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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

"Because of that, I am firing myself"

A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making. When I gave my report to the Board Of Directors, the Board responded by firing both the CTO and the CEO. This seems normal to me.

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I don't know who needs to hear this, but laying people off _does not mean the company is doing terrible_ and this narrative is the reason why you get vastly different opinions about handling this scenario.

All laying people off means is that there are items that the company will not be executing against in the future. It may or may not mean that they're in a bad spot, but very often - and the case with many of the current tech giants laying off that we're seeing - it simply means they grew more than they needed for the road ahead.

Whether or not that's good or bad is a fair question. It was asked on a previous thread whether we as a society should be comfortable with companies gabling with the jobs of their employees, and I think that's a worthwhile question. But it most certainly does not mean that a company is "doing terrible."

It doesn't mean that they're doing terrible as a going concern, but it does mean that they're a terrible company to work for.

If you're hiring in bulk to tie up talent your competitors might want during a boom, and then promptly firing thousands in the bust, you're bad people and should feel bad.

But then, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get an executive to understand the impacts of their decision when their compensation package depends upon them not understanding it.

It's not that Zoom has done terrible for a while, in fact the opposite is true. Yuan is the founder, and the company went from nothing to being pretty huge under his leadership. On the other hand, he signed off on hiring a lot of people because the company grew really fast during the pandemic — too many, as it turns out. What do you make of that? Should the CEO be considered a failure because too many people were hired, or a success because the company's revenue grew by like 1000% in the last three years? Both are really responses to the pandemic, and it may be that neither are really his fault, even if they are on his plate to deal with.

You answered your own question. Yes. Who removes a CEO? The Board. If the Board does their job (correctly), then they will make the right decision to release or retain the right CEO.

If the Board fails to do its job? What, then? Yep, shareholders have to intervene.

Which leads to what happens if the shareholders themselves don't figure out what to do or the right-decision to be made? Well, they lose a bunch of value as the company's value [eventually] plummets.

The board likely signed off on the hiring plan. Layoffs are hard but as other commenters have pointed out are not inherently a sign the company is doing poorly. In many cases a board may choose to reward a ceo for identifying cuts and charting and executing a path forward.

I'm sure you can't speak about it, but now I'm very curious what levels of technical debt it takes for the board to fire a CTO.

I have to assume it goes beyond just not following best practices, and perhaps into deep levels of pointless "not invented here syndrome" or some other massive waste of resources.

That seems like the call of the board, no? Certainly, CEOs at any substantial level are accountable to a group of people. Everyone answers to someone.

Can you comment on how you got that job?

> I was hired by a Board Of Directors, of a startup with 150 people, to do an evaluation of the technology and code, and I found epic levels of tech debt and irresponsible decision making

A BOD doesn’t hire someone to do this without there being some suspicion within the board that there is an issue. That board was likely divided on keeping one or both of those individuals and your results were used to sway votes.

This is some sort of blame game? Why stop there? Why don’t we fire the whole chain of management, including the top guy, AND let all these people that were laid of KEEP their jobs instead. It wasn’t their fault after all and we are making decision on the basis of blames, right? Let’s see how that turns out.

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