Comment by WillAdams

Some friends of mine in sales roles took a pay cut during the pandemic. Not just the lost commissions because nobody was buying, but base salary as well. They liked their jobs otherwise and felt it was a worthwhile sacrifice to help the company survive. During that time they worked less, and that was the expectation, because there wasn't really much revenue producing work they could do anyway.

I worked for a small company through the dot-com crash (when I was lucky to get a new position as a previous employer cratered). 20% pay cut. Things eventually recovered with a much later employer.

I hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies will be called to demonstrate the same sort of integrity and compassion which Robin Lee and his father have, and I'd rather have that than more money in my pocket or my 401K (which I've done my best to direct towards investments which I consider to be ethical).

Do you? It is all a matter of incentives. When the sky is the limit for executive compensation and we tie it to lagging short term indicators such as stock prices aren’t we incentivizing executives to focus on short term gain at the expense of long term value creation?

Doesn’t this general climate disproportionately advantage the well connected, the insider traders?

And as a citizen of a given jurisdiction, even if you are doing great in the capital markets, is it worth the living in an increasingly enshittified society?

And yet the tolerance for bad decisions is much higher in bigger companies. Make a bad decision at large company and simple intertia will keep you going. Make a bad decision in a small company and you're out of business.