I don't know if the above fear would actually play out, nobody is willing to not make changes to find out.
High level management is fundamentally hard to stay on top of over time. It's about as easy as thinking chess is easy because you can theoretically know every move your opponent might make. There are so many moving parts to an organization that having visibility to them isnt enough to perform well. They have to influence most of the business pretty indirectly. If changing things gives you the confidence necessary to keep things running.. that's what you're going to do. Everything is a gamble, so doing nothing is kind of unacceptable leadership behavior unless they are actively taking up the mantle left by previous management and understand it very well already.
It's hard to keep a good (confident, ambitious) team from re-engineering. All the same dynamics apply: In your mind the disadvantages of change are small because you don't know them, but the advantages are large because you planned them. Making change gives you more control over your fate because you are executing your own plan as opposed to staying the course. Finally, how do you keep people motivated to show up every morning if you don't have a vision for change in the future?
I don't think its that different for managers and engineers. There's a lot pushing people to try something, even if the objective odds of success aren't great.
Management are contemporary clergy, spewing high minded ephemera, only to go home unable to point at anything net new left behind by their effort.
I grew up in farm land; we had no middle managers. Somehow food still got grown, harvested, and sold; somehow a Linux kernel and other wildly popular open source exists without them.
Post-WW industrialism needs to wind down. Militant minded people came home and forced their PTSD on workers. We spend a lot of resources equipping people to output nothing in deference to traditional economic memes. America of recent decades necessarily built itself into a production powerhouse to resupply a destroyed world. Such memes are outdated given automation and unsustainable given real material costs.
It's an area that is pretty tough to make meaningful criticism. its kind of a show dont tell type situation imo. If upper management seems under-qualified and overpaid to you, then maybe you have a calling to go perform better and get paid more.
Company management is in underdeveloped game-theory territory. Sure we can isolate one part of their job and describe how they are failing on it, but we dont know the trade-offs being made on a daily basis with their time and focus. a lot of which is going to be company secrets, if it even leaves their personal thoughts. Any criticism that comes down to saying "they should have done more" is likely out-of-touch, for example. Unless you can prove they were actually being lazy.. which is usually not the case, since they are often workaholics (ime). But we usually cant tell if something is a good move or not until it plays out on the market. So making criticisms based on hindsight is weak, as is making criticism that lack the full picture of the organizations goals and the time / energy they actually have on hand to accomplish them
CEO is a very general job role. I dont understand your point with the painters. That would be an operations issue, so I actually wouldnt criticize the CEO of the painting company at all for it. thanks to him/her, I was able to contact a painting company, they showed up, they painted the apartment, and left. I would think the operations team (the painters) deserve to be fired and held accountable for claiming they know how to paint a room when they clearly didn't. Nothing about their job is general or consists of trade-offs. If I said "you only have 10 minutes to paint the room and then leave" then yeah, it might come out like shit and the "excuses" would be valid. which is the kind of time pressure CEO's are often under with respect to things they are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.
i would hold the CEO responsible with respect to resolving the issue and refunding me, etc, since the CEO role is to be responsible for the outcomes of the company.. but he's not the one painting the room. Just like with any company, the CEO does not literally run the company. If service is poor, it is usually because people are finding their way past hiring filters to get jobs they aren't qualified for. Let's not forget that people everywhere are often advised to lie their way into employment, fake it till you make it, baffle them with bullshit, reword your resume to sound more impressive, etc. These people line the mechanisms that CEO's use to accomplish anything at any company.
Of course, the CEO position is no exception to this and I am not saying it is literally impossible to build a case against a CEO. I am saying it needs to fully encompass the position or else you're likely assigning criticism to the CEO for some culmination of lower level operational incompetence that they simply failed to overcome. If a director over-promises to the CEO and the CEO signs off on the basis of trust with the director, then when the bar is not met later of course the CEO will be held responsible but the reality of fault sits with the director, or maybe a subordinate to the director who convinced the director that the over-promise was doable. You then have to get into the weeds of whether or not there were signs the CEO should have seen as to not trust the director, or if they had reason to overrule the directors approach, etc. you then have to do similar things across all areas of the company to derive a valid criticism that the CEO is the common denominator in it all.
Leadership is significantly harder to criticize appropriately than operations. Personally, I would like to stop reading meaningless criticisms from people who want to complain and be heard but dont want to do the work necessary to make a valid complaint.
So if had a horribly painted room that you just paid extremely well to have completed, and the painters came up to you and gave you a laundry list of reasons that they failed... Would you hold off on criticizing them until you had a complete understanding of what it takes to be a painter?
trying to use painting as an analogous situation like that isnt transferable to the point i am making though. Putting the excuses in their mouth doesnt even make sense. We are presupposing that the painters did a horrible job.. while discussing how to decide whether or not a CEO did a horrible job. The only reason you know the painters did a bad job is because we are saying they did. the only reason we can use painting as an example is because most people can imagine a terrible paint job. i.e. we do have a full scope understanding of what it takes to be a painter. I am saying it is much harder to imagine the role of a CEO and what good results would look like than it is a painter.
Maybe my wording was fuzzy, but I am not saying you need a complete understanding of the CEO's role, but it does need to be of full scope. I see that reads near synonymous, so in other words it may be infeasible to account for the total depth of their role, but at the very least the entire breadth of the role should be looked at. If you default to "i gave you a lot of money to make it happen so it should be perfect" type logic; you're just being a "karen". the cost of something has nothing to do with the results, directly. Money needs to be converted into something that helps the work, and in that process we are all still limited by reality; diminishing returns, supply chains, quality of communication, availability of resources, etc. A CEO is at the focal point of all of this, and is human. Whether they get paid nothing or everything doesnt change how effective they can reasonably be.
But they do deserve criticism. it just needs a lot of work to do it right. you have to provide some sort of evidence that across all scopes of work the trade-offs do not make sense. maybe the CEO sacrifices on every front in order to provide the fastest service in the business and is successful in that. If you leave speed of delivery out of your criticism it becomes a meaningless criticism. "They charge a lot for poor quality". "These painters did a terrible job.. (even though I called them this morning, and they were done by lunch which allowed me to do a walk through with a potential tenant)".
All i'm really trying to emphasize is that we absolutely can criticize a CEO, but if you dont do it properly it is very easily washed away by the many unknowns of the position. however, if it is done right - it would be very damning as they cant default to company policy or directives from above as a scapegoat since they are the ones creating such things.
This is a bullshit reason based on jealousy, not reason.
> when those actions can have a negative effect on those below them and even to the external environment
This is the real reason it’s fair to be very critical of their maneuvers.
Reality is not zero sum, but neither are resources infinite. Is it really bullshit to critique more thoroughly that to which more of the finite resources are dedicated?
this kind of aligns with my point tbh. We give $10 critiques to million dollar positions as if they hold weight.
If this is trully BS, then allow lead developers to write checks for their whole team using the company's bank account.
they hold power in organisation, they can increase their own renumeration in a way that's rank and file staff cannot. Executive compensation has skyrocketed in the past 20 years.
If their management is ineffective, then they don't deserve top comopensation.
Satya: 1992, CEO in in 2014 Tim: 1998, CEO in ~2009 Sundar: 2004, CEO in 2015 Andy: 1997, CEO in 2021 Ted: 2000, CEO in 2020
They were all senior executives well before assuming their CEO roles.