The size of the cuts in bonus feels low in absolute terms (800K AUD across all the execs in total), but it is better accountability than any organization in America when it comes to breaches.
guiambros 24 hours ago [-]
Indeed. This should be a standard set by every board: depending on the size of the data breach, the cut on executive salaries goes from 10 all the way to to 50% -- including bonus and stock comp.
I bet you we'd drastically reduce the number of companies get hacked overnight.
antonvs 16 hours ago [-]
> I bet you we'd drastically reduce the number of companies get hacked overnight.
The problem is that execs and companies in general don’t know how to achieve that. A great deal of security work at companies is cargo cult stuff designed to meet vague and largely irrelevant standards, without any real engagement with what’s happening in the company’s actual systems.
This is not the kind of problem that can be solved simply by motivating the kind of execs that have been allowed to succeed at today’s companies.
franga2000 11 hours ago [-]
The flip side is true, however: the problem can not be solved without motivating the execs.
At the end of the day, if the pile of cash they take home at the end of the day isn't inversely proportional to the number of people they fucked over, the best case is they don't care and the worst case is they'll notice that there's money to be saved (and therefore transfered to their pile) by fucking people over and do it even more.
Note that I didn't just say "number of people whose data was leaked" - the same thing applies to other ways of fucking over your users or even employees. Aligning execs' inventives usually isn't the whole solution, but it usually is a necessary part of the solution.
bigiain 20 hours ago [-]
Note too, if you read far enough onto the article, Hudson got a "short term bonus cut" of $250,000 - but in the same time period her base salary went up by $1.9 million dollars.
This is just bullshit media-spin.
> Qantas has slashed short-term bonuses for its senior leadership
> Group CEO Vanessa Hudson will see her pay slashed by A$250,000
> the annual report shows that Qantas’ senior leadership salaries were higher than the year-ago period, despite the bonus cuts. Hudson’s annual salary, for example, stood at around A$6.3 million, higher than the A$4.4 million in the previous financial year.
gaanbal 23 hours ago [-]
when you're making 6 million a year, a 250k cut is inconsequential
my guess is they're doing this to make people feel like they're taking accountability
tgsovlerkhgsel 22 hours ago [-]
It's a lot more accountability than the usual hollow phrases with zero actual consequences, and could be sufficient to actually encourage taking this more seriously.
seb1204 23 hours ago [-]
This is not Qantas first breach. A good step but too little too late in my opinion.
declan_roberts 22 hours ago [-]
The correct response is not to cut executive pay, it's to dramatically increase SWE/Secops/Devops pay and stop outsourcing everything.
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
No, accountability is the correct way to incentivize a high level of diligence. Paying engineers more doesn’t by itself do that.
bigiain 20 hours ago [-]
Yep.
Don't cut executive pay. Put executives in jail.
I'll bet that if Qantas ever get fined for this data breach, the fine/penalties will cost the company less than the increase in senior leadership salaries for that year.
itake 21 hours ago [-]
I’m skeptical. Ive never seen a situation where tech workers intentionally created low quality work because they didn’t like they pay they agreed to work for…
Usually, it would be a skill issue that could only be solved by additional training or churning headcount.
adt 20 hours ago [-]
Indeed.
>One thing that programmers don’t care about. They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things... You do have to pay competitively, but all said, of all the things that programmers look at in deciding where to work, as long as the salaries are basically fair, they will be surprisingly low on their list of considerations, and offering high salaries is a surprisingly ineffective tool in overcoming problems like the fact that programmers get 15″ monitors and salespeople yell at them all the time and the job involves making nuclear weapons out of baby seals.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to-d...
itake 18 hours ago [-]
I think programmers (especially post levels.fyi, r/careeradvice, and blind) care a lot more about TC than in 2006, but if people are upset about pay, they leave. They don't intentionally skip authentication steps as a silent protest for being paid lower than they want to.
jiggawatts 22 hours ago [-]
No, the correct response is to use even cheaper outsourcers, but force them to jump through at least a dozen VPN, MFA, PIM, and PSM hoops before landing on a server that has half a dozen security agents slowing it down to a speed that can be best described as "cold molasses" with every packet in and out both triple encrypted and somehow magically "inspected" by an advanced firewall that runs on industrial quantities of snake oil.
anonymars 21 hours ago [-]
It was my day off man, why you gotta be like that <eye twitches>
jiggawatts 21 hours ago [-]
The total executive pay cut is less than 10c per affected customer.
Their pay rise for the year is greater than the cut.
In other words, they gave themselves a smaller bonus increase this year.
Not "no bonus".
Not "no bonus increase"
A smaller increase in the bonus.
The French chopped their aristocrats' heads off in an era of smaller income inequality than we're seeing in western countries today.
sandworm101 24 hours ago [-]
Incorrect title. Article states "the Australian carrier says it is cutting the executive bonuses by 15% for the fiscal year." That is not 15% of pay. That is 15% of bonuses, which do not represent all pay.
cadamsdotcom 23 hours ago [-]
Agreed. In the submitted title, the word “pay” should be swapped for “bonuses”.
I bet you we'd drastically reduce the number of companies get hacked overnight.
The problem is that execs and companies in general don’t know how to achieve that. A great deal of security work at companies is cargo cult stuff designed to meet vague and largely irrelevant standards, without any real engagement with what’s happening in the company’s actual systems.
This is not the kind of problem that can be solved simply by motivating the kind of execs that have been allowed to succeed at today’s companies.
At the end of the day, if the pile of cash they take home at the end of the day isn't inversely proportional to the number of people they fucked over, the best case is they don't care and the worst case is they'll notice that there's money to be saved (and therefore transfered to their pile) by fucking people over and do it even more.
Note that I didn't just say "number of people whose data was leaked" - the same thing applies to other ways of fucking over your users or even employees. Aligning execs' inventives usually isn't the whole solution, but it usually is a necessary part of the solution.
This is just bullshit media-spin.
> Qantas has slashed short-term bonuses for its senior leadership
> Group CEO Vanessa Hudson will see her pay slashed by A$250,000
> the annual report shows that Qantas’ senior leadership salaries were higher than the year-ago period, despite the bonus cuts. Hudson’s annual salary, for example, stood at around A$6.3 million, higher than the A$4.4 million in the previous financial year.
my guess is they're doing this to make people feel like they're taking accountability
Don't cut executive pay. Put executives in jail.
I'll bet that if Qantas ever get fined for this data breach, the fine/penalties will cost the company less than the increase in senior leadership salaries for that year.
Usually, it would be a skill issue that could only be solved by additional training or churning headcount.
>One thing that programmers don’t care about. They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things... You do have to pay competitively, but all said, of all the things that programmers look at in deciding where to work, as long as the salaries are basically fair, they will be surprisingly low on their list of considerations, and offering high salaries is a surprisingly ineffective tool in overcoming problems like the fact that programmers get 15″ monitors and salespeople yell at them all the time and the job involves making nuclear weapons out of baby seals. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to-d...
Their pay rise for the year is greater than the cut.
In other words, they gave themselves a smaller bonus increase this year.
Not "no bonus".
Not "no bonus increase"
A smaller increase in the bonus.
The French chopped their aristocrats' heads off in an era of smaller income inequality than we're seeing in western countries today.