But if the company is _coincidentally_ doing great, then the CEO gets credit. If it's tanking, the CEO leaves for another CEO position because the main prerequisite of being a CEO is having been a CEO, regardless of performance.
But if the company is _coincidentally_ doing great, then the CEO gets credit. If it's tanking, the CEO leaves for another CEO position because the main prerequisite of being a CEO is having been a CEO, regardless of performance.
The reality is that few people have the mental and psychological constitution required to do the job of CEO at any decent sized company. You don’t need to look further than startups to empirically know that most people, even when self-selecting, can’t do the job of CEO even when playing the easy mode of a small company.
A big portion of the job is just being able to not crumble apart, over a long period of time. Another metric: How prone are you to making a horrible decision when under extreme stress, instead of an average one?
The depths at which the worst case scenarios can bottom out are deep. However, when the downside does not materialize, all that is left is an average decision. And average decisions are easy to critique in hindsight, for the CEOs themselves, as well as for most other people.
In that sense, programming is similar: When you steer clear of horrible code, consinstently and over a long period of time, the plain looking stuff that comes out the other end can look like a given to somebody who hasn't been through enough code filled with bad decisions to appreciate their absence.
The FAANG (and other letter group) global mega corp survivors have one or two valid grievances.
I'm not at all saying all FAANG bosses are great, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue that all they do is "make a couple decisions a week and then play golf." Anyone that says that is just showing how clueless they are as to what goes in to running a large company.
Where I work, the people higher than me (remote or not) work constantly, around the clock, to the point where I worry about their health.
I also like going into the office 3 days a week. It's a nice space, I like the separation between work and home, and there's good food nearby. As long as I'm allowed to WFH a couple days a week and when I have an appointment or something.
You can argue that these two aren't representative and put in more effort than the average CEO, but you can't argue that their experience of being CEO isn't extremely intense.
Good CEOs are constantly juggling all kinds of complex thought-work, to a much greater extent than the average line worker would be happy doing. Programmers in particular get stressed and unhappy if you ask them to context switch between unrelated tasks, deal with interruptions and regularly make decisions that are completely ambiguous. They also probably won't be happy if they have to spend a lot of time on relationship building, performance evaluations or managing the performance of people under them.
A good CEO's typical day will easily switch between a dozen different things - a product review in the morning where they're expected to give immediate and ideally insightful feedback to a team that's been preparing for months (remembering to manage their own expectations and happyness, you wouldn't want your star designer quitting on you), then immediately after a meeting with the finance team about some complicated tax issue, and then a recruiting call with someone to replace the head of sales who you just had to fire because they {missed their targets, leaked confidential info to the press, insulted a key customer, got targeted by a woke mob} and then you move on to lunch, briefly, which you probably eat alone because none of your immediate reports particularly want to hang out with the boss and anyway you need to read a report on your competitor's new product launch. Oh and then it's time to go to the airport because {a key customer the other side of the country is upset, the government is demanding to question you, your PR team set up a speaking event at a conference and only told you yesterday}, so hopefully your spouse isn't too upset that you won't be home for dinner tonight. On the way to the airport you'll have to be on the phone with a lawyer because your company is getting sued, again, and so you need to know the status of the case but couldn't find time to fit an in-person meeting (which you'd have much preferred). You'll probably also need to plan for how to pay if you lose that case, which realistically means who you'll have to lay off or break comp promises to.
And then dawn breaks, and it all begins again. That's a good day, when you didn't have to do layoffs or explain to the board why the new product you'd hoped would turn things around is now subject to a recall.
I've seen how this stuff affects people up close. You do need to be very tough, and even then it can grind people down pretty catastrophically. There's nobody to blame at that level and you can't just quit because you don't like it anymore. If it starts going wrong you're sort of trapped.
Yeah, I've done less than two hours of work, but that doesn't mean I had 22 hours of free time.
Doctors are often on call 24/7 and do significantly more work than the average C-suite, yet you're complaining about a two hour work day?
The lack of self awareness is astounding.
Some may receive compensation of this nature, many more may not. You are making wild assumptions. Just putting that out there.
My bad :(
This condescending "entry level employee good" thing is total nonsense. It's absolutely common for many 30 year career stretches to never actually see a decent hard-working executive out in the wild. And if you do actually encounter one, then there's a decent chance that you also got to watch that person get dethroned and replaced with someone worse by political machinations of the rest of the executive suite!
What is crazy is dismissing thousands of man-years of lived experience with completely broken "leadership" as.. what exactly, jealousy? But most of the people that hate the C-suite probably don't want to work there, and probably don't even really expect fair compensation at this point, they just want a little more accountability, and a little less hypocrisy.
And just in case you actually want to understand the angst and the zeitgeist around this stuff, I'll add this more subtle point. Engineers that work in tech today are increasingly seen by outsiders as roughly equivalent to, IDK, blood-diamond tycoons. But the fact is that lots of engineers are struggling too, and anyway we didn't ruin the world, the MBAs did while they told us (and everyone else) they were building something different. There's a strong reluctance to shoulder all this blame for the executive class, because at the end of the day or the end of our careers, most engineers actually still have to live next to normal people and won't get to fuck off to the Hamptons or whatever monied enclaves executives use to insulate themselves from the world.
Really? In my bubble this is far from common and more likely ignorance to what executives are doing. Execs tend to become so because they are highly motivated people willing to dedicate themself to their jobs.
I had an employee once would would constantly complain about their old bosses, all of them as far as I could see. He was a really smart guy with potential but so negative about anyhting leadership. One day I decided to roll the dice and said something like "you always talk about how bad your bosses are, and no doubt you'll add me to the list when you move to the next company. Have you ever considered we all get a bad boss or two, but when every boss is bad maybe you're the problem not them". I knew this was a risky move but it worked. He took it on board and became a much better contributor and dropped this 'all bosses are bad' type approach.
I've had great bosses, but that's not what we're discussing. This is about executives. And while I agree that executives are certainly highly motivated, I just think that at a certain level mostly that is motivation to lie, misdirect, deflect, and steal. This also isn't about small businesses, which are much more likely to have legitimate entrepreneurs or merit-based processes, even at the top. For most medium-sized businesses and certainly for large ones, everything is different and anyone can see that pedigree, nepotism, and failing upwards all become more dominant factors. Take an honest look at yourself and your bubble and the line workers. Who can do who's job, really? Which work is more skilled?
Hacker News isn't that though, it's just an orange Reddit.
Yes, I can imagine in some odd situations (say family businesses) you might have "figurehead" CEOs, but every CEO I've ever worked with put in a huge number of hours. I think there is plenty to honestly debate regarding CEO compensation, especially when it comes to egregious wealth inequality, but this idea that CEOs are just a bunch of lazy schmoozers sounds like an r/antiwork fever dream to me.
Nobody is suggesting this but you. It’s understandable that leadership would make more money. But 39x more money is harder to justify, especially with historical context.
Almost everyone in my network that can't get a job is running a "company".