> If I am manager and I hire poor devs and they fuck up a project, who is to blame? Is it the poor devs who can't code or is it me who hired them?
See, this is why blame isn't a particularly useful way to approach the problem. In all likelihood, both share some degree of blame.
> Imagine half of CEO candidates being bad people, half being good ones. Imagine that shareholders will always chose the ones that will only care for their share value and this happens to be choosing bad people.
Imagine we put the bad half in jail. Then nobody will be willing to perform massive layoffs, and shareholders will have to pick from the pool of good CEOs. This isn't complicated.
Actual jail time is a bit more extreme than necessary: proportional fines are more along the lines of what I think would be best.
> Who you really need to go for is shareholders. Make them pay for not treating people right, make it not worth.
The problem with going after shareholders is that not all of them are to blame for problems.
Shareholders simply don't have visibility into companies to be able to make informed decisions. Technically shareholders have the right to some degree of visibility, but if you own a diverse portfolio you're spread too thin. Consider the literally most common form of investing in stocks: buying an S&P 500 index fund--are you really of the opinion that it's shareholders' responsibility to be intimately aware of the goings-on of 500 different stocks?
Even if you put this responsibility on the fund manager, 500 stocks is a lot (and the problem is even worse with total market funds). Additionally, [index] fund managers hands are partially tied: they can vote in elections but they can't sell the stock because they have to conform to the index.
And ultimately, minority shareholders can't even meaningfully vote. In many (maybe even most?) companies, And finally, it's a big assumption to believe that share price is actually an incentive to shareholders. For the larger shareholders of a company, the shares in a company have to be viewed in the context of their overall portfolio. There are situations where driving down the price of shares you own can be profitable. For example, if you own shares in competing companies A and B, you can buy put options against your own shares in B and then drive it into the ground. You lose money on your B shares, but that's more than compensated by your puts and the rise in price of A shares.
> No, don't go after CEOs. It will just create a new stack of perverse incentives.
Sociopaths will always find perverse incentives (such as the company A and B example above). Making changes many layers of abstraction away from the problems as you're proposing just increases the complexity of situations and makes it easier to find loopholes.
The CEOs are the ones who make the decision to lay people off. They should be held responsible for that decision. It's not even about blame, it's just about solving the problem in the most direct way possible.