Now, sometimes CEO's run he company. Often not though.

CEO seems like a great job for AI.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Other working cultures have adopted committees as the top. Is is the dominant form in US shareholder capitalism.

The original post is surely satire.

Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.

This is actually how the world works

> massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it

The "Obama putting a medal around Obama's neck" meme seems appropriate here.

But don't you fall in the same trap as they try to lure you with: expressing a CEO's value as revenue/profit optimization? With that kind of logic, you should pivot your business, whatever it is, to whatever is looking more profitable in the short term. It's short-sighted. And it misses the ethical and social aspect of the organization that forms the company.

I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.

Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....

How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.

And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?

It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".

However at the same time it can also be true that some leaders are either poor or make no difference - but as long as they don't have to react to external change ( or only do so as part of a herd ) they can coast quite happily for years while 'earning' huge rewards.

Leadership is only really tested when the right course is a different one from either the past or your peers.

Roughly, how did it become clear that the second or third place candidates set the company back by months? Did the company ultimately hire the first place candidate and discover their superior effectiveness in the org?

I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.

The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.

Put them anywhere else and it will be a disaster.

A good case study of this is Ron Johnson, who did miracles at Apple and then ran J.C. Penny into the ground.

If you look at the causes, it was blatantly obvious what he was doing wrong (doing away with sale prices). It's a kind of fundamental thing that one could understand by just asking some questions. Maybe it's not genius, maybe people "just do things" and they just happen to work once.

Most success stories are accidental, and one's ability to succeed really depends on how many times they are allowed to fail first.

Most of us here - we have no such luxury. We fail, we become homeless.

There are exceptions, of course, and there are truly talented managers out there. If I look around, however, all I see is clown cars accidentally driving into gold mines.

"proven talent"?

When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer.

So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human involvement. A company just ticking along? I’m less convinced. Or to be more specific, as a developer who is told my work is obsolete by CEOs, I’m interested to know why they don’t apply the same logic inwards.

past success does not mean future success. cz one might just have circumstantial.

so what tends to happen shitty leaders are promoted based on "reasonable/visible" metrics - such as having an MBA, etc.

unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?

Looks like this guy was considered "proven," by his company. So much, so, that they didn't even bother checking his basic bona fides. Wouldn’t surprise me, if he was actually pretty good at his job.

I think a lot of the "proof" at this level, is Mastery of the Bro-Fu. If you can speak the right language, wear the right watch, and drive the right car, the key to the executive washroom is tossed to you, without a second thought.

I was never a "fanboy" of Jeff Bezos, but I do admire when people do or take the correct approach, I say that to preface that I admire that early on he would tell investors that he's only to be considered as a long term investment, which I wish the stock market had some way to protect these sorts of stocks from the whims of people who quickly crash the value of a company on speculation or other meaningless metrics when you're heavily investing in R&D and have one bad quarter, maybe two, but your third quarter will yield results, but oh no, you have to fire people to make the market happy, so your efforts are ruined.

Fixed that for ya.

The same applies to CEOs. Steve Jobs was a narcissist, but he probably kept a hundred other bikeshedding assholes (who had just as much ego, but far less taste) in check, and that's why Apple was able to function in spite of itself.

How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?

And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.

I'm not saying top talent doesn't make the difference, I'm just saying that CVs and impressions aren't always completely related.

I see no bias here /s.

What I have witnessed, with empirical evidence, is that productivity and/or output across the organization slows down. It is great at first as everyone can catch up on their work and existing projects but then the longer term implications is the teams are disconnected, decisions are more difficult, coordination of simple tasks more difficult, onboarding and actually integrating new employees is difficult, curating the culture is difficult, and it goes on. If you’re a very disciplined individual contributor focusing on low collaboration units of work, then it’s likely you did see a productivity boost. It’s unlikely you could maintain it over long periods of time. But even if you did, you’re probably an outlier.

So it’s not about anyone’s need to feel worthwhile it’s literally about doing what is probably the best for the company even if it upsets some people. Even if some people will be less productive, the organization as a whole will function better. When productivity goes up, it’s only a good thing if output and all the other tangibles aren’t sacrificed in the process. The leaders of organizations initiating RTO usually have done so by avoiding this true talk type conversation with the employees. This is what has led to people filling in the gaps with BS about real estate evaluations. It’s been poor communication and I think a dose of honestly and openness would be beneficial. Sometimes it’s a feeling and they don’t have the means to really collect data and lay it out in an empirical way, so I think that’s part of the reason they avoid it.

2010-2016 in SF there was no such thing as a manager except PM who had no power (they were mostly just happy to be there).

Over time middle management and HR got insane - became the entire show. The whole point of a tech job. Then it was 1:1s and backstabbing all the sudden you could get someone fired. Hilarious, a few years prior if you complained about someone it was your problem - if you don’t like the culture you can leave. And some did because there were many opportunities.

Same thing happened with the web. Turned into banning and blacklisting and all the bullshit authority surrounding the activity taking over the activity itself - ruining it.

It’s not needed, we did better without these things.

Like a family home in Bay Area is 2-3M. Lots of other places in California with better weather and houses closer to 1M. The primary reason the area supports such high housing costs is the density of high paying jobs that require in office somewhere in the bay.

Without RTO, all the managers with property in the bay get skittish that a great exodus will happen from the Bay Area like SF in covid and their house won’t appreciate 10-20% a year

That's what middle management does, your C-suite has an entirely different function.

Anyone can get a decision now-ish, without filtering through tiers of middle management.

> they are absolutely clueless.

That's because you aren't asking them about their college rowing days, yachting, collecting weird mechanical wristwatches, equestrian sports, the best restaurants in the Hamptons or other matters on which they are uniquely suited for and qualified.

No, you've identified the real issue: all the CEOs come from Harvard/Yale. There is a very large wealth class divide between the people who get these jobs almost exclusively due to "networking" (often failing upwards) and the increasingly rare people who actually work up to those roles. It's very much a club that uses every tool possible to maintain the opportunity hording, including AI.

This is largely because being an executive in 2026 has very, very, little to due with technical expertise. AI will just be another tool in their workshop for that.

The white-washing of stolen wealth via "self-made" hollywood and startup careers has reached unfathomable levels.

Yes, daddy worked for the US gov in the 70s and somehow we have eight-digit offshore wealth.

I think I am more inclined to believe the opposite of this

A big fraction of a senior executives' work can also be delegated to others in the company (or outside consultants and services), the thing that can't is being ultimately responsible for making the final decisions - product, people, direction etc.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author)

An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.

what? how? literally what work is already not done by some subordinate that an executive does now?

if some work can be replaced, its already done by some employee. those employees are susceptible to replacement.

That's doing a lot of lifting.

I think you could make a 50/50 decision at the CEO level for most decisions, and merely by making a decision faster the org would have better profit outcomes.