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'Jeff Bezos is Wrong, Tech Workers Are Not Bullies' (ft.com)
Silicon Valley employees have a right and duty to protest when we think projects are unethical, writes Laura Nolan, who recently left Google. From her opinion piece for Financial Times: Messrs Bezos and Bloomberg paint Amazon and Google as victims, pushed around by powerful employees who do not care about patriotism. This is absurd. Google and Amazon, and the DoD for that matter, are some of the most dominant institutions the world has known. Mr Bezos recently became the richest man in modern history. Mr Bloomberg is not far behind on the list of the world's wealthiest. Demanding that such power be held to account is common sense.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees -- the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds -- have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union. I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we've seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and personnel decisions they consider unethical. I am part of this growing tech workers' movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
Rank-and-file tech employees, by contrast, do not have the same leverage. Ordinary Amazon employees -- the median annual salary is less than Mr Bezos earns in 10 seconds -- have been aggressively discouraged from unionising. Microsoft fired a team of contract engineers after they voted to unionise and as yet there is no tech worker union. I believe Silicon Valley leaders have historically put profit ahead of employee livelihood and whatever perks these companies provide come at the discretion of bosses, and are less a reflection of individual merit than of employer convenience.
It is significant, then, that over the past year we've seen a groundswell of worker dissent as thousands of employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and elsewhere have pushed back against projects and personnel decisions they consider unethical. I am part of this growing tech workers' movement. We believe we have a duty to resist the oppressive and unethical application of the powerful technology we build, and a right to know how our work is used.
Nah ... Since you are anti-freedom, we would prefer to give you a taste of your own medicine. You seem to have mistook the definition of capatilism as "I am free to do whatever I want as long as I can find people desperate enough to do it for the pittance I am offering." The hilarious thing is you are (no doubt) the same idiot crying that there is no wall in place to keep out these people you are desperate to exploit.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The sole purpose of companies is to make a return on shareholder equity. Period.
People often repeat this inaccurate meme, but the truth is that the purpose of companies is to fulfill their charter. You can found a company for a broad variety of purposes, and many of them have little to nothing to do with profit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is the richest man in the world. But that's not because he is paid outrageously, indeed, for a man running a $1T+ company, his compensation is relatively minuscule.
From Salary.com
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Executive Compensation
As Chief Executive Officer, Director at AMAZON COM INC, Jeffrey P. Bezos made $1,681,840 in total compensation. Of this total $81,840 was received as a salary, $0 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $0 was awarded as stock and $1,600,000 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2017 fiscal year.
Bloomberg:
Amazon.com Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos received $1.68 million in total pay last year, unchanged from 2012, including $81,840 in salary and $1.6 million to cover security arrangements.
Of course, he is fabulously wealthy due to his ownership share of a trillion-dollar company: Bezos currently holds 78,893,033 shares or 16.3% of the shares outstanding. His wealth can fluctuate wildly as the share prices change--in either direction. In fact, at this point today, the price is down $21.95 per share, so just today Bezos has lost $1.731B, so far. On a good day he may come up positive to the same tune.
Based on salary and other compensation, Bezos earns about 5 cents per second, so the "10 seconds" notion is just plain wrong. His on-paper wealth may indeed rise and fall rapidly, Bernie Sanders Sanders' claim that Bezos' wealth increases by $275 million every day may be true for certain days. But he can lose $275 million per day on bad days, too.
P.S. His salary (not counting security costs for which he is reimbursed) is way less than what his long-time critic Sen. Bernie Sanders makes in his job as a US Senator, and Sanders doesn't ever see the bill for his security costs.