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CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

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Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#141
post #35

CEOs of medium/large companies are the face of the company which means making a couple key decisions per week (a few work hours) and meeting with current/prospective clients (leisure activities). Coupled with making far more $ than the rest of the employees, I suspect they're both bored at the office and feel downgraded to a regular employee. Thus, out-of-office with nothing to show. But if the company is _coincident…

Everyone on this site is so anti-C-suite it's crazy. All the standard "big company CEO bad, me entry level employee good" talking points. You would think that a site based on entrepreneurship would have people on it that have more of an understanding of what running a business is actually like.

> Everyone on this site is so anti-C-suite it's crazy. All the standard "big company CEO bad, me entry level employee good" talking points.

This condescending "entry level employee good" thing is total nonsense. It's absolutely common for many 30 year career stretches to never actually see a decent hard-working executive out in the wild. And if you do actually encounter one, then there's a decent chance that you also got to watch that person get dethroned and replaced with someone worse by political machinations of the rest of the executive suite!

What is crazy is dismissing thousands of man-years of lived experience with completely broken "leadership" as.. what exactly, jealousy? But most of the people that hate the C-suite probably don't want to work there, and probably don't even really expect fair compensation at this point, they just want a little more accountability, and a little less hypocrisy.

And just in case you actually want to understand the angst and the zeitgeist around this stuff, I'll add this more subtle point. Engineers that work in tech today are increasingly seen by outsiders as roughly equivalent to, IDK, blood-diamond tycoons. But the fact is that lots of engineers are struggling too, and anyway we didn't ruin the world, the MBAs did while they told us (and everyone else) they were building something different. There's a strong reluctance to shoulder all this blame for the executive class, because at the end of the day or the end of our careers, most engineers actually still have to live next to normal people and won't get to fuck off to the Hamptons or whatever monied enclaves executives use to insulate themselves from the world.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#142
post #111

Here's a pro tip to CEOs and wannabe CEOs; get a fucking executive coach and work on not being a bubble-dwelling turd. I swear to god American business has its head up its own ass, from the VPs to the ELT, and it's the easiest thing in the world to have some goddamn self awareness and empathy.

+1. The entitlement and elitism is out of control. No Dave you’re not Steve Jobs 2.0 sit the fuck down and listen to our customers please!

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#143
post #88
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The way I have started looking at it is CEOs/founders won the lottery. They control the keys, but they share a tiny fraction of the gold with the employees. I come to this conclusion, b/c I think its extremely rare that the 'best' person to be the executive on day0 is rarely the 'best' person to be an executive in every stage of a company's lifecycle. but the executives can cling on, b/c they have low accountability…

There are plenty of CEOs who came out of nothing, grinded and took risks. They also didn't act entitled, played victim and blamed luck

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#144
post #95
post #40

A recurring theme in so many startups I've seen inside is how the CEO in particular is extremely aloof with regards to presence. Sometimes that translates to aloofness for staff, but what more often happens is that when the CEO _does_ come in they expect other people to be there. So long as the alignment is good they don't care, but when it's not aligned, they just assume nobody is ever around and get real pissy abou…

Or… the ceo has a job where they need to be out meeting people. For sales, recruiting, etc They generally expect people who can work from the office are working from the office. For example they wouldn’t expect to see forward deployed engineers sitting at the office twiddling their thumbs…

[deleted]

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#145
post #35

CEOs of medium/large companies are the face of the company which means making a couple key decisions per week (a few work hours) and meeting with current/prospective clients (leisure activities). Coupled with making far more $ than the rest of the employees, I suspect they're both bored at the office and feel downgraded to a regular employee. Thus, out-of-office with nothing to show. But if the company is _coincident…

This might be hard to believe, but yet another steak dinner at the expense of time with your family/house/hobbies/whatever gets old fast for some, and some of those key decisions can affect the livelihoods of hundreds of people as well as your company's value, if publicly traded.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#146
post #24

Where is my AI CEO?

You mean we could save $32 million a year just by replacing this one guy with AI?

I do.

CEOs are just picking lanes. Lanes defined by their crew. (The Captain doesn't determine the answer, they pick the answer from options provided by the crew).

And AI can factor in much more than any human.

So...feed the workers data into the AI CEO.

I'm building on lots of Adam Smith ideas - let the worker pick the optimum path.

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Executives work insane hours. The jobs are there if you want to gun for them. Yes there are lazy executives, but successful companies focused on shareholder value tend to weed them out.

> Executives work insane hours. Often quite a bit less than it looks on-paper when you remove the "working lunch" and "client dinner" and "meeting (at the country club)" and "reading emails while lounging on the private jet" bits.

All of that is work!

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#149
post #104
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meeting with current and prospective clients is not leisure, it's stressful as fuck even if it's over dinner.

Is it 39x more stressful than destroying your body on a factory floor so you can feed your kids?

When some of the meetings and decisions execs make affects the livelihood of huge groups of those people, I'd say "it can be sometimes"

Re: CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

#150
post #104
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meeting with current and prospective clients is not leisure, it's stressful as fuck even if it's over dinner.

Is it 39x more stressful than destroying your body on a factory floor so you can feed your kids?

I've never been a CEO of a big company, but I've been the CEO of a company that did $5m a year in business. I've also worked for $6 an hour sweeping, busked on the subway, and been the lowest paid person at a few companies besides. The CEO role had by far the most stress, to the point it caused me debilitating health issues.
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