Hacker News Reader

Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com