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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Honest question - what do you expect it to look like beside making the statement and giving employees a more than gracious severance package to back up the words?

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He goes and asks an executive recruitment firm to find a successor and spends more time on the board.

Yeah it sounds tough but if he'd hired a guy who oversaw what's just happened, he would have fired him.

When you actually take responsibklity and accountsbility in the real world and not the bs world of C-suite executives, it means there are consequences for you. Might mean he steps down from his position, it might mean he gets a his compensation package cut, it might mean something else. But it means more than empty words.

I mean, if you get into a minor car accident, taking responsibility basically means paying for damage to the car. To me it seems like taking responsibility for hiring too many people by ensuring a nice severance package and paying for access to external hiring consultants for people who want it, is pretty analogous to how ordinary people take responsibility when they accidentally do something that wrongs someone else i.e. They try and fix the effects of the wrong.

Taking responsibility means trying to make it right. It doesn't mean taking a hit personally, unless that hit helps make the situation right.

He's not personally paying for those severance packages. Is this really that hard to understand?

Does it matter as long as he is the cause of them getting compensated?

Vengence isn't the same as justice. If you care more about zuck personally hurting than laid off employees being compensated, you are after the former not the latter.

To use the car accideny analogy - do you also think its a cop out for people to have insurance?

he's taken a major hit to his personal wealth as a consequence of this bad decision, so I'd say the consequences are pretty real for him

I guess in an ideal world, the board removes him as CEO?

Why? He is making a correct decision from the business point of view, it is unclear who will be the replacement CEO, and there are similar layoffs across other tech companies. The board has zero incentive of changing the CEO now.

This decision might be correct but the previous one was wrong. In his own words:

"I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected."

So, keep him to downsize the company and replace him when it's time to start growing again?

It's evidently clear now, his "correct decision from a business point of view" to increase investments during Covid was wrong as they resulted in these 11,000 people being let go. I think the same could be said for the increased investment in metaverse, which I imagine is predicated on the prior large growth of people moving online during Covid, which is now returning to the mean.

I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?

(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)

This decision is correct, given all the incorrect strategic decisions he made leading up to it. The markets have clearly lost a lot of confidence in his leadership, and I would have to imagine the remaining employees have too. Stepping down would be a drastic step, but merely stating “I take responsibility” is unlikely on its own to restore confidence in his ability to right the ship either.

He has the majority of the voting shares so it's rightfully his decision.

I would expect that he doesn't say he would take responsibility if that doesn't mean anything at all.

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