Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
I dunno about you, but I just like to just generally do my job as well as I can. I mean, I'm in work anyway so I might as well?
That's not really the issue. The issue is what is the definition of 'doing your job'? If you're told to maximize X but in reality you should be focusing on Y, what is your responsibility?

In my job, rare is the case that I have a clear choice between a 'good' decision and a bad one. Much more frequently I'm faced with a decision on how to deploy limited resources towards furthering my objectives and company goals. Exactly how I'm going to set priorities - all for tasks that are ostensibly important and valuable - is driven to a large extent by the guidance I'm given by management. In the case of top level management in a large company, they're being given that guidance by the BOD specifically and shareholders more generally. If you set up the signals so that the desired outcome is not actually how they are being measured and evaluated, you're obviously setting them up for failure.

There are plenty of greedy, amoral people who will screw over a company for their own personal gain. But in my experience most people do want to do a good job, but it's not always clear what that means.

By the same token, an across the board pay rise of, say, 10%-15% for all staff is also small beans. They can't control US policy, they can control the absurd payouts they give to what is, at the end of the day, a tiny, tiny fraction of their work force. When there's a few 10s of millions going spare and the first instinct is always to make sure it goes into the hands of people who are already rich rather than the people who do most of the actual work (i.e designing and making various things that fly) then I think it's a pretty strong indicator that the problem isn't that public sector staff are overpaid, it's the private sector underpays people at the bottom in the middle and wildly overpays people at the top.

Which, to be fair, I don't think you were disagreeing with.
I don't have an issue with paying workers more per se (though I suspect you undervalue the contributions of people in the C-suite), and all things being equal some increased compensation for appropriately targeted segments of one's workforce may make sense.

The reality is that the dynamics of how pay are set in the public and private sector are different, and one is not necessarily better than another. In the public sector, it's much harder to reward outstanding achievement or punish underperformance because salary bands are more or less set in stone. The dynamics of worker turnover, recruitment, budgeting, etc. are completely different, and the responsibilities and priorities of those who set pay scales are different. While the US government theoretically has a responsibility to conserve taxpayer cash and maximize return on 'investment', in reality that's barely enforced compared to the continual scrutiny that company bosses get on their labor costs and results.

For that matter, I'd argue that the top levels of the US government are grossly underpaid. The President of the United States is possibly the hardest job on the planet, and it's paid $400k pa. Cabinet members almost universally forego extremely good compensation in the private sector for miniscule pay while managing massive bureaucracies. Broadly, people in the top levels of the government (appointed or career bureaucrats) are not doing it for the money, but some combination of a sense of civic duty or a wish for recognition. While this isn't all bad, it does mean that comparisons to top earners in the private sector are somewhat misplaced.

"forced"
Actually, I stand by my language. If you're the CEO of a company that has massive amounts of cash riding on a decision about how to (legally) allocate profits and investment, you not only have the right but the fiduciary responsibility to deploy your company's capital in the most efficient way possible.