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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> This focus has a devastating impact on the lives of CEOs... Leaders deserve to be happy too... solving the problems starts with communication... we need to wage war on this picture

A whole article about how hard CEOs have it, and not a single mention of CEO pay or the ongoing efforts to even get reporting of CEO pay ratios?

I mean I agree that CEOs get a ridiculous amount of stress and an unfair share of credit and blame, but if we want to fix it, I wouldn't start with platitudes like 'why don't we talk more', I'd start by paying CEOs less.

> The result is that a startling 100% of CEOs report that they suffer from stress and, according to research by Apollo Life, one in four say they struggle with insomnia.

Yeah, 100% of the population suffers from stress too. And I just googled it: 30% of the population suffers from insomnia. LOL.

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Pretty funny isn't it. Seeing the cult of the CEO in an article about the cult of the CEO. Cultural changes always need time.

> I'd start by paying CEOs less.

I would say that it's a good thing that you're not king then...

And no, the stress of C level jobs does not compare to the mean like you would have it.

I agree that the stress level of C jobs does not compare to the mean. It must be nice not to have to stress about a mortgage, kids college, affordable healthcare and all the other things that ordinary people in western society struggle with.

I think a lot of people would trade stressing about their families financial well being with the needs of the shareholders. I'm not saying it is not a tough job but at the end of the day I don't think CEOs stress compares to regular middle class people just trying to get by.

A C-level (at least an honest, non-sociopathic, non-clueless one) will stress about the mortgage, kids college, affordable healthcare and all the other things of his or her thousands of employees, since actions at that level impact all of the above. With great power comes great responsibility...

I've just watched the head of a company I know hire 4 employees out of his own pocket in a shell company to do nothing, after the company where they were all employed went bankrupt. He couldn't afford more than that. He hired them a few months later in his new job. This kind of leadership doesn't make it to Business Insider or Tech Crunch.

You don't know what you're talking about. CEOs have mortgages, healthcare, and families to worry about. They also have a handful of very demanding, very intimidating investors to please, to each of whom they owe millions, they have employees that are constantly getting poached, they have users that are shitting on their product online.

At large, people are terrible. CEOs are working with these terrible, dumb, rude, and sometimes harmful people to get them to invest, to work, to be productive, to just help get a product out the door. And if they don't get products out the door - If companies do not succeed - You can say goodbye to your nation. We are built on the fruits of technology-selling companies through and through; our wealthy nations do not come from nowhere, someone has to do the work, and CEOs are all doing the work in addition to family, healthcare, and mortgage woes.

I was about to fly off the handle until I realised your sarcasm.

It's not sarcasm

Care to elaborate at all?

I am a C-level in my own company. It has been wildly stressful. But it's also more fulfilling than any other job I've had because it's mine, I do overtime to fix my mistakes and not other people's mistakes.

The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything is because CEOs as a group have negotiated their compensation and sold themselves as bringing 350x more value to a company than the average employee. If you do that, you're going to get called upon to prove it at some point.

The undue stress is literally caused by the undue compensation, they go hand in hand. If you want to reduce one, you have to reduce the other.

FWIW, I never said C level jobs compare to the mean stress wise, and I even stated that I agree CEOs suffer ridiculous amounts of stress. I pointed out that more of the population suffers insomnia than CEOs according to the article. That's funny; the article was trying to make it sound like CEOs have disproportionate amounts of insomnia, but it turns out the actual numbers for the population are higher than the numbers the article states for CEOs. If you'd care to disagree with that, feel free to cite a source. Here's mine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978319/

As you saw I didn't say anything about insomnia. That was lazy reporting.

I think we have a faulty premise at play (or just a disagreement.)

> The main reason that CEOs have extra stress and get extra blame and get looked at to solve everything

Is because they are CEOs. The buck stops with them.

Care to elaborate at all?

That wasn't lazy reporting, the article made an intentional and consistent series of assertions intended to paint the CEOs life as unduly difficult compared to other people, insomnia is a conscious part of that narrative.

What is lazy reporting, in my opinion, is completely ignoring the issue of CEO compensation. Even if you agree with current CEO compensation trends, it still needs to be addressed. If you get paid more, you should expect to stress more. If not, then why not? Why should someone making 1M not expect 10x more stress than someone making 100k? There may be reasons, but you should articulate them if you want to be taken seriously.

EDIT: scratch that, my writing is lazy. :P I speculate that ignoring compensation was also intentional, not lazy.

> Is because they are CEOs. The buck stops with them.

Then a commensurate amount of stress comes with the job, does it not? Your point here opposes what the article says, that a company is a team effort and not an individual contribution. So I don't understand, what are you arguing for? You want to have CEOs continue to take ultimate responsibility, but not have to have as much stress? How? Or you want them to continue averaging 350x the pay of employees and also continue to have more stress? Can you have it both ways? Why?

The effort to get pay ratio reporting of CEOs to be standard - something I alluded to - is something the SEC is currently considering rolling back. Do you believe pay ratio reporting is a reasonable goal? Do you believe that the US average CEO pay ratios are trending in the right direction?

No, I do not believe that there should be a linear relationship between compensation and stress.

And no, I didn't make a an original post about the article. I'm just addressing compensation.

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