Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #296

kerkeslager wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like just relying on the invisible hand of the market to create good results doesn't work. And to be clear: just because you're incentivized to harm people, doesn't exonerate you when you harm people. "I was just following incentives" isn't a defense.

Depends on what you are optimizing for. Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market. How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?

Do you think flooding the market with a lot of laid-off people is going to keep tech unemployment low?

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

#312

Post by HWR_14 » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

automatic6131 wrote: post #102

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…

>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…

How did they fail? The spent 1 year salary times 15,000 people times $333,333/man-year. So $5 billion. That's a pretty big cost. On the other hand, it was a hedge against losing significant opportunities/market share. The question is "was it a good bet".

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

#313

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:39 PM UTC

Why should relatively wealthy tech workers have more rights than everyone else? Get rid of at-will employment for people who sweat for a living before considering punishment for CEOs who consider 3 months severance for unneeded employees something considerably less than an atrocity. A huge percentage of Americans don't even have paid sick days.

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

#314

Post by superfrank » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #241

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.

All of the C-suite MBAs got hooked on the same meme. That's why monoculture is dangerous.

Or maybe there just wasn't enough information to make an informed decision and the safest thing to do in that situation is just stay with the pack.

It's like if someone asked you to open a car dealership in a town you knew nothing about. The safest thing to do is just pick the area where all the other dealerships already are. You don't gain a competitive from doing that, but you also ensure they don't either.

It's not the ideal strategy, but doing what everyone else is doing so you don't fall behind makes the most sense some times.

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

#315

Post by danaris » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:45 PM UTC

skt5 wrote: post #308

danaris wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whenever you have to make decisions involving multiple humans, tradeoffs are pretty much a guarantee.

However, over the past few hundred years, we've been gradually coming to the collective conclusion that autocracy is inferior to democracy for systems involving larger numbers of people and decisions of larger stakes.

I don't see why that should apply any less to replacing the hierarchical model of companies, where a CEO can walk into any room and say "You're fired," with a (more-)democratic system, than it did to replacing kingdoms, where a king could walk into any room and say "Off with your head," with a representative democracy.

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

#316

Post by next_xibalba » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:46 PM UTC

thwayunion wrote: post #91

next_xibalba wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a poor, uninformed take. The incentive structure of public companies is only to maximize share price. If a CEO fails to do this, an activist investor will spot the opportunity, buy up shares, and agitate for strategy or leadership change until share price maximization is once again the top priority.

> maximize share price This is obviously not true. Even in the most extreme version of the "shareholder value" philosophy, the goal is not to maximize share price alone. The goal is to maximize total return way that is sustainable within the timeframe that the major of (voting) shareholders consider relevant. The simplest counter-example is the existence of dividends. Any time a company issues a dividend, they could…

> The simplest counter-example is the existence of dividends.

No. All professional valuation models account for dividends and buybacks. Both can and do effect share price.

> financial engineering tricks that a company could do to make their share price shoot to the moon just before cratering to zero

Yes, I would have assumed it obvious that a company wouldn't seek to maximize their share price over an infinitesimal time frame.

I am not advocating for the correctness or perfectness of the current incentive structure. Rather, I am pointing out that any company which is not seeking to improve their share price will very quickly be targeted by short sellers and activists. And thus, management will change priorities to align with increasing shareholder returns or they will be replaced.

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

#317

Post by WirelessGigabit » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

legutierr wrote: post #23

When there is strong demand for a product, a company should hire more people so that it can keep up with demand. Likewise, a company should hire when it has short-term capital investment plans that require additional staffing. I don't think anyone would argue with that. When demand decreases, or when a capital-intensive buildout is complete, would it be incorrect for the firm to decrease its staffing levels? If leade…

Humans are not just in time resources.

And low unemployment in the USA means many people working > 2 jobs, without benefits, just to keep a roof over their heads.

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

#318

Post by caskstrength » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:56 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #128

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…

> On the face of it, it was obvious If it was obvious, then the market would have priced it in. But it didn't. So the crowdsourced collective wisdom was indeed that industries were leaping 5-10 years into the future overnight. That was the thing that was "obvious" to most people. You may have disagreed at the time, and if you'd shorted stocks you could have made some money. But the idea that "on the face of it, it wa…

> If it was obvious, then the market would have priced it in.

Look, right now market is pricing in a soft landing and FED reversing the fiscal policy in the second half of the year, which is highly unlikely (i.e. "obviously" not going to happen). Yes, there are several people pointing this out. No, I'm not selling my (imaginary) house to short stocks and make some money from it.

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

#319

Post by lhorie » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #303

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…

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?

Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. Screw ups are something else. When you think about cases like WeWork or Theranos, then I think we get into more familiar territory: gross negligence is a widely acceptable reason for firing, no matter if you're the CEO, Joe developer or a janitor.

An operational mistake by a SWE might be something like picking the wrong technology, and for a CEO, an operational mistake might be something like a bad acquisition. Just as a technology is a tool for the dev, an acquisition is a tool for the CEO. Both of these are examples of getting bad outcomes from their tool usage decisions, but they're still categorically operational mistakes, as opposed to gross misconduct.

So my two cents is that if one wants to argue that operational mistakes categorically warrant firing personnel, then yeah, I think I'm gonna have a problem with that line of thinking.

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

#320

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

superfrank wrote: post #314

arrosenberg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the C-suite MBAs got hooked on the same meme. That's why monoculture is dangerous.

Or maybe there just wasn't enough information to make an informed decision and the safest thing to do in that situation is just stay with the pack. It's like if someone asked you to open a car dealership in a town you knew nothing about. The safest thing to do is just pick the area where all the other dealerships already are. You don't gain a competitive from doing that, but you also ensure they don't either. It's no…

Wasn't the subprime mortgage crisis similarly caused by an entire industry engaging in practices simply because "that's what everyone else is doing"? Wasn't the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bubble also propped up by groupthink? Why can't bad decisions be called out for what they are and not be excused as rational economic behavior?