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Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

stale2002

> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?

The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.

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Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.

Workers are not legally or financially accountable for any of that. That is the whole point of a "job". I think you are confused.

When the worker loses their jobs over bad executive decisions, they sure feel like they were pretty harshly financially penalized for those decisions.

And they can get a new job? Or should people be in the same job all their life?

Neither are CEOs in our present society

Are you confusing CEOs with founders, shareholders, etc.? Chief Executive Officer is, in fact, a "job."

Many people observe a limited subset of reality. It's highly visible when a company hits a crisis and people lose their jobs; it's much more common, but much less visible, for a CEO to get an after-hours call about a brewing problem which they must immediately work to smooth over.

It’s amazing how many people on this website harp on about nobody noticing their hard work, nobody caring unless the server is down, etc, and not being able to conceive of the remote chance of this same phenomenon applying to other roles in an organisation.

You truly don't see the difference between those two examples?

I'm not quite sure why you ask that? I'm not arguing that these two very different examples are the same, I'm explaining more concretely what it means to say that a CEO's job is to "to be responsible to the business".

And you don't see being laid off due to the business's failure as being "responsible to the business"?

I do. It’s on the CEO’s shoulders the other 95% of the time. (Which again, I agree is not some horrible deal, it’s much more fun to be a CEO who’s stressed with too many calls than a blue collar worker who’s stressed about feeding their family.)

I wish that was true some how. In real world unfortunately the buck stops at whoever is easy scape goat, at times it can be a CEO

Doesn't this usually just mean saying "I take full responsibility" and then firing a bunch of unrelated people?

Rewponsibility is why we pay external consultants!

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