It would be great if there were a clear definition of what "pay" means. Sundar Pichai's pay includes his $240m stock package granted in 2019. That's a truckload of stock but is that to be considered pay?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21031629/google-ceo-sund...
Why wouldn't it be? Would you consider Steve Jobs' "pay" back when he was running Apple for the second time to be $1? I consider Jack Dorsey's entry to be an error, or a case of incomplete data.
Apples to oranges. You should be considering salary to salary.
If shareholders want to pay their CEO more directly from their pockets in the form of dilution, it doesn't hurt or affect the standard employee in any way.
A CEO gets paid in stock, which the company later buys back with cash. Ergo, the CEO getting stock compensation reduced the amount of money available to pay workers.
GAAP requires companies to report stock compensation as an expense because it does actually move wealth around in a zero-sum fashion. It’s not a magic free money tree.
No, the buybacks do. Youre making it seem as if the only way for a CEO to sell stock is if the company buys it back.
And it's specifically called a non-cash expense, because it doesn't affect cash (which salary does). You are correct in that it isn't a free money tree. It's paid for by shareholders. If the shareholders wish to pay their CEO $X, the government has no reason to intervene. It doesn't make the employees any better or worse off.
And how does the CEO salary hurt the standard employee? Most of the S&P 500 companies employ around 100k of people. dividing $20M salary equally between them would give each of them $16.6 per month.
You are correct. It doesn't. The entire CEO pay controversy is a wedge issue. The only people who should be complaining about CEO pay are shareholders.
The $1.7million reflects not the increase in Bezos' net worth, but the cost of Bezos' employment to the company (salary + security and transportation). This is what actually shows up in expenses in Amazon's financials.
AFAIK, Jeff hasn't gotten a stock grant since the IPO in 1997, so the vast majority of his net worth gains are purely capitol gains from holding amazon stock for over 20 years. Since there have not been additional stocks granted, this increase in Bezos' wealth actually costs Amazon nothing, not even dilution, as it's just an increase of value of existing shares.
Get this, I just found out Google hires for a role called "Application Engineer" which is a role where you program but are lower class and lowered paid than regular "software engineers."
Google might not agree with the "lower class" part but the fact that for an application engineer to switch roles to software engineering within google requires them to go through a harder interview process indicates a deliberate caste based ranking structure that limits growth based off of your ability to pass an algorithm interview.
I actually believe it's 100% within google's rights to do something like this, but I think it's very bad that they disguise this ranking with the role name. I know people who didn't realize what they were getting into until they joined google.
Seriously, just name the role for what it is: High IQ Software Engineers vs. Average IQ Software Engineers because that's essentially what they're interviewing for.
There is nothing wrong with this. I am saying what is wrong is that people aren't made aware that this is what the position entails. You are being hired on as a lower class engineer.
I've had friends hired without being aware of this fact. Literally great software engineers at other companies with google fully aware of their previous title than suddenly unknowingly delegated to a lower class position with google not elucidating the difference.
It's like a software engineer applying for a software technician job. And you as the hiring manager not mentioning anything because you know the person applying isn't yet fully aware of the difference. These roles are literally targetting people who have software engineer in their titles but can't make the cut of the normal google interview.
It should be made clear that there is a difference between a technician and an engineer... just like it needs to be made clear that an application engineer is not a software engineer at google.
Also I would argue that the expectations are generally the same. You are spending your days programming there's really no difference.
Additionally it's an elitist attitude on googles part. Basically their saying that everyone who is normally considered a software engineer at other places aren't qualified to be software engineers at google. The only people considered to be software engineers are the people who pass that interview which is less than 1% of all people who apply. So they funnel these people into a lower caste that can never move on to be a software engineer EVEN when performance proves otherwise.