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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

I too used to think that CEOs were a waste of resources, and that they had minimal if any impact on most companies. But I think people grossly underestimate how important CEOs are, because the vast majority of them do a decent job. When you swap out somebody who does a decent job for another person who performs at about the same level it's not really that noticeable.

That said, you'll come to appreciate those "decent" CEOs after you've had an experience with a truly bad CEO. One such experience was enough for me to decide that who runs the company at the top is critical to the success of most companies.

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I'll second this comment.

Armchair evaluation of CEOs suffers from survivorship bias.

Decent/good CEO keeps the business moving. A bad CEO can sink a company.

Boards/owners (dependant on corporate structure) can mitigate results.

> When you swap out somebody who does a decent job for another person who performs at about the same level it's not really that noticeable.

Which interestingly is the same effect as swapping out somebody who does nothing for someone else who does nothing.

> When you swap out somebody who does a decent job for another person who performs at about the same level it's not really that noticeable.

>> Which interestingly is the same effect as swapping out somebody who does nothing for someone else who does nothing.

I disagree. Swapping out a decent senior dev for a decent senior dev doesn't have a net negative effect like swapping out a senior dev who does nothing for another senior dev who does nothing. In scenario one, you have a senior dev who ramps up in a decent amount of time, does the work they're paid for, and isn't a waste of time and money like a bad hire. In the second scenario, you have a senior dev who's just as damaging as their predecessor, but you've lost the time and money you've invested in onboarding them while also paying the ongoing opportunity cost you could have avoided with a decent hire and any technical debt they accrue gets tossed on the pile with the rest of the debt their predecessor accrued. It would have been better to have just kept the first guy instead of wasting time, money, and morale on someone new.

How in a forum of techies man of whom have spent the good part of their careers trying to get companies to not see IT and Ops as a cost center and "nothing is wrong so why are we paying you" do we so casually dismiss other people's work?

Benign neglect is what I'm looking for from top management. A CEO might be like a fire extinguisher; you need to have one, but it rarely does anything but sit there; but, when it's needed, it better work?

Actually though, setting up and maintaining the organization so it can self manage is harder than it looks. Of course, some CEOs have good results with meddling too. It's hard to have two CEOs and A/B test them, although RIM/Blackberry had two CEOs for a while, and there's some other companies that tried it too.

I do agree, in German we have an idiom "Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her" ("a fish rots from the head down") to describe precisely how bad management cause ripples all the way down. That being said, CEOs are still prime candidates for automatization. I mean, surely nobody wants to replace good CEOs with bad software but rather with equally or better performing software equivalents. Additionally, one day it might be easier to ensure an AI CEO makes better moral/environmental decisions than his human counterpart.

I google'd around and I can't find anything conclusive about whether a fish literally rots from the head down.

I'd be curious if it's merely an expression or a true thing about fish.

  In reality, it is the guts of fish that rot and stink before the head.

Source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...

  The guts of fish will start to rot quickly and spread terrible bacteria and disease throughout the entire fish.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/comments/mv04em/is_gutting...

Hope this helps. I'm not sure why you were downvoted for expressing curiosity about fish biology.

At a guess (a wild-ass one, I admit): Some of the softest, most porous tissue of a fish, with the highest surface-area-to-volume ratio, and most exposed to the environment with all its microbes -- as opposed to most of their flesh, that is contained within skin and scales -- are the gills. So it feels very plausible that the gills are the first bit of a dead fish that would start to rot.

Well, those or the guts, of course: Assuming fish have an intestinal microflora like land animals, their guts would have a head start on rotting (Heh!) over even the gills. But I guess that's where skin-and-scales-as-container comes in again, only the other way around: the possibly rotting guts are hidden away inside the critter, so not as immediately noticeable as any rot starting from the gills up at the head.

This is all my private speculation, though, and most probably influenced by (i.e, my self-rationalisation of) precisely the saying you're enquiring about.

The problem I have with CEOs is when they're doing a good job they make $$$ but when they're doing a bad job they still make $$. When a company goes down, they have golden parachutes to ensure that they're safe. Meanwhile, workers get shafted.

That and I have a problem with CEOs that demands to increase their pay by double, triple, quadruple amounts without increasing their employees pays. Not only CEOs, K-12 Boards did the same thing, increasing the superintendent pay without increasing the pay for teachers and school employees. Non-profits did the same, look at Mozilla. This is one reason why the ratio (employer:employee) is so obtusely off. American employees don't have such protection against this.

CEOs are workers. If you're talking about people who don't work for the business, you might be thinking of shareholders?

I don't think he's complaining the the CEOs get paid a salary. I think he's saying that even when a CEO massively screws up - they get a multi-million dollar golden parachute.

Everything they do is massive. People are paid relative to the size of their potential success or screwup, and pay is not withdrawn based on which they did.

I get the point that golden parachutes are annoying, but yeah. It's all part of the compensation package, and the reason for it is in the above paragraph.

Indeed, and the majority of a CEO’s direction and decisions are fundamentally different from those that the other employees make. As a software engineer I’m simply not privy to the kinds of choices the CEO is making and “no news is good news” is often the case with C-Suite decisions. But, if they are making some bad choices it really shows.

I think this is the case with any manager. A great manager will not be noticeable. Things just seem to run fine.

But when you come across a bad manager, you will surely notice!

Sad for them that they only get noticed when they are bad at their job, not really when they are good or great.

> who runs the company at the top is critical to the success of most companies.

I think it's culture and power/organizational structure that determines this. Culture is disseminated from the top down, due to the power structure. If you remove the power from the CEO, their value goes away. If you change the culture without the CEO, their value goes away. So you don't need a CEO if you can force the company to change its culture and power structure a different way.

The example I would think of is getting a budget lawyer for something important.

You need someone that can give the time and attention - except you would be better off with a human that can do the right thing poorly, instead of a robot that can do the wrong thing well.

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