There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships.
Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills of a CEO.
Except, it seems, when it comes to the current AI zeitgeist. Then it feels a lot more like CEOs are taking a "my way or the highway" approach. Maybe they can compromise on just how necessary it is for all employees to use AI?
But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors and all the VPs and SVPs, if something goes wrong.
For most companies, especially large companies, it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering, business development, etc. That, at least in principle, can be handled by other parts of the hierarchy.
If you are the CEO of a company, you should have expertise in whatever your company does, and If your company is primarily a software company, then you should have expertise in software engineering. You cannot effectively manage something that you don't understand.
Knowing which ass(es) to kiss when: $9,999,999
And that's how CEOs justify their exorbitant compensation
However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops.
There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using.
I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?
I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness.
There are some case studies here, but it's only one professor in a largely non-capitalist approach overall:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.
If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them).
Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer.
With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
Because I would love for it to be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8...
There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it.
One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen.
It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it.
The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible.
I believe the Germans have had success with including labor representatives on corporate boards. Maybe we can start there.
That was never put to a vote but it still thrusted upon a country where the results are what you would expect: the worse income inequality ever seen in the history of the nation, life expectancy has increased, deaths of despair have reached record highs, more children go to bed hungry, healthcare is being ripped from civilians, and corporations are legally allowed to poison and kill civilians (health insurance companies with their death panels, manufacturers causing cancer valleys) with zero legal repercussions.
So yeah maybe we should actually go the extreme into the other direction, if democracy is good enough to lead nations it's good enough to run businesses. If you're a worker IDK how you would argue otherwise. Being able to keep your boss/leadership accountable by voting for them out seems like a win for every workplace metric imaginable.
Imagine how better of a company Meta would be if Zuckerberg wasn't allowed to waste billions accomplishing nothing. In a just society he would have been voted out, but in a neoliberal society he is granted an insurmountable amount of wealth.
I'm sorry but this society sucks and acting like we can't do better, be better is beyond pathetic.
Health care is a different topic and yes, socialized healthcare systems seem to perform better across the board.
The idea that opponents of neoliberalism have to recreate all aspects of society and consider every potential edge case isn't realistic, and it's not how systematic change actually occurs.
Once again, the Q is this. Where is the evidence that neoliberal economics has helped Americans? Income inequality is at its absolute height, along with deaths of despair.
I'm sorry but why are you personally defending such a sick society? Did you vote to implement neoliberalism in the 1970s or what? Where you the one who told Ford to tell NYC to suck it?
There was an unequivocal claim that it will work better than our current system.
“Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.”
That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will.
Now, corporations usually have the problem of competition, so if they aren't responsive (or at least responsive enough), they get out-competed by those that are. Is that enough to make them different from governments? Perhaps, but I don't know.
That's just neoliberalism baby!
Yet they seem still inclined to elect them.
Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time.
The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.
I don't hold much empathy for higher-ups, for other reasons. But its clear to me man was not meant for this. Large orgs are almost destined to be dysfunctional, as they move beyond "you have to study hard and make a real effort to remember everyone" to "no matter how much you try it is literally impossible to remember everyone, more people are being hired and fired each day than you can keep up with"
So it self selects for sociopaths. Good to know
Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.
Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working
Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.
I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.
on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.
What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.
I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.
And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.
FTFY
FTFY
This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.
Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.
I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.
Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.
Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.
I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law)
>Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though.
I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors.
That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously.
I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else.
Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many "startups" when we're really striving for small businesses.
But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that.
Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-)
I spent most of my time in government, and I was quite shocked in private industry how enthusiastically nearly everyone had taken to the class divide. It was a bit like A Brave New World. Even when resenting it, the lower class totally bought into the mythos of the upper class. It was very clear I would never be an executive at my company, but at the same time, my particular company was riddled with incompetent and corrupt executives.
I didn't feel or sound like one of them, and I refused to lie or bullshit. And every one of them could tell, and it forever marked me as an outsider.
Define "upper crust"? Because I'm reading this as "old money", and a lot of the "old money" people I've met aren't actually generating much of it right now... they're just tending to investments purchases when the family horse glue factory or whatever got sold in the 1890s.
With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt.
I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting and demanding problem, and their decisions are going to be more important.
There was a time when I used to recommend "Out of the Crisis", a book from Demming, to business leaders.
Problem is, "Out of the crisis" still assumes as a premise that companies compete on the quality of their products, that making money comes from actually making and selling stuff. That leaders are not the anti-intelectual morons that believe that absolutely any thing can be explained with a 15 minutes deck, that math and statistics are passtimes for weird geeks that don't add "business value" and because of that, is a book that could have steered us toward a better world in the 80s, but now it is completely useless, because its recipes can't handle the level of degradation things goto into.
have to do politics -> bad ceo
NOT(have to do politics) -> NOT(bad ceo)If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social media, and I would love to hear your basis for claiming this. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2) is that genuine compulsive use of social media is quite rare, and most people who describe themselves as "addicted" are just regular users who enjoy it but kinda feel like it's a waste of time.
> Meta Settles Lawsuit That Claimed Social Media Addiction Screwed Up Schools
> On Thursday, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district that claimed the tech giant’s social media platforms have created a mental health crisis at its schools.
> The case was considered the first of its kind and a bellwether (a case that is representative of a large pool of lawsuits and will be a test for future litigation). The plaintiffs argue that social media platforms have had a major negative impact on the mental health of school-age children, which in turn has caused a burden on the education system, as American schools were forced to redirect resources to counter this problem.
> The settlement comes shortly after Meta lost a key bellwether social media addiction trial. Back in March, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that Meta was liable for the adverse mental health effects a now 20-year-old suffered after getting addicted to Instagram from an early age. The representatives of the young woman argued successfully that it was Meta’s deliberate design choices, like the infinite scroll and face-altering filters on stories, that had exacerbated her addiction and subsequent mental health issues like self-harm and depression.
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People#Myanmar_genoci...
> The military junta in Myanmar was facilitated by Facebook to post hate speech that sought to foment sexual violence and promote genocide against the Rohingya. "Myanmar would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived" Wynn-Williams writes.
> Wynn-Williams argued that Facebook failed to moderate hate speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar, including the use of the racial slur kalar. She noted that the company only had two Burmese language moderators, both based in Dublin, for the entire country, and claimed that one of the two moderators gave a pass to hate speech while removing pro-human rights content. She further claimed that she raised concerns that the moderator was "in cahoots with the" junta, only to have her concerns dismissed by the content team. Additionally, she claimed that her efforts to have Facebook's Community Standards rules translated into the Burmese language were resisted by the company communications team, who told her that "Myanmar isn’t a priority country" in the region.
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
> The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform.[2] The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the data to analytically assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
> Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012.
---
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/facebook-manipulated-us...
> Facebook manipulated the emotions of hundreds of thousands of its users, and found that they would pass on happy or sad emotions, it has said. The experiment, for which researchers did not gain specific consent, has provoked criticism from users with privacy and ethical concerns.
> For one week in 2012, Facebook skewed nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to either be happier or sadder than normal. The experiment found that after the experiment was over users tended to post positive or negative comments according to the skew that was given to their news feed.
> The research has provoked distress because of the manipulation involved.
> Studies of real world networks show that what the researchers call ‘emotional contagion’ can be transferred through networks. But researchers say that the study is the first evidence that the effect can happen without direct interaction or nonverbal clues.
> Anyone who used the English version of Facebook automatically qualified for the experiment, the results of which were published earlier this month. Researchers analysed the words used in posts to automatically decide whether they were likely to be positive or negative, and shifted them up or down according to which group users fell into.
It literally just requires filing an LLC or Corporation. There are several SaaS companies that will do it for you.