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Comment by gnrlist | Hacker News Reader

Just like in sports, you get paid more for what you have done vs what you could do.

Having a few really good pieces of work to show off is no guarantee that you'll consistently pump out good work, or that you haven't left clients high and dry before. Since a third party has no real way of gauging that except by your track record, they're taking more of a chance on someone with less of a track record. More risk means they need more reward, which means you get paid less.

Most of us COULD run a Fortune 500 company as well as the average CEO but we won't get the chance, nor compensation, until we have the experience.

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I honestly do not think most of us could.

I hand out with three groups of people: geeks, hacks and lawyers. All of them often easily think they could easily do any other job. This includes the lawyers and journalists thinking that making software is easy. Based on that, I think we're as deluded as they are.

Agreed. I know that "fudiciary duty" is a thing, but not what it involves. There are laws about accounting standards, but I can't even say what standard accountants need to rech to know those standards. I only found put a year ago that, in the UK, the (director?) of a Limited company can become personally liable for company debts if they trade while insolvent.

Import and export laws? Nope. Which parts of an employment contract are enforceable? Nope. Minimum standards for office temperature, cleanliness, health and safety? Nope. How much unpaid overtime you can make your employees do, and how that intersects with minimum wage rules. Nope.

But that's not what people mean when they say they could run a Fortune 500 company if given the chance. All of the things you list are things that are easily learned, the bigger question is whether in addition to that knowledge the CEOs of big companies have any particular character traits, unique skills or business insights or not.

Why do you think learning all of those things would be "easy"?

Those are essentially solved problems for which you don't need to reinvent the wheel and can copy what any successful small or medium business does.

It depends on how you define "easy".

I have a feeling that if I took all the time and energy I've put into studying and working with computers my entire life and chose to put all that time and energy into studying and working with business concepts instead, I'd be able to run a business, possibly even a Fortune 500 one.

Alas I didn't spend all that time and energy on business, so I can't run a Fortune 500 company, but alternate universe me might.

> Copyright, trademark and patent laws I think I get

Probably not :)

Even copyright law that's "simple" on paper gets sooo hairy so fast in practice - just look at all the FOSS licenses :)

I think I explained myself quite poorly, because I agree with you.

I meant "get" it in the sense that I can tell when I do or don't need a lawyer, rather than my friends and family who moan about Google for (c)-ing a photo of the sky ("They don't own the sky!") or what trademarks and patents are even for ("How did Apple get a patent on putting the letter 'i' in front of every product name?", to paraphrase).

I'm no expert, but I'm not a n00b either [that said, I think the monkey should own the copyright on their selfie, not the camera owner, but that's opinion not law. :)]

The rest if my examples, well… I don't even know enough to know if they are hard or easy. Which should be a good sign that I don't have the skills to run a business in its own right, so I'm not sure why other people are telling me I'm wrong about not being able to.

All things that you list are very specific domains, you'd have dedicated people responsible for them in even a medium-size corporation. The thing you really need to know, is how to make sure these people do not lie to you and do their work honestly and responsibly. One of the options is having corresponding competence yourself, but that doesn't scale.

Delegation is a black art, that's what I mean, but without really mastering it you cannot manage anything with >10 people, especially in high tech.

Perhaps there are a lot of people that are simply not very good at what they do, for instance because they don't care about doing a good job. If you then care about doing a good job, then there are a lot of jobs you can already do better than the people currently doing them. You will never be as good as the people with relevant training and experience that care about doing a good job, but you could be right that you could do a pretty good job.

I imagine a whole lot of people could do a better job than Yahoo's new CEO, for example. At that level, being the CEO of a corporation with that level of money that already runs itself, you could likely get by doing pretty much nothing/just going along with your advisors'/the board's advice to keep the company at least in the black.

It's often hard for people to appreciate the scale at which the CEO has an impact. As an individual engineer, if you're replaced by someone who's not an engineer, they are going to fail big time... But the amount of damage they can go to the company is very limited. Someone else will just pick up their slack, and the financial loss to the company is likely less than a million dollars.

At the CEO level though, even if you don't fill completely, even if you're 99% as good as the previous CEO, that 1% difference on a massive company translates to a loss of tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's assuming you're 99% as good. If you're only 90% as good, the damage is even greater.

Can you scrape by as CEO without bankrupting the company? Sure. But there's a reason why boards are still willing to pay millions of dollars to hire the best possible candidate. Because when you're managing assets worth billions of dollars, scrimping on a few million is simply premature optimization.

There ARE studies showing that CEO pay does not correlate with company success. Which I think implies a lot of big ships nearly run themselves. So I wouldn't say most of us could, but those with a sufficient enough business/managerial experience could, and many of those make a fraction of what a fortune 500 CEO makes.

> Most of us COULD run a Fortune 500 company as well as the average CEO

I appreciate your optimism; at the same time, I think it is somewhat unwarranted.

Running a 10-person company is challenging enough to have your shrink on the speed dial. As for Fortune 500 CEOs, those are superhumans on steroids (or cocaine and alcohol), who bend reality by their very presence. You have about the same chance of approaching their attitude as becoming an Olympic athlete.

Thankfully, there are other ways to achieve happiness (or make money, if you want something more quantitative) without becoming a big company CEO. One thing I know for sure: I don't envy them.

this kind of absurd lionization of the wealthy is part of the problem.

I've met some extremely wealthy CEOs, and they warp nothing around them. It's an elite career track and old boys club, that's it.

I met them as well. What industry are you referring to?

Extraordinary claims would do well to find some extraordinary evidence to support them, lest they collapse under the weight of their disproportionate grandeur.

There is a substantial intersection between wealthy people and CEOs, but they're still employees, so they're not that wealthy.

I have no doubt that a lot of big-co CEOs are operating at the limit of human capacity, but that doesn't really have any effect on my opinion of trust fund kids.

Trust fund kids do exist, of course, but those are usually not Fortune 500 CEOs (or at least not for long, unless they worked hard for that).

CEO's, as such, are employees, but lots of them are capitalists and derive as much or much more of their wealth from capital as from labor income.

My original statement was a bit over the top, but the idea I was getting at is how little impact most CEO's have on company performance (https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky), and how their pay does not correspond to their performance (https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highe... ). Along the same lines as the original post where performance doesn't match up with compensation, CEOs are just on the other end of the spectrum.

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