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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it would be a terrible idea. CEOs are already incredibly short sighted, neglecting long-term disasters for short-term gains. Sometimes it seems as though CEOs aren't able to see beyond the next quarterly earnings report. Having a limit would incentivize running the company into the ground to get the highest quarterly profit possible. What do they care? Someone else will be CEO next year.

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Maybe tying their severance, retirement package or stock options to the performance to the companies long term growth would help alleviate that problem.

It is possible to combine term-limits with a long share-vesting period in order to (potentially) reap the best of both strategies.

But surely if CEOs had term limits then the good ones would be jumping from one company to another, so if they think too short term then no board would hire them.

Boards would hire the CEOs that set the next one up for success.

Kinda like how term limits for the us president doesn’t usually result in that type of behavior since it would screw over their party.

That only works if you assume high-quality objectively-understandable information.

Boards are the ones hiring the bad CEOs now. They're not equipped to tell the difference, even when they're not actively colluding to juice the short-term share prices so they can get out with a yachtload of money.

The terms could be 5 years long, and re-electable.

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