OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future • Hacker News Board

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#391

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 12:37 AM UTC

conductr wrote: post #359

seany wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad take. There are plenty of orgs that were remote in some form or another way before covid. They're just organized and managed differently. It's 100% a management doesn't want to change issue.

It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to…

>You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper.

I really cannot take a sentiment like this seriously after seeing the last 15 years of American work culture. And especially the last 3. We spent the better part of 40 years tearing down the concept of careers, trying to de-professionalize as much local labor as possible, and outsource whatever remains, and yet companies still want to pretend they care about "culture" and and "engagement"? They lay off millions of workers the past few years and yet "retention" is still a metric somehow?

This is the problem seeing employees on a spreadsheet. You don't see the generational damage this is inflicting and the upcoming reckoning when that generation can no longer be ignored politically.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#392

Post by conductr » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 3:44 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #391

conductr wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to…

>You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper. I really cannot take a sentiment like this seriously after seeing the last 15 years of American work culture. And especially the last 3. We spent the better part of 40 years tearing down the concept of careers, trying to de-professionalize as much local labor as possible, and outsource…

I’m not trying to rationalize or humanize any of this , I’m just explaining it.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#393

Post by conductr » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 3:55 AM UTC

seany wrote: post #379

conductr wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to…

I mean, it's just anecdote vs anecdote. I'm a serial first eng -> VP/Dir for the last ... almost 30 years; I'm well aware of how creative projects work remote, and that retention and engagement are important. I've seen repeatedly over the last ten years especially C levels that want people in offices for "vibes" with _no_ data to back that up... In some cases opposite data. All of that gets mixed with data from teams…

As you spit your listerine, please also clean your glasses and read again because the discussion is being made at a macro level and not centered on any particular industry and it’s also concerning RTO; as in, the company once was office based and wishes to resume that now that the pandemic is in the rear view. This is not a vibe seeking CEO discussion, it’s about large companies that were office first and designed and staffed around that concept. Them feeling like remote is a bad fit is completely fair game and employees should never have had expectations that it would be remote forever.

The truth of that may be upsetting, management is aware.

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#394

Post by Anonyneko » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #272

bob1029 wrote: post #234

I have learned that the purpose of a CEO in many (most?) companies is not to actually run the company. Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity. They are empowered to act on behalf of the entire organization. This is important because a corporation of many individuals generally cannot act as one. You can sometimes get close with really, really good teamwork, but that's still not…

So when the corporations do something illegal why doesn’t this conduit go to jail or pay out of pocket for misconduct? Or is the said conduit only in play for all the convenient aspects of the job like firing people while taking millions in bonuses?

In the post-Soviet world it's a fairly normal practice to have a "CEO on paper" who's only there to go to jail if things go wrong, and have a completely different person or people make all of the business decisions and handle deals and big customers. E.g. in one of my former workplaces this formal "CEO" was the bookkeeping guy who handled our salary payments and whatnot.

This practice is old enough that it was parodied in "The Golden Calf" in 1931...

Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

#395

Post by aakresearch » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #359

seany wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad take. There are plenty of orgs that were remote in some form or another way before covid. They're just organized and managed differently. It's 100% a management doesn't want to change issue.

It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to…

I find this argument for-RTO/against-WFH emitting exactly the same vibes as argument against women suffrage and workforce participation. Yes, if we forget that we are talking about real people, and only consider a benefit of abstract entities that companies (or society) are, there may be some conjectures, or - dare I say - please bear with me - even limited "evidence" of it. After all, the status quo has supported both arguments for very long time (millennia for society and centuries of industrialization era for companies) and opposition was non-existent for most of that time. Unthinkable even, so embedded was the status quo. But this horse has bolted, because benefits for the freedom and wellbeing of individual - woman or WFH worker - are so enormous, that I do not understand how this handwavy anti-Remote argument is more defensible than anti-suffrage.