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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

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Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#121

Post by jimbokun »

shimman wrote: post #118
jimbokun wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where’s your real world evidence of all these benefits of coops? Because I would love for it to be true.

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 l…

“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.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#122

Post by dieselgate »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

> 90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work.

Don't think I've heard that one but certainly rings true to my experience.

Reminds me of "ninety percent of the game is half mental"

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#123

Post by ungreased0675 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #111
ungreased0675 wrote: post #2

A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?

AI means mediocre. Mediocre companies are pretty bad to work in. So it would guarantee a soulless and pointless company imo

My charitable word would be average. AI means average. And an average CEO isn’t that bad. It’d be a deliberate trade in exchange for less spending on salaries. (just one very large salary)

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#124

Post by firefax »

everdrive wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#125

Post by as1mov »

spoonjim wrote: post #79

CEOs who think that excavators replace their hand-diggers are just bad CEOs

If the excavators only worked half the time, sometimes goes out of control bonking someone in the head and costs a billion dollars, then yeah they're pretty bad CEOs

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#127

Post by tauserfunnel »

socketcluster wrote: post #55
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page. If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them. Your product…

I hate to use a throwaway, but this bit:

> with a functioning user acquisition funnel

How do you actually get this. I've got a product, the site is hand crafted, shows the complex product really well (and had good feedback on it) but how do I acquire the users?

It seems as the cost of creating software has plummeted, it's the actual sales side of it that's going to matter even more. I'm stuck at this point.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#128

Post by nobodyandproud »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #2

A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?

I posited that one as a question.

Naive and stupid, but it was downvoted and flagged away into oblivion with zero chance for a conversation.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#129

Post by mullingitover »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #93
mullingitover wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work. Then there's the technical debt! Shipping is frankly the easy part . It's the operating overhead that often breaks you. I liken it to free puppies.

This is true. I have always prided myself on writing concise, high-Quality code, because it tends to be quite debt-free. So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt.

The problem is that the lines of code are riding on a stack of other dependencies that all need care and feeding. Things reach EOL. Frameworks have major breaking changes. CVEs are discovered.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#130

Post by mplanchard »

nickpinkston wrote: post #35
Henchman21 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

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 usin…

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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