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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

If they're not special, why do we have to pay them so much just to get out of bed?

I was part of CEO recruitment process (sadly not FAANG-like, so maybe it wasn't "so much"-level yet).

Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high. Tbh same is truth for any management job - a lot of competent people prefer calmer life.

Obviously for the very top compensation is bonkers and there's fair share of frauds that ended in the position for various reasons, but if you want someone reasonable pool shrinks quite fast.

> a lot of competent people prefer calmer life

I may not be _that_ competent, but the calmer life is worth sacrificing a fair few dollars for. For each job I've changed, I've gone to a lower paying position, such that I'm currently still on $10k (around 8%) less than I was earning... 5 years ago, two jobs ago, which was probably about the same as the job I left 6 years before that. All previous jobs were worth leaving.

Parenting, maintaining a long-term relationship, playing (two, kinda) sport(s), home-labbing, keeping up with the state of the world, all take time and I enjoy all of them. It allows me to enjoy the work I do too, to not resent it for all the other things I could have been doing.

I'm in a position of privilege to say any of this, but I've also been careful and relatively well planned with my finances in order to reach this point. I'd be kinda f'd if I was out of work for longer than 6 months, but I'm sure I could re-plan and re-organise priorities and spending to minimise the damage (but we'd definitely be f'd if we both were out of work...).

Have you considered being paid $20 million for one year, and then staying home with family for the next ten years? Even after taxes, you'd still have much more of both time and money than a career in, say, air traffic control.

Maybe, if that was even offered as an option. I doubt I'm that competent, however, and just the fact I have that doubt probably excludes me from the possibility.

Oh don't worry, even if you fail at the job, you can still receive a golden parachute worth more than your employees will earn in their whole careers.

https://www.manufacturing.net/aerospace/news/21109798/boeing...

I genuinely don't think I'd be able to sleep at night.

It's fucking gross. If a person can live with it, they don't deserve to.

Hell, I would gladly take any job where "failing upward" was the rule. Do it for a few years, fail, and then move on to the next higher level opportunity.

Most job levels fail downwards, but once you get to a certain level, for whatever reason, nearly everyone fails upwards. I think "director at a FAANG" and "VP at a medium sized company" are about the level where roles start defaulting to failing upward.

Following Boeing example you given below - it's not like the guy was given offer to become a CEO out of the blue & had to endure year to be set for life.

He was slowly climbing through the ranks of huge organization over the span of almost 30 years. Given later revelations I certainly wouldn't call it easy or calm - likely even morally challenging sometimes (not admiring anything here - simply any position of power comes with this kind of issues - no matter you're playing for good or bad guys).

Taste of Boeing shareholders for execs is whole other discussion, but I really don't think there's huge crowd of people both willing and capable of filling those shoes.

>Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high.

I don't believe that. The average CEO is going to have perhaps ten direct reports. I'm willing to bet nearly every one of those is capable and up for the job.

I don't think so, not even close.

In my past I got high enough to barely touch the ceiling of a multi-billion dollar public company. I routinely had 1:1s with directs to the CEO. Not one of them would be willing or able to take that CEO job.

Just the amount of public facing interviews on CNBC would disqualify half and the other half wouldn't want to do it. They were already being paid very well.

if they're directs to the CEO they're also C-levels and are getting pretty solid compensation.

CFO or CTO or CISO gets compensated, and they have significant challenges and stress.

Well, consider typical dev team - how many members usually are able to and want to jump to the staff level?

If everyone actually came together and decided that they are not worth paying what they are paid now the compensation would likely normalize to a few multiples of other roles.

But lot of compensation is just magic money out of air that is stock valuations so the stock holder just gives slice of what they think they made. So as long as they financialised system exist so will extreme compensations.

Since most of it is magic money, I'm not sure how much sense is there in evaluating them on it. I.e. if I were suddenly worth $1B, but 90% of that was in a mix of assets I can't do anything with, and some bullshit Wall Street fake money that, at this scale, disappears the moment you look at it, then the actual money I could use would be much, much less.

That's a good question, and although I think I have a good answer, I fear it would be too much of a tangent to speculate on here.

If we're not speculating, what are we even doing here?

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