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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

If you are running something worth over $1 trillion that makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year it makes sense though, right? You can argue even a mediocre CEO could do ok, and I’d agree, but at the same time you could easily justify paying huge amounts of money to get a CEO who will only perform better by 1%/year.

To me it’s really the size of the big tech companies that’s mind boggling. The fact companies that didn’t, or barely, even existed 25 years ago can make hundreds of billions of dollars is just insane.

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>If you are running something worth over $1 trillion that makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year it makes sense though, right?

But he isn't running it. He has legal control over it, but in terms of sweat equity he only gets 24 hours in the day like everyone else and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee.

Sure, but he decides how to allocate resources, make acquisitions, etc. across over 100k employees. If he decided to pull another Google+ he could easily destroy many tens of thousands of engineers’ worth of labor. And it’d only take him a few hundred hours to make that decision, set up the org to lead the project and delegate the execution to them. Putting those engineers on something that actually makes money and is a viable business like Cloud could do the opposite.

It’s not about the time it takes him to make these decisions so much as the quality of his decisions having potentially massive $ impacts on the company’s performance.

None of that is really his call to make alone, upper management & the board also has influence & burdens much of the load. This idea that he's the only man in the room or on the planet that could do this position seems pretty absurd.

Any moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful. I’d expect more interesting ideas than the old tried and true “get some lucrative government and enterprise contracts”, “guess we better dust off our AI tech and react to OpenAI”, etc. He seems to be a reactionary not a visionary.

> Any moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful.

Yet Google doesn’t seem to be doing all that well at all in this area. At least relatively…

Yes, he was late and executed poorly. Generally Google is operationally deficient, but technically rich. That is a management problem. The best thing for Google is to split up into parts so they can become more focused and lean within each business category: social media, ads, search, cloud services, etc

Jobs and Nadella certainly did contribute more than 1000x the labor of a [...] employee.

How? Jobs did have some original ideas, but it's not like NeXT was a resounding success on its own that toppled Apple & Microsoft. Being the ideas guy is different than the implementation guy, and in some cases he was neither.

Jobs turned 90-days-bankruptcy Apple into the wealthiest company in the world.

All by himself?

What Jobs did is make the right decisions. The rest of the company that was 90 days from bankruptcy was the same.

The difference was Jobs made much better decisions.

Would Apple have become one if not the most successful companies of all time if they had all the other people who helped Jobs accomplish this but not him?

Probably not.

There was a parade of CEOs before Jobs that could not fix Apple.

Why couldn't he just turn NeXT into the wealthiest company in the world? Perhaps you could say that's what he did by getting bought out by Apple, but Ives was an Amelio hire, and hard to say Ives wasn't as pivotal to Apple's future success as Jobs.

Jobs takes a lot of the credit, and some of it is due, but there were many other people involved in bringing him back on board & the transition back to profitability/dominance.

Well, that's not entirely fair, Jobs was credited for making a huge partnership with Microsoft that saved Apple. That deal would never have happened if any other person in the world tried to make it happen.

It literally had to be Jobs and Gates making that deal, and it worked. Apple got enough money to launch its iMac which made it enough money to then launch its store, which gave it enough money to finally turn real profits.

I know a lot of people were involved in that happening, but Steve Jobs was literally the only person in the world who had the cult following to execute on his vision. Any other leader would have been met with resistance and skepticism every step of the way.

Am I suggesting that SJ should make $200mil for that effort, no, but I am suggesting that if you're making an argument against CEO impact, SJ is probably the worst example as I'm 100% sure that man was the only one who could have turned Apple around.

Some of the Microsoft deal was due to the antitrust pressures MSFT was under in the late 90's, seeing Apple go under would've removed any deniability and put them under the microscope.

That said it's hard to argue that Jobs didn't have vision, or wasn't at least able to find people who had vision & talent, even if he was a polarizing figure.

> Why couldn't he just turn NeXT into the wealthiest company in the world?

That is a great question. The answer is complicated, but the primary reason is he screwed up. The machine was way too costly for its target market. By then, he'd run out of money. But he'd learned a great deal. He then bought control of Pixar, and turned that from failure into a massive powerhouse. Then he went back to Apple.

There's a book about it, "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs".

Jobs made three fortunes: Apple II, Pixar, and then Apple again. Just one of those would be a spectacular achievement, but he did it 3 times.

> and you can't tell me he somehow converts that to 1000x the labor of an average, capable, willing, working employee.

Yes, I can't tell you that because CEO isn't about labor.

I can tell you that impact of decisions of the CEO that I work for is at least 1000x bigger than mine.

If you don't believe that I don't know what to tell you.

CEO is not about writing lines of code, he doesn't write 1000x more LoC than I do, but he has at least 1000x more impact than I do.

You think great CEOs like Satya of MSFT or Dr. Lisa Su of AMD aren't at least 1000x average employee?

I think this misses one important point though: why would any human being need this amount of money and could these resources be allocated better? If we look more broadly than a single employee or a single business entity fwiw, this feels like a huge waste of resources.

Compensation is not about need, it's about supply and demand. If I as a Google shareholder could pay 225 million to receive billions in profit and thereby drive up the stock price and my stock value, then I'll take that deal, and that's how every other shareholder thinks, too. Because if not, then they could simply vote to not pay for the CEO's compensation.

We want our best decision makers launching and backing companies, not retiring because that's all they're able to do. Musk and Bezos need more competition.

JFC, stop putting them on a pedestal.

I've said this before but it bears repeating: CEO's aren't special. Bob Iger came back to Disney to finish it off. Shit, look at Elizabeth Holmes.

No one deserves that much of a multiple over the people actually creating products or value.

When CEO's fail they get golden parachutes. When they get lucky they are praised as some sort of rare superhuman.

The cult of CEO and HR needs to wither and die

I do agree in principle but it’s not that obvious to me if overall it would be much better if all the surplus went to the shareholders instead. At least CEOs generally have to actually work for that money..

> CEO's aren't special

some CEOs are terrible, a lot are mediocre and a few are indeed special and worth every penny they get and much more (from the utilitarian/rational point of the company’s shareholders). The problem is that it’s very hard to tell in advance..

I think that:

Not many people can actually perform this job.

This kind of job requires really solid skillset across various domains.

It feels like you not only need to be great at managing people, doing business, doing politics (the real one), having vision, but also do not be bullshitter, so your employees believe in you.

Meanwhile, CEOs strategies aren't something you can test within a month or two and fire CEO and get a new one.

In some industries you need at least a few years in order to see whether specific "bet" was good, so you aren't going to fire your CEO after half of the year.

Meanwhile CEOs decision can have very very costly impact on the company, so the risk is huge.

Maybe they do but consequences for bad actions are not 1000x average employee. They actually get a golden parachute when they screw up, destroy a company and lives of thousands of people.

So rewards and consequences are not at all proportional like you are trying to imply.

He pays 1000x taxes too, does he use 1000x more resources of the country?

Its not like the individuals actually need the money like, perhaps, a new product line would. Its just about getting paid the most. If you look at it that way, we would do well to deepen the progressive tax.

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