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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians.

If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you.

Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the furthest out of touch and thus least qualified to wield so much power. There should be a cap on personal wealth. And generational wealth should be prevented from creating dynasties. There should be no billionaires.

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I don't think the problem is ignorance, but different motivations. Executive leadership often wants to maximize profit and growth. Everybody else [generally] wants to maximize the company's performance at what it does. In an ideal world the two should be pretty much the same thing, in reality they're often very disconnected, especially in any product that is offered for free. Free products completely distort normal operations because the customer is no longer the customer, but something closer to the product itself - as that's what's "really" sold.

So it seems that any solution would require having executive leadership not driven by growth+profit, or removing the disconnect between "quality" and growth+profit.

Everyone wants what's best for themselves.

You have my vote. Although as dictator, maybe you don't need it.

Hard agree, but it’s not actionable for anyone not rich.

Bottom up approaches are the only things that will solve these things, so yes you and me have to put our money and talents where our mouths are.

This board tends towards believing in democracy yet we spend half+ of our waking hours existing within non-democratic institutions…they’re not even representative republics, the thing we pass off as pro-democracy today.

If we want it, we have to build it, we have to build safe-guards, and we have to stand by and not loot as much money as possible when the time presents.

We have so far shown we are collectively not capable of doing these things.

Are there any multi-billion dollar organizations that work on the principles we so desire in our own government? Maybe democracy is just a joke and a sentiment for feel-good buy-in from the masses.

“Tech” has devolved into crony- capitalism on crack. But we’ve minted quite a few average-joe millionaires, so yay?

The book Reinventing Organizations walks through a number of examples of large organizations that tried to have a bottom-up decision-making process, some succeeded for the long haul, some reverted back to top-down.

> If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company.

Maybe try this rule in your own company first. If it’s an improvement over the current system you’ll have a competitive advantage. If it doesn’t work, then you wouldn’t have been benevolent.

> the richest people are the furthest out of touch and thus least qualified to wield so much power

I’m not connected to anyone above “vacation-house rich”, but at their level a lot of the power they wield is in experience, communication and connections. If I’m going to invest in a project, I want someone who’s experienced in the domain, can clearly communicate their vision and has connections in the industry. Wealthy people often tick those boxes.

Here are some alternative free market idea for you:

1. Grant all FTEs some type of ownership in the company (stock, options or profit sharing), and do so on a recurring basis as well

2. Peg the CEOs total comp to be a max of 20x the lowest earner in the company. If the CEO gets a bonus, all FTEs get a minimum of 1/20th that amount as well.

I like both those ideas!

Especially the 2nd one. Linking CEO compensation to FTE pay feels like a good way to remind the powerful that their power derives from the consent of their employees. Plus I'm very against the massive inequality that has skyrocketed in the past few decades.

I just wish there was a way to get the powerful to understand that it's not a one way relationship. The 2 parts, FTEs and executives, both rely on each other to function. But so many people don't want that balance, one way or another.

> I just wish there was a way to get the powerful to understand that it's not a one way relationship

I guarantee you, they do understand that. This is not a matter of changing individuals by teaching them and "getting them to understand". The system as a whole must be changed. The mechanisms that allow those people to exist in the first place must be destroyed.

FTEs rely on executives on the current system, but it doesn't have to be that way. The opposite is not true, tho. There are no executives without workers.

As Abraham Lincoln once said:

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Why not just require all large companies to be employee-owned co-ops? That's the only way you truly make it so that "their power derives from the consent of their employees".

https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-syst...

Everyone needs to really learn what the Toyota Production system has taught manufacturing for decades.

How do I join the party where do I sign?

Lots of similar ideas exist in politics. Look for Socialist or Communist in the party name.

I guess that's intended to be snark but contrary to what a surprising number of people seem to think, socialist ideas make many countries nice places to live. Communism of course is a different matter, but you know that.

It did come out snarky but that wasn't my intention. I'm one of those who vote for "socialist ideas" and I'm also one of those who disagree that "communism is a different matter".

> There should be no billionaires.

This just means, “people shouldn’t be able to own large companies”. You’re going to need strong evidence that relinquishing ownership of any successful company to the government (or whoever you give the absconded shares to) is a way to run a sustainable company.

What large country (50m+) has successfully eliminated billionaires without eliminating most of their own economy?

Or maybe companies should never get that big. Keep them small and human scale. Large companies represent an unreasonable concentration of wealth and therefore power. I think they're fundamentally a threat to democracy.

My pet theory is ban marketing budgets beyond a certain size

> relinquishing ownership of any successful company to the government

Why the government? Why not collective ownership by workers, and maybe partly to users in applicable cases?

Also, why would the existence of such big companies be an absolute necessity in the first place?

To your second paragraph…

Big orgs (regardless of public or private) can exploit economies of scale, which makes cheap products possible and available to the masses.

Big orgs have big org problems that small orgs don’t (HR, Legal, Architecture, …), so they need specialist senior leaders who spend their days doing things that rank-and-file staff don’t understand, and usually don’t even know need to be done.

HN loves to rag on the C-suite, but they are real jobs that need real skills. To all the armchair CxOs confident that boards are idiots and are paying their execs for nothing, all I can say is: try it.

Economies of scale matter less in industries where the most important factor in the cost of the product is labor, which is the case for software engineering. Unless, of course, you're implying that big orgs can cut costs by driving wages down.

And the problem with large corporate boards isn't that they're idiots - it's that they're dominated by sociopaths. They aren't paying their execs for nothing - they're paying their execs to screw over their employees and their customers most effectively - which is, indeed, a real job that does need real skills.

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