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Comment by bratao | Hacker News Reader

I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day.

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.

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But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.

Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.

> really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help

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.

You can't drop everyone in that position but there is a significant number that still could do it. It is not 100% more like 50%/60% luck.

Does execution, management, marketing and hiring not matter? The best product or opportunity wins and it’s just whose along for the ride?

I hate this new cult of personality thing many are trying to cultivate.

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.

So you don’t believe execution on these points makes a difference?

Bring it more local. Does how you manage your household or work matter? Where does scaling that up break?

Seems people have been very clear on this and you keep dragging it back to points already made.

I’m asking for clarification because if the answer is no I’m afraid we are in psychologically different worlds and people feel out of control of very basic parts of their lives.

>people feel out of control of very basic parts of their lives.

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.

Of course that matters but many can do this.

I go to plenty of homes and their dishes are perfectly clean.

Everything matters. Luck matters as much as the other things.

What is luck and why assume an equal weighting? Is it luck whether you accomplish your household chores?

Of course! For example, luck may be the difference in being in good health or not, or having people that depend on you being in good health or not. If you are suffering from a depression, or (undiagnosed/untreated) ADHD, or a broken leg, or blindness, or you have to take care of a sick loved one, those are all things that you have little control over but they affect your ability to do household chores. And if you are disabled but you also happen to be rich due to a large inheritence (so luck), then you can hire a housekeeper. There are so many factors that can influence your ability to complete household chores that are outside your control, that we should surely include luck as a factor.

You know which people are eager to take on more responsibilities? The people who don't believe in the concept responsibility.

It also depends on whether you're providing appropriate compensation for the responsibility that you're offering. I see several cases where managers offer more responsibility for a peanuts' worth of pay hike and then say the same stuff you said.

Yes. At my work place a level bump is almost a doubling of comp and the main criteria is being able to be responsible for projects.

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 work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility,

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.

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.

So you don’t think people have a skill ceiling in this area?

There surely is at some point.

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.

I’m typically an IC as well. I’m certainly at my ceiling whenever I do any management.

From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.

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

The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.

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.

They spend 18 rounds over six months vetting a developer with silly puzzles that must be solved from memory, with an audience. It's about as far from the job as possible.

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.

Because that hiring battery would end up selecting “The wrong kind of people.”

>Leaders are necessary.

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?

And about startups. For a while the Stanford MBA + MIT CS founder duo guaranteed a pavlovian response from VC regardless their actual experience.

Maybe we should have LLMs (and ML for results) start hiring at the top level to dogfood some reality back into the class

CEOs are basically dice rollers. "Proven" are just formerly lucky gamblers. The only control that CEO has is whether they roll the dice themselves or let their underlings roll. It's entirely possible that the only CEOs that are winning against the odds are the ones that roll themselves the least.

The guy who took over JC Penney's after leaving Apple's Retail division is a good example of this. On paper great pedigree. Success --but did not understand a different, albeit retail, market so well and things tanked horribly.

Yeah, JC Penney was not Apple Stores (which by the way probably looked awful to a lot of people on paper--see Microsoft's attempt to clone). But JC Penny was a discount brand whose shoppers absolutely weren't looking for an expensive Apple Store experience.

Today I bet that guy still somehow makes 20x what I do.

I feel like we should consider the opposite as well. What if you actually hire someone who is great but they achieve zero results because of sheet bad luck and “help” from a product team that couldn’t go right.

No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs.

This is actually how the world works

You are confusing CEO pay with CEO ability. There is plenty of examples of companies doing poorly until a new CEO comes in, and others of a company doing well until the CEO retires and a replacement comes in.

Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.

no its not like that, these people get plopped into positions of power, and alot of time theres no good way to assess their performance

There are plenty of good ways to assess performance of CEO. However the important ones can only be run 10-20 years from now and so they are not helpful.

Right it’s like venture investing c very hard to evaluate short term

Is there? I don't see many control group companies working in absence of a CEO.

There's an equally valid hypothesis that a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform; whereas a bad CEO is one who, due to ego and self-aggrandizement, can't help but impose themselves via meddling and prevent a good company from performing. By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all, despite what the executive class would have you believe. The aristocracy of old also argued that their titles were earned and that society could not function without them.

yeah just sit there, keep a steady hand, and project confidence

There are a lot of well-functioning organizations for which that’s exactly what’s needed.

Leaders should be paid for outcomes not activities.

Outcomes of leadership are hard to measure.

If you pay by success of the company, noone is going to want to do a 5 year corporate turnaround.

> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform

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.

And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.

Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.

> But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions.

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.

Nah.

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.

Sure, a college student can tell you if a company is making or losing money. But there are ample examples of "good" companies crashing because they didn't react to shifts in the market, which requires projecting into the future.

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.

Yes, sometimes a healthy company will eventually have their business undermined by some future technology.

Except that's not what we were discussing.

There are plenty of anecdotal examples of co-CEOs not working very well.

Warren Buffet has always said that he likes to invest in businesses that are so great that even an idiot can run them (because often an idiot will be running them).

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.

I think it's the other way around. They're not talking about CEO ability, they're talking about CEO performance, which aren't the same. Money follows performance (based on outcomes, not actual talent). It's like professional sports - win a championship, get a big payday, regardless of how it happened.

No, the only thing that matters is what you can negotiate. Since most executives + board vote on their own salaries, which ones have you ever seen negotiated to lower their salaries?

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).

Investors aren't dumb. What does Ivy gain in this trade by just raising a lot of money and running it poorly?

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.

the world doesnt work like an efficient machine, and capital is far more of a moat than people want to admit. these "founders" are more like professional managers from the same backgrounds as the investors

there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.

Saying capital is a moat is not convincing.

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.

https://dealroom.co/guides/global

> Investors aren't dumb.

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.

Assuming he doesn’t completely shit the bed he can spin any mediocre tenure into a great success and now he has experience running a company.

"This is actually how the world works"

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.

my comments are from living in nyc for 15 years, alot of lived experience and meeting people behind closed doors

I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."

Sure, but his equity award deadline had passed, thus the fishing trip. And if things go well with Everett on the trip, the new funding would mean he can ditch those risky accounts.

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I'd argue that the "rampant cynicism and nihilism" and more a result of the environment than algorithms manipulating people, the content is also made by other people, and it just serves up what people want. Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling since everyone has their own feed instead of the reddit or HN approach with a shared feed. Also the phrase is that a few bad apples spoil the batch, nobody cares about the rest of the batch until you can get rid of the bad ones

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

"Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling"

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.

i dont think hating on ivy league types is that common, and 90% of people have no real life experience with this kind of thing, or are even aware of how corporate hiring/funding works at the higher level.

>What 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.

But have you been inside the old money, prep school world? It is absolutely about connections and getting into the system for the most part. The meritocracy bootstrap stuff is life coaching fluff to keep us in the middle grinding.

I've long thought the bootstrap stuff was a partial scam. There is so much information inside people's heads about how to successfully start a business. In some industries, with the right contacts, they can tell you exactly what to build, how to price it, how to do go to market.

Meanwhile, you could spend years grinding for nothing without the above information

Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .

you messed up!

It's who you know. You are just more likely to know the right people to raise money than a random non-Ivy type.

In the startup world they're only really looking to bat better than 10 pct overall to mark success, right? Do we wonder why it's all just a crap shoot?

> speaking as a founder/CEO

> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it

The "Obama putting a medal around Obama's neck" meme seems appropriate here.

Exactly my reaction. Of course a CEO is going to write a post saying "CEOs are expensive but worth it". At least they admitted to it, I guess!

I feel like you're suffering from some sort of confirmation bias.

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.

Is it just that the company collapsed? The third-rate version of him probably would have ended up in jail a-la SBF or Ms Holmes, with hopefully no one getting killed or maimed, or chemicals in a factory causing cancer across neighborhoods or poisoning wells or something.

There are things worse than losing your job.

Only truly exceptional executives can be SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.

There's also Madoff.

Or maybe the third rate version would have made different choices, and those may have due to pure chance worked out well for us.

That's only if the company's revenue is in excess of 100B. There aren't many companies like that. Certainly not enough for an AI platform to monetize.

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.

> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

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) .....

Genuine questions from the ground floor:

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?

> How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles?

Those with the higher price tag are better /s

The site is satire… I don’t think it’s a serious pitch for “replace your CEO with AI”, it’s “hey, CEOs, if you disagree with this, why don’t you apply the same logic to all the parts of your business and all the employees you’ve confidently stated will be replaced by AI?”

If the past decade has taught me anything, it's that today's satire is tomorrow's reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Good leadership makes a huge difference - whether that be big or small. I've seen it myself - in particular it's amazing much of a difference good leadership can make at a huge company.

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.

> Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.

It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".

"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?

I'm not OP but I think it is both normal, proper, and desirable.

It is logical that there are people who are great at what they do and others who are not. We’ve all worked with both and if you are in the business of finding talented people, how else would you talk about it?

"Talented people", not "talent".

That’s a weird thing to be upset and reprimand us about.

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.

Well, then you just did. :)

Nuance is “resources” has the connotation of exploitation whereas “talent” is positive. The former is used to also refer to non-human things like iron ore, but I am not aware that “talent” is ever used to refer to anything other than people.

Also, I’m not trying to change people to stop using the word “resources”, even if I am not a fan.

> 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?

Sounds a bit like casting lingo in performing arts, but other than that, not sure what you're hinting at.

Yes, “the talent” is waiting out in their trailer and needs you to talk to them

... What are you getting at, I'm genuinely curious? What's wrong with the phrase "top talent"!?

I don't know, sounds very off putting, just like "resources" in "human resources". I get that this is normalized in all the corporations, but one still can choose to use terms that don't reduce people to "value produced".

This is unusually reactive response to normal language.

"Talented" is normal "Talent" is abusive

Yes. Highly accountable and responsible people with deep knowledge are rare.

> The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.

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?

Like others have said - many people at the top are so successful because they ended up at the right place and right time, and their approach just fit exactly the problem at hand. They did not see the future, they just had a hunch - and that can go either way.

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.

Good employees are good and bad employees are bad?

"proven talent"?

Most CEOs are not Lisa Su or Steve Jobs, or even remotely close. Current AI could surely do better than the majority of them.

But speaking as top talent, the quality gap between an average hire and me is night and day. I'm worth it.

See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.

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.

CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.

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.

> CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.

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.

Maybe this is more of a startup thing , but i remember the CEO personally apologizing to all of us when we shut down.

The buck stops somewhere.

Yeah, it's probably different when the CEO is a founder in some way. As an organization scales, leadership is replaced with non-founders, and blame becomes diffused, the nature of the C-level is just not the same.

It's not as insidious as the name implies, but it does happen. Sometimes a CEO is brought in for 2-3 years to clean house, take bad PR, then move oh for the next CEO to come in with a clean slate. This happens often; IIRC this is happening with the starbucks CEO who is more or less there with the goal to union bust and layoff.

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).

That's the point isn't it? You overpay a wealthy dude with connections to gain a node on nepotism graph.

I think there are parallels here to software development.

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.

Is a company ever really just "ticking along" though? Seems to me like you're always sliding one way or the other, largely due to leadership at the top.

Same goes for software development projects. I think the point of the satire is “why does it apply to X but not you?”

> A company just ticking along?

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.

You’re getting a lot of pushback, but I’m genuinely interested in your experiences. What differences have you seen between average and top leaders? Not in results, but in terms of how they approached the job?

Sometimes a lot of it is in their rolodex. Important people in government or banking or VC firms or other companies will take their calls.

How does a board objectively evaluate that a potential CEO is worth say $25M/year over a candidate who will take the job for $4M/year?

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?

Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?

> Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?

There's a huge difference between managing a small company in a competitive marketing with self-funding and the administration of the giant public corporations in a increasingly concentrated marketing.

And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.

Steve jobs said the same thing. however, we need to define great talent. imo they are laser focused people who also love helping others.

unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?

Also look at Marc Benioff who checks stock market has seesawed Salesforce into a low it hasn't seen in 4 years. The man seems to manage to repeatedly pull failure from the jaws of success.

Now look at his earnings.

The same thing is true in software engineering: an AI model is equivalent to an average programer (average with a huge standard deviation). Averigua is better than half, but still way behind the top performers

The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.

the thing about CEOs (well let us just say strategic/visionary) leaders since they're found across the whole org chart level - is finding them is very difficult since assessing their skills is also difficult.

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.

Ars had an interesting story, yesterday: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...

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.

I would like to replace a few CIOs or CTOs at some companies, software quality has been down the drain since before AI. It's just terrible. Stock market pricing driven development is a detriment on software quality.

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.

I'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.

Steve Jobs was a founder, not your average CEO hire. He built the company from scratch.

Steve Jobs was hired as the CEO of Apple when the company was 20 years old. He was never CEO before that.

Yes. I've heard some say that SJ being fired allowed him to go out and learn to move from founder to CEO. Only when he came back to Apple did he finally have the skills and maturity to be CEO.

Is Steve Jobs even a good example of "the type of person I want to hire as CEO"? I think he probably is not.

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.

The question remains whether that was all him or a combination of Wozniak and Ive, on top of being at the right place(s) at the right time(s) (iMac, iPod, iPhone).

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.

I don't think anyone has ever claimed Apple was all SJ. But Woz would have likely stayed at HP without the prodding by SJ.

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.

You can still find articles lambasting the iphone for having a small screen, 'who would want to surf the web on their phone'.

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?

Yes, my opinion is that after being the CEO of Next and Pixar he became the CEO we associate with Apple's success in the 2000s.

Man, everyone is demonstrably bad - until they aren't. Some things, like being CEO, are much more rare in the "try, try, try again" space, but it does seem to work like most things. My son was a terrible, demonstrably bad hitter for ~2 years. Then, all of a sudden, he was not, nor will he ever be again.

Agreed. I was thinking more along the lines of what does it mean to say "I want to hire the next Steve Jobs as our CEO"?

What matters is their connections to powerful people. That's what you buy.

Months? Most terrible founders and CEOs I've worked for set the company back years, and most of the time significantly damaged it to the point of no return for everyone involved. The worst ones are the arrogant, low-skill and/or low-effort bunch. They destroy the soul of the company, drive away customers, talent and loot whatever value is left in the company and take for themselves.

the quality gap between an average hire and top talent ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶ is night and day.

Fixed that for ya.

I respect your opinion, but behind winners imho there's 99% being in the right place at the right time. And people change and so do their motivation.

I'm not saying top talent doesn't make the difference, I'm just saying that CVs and impressions aren't always completely related.

Whoa there buddy, you are highlighting that true talent, like beauty, actually does exist. This kind of thinking is not tolerable on Hacker News.

> speaking as a founder/CEO [...] Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.

I see no bias here /s.

Unfortunately this is not what 95% of HN wants to hear, even though its the truth. But you have my upvote.

The post is a satire and when writing this I see it at #1 of the front page and the comment is #1 too. So I guess you are kinda wrong.

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