Good luck automating an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs. Your algorithm would never come up with new ideas like Amazon or Space X So far "automation" means a bunch of if/else statement or at most a biased deep learning algorithm, this is why they're used on entry jobs, because they're fundamentally not very useful for anything other than pre defined repeatable and easy tasks
CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
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Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably because the market dictates their salary, not a vague notion of what they should be paid. Or, to reframe the question: why don't people hire cheaper CEOs?
The simple answer is that people don't hire cheaper CEOs because the people who hire CEOs are the boards of companies and the boards of companies are mainly staffed by CEOs of other companies who unsurprisingly are incentivized to advocate for higher CEO pay.
This is one of the better reasons to bet on startups in a world where power accumulates advantage. During the growth stage of a startup, the incentives of owners, managers and team members are much more aligned than they will be later in the trajectory.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#83Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#84I can't help but feel that CEO's are over-valued and it's fundamentally an attribution problem as it's hard to know how much value they actually add. A comparison would be to fund managers and how the rise of index funds showed they actually added very little value in many cases, and weren't worth their fees.
I feel there are ways to be more targeted in calculating contributions. I also feel the hiring process for CEO and executives are inefficient.
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#85CEOs aren't paid for the day-to-day value they provide to the company. They're paid for the long-term, strategic value the owners think they might provide the company in comparison to other candidates. So if you think CEO Candidate X will make you a 3x return on your investment, but CEO Candidate Y will make you a 5x return, it's almost certainly worth it to pay him/her the extra $200K to get you there, if that's the…
They should then be compensated with a leveraged long-term derivative product that pays based on the stock difference between their company and the industry, 5 to 10 years apart. "You want to be insanely rich? Here's a huge company that's not yours as a resource, now make it so it is the best one in 10 years!"
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#86Good luck automating an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs. Your algorithm would never come up with new ideas like Amazon or Space X So far "automation" means a bunch of if/else statement or at most a biased deep learning algorithm, this is why they're used on entry jobs, because they're fundamentally not very useful for anything other than pre defined repeatable and easy tasks
“Sell shit online” is such an inobvious idea. I don’t know how Bezos thought it up! Completely unexpected.
It's always obvious and easy when you look back at history ...
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#87Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why is paying them less not seen as an option? I don't understand - do you think companies are voluntarily paying them money that they don't have to? If you won't pay them what they want they'll go elsewhere to someone that will. Just like you would, I presume.
"the people who hire CEOs are the boards of companies and the boards of companies are mainly staffed by CEOs of other companies who unsurprisingly are incentivized to advocate for higher CEO pay."
Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
#89"If a role can be outsourced, it can be automated." I really don't see the logic in this statement.
It's based on the faulty presumption that labor outsourcing motivations are purely based on cost minimization. Obviously, this falls apart if one considers that outsourcing also occurs for specialized labor that firms prefer not to keep in-house. A great example of this is legal. If you rewrote the title as "Lawyers are hugely expensive -- why not automate them?" it would sound patently absurd.
There may be more validity in this whole approach than it would appear at first glance.