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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

#341

Post by yunohn »

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…

> saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth

This is the kicker for me. C-levels assuming that a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic leading to online growth would sustain for the next decade. They should make 10Y plans, not 1Q based ones.

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

#342

Post by sharemywin »

Darmody wrote: post #265
sharemywin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when you post insane profits and still laying off people? come on. good luck hiring people next time your looking for people.

It's FAANG companies who are firing, not your local webdev agency. As soon as they start looking for people and offering salaries starting at 150k, tens of thousands will jump straight in.

maybe. maybe not.

I imagine one of the selling points of recruiters was we haven't had layoffs.

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

#343

Post by Apocryphon »

yunohn wrote: post #341
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…

> saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth This is the kicker for me. C-levels assuming that a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic leading to online growth would sustain for the next decade. They should make 10Y plans, not 1Q based ones.

And not just c-levels, but the shareholders influencing their decisions.

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

#344

Post by kerkeslager »

twawaaay wrote: post #322
kerkeslager wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is people who don't care about other people. Agreed, but the idea that CEOs are somehow not part of this group is a bit bizarre, particularly when you consider that a large part of CEO compensation is often stock or stock options. You can't exonerate CEOs by blaming shareholders when CEOs are generally shareholders.

I am not exonerating CEO as a person. But think in terms of the goal you want to achieve. If your goal is to stop layoffs and convince the CEO to act in a different way that shareholders will not like, the CEO will be replaced. And you will not achieve the goal. Again, the CEO is accountable to law and shareholders. Either you convince shareholders to change their mind or you change the law. That's it. Changing the m…

> I am not exonerating CEO as a person.

Well, if you're not trying to exonerate CEOs, saying "The problem is not CEOs. The problem is shareholders / owners" is a pretty strange thing to say. The CEO, as a person, made the decision; the CEO, as a person, is responsible for that decision. The CEO is the problem.

> Either you convince shareholders to change their mind or you change the law. That's it. Changing the mind o CEO makes no difference.

I'm not saying we should change the mind of CEOs, I'm saying we should change the law.

And changing the law to penalize CEOs who do harmful things is met with a lot of opposition, because of people saying stuff like, "The problem is not CEOs. The problem is shareholders / owners."

What's your proposed solution? It seems that you understand how incentives work, so I hope I don't have to explain why changing the minds of shareholders won't work.

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

#345

Post by s1artibartfast »

Apocryphon wrote: post #311
s1artibartfast wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you are optimizing for. Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market. How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?

Do you think flooding the market with a lot of laid-off people is going to keep tech unemployment low?

Unemployment rate in Tech and software development is still incredibly low, even lower than the general rate.

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

#346

Post by Apocryphon »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #345
Apocryphon wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think flooding the market with a lot of laid-off people is going to keep tech unemployment low?

Unemployment rate in Tech and software development is still incredibly low, even lower than the general rate.

What is the rate you are citing and when was it calculated amidst all of this

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

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

#347

Post by iamwpj »

josephcsible wrote: post #268
lhorie wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

Executives should be held personally responsible for kinds of things that low-level employees aren't. That's why executives get paid so much more.

Ok, then fire them from not improving quarterly expectations. Seriously -- this is a real functional system that can work. You're acting like C-level accountability is an edgy suggestion. It very much isn't.

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

#348

Post by kerkeslager »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #296
kerkeslager wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like just relying on the invisible hand of the market to create good results doesn't work. And to be clear: just because you're incentivized to harm people, doesn't exonerate you when you harm people. "I was just following incentives" isn't a defense.

Depends on what you are optimizing for. Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market. How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?

> Depends on what you are optimizing for.

I'm optimizing for people's well-being.

Yes, I'm aware that people's well-being is hard to measure. That doesn't make it not worth optimizing for.

> Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market.

1. Contractors are losing jobs too through lack of renewal of contracts, it's just not being reported because on paper it's an absence of an event, not an event.

2. Even among full time workers, tech workers aren't the only ones getting laid off.

3. The big companies are the ones being reported, but smaller companies are following suit, and don't have as nice of severance packages.

4. It is not in evidence that we are in a low unemployment market. Those who were just laid off aren't reflected in unemployment statistics yet. In many cases you can't file for unemployment if you received severance, so many will never be reflected in unemployment statistics. And there are a bunch of ways in which unemployment and underemployment simply aren't represented by the statistics, ever.

5. If the severances were as good as you're saying, it would be cheaper for the companies to keep the workers on. Representing this as anything other than companies using workers to subsidize their lost revenues is absurd.

> How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?

I'm not sad when execs get fired, that's what I'm proposing. But it appears you've done some mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the workers are the ones with vast amounts of wealth.

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