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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

To me this illustrates one of the biggest problems we have in america which is the crazy firewall between rich and poor. Kamel wanted to have a serious discussion with Kalanick about how his decisions as CEO were affecting Kamel's life and Kalanick gets upset about this. That's your job! At least it should be. If you can't even handle light criticism from the people you employ, you shouldn't be at the top.

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Have you worked at a big company? In none of the fortune 500 companies have I met the CEO who has taken a minute to explain like Travis tried. In fact in some of the companies I worked for the CEO won't even respond to email.

I work for a gigantic corporation and you're right that the CEO wouldn't respond to me. In fact, if we were in a car together and I started talking to him about how my pay wasn't so hot this year I would expect him to be extremely uncomfortable. He should be! He makes huge decisions which affect thousands and thousands of lives. CEOs should be in constant contact with peons like me and Kamel. Maybe they would adjust their decisions so they wouldn't have to be confronted in this sort of way.

Except the CEO works for the board whose goal is to keep the company profitable so it can continue to exist.

If you are upset about pay, you go to your manager or in the case of Kamel, you go work for a competitor Lyft. You have every right to voice your complaints but don't be surprised when they fall on deaf ears.

I read something a while back (maybe here?) and I wish I could find the quote but my google-fu is failing me now, anyways it's something like this: "If the corporate structure is set up in such a way as to diffuse responsibility so thinly that no single person can actually be held responsible then the corporate structure is broken." This is a problem in many, many corporations but Uber is an extreme example. Kamel is just trying to hold someone responsible for the pay changes. Of course Kalanick is going to try to reject responsibility, it's what corporate America has taught him to do. That just seems a little messed up to me.

EDIT:

Furthermore, there is no good reason that a CEO should not work for the board as well as for their employees and their customers. Or maybe it's that the board should be looking out for their employees and customers. Either way, somebody should be listening to guys like Kamel so that outbursts like this don't have to happen.

Somewhat tangential, but if Kalanick's purpose is to make sure that Uber is profitable then he is failing at his job, considering they've lost billions of dollars quarter after quarter. And in this case, the driver can't be reasonably expected to go to Lyft because Lyft doesn't go black car services.

Or ears that yell BULLSHIT!

Why don't you work really hard, become a CEO like him, then show us how you are in constant contact with peons such as how you used to be.

In a large company it simply doesn't work like that, if everyone can come to the CEO with every little problem they have then he or she is going to be fielding complaints 24/7. Griping goes up in steps - you gripe to your manager, they gripe to theirs and so on.

EDIT: Spleling

This is driven by the argument that drivers are not employees. He has no vested interest in the drivers circumstances.

I showed up to uber to pick up a phone that my girlfriend at the time had left in an uber. They told me to wait in line behind the drivers. "Sir, we are all customers here."

He was clearly off duty. Being the CEO of a company like Uber is very difficult indeed. Surely the guy doesn't have to answer to literally every single person he meets 24/7 because he is the CEO. He deserves no personal free time?

If he wanted "personal free time" without being asked questions, including some pointed ones, he probably shouldn't have taken a car from the service he owns. This person wasn't just "literally" another person, they were technically his employee/contractor and were on the clock even if he wasn't. If I was in this situation where I was working while my boss was technically not but in my presence, I feel like it would be appropriate to ask my boss questions pertaining to my work.

Bullshit. He gets paid the big bucks for exactly that.

Nope, he get's the money because he founded a company and didn't immediately drive it into the ground.

Founders tend to maintain their seats at the table because they were the guys to originally build the table in the first place, and thus have political privilege.

He gets paid big bucks to lead a company like Uber and be held accountable by the board, not some random stranger. You seem to have some romanticized view of the world that's not congruent with reality.

> If you can't even handle light criticism from the people you employ, you shouldn't be at the top.

I ask this in all seriousness: what qualities make for a good leader assuming the ideals of capitalism? I understand many people here will say they would prefer to work for a moral leader who can handle criticism and adapt to make sure his employees are taken care of, but do those leaders perform better at growing companies quickly? I guess what I'm asking is for data - are assholes more likely to be successful CEOs? Or maybe they're better at the early stages when growing a company, or perhaps they're better at the later stages when a company needs to deal with regulations, or maybe they're always the worst. What data is there for this apart from anecdotes?

Turning that question around, what sort of a leader do you want to work for? Or folks usually like to work for? This whole idea of growing a company as the only (or most important) thing that matters is something that should die. We want people who we genuinely respect and imitate as our leaders. We want to build products that are genuinely useful and bring about a positive change in the society.

Yes, that's a personal decision in deciding where to work. But it's easy to come up with specific examples of CEOs that are assholes who grow gigantic companies. I was just using this specific example with Kalanick to raise the question. Perhaps a better example is Steve Jobs, someone who had something of a cult following but from what I've heard was an all around terrible person. If these people truly weren't tolerated, they wouldn't get to the top in the first place.

I guess some of these leaders have strengths that we probably can't easily put into words. For ex., a leader who can bring about the best from people, a leader who has a knack for understanding people, etc., I wonder how much of those other qualities played role more than them being assholes.

right. i think the point is, we should tolerate them less, so that they get to the top less.

I'm not asking what we should do from a moral perspective, which is highly subjective. I'm asking for data. Has anyone done an analysis on the traits of successful CEOs?

There are studies that have shown that CEOs are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population. If you assume being a psychopath also makes you an asshole, and some level of success is required in order to become a CEO, it wouldn't be unreasonable to claim that being an asshole makes you more successful.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-p...

That really is an atrocious article; they compared numbers which are loosely correlated at best:

>"The study of 261 senior professionals in the United States found that 21 per cent had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. The rate of psychopathy in the general population is about one in a hundred."

They should have applied the same standard to both groups, but instead used a very loose definition for the professionals, and a very stringent definition for the general population.

"The Psychopath Test" is a great book on this subject, and recommended reading on it; all these popular blog posts are just meaningless polemical drivel.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychopath_Test

I can't speak to the methodology of the study in the article, but it appears that the author of The Psychopath Test found that the rate was 4x the general population[1], so I feel like the argument still stands

[1] http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2015/04/why-a-disproport...

If you're not going to read the entire book, please at least read more of the Wikipedia article.

>He considers the book a cautionary tale against diagnosing someone without really knowing them, and about the need to avoid confirmation bias. He thinks that is "part of the reason why there are so many miscarriages of justice in the psychopath-spotting field." He does believe that Hare's construct of psychopathy applies to some people, and that their victims deserve sympathy, but is concerned about the "alarming world of globe-trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had.

I've placed a hold with my local library to check it out. Until I have a chance to read it, that appears to be an argument against attempting to diagnose an individual without significant psychiatric observation, which is a noble goal. But assuming the citation of the book in the article is correct, then there appears to be a link between psychopathy and being a CEO. Is your contention that this finding is incorrect or that we need to be careful in how we interpret the finding?

It is possible that there is some connection between being a psychopath and being a CEO, but I have no good evidence of it, and it is also possible that being CEO of a large company increases anti-social behavior patterns (as a lot of people are out to get you). The interesting question is whether psychopaths are more likely to become CEOs. Your second link didn't seem to appreciate the main message that Ronson described in his book; they just made passing mention of it.

Great leaders cause their staff to grow personally and professionally; they do this by finding out what keeps the staff from becoming all they can be, and removing those barriers. This causes companies and the industry at large to grow.

E.G. We used to have a general manager at where I worked some 30 years ago who handled a time theft case this way; he brought the guy into his office with a manager, laid down the time theft amount and days time theft occurred and gave the guy two options. Walk out the door, or work and pay it back; if you choose to be dishonest we have no use for you, leave. If you choose to be honest, pay it back, show me you can be a moral person, we're even. That person chose to pay it back, and they stayed with that company some 20 additional years.

Any other quality is secondary. You don't have to know a library of algorithms or what the latest and greatest API is to be a great leader or even a competent programmer. Those things are distractions from understanding the fundamental theories and best practices of computer science anyway, and a lot of it is technological imperialism delivered through marketing to management already very aware technology needs to be inhibited for them to stay employed.

Another very large organization I worked for had a standard software they had deployed all over the organization, and one department, a lab, had a bar-coding requirement for data entry to eliminate very costly problems that traced back to the lab. It wasn't my department's job to build infrastructure for them, and they had budgetary constraints that kept them from updating. I suggested they ask the staff to change the font of the text to a bar-code font which is something after doing 5 minutes of google research, I discovered the app allowed. I closed out the ticket and referenced that as a suggestion, and gave them the ticket to reference later. Lo and behold, 2 months later, they get a estimate for $50,000. This organization is one of the biggest employers in the US, and routinely mergers with another company about once every other year. There is no leadership in their organization, and we all suffer for it.

How is that his job? Stop being a silicon valley hippie for a second and think about how realistic that is.

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