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OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

overpaid.lol

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Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#211

Post by ravenstine »

999900000999 wrote: post #194
stego-tech wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders. I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally se…

CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart. I’ve worked with exceptional CEOs at start ups. A startup CEO has to be a good sales person. They need to be able to make that final pitch to sell the company. Then everyone ideally cashes out and we’re all rich without the need to ever work again. It’s probably not going to happen, but I often dream of getting ric…

> CEOs are also Fall Guys. A fall guy is the person who takes the blame when the whole thing falls apart.

Do you have an example of this? The usual criticism of CEOs is based on the exact opposite; that we are the fall guys, and that CEOs usually profit (and are rarely punished for) their own failed decisions.

Looking back at all the companies I've worked for, I can't think of one time a CEO actually suffered blowback for serious mistakes. The closest would be Steve Jobs having been let go from Apple, but that was in 1985 and he wasn't even the CEO back then.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#213

Post by elzbardico »

bratao wrote: 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…

There's a huge difference between managing a small company in a competitive marketing with self-funding and the administration of the giant public corporations in a increasingly concentrated marketing.

And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#214

Post by dd8601fn »

antasvara wrote: post #174
kibwen wrote: 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…

Nah.

We know what good looks like in financial results and reputation. It's really not that complicated.

The rest of that bullshit isn't about evaluating a working company, it's about gamblers gambling on non-companies before they become real companies.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#215

Post by quacked »

mikert89 wrote: post #146
pj_mukh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is actually how the world works" The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system. Plen…

my comments are from living in nyc for 15 years, alot of lived experience and meeting people behind closed doors

I was part of a company that was doing 10s of M in revenue, a few hundred employees, and had the technical prowess and IP to become a multi billion unicorn but the blue blood CEO was so clueless that he lost literally his entire technical core staff to incredible mismanagement. My favorite memory of him, and this sounds like a fake anecdote, is that on a big emergency call where he was pulling a huge amount of engineers and project managers off an account that was on fire to help with an account that was even more on fire (thus depriving the original account of labor and guaranteeing it would be in the same state in a few weeks), he spent 5 minutes talking about the chartered fishing trip he was on in Canada and then asked the audience if anyone and any plans for the weekend. Someone spoke up and said "yeah, I'll be working."

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#216

Post by mikert89 »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #177
mikert89 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs. This is actually how the world works

Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .

you messed up!

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#217

Post by danans »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #177
mikert89 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs. This is actually how the world works

Dammit! Why am I the only 'Ivy type' that cannot raise a round?!!! .

It's who you know. You are just more likely to know the right people to raise money than a random non-Ivy type.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#218

Post by simianwords »

ForHackernews wrote: post #5

This is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI. In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals. What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by…

> A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.

what? how? literally what work is already not done by some subordinate that an executive does now?

if some work can be replaced, its already done by some employee. those employees are susceptible to replacement.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#219

Post by psychoslave »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #169
andrewmutz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all. As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results. It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors…

>Leaders are necessary.

Sure, where would be biological lifeforms today if hadn’t been driven by some visionary leaders. Ooops? But I mean, now that humanity provide great leaders, biosphere is thriving like never before. Reooops?

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#220

Post by CSMastermind »

CGP_Labs wrote: post #53

Considering AI's strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense that upper management—whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices—may be easier to replace with AI than frontline or essential workers, who constantly have to adapt to unpredictable situations. But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge thr…

> whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices

That's what middle management does, your C-suite has an entirely different function.

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