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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

That's a possibility, if being a CEO is mainly a matter of not screwing up in some spectacular way, and not dipping your hand too deep into the cookie jar. Performance doesn't have to be a monotonic function passing through the origin.

There are other jobs like this: Surgeons, airline pilots, and tympanists. Maybe the skilled trades in general. Sure, the good ones may show their brilliance on rare occasions, but those don't happen often enough to show up in a statistical study. Mainly they need the training, practice, and self discipline to follow the correct procedures and get it right every time.

I'm thinking of an analogy, which virtually guarantees that it will be a bad one: A bad plumber would be bad for the performance of my house, but a good plumber can't really make my house perform any better. Yet I don't want plumbing to be run democratically in my house without a plumber. (Note: I'm the plumber in my house).

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If you look at it from the point of view of you, the homeowner, then you don't see a good plumber but merely a plumber that follows procedures so the job is done correctly. Likewise, you see a bad plumber that screwed up the job and flooded your house.

Perhaps the "good" part of being a good plumber is doing the job correctly every single time and not making mistakes. If this were the case then I'd argue you are a perfect plumber. At what point on the scale does a mistake or mistakes take you from good to bad? A plumber with a 90% success rate is, in my definition, a good plumber as the stakes are not as high. A surgeon or airline pilot, in my mind, must have a 100% success rate in order to be considered competent since lives are at stake. You'd be hard pressed to show that a former CEO that now has a different position at another company is not a CEO due to being a bad CEO as they likely wouldn't be hired at all for any high-level position.

To wrap this up, if there was still a plumber out there that was a bad plumber then I suspect he/she wouldn't be a plumber long enough to still get jobs.

A good plumber can make your house run better if they come up with a more efficient or innovative way of doing a process that you didn't think about but in your mind that wouldn't make them a good plumber but merely a plumber that follows processes and doesn't make mistakes. If not for mistakes then we may never find better ways of doing something.

I like your analogy and I think it's got its merit. A good plumber might be able to solve a problem faster than an average one, though.

Yes, definitely. I am amazed by how quick the pro's are. There have been some jobs in my house that absolutely had to be leak tight on the first try, e.g., where a fixture is above a drywall ceiling. I've hired a plumber for those jobs.

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