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Comment by DaniloDias | Hacker News Reader

I find this statement strange. Curious if others experience aligns with mine:

Being a CEO is all consuming.

You don’t want to be a parent and a CEO, cause the company comes first.

You don’t want to be married and a CEO, because the company comes first.

If you could “automate” this job, the developers behind the scripts become de facto CEO. Their scripts cannot fail. They will have to make the same sacrifices as the meatspace CEO.

I dunno if it’s an Icarus thing or what, but the closer I am in interactions with ceos, the more I pity them.

Asking these people to trade their lives for the possibility of no payout seems doomed to fail. The only reason people trade their lives for this role is because it is worth the personal damage and risk.

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When I worked in the game industry QA folks were regularly asked to put in twelve to sixteen hours a day - they're sacrificing their health and lives for their jobs but without any promise of payout. Ditto for pretty much anyone else working on the bottom 3/4ths of the economy.

My immediate reaction is the diff between CEO and QA is that QA doesn’t negotiate well.

They’re willing to endure bad work for limited pay. You don’t want this type of person leading a company.

I’ve also worked (and left) the field of gaming QA. FWIW, I’m not trying to being controversial- this is my sincerely held belief. I think gaming QA is a good foot in the door to a career in tech, but something that should be abandoned as soon as you get a feel for what it takes to work in an agile environment and make your deliverables. The gaming industry seems like the place where you go to kill your health and happiness to me. As long as people keep signing up for the work, conditions will be awful.

I would suggest a different take-away, it takes power and stability to negotiate power. Basically, you need to have a powerful position to gamble on securing better compensation. If minimum wage were a problem unique to QA[1] then that explanation might ring true but I think the fact that you see the same pattern of exploitation in fast-food and the service sector at large paints a clearer picture that our educational system is just failing to teach people they have personal value.

I do agree that the difference between a good CEO and a terrible CEO can be pretty stark - but I also think that the best CEO can't turn around a company rife with nepotism and other organizational diseases - the plebs contribute a lot more to company health than they're given credit for... That's my primary source of disagreement on CEO compensation - everyone else is being undervalued and so the creation of value is being misattributed to a CEO. The CEO should probably be the highest earner at nearly every company - but only rarely should the CEO earn five or six times that of someone in the mail room and we shouldn't see the 200:1 ratios that are relative common today[2].

1. It does have a unique exacerbating factor, every year a bunch of new grads think "Oh man, video games - I want to work on those" and thus there's a large pool of people willing to be paid peanuts to work in the field. This causes the experienced QA folks to have their labour devalued to compete with the large pool of free labour. I very much agree with your last few sentences - that's what seems to be the take-away for the gaming industry for me as well.

2. A random study - I know the numbers are in this ballpark but I'm not familiar with the specifics https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

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