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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

Why would he? He's doing the job he's paid to do, which includes managing downsizing when it's appropriate.

Because he's responsible for the fact they need to do this?

This email is basically:

Oh dear we're in a tight spot, no idea how we got here, it's a mystery! I guess someone (definitely not me!) ran the business in a way that demonstrated an appalling understanding of our market, our customers, and the macro climate, and a fundamental carelessness with investor money and employee livelihoods. Don't worry though, that person was definitely not me, so I'm the right person to lead us out of this.

p.s. look shiny severance packages!!!

p.p.s. Once again, that person was not me, so there shouldn't be any consequences for me, other than a bunch of easily impressed tech workers giving me praise for the severance package.

It's the CEO/leader's job to make these decisions and to course correct when he's made a mistake. Publicly admonishing himself is, at best, a pointless display of virtue signaling. He could write 10 pages groveling for forgiveness from his employees and the public, but people would complain about that too.

I suspect the overall CEO compensation package for a company the size and structure of Lattice is trivial compared to other expenses.

> people would complain about that too.

I mean, are we certain of that? Maybe someone should try it first.

One could sit and read 10 pages of groveling for forgiveness but it still won't replace the paycheck that's going away. It would likely be about as effective as a spouse begging for forgiveness after getting caught in a multi-year affair.

The board and investors and remaining employees don't need an apology. They need better leadership, or they need performance management of the current leadership with actual consequences, as they would rightly expect for any other failing employee.

I'm not suggesting he publicly admonish himself or take a "virtue signalling" pay cut or something. I'm suggesting the board fire him or other parts of leadership for cause, and hire people who make better decisions.

Presumably the board have considered that course of action and decided against it. It’s just possible that they have access to information that you don’t, and so have come to a different conclusion.

Totally plausible. The credulous awarding of PR points by tech workers on HN whenever a blog post describing severance > $0 is even more stupid without that information asymmetry in mind.

You are framing it like this company exists in vacuum and can ignore all external factors. And that is clearly not the case. They decided to regroup and downsize during tougher times, that's all.

I think the "CEO pay should be cut for layoffs" comments come from a misunderstanding of how CEO pay differs between public companies and VC-backed companies.

A VC backed CEO is usually paid a lower salary than the average software developer. Their biggest pay is by owning a lot of equity that's on a standard vesting schedule. Cutting their salary would be entirely performative. And clawing back equity is difficult and only matters is the company does well.

A public company CEO is usually not the founder. They're compensated with stock bonuses (that can be almost immediately liquidated) based on performance, as well as a large salary.

I think forgoing a bonus when you're the CEO and doing layoffs would be great. Unfortunately, that goes against the interest of the CEO and investors

Not stealing goes against the interest of the pirate.

The other part that rubs me the wrong way, some? "We will continue to offer you the Invest in your People fund, where we might invest $100K in your startup".

"We have to lay 15% of you off, but don't worry, we can still find $100K's all over to speculatively invest in startups"...

Yeah, I don't get the lust for blood that people have like clockwork whenever layoffs occur and the CEO is forthright about taking the blame. Would it be better if they handled it like Elon [1]? I don't recall people wondering aloud if Elon took a pay cut when that happened. Do we really think this is preferable to layoffs like Lattice, or Coinbase, or Stripe, and wish this style was more of the norm?

[1] https://www.kron4.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2022/11/tw...

Because the CEOs usually stay rich and the people who lose their jobs don't. And there's no rule stating that the CEO has to make 1000x what other people do. If you want to keep it that way, good on you. Some folks want something different and so they hold executives to a different standard!

Read the letter again. This CEO is absolutely not forthright about taking the blame. He doesn't even speculate about root causes, much less assign blame. He describes the problem...

"While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place."

...but nowhere does he talk about why these things happened.

He literally uses the passive voice top avoid taking responsibility ("our organization was built" not "I built").

You come away with the feeling this is a good letter in which he takes responsibility because he distracts you by spending the rest of the letter describing the details of the severance offer, which is completely orthogonal to the issue of root causes and responsibility.

I'll acknowledge you're correct (if slightly cynical) and I'm being naive (if optimistic). This is an interesting area that deserves further scrutiny and research -- I don't pretend to have the answer.

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