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OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

overpaid.lol

181–190 of 395 posts

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#181
> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output.

Disagree with this statement.

Take Walmart (as a boring example):

- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA

- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m

CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.

Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#182
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Top talent" - I'm curious, do you really believe this is a normal / proper / desirable way of talking about other people?

... What are you getting at, I'm genuinely curious? What's wrong with the phrase "top talent"!?

I don't know, sounds very off putting, just like "resources" in "human resources". I get that this is normalized in all the corporations, but one still can choose to use terms that don't reduce people to "value produced".

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#183

This is the kind of agent I want to see. Board rooms and executive management need to be just as scared as the rest of us.

You got it all wrong. You see, AGI (conveniently ignore the definition for now) might be able to replace everybody. In truth it will be uses by the C level to subjugate everybody else.

They would have to get past their own psychosis first.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#184
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results. Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up wit…

From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general. Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job. The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role

And about startups. For a while the Stanford MBA + MIT CS founder duo guaranteed a pavlovian response from VC regardless their actual experience.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#185
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an equally valid hypothesis that a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform; whereas a bad CEO is one who, due to ego and self-aggrandizement, can't help but impose themselves via meddling and prevent a good company from performing. By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive com…

> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good." > By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potenti…

And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.

Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Talented people", not "talent".

That’s a weird thing to be upset and reprimand us about. I suppose one can insist that people say “most talented people” but it seems so much more streamlined and to say “top talent”. I have never come across anyone who is bothered by this. FWIW I am way more bothered by the use of the word “resources” to refer to people. I think it is disgusting and offensive.

Well, then you just did. :)

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#187
post #54

I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day. Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back…

You’re getting a lot of pushback, but I’m genuinely interested in your experiences. What differences have you seen between average and top leaders? Not in results, but in terms of how they approached the job?

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#188
post #181

> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output. Disagree with this statement. Take Walmart (as a boring example): - 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA - CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost. Argua…

That CEO is sure sticking a lot of shelves themself to provide value

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#189
post #181

> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output. Disagree with this statement. Take Walmart (as a boring example): - 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA - CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost. Argua…

That CEO is sure sticking a lot of shelves themself to provide value

Quantity of shelves stacked isn't a typical measure of value in an organisation.

If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#190
post #181

> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output. Disagree with this statement. Take Walmart (as a boring example): - 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA - CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost. Argua…

> Arguably

That's doing a lot of lifting.

I think you could make a 50/50 decision at the CEO level for most decisions, and merely by making a decision faster the org would have better profit outcomes.

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