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Comment by mcrae | Hacker News Reader

You’re assuming that there is a pool of hypothetical executives who are a) familiar with the industry, b) familiar with the company, c) available, and d) willing to earn an amount less than what the existing executives are offered here, and e) willing to take a very risky job that will likely end fairly shortly.

I’m not an expert but it seems like these people may not exist and that keeping the existing management on may be in the shareholders’ interest.

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Promote internally. That's what generally happens in the military under similar conditions.

Xenophon wrote about the march of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries whose officers were murdered by the Persians, inside Persia. They elected new officers, swearing to obey their orders, and fought their way out of Persia, returning the survivors to Greece.

Yes but... and I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but these executives haven't been murdered by Persians. They've just been paid a relatively trivial amount to do their jobs for a few months.

And who's to stay the internally-promoted folks will demand any less payment?

Anyways, sounds like you're just opposed to these payments fundamentally despite all of the rational arguments that have been elucidated in this thread in support of them.

He's arguing the support is nonsensical considering the facts. That you disagree is your opinion.

If you thought those internal candidates were better, why didn’t you promote them before?

Either you think they’re not, or you think that now you have evidence they are based on the fact that the current execs drove the thing to the brink. That’s a fair piece of data for a lot of cases, but I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of pandemic-shutdown-induced cases that we’re seeing now.

> If you thought those internal candidates were better, why didn’t you promote them before?

Bad judgment. I've seen plenty of capable people in management positions who get supplanted by outside hires installed above them. Sure, sometimes it does work out, but many many times it does not. The outside hire ends up pissing people off to the point where most of the high-performing talent (including the people who were passed over for promotion) leave, and the department goes down in flames. I've seen this happen firsthand quite a few times, and hear about it happening all the time.

If someone wasn’t thought to be good enough to be a manager in good times, why would they be good enough to be a manager when the company was in crisis?

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