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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 enough for a lot of customers.
If you are in some regulated B2B context, not having a CEO or having a "non-traditional" CEO can result in lost deals. The counterparties are looking for "one throat to choke" when they are being made responsible for approving large contracts. They want a person's cell phone number they can call when they're having a bad mood about whatever they've just paid for. They don't want to talk to your developers or the cranky old founders. They want to talk to a person who can be summoned to any arbitrary golf course within 48 hours and who will arrive in a fantastic mood 100% of the time. This person often doesn't have to know a goddamn thing about what your company's product actually does. They just have to be a delegate. A conduit of information and a representative element.
Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.
Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.
The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.
It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.
And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.
Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.
As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
This world view is not falsifiable. Regardless of success you can say it was luck.
But I just don’t understand this. In my work we are constantly giving people chances to take on more responsibility, and often they don’t want to, or it doesn’t work out. Why would you expect that you could drop them in as CEO?
Are CEOs always the cause of success or failure? No. Are they good at avoiding blame? Yes. Are they also extremely skilled and competent people? Yes.
This is actually how the world works
The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.
Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.
I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse
Ivy types have a poor history of figuring out which is which in advance though.
You think he can raise a huge round and just decide to pay himself $20m a year?
Capital is not a moat. There are entire industries (VC, PE, Banks, etc) that are looking to write checks. Nothing would make them happier than to give you money, under the condition that there is significant upside (more VC) or assets (PE, Banks) and you commit to doing the hard work for very little pay.
This is actually how the world works.
there is alot of beta involved, i.e. put 10M into payroll startup xyz, expect some rate of return.
They are not dumb, just incompetent in the domains where they invest the money. And surrounded by yes-men because they are the ones writing the checks.
> 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.
There are things worse than losing your job.
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?
Those with the higher price tag are better /s
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.
It has a name, it's called "survivorship bias".
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.
"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.
Environment around you changes all the time which means if a company wants to stay around it needs to be able to adapt at any moment.
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.
I’ve worked with exceptional CEOs at start ups. A startup CEO has to be a good sales person. They need to be able to make that final pitch to sell the company.
Then everyone ideally cashes out and we’re all rich without the need to ever work again.
It’s probably not going to happen, but I often dream of getting rich and in my retirement running a game studio in a low cost of living country.
I want to literally code right alongside my employees and pay them fair wages even if we make no money.
Good basic games. A strict no DLC policy and full open source( if possible) 5 years after release.
Do you have an example of this? The usual criticism of CEOs is based on the exact opposite; that we are the fall guys, and that CEOs usually profit (and are rarely punished for) their own failed decisions.
Looking back at all the companies I've worked for, I can't think of one time a CEO actually suffered blowback for serious mistakes. The closest would be Steve Jobs having been let go from Apple, but that was in 1985 and he wasn't even the CEO back then.
unfortunately, have seen too much arrogance in corporate, and have always asked what if that person has been a humble guy?
And then, there is the whole layers of wannabees in the middle market.
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.
Fixed that for ya.
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.
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.
He was a demonstrably bad CEO, so much so that the Apple board fired him. He then went on to get better at the job through running another two companies until, eventually, Apple purchased one of these companies (it was very much unsuccessful, BTW). Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
The CEO is in large part responsible for picking what products have hope to grow the company. The iphone was far from a slam dunk, many thought it would fail. Now it's responsible for over half their revenue and they're one of the largest companies in the world.
>Then he became CEO and the company and was, finally, phenomenally successful.
I'm totally confused by your post, so you admit he became a good CEO then?
Also he died 15 years ago, but Apple's success (measured in market cap at least) went up more than 10x since he died (from 300-400B to 3-4T), under Tim Cook. That's arguably from the groundwork and reputation the company laid down 15 years ago, but still - few companies manage to keep growing on stuff they did 15 years ago. Oil industry notwithstanding.
How often is the only proof the price tag from their previous position?
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.
I don't care who started first, theirs is a catchy Corporate Identity. I've been around since GPT2&CrAIyon (an equally-catchy name).
Hopefully everybody enjoys the Wednesday they deserve =D
https://bossasaservice.com
More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.
But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge through rationality alone. In the end, perhaps the real role of leadership is not to choose what AI considers the optimal decision, but to take responsibility for making unique bets—ones that may have a lower chance of success but offer the potential for much greater rewards.
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.
I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
> "The only layer immune to "efficiency" is the one that approves it."
Obviously kind of early and hard to pull off still, but by the end of next year I think you will see a ton of people attempting it with at least partial success.
There are already plenty of less serious attempts.
I'm stealing this one.
Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.
If I run `/post-license` inside of the project, it analyzes what SAAS it uses, how exactly, writes bespoke tailored version of this software, disables proprietary one and returns links to cancel licenses.
I already saved this way a few k USD but I admit I've just started offering this to my clients.
Why do they need to pay yearly licenses for ai generated code when it could be ai generated once just for them?
With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
> 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
The most disappointing part q_q
In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.
What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
> Teen boys are choosing AI girlfriends over real ones for "maximum control, zero rejection"
https://fortune.com/2026/04/17/teen-boys-dating-ai-chatbot-g...
> The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-gi...
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.
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.
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.
use data when you make claims
Corporate America was gutted. This was also when hostile takeovers were the new thing. Buy, slice and dice and parting out of corps was all the rage.
(I have no idea, but now I wonder.)
Frankly, when people worry about “AI eating jobs,” it’s these MBA-manager types who are probably most ripe for role elimination.
AI helps doers do more, but it also means we need vastly fewer people whose job is just to coordinate, summarize, manage, and relay information but fundamentally aren’t the ones innovating, building, or doing.
I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.
Of course, letting AI do that, seems like just a incredibly bad idea. Not that it's much better with people, but at least, with the average IQ of CEOs you can be sure they're not good at it ...
now middle management - that can be useless. more layers between CEO and you, the more useless.
Work is the thing that helps one lift society up.
We're all connected beings and one's occupation is how we each contribute to that society. The idea that it's something we suffer through in order to eat is a crummy reversal of the idea of having purpose.
It doesn't matter if one is selling toilets or scrubbing them, each of us is still keeping civilization in motion; giving it life.
Don't enjoy your occupation? Go back to school. Can't afford school? Hunt down people you respect and figure out how to work with or for them.
Disagree with this statement.
Take Walmart (as a boring example):
- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA
- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m
CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.
Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'
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.
If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.