OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
overpaid.lol
overpaid.lol
Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity. They are empowered to act on behalf of the entire organization. This is important because a corporation of many individuals generally cannot act as one. You can sometimes get close with really, really good teamwork, but that's still not enough for a lot of customers.
If you are in some regulated B2B context, not having a CEO or having a "non-traditional" CEO can result in lost deals. The counterparties are looking for "one throat to choke" when they are being made responsible for approving large contracts. They want a person's cell phone number they can call when they're having a bad mood about whatever they've just paid for. They don't want to talk to your developers or the cranky old founders. They want to talk to a person who can be summoned to any arbitrary golf course within 48 hours and who will arrive in a fantastic mood 100% of the time. This person often doesn't have to know a goddamn thing about what your company's product actually does. They just have to be a delegate. A conduit of information and a representative element.
I'm not sure it justifies the salary, but that's a different thing.
Now, sometimes CEO's run he company. Often not though.
why if YOU profit off a single copyright violation, it could be $250,000 and up to five years, but if you do it against millions of artists, and have a corporation (and money), it's just a few thousand per and you walk and keep doing business (never mind pretending the rest of it is 'fair use', when no human work is being done to produce the Fourier-combined ploduct and nothing new is added).
If there’s no real accountability then it’s a very real and negative problem.
it is very easy to prove to the CEO earned the credit for all things good
Boy was I wrong. They have zero risk and pure upside of being an executive. Oh it's a hard job, it's stressful?
So is mine and I get paid peanuts in comparison!
In any large organization, there is a legal department, there is a chief legal office/General counsel. These guys train CEO enough how to pass down messages. When I was a salesman, my training team and my managers never told us to lie. However, the pressure tactics they use force sales people to lie. That's how things work.
Even if some assistant attorney/prosecutor wants to use RICO, he/she will be overruled in the same department.
Sorry, I was generalising a bit without making that explicit:
> However, the [authorities] will not [use some laws] against the elite class, as ex-prosecutors end up working for the same elite through law firms.
I meant that in practice the revolving door seems to reward tough stances more than it seems to punish them.
Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.
The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?
A candidate would simply go to any circuit court judge and get an injunction against the media company. If the media company did not comply, the judge would find the officers in contempt. Marshals would then arrest and throw the companies officers in jail indefinitely until they complied.
That's what you're asking for. It's genuinely stupid. I say this as someone that would declare a national emergency on day 1 of being elected just to have the Air Force turn most media company HQs into smoldering craters.
You really cracked this case wide open, Sherlock.
Every time SCOTUS makes a ruling, there are thousands of extremely talented activist lawyers that immediate begin working on legal strategies to further expand a ruling in ways they believe are favorable to their political ends. You have to understand, there are lawyers who focus on specific justices and study the idiosyncrasies of their rulings/philosophy so they can reverse-engineer legal outcomes as they desire.
In United States v. Jones, Ginsburg and Thomas ruled that attaching a GPS tracker to a car and monitoring it was a Fourth Amendment search. Thomas believes physically attaching the device is a property trespass and constitutes a search. Ginsburg believed prolonged GPS surveillance violates a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Even though Ginsburg and Thomas are polar opposites, if you understand how they rule, you can still get the outcome you want with the right case.
Say that I hold the political that the US should provide more humanitarian aid to Gaza. If I raise a bunch of money for this cause, can I use that money to make movies about the poor conditions in Gaza? Can I buy a full page in the New York Times with information about the crisis in Gaza? Can I use the money to run ads advocating my position on Gaza? Can I use the money to buy ads that support candidates that share my position on this issue?
This is basically what super PACs do. Of course I don't want it so that you can deliver a bunch of gold bars to a senator in exchange for their vote on a bill, but was illegal before citizens united and remains illegal after.
For me, I don't see how you can reasonably enforce some rule against using "money to influence politics" without also having some central entity that gets to police everyone's political speech, and that scares me.
We already have those. It's exactly why AIPAC keeps slipping through all legal boundaries.
Regardless, the idea here on how Hawaii (and potentially other states) going around this is very simple: they can spend on elections, but that doesn't mean the state needs to give them all their incentives.
This practice is old enough that it was parodied in "The Golden Calf" in 1931...
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other working cultures have adopted committees as the top. Is is the dominant form in US shareholder capitalism.
The original post is surely satire.
Yes, they say so at the bottom of the page.
CEO seems like a great job for AI.
A simulacrum of accountability to be replaced in lieu of ever acknowledging fault. No machine could ever replace a flesh-and-blood scapegoat.
Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
This is actually how the world works
Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
Leaders should be paid for outcomes not activities.
If you pay by success of the company, noone is going to want to do a 5 year corporate turnaround.
How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good."
> By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all
Sure, but somebody is still making the decisions the CEO would have otherwise made. Maybe it's a good thing that the power isn't concentrated in one person; I'd be open to that. But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. That's fine if they were already making good decisions, hit it's disastrous if they weren't.
Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.
There is a lot of evidence that corporate mergers destroy value.
What if... they were disintermediated by markets instead of being one company?
There are tons of reasons why companies exist (the whole Theory of the Firm line of research), but the information asymmetry barriers are constantly coming down.
We know what good looks like in financial results and reputation. It's really not that complicated.
The rest of that bullshit isn't about evaluating a working company, it's about gamblers gambling on non-companies before they become real companies.
Blockbuster was good until it wasn't. Sears was good until it wasn't. Barnes and Noble was good, then it fell apart, and now it's good again. The lesson to learn is that by the time your financials say things are taking a turn, you're a year to multiple years late to start fixing the problem.
Except that's not what we were discussing.
Any company that is thrashing around, constantly changing priorities, executive turnover, lots of layoffs is obviously being poorly run, yet this is typically exactly what happens when a new CEO is bought in to fix whatever was ailing before: the almost inevitable new-CEO plan: fire executives, bring in past cronies, have a few layoffs (because he's a tough guy, making those tough decisions), and change company priorities. Rinse and repeat - in a few years there'll be a new CEO coming in and doing the same again.
It's an extreme abuse of power, especially since workers are the sole reason why a company is able to succeed or not and they don't get the same privileges as a board + executive.
Not too mention most corporations + startups are setup to encourage the worse forms of human collaboration (dictatorships + centrally planned economies).
You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?
Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.
This is actually how the world works.
there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.
From the vast amount of VC money going around, nearly half a trillion expected in 2026, not including other forms of funding, it's safe to say that there is a lot of capital for people that can execute.
I don't see how you can translate money to product/startup success. You think there's some magic lever you can press to get people to use your product? Selling $10 for $5 and building a market like that is rare (moviepass) but even that is incredibly difficult. Advertising is very inefficient and sales is hard.
They are not dumb, just incompetent in the domains where they invest the money. And surrounded by yes-men because they are the ones writing the checks.
The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.
Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.
I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse
No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.
" more a result of the environment than algorithms"
What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.
The one seeing themselves or co-workers laid off while companies report record earnings.
The ones seeing a CEO tank a company then move on to the next company next week with a huge pay package.
The one seeing their little sibling or kid graduate with honors and multiple internships, and having the complete inability to get a job in their field.
Do I need to explain more? Media reflects reality at the end of the day. You acn talk about doomscrolling, but part of it only works because exaggeration always starts by exploiting some truth you've seen first hand.
Meanwhile, you could spend years grinding for nothing without the above information
"proven talent"?
But don't you fall in the same trap as they try to lure you with: expressing a CEO's value as revenue/profit optimization? With that kind of logic, you should pivot your business, whatever it is, to whatever is looking more profitable in the short term. It's short-sighted. And it misses the ethical and social aspect of the organization that forms the company.
Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.
But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?
Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.
But to that point most of the time, poor performance is attributed to "the market" and strong performance is attributed to "leadership". There is some clear cognitive dissonance going on.
Bring it more local. Does how you manage your household or work matter? Where does scaling that up break?
Yes, yes they do. Especially these days where the systems are completely failing an entire generation before they can even get a foot in the door.
I go to plenty of homes and their dishes are perfectly clean.
Are there people who could do more and are happy where they are at? Sure. But that’s also not going to work for CEO.
In my experience, this means one of two things:
You're asking people who already have too much to do, to add even more to their plate.
Or
You're throwing the projects which are doomed to failure and nobody else will touch at them.
In basically every job I've ever had this has been the case. There is nothing like being given a shit sandwich and being told it's delicious ice cream.
I'm saying this more from the perspective of an IC though, who is dealing with the next 2-3 levels of management. Perhaps it's a different story in the C-suite, but I'm dubious.
IMO it's more often a problem of training and support. Throwing people into the deep end and standing back while they sink or swim seems like a myopic strategy to me, but maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.
Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.
The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.
It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.
And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.
Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.
As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
This happened by trying to find capable people that didn't come to you through nepotism and paper mills and such.
The strange thing is that nobody has developed a hiring battery for the naturally hyperconfident employee you met through the grapevine, who costs you millions, and as often as not, irreparably damages the company.
Sure, where would be biological lifeforms today if hadn’t been driven by some visionary leaders. Ooops? But I mean, now that humanity provide great leaders, biosphere is thriving like never before. Reooops?
He was a demonstrably bad CEO, so much so that the Apple board fired him. He then went on to get better at the job through running another two companies until, eventually, Apple purchased one of these companies (it was very much unsuccessful, BTW). Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
Also he died 15 years ago, but Apple's success (measured in market cap at least) went up more than 10x since he died (from 300-400B to 3-4T), under Tim Cook. That's arguably from the groundwork and reputation the company laid down 15 years ago, but still - few companies manage to keep growing on stuff they did 15 years ago. Oil industry notwithstanding.
And since we're talking about CEOs, top-level personnel decisions are one of the biggest impacts a CEO can make. SJ promoted Ive to director of design, he also hired and eventually promoted Cook to COO.
The CEO is in large part responsible for picking what products have hope to grow the company. The iphone was far from a slam dunk, many thought it would fail. Now it's responsible for over half their revenue and they're one of the largest companies in the world.
>Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
I'm totally confused by your post, so you admit he became a good CEO then?
I suppose one can insist that people say “most talented people” but it seems so much more streamlined and to say “top talent”. I have never come across anyone who is bothered by this.
FWIW I am way more bothered by the use of the word “resources” to refer to people. I think it is disgusting and offensive.
Also, I’m not trying to change people to stop using the word “resources”, even if I am not a fan.
I'm not sure why you mention that part. Maybe the text doesn't fully carry your message, so I need to ask: are you proud that you are not trying to change people?
I'm not saying top talent doesn't make the difference, I'm just saying that CVs and impressions aren't always completely related.
I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.
There are things worse than losing your job.
I was never a "fanboy" of Jeff Bezos, but I do admire when people do or take the correct approach, I say that to preface that I admire that early on he would tell investors that he's only to be considered as a long term investment, which I wish the stock market had some way to protect these sorts of stocks from the whims of people who quickly crash the value of a company on speculation or other meaningless metrics when you're heavily investing in R&D and have one bad quarter, maybe two, but your third quarter will yield results, but oh no, you have to fire people to make the market happy, so your efforts are ruined.
Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....
When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer.
So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human involvement. A company just ticking along? I’m less convinced. Or to be more specific, as a developer who is told my work is obsolete by CEOs, I’m interested to know why they don’t apply the same logic inwards.
Environment around you changes all the time which means if a company wants to stay around it needs to be able to adapt at any moment.
unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?
I see no bias here /s.
How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.
And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?
Those with the higher price tag are better /s
It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".
> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it
The "Obama putting a medal around Obama's neck" meme seems appropriate here.
How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?
Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic bona fides. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.
I think a lot of the "proof" at this level, is Mastery of the Bro-Fu. If you can speak the right language, wear the right watch, and drive the right car, the key to the executive washroom is tossed to you, without a second thought.
However at the same time it can also be true that some leaders are either poor or make no difference - but as long as they don't have to react to external change ( or only do so as part of a herd ) they can coast quite happily for years while 'earning' huge rewards.
Leadership is only really tested when the right course is a different one from either the past or your peers.
I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.
The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.
I’ve worked with exceptional CEOs at start ups. A startup CEO has to be a good sales person. They need to be able to make that final pitch to sell the company.
Then everyone ideally cashes out and we’re all rich without the need to ever work again.
It’s probably not going to happen, but I often dream of getting rich and in my retirement running a game studio in a low cost of living country.
I want to literally code right alongside my employees and pay them fair wages even if we make no money.
Good basic games. A strict no DLC policy and full open source( if possible) 5 years after release.
Do you have an example of this? The usual criticism of CEOs is based on the exact opposite; that we are the fall guys, and that CEOs usually profit (and are rarely punished for) their own failed decisions.
Looking back at all the companies I've worked for, I can't think of one time a CEO actually suffered blowback for serious mistakes. The closest would be Steve Jobs having been let go from Apple, but that was in 1985 and he wasn't even the CEO back then.
The buck stops somewhere.
I say it's insidious because they still get paid millions and have an excellent exit package. And it's not like it tarnishes their resume either (said CEO has done the above consistently).
Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.
A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.
If you look at the causes, it was blatantly obvious what he was doing wrong (doing away with sale prices). It's a kind of fundamental thing that one could understand by just asking some questions. Maybe it's not genius, maybe people "just do things" and they just happen to work once.
Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.
Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.
There are exceptions, of course, and there are truly talented managers out there. If I look around, however, all I see is clown cars accidentally driving into gold mines.
Fixed that for ya.
And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.
past success does not mean future success. cz one might just have circumstantial.
so what tends to happen shitty leaders are promoted based on "reasonable/visible" metrics - such as having an MBA, etc.
Roughly, how did it become clear that the second or third place candidates set the company back by months? Did the company ultimately hire the first place candidate and discover their superior effectiveness in the org?
Previous job performance isn't that reliable since countless CEOs have been great at one company in terms of raising stock price/revenue/profit/whatever, and then flamed out at a future company. How does one know in advance that one CEO will increase revenue by a few percent more than another, and justify such an expensive compensation package?
Now look at his earnings.
Like a family home in Bay Area is 2-3M. Lots of other places in California with better weather and houses closer to 1M. The primary reason the area supports such high housing costs is the density of high paying jobs that require in office somewhere in the bay.
Without RTO, all the managers with property in the bay get skittish that a great exodus will happen from the Bay Area like SF in covid and their house won’t appreciate 10-20% a year
2010-2016 in SF there was no such thing as a manager except PM who had no power (they were mostly just happy to be there).
Over time middle management and HR got insane - became the entire show. The whole point of a tech job. Then it was 1:1s and backstabbing all the sudden you could get someone fired. Hilarious, a few years prior if you complained about someone it was your problem - if you don’t like the culture you can leave. And some did because there were many opportunities.
Same thing happened with the web. Turned into banning and blacklisting and all the bullshit authority surrounding the activity taking over the activity itself - ruining it.
It’s not needed, we did better without these things.
What I have witnessed, with empirical evidence, is that productivity and/or output across the organization slows down. It is great at first as everyone can catch up on their work and existing projects but then the longer term implications is the teams are disconnected, decisions are more difficult, coordination of simple tasks more difficult, onboarding and actually integrating new employees is difficult, curating the culture is difficult, and it goes on. If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.
So it’s not about anyone’s need to feel worthwhile it’s literally about doing what is probably the best for the company even if it upsets some people. Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better. When productivity goes up, it’s only a good thing if output and all the other tangibles aren’t sacrificed in the process. The leaders of organizations initiating RTO usually have done so by avoiding this true talk type conversation with the employees. This is what has led to people filling in the gaps with BS about real estate evaluations. It’s been poor communication and I think a dose of honestly and openness would be beneficial. Sometimes it’s a feeling and they don’t have the means to really collect data and lay it out in an empirical way, so I think that’s part of the reason they avoid it.
The management team doesn't want it to be up for discussion, and doesn’t want to create wfh subclasses of employees, which is what data would lead to.
This is what the execs might THINK but it's not actually based in real evidence. RTO does not make organizations function better. Execs are gaslighting themselves into believing that RTO makes the org function better, but it's an illusion.
Honestly, the amount of times I need to call and impromptu meeting during normal/expected work hours but can't get the necessary attendees because 1) walking the dog 2) at the gym 3) putting baby down for a nap 4-99) life>work. This is something I can manage around, but it slows things down. I can't make a decision today, I have to schedule the discussion for another day when my calendar is open which might be next week. This just doesn't work for executives in our fast paced business environment. I appreciate that IC's like the flexibility and balance wfh provides, and feel like they are checking all the boxes even better than ever, but they often do not actually hold up their end of the deal and prioritize the urgency of their jobs once they get settled into the wfh setting. It's great if you do, but on average, people take a lot of advantage of the flexibility and it does slow down everything.
That said, I feel most management teams have settled on being hybrid, where working in office is fluid, or perhaps standardized on a few days a week. I think everyone sees value in that approach, there's usually a happy medium is my opinion. But fully remote doesn't work well for a lot of larger complex orgs.
Office first by default is a scourge on this industry.
Anyway, need to go empty my mouth after throwing up from reading your reply.
The truth of that may be upsetting, management is aware.
I really cannot take a sentiment like this seriously after seeing the last 15 years of American work culture. And especially the last 3. We spent the better part of 40 years tearing down the concept of careers, trying to de-professionalize as much local labor as possible, and outsource whatever remains, and yet companies still want to pretend they care about "culture" and and "engagement"? They lay off millions of workers the past few years and yet "retention" is still a metric somehow?
This is the problem seeing employees on a spreadsheet. You don't see the generational damage this is inflicting and the upcoming reckoning when that generation can no longer be ignored politically.
The only thing I agree with is that onboarding is more difficult, but we haven't exactlty been in a hiring moood as of late.
> If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.
A lot of development work is heads down. That's why I agree hybrid is the best approach, but I argue it doesn't even need to be once a week for many. Maybe go in bouts of a few weeks or even months, then have 1-2 weeks of in-person planning.
But this doesn't fit the 9-5 they want to push.
>The fact ICs think productivity is the most important thing they can provide is a signal they’re wrong (in the eyes of a leadership team).
>The management team doesn't want it to be up for discussion, and doesn’t want to create wfh subclasses of employees, which is what data would lead to.
All I hear is that managers ultimately care more about preserving their jobs (or the concept of their jobs) than about actually providing value to the company. And Managers are the ones that get to talk to executives, not CEOS.
Hearing that IC's are "wrong" for following their job description to "individually contribute" sure does sum up today's job market.
I don't care who started first, theirs is a catchy Corporate Identity. I've been around since GPT2&CrAIyon (an equally-catchy name).
Hopefully everybody enjoys the Wednesday they deserve =D
"Quis tellus eget adipiscing convallis sit sit eget aliquet quis. Suspendisse eget egestas a elementum pulvinar et feugiat blandit at. In mi viverra elit nunc."
More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.
But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge through rationality alone. In the end, perhaps the real role of leadership is not to choose what AI considers the optimal decision, but to take responsibility for making unique bets—ones that may have a lower chance of success but offer the potential for much greater rewards.
Anyone can get a decision now-ish, without filtering through tiers of middle management.
Though not sure 'irrational' is the right term - perhaps the willingness to take a decision without all the data, because doing something is more important than being completely right. Or the willingness to do something new based on personal judgement.
Take the classic example - the iPhone - I suspect pretty much everybody working on the project, who saw the working prototypes knew it was great - 'you had me at scrolling' etc.
Could AI have predict that emotional response to the product in advance? Dunno.
That's what middle management does, your C-suite has an entirely different function.
In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.
What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
You clearly haven't encountered the large group of people who trust hallucinated LLM output more than their coworkers.
If this were so obviously true there wouldn't be nearly so much concern about people having relationships with AIs.
The position was "a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human" and quite clearly to some people it can, so the statement is false.
If CEOs are going to start claiming that a core role of their job is emotional inspiration as a result of all those all hands meetings they’re going to be surprised how much laughter they get in return.
Basically all of it
> If I as a software developer am to be told I can do fine without human meetings to discuss product requirements, why can’t CEOs?
Because your job is different than a CEO (and it's also not true for your job)
Oh hell no. That's not where the value lies.
You can't send an AI CEO as part of a trade delegation. Sending an AI to close the deal doesn't tell the other party that you're there to make sure the deal happens. That's the sort of thing a human CEO does that an AI can't.
But they’ll have an AI CEO too. They will discuss and make a deal.
> Teen boys are choosing AI girlfriends over real ones for "maximum control, zero rejection"
https://fortune.com/2026/04/17/teen-boys-dating-ai-chatbot-g...
> The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-gi...
Not that any of it is gender specific. The women on /r/myboyfriendisai are making the exact same mistakes, in many ways it’s worse because many are fully grown adults.
A big fraction of a senior executives' work can also be delegated to others in the company (or outside consultants and services), the thing that can't is being ultimately responsible for making the final decisions - product, people, direction etc.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author)
An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.
use data when you make claims
(I have no idea, but now I wonder.)
Corporate America was gutted. This was also when hostile takeovers were the new thing. Buy, slice and dice and parting out of corps was all the rage.
what? how? literally what work is already not done by some subordinate that an executive does now?
if some work can be replaced, its already done by some employee. those employees are susceptible to replacement.
Obviously kind of early and hard to pull off still, but by the end of next year I think you will see a ton of people attempting it with at least partial success.
There are already plenty of less serious attempts.
I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
"What does this team do? Answer customer tickets? Well let's replace with AI!"
With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
> they are absolutely clueless.
That's because you aren't asking them about their college rowing days, yachting, collecting weird mechanical wristwatches, equestrian sports, the best restaurants in the Hamptons or other matters on which they are uniquely suited for and qualified.
The white-washing of stolen wealth via "self-made" hollywood and startup careers has reached unfathomable levels.
Yes, daddy worked for the US gov in the 70s and somehow we have eight-digit offshore wealth.
I think I am more inclined to believe the opposite of this
No, you've identified the real issue: all the CEOs come from Harvard/Yale. There is a very large wealth class divide between the people who get these jobs almost exclusively due to "networking" (often failing upwards) and the increasingly rare people who actually work up to those roles. It's very much a club that uses every tool possible to maintain the opportunity hording, including AI.
This is largely because being an executive in 2026 has very, very, little to due with technical expertise. AI will just be another tool in their workshop for that.
Of course, letting AI do that, seems like just a incredibly bad idea. Not that it's much better with people, but at least, with the average IQ of CEOs you can be sure they're not good at it ...
If I run `/post-license` inside of the project, it analyzes what SAAS it uses, how exactly, writes bespoke tailored version of this software, disables proprietary one and returns links to cancel licenses.
I already saved this way a few k USD but I admit I've just started offering this to my clients.
Why do they need to pay yearly licenses for ai generated code when it could be ai generated once just for them?
> "The only layer immune to "efficiency" is the one that approves it."
I'm stealing this one.
Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.
The reason why CEOs exist is because the owners/shareholders want someone do run the company for them.
That is why their salaries are enormous. I love this Ai concept though! It is genius and hilarious.
> OverpAId has raised $0 in Series A funding, at a valuation of infinity divided by zero. Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable".
Take my money!!!
now middle management - that can be useless. more layers between CEO and you, the more useless.
The most disappointing part q_q
I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.
Frankly, when people worry about “AI eating jobs,” it’s these MBA-manager types who are probably most ripe for role elimination.
AI helps doers do more, but it also means we need vastly fewer people whose job is just to coordinate, summarize, manage, and relay information but fundamentally aren’t the ones innovating, building, or doing.
Work is the thing that helps one lift society up.
We're all connected beings and one's occupation is how we each contribute to that society. The idea that it's something we suffer through in order to eat is a crummy reversal of the idea of having purpose.
It doesn't matter if one is selling toilets or scrubbing them, each of us is still keeping civilization in motion; giving it life.
Don't enjoy your occupation? Go back to school. Can't afford school? Hunt down people you respect and figure out how to work with or for them.
I can do a lot of work and contribute to society without having a job. In fact, that’s how I think it should be for everyone.
No jobs. Universal income. People doing things they love.
Well, I don't believe that just because you work hard, you'll always succeed. Most people just see me as a subordinate worker. Of course, if you come from a wealthy family, it's probably different.
Disagree with this statement.
Take Walmart (as a boring example):
- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA
- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m
CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.
Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'
If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.
That's doing a lot of lifting.
I think you could make a 50/50 decision at the CEO level for most decisions, and merely by making a decision faster the org would have better profit outcomes.