| ▲ | everdrive 6 hours ago |
| There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well. |
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| ▲ | willio58 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has. | | |
| ▲ | bitwize 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Kissing ass: $1 Knowing which ass(es) to kiss when: $9,999,999 And that's how CEOs justify their exorbitant compensation | |
| ▲ | claysmithr 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | not a skill i'm interested in, lol.. |
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| ▲ | Henchman21 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them! | | |
| ▲ | nickpinkston 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc. However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops. There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using. I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them. | | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies. If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex. | |
| ▲ | mplanchard 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This seems hard to tease out from the fact that a) the majority of companies do not survive, b) the large, large majority of companies that do survive do not wind up being large or innovative, and c) there are far fewer coops than regular companies. If you assume equal chance of success between them, you’d still see vanishingly small numbers of large, innovative coops, because a small percentage of a small number is small. |
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| ▲ | nemomarx 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you. | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What are the concrete benefits? Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees? | | |
| ▲ | munk-a 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share. I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness. | | |
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| ▲ | oytis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In software I can imagine a worker-owned consultancy, but not a product company. It would imply staying in one place working on one product for your whole life, which doesn't sound inspiring | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A company need not be a single product, and working in a worker-owned cooperative need not be a lifetime commitment to a single firm (though cooperatives ideally will have less turnover than firms owned by capital separated from labor.) | |
| ▲ | shimman 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, it implies that you give workers the means to dictate the direction of the company. That is what workplace democracy does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers. If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them). Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer. With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want? | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Where’s your real world evidence of all these benefits of coops? Because I would love for it to be true. | | |
| ▲ | shimman 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well workplace democracy has only been tried in a few corporations. If you want an interesting business case look into Semco Partners in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8... There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it. One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen. It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it. The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | “We are sure it will work because it’s never been tried!” I believe the Germans have had success with including labor representatives on corporate boards. Maybe we can start there. | | |
| ▲ | mplanchard 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a shallow dismissal of GP’s point. The point is more, “we aren’t sure it won’t work because it has never been tried,” which is much less of a straw man to argue with. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No. There was an unequivocal claim that it will work better than our current system. | | |
| ▲ | sarchertech 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They said “Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.” That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will. | | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well... there is historical evidence that centrally planned dictatorships are not a very responsive form of government. Now, corporations usually have the problem of competition, so if they aren't responsive (or at least responsive enough), they get out-competed by those that are. Is that enough to make them different from governments? Perhaps, but I don't know. |
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| ▲ | mplanchard 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Could you quote that? I don’t see it. |
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| ▲ | zeroonetwothree 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions? | | |
| ▲ | nathan_compton 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers. | |
| ▲ | shimman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, look at functioning democracies. They don't need authoritarian rulers, only those that want to be authoritarians argue elsewise. |
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| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe, but not necessarily for this reason. Even in a worker-owned coop, someone sets the overall direction. And how is that person going to be selected? It's still going to be largely politics. | | |
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| ▲ | dijit 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > it's quite difficult to become a CEO on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have. What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them. I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently. |
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| ▲ | Hoasi 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. | | |
| ▲ | manoDev 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > To be fair, raising money takes connections, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. FTFY | | |
| ▲ | noisy_boy 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >> To be fair, building connections takes skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. FTFY |
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| ▲ | slg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1. | |
| ▲ | jongjong 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions. This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else. Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills. I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other. |
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| ▲ | firefax 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What skills? I've met several. Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment. |
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| ▲ | cm11 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror. Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different. | | |
| ▲ | firefax an hour ago | parent [-] | | >I think it's private schools in general. I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law) >Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors. That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously. I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else. Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many
"startups" when we're really striving for small businesses. But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that. Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-) |
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| ▲ | 59nadir 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's not difficult at all to become one, and the work involved in being a CEO is not particularly difficult in comparison to senior technical work at all. The only thing that is harder about being a CEO is the responsibility. I'm sure being the CEO of Microsoft or whatever is plenty difficult and demanding in many ways, but most CEOs are not that, and speaking just from experience most CEOs and CTOs are clueless morons. With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt. I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting and demanding problem, and their decisions are going to be more important. |
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| ▲ | elzbardico 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Years of ZIRP, QE, bailouts and stymulus money muddled the waters a lot. Add to this the Old Boys (and Girls now) Networks, a culture that values getting money fast as the ultimate value, the prevalence of politics and you end up getting a boatload of bad CEOs. There was a time when I used to recommend "Out of the Crisis", a book from Demming, to business leaders. Problem is, "Out of the crisis" still assumes as a premise that companies compete on the quality of their products, that making money comes from actually making and selling stuff. That leaders are not the anti-intelectual morons that believe that absolutely any thing can be explained with a 15 minutes deck, that math and statistics are passtimes for weird geeks that don't add "business value" and because of that, is a book that could have steered us toward a better world in the 80s, but now it is completely useless, because its recipes can't handle the level of degradation things goto into. |
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| ▲ | dominotw 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo. |
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| ▲ | orphea 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What about him? have to do politics -> bad ceo
doesn't mean NOT(have to do politics) -> NOT(bad ceo)
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| ▲ | jimbokun 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Winkelvoss twins would beg to differ. | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | From your tone, it sounds like you may just be intending to warn me that it's cringe not to agree with any criticism of Zuckerberg? If that's so, I have to respectfully disagree; I think this is a bad attitude that leads towards being poorly informed about the world. If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social media, and I would love to hear your basis for claiming this. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2) is that genuine compulsive use of social media is quite rare, and most people who describe themselves as "addicted" are just regular users who enjoy it but kinda feel like it's a waste of time. | | |
| ▲ | not_kurt_godel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | https://gizmodo.com/meta-settles-lawsuit-that-claimed-social... > Meta Settles Lawsuit That Claimed Social Media Addiction Screwed Up Schools > On Thursday, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district that claimed the tech giant’s social media platforms have created a mental health crisis at its schools. > The case was considered the first of its kind and a bellwether (a case that is representative of a large pool of lawsuits and will be a test for future litigation). The plaintiffs argue that social media platforms have had a major negative impact on the mental health of school-age children, which in turn has caused a burden on the education system, as American schools were forced to redirect resources to counter this problem. > The settlement comes shortly after Meta lost a key bellwether social media addiction trial. Back in March, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that Meta was liable for the adverse mental health effects a now 20-year-old suffered after getting addicted to Instagram from an early age. The representatives of the young woman argued successfully that it was Meta’s deliberate design choices, like the infinite scroll and face-altering filters on stories, that had exacerbated her addiction and subsequent mental health issues like self-harm and depression. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People#Myanmar_genoci... > The military junta in Myanmar was facilitated by Facebook to post hate speech that sought to foment sexual violence and promote genocide against the Rohingya. "Myanmar would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived" Wynn-Williams writes. > Wynn-Williams argued that Facebook failed to moderate hate speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar, including the use of the racial slur kalar. She noted that the company only had two Burmese language moderators, both based in Dublin, for the entire country, and claimed that one of the two moderators gave a pass to hate speech while removing pro-human rights content. She further claimed that she raised concerns that the moderator was "in cahoots with the" junta, only to have her concerns dismissed by the content team. Additionally, she claimed that her efforts to have Facebook's Community Standards rules translated into the Burmese language were resisted by the company communications team, who told her that "Myanmar isn’t a priority country" in the region. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... > In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent. > The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform.[2] The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the data to analytically assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. > Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012. --- https://www.the-independent.com/tech/facebook-manipulated-us... > Facebook manipulated the emotions of hundreds of thousands of its users, and found that they would pass on happy or sad emotions, it has said. The experiment, for which researchers did not gain specific consent, has provoked criticism from users with privacy and ethical concerns. > For one week in 2012, Facebook skewed nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to either be happier or sadder than normal. The experiment found that after the experiment was over users tended to post positive or negative comments according to the skew that was given to their news feed. > The research has provoked distress because of the manipulation involved. > Studies of real world networks show that what the researchers call ‘emotional contagion’ can be transferred through networks. But researchers say that the study is the first evidence that the effect can happen without direct interaction or nonverbal clues. > Anyone who used the English version of Facebook automatically qualified for the experiment, the results of which were published earlier this month. Researchers analysed the words used in posts to automatically decide whether they were likely to be positive or negative, and shifted them up or down according to which group users fell into. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | irishcoffee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah and Justin Timberlake was a co star. You’re really beefing about a movie almost 2 decades old? | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's on my mind because they're releasing a sequel in October, and Aaron Sorkin has not (as far as I've seen) acknowledged that much of the original was not true nor promised to be more accurate this time around. I'm pretty confident that it's going to be about the same mix as last time, and I'm going to have to go around saying "actually the scene where Zuckerberg did suchandsuch terrible thing wasn't real", and people will respond by insinuating that it's lame for me to care. | | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you’re looking for an honest depiction of events out of Hollywood, you’re going to be persistently disappointed. |
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