"Determines a vision and strategy..."
...and for this nebulous MBA speak, gets paid 40x as much as the people who actually do work.
...and for this nebulous MBA speak, gets paid 40x as much as the people who actually do work.
And don't knock the value of determining a vision and strategy: people don't just wake up in the morning knowing what they should be doing at the office today/this week/this year. If you don't think a clear vision and strategy matters, just ask Yahoo.
In other words, CEOs get paid X under the premise that they will cause the value of the company to increase by more than X.
E.g. Ben Horowitz "determined the vision and strategy" for Loudcloud when they moved away from managed services market and spun out Opsware, which led to a 1.6Bn exit. (http://voices.allthingsd.com/20100317/the-case-for-the-fat-s...) Its hard to argue that there was no value in that.
Which one sounds more concrete:
"I cleared out the ticket queue and wrote tests for all outstanding issues"
or
"I thought about my vision."
"For our design brief I came up with ten design elements that fit with the message we're trying to sub-communicate on our website, and found five examples of each element used on various sites across the web."
or
"I spent three hours talking to my computer."
The point is if it sounds that nebulous it's probably because you don't understand what they're actually doing. To someone who doesn't understand what coders do, coding sounds just as nebulous as 'business stuff'.
Now it's possible that the business person isn't actually doing anything, but then again it's just as possible that the coder isn't actually doing anything either.
I would bet the vast majority, once you push them on it, would respond with more of the same, and if you continued to push them on it, would ultimately defer to an underling for specifics.
It's not even the mumbo-jumbo that annoys me. It's fine if you want to say that a CEO sets the direction, goals, and overall plan of the company. I can believe that, and it's certainly valuable. What I cannot believe or accept is that they deserve to be paid an order of magnitude more money for doing so.
This is where you need a smart, ambitious CEO with a strong vision. They place the goalposts so that everyone can measure their own progress and contribution, as well as that of their group. It also gives investors and shareholders something on which to evaluate the company other than simple financials.
Really? How's that? If the tickets and test suites (for example) where your task, then how is completing them not an indicator of getting work done?