Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

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Yup, I had a similar experience and what CEOs spend their time doing was vastly different than what I expected.

- Their calendar is often broken up into 15 minute meetings

- Lots of external meetings because a big part of the job is "being the face of the company"

- The 15 minute meetings are often just a final "sign off" on some important decision; CEO bring the company-level perspective and can highlight key issues identified by the board

- What a department might spend 3 months working on, the CEO often has to understand and make a decision on in 10 min (see prior HN post "how to communicate to executives")

- What people presenting to the CEO thought was important was often very different than what CEO thought was important (e.g. team thought product launch price was critical while CEO was worried about a $500M supplier contract that was in the final stages of negotiation and if this product launch could be leveraged to close the deal and save the company millions)

- The political side was very important; HN likes to think raw intellectual horsepower matters, but ability to communicate and "get people on your side" is at least 50% of a CEOs job; your idea might be brilliant but if you can't convince the sales team of it, your idea is worthless

> but ability to communicate and "get people on your side" is at least 50% of a CEOs job;

It's gotta be 50% of every job. Heck, even on open source projects, you need to be lucid and explain what you are doing.

Look no further than for example, the ANTS project, which has done some very cool work in the plan9 space but hasn't always gotten a good reception due to the author being somewhere between Terry A. Davis and a normal programmer. And it's in the communication that's key.

Very true, but instead of trying to sell your idea to a dozen team mates who understand the technical side, try and sell it to a 10,000 person company of sales, finance, marketing, plus board of directors and shareholders.

And many of these aren’t people who will shy away from telling you “no, if you do that I’ll just undermine your idea so my idea prevails”.

A lot of individual contributors probably don't appreciate just how massively scheduled the days of CEOs and other senior executives are. Want an hour to work something in private? It's going to have to be on a calendar. Traveling? Your meals are probably be mostly scheduled with customers, etc.

Many CEOs are, of course, very well compensated. But, whether or not you think it's extraordinarily difficult, it's certainly very demanding in terms of time and schedule.

In terms of quality, I mean, how many people have bad bosses who can't even manage a team of 5? In my experience, it's not always easy to find qualified people for those roles.

Now imagine some large company and I'm not that shocked that the pool of people who can effectively lead large (>10,000 employee) organizations is relatively small. It's basically a small subset of those who can lead small organizations.

And not to say unqualified people don't end up in those roles, they do. But generally I'd argue the qualifications of a CEO are likely as scarce as say the qualifications of a neurosurgeon or some other hyper-specialized technical role.

> prior HN post "how to communicate to executives"

Can you share a link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409842

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