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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

PayPal had good earnings last quarter (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/paypal-shares-up-on-earning...), so bad performance may not be the reason.

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He was CTO, why would infrastructure guy ever be held responsible for poor overall performance? It's not rocket science, nor F1 team

Shit flows downhill and they needed a scapegoat to make the board happy. The general public doesn't know what a CTO does so problem solved nice and neat.

I would disagree along the lines that the general public didn't even know there was a problem. I'm still not even sure what the issue was, myself(besides the usual complaints about paypal).

From his bio page:

"In 2011, James moved over to PayPal, first as vice president of global product development and, beginning in 2012, as chief technology officer. In 2015, he expanded his role to also lead the Payment Services business in PayPal, a global team that powers the efficient movement of money and rewards into, out of, and within the PayPal network."

So, he was CTO/Infrastructure Guy, then they added on SVP Payment Services some time last year, which sounds like it has a lot to do with overall performance.

> He was CTO

...and Senior VP Payment Services.

> why would infrastructure guy ever be held responsible for poor overall performance?

Payment Services is a pretty central business function for PayPal.

CTO can also be a product person, or at the very least they should be tightly integrated into the product development lifecycle.

A CTO that is just an "infrastructure guy" is not a CTO by any measure I've seen.

ALL C-level's are responsible for company results.

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