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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

#161

Post by cm11 »

firefax wrote: post #124
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.

I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror.

Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.

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

#162

Post by bluefirebrand »

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.

You mentioned in another part of this thread that you worked in hardware mostly?

It seems like the cost of changing hardware code is high enough to still insist on building it high quality, is that accurate?

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

#164

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cornholio wrote: post #153
socketcluster wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm not entirely sure how that dismisses the CEO's putative argument: they go big on AI precisely because shipping end-to-end is hard, so they think they shouldn't waste resources on tasks that can be automated. The structure of a good argument would be something like: certain tasks are fundamentally human and impossible to automate (which and why?) and by pushing AI use beyond what is optimal you are actually hurtin…

I wouldn't say it "dismisses" their argument, but I think AI marketing encourages them to take an over-simplified view of what it takes to ship product. Most folks like a good, simple story, as opposed to the unvarnished truth.

> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."

-- H. L. Mencken

It's like the classic scenario, where you lash-up a barely functional UI demo, and the manager cuts your development schedule by 90%, because you "already have it working." That taught me to never do a lash-up demo. If I show something to someone, it is ship-quality (but often incomplete). It's a technique that I've used for years, and is a great way to involve nontechnical stakeholders, without risking stuff like "it's already working."

All that said, I think that AI definitely could automate a lot of the repetitive stuff involved in shipping. It's just that the CEO would fire the folks that could teach it, before it can learn, because they think that what they do, is "unimportant."

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

#165

Post by lenerdenator »

> The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”

> This is a bad CEO.

There is one and only one measure of whether a CEO is good or bad:

Does the CEO keep the majority of shareholders happy?

Since they are more often than not kept happy with money, if the AI makes the CEO ask the question above and the result is a larger return on the shareholders' investment, then that is a good CEO.

When your domain of knowledge considers Jack Welch to be a genius, there is no floor.

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

#166

Post by Yokohiii »

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…

> I liken it to having children. Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work.

I am not a children person. But I love this analogy.

To deliver something nice, we also must accept some suffering.

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

#167

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #162
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mentioned in another part of this thread that you worked in hardware mostly? It seems like the cost of changing hardware code is high enough to still insist on building it high quality, is that accurate?

Yes. It's also why working as a software (host) developer at a hardware company is difficult.

Hardware people insist on treating software the same as firmware.

Bad firmware can cause real-world, physical damage, and be impossible to fix without a hardware recall. A firmware bug can wipe out a hardware company. A software bug can be embarassing, but can also be corrected a lot more easily (as long as it is being treated differently from firmware).

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

#168

Post by ihsw »

orphea wrote: post #58
ottoflux wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% been saying this for a while now. the main thing AI will be able to replace is a C suite.

maybe this is the way forward. Imagine how many tokens one could burn given C suite salaries.

[dead]

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

#169

Post by firefax »

cm11 wrote: post #161
firefax wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other'…

>I think it's private schools in general.

I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law)

>Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though.

I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors.

That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously.

I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else.

Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many "startups" when we're really striving for small businesses.

But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that.

Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-)

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

#170

Post by elzbardico »

hintymad wrote: post #109
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…

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

Anthropic is full of shit.
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