Yeah. I’m over 40, and I expect a high salary due to my productivity and experience. You could replace me with 3 folks from around the world, and it’s arguably a reasonable business decision.
This has been compounding the normal, expected resource churn.
It's a qualitative stance, but a Big Brain with 10 years in an established area is worth more than three "fast brains" with 1 year of local, institutional knowledge.
I might take the "fast brains" (especially if they have limited commitments) if we were in a different situation such as starting up.
The experience builds, and my experience is that the sweet spot is frequently hiring people in their 40s who have ~20 years of practical experience in the domain or a related area, and who know how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls fresher employees might encounter while also creating a lot of shortcuts by virtue of their experience & networks. It was interesting: over the course of my career, the teams I was managing had ever-increasing average ages, ranging from mid-20s when I was leading my first team of developers to late-40s over the last few years in big tech. Different functions (business vs technical), but while I appreciate the enthusiasm so many new grads demonstrate, the self-sufficiency + competency of mid-career folks is worth its weight in gold.
A neat compensation package for a CEO would be “What will the stock price be in a decade?” But you could never get a CEO to commit for a decade because they know like we all do that job hopping is how you make more money and get raises. The system is messed up all the way down.
https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-ceo-life-cycle
> For instance, when we asked CEOs about the ideal tenure for the role, many mentioned the widely touted seven-year average. When we surveyed directors, they said that CEOs generally should leave the job after 9.5 years—a point at which, many believe, performance typically plateaus. Why these expectations? No one has a compelling or evidence-based answer. They are simply conventional wisdom.
The graph in that linked article is particularly telling as it shows performance increases all come after ten years.
Phil Harrison is a known FAANG example, but in smaller companies, there are tons of Harrisons. Stephen Elop is a FAANG-adjacent example, having been the CEO of Nokia in its downfall and now job-hopping quite a lot.
As a completely unrelated side-note, I love this quote from Elop's Wikipedia page:
> In his first speech at a Telstra conference in September 2016, Elop cited Nokia as an example of a "great" company that can self-assess and "transform" when necessary, referencing its success as a networks equipment supplier. He said that Telstra was also needing a necessary transformation to become more of a technology company. Elop was dismissed from Telstra as part of its restructuring on 31 July 2018.
Short-termist, but a lot of business decisions are very short-termist, so I think the argument is good. Someone might think that.