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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

#331

Post by meany »

jackmott42 wrote: post #172
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…

It is a very odd discussion to have since, even when running a company well, no public company should be compensating its CEO to the tune of even 1 million a year. It is absolutely a ruling class leeching off society that this happens. It doesn't happen everywhere or even in america in the past, big companies can be run without this behavior. It isn't supply and demand, it is cronyism. Should a CEO be allowed to get…

Shareholders can sell there stock and I'm sure many did - that's how they send a message that they don't like the path leaders are on. Shareholders buy/hold/sell stock knowing the contractual obligations. As a shareholder, albeit a tiny one, I don't see how I'm harmed.

When you say CEO compensation isn't tied to supply and demand, what data do have to support that? We pay football/basketball/baseball players well more than 1M dollars. Do you think the impact between a good and mediocre CEO for a large company is less than 1M? Even tiny drops in performance due to decisions at the CEO level would cost millions at the biggest companies. As companies scale larger, bad decisions will cost more and more. I think a rationale case can be made that many of these CEOs are generating more value than they cost in compensation.

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

#332

Post by Keegs »

kerkeslager wrote: post #254
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #3

This is based upon the assumption that layoffs are a failure rather than a feature which, while I find it distasteful using people's livelihoods in such a way, doesn't actually seem to be the reckoning for a lot of people. When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad? If you can ignore the human factor it makes sense.

> When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad? Because you don't want to harm people.

> Because you don’t want to harm people

Yes but you see the risk to our brand is less than the expected return so harming people is in the shareholders’ interest.

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

#333

Post by Apocryphon »

superfrank wrote: post #326
Apocryphon wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, I think the culpability of CEOs has to be balanced with the corporate boards that appoint them and give them direction, and the major activist shareholders who were the ones who gave them marching orders to the tune of unrealistic growth targets into a volatile skewed economic situation in the first place.

But the point is when everyone gets something wrong, there should be time for at least reflection and steps to remediate such a mistake from happening again in the future. Just saying the "economy is complex" is no excuse. If anything, it is defeatism.

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

#334

Post by arrosenberg »

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…

I could see an argument for locally rational in the same way that no one gets fired for using IBM, but it's usually pretty clear to the lower level employees that something isn't right. Middle management and lower level employees all knew the economy was messed up, it's hard for me to conclude that the C*O's don't rationally know the same thing.

> You don't gain a competitive from doing that, but you also ensure they don't either.

In fact, you may gain a competitive advantage from doing the opposite of the herd if the herd is about to run off a cliff.

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

#335

Post by [deleted] »

caskstrength wrote: post #318
crazygringo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#336

Post by lhorie »

bradleyjg wrote: post #323
lhorie wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There’s zero introspection or root causing

You mean unlike the Experian breach post mortem, or the numerous "everything is green" Slack outages? IMHO, Costco talking about container costs is introspection. I'll grant that taking analogies too literally does indeed lead one to conclude the other party's arguments are bullshit, but I think that's just a matter of perspective and unwillingness to engage in good faith discussions.

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

#337

Post by cudgy »

seper8 wrote: post #279
cudgy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shareholders should revolt against those rich software developers? Of course they should. Hiring a few, strategic, expert developers at those rates might make sense. However, paying 200k+ for a newly graduated student with no experience should have been questioned firmly.

Maybe that newly graduated student provides more than 200k in value?

Ok, but did the company have to pay that much to get that same value? I saved a company from losing a $5 million dollar sale when I was 6 months out of university, but should I have received $5 million for my value? Plenty of other people could have accomplished the same thing.

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

#338

Post by mc32 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #329
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 t…

It's all relative. Relative to other developed economies employment laws are more flexible in the US. In China, interestingly, for private businesses it's relatively easy to fire employees. You get massive protests when an employer refuses owed backpay for people in mass layoffs.

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

#339

Post by cudgy »

hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #237
cudgy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shareholders should revolt against those rich software developers? Of course they should. Hiring a few, strategic, expert developers at those rates might make sense. However, paying 200k+ for a newly graduated student with no experience should have been questioned firmly.

Yes, it would be much better for inequality if everyone's salaries were low and the trillions of value created in tech to go to a couple VCs, their LPs and their trust fund kids.

Some of that goes to workers with vested options too plus 401k and pension investors as well. Also, we are not talking about low salaries with the FAANG companies; the rest of the industry gets paid much less and noone is crying a river for them.

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

#340

Post by Hermitian909 »

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?

So far as I'm aware blameless postmortems don't really exist for project level failures. If I propose a new system, say a new load balancing scheme, it staffed and built and then is a failure as a system I am actually going to get blamed for that failure.

The same is true for directors and CEOs.

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