 60 day WARN act plus a separation package.

I don't know the details, as I'm not a Yahoo employee, but it's not uncommon for that to be the case.