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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

Stellantis has 270,000+ employees across 16 brands. I'm not saying their CEO does or doesn't deserve $20m in compensation but at some point you're going to run into a problem where... nobody wants to do that job for $1m/yr and they wouldn't be qualified or very good at it.

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> nobody wants to do that job for $1m/yr

I invite everyone here to raise their hand if they're just as hard-pressed as me to think of any job that they wouldn't do for a million per year.

Nobody who is qualified to do it... I've worked with executives at that level, and let's face it-- most of us don't have the single-minded devotion to do it, nor the experience to manage thousands of people.

I do not understand people that believe all executive are useless and do nothing.

Can you blame anyone? For decades, average workers have faced layoffs, shrinking wages, stagnant career growth and numerous other downsides. For instance, Wells Fargo has gone through multiple layoffs and downsizing over the last 2 decades, and yet their CEOs have all gotten golden parachutes, never once facing the negative affects of their own decision making. There's so many examples of this it hardly makes front page news anymore.

Between the failures of Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, and with hindsight being able to see how those falls could have been avoided, I've come to see the job in new light.

I mean, to be fair, no executive is managing thousands of people. Maybe leading thousands of people, but there's a real physical limit to how many people you can directly manage.

That was my first thought at "270,000+ employees across 16 brands". They're not handling those people. They're paying multiple tiers below them to deal with those people. They'd be thinking of brands as units, and staff below them think of teams within those brands as units, and so on.

> nor the experience to manage thousands of people.

No-one is managing thousands of people.

You might have ~10 direct reports as CEO (common incident command theory says that number should be between 3 and 7, optimal around 5, because after that, you start to lose connectivity between what each report is doing).

I wouldn't take that CEO position. Seriously. I would make a terrible manager, let alone a CEO of a massive company responsible for the livelihoods of thousands of people. I might be able to keep something floating for a year, if I leaned heavily enough on other experienced people around me, and even then only if I could trust them. I've been places where the people just under the top layers were royally screwing things up and the top layers weren't competent enough to see it.

Do I wish I could make that sort of money and run a world changing company? Sure do. But I'm self aware enough to know how badly that would likely go for both me and the people I'd be responsible to.

True, although if you're getting above $1M/year as a CEO, it's not because "the job is really hard." In fact, the bigger the company, the more layers of management to keep you from any real work.

Instead, the board has approved that compensation based on very real business needs: growing the company, acquiring competitors, changing business models, etc. It's actually hard to find a leader who has experience doing that thing and is also the right fit. Hiring the wrong CEO is a quick way to kill the whole company. On the flip side, to the board, a CEO that can drive meaningful growth is worth the risk, even if they have to fire with a golden parachute two years later.

I'm not trying to justify pay disparity (in fact I think there should be minimum AND maximum FT salaries when currently there are neither), but that's what's going through the board's mind when they set CEO compensation.

Maybe if a company gets so big that finding people to manage it becomes disproportionately expensive, it's time to break it up.

As long as we do the same to the gov.

Why is that in anyone’s best interest?

Because it's unable to allocate resources efficiently. Breaking it up may be more rewarding for sahreholders over the longer term.

That would be even more expensive with every company needing its own C suite

But apparently people will do it for $2 - $5 million. In the most recent fiscal years, Stellantis’ revenue was about double Honda’s.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/how-much-money-does-ceo-of-hond...

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