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Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

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Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#251

Post by WalterBright »

loandbehold wrote: post #238
WalterBright wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Steve Jobs transformed Apple from 90 days to bankruptcy to the biggest company in the world. Was he worth $200 million in compensation? Hell yeah. Because he is responsible for that wealth creation. This kind of turnaround also happened at Barnes & Noble, all due to one man - the CEO, James Daunt. https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barne... CEOs get paid a lot because they are crucial to t…

But even poorly performing CEOs get paid 100s of millions. Why?

Because they have a track record in the past of making highly profitable decisions. If you have a track record of doing a great job, you get a high salary offer. If you do a bad job at your new job, you still get paid the high salary.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#252

Post by NineStarPoint »

aliswe wrote: post #242
waboremo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your CEO is a lemming, they are not capable of leading a company. They should be fired. If you want to see a real leader, look at Tim Cook. He made decisions based specifically on where the company is, where it's going, and already factored in external factors (such as the pandemic growth). Contrast this to dozens of other "CEO"s who made a horrible decision hastily, executed layoffs horribly wrong, and then vague…

why would a company like apple need to hire more people because of covid though?

Why would Meta have needed to either though? Or really Alphabet, Microsoft, Twitter, or a bunch of other companies? Maybe a handful more people to deal with scaling issues on products specific to pandemic needs, but the pandemic was always going to be temporary. They hired heavily in excess of just pandemic related concerns, it was more about expecting a paradigm shift. (Even now they almost all have substantially more people than before the pandemic though ,so you could argue it is less an error of type and more an error of magnitude)

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#253

Post by Apocryphon »

jedberg wrote: post #243
automatic6131 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when COVID hit and tech companies saw large surges because investors and CEOs saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth Yes, they all egregiously failed. A massive, widespread, collective failure for which they should lose their jobs, as many other people do. On the face of it, it was obvious, that's not even hindsight bias - it was the topsy turvy world that bad…

> collective failure for which they should lose their jobs, as many other people do. Only bad companies fire people for taking risks and failing. Good companies reward that behavior if the risk was reasonable and the learnings were positive. They fire people who take unnecessary risk. Hiring into the pandemic was a good risk in my opinion.

Why was it a good risk? The writing on the wall that tech was overinflated, that TC was insane, that the money printing was going to have a severe correction eventually. It should have been common wisdom that it was a temporary state of affairs because the growth in tech was not built on irreversible trends. Lockdown would end eventually. All of those food delivery apps, at the very least, could not expect exponential growth once restaurants opened again.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#254

Post by kerkeslager »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #3

This is based upon the assumption that layoffs are a failure rather than a feature which, while I find it distasteful using people's livelihoods in such a way, doesn't actually seem to be the reckoning for a lot of people. When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad? If you can ignore the human factor it makes sense.

> When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad?

Because you don't want to harm people.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#255

Post by manuelabeledo »

legutierr wrote: post #191
manuelabeledo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Managers' taking risks on massive hirings leads directly to lower unemployment and higher wages. That's also not true, because it excludes a myriad of parameters, some of which we are able to observe in current trends, like inflation and talent pool size.

Is there only one explanation for lower unemployment and higher wages? No, and clearly I'm not saying anything like that. But would you seriously argue that when a company hires 100 people it doesn't lower unemployment by 100 people? And that when 100 people receive job offers, their ability to negotiate higher salaries does not also increase?

> But would you seriously argue that when a company hires 100 people it doesn't lower unemployment by 100 people? And that when 100 people receive job offers, their ability to negotiate higher salaries does not also increase?

There's already a very common scenario where this does not happen: layoffs targeting higher earners.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#256

Post by noisenotsignal »

hello_moto wrote: post #92
mabbo wrote: post #20

The goal of the CEO of a publicly traded company is to make the shareholders money. As much money as possible. If laying people off is the best way to do that, they'll do it. Blaming the CEO for doing the job they were hired to do seems short-sighted. Blame the broken system that incentivizes this, that makes doing it profitable. And then, let's change the system.

> And then, let's change the system. How about ... get ready for a taboo word in hi-tech: unionized? at a certain size, a hi-tech company must face labour union? Before anyone suggests that Union protect low performer and penalized high performer, keep in mind that right now, at this moment, high performers are culled left and right in FAANG because their salary is too high. High performers also gravitated towards "c…

Being laid off isn’t sufficient to make this a bad situation for high performers. If they’re getting new jobs quickly, it’s just a short-term setback.

Note that I’m not commenting on how high performers are doing in terms of getting new jobs! It could be bad, it could be good, I don’t know.

But layoffs with less worker protections have always been the trade-off for higher compensation for top performers. Just because the understood risk occurred doesn’t mean that it was a bad risk to take, or even that it was much of a risk at all (especially if top performers have emergency funds that tide them over to their next job)!

All this to say that your rebuttal to the high performer argument isn’t super convincing. I’m sure it could be made better, but as it stands it’s not offering much.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#257

Post by s1artibartfast »

snotrockets wrote: post #150
colinmorelli wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bar for asking a CEO to quit is "you did not correctly predict the future" then we're going to have to ask most CEOs to quit at some point. And most employees for that matter. The issue I have is with broad strokes generalizations that layoffs indicate a failure of a CEO. They don't necessarily mean that. Any more than shipping a bug to production indicates a failure of an engineer who should now be fired. Sim…

The CEO job is to choose the best prediction of the future from those available to them, and make sure the company executes on it. So yes, that's the bar.

If you think the CEO is making bad decisions, you should fire then before the decision, not based on the outcome.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#258

Post by lhorie »

automatic6131 wrote: post #102
colinmorelli wrote: post #86

Regardless of individual opinions on whether CEOs should be terminated for layoffs or not - there's a surprising amount of comments here that seem to not understand that growing companies don't hire for today, but for where they want to be tomorrow. Where you want to be tomorrow is based on where you and your investors believe the world is going. If the world materially changes enough to shift your expectations about…

>when COVID hit and tech companies saw large surges because investors and CEOs saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth Yes, they all egregiously failed. A massive, widespread, collective failure for which they should lose their jobs, as many other people do. On the face of it, it was obvious, that's not even hindsight bias - it was the topsy turvy world that bad…

I'm seeing a lot of this "screw up = get fired" narrative lately and I think it's a bit ironic.

Talk about screwing up in engineering contexts and suddenly the tune changes: now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault.

Imagine a youtuber saying googlers should be fired because some decision was made that affected the youtuber's income negatively. Or imagine an Uber driver saying that. Or a small business owner dealing w/ a Stripe mishap or whatever. If you are the one being targeted by these calls for loss of employment, then comes out the "I'm not the responsible person here" card.

So on the one hand, you hear people with pitchforks about how CEOs or whoever need to take responsibility in some movie-esque "bad guy ending" fashion, but turn the tables and nobody wants to step up to be responsible for their own shit shows.

Even if we entertain the idea of firing CEOs, is the implicit assumption that companies can run fine without one? By that logic, anyone could just give a bunch of money to a bunch of fiverr code monkeys and that business would run just fine? I don't really get what the logical conclusion of this whole line of argument is supposed to be.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#259

Post by jedberg »

Apocryphon wrote: post #253
jedberg wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> collective failure for which they should lose their jobs, as many other people do. Only bad companies fire people for taking risks and failing. Good companies reward that behavior if the risk was reasonable and the learnings were positive. They fire people who take unnecessary risk. Hiring into the pandemic was a good risk in my opinion.

Why was it a good risk? The writing on the wall that tech was overinflated, that TC was insane, that the money printing was going to have a severe correction eventually. It should have been common wisdom that it was a temporary state of affairs because the growth in tech was not built on irreversible trends. Lockdown would end eventually. All of those food delivery apps, at the very least, could not expect exponentia…

> The writing on the wall that tech was overinflated, that TC was insane, that the money printing was going to have a severe correction eventually.

Sure, and then you lay people off when that correction comes in. In the meantime you're hiring the best people and having them do great work. And when they layoffs come, maybe some of them stay.

> All of those food delivery apps, at the very least, could not expect exponential growth once restaurants opened again.

Sure, but if they didn't build market share during the pandemic, they would never catch up afterwards.

When the market is on fire, you need to ride the rocket. You always know that you have layoffs in your back pocket for when the market cools.

It's not like these layoffs should be a surprise to anyone -- it happens after every hot market. Sure it absolutely sucks for those that are affected by it, I know because it happened to me in 2001. Barely got through it. But it's not a big surprise.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#260

Post by SantalBlush »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #245
cudgy wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, hiring for a future that is based on economic predictions that are notoriously inaccurate due to many factors, including simple personal biases of the experts making the predictions is quite foolish if you think rationally about it.

Not when the downsides are unbalanced. If the future does not come to pass and you acted on it, you have to lay-off 10% of your workforce. If the future does come to pass and you didn’t act on it, other companies that did act on it eat your lunch and you may end up with many more people losing jobs than just 10%. So the question is if there should be truly zero level of faith in economic predictions, or if there stat…

You are absolutely correct. No economic prediction is perfectly accurate, therefore they are always at least somewhat inaccurate. So calling them inaccurate is a truism. In reality, some predictions are more valuable than others, based on their evidence, methodology, etc.

Moreover, it doesn't pay to be a hero on Wall Street. Like you hint at here, it's much safer to go with the crowd and be wrong than to go against the crowd and be wrong. That's just a fact of life in business.

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