The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over | Hacker News Reader

The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over

wsj.com

65 pointspetethomas56 comments

The type of people who “wait their turn” aren’t the same type of people who rapidly climb corporate ladders.

I was under the impression that American corporations reward performance over seniority, not sure about now...politics?

It's not a reward for past performance. They're putting who they think will do best in the role in the role and past performance is one very large, but not the only axis on which that is judged.

And, that being said, in larger and richer organizations (infinite monopoly bucks fueled FAANG workplaces perhaps being the penultimate example) the incentives to simply promote the most fit can get more easily polluted by irrelevant criteria than in smaller, leaner organizations that have less runway to continue existing and less opportunity for individuals to dip out without consequence if decisions are not made in a rigorous manner and the results are bad.

> penultimate

Unless I'm misunderstanding your statement, I think this word means nearly the exact opposite of what you think it means.

"Penultimate" does not mean "supremely ultimate". It actually means second from last.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/penultimate-vs-ulti...

Next to last or almost last as in latest in time, not as in ranked on some other axis. Implying that the series is unfinished because there will ultimately be another booming industry the torch is passed to.

not "first from last"?

It’s always been politics, albeit to varying degrees. Some orgs lean toward facts and performance, others not so much, but yeah it’s always a factor even if not acknowledged.

And don't downplay how much of a role politics can play at making those facts/performance metrics harder/easier to achieve - and some companies are excellent deluding themselves into thinking it's not the case.

> American corporations reward performance over seniority

more like loyalty to upper management which correlates with seniority (spent many years in the same company/group).

GenX has just been quietly banking the cash. Better to be a kingmaker than a king. You can have a longer reign.

Generalizing to the point where we're lumping entire decades of people together is done far too often.

Just live your life, let others live theirs, and stop arguing over generalizations so broad they can't possibly be universally correct. It is just a waste of time and energy.

It's not just in business it's politics, on air personalities, movies / tv shows are focusing reboots and sequels.

When interviewed earlier, the passed-over GenX CEOs only comment was "Whatever, man."

Okay let's see the proof... Bueller? Bueller? (Sorry you need to be Gen X to get that reference).

Boomer CEOs are "holding on" to their roles, and the board is apparently okay with this, but suddenly when it comes to pick a successor the board is going to flip 180 and value "youth" and pick a Gen Y over Gen X? Sure, Jan (another Gen X reference for ya).

The rest of the article is just more of the same. 9 of the last 10 presidents were Boomers, thanks to life-extending medical advancements, which we are going to throw in the trash as soon as the last Boomer dies, so ensure that Gen X never gets them (are you serious?)

My dad recently told me it's broadly like that where he works, but at the IC level. It's mostly boomers and millennials, but the boomers actively retiring.

That's a bathtub curve. You see it in a lot of industries. The joke for AE at GA Tech circa 2000 was "Aerospace 'Do you want fries with that?' Engineering". Hiring picked up later as Baby Boomers and other older generations started hitting retirement age, but the effect is that a generation gets largely skipped over. Those trained and interested in it will find jobs elsewhere, tangentially related to the field perhaps but not training towards those critical, soon to be vacant positions.

You have a lot of seniors, a lot of juniors (because eventually you realize the coming staffing problem), and few mid-career folks (as a proportion of the whole). A particular downside is that retirement cliff. When the seniors go, you lose decades of experience for each retiree, centuries of experience with every 2-4 retirees.

Or is it a bullwhip effect?

I thought I wrote a reply, but I guess I didn't submit it.

Summary version rather than rewriting: A bathtub curve could show up along with the bullwhip effect. It doesn't describe how it came into existence, it's descriptive of the structure.

If you have a long enough period in your bullwhip effect, you could see the seniors riding it out without replacements or additional hires coming in (they weren't seniors when this started) because of insufficient demand. Then a demand increase causes a hiring surge, but it's mostly targeted at juniors because they're cheaper and you still have your seniors.

GenX wrote much of the open source software and the foolishly co-opted the culture war initiatives led by boomers (for job security reasons) and millennials (some idealism, some job security, some sticking it to GenX).

They have sold out the open source ecosystem and are now being treated as weak. Ironically, probably millennials will pivot faster to the 2025 realities and the newly required allegiances than GenX.

The whole 2010s bull-run was Millenials monetizing non-gpl-3 open source stacks written by idealistic GenX in the 2000s. Most notably Zuckerberg.

"idealistic gen X", and still so, but very disinclined to just keep on handing out ideas and bieng generaly helpfull, for which AI is not going to be able to replace. Gen X is a potent creative force, and used to having to work in a world controlled by others, and I believe will do just fine by picking through the carnage caused by rampant idiosy.........it's not our fight

like the hyenas in The Lion King

you will have to explain your cartoon metaphore as I dont watch movies or television but if the allusion is to not following kings then I think that then perhaps you are aluding to the orange one?, in any case there is a widespread dissilusionment as expressed in the "No Kings" movement.

https://www.inlander.com/news/todays-no-kings-movement-trace...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Kings_protests

In the Lion King, the Hyenas were an alternate pack with loyalty to Scar, Mufasa's (the previous king) brother. The Pridelands of the lions suffered greatly for everyone after Scar ascended to power through murdering his brother with a stampede induced with the hyenas backing, and running off Mufasa's son through psychological manipulation, clearing the way for his own ascension to the throne.

Ultimately, Scar was undone by the very pack that helped him ascend to power, and everyone lived happily ever after after the return of the rightful King's son, blah blah blah... You get the picture.

Point being, the hyena comment is not terribly flattering in any dimension. It implies both a fundamental weakness of character in terms of being willing to be led by the most degenerate and awful type of person willing to tell one what one wants to hear, and promise to deliver what one wants while simultaneously being ultimately opportunistic in alignment/loyalty, and only rising up/breaking from an inept or cruel charismatic pack leader only on after another external force has done most of the work in making the need to switch apparent.

Free shouldn't mean being used by who and how I want. If so, that's just window dressing for a proprietary license.

That's manifestly untrue. Every open source license speaks about how it must be treated.

In case that wasn't clear, the "idealism" referred to the motivation for culture war initiatives, not to writing open source. GenX was indeed idealistic in writing open source.

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