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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

You're right but that's gross competence, not gross incompetence. The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy. Most of the time the two coincide, but sometimes they don't. The CEO works for the board of directors/shareholders, not for the employees.

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This sort of bullshit is exactly what causes companies to go downhill. Strong leadership would have handled these layoffs much, much differently, to say nothing to the fact that a good CEO should have been able to avoid them entirely.

Riccitiello needs to go. As another commenter put it, Unity is too important of a product for its stewards to be languishing like this.

Not disagreeing with you, but I still think that it doesn't go hard enough to the point of "strong leadership." And I consider leadership here to be not just the CEO but all of the top-level management.

Wouldn't strong leadership have prevented the need for layoffs at all?

> The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy

lol. keep pissing off employees and see how long you can 'keep the firm going'.

that mindset makes no damn sense.

Who said anything about keeping on doing that? It is not the right thing most of the time.

It's a very short term perspective. No employee is going to believe this CEO about anything important anymore, in this company or his next. So the disconnect between employees and CxOs grows, and decision making gets decoupled from reality.

> The job of the CEO is to keep the firm going, not to make employees happy.

Sociopathic CEOs actually believe this. Maintaining employee morale is crucial to the long term health of a company. Ignore it and you suffer a slow death from brain drain and disaffected employees. "They pretend to care about us, I pretend to care about my job."

CEO can jump ship.

Sociopathic CEOs are also very persuasive with these arguments, making most employees believe it is a necessary sacrifice. And, as is evident, these CEOs put themselves in a trolley dilemmas all the time, instead of being honest and transparent (too proud narcissists) avoiding those all together.

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