CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them? • Hacker News Board

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#141

Post by mottosso » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

nataz wrote: post #132

woeirua wrote: post #116

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…

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.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#142

Post by egh » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

ARandomerDude wrote: post #42

CEOs 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…

Nice. We finally found the guy who believes this fairy tale!

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#143

Post by g8oz » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #88

k__ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

Why would investors vote for board members that waste their money?

Class solidarity.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#144

Post by lbriner » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

Is there a principle that says that we pay our peers high salaries to help justify our own?

If I get away with paying all my devs $30K, I can hardly justify my own $100K salary!

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#145

Post by throwawayboise » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

lbriner wrote: post #122

bmmayer1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another thing that CEOs do which is provide values guidance and inspirational leadership for a company. That's not something a robot can do...yet.

That might be what they are supposed to do but apart from my current company, this has happened in precisely none of my previous employers (about 5 of them). At one company, I didn't even know who the CEO was. We had some company party because we won an award and I had to ask my colleague who the guy was who was speaking. Awkward (but at least I didn't have to ask the CEO who he was).

LOL that happened to me once. I was at some unrelated event and was wearing a company shirt. Someone mentioned to me that her husband worked there. She said his name, and I remarked that I didn't know of him. She sort of stared at me and said with a tone of incredulity, "he's the company vice president!"

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#146

Post by aapppwe » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

lbriner wrote: post #117

harperlee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Isn't part of the problem the overlap between action and effect? I might join a business as CEO and it does really well for 5 years because of the previous CEO, I could claim that it is my leadership and ask for my bonus. On the other hand, maybe I do well but my successor is an idiot and makes the company tank so now I won't get my 10 year bonus because they screwed it all up. Unless your idea only works for CEOs wh…

this is the problem with any leadership position in general, congress, president.... etc

I think the best way to address this is to provide standardize kpi monitoring.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#147

Post by netflixandkill » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #86

egypturnash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Sell shit online” is such an inobvious idea. I don’t know how Bezos thought it up! Completely unexpected.

Then why is he the richest man on earth and you're not ? It's always obvious and easy when you look back at history ...

The keys to wild success are getting in early and being lucky.

I'm entirely sure a lot of the early people at Amazon were in fact quite bright and hard working, and many good decisions were made, but plenty of other people knew selling stuff online was going to happen but couldn't get the stars to align on funding, or had a key member suffer a personal setback early on, etc.

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#148

Post by yowlingcat » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

Strangs wrote: post #89

yowlingcat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/technology-is-changing-the-l... There may be more validity in this whole approach than it would appear at first glance.

I'm not saying that there isn't -- but another common fallacy you'll see is conflation of rote work automation with decision automation. Rote work automation is very doable and quite helpful, but it helps create a force multiplier for the human who is at the end of the day doing the job.

Decision automation is not easy at all -- whether for executives or for legal. There's a lot of root cause analysis, presumption unpacking, and other complex problem definition that's intrinsic to the nature of the role.

But that's a crucial distinction -- if you can't automate the decisioning, you're not necessarily going to make CEOs (or lawyers) less expensive; on the contrary, you may rather just increase the scope of what they're capable of doing (because there were all these other things they would've done had they had the resources and tools to do).

I think of that the same way I think of the "Software engineers are expensive -- why not automate them?" question. Maybe some of it can be automated, but some of it is just plain human problem solving. Not all human problems can be solved with automation. Especially if/when faulty automation is what created those problems in the first place!

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#149

Post by ab111111111 » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

ARandomerDude wrote: post #42

CEOs 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…

Sure. Quite. But why not try developing an AI to replace them that can make you a >5x return?

Re: CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

#150

Post by nataz » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #102

The comments in here are hilarious. If you think the CEO doesn't matter in a company you have never been on a board of a company and had the responsibility to hire and fire them.

Their comments matter, but they aren't well informed.

Hacker news is full of bright ambitious folks who think they are very smart, or they can change the world, or they can make a lot of money. It's all about their personal impact.

HN celebrates individual contribution. Which is fine and good.

That said, I'd argue that many folks here would benefit from spending time on how to be better leaders, or gasp, managers and executives.

Most people, by definition, aren't going to be 10x or 100x engineers. But a good manager, supervisor, executive will make everyone around them better.