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Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

The real question is: does the CEO take full responsibility?

I mean, it’s a funny joke. But this attitude only upsets people who thought jobs were not transactional. Kind of reminds me of stories by people who paid for sex and found out the sex worker didn’t want to cuddle afterwards.

Someone could have an entirely transactional understanding of their job but assume that - alongside many implicit elements of that transaction - there's a component of through-line longevity.

I mean it's not like the sex worker spends the entire session talking about how they're all in it together and they're a team and then at the end releases a public statement about how difficult the decision not to cuddle was for them.

Except the sex workers often literally offer the girlfriend experience, which is, arguably, exactly that, a "make believe" relationship for some agreed time.

Thank God they don't use the 'We're family" angle like companies do ... xD

NB: I'm just playing along for fun, never been involved in any way with sex work or sex workers.

> But this attitude only upsets people who thought jobs were not transactional

It's entirely possible to believe your job is transactional while expecting accountability for all underperforming colleagues, at all levels. Rather than just the rank-and-file.

This is why it is important to fire people who push regressions to production. Accountability is important!

Maybe? Depends on the severity of the regression, how much it cost, whether there was negligence or carelessness involved etc. And arguably you'd first fire the person who set up a process that allows regressions to be pushed to prod so easily.

Underperformance is not a single mistake. It's a pattern of behaviors that compound.

A CEO looking at the economic climate of 2020-2021 and thinking they needed to hire to support the growth in demand for their products is not being negligent, they simply lacked the crystal ball that would have told them the Fed was going to slam the brakes on the economy last year. Even the Fed said they wouldn't be doing that. In light of what's happened, companies need to get leaner to survive.

Now if these CEOs don't manage to turn the ship around in the next couple years it probably is in fact time to look for a replacement.

Who in their right mind thought interest rates would stay that low and inflation wouldn't eventually catch up?

Jerome Powell

What's the point in paying people tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if they make the same predictions and bad decisions as everyone else? And have exactly one contingency plan if things go sideways? Which is also everyone else's plan btw and not even a very good one. They hired in a seller's market for talent, and are now firing in a buyer's market.

You could hypothetically have a CEO that was good in a period of economic expansion but poor in a period of economic contraction. By the time you figure out you have one of these CEOs at the helm, it's probably too late to do much about it. And any replacement CEO you bring in is all the more likely to make drastic cuts to cost centers (headcount).

Yep, we just had this happen with a newer staff member. When we contacted the primary maintainer of the regressed system, they replied “you need to overwrite XYZ binary/config files using the backup build from ABC machine after patching”… like how is this suitable for a prod scenario? We’d have been foolish to fire the new staff member who technically pushed the regression.

Sounds like a lack of accountability. Heads must roll.

The very idea of separating humanity from the system we live in will never sit right with me. Jobs are purely transactional on paper, sure, but in the end, we're not _just_ dealing with jobs, but people and their livelihoods. We're simply lucky enough to be in a field where saving up and building a financial security cushion is doable.

In practice, accountability only seems to go up so far. I shortly did consulting for a company that did large layoffs in early COVID days. The board played the "we take responsibility" card, cut in their own salaries, but scratch a little bit under the fresh coat of paint and most of the board's income isn't that mostly symbolic salary. The ones effectively paying the price were the file and rank, as usual.

I think it could be a bit easier to think of things this way if there were a stronger social safety net, especially in the USA.

Also I think the scale of the company you work at has an impact on this. The larger the company, the less personal treatment I would expect.

what about accountability to the people who took a risk investing in the company?

maybe the CEO didn't predict the future however many months or years ago to get to a point where no layoffs would've been necessary, but maybe this would've been at the cost of less growth, possibly having worse consequences

the idea of "humanity" is completely opaque, it's not that hard to look at the reality instead

"The reality" is jobs = people. We don't live in a vacuum. It's seriously not that hard either. Between the hundreds of thousands of regular people losing their livelihoods and some investors losing money ("don't invest what you can't afford to lose" something something), doesn't sound too complicated for me.

Humanity is not opaque unless you make it so, like this particular system does. It's just people.

if you don't have money to pay employees then they're out of a job, and if you don't grow you don't get investors and don't hire people

please explain how "humanity" solves this

It’s called “Japan”. Low performers are kept in corporations to do nothing all day while many of their peers work themselves to death.

Are you implying 100000+ people getting laid off in a handful of months merely is about weeding off "underperformers"?

No, I’m saying that not laying anyone off ever isn’t a good idea.

Termination and layoff are two very different things. You typically don't layoff people for incompetence, you fire them.

Humanity solves this by having an entrepreneur that just wants to have a business up & running in a sustainable, bootstrapped way, that will give jobs to X people earning Y in salary, while the founder in the long run will earn 5-7Y salary. Instead of having founders that want to be billionaires with VC money in a 5 years time-frame. There is still risk, and a business might fail and jobs be lost, but the scale is different.

Therefore coming back to my initial comment: the very system we live in is based on this conception that we have to forego treating people like humans and have to consider them as mere "resources" just to make it work. Not pretending like I have a solution in the current context. It just will never sit right with me, that's all.

> It's seriously not that hard either.

Hah. Suggesting an unworkable solution is of course trivial, never mind the centuries of debate of all the shades of economic systems like cutthroat capitalism, democratic socialism, dictatorship of the proletariat and everything in between.

I mean, this is like saying Robin Hood was a serious philosopher of social economics instead of a folktale, and "robbing the rich to feed the poor" is a legit strategy that can and should be implemented under the current capitalist system.

And somehow you'd think I was the arrogant one around here for saying there's a lot we don't understand (especially about humanity, i.e. ourselves!).

I didn't suggest a solution. I literally just said "humanity" is people, and our system treating people like numbers on a spreadsheet will never sit right with me.

The rest is you going on a tangent.

The problem isn't that CEOs don't get punished. The problem is when they virtue signal with "I'm sowwy " and claim responsibility without accepting accountability.

That's the defined procedure though, without that, you draw more attention. There is a clearly defined playbook at this point, and it WORKS, so why go making up your own words when they just wanna hear the song?

When the playbook has become a meme, I think there's a case to be made for updating it.

Exactly. The expected results of the playbook used to be Compassion, feels.

Now its eyerolls, cynicism.

> The responsibility for that falls squarely on me [Jay].

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/CONFLUENT-INC-124...

Responsibility without consequences is meaningless.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

I expected the "we're sorry" clip from South Park.

The CEO take full credit for the layoffs, that is what they mean when they say they take full responsibility. In the eyes of those who matter to the CEO the layoff is a good thing, who would want that credit to trickle down the ranks to the middle managers?

Too bad full doesn't include financial.

Some of these “fully responsible” CEOs are going to end up triggering bonuses based on performance at the end of this year. The lip service is strong but the reality is disconnected from these layoffs’ messaging.

A company I consult for is decidedly guilty of this. Not one month ago it was blue skys and calm waters. This week? “Full responsibility.”

Did they get their end of 2022 bonuses? Absolutely. I fail to see how the first two weeks of 2023 could be so different from the last two of 2022. That’s because they had this in the planning stage for a while.

I don’t get this mentality. From a meta level, Confluent isn’t profitable. In this environment, what would you have Confluent to do?

The second point, a job is always transactional, you exchange labor for money and at any given time, either party can stop that transaction

Also, if you are a tech person in any major city in the US, you are more than likely making at least twice the median wage in that city. If others can survive making half of what you’re making, you should be able to save enough to weather a brief storm.

Of course I understand things are different if you are here on H1B.

Empathy for those laid off shouldn't vary based on visa status. These are real people losing their jobs, searching for another job in an already saturated market.

I don't think they meant different empathy, just visa holders have fewer options around getting a new job

I completely disagree. Not all job losses are the same, and visa status makes an enormous difference in the consequences of losing one's job.

I've been laid off. At the time, I had plenty of savings and nobody depending on me besides my dog. I took some time off and was later able to find a new job. The company didn't have any H-1Bs at the time, but if it did they certainly would've been in a much worse situation than I was and clearly more deserving of empathy.

I feel that the original post rubbed me the wrong way. The whole "others have it worse, so toughen up" doesn't serve to help anyone.

When I was laid off, I had four months worth of savings and could have scraped by longer. No matter how much money that my coworkers had that are here on H1B, they had to find a job no matter what.

Did you feel any empathy when the Disney CEO was fired with a multi million dollar severance package? Things are different for different people.

Based on the people I know who work at Confluent, the messaging at all hands meetings has been that the market conditions didn't affect staffing plans. Employees make decisions based on the expectation of ongoing employment - if the CEO keeps says "we won't do layoffs" and then you buy a house and get laid off, that seems like detrimental reliance.

It's also worth noting many places enshrine in law protections for layoffs because of the power imbalance between employees and employers.

One should never assume anything about his employment status other than that it can end at any moment. Companies’ management might have empathy, but as a rule they absolutely don’t care about employees.

> Employees make decisions based on the expectation of ongoing employment

Then again outside of visa holders they are naive.

I’ve been working professionally for 25+ years and there isn’t a day after my first year after I built up savings that I depended on my employer instead of my employability to support my addiction to food and shelter.

In the case of Confluent, who depends on a non profitable company to be a sustainable place of unemployment? You go in knowing that any given day that you are going to be laid off and save accordingly.

And no when I graduated from college I wasn’t making an above average salary. I started out making $30K and found the cheapest apartment I could until I saved money.

Responsibility would mean cutting executive compensation. If the executives are choosing to inflict suffering on anyone but themselves, that's not responsibility, that's crocodile tears.

should be able to save enough to weather a brief storm is a huge assumption. What do you do if you have dependents or complex medical needs personally? What happens if you have a personal emergency during your job search? What do you do if you have existing debt from a previous emergency, medical crisis, etc?

While what you describe are serious problems and would be very anxiety inducing for many (most?), the truth remains that it isn't someone else's problem or responsibility.

I'm not ascribing anything but to say that people who are laid off deserve sympathy because you cannot assume their personal circumstances surrounding the layoff. I have no dependents so it doesn't matter to me. My friend's wife is only able to work because of his healthcare, and if she loses his healthcare even if he finds a new job quickly his new health insurance will force the wife into a nightmare of proving she's sick enough to get her medicine again, putting her out of work.

That’s very very unfortunate and warrants sympathy for sure. At the same time, one’s employer isn’t the one responsible for securing your financial stability or future.

> What do you do if you have dependents or complex medical needs personally

You get COBRA through your former employer. Been there done that. I had a pre-existing condition that I couldn’t get health insurance individually (pre-ACA)

> What happens if you have a personal emergency during your job search? What do you do if you have existing debt from a previous emergency, medical crisis, etc?

You talk to the people and make arrangements or you just don’t pay them until you can afford to. Your priority becomes house, food, shelter, car.

How do you think people making much less than tech workers handle it?

> How do you think people making much less than tech workers handle it?

They don't. That doesn't make being laid off not worth sympathy, though! You don't know someone's personal life circumstances. It's not helpful to just presume they'll be okay and therefore it isn't worth advocating for better treatment.

> The second point, a job is always transactional

Precisely. Corporations made jobs always transactional. Now the employees and the public are making corporations transactional by affording them no sympathy or loyalty whatsoever.

As long as CXO takes real responsibility by cutting their salary to a significant percentage and refusing stock refreshers (or whatever called) I'm fine. By saying "I take full responsibility" but still maintains the original pay is not convincing. Since tech CXOs usually take very large stock and cash compensations (well into multi-millions), just imagine how much cost can be saved by cutting all CXO compensation by 50%.

The company can also initiate a vote of all employees to remove this cut of CXO compensations, so that if CXO is really doing well overall I'm sure he will be recognized and his compensation defended by the whole company.

I make a mistake, I get fired.

CEO makes a mistake, I get laid off. CEO takes full responsibility.

Layoffs don't prove the CEO made a mistake. Understaffing and overstaffing are both errors. A small layoff when the SHTF shows they at least didn't understaff. If you're a growing startup in ZIRP, understaffing is arguably a bigger error than overstaffing, up to a point.

I have no idea if Confluent overstaffed. I admit I'm surprised to hear they aren't profitable though.

> Layoffs don't prove the CEO made a mistake

That is irrelevant, since they are taking full responsibility anyway, right?

Just kidding.

And complaining about life not being “fair” is a waste of my energy.

If employees were being encouraged to jump ship every 3-6 months for a pay raise during the pandemic, why should companies show any loyalty to them either?

If employees can jump for a significant pay raise en-mass, the companies weren’t showing loyalty to begin with.

The CEO's job (responsibility) is not to give people jobs, but to steer a company for success on behalf of the owners.

If your comment ("CEO takes full responsibility") is suggesting s/he should be fired or compensation reduced because of their misread of the future, that would be quite silly.

Companies don't fire people for making mistakes (in fact if you make no mistakes you probably should be let go because you're not pushing the boundaries enough or taking sufficient risk). Reducing comp as punishment would also not make sense, for obvious reasons.

I think you should get your sarcasm detector checked. He was referring to the recent surge of empty CEO statements built around the "full responsibility" cliche.

Sure, but when you look at the history of comments around this theme (CEO, layoffs), it seems pretty clear that people want a CEO to take responsibility in some other way that laying off staff.

I can't speak for everyone else but a lot of what I've seen is mockery of a meaningless statement that would have been better left unsaid.

Perhaps, but scanning the conversation thread here again, I see most people wanting to punish the CEO for steering the ship for a new reality in a way that includes layoffs.

> If your comment ("CEO takes full responsibility") is suggesting s/he should be fired or compensation reduced because of their misread of the future, that would be quite silly.

If he suffers no negative consequences then in what way is he taking responsibility? This is just meaningless psychobabble. He could not say it and it would be no different.

"Reducing comp as punishment would also not make sense, for obvious reasons."

If leadership is financially incentivized for positive outcomes, why shouldn't they carry downside financial risk as well?

If a leader makes poor decision after another, they will be penalized by the board (either in job prospects, having this job, or compensation).

Ultimately, the comp for the CEO is set by the board and that is determined by supply/demand (which inputes performance of the CEO). Penalizing someone for one mistake in anticipating the future would make a company so risk averse that returns would be very low - not a good outcome for the owners.

If that leader is a founder of a company with a dual-class stock, they won't

In that case, there's a natural incentive for the leader to do things that make the business successful long-term. It is in their best interest.

leadership's financial incentive is basically stocks which does carry the downside of losing value when the stock price goes down. The problem for us normals is that leadership gets paid life changing amounts of money every year, so losing a couple of millions is not that big of a deal.

It's a reference to the Google CEO's statement about their layoffs and I think the point is that it's an empty platitude.

Only an empty platitude if one interprets it as meant for those laid off. But if you think about it as a message to remaining employees, the board, and to shareholders, it isn't an empty platitude at all.

Perhaps but even then it's still pointless. Over-hiring was a strategy to take advantage of easy money and layoffs are a strategy to clean it up when the well runs dry. The very act of laying people off indicates that you are taking responsibility for changing direction.

That said, when someone says they're taking full responsibility there's an implication that they're going to take on pain or consequences. I don't say I'm taking full responsibility for washing my car when it gets dirty. Not saying he should be fired or take a pay cut, just that he said something dumb and did a terrible job of reading the room.

You have a pretty one-dimensional view of a company's goal. Well, many have, especially the higher-ups in the US, of course, making those vision statements more of a joke than they ever were. But for some, companies have a responsibility towards their employees, customers and environment as well.

In your hyper-financialized viewpoint, the CEO's job should be to make as much money for him/herself as possible.

> In your hyper-financialized viewpoint, the CEO's job should be to make as much money for him/herself as possible.

No, the CEO is meant to optimize not for themselves, but for the owners of the company. If the CEO didn't do that, the board should fire them.

But what if the board are optimizing for themselves as well?

Then the board is breaking their fiduciary duty and the shareholders will sue them into oblivion.

How would you prove it? "We thought that these stock buybacks we put on the company credit card were for the good of the shareholders long term, it's a coinsidance that it happened to increase our compensation as well, sorry it didn't work out as we thought."

If you're curious to learn more then instead of debating in the abstract, it is worth learning more about:

a) how board members are compensated

b) what type of people are appointed to boards

A good start is https://www.investopedia.com/articles/wealth-management/0404...

Lol! Questions that need answers . . .

Reminds me of https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ : the cliche is that "our incredible journey" means "we are being bought out and our product will be deleted"

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