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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

If/when the accountability starts to become inevitable, that gives them lots of bus-fodder, then.

One thing that I have learned (and, no one else seems to have learned), is that Accountability begins and ends at the top.

It doesn't matter if it was a "rogue employee." The top head is Responsible. That's (ostensibly) why they get paid the big bucks (or so I'm told, but never shown).

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So are you suggesting that every time an employee commits a crime, CEOs should go to jail alongside them?

Every time a politician commits an offence the president/prime minister should go to prison?

Every time a pupil breaks the law, the principal of the school should go to prison?

I'd suggest the reason 'no on else seems to have learned' it is because it's a ridiculous and impractical idea. Should CEOs (etc) be punished if they knowingly aid and abet crime and/or cover it up? Sure, I think most people are on board with that.

Executives are not punished even when they knowingly and purposefully perpetuate a crime, just see Boeing.

That's exactly how this works in regulated industries. At UK banks there is criminal liability for senior management for institutional failures.

Concretely in this case, if you are bringing a prosecution and you fail to uphold the rights of the defendant, yes I absolutely think you should face criminal liability for that.

> So are you suggesting that every time an employee commits a crime, CEOs should go to jail alongside them?

Pretty much, yeah.

Happens in the military (not always, of course, but more common).

The argument I always hear, justifying the enormous pay differential, between the CEO and their staff, is that the CEO is ultimately responsible for everything.

In practice, this almost is never the case.

The main reason for CEO pay is that's what it costs to hire a CEO.

As determined by Boards filled with other CEOs.

I'm pretty sure that SE salaries would be much higher if the only people allowed to determine their salaries were their peers.

Are they filled with other CEOs? I thought boards were filled with different people concerned with different topics. Where do you see that they're filled with other CEOs?

https://theyrule.net/ is a good visualizer of boards of public companies, and the titles of the directors.

Just as a quick first check, of the three most influential/connected directors listed on the front page: 2 are ex-CEOs, and the third is a mixture, including having been Obama's ambassador to the EU. How did you see how many are CEOs out of the total?

I just acquired this belief from throwaway comments in the FT over the years. I do know that generally boards are filled with CxO people, because they tend to have the right experience.

The website doesn't have an overall table of stats. You yourself noted that 2/3 of the top 3 are ex-CEOs. They might have taken on those directorships when they were still CEOs. They might take on new CEO roles in the future. I think the overall point stands.

It doesn't seem to - 2 of the top 3 people might be ex-CEOs, but that doesn't mean that all board members are CXOs. That's why I was asking how we see it for all board members, and not just the top 3.

> that doesn't mean that all board members are CXOs

Yes even one contrary example would disprove this statement. I thought the original sentiment was boards are dominated by top executives in industry, and not that literally 100% of board members are currently a CEO. The former isn't obviously untrue to me, the latter is easily disproved.

It isn't even necessarily wrong to have mostly CEOs or ex-CEOs on boards. You really do want experienced businesspeople as board members. But that conflict of interest or "class loyalty" should be kept in mind when discussing whether CEO pay is set by a competitive, open market.

Idk if that's true you could hire me as CEO for much less.

I'm sure they could. But would they?

I'm not complaining about the pay.

I'm just complaining about the ethical rot. I have always believed that leaders need to be held to higher standards than anyone else, and, if they want to cry about it, they should distribute their pay to the folks that have to bear those standards, because their "leaders" won't.

You're exaggerating this, but there certainly used to be concepts of ministerial and executive responsibility, even for things which were not entirely within that person's knowledge or control.

Ministers used to resign voluntarily. "Cabinet collective responsibility" used to be a thing. As recently as the Major government and the first term of Blair.

These days senior Tories greet the idea of responsibility with a shrug. That's how we got the Truss disaster, and why they're on course for electoral wipeout.

Used to resign voluntarily? They still do, part of why the Conservative government has been so ineffective is that their ministers are constantly resigning or being fired, either due to disagreements with government policy or for some over-the-top honour related reason (e.g. they were accused of being mean to a civil servant).

There are ministerial positions where they've had as many ministers in as many years!

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