9 ms·

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

by Esau 11y ago

notacoward 11y ago
Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.
- Alupis 11y ago
  > It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Well... what do you expect? You're either the job creator or the job filler. If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. > Their fault for not cultivating the right connections. And yes, knowing the right people is part of that game. And yes, sometimes the job creators must destroy some jobs in order to save the rest. What's better... 10% of Yahoo! laid off... or 100%?
  - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
    You're either the job creator or the job filler. Please explain to me which one of those labels best applies to the executive team at Yahoo.
    - Alupis 11y ago
      > Please explain to me which one of those labels best applies to the executive team at Yahoo Clearly the former. In 2012 Yahoo had 11,700 employees, and by 2014 they had 12,500 employees.[1] The 10% layoff is going to be around the difference there (so net zero), but I don't think any reasonable person could argue not cutting jobs in this situation would result in a net gain for Yahoo. It's a company in trouble, and it's a reasonable course of action. [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/260291/number-of-full-time-yahoo-employees/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/260291/number-of-full-tim...
      - yeukhon 11y ago
        Agree, probably just a response to the market, and doesn't actually yield any substantial gain except cutting a 20-30M a year.
  - sillysaurus3 11y ago
    If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. Haha... I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did. In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them. Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred percent shattered. There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven. Why can't I meet the right people? Because of what I say when given an initial opportunity. And why am I not able to say the right things? Because of the background and context I grew up in. And I'm not talking about appealing to some rich person and asking for an opportunity. I'm talking about meeting peers, or building a team, or any of the things that really matter. One could argue that this situation is mutable, and that it's mostly my fault for what I say. Obviously, yes, it's my fault for the things I say. But when your whole life has been spent being trained in a certain way, by being in the river of society that pushes us all along, the slipstream that you end up in as a child pretty much makes or breaks your ability to learn how to do anything close to what you're suggesting. To play that game you mention. Enjoy being a job creator. It's an opportunity that you should make the most of, in the stead of all the people who can't.
    - Alupis 11y ago
      There are many counter examples to your anecdote. Larry Ellison comes to mind, but there are others (in fact, most of our most successful people come from very broken backgrounds). It's what you do with that drive/anger/passion/frustration/motivation/defiance that counts. It takes a lot of risk, and guts to strike out and create jobs - and more often than not it doesn't work out... but that's all part of the game. It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas.
      - sillysaurus3 11y ago
        Correlation: Look up Sam's comments about his parents. Think of pg's background. Of the successful people from broken backgrounds, they were usually successful by moving on to affluent universities where they recovered. It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas. This is in fact the central argument of my original comment: Merit is mostly communication, and your ability to communicate is defined by the context you grow up in. Not in spite of it. When the world shapes you, reshaping yourself is not the only thing that matters. Your old mistakes can brand you for life.
  - jbooth 11y ago
    Is this poe's law?
  - notacoward 11y ago
    > You're either the job creator or the job filler. That's a very simplistic view. Doing the work and making the stuff also create jobs. How many right here have jobs because developers - not execs, not investors - created the technology we use? Yes, even at Yahoo. Like Hadoop. The idea that the people who contribute money create jobs and the people who contribute labor (in our case via code) don't is utterly, obviously, dangerously wrong. It's self-serving claptrap from those who have no ability to participate in acts of creation instead of arbitrage. No hacker for which this site is named should accept it.
    - jevgeni 11y ago
      I remember seeing a 1970s video from the Soviet Union about a piece of software some soviet scientists developed that could automatically retouch and restore photographs. Like at Adobe Photoshop CC level. What impact did it have? Zero. Because some technocrat apparatchik decided it wasn't worth it developing and promoting the thing further. One can have insane ability to create things, but it will be ultimately futile, if the things created can't sustainably reach consumers.
      - notacoward 11y ago
        One can have the ability to play middleman, but it will be ultimately futile, if there's nothing to play middleman for. Getting things to consumers first requires that there be a thing, which requires a creative act. Investors and executives can certainly help to facilitate those creative acts, but why should that give them first claim to 99% of the proceeds? It's certainly not a risk premium when those people glide away while the creators get screwed. It's pure rent, in the economics sense.
        jevgeni 11y ago
        Well, if the creators are so precious and the "middlemen" - not, why just not stop using the "middlemen"?
- kzhahou 11y ago
  I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. I wonder if HN doesn't see a problem with founders because they all hope to be a billionaire founder themselves one day, but they don't personally relate to hired or big-company CEOs.
  - PakG1 11y ago
    I think HN has grown large enough that there appears to be several competing hiveminds. I remember once commenting about people using their free time to contribute to open source and a ton of people sarcastically asked where they could find it. Then on another thread the next day, I saw ton of people extolling the benefits of contributing to open source in your free time. HN's all grown up to have multiple personalities.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    > I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. The HN Hivemind that I've witnessed as of the last 18 months or so is decidedly supportive of founders giving up much much more equity to employees, owing to ease of fundraising and low capital startup costs, combining to derisk the once very personally risky endeavor of starting a company. In that sense the hivemind currently loosely follows the words of Sam Altman who is the present overmind of YC, so it is rather apt.
  - xenadu02 11y ago
    Except when a startup founder fails at their job the company is usually shut down or the acquihire leaves them with a small payout. When a startup makes it big, many of the rank and file have large payouts as well. American CEOs get paid obscenely cartoonishly evil amounts of money for running companies into the ground. Even when the company does really well and they get massive stock grants, the rank and file get nothing.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      > the rank and file get nothing. They get less than nothing, they get fired.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade Dug the mines and built the workshops - endless miles of railroad laid Now we stand, outcast and starving, 'mid the wonders we have made But the union makes us strong I don't really mean to express an opinion here, but I was struck by how closely the views (and even the rhetoric) corresponded. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever )
w1ntermute 11y ago
Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time. It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optimize products that already have their flywheels spinning, and got insanely lucky by betting on the right horse back in 1999. 0: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/12/04/marissa-mayer-severance-benefits/76781384/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/12/04/maris... 1: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
- andrewvc 11y ago
  I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argument against the incredibly high CEO pay in contemporary companies, it dramatically underestimates the importance of the work of the rank and file. That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? And of the set of people who could have done better, how many would take an offer to fix yahoo contingent on performance? I think the answer is probably zero. The whole system is rigged, companies feel like they have to pick someone out of a relatively narrow talent pool, and since they are (wrongly) in such demand, they can all command extremely high salaries.
  - jkot 11y ago
    I think the question is not if CEO is good, but if CEO is worth her/his salary.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      Hmm, I would think salary would be one of the smaller considerations when choosing a CEO at that level. It's generally going to be a drop in the budget compared to annual revenue. A negotiation point for sure, but more of a side show to other concerns.

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

by Esau 11y ago

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.

Alupis 11y ago
> It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Well... what do you expect? You're either the job creator or the job filler. If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. > Their fault for not cultivating the right connections. And yes, knowing the right people is part of that game. And yes, sometimes the job creators must destroy some jobs in order to save the rest. What's better... 10% of Yahoo! laid off... or 100%?
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  You're either the job creator or the job filler. Please explain to me which one of those labels best applies to the executive team at Yahoo.
  - Alupis 11y ago
    > Please explain to me which one of those labels best applies to the executive team at Yahoo Clearly the former. In 2012 Yahoo had 11,700 employees, and by 2014 they had 12,500 employees.[1] The 10% layoff is going to be around the difference there (so net zero), but I don't think any reasonable person could argue not cutting jobs in this situation would result in a net gain for Yahoo. It's a company in trouble, and it's a reasonable course of action. [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/260291/number-of-full-time-yahoo-employees/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/260291/number-of-full-tim...
    - yeukhon 11y ago
      Agree, probably just a response to the market, and doesn't actually yield any substantial gain except cutting a 20-30M a year.
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. Haha... I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did. In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them. Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred percent shattered. There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven. Why can't I meet the right people? Because of what I say when given an initial opportunity. And why am I not able to say the right things? Because of the background and context I grew up in. And I'm not talking about appealing to some rich person and asking for an opportunity. I'm talking about meeting peers, or building a team, or any of the things that really matter. One could argue that this situation is mutable, and that it's mostly my fault for what I say. Obviously, yes, it's my fault for the things I say. But when your whole life has been spent being trained in a certain way, by being in the river of society that pushes us all along, the slipstream that you end up in as a child pretty much makes or breaks your ability to learn how to do anything close to what you're suggesting. To play that game you mention. Enjoy being a job creator. It's an opportunity that you should make the most of, in the stead of all the people who can't.
  - Alupis 11y ago
    There are many counter examples to your anecdote. Larry Ellison comes to mind, but there are others (in fact, most of our most successful people come from very broken backgrounds). It's what you do with that drive/anger/passion/frustration/motivation/defiance that counts. It takes a lot of risk, and guts to strike out and create jobs - and more often than not it doesn't work out... but that's all part of the game. It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas.
    - sillysaurus3 11y ago
      Correlation: Look up Sam's comments about his parents. Think of pg's background. Of the successful people from broken backgrounds, they were usually successful by moving on to affluent universities where they recovered. It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas. This is in fact the central argument of my original comment: Merit is mostly communication, and your ability to communicate is defined by the context you grow up in. Not in spite of it. When the world shapes you, reshaping yourself is not the only thing that matters. Your old mistakes can brand you for life.
- jbooth 11y ago
  Is this poe's law?
- notacoward 11y ago
  > You're either the job creator or the job filler. That's a very simplistic view. Doing the work and making the stuff also create jobs. How many right here have jobs because developers - not execs, not investors - created the technology we use? Yes, even at Yahoo. Like Hadoop. The idea that the people who contribute money create jobs and the people who contribute labor (in our case via code) don't is utterly, obviously, dangerously wrong. It's self-serving claptrap from those who have no ability to participate in acts of creation instead of arbitrage. No hacker for which this site is named should accept it.
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    I remember seeing a 1970s video from the Soviet Union about a piece of software some soviet scientists developed that could automatically retouch and restore photographs. Like at Adobe Photoshop CC level. What impact did it have? Zero. Because some technocrat apparatchik decided it wasn't worth it developing and promoting the thing further. One can have insane ability to create things, but it will be ultimately futile, if the things created can't sustainably reach consumers.
    - notacoward 11y ago
      One can have the ability to play middleman, but it will be ultimately futile, if there's nothing to play middleman for. Getting things to consumers first requires that there be a thing, which requires a creative act. Investors and executives can certainly help to facilitate those creative acts, but why should that give them first claim to 99% of the proceeds? It's certainly not a risk premium when those people glide away while the creators get screwed. It's pure rent, in the economics sense.
      - jevgeni 11y ago
        Well, if the creators are so precious and the "middlemen" - not, why just not stop using the "middlemen"?
kzhahou 11y ago
I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. I wonder if HN doesn't see a problem with founders because they all hope to be a billionaire founder themselves one day, but they don't personally relate to hired or big-company CEOs.
- PakG1 11y ago
  I think HN has grown large enough that there appears to be several competing hiveminds. I remember once commenting about people using their free time to contribute to open source and a ton of people sarcastically asked where they could find it. Then on another thread the next day, I saw ton of people extolling the benefits of contributing to open source in your free time. HN's all grown up to have multiple personalities.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  > I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. The HN Hivemind that I've witnessed as of the last 18 months or so is decidedly supportive of founders giving up much much more equity to employees, owing to ease of fundraising and low capital startup costs, combining to derisk the once very personally risky endeavor of starting a company. In that sense the hivemind currently loosely follows the words of Sam Altman who is the present overmind of YC, so it is rather apt.
- xenadu02 11y ago
  Except when a startup founder fails at their job the company is usually shut down or the acquihire leaves them with a small payout. When a startup makes it big, many of the rank and file have large payouts as well. American CEOs get paid obscenely cartoonishly evil amounts of money for running companies into the ground. Even when the company does really well and they get massive stock grants, the rank and file get nothing.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    > the rank and file get nothing. They get less than nothing, they get fired.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade Dug the mines and built the workshops - endless miles of railroad laid Now we stand, outcast and starving, 'mid the wonders we have made But the union makes us strong I don't really mean to express an opinion here, but I was struck by how closely the views (and even the rhetoric) corresponded. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever )

w1ntermute 11y ago

Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time. It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optimize products that already have their flywheels spinning, and got insanely lucky by betting on the right horse back in 1999. 0: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/12/04/marissa-mayer-severance-benefits/76781384/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/12/04/maris... 1: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

andrewvc 11y ago
I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argument against the incredibly high CEO pay in contemporary companies, it dramatically underestimates the importance of the work of the rank and file. That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? And of the set of people who could have done better, how many would take an offer to fix yahoo contingent on performance? I think the answer is probably zero. The whole system is rigged, companies feel like they have to pick someone out of a relatively narrow talent pool, and since they are (wrongly) in such demand, they can all command extremely high salaries.
- jkot 11y ago
  I think the question is not if CEO is good, but if CEO is worth her/his salary.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    Hmm, I would think salary would be one of the smaller considerations when choosing a CEO at that level. It's generally going to be a drop in the budget compared to annual revenue. A negotiation point for sure, but more of a side show to other concerns.