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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

#321

Post by roncesvalles »

simple10 wrote: post #190

Am I oversimplifying, or are the layoffs more of a predictable function of correcting for zero interest money without fear of employment lawsuits? Money was free (zero interest) during covid. Most tech companies increased staff to keep pace with each other. A lot of these hires were in support staff and junior positions needed to support low acquisition costs of new customers. Now that interest rates went up and grow…

The interest rate argument is nonsensical and parroted by armchair experts. Barring a few atypical exceptions like IBM, Big Tech companies don't borrow money to grow.

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

#322

Post by twawaaay »

kerkeslager wrote: post #267
twawaaay wrote: post #212

Accountable to whom? For everything within the law, CEOs are only accountable to company owners. That's it. CEOs are only managing the company for somebody else -- the owners of the company. That's it. That's all they do. When the owners don't like the CEO they just get a new one, until they find a person that will do their bidding (or at least increase their share value). Trying to change the mind of a CEO makes no…

> The problem is people who don't care about other people. Agreed, but the idea that CEOs are somehow not part of this group is a bit bizarre, particularly when you consider that a large part of CEO compensation is often stock or stock options. You can't exonerate CEOs by blaming shareholders when CEOs are generally shareholders.

I am not exonerating CEO as a person.

But think in terms of the goal you want to achieve. If your goal is to stop layoffs and convince the CEO to act in a different way that shareholders will not like, the CEO will be replaced. And you will not achieve the goal.

Again, the CEO is accountable to law and shareholders. Either you convince shareholders to change their mind or you change the law. That's it. Changing the mind o CEO makes no difference.

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

#323

Post by bradleyjg »

lhorie wrote: post #319
bradleyjg wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opera…

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.

This is bullshit. An earnings call is nothing like an engineering post mortem for an outage. There’s zero introspection or root causing.

It’s typical Silicon Valley style hypocrisy, where founders and CEOs claim there’s a certain company culture but never walk the walk themselves.

Give me a NY bank any day. At least they aren’t constantly blowing smoke up employees’ asses. Everyone knows the score.

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

#324

Post by sdz »

Apocryphon wrote: post #282
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. That makes me wonder why investors, particularly activist shareholders who drive the direction of boards, are never under scrutiny. Maybe their decisions to chase unrealistic growth, which forces the hands of CEOs and lesser executives, should also be reviewed. Maybe they should be somehow penalized or san…

The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured every day, and if they underperform for a number of quarters in a row, their investors will absolutely “fire” them by withdrawing money from their funds.

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

#325

Post by barbazoo »

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.

I guess the question is whether leadership could have anticipated a retraction of the economy just a few years later. But this made me think of another question. How much job security can we reasonably expect in the first place? If we want jobs to be secure, then that needs to be legislated or people need to unionize (and take the pay cut). I'm aware that I have no say in how the business is run and I can basically be let go either anytime or within a short time and I need to prepare myself for that.

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

#326

Post by superfrank »

Apocryphon wrote: post #320
superfrank wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why can't bad decisions be called out for what they are and not be excused as rational economic behavior?

My point is that we only know it was a bad decision after the fact.

The economy is incredibly complex and anyone who tells you they can consistently predict what comes next is lying to you or lying to themselves. Even experts who dedicate their lives to studying economics get things wrong regularly. Calling for a CEOs head because they failed to predict something that pretty much everyone of their competitors also got wrong seems stupid.

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

#327

Post by caskstrength »

colinmorelli wrote: post #147
sharemywin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hate the CEO's saying "I take full responsibility for what happened" I call bullshit. If you did you'd quit in shame.

If the bar for asking a CEO to quit is "you did not correctly predict the future" then we're going to have to ask most CEOs to quit at some point. And most employees for that matter. The issue I have is with broad strokes generalizations that layoffs indicate a failure of a CEO. They don't necessarily mean that. Any more than shipping a bug to production indicates a failure of an engineer who should now be fired. Sim…

> If the bar for asking a CEO to quit is "you did not correctly predict the future" then we're going to have to ask most CEOs to quit at some point. And most employees for that matter.

I think level of responsibility for CEO should be different compared to regular employees. They get paid fuck you money and never need to work again afterwards.

There was a thread about google layoffs recently where people discussed L9s being laid off and how such people are expected to "redefine the industry" every year and walk on water in general. Yet, somehow the responsibility that seems to increase exponentially with level goes to almost junior level "oopsie couldn't predict what would happen after covid when free money stop flowing, no biggie I guess, let's just fire all these people we have hired during previous two years" for execs. It seems that the only way for them to get fired is if one of employees they sexually harassed talks and even then they get golden parachute.

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

#328

Post by Apocryphon »

sdz wrote: post #324
Apocryphon wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. That makes me wonder why investors, particularly activist shareholders who drive the direction of boards, are never under scrutiny. Maybe their decisions to chase unrealistic growth, which forces the hands of CEOs and lesser executives, should also be reviewed. Maybe they should be somehow penalized or san…

The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured every day, and if they underperform for a number of quarters in a row, their investors will absolutely “fire” them by withdrawing money from their funds.

Then sounds like their incentives are inherently not conducive to the business of running businesses built on reasonable growth, and causes them to fall prey to the groupthink of expecting unrealistic macro environments to continue indefinitely.

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

#329

Post by roncesvalles »

mc32 wrote: post #9

The US is not a command economy and given the open nature of hiring and firing (few encumbrances) results in firms being able to hire quickly and fire quickly. It allows for a more dynamic economy. Obviously this adds some uncertainty to affected parties (firms and labor). Individual contributors lose their source of income and firms may be less financially stable (may now have financial constraints) on the other han…

>The US is not a command economy and given the open nature of hiring and firing (few encumbrances) results in firms being able to hire quickly and fire quickly.

Really? My epiphanic assessment from working in corporate America is that the single biggest challenge for American capitalism is that it's very difficult to fire people. That is, there is much more organizational friction in making a decision to fire, than to make a decision to hire.

Even in at-will states, big companies require months or even years of "paper trail" to fire a non-performant or harmful employee. Notably, Amazon's aggressive PIP system seems to be specifically designed from the ground up to counter this problem, and even they seem to be dialing down the aggressiveness because of bad PR.

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

#330

Post by robocat »

pembrook wrote: post #301
robocat wrote: post #158

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. 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 mark…

FANG employee developers can earn more than directors, and as you go up the pay scale, more of a software developers pay is equity compensation.

Directors of the S&P500 earn median $300k per directorship including equity compensation: “The combination of cash and equity changes has pushed pay levels to a new milestone in the history of GECAT’s annual study, and median total direct compensation (TDC) now rests at $300,000” https://www.wtwco.com/en-US/Insights/2022/12/2022-director-c...

And your point is kind of irrelevant to what I was saying. I am arguing relatively, many software engineers at FANG earn what most people would call “obscene salaries”.

If you want to argue executives or directors are overpaid, you also need to consider why (a) highly paid software developers are not overpaid, and (b) why your solution shouldn’t be applied to everybody in the USA as a whole (given the USA is extracting money from poor people and poor countries worldwide).

Edit: actually, on rereading your 5X argument, I realise I just won’t try to understand your point. I need more objective numbers to work with when trying to understand an argument. I won’t be adding to this thread.

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