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Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

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Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#301

Post by pembrook »

robocat wrote: post #158
pembrook wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The managerial class looting public companies for outsized compensation while taking near-zero risk, is a huge problem in the modern economy. Being a steward of an already-giant company...one that has product-market fit, reliable sales/distribution channels, household brand awareness, and a position of gravity in the markets...is infinitely easier than building something from scratch. Nobody who was employee #1567 sh…

> The managerial class looting public companies for outsized compensation while taking near-zero risk, is a huge problem in the modern economy. From the public’s point-of-view, the “software class” are looting the public: outsized compensation for a risk of say 2% (20% fired over ten years). Nobody who was employee #13370 should ever be granted $100k+ of equity in a business they didn't build. I’m being sarcastic: bu…

The pay of a rank-and-file engineer is commoditized with pay-bands and kept in check by market forces (we're talking millions of people -- hard to prop up inefficient pay at that scale). Certainly there might some geographic inefficiencies but those are slowly being arbitraged away (there's zero reason a European developer should be making 1/4th of what an American developer would).

On the other hand, the talent market for Director at Public Company is much less efficient and opaque. You're talking about a club of a few thousand people globally who restrict entry via irrational signaling values like "was on the rowing team at Harvard" or "created PowerPoints for a year at McKinsey."

I'm certain we could 5X the amount of people we let into the "public company management" talent pool with near zero effect on outcomes at a macro level--while having the benefit of saving investors money on comp.

You can't 5X the amount of people you let into the engineering talent pool without making things much worse. That market is much more efficient.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#302

Post by bradleyjg »

colinmorelli wrote: post #86

Regardless of individual opinions on whether CEOs should be terminated for layoffs or not - there's a surprising amount of comments here that seem to not understand that growing companies don't hire for today, but for where they want to be tomorrow. Where you want to be tomorrow is based on where you and your investors believe the world is going. If the world materially changes enough to shift your expectations about…

In other words, when COVID hit and tech companies saw large surges because investors and CEOs saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth. As the market has shifted and inflation combined with an end to the public health emergency has tempered growth expectations, investors and CEOs cut head count to match.

What you’re missing here is that it’s their job to be correct.

Covid was, perhaps, unpredictable but the end of Covid wasn’t.

Of course, accurately predicting the future is very difficult but these are the highest paid people in the entire world. They should be able to do very difficult things to dramatically help their businesses, that’s why they make the big bucks. If they aren’t performing they should be replaced by someone better. Otherwise what we have is cronyism and not capitalism.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#303

Post by bradleyjg »

lhorie wrote: post #258
automatic6131 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when COVID hit and tech companies saw large surges because investors and CEOs saw industries leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight, they hired to support that growth Yes, they all egregiously failed. A massive, widespread, collective failure for which they should lose their jobs, as many other people do. On the face of it, it was obvious, that's not even hindsight bias - it was the topsy turvy world that bad…

I'm seeing a lot of this "screw up = get fired" narrative lately and I think it's a bit ironic. Talk about screwing up in engineering contexts and suddenly the tune changes: now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. Imagine a youtuber saying googlers should be fired because some decision was made that affected the youtuber's income negatively. Or im…

now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault.

I’ve seen lots of public post mortems for engineering screw ups. Can you point me to a Fortune 500 public post mortem for a bad acquisition or something else CEO driven?

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#304

Post by hello_moto »

noisenotsignal wrote: post #256
hello_moto wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then, let's change the system. How about ... get ready for a taboo word in hi-tech: unionized? at a certain size, a hi-tech company must face labour union? Before anyone suggests that Union protect low performer and penalized high performer, keep in mind that right now, at this moment, high performers are culled left and right in FAANG because their salary is too high. High performers also gravitated towards "c…

Being laid off isn’t sufficient to make this a bad situation for high performers. If they’re getting new jobs quickly, it’s just a short-term setback. Note that I’m not commenting on how high performers are doing in terms of getting new jobs! It could be bad, it could be good, I don’t know. But layoffs with less worker protections have always been the trade-off for higher compensation for top performers. Just because…

> Note that I’m not commenting on how high performers are doing in terms of getting new jobs! It could be bad, it could be good, I don’t know.

> But layoffs with less worker protections have always been the trade-off for higher compensation for top performers.

We'll have to wait and see how this play out in order to validate your statement.

Will the days of top-compn for high-performers come back again? Or are we heading for correction?

Hi-tech high-compn is one factor of inflation that bleeds to housing sector (see property prices in hi-tech dense area).

My other argument would be nobody can be LeBron James: high-performer for 20+ years consistently. Some only did for one stretch (3-5 years, or just in one company; different companies have different problems and organizational challenges), some longer (10 maybe, if they're lucky).

Burnout is real in hi-tech. Nobody has done any data or correlation between high-performers, top compensation, and burnout.

I see your angle "if it's a well understood risk" a.k.a making a deal with the devil ;).

Having said that, I'd like to see how things play out rather than using previous state of the hi-tech high-compn culture that exist thanks to cheap money via US printing machine.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#305

Post by Clent »

foobiekr wrote: post #284
josephcsible wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Executives should be held personally responsible for kinds of things that low-level employees aren't. That's why executives get paid so much more.

Do you want execs that never take risks and simply milk cash cows until they die? Do you want golden parachutes? This is how you get these.

If we don't let them be bad in the job in one way, they'll be bad in the job in another way, therefore why bother.

I reject these defeatist attitudes and question the engineering skills of anyone who thinks this way.

It is always better to try something. Human created systems are inherently problematic and do not fix themselves.

The dream is to engineer a system that does not have faults.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#306

Post by noisenotsignal »

hello_moto wrote: post #304
noisenotsignal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being laid off isn’t sufficient to make this a bad situation for high performers. If they’re getting new jobs quickly, it’s just a short-term setback. Note that I’m not commenting on how high performers are doing in terms of getting new jobs! It could be bad, it could be good, I don’t know. But layoffs with less worker protections have always been the trade-off for higher compensation for top performers. Just because…

> Note that I’m not commenting on how high performers are doing in terms of getting new jobs! It could be bad, it could be good, I don’t know. > But layoffs with less worker protections have always been the trade-off for higher compensation for top performers. We'll have to wait and see how this play out in order to validate your statement. Will the days of top-compn for high-performers come back again? Or are we hea…

Makes sense, thanks for your understanding! As I alluded to, I think you can make a convincing projection that the future state will be worse. It’s just that the current situation is still within the bounds of expectation, so it’s not itself a sufficient counter argument to anti-union sentiment.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#307

Post by superfrank »

waboremo wrote: post #231
superfrank wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fact that so many CEOs got it wrong is actually an argument for why the shouldn't be fired. If one or two CEOs got it wrong, you could argue that they were incompetent, ignorant, or greedy and they should have been better informed because plenty of other CEOs were. Everyone getting something wrong says to me that the failure wasn't down to individual mistakes and there was something larger at play.

If your CEO is a lemming, they are not capable of leading a company. They should be fired. If you want to see a real leader, look at Tim Cook. He made decisions based specifically on where the company is, where it's going, and already factored in external factors (such as the pandemic growth). Contrast this to dozens of other "CEO"s who made a horrible decision hastily, executed layoffs horribly wrong, and then vague…

I think that's a bad take. Tim Cook is arguably the best CEO out there right now. Saying all CEOs should just do what Tim Cook did is like saying all swimmers should just be more like Michael Phelps.

> When that ship slams into an iceberg, you have failed your core role.

I agree with your line of thinking, but I don't think any of these companies failed in their core role. Looking at the FAANG companies, stock prices are down a bit, but none of these companies are on the verge of collapse and all are still market leaders in their respective areas.

Hell, for all we know, this could have been the plan all along. Hire a bunch of people while interest rates are low and let them all go when interest rates go back up. I realize that layoffs are not a good thing and they affect real people, but the reality is that they are not a sign that a CEO is failing in their core role.

> What happens when workers fail their core role?

It depends... If I've got one employee on my team who continually fucks up our deploy process causing outages. Yeah, they probably need to be fired. If every developer on my team fucks up our deploy process causing outages, then issue is probably that our deploy process is bad and firing people isn't going to fix anything.

Which brings me back to my original point.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#308

Post by skt5 »

danaris wrote: post #283
lhorie wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of this "screw up = get fired" narrative lately and I think it's a bit ironic. Talk about screwing up in engineering contexts and suddenly the tune changes: now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. Imagine a youtuber saying googlers should be fired because some decision was made that affected the youtuber's income negatively. Or im…

When you've been subjected to decades of drivel asserting loudly and repeatedly that the reason CEOs get paid big money is specifically because they are the ones who hold the responsibility for screwups like this, you start to think that maybe they should actually be held accountable, just like they say they deserve. When an individual engineer screws up, if the processes in place are working correctly, that screwup…

> create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for".

this sounds very similar to a government where politicians are elected (un)fairly. likely, this just presents another set of trade-offs.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#309

Post by buildbot »

zucked wrote: post #281
waboremo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your CEO is a lemming, they are not capable of leading a company. They should be fired. If you want to see a real leader, look at Tim Cook. He made decisions based specifically on where the company is, where it's going, and already factored in external factors (such as the pandemic growth). Contrast this to dozens of other "CEO"s who made a horrible decision hastily, executed layoffs horribly wrong, and then vague…

I can appreciate your point, but you have to also consider that a characteristic of Apple is the sheer size of the business. Apple can afford to be more conservative with their business plans because they can weather storms more readily. If Apple failed to plan for a huge economic event that let competitors gain some ground, they can survive that misstep because they have such a huge moat. Conversely, if Apple did ov…

But it's not just mid-sized SaaS - Google, Microsoft, Facebook are also _massive_. So this feels like a spurious argument.

Re: Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs

#310

Post by skt5 »

dml2135 wrote: post #266
s1artibartfast wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a different question then if it's obvious. I don't really understand the obvious claim. If it was obvious to investors and executives then what? They knowingly spent money they knew was a waste?

It's not that complicated -- it was obvious to some people, and not obvious to others. Clearly then, the wrong people were in charge.

I wonder if for those who it was very obvious for "put their money where their mouths were" and bought a set of securities that would make them a ton of money on what was obvious when the obvious materializes in real life.

then, with that ton of money, they could buy enough shares to influence the board to implement their agenda.

in theory, this would quantify the definition of "obvious".

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