Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

A lot of anger in the comments here. Not exactly sure who it's directed at: the existence of connected people? The founder who makes the bad hiring decision? The fact that their compensation is so high? All of the above?

Unless you're advocating for capped compensation or removing autonomy in who a founder is allowed to hire, if you're angry, it's probably a form of jealousy. It's somewhat natural to feel jealous at people who don't "work hard enough" (by your standards) and yet reap larger rewards than you. Or who have seemingly casual lives (by your standards), yet get more opportunities. It's also easy to pretend that jealousy is actually selfless outrage and claim offense against everyone else (for whom your outrage represents).

But the same could likely be said about you, if you talked to the right people. Where I used to live, "Go home, tech bro" was common graffiti to see. I knew a woman in the beauty industry whose partner was in the tech industry. She resented how much money that he made because, her words, "she worked harder than he did." As if her idea of work was how value should be calculated.

While your point about jealousy is a good one, MBA-ification is real and has real consequences, many of which might reasonably provoke frustration

I do agree the anger is ideally channeled into some attempt to productively frame, understand and solve the problem, but dismissing it all as sour grapes doesn't seem very helpful either

I saw the issue pithily summarized recently:

> Salesmen, in any field other than sales, are like an invasive species who outcompete the natives with their superior social polish, but who struggle to actually do anything, which leads to systemic underperformance and the erosion of trust, which only makes the competitive necessity of salesmanship even greater

We need to build social systems which don't select preferentially for relentless salespeople and smooth talking charlatans if we want to live in a prosperous, harmonious society. The optimal proportion of these is in all likelihood not zero, but does anyone believe it's as high as we see now?

>We need to build social systems which don't select for relentless salespeople and smooth talking charlatans if we want to live in a prosperous, harmonious society. The optimal proportion of these is in all likelihood not zero, but does anyone believe it's as high as we see now?

I see the good intentions here, but I don't really support it. Would I like people to lie and cheat less? Yes. Would I like a society where nobody can lie and cheat? No, because of what that enforcement would entail.

Agreed, it's better to tolerate some amount of abuse than eliminate every potential for it by force. I just think it's possible to find a better balance than we have now, if not imperative if we want to survive civilizational adolescence

Without fail, there is always one comment on HN that is faux-insightful but really just being contrarian towards the general tone of other comments without much substance.

You don't need to advocate for capped compensation or removing autonomy to be righteously angry over inept leadership. You should be angry over inept leadership, it's essentially corruption, and hurts everyone else in the organization. I don't even know what the point of this comment is.

You responded to my point about about capped compensation or removing autonomy, so I think you understand what my point is: the anger people are expressing, including so-called "righteous anger," is totally hypocritical unless you are advocating for measures that would also apply to you. If you're not willing to commit to those measures, then you're just expressing jealousy that it's not you in that situation.

But why does capped compensation help? The issue is not that people are highly paid, but that undeserving, corrupt, and even fraudulent people are highly paid. Capped compensation may well be a good idea (not sure), but it doesn't really help with corruption and incompetence. The point is that there are already double standards that apply to the average worker, but less so to the C-suite (particularly in startups).

I don't think it would be accurate to consider my anger over the CEO who awarded themselves a $25M bonus while laying off hundreds of my colleagues and tanking the company to be "jealousy".

Edit: I apologize for the aggressive tone in the original reply, though I disagree with your take it wasn't necessary.

Thanks for keeping it civil, I appreciate it! The capped compensation is for the "they're paid too much" angle. Removing autonomy in hiring is for the "they're undeserving/corrupt" angle. That way there's a different process for hiring that isn't corrupted by nepotism/cronyism.

I'm not trying to sound like I'm discrediting your experience or feelings, but I only really have your side of what happened, so of course your experience will sound justified from your perspective. There's a lot of possibilities for why that could have happened, not including ones that nobody could know about except upper management.

I may be wrong about my assessment of the leadership's competence in this case (I'm not, but I can see how you may not be able to know) but that doesn't mean jealousy is the motive. Your skepticism should be equally applied to the psychological motives of the commenters, in my opinion.

I'd absolutely commit to measures like more transparency and objectivity in hiring criteria, and of course that would apply to me as well. I've got nothing but contempt for the "senior developers" of HN who think writing fizzbuzz or coding on a whiteboard is beneath them; I have zero problem with being asked to demonstrate the concrete skills that I'm bringing to a position (and if that means I get beaten to the punch by someone with a less impressive degree/CV who happens to be better at the actual work, well, them's the breaks). I just wish the same applied at the top as well.

No it’s just years of watching some average guy make millions for literally nothing

How is this not jealousy?

If being angry at incompetent people being paid too much is jealousy I have no problems with it.

Jealously would imply wanting to be that guy? By that definition I for one would be jealous of a Mega Millions winner (although I probably shouldn't be) but would not be jealous of a good-for-nothing exec who accomplished nothing other than collecting huge paycheck while letting a bunch of people down who all put their trust in them.

Even though I think some people are jealous there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be mad. Often highly paid people are where they are due to nepotistic inertia. It's extra infuriating because they all pretend it's merit, and those that admit there's a broken system that enables their wealth ignore any personal responsibility for it's existence. Everyone else is working the system after all, don't want to be left behind. In general many (most?) highly paid people are in that position because of a system of exploitation that they're tacitly involved in and turn a blind eye to. So yeah, plenty of reasons to be mad.

At a startup the most common failure mode I've seen is hiring someone who, even if they were good at there last job at BiggerCo, is terrible at what the startup (in a different business development stage) needs.

Hiring a person who's been running a thousand-person org to take over a 1-10 person org is often insanity, but it can look smart because "wow, they were doing so much at such a successful place and have so many great stories to share." Run a 1000-person org and after all, even if you suck, some of your sub-departments are likely to hit on some great results that you can share in future interviews!

As a worker, I create wealth. There is also a parasitic class of heirs who are LPs for VCs, or who get dividend, rent and interest checks - rentiers expropriating surplus labor time of those who work. Yes, my attitude towards them is about what Lenin's were for the tsar and his parasitical family.

I can care less what those who are parasites off my labor think of me, and their cadre who somehow benefit off this paraditism. Workers work, create wealth and have no need of these parasites. Yes we resent them, and will eventually eliminate this parasitism.

Is the management of workers and capital not work? Where can I see workers who have self-organized (without management) to the size of a thousand-person corporation?

We live in a society ... where humans do human things. Cronyism, nepotism, and tribalism are normal human behaviors, regardless of how some people think humans should behave. Our fellow humans are under no obligation to surpass humanity and behave altruistically. I think a more useful question is how do we utilize or exploit our human behavior to improve ourselves and our societies.

I doubt that most people here are angry about this. For me, at least, my anger arises from the opportunity cost.

First, if you spend a lot of money (and time) supporting a dud executive then you you’ve lost a bunch of runway. These people are often in a position to put startups into a death spiral from which they will never recover.

So it follows that as a founder that idea is dead - it’s almost impossible to restart. If you’ve put your heart and soul into a business, spent a year raising funds and putting a team together, and then some bozo is parachuted into a position of authority and proceeds to throws all your hard work out the window as they miss their own targets and crash into the terrain, yeah that’s gonna make you pretty pissed off because you won’t get that opportunity ever again.

It’s not about jealousy. It’s about the destruction of value.

If growing a startup into a successful business was a solved problem, then there wouldn't be as many failures. My point is: why does their appear to be an assumption that only a "dud" exec fails? Where is the allowance for the fact that there are a lot of random variables?

Don't get me wrong, I know executives make poor decisions (and have seen a few myself first hand), but also I've seen decisions that nobody knew were right or not (or at least they didn't say so, at the time). Yet if it failed, of course the armchair quarterbacks come out with the "I told you so."

I don't think that's the assumption at all. Failure can - and does - happen to everyone, and doesn't on its own imply incompetence. We all make bad assumptions and bad projections, and that's part of the game.

But an incompetent executive will avoid making decisions altogether, and will pretend to lead by setting goals that are entirely detached from reality.

In my experience, the lack of decision making and inappropriate goal setting is quite obvious to those of us "in the trenches". You can't, for example, expect to triple your sales in the next quarter unless you're doing something to support that goal, like increasing the size of the sales team or doing more marketing. But I have worked for people who have set sales targets thinking that this is all that's needed to make sales. These people are good at talking about the "what" but no good at working out the "how".

There is strategic thinking, tactical thinking and wishful thinking. Incompetent executives generally operate using the latter framework.

I think there's justified anger on the part of people who have seen companies they enjoy working at be damaged, either in culture or in more direct results by a poor C-level hire, and most people have experienced situations where this has been abundantly clear from the outset.

It's completely reasonable to want to see a company you work for succeed, and it's completely reasonable to be frustrated when those companies make obviously bad decisions that put your job in jeopardy or make the company a worse place to work for. Particularly with startups, a lot of your career success is fairly closely tied to the success of the companies you work for (no one cares about hiring a eng or other role from a startup who crashed and burned).

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