{"id":168,"date":"2006-03-29T12:37:14","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T03:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-03-29\/168"},"modified":"2006-03-29T12:37:14","modified_gmt":"2006-03-29T03:37:14","slug":"revisiting-the-scandal-of-executive-compensation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-03-29\/168","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting the Scandal of Executive Compensation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

\n\nIn my previous post<\/a> I\ntalked<\/span> about looking at my server log files to see what kind of\nsearch-engine queries brought people to my pages. One such query<\/span> that I\nnoticed<\/span> in the log this morning brought a smile<\/span> to my face:\n\n<\/p>\n

“Question Jeffrey Friedl asked at the May 2003 shareholder meeting<\/b>”<\/center>\n

\n\nI don't know who did the search or why they were looking for it, but they\ncertainly found what they were after. It brought<\/span> them to a set<\/span> of pages I'd\nmade years ago and had largely forgot about, and didn't know were even\nindexed by the search engines:\n\n<\/p>\n

Gluttony at the Top — Executive Compensation at Yahoo<\/b><\/a><\/center>\n

\n\nIt includes a transcript of a question<\/a> I asked<\/span> at a\nYahoo!<\/span> company shareholder meeting, and a subsequent<\/span> letter to the Yahoo! board\nof directors<\/a>.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nThe letter generated almost no response. I'd heard<\/span> through the grapevine\nthat one of the executives (not Mr. Semel) was incensed and wanted me to be\nfired, but smarter heads apparently prevailed. I was contacted<\/span> by HR for a\nchat,<\/span> but otherwise, I got no<\/span> response.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI then made the web pages which chronicled the story<\/a> and quietly\ncirculated it among friends at Yahoo! For a while<\/span>, people I'd never met\nwould come up to me around campus and give me a thumbs<\/span> up about the pages,\nor tell me to “keep up the fight”, etc. I eventually<\/span> got a\nvisit<\/span> from David Filo, and we talked at length in a conversation<\/span> that was\nessentially his asking me to take down the site without actually asking me\nto take down the site. I like and<\/span> respect David a lot,<\/span> and took down the\nsite, which had been on an internal Yahoo! server not visible from the\noutside. (Some long time later, someone asked if they could see it, so I\nput<\/span> it up on my non-Yahoo! server and pointed them at it. I never<\/span> linked to\nit, but somehow the search engines found it.)\n\n<\/p>

\n\nAnyway, I did later<\/span> have a couple<\/span> of meetings with Mr. Semel. In the first<\/span>, I told him<\/span> that while he may be a great<\/span> businessman, he was neglecting the\ntroops, who wanted more of him. I suggested<\/span> that he take an hour a few<\/span> days\na week<\/span> to just walk the campus and chat with employees. He'd garner<\/span> a\nreputation<\/span> of openness and approachableness and would eventually start\nhearing things directly that he'd not otherwise hear at all. He said he<\/span>'d\nthink about it, and was quite cordial. (He never did anything about it, of\ncourse.)\n\n<\/p>\n\n

\n\nIn another meeting some months later, I brought<\/span> up the compensation bit. His cordialness<\/span> was gone, and he got very condescending and said that the\nmarket dictates what he gets paid. He couldn't even conceive<\/i> how any\nemployee could feel bad about what he gets. I think<\/span> he's been using the\nexecutive bathroom too long to remember what it's like to be a real<\/span> person.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nAs far as the “market demand” argument, it's a commonly<\/span>-cited\none, but misleading (which is probably why it's commonly cited). For\nexample, consider highly paid sports figures: those paying the tens of\nmillions a year<\/span> to retain a top<\/span>-quality player have a vested interest in\npaying as little as possible<\/b> because they're spending their own money\n— they pay only as much as they can get away with. That's market demand.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nOn the other hand, those handing out tens of millions to company execs are\nnot spending their own money (they're spending the company's money), and\noften have a vested<\/span> interest in paying as much as they can<\/b> get away\nwith. Members of a company's<\/span> board of directors are the ones who decide\nexecutive compensation, and they are often executives at their own company\n(e.g. company XYZ board member may be the president of unrelated company\nPDQ). The more they<\/span> can fan the executive-compensation fire in their\ncapacity as a board<\/span> member, the more they can go back to their own company\nand demand more compensation for themselves, as they'll be able to point\ntheir finger back and say “look, that's what the market is\npaying!”. That's not market demand, that's conflict of interest.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nIt's a wholly dishonest old-boys club of which the Yahoo! board and execs\nare fully-paid members (paid by the company as a perk,<\/span> off course).\n\n<\/p>

\n\nEventually, I realized<\/span> what most people probably know from the start, and\nthat's the sad reality that there's nothing I could<\/span> do to improve the\nsituation. I was just<\/span> causing myself stress, so I let<\/span> it go.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI was a Yahoo employee for eight years, until early 2005 (I left<\/span> sort of\ninvoluntarily — I'd moved to Kyoto for family reasons and worked remotely,\nbut HR didn't like it and eventually told me to come back or leave the\ncompany). I'm still<\/span> a Yahoo!<\/span> shareholder but have not looked at the company\nreport or followed the compensation of Mr. Semel and friends for years.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my previous post I talked about looking at my server log files to see what kind of search-engine queries brought people to my pages. One such query that I noticed in the log this morning brought a smile to my face: <\/p> \"Question Jeffrey Friedl asked at the May 2003 shareholder meeting<\/b>\"

I don't know who did the search or why they were looking for it, but they certainly found what they were after. It brought them to a set of pages I'd made years ago and had largely forgot about, and didn't know were even indexed [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}