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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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