[ue_]

I don't really understand what he means by this. Just beacuse you're choosing to have a certain job, or because you can leave, it doesn't mean you're not entitled to compensation. If that were true, anyone with any choice of job wouldn't receive a wage in exchange for his labour power.

Of course the people under him get paid (perhaps not by Satya himself), so what does he mean? That the leadership is unpaid? One would expect that leadership means a higher paid position, because leaders are applying a more specialised labour.

Am I looking at this the wrong way round, or being obtuse?

[taneq]

I think it means "treat them as well as you'd treat a volunteer doing the same job". The contrapositive (which I've actually had thrown at me in a past job) is "your employees get paid to do their job, they deserve no thanks beyond that".

[danielvf]

Satya Is says that he wants to make his employees jobs fulfilling enough that people would want to do it. He's not really discussing pay at all. Of course he's getting paid and they are getting paid.

So I've worked near corporate people who obviously hated their jobs. Being in a team with such people is not a good thing for you or the project.

Similarly I was part of a volunteer team that formed ad-hoc to save a huge programing contest. Every person was there because they wanted to be there. It was a whole lot of fun and an effective team.

[RugnirViking]

I think what he means is you need to be thankful for their contribution and try to make it fun for them.

In the sense that when you run a volunteer organisation you want to keep people coming back

[basejumping]

It means Satya has a privilege to be the leader, but that can be denied by his people if they leave, because there are plenty of opportunities, so that's why he treats them with extra respect - un unpaid volunteer is a way of saying the people are doing him a favor.