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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Neither CEO nor dev here but must say hn comments on CEOs are always wild. It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description

Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about

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The founders who become CEOs are generally the better ones. The ones that draw universal hatred are usually hired by the board of public companies, to enact unpopular measures to ensure shareholder returns, such as firing expensive developers to make room for cheap AI; or unfairly denying health care to policy holders (like Luigi's alleged victim); etc. The relatively rare heartless corporate CEO also receives disproportionate public attention compared to the more common founder->CEO.

They are usually ousted really fast - as there goals do not align with the shareholders?

Anecdote: John Sculley lasted ten years.

snap

The better you work, the less energy you have to spend on office politics

But there is literature concensus that at least in the US, non-US born CEOs are the best, and there is little relation between founders -> CEOs and good company performance on multiple metrics.

They can be the best at bringing in shareholder value, which would have a great correlation with enshittification. Having the ability to reduce the quality of something so that customers barely stay (or have no where else to go because they have been trapped in a monopoly or a walled garden) is not a skill. I'd argue it is a trait out of cartoon villains.

We watched very different cartoons.

Scooby-Doo > * when it comes to accurately depicting the predictable nature of capitalist villainy.

Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty.

The U.S. justice system is notorious for pushing people to plead guilty when they really aren't, or for cases involving extenuating circumstances.

The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive, but since it was an executive in a position of making decisions that damaged or ended the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, they would give him a pass (and directions to other executives/billionaires).

> The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive

And he pleaded guilty. There’s nothing “alleged” about this conversation, despite feelings about any other aspects of it.

I didn't say anything about alleged. I said the "apparent facts". I chose the phrase "apparent facts" because prosecutors and police outright lie or, at best, misstate the facts about what happened, such as when ICE agents claimed that the people they shot were driving their cars at them.

He said alleged victim

> The ones that draw universal hatred are usually hired by the board of public companies

Nah. When I talk about CEOs I usually mean founders-turned-CEO because those are the types I've personally known and shared space with. Remember, this is HN.

Most of those guys are megalomaniacs, clueless, or clueless megalomaniacs.

I think we're all talking about CEOs with business degrees, who subscribe to the Jack Welsh school of domain-knowledge-free corporate leadership.

There are a few different scenarios that people fit into:

* Lack of focus and discipline: Good founder, huckster, good at sales but won't scale with the business when it needs to start focussing.

* Fearful and nervous: Might start a business but doesn't want to make the wrong decision and so stops the business from growing due to decisions not being made when they need making.

* Not a founder but got the role somewhere once, lacks genuine transferable skills. Might work OK in another business but more than likely just riding the existing success/failure of the new business and leaves after 1-2 years to "face a new challenge".

* The rarest of all. Has all the relevant skills, creative, outgoing, mission focused and makes hard decisions efficiently. Will do well in whatever business they are in but might not be very popular!

I dunno most CEOs I have been under of seem to work really hard and try to get stuff done in a sane manner, it is usually the middle management that fs up.

CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making of their subordinates).

If you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.

>qIf you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.”

I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, which is the only good book on leadership I’ve managed to find.

Yeah if new CEO gives the middle management mission in the lines of - we need high productivity, lets be nice and supportive to our teams to get the best out of them since we believe core of our employees are smart hard working folks, it trickles down into thousand little (and not so little things).

Reverse also trickles some brown stuff down. CEO who doesn't care about that leaves stuff to middle management, who are often over-eager to please for the carrot on stick in form of bonuses.

Yeah it is that old saying, the best person to wield power is the one that doesn't want it. High pay and bonuses get rats into the ship, low pay makes no competent sailor want to join your crew.

Decided to check this book out because of this and it is actually extremely interesting. Thank you for mentioning it. Have you ever read “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz? It’s about turning NASA into a fully functioning organisation, and your book reminded me of it.

Yes, I enjoyed Kranz’s book as well, though I thought it was quite different. If you liked that, I might suggest “Moon Lander” by Thomas J Kelly, which was the basis for the “From the Earth to the Moon” episode “Spider” (also excellent). You may also enjoy “More than My Share of it All” by Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, about the early history of Lockheed’s Skunk Works.

I've been in a situation where I had to work directly with a good CEO (plus board, C-Levels, and a lot of middle-management) and problematic middle-management was the actual problem.

It was almost like parody:

- CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do".

- Bureaucracy and inefficiency, with everyone complaining about it, but whenever CEO pushed back on that same bureaucracy, the discussion would be hampered by one or two people fillibustering the meeting to force the status quo.

- People going to golf courses or resort trips paid by vendors and then pushing for a vendor that costs 100k/year. This one was so blatant that I was surprised said person wasn't fired.

- CEO and C-Levels taking suggestions from the trenches, and the board loving it, but middle-managers laughing about the suggestions behind the CEOs back, right after the meeting. This one stung because a few of those were suggestions I made and he presented as his own on my request.

This is the kind of stuff that HN people would go "Chesterton Fence" but was just fucking corruption and schoolyard bullying from middle-management.

Obviously the company didn't grow in the period, and the CEO resigned and left for much greener pastures.

In the end the only lesson I learned is that the CEO should have laid-off those people.

And that the CEO should make more money because childcare is hard work.

Funny thing is that I'm a middle manager myself.

Sounds like those middle managers needed to be fired, not laid off.

Yeah this is what I have seen in the orgs I been in too (although not as bad as you pointed out), I have also seen CEOs fail by inaction like you pointed out (not laying off people doing bad things).

Although I am more afraid of the middle manager who hides information than the CEO who doesn't act on it.

I'm no MBA (insert joke here about that being good or bad), but my general opinion is that leaders should delegate and then be held responsible. Details (beyond enough for the higher leadership to be effective) should be relatively minimal. Having some cross-functional accountability (eg security/financial audits, etc) is fine, but in my experience the vast majority of corporate dysfunction comes from micromanaging. This gets compounded when middle management also has to interpret and implement said micromanagement. Obviously people need to learn and make mistakes; mistakes are fine so long as they're not repeated! There is a reason that some of the best, most effective leaders I've ever worked under shield those under them from the politics of the organization.

I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.

Interesting. I have had mostly the opposite experience. CEO(s) that changed strategy + focus every month and the middle management having to pick up the pieces. Keep people motivated and deliver.

> It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description

In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.

Haha! Sometimes non techies think software developers are just like those from the Silicon Valley series. Sometimes a bit too close to reality though.

I think the difference is that Silicon Valley clearly had writers who were very familiar with software engineers and founder culture etc.

Whereas no one on the set of e.g. Suits has ever had contact with the legal system

I can tell you that in my case, at least, the real areas of opportunity for something like this come from the masses of people that flood the manager up to senior VP level in a mega-corp. When I'm sitting in a meeting with 8 people and myself and 1 other person are doing most of the work while the rest are vaguely accountable for some metric being reported (we two talk about what's going on, plans, maybe present something completed while the others say "I don't have anything" and the meeting ends, repeat ad nauseum) I start dreaming of what a setup like the one posted here could do. Feels like we could cut at least 50% of our people at those higher levels and stay perfectly efficient and make progress.

Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.

I'm not going to vouch for every single HN comment, but running a large established company is fundamentally different from founding a startup, and I think most people recognize that. Getting a big company CEO job has way way more to do with networking and reputation than any sort of technical competence.

When one of those jobs comes open it's almost guaranteed to be filled with someone from a specific .00001% of the population. Who most of the time also happens to be golfing buddies with at least one board member. Are corporate boards that amazing at sifting through millions of potential candidates and finding the meritocratic best fit? I doubt it.

Goomba fallacy

Oh I didn’t know that one, it’s pretty good! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

Not really. I’m not contrasting two peoples opinions on the same thing, but rather aggregate vibe on two different but functionally similar things.

Bit like if hn was convinced white cats catch mice better than black ones. Point out that this makes no sense wouldn’t be a fallacy, even if it involves aggregating opinions from people with their own views on cats

CEOs apparently don’t bother to share their calendars with ordinary workers, and in many of the times when they do interact with them it feels more like lip services, so it’s natural to assume that they don’t do much.

But in reality it must be a hugely difficult job. I can’t imagine dealing with so many humans myself.

Founders are often starting the fires that they need to put out. I think a good deal of what they do is replaceable with an LLM today.

The wine-and-dine sales prospects will last until agents control purse strings.

Obviously there is simplification going on, but clearly somewhere between founder of a 5 person startup. And CEO of a public multi-national there is a line where they really are not much alike.

The whole point of the post is not to straw man CEOs it’s to point out that if devs can be automated then so can CEOs. Treating a founder and CEO as the same thing can be easily a false equivalency depending on the company.

I mean, here the submission is about a CEO who fired the company to replace them with LLMs. That would have been a an HBO‘s Silicon Valley joke a few years ago

Ooh, next do "MBAs" ;)

Both exist. I’d imagine most HN commenters do not work for startup headed up by a founder. The majority work for larger companies where the CEO isn’t as hands on as a startup founder and is never seen in the workplace. I promise you there’s a reason the stereotype exists!

That is true but “is never seen in the workplace” to doesn’t add value is still one hell of a leap.

At scale CEOs don’t add value by clocking in and pumping out LoC themselves and they sure aren’t having all their employees tag along on their day to day.

Reckon there is either an underlying belief that coding LoC is the only value and everyone else is contributing nothing or a if I can’t see it then it must not exist. Either way is not great.

But yeah sure I suppose it is possible that there are CEOs that do nothing yet get paid millions and somehow holds on to a competitive job by some unspecified magic. Doesn’t seem hugely plausible but yeah maybe

In reality the leap for a significant portion of HN goes more like “is not seen in the workplace” -> “is a sociopathic monster who is waging class warfare against me and my friends and all that is good and true in the world, and deserves to be shot in the back on a public street”

People are fucking unhinged. Thank god these people are almost all too lazy and cowardly to act on their little revenge fantasies.

I think a founder and a CEO are two different animals entirely. The two roles couldn’t be any more different, they just happen to share a title.

This caricature that’s occurring could also be thanks to all the horrible CEOs being so visible to everyone.

One of my friend’s medium-size billion dollar-ish company with almost a thousand employees is run by a CEO who is currently in AI psychosis and has started regularly submitting pull requests and demanding they get reviewed as if he’s a member of the development team. He basically comes in with a wrecking ball to carefully planned work with his own daily inspirations that he demands teams far down the totem pole drop everything to work on.

This isn’t an animal that has never been seen, this is a real person that is acting a real fool and negatively impacting my real friend.

We have all been fed this narrative that CEO is the most demanding job in the corporate ladder. How does this CEO have time to be submitting pull requests?

Then you have people like Elon Musk who demonstrate categorically that it’s actually possible to be the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies at once. The fact that this is possible at all smashes the facade of the “impossibly busy CEO.”

Look at how many CEOs have other corporate engagements outside of their primary CEO job. How does Tim Cook have time to be a board member of Nike? How does Satya Nadella have time to be on the board of Starbucks and the University of Chicago?

Logically, if the CEO is such a rigorous job with grueling hours you shouldn’t be physically able to do it at two companies, be a board member for completely unrelated businesses, or run a philanthropic foundation on the side in your spare time.

Then we move on to the "rich guy toys."

How does Mark Zuckerberg have the time to utilize a $300 million yacht? If he's so busy why doesn't he just charter one on the rare occasion he has a week off? Isn't a boat a horrible place to be when you're a busy CEO who needs to constantly travel to company sites, industry and government engagements, and be in close communication with company leaders? Keep in mind, he has owned large scale yachts long before Starlink was a thing.

This is the kind of stuff the CEO of the largest social media company in the world has time for: multiple months of vacationing on his yacht with transponders turned off.

> His $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, has been sailing in stealth mode for the last three months, with its AIS (Automatic Identification System) turned off throughout the European holiday. That’s more than 90 days where the 388 feet long vessel is sailing blind in the busy waters of the Mediterranean.

> Zuckerberg is thoroughly enjoying his time on the newly acquired $300 million luxury vessel. Back in May, the billionaire celebrated his 40th birthday by flying to Panama on his private jet to board the Feadship-built megayacht. A month later, the Meta boss whisked his entire family away on Launchpad on a luxurious cruise to celebrate his father’s 70th birthday, which also coincided with Father’s Day.

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-sailing...

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-superya...

Being a non-executive board member often involves very little time or attention, it's mostly lending your name and credibility to the organization. Consider it an American form of royal patronage[0]

[0] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a63431790/...

According to this executive survey, the average time spent for board duties for public companies is well over 242 hours per year: https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/spencer-s...

So that would be like if I took 6 work weeks weeks off per year to work full time at some other company.

I'm not sure I trust any self-reported numbers on this kind of stuff. 10 - 20 days per year (but not evenly distributed) is a common figure I see thrown around: https://www.nedcapital.co.uk/how-much-time-does-a-non-execut...

10-20 days a year is in the same ballpark and is still a lot. I quoted 6 work weeks (40 hours per day at 5 days per week) which is 30 days a year, not that much higher than your stated 10-20 days.

The article I linked specifically mentioned that private company boards demand less time than public company boards, around 200 hours, roughly 25 work days.

Any of these figures is pretty close to my entire yearly PTO allocation as an individual contributor.

Nike consistently has 5 board meetings per year, so Tim Cook is taking time out of running the second most valuable company in the world to do that, for some reason.

The reasons are money and power/influence. But I take your point.

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