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yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget.

yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget. She had student loans and $300 in her bank account when she started her company. Her dad was a carpenter in Brooklyn and her mom a school teacher. She gave up her personal paycheck for 2 months to keep from laying off her best employees when she was in between funding rounds. An evaluation is way different than an individuals salary. Maybe a primer on how funding works will help, not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries, most of them gave up everything and risked everything and some dropped out of college to pursue something they wanted to do. yes there are a bunch of pompous CEOs out there and I deal with them too as a women working in a tech male dominated environment. Believe, I'm not any more stoked about this than you are and it is certainly damaging to the idea that other personalities could contribute positively in the same realm of influence and level of decision making. I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country. I know 3 CEOs, two of them their companies are evaluated at 10million, and one at over 100million, and they both are salaried and the higher paid one rents an apartment, and hise wife took his house, sued him for all his money, takes her boyfriends on vacations with his salaries while he works 20+ hour days and rearranges all of his work travel so he can spend 3 days with his daughters no matter who it is that wants to meet him, he doesnt sacrifice time with his daughters. He hasnt had a vacation in 5 years because he works so much and buying a house isn't an option for him right now. He still has to go before boards of investors to ask for a raise and the market in tech is super competitive, even with the evaluation it could all go under and the pressure is high. From what I see being good friends with these people they are not spending their friday nights at lavish parties, they are sleeping or working late or every now and then binge drinking the stress away, which is not a life i envy to be honest, but I don't consider them sociopaths. I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground with lavish parties and that there is no relationship between the standards and engineering ideas they founded and the companies and the culture they set for all the rank and file engineers are all unfounded. I absolutely believe CEOs who are non sociopathic females who dont bring bikini models to launch parties might actually result in a more culturally inviting environment for female engineers, though I can't really tell form the data is that is the root cause of why women are lacking so I don't know if that would solve it. I do know that Sheryl Sandberg wrote a pretty great book about women in business called Lean In, and it is positive and focuses on what women can do to improve themselves working in business and tech instead of waiting for men to fix all the problems, and overall it is is a very positive attitude about taking ownership of your own destiny instead of waiting for a man to give it to you and I think if you read the book the word "sociopath" would not exactly be the term that comes to your mind in regards to her, os Marissa Meyer for that matter if youve ever heard her speak or interact with people or teach on her operable business standards and principles... I'm not really offended I guess. Youre definitely not even close to the top of the list of people who have said remarkably offensive things to me, I just think youre wrong. I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault. Thats what modern media has done to us. We just bully humiliate make assumptions and criticise everyone in leadership positions. I don't think what the trending instagram hashtag is or CNN headline is necessarily an accurate representation of these hardworking brilliant people, but thats just my opinion. You are obviously welcome to your own. I'm not saying we should pity CEOs, I'm just saying as a whole in society we quickly jump to blame people, and female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure.

Arizhel 10y ago
>yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget. Ah, so you're doing the silly thing called "equivocation". I never said all business owners were horrible people; it should be pretty obvious that I'm railing against mega-millionaire/billionaire CEOs of large and highly valued companies. It's just like complaining about politicians; most of the ones in Washington can be assumed to be evil sociopaths, with a few notable exceptions, but that doesn't mean that every local mayor or city councilman across the nation is a bad person (quite likely the opposite). Power corrupts absolutely, and the more power people have, generally the worse those people are. I've known plenty of small-business owners who were very decent people; I'm not complaining about them at all. These people are nothing like Carly Fiorina or Travis Kalanick. >not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries I'm quite aware of this. A $1M company is not even remotely a big company. One engineer can easily cost $150-250k in fully-loaded costs, more in SV. So of course a CEO isn't going to be ultra-rich here, in fact such a company is likely to not even have a "CEO", but rather simply an "owner". It's the companies valued in tens of billions of dollars and up where you have the horrible CEOs with $200M golden parachutes. This is elementary economics. Giant companies have far higher revenues and profits which their executives can skim. >I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country. I apologize that I over-generalized and didn't cite a valuation or something, but I thought it was pretty obvious that I'm not complaining about business owners across the board, just the richest, most powerful ones. They're the ones I see with the worst behavior. Of course, with their greater size comes greater visibility, but you'd think that as a class maybe they'd take this into account and act better, but apparently not. >I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground I think at the upper end, and in American companies in particular, this is very often the case. No, I don't believe it to necessarily be the case for some person with a little $1M company with a handful of employees; that's a totally different situation. Now there are some real jerks even at that level, but there's jerks everywhere, but at least the small company execs/owners can't hurt that many people with their actions the way someone like Carly can with massive layoffs and totally ruining the culture of a formerly-great company (ask any old-time HP engineer what they think of her), or worse getting involved in politics or influencing politicians to pass bad laws and policies which favor his billionaire buddies and screw the lower classes. >I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault. CEOs (again, the very rich ones, not some small businessperson), combined with their politician cronies, are at the top of our socioeconomic hierarchy. They basically run our society, they write the laws, the control the enforcers, and they have all the power, and benefit the most from their positions in society. So yes, it really IS all their fault. In any hierarchal organization, the failure of the organization is always the fault of the leaders and those who control all the power. >and criticise everyone in leadership positions. Why shouldn't we? Again, they have all the power. The people at the bottom have nearly none. As for why women are lacking in this profession, that's another discussion from our little argument here but personally I think it comes down to culture: American culture does not assign much prestige to STEM workers (like it does for doctors and lawyers and executives), parents and society steer young girls away from it ("math is hard!"), and recently it's gotten a rotten reputation for poor treatment of women (thank CEO Kalanick and his cronies for part of this, plus plenty of other tech companies). Smart young women in college have a lot of options available to them these days, such as in medicine, so perhaps they're steering clear. Has anyone tried interviewing a bunch of college women who are in other "hard" majors/career tracks, and asking them if they ever considered STEM/tech and why they didn't go that route, and instead chose medicine/law/finance/etc.? I've worked with a fair number of female engineers, and one thing I'll point out is that in my experience, most of them were not white American women, they were Asians of some sort (some East Asian, some Indian/Bangladesh/Pakistani). So why is it that those Asian cultures seem to have more women interested in these jobs than the supposedly "more liberal" American and European cultures? I'm not a sociologist, but I think it's definitely a cultural problem, and that's not something you're going to fix by encouraging girls to major in CS; by that age, you're already too late. >female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure. Unfortunately I'm sure that's true, but it's not just female execs, it's women everywhere. You just see it a lot with CEOs because they're high-profile. There's a lot of shitty men out there.

Arizhel 10y ago

>yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget. Ah, so you're doing the silly thing called "equivocation". I never said all business owners were horrible people; it should be pretty obvious that I'm railing against mega-millionaire/billionaire CEOs of large and highly valued companies. It's just like complaining about politicians; most of the ones in Washington can be assumed to be evil sociopaths, with a few notable exceptions, but that doesn't mean that every local mayor or city councilman across the nation is a bad person (quite likely the opposite). Power corrupts absolutely, and the more power people have, generally the worse those people are. I've known plenty of small-business owners who were very decent people; I'm not complaining about them at all. These people are nothing like Carly Fiorina or Travis Kalanick. >not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries I'm quite aware of this. A $1M company is not even remotely a big company. One engineer can easily cost $150-250k in fully-loaded costs, more in SV. So of course a CEO isn't going to be ultra-rich here, in fact such a company is likely to not even have a "CEO", but rather simply an "owner". It's the companies valued in tens of billions of dollars and up where you have the horrible CEOs with $200M golden parachutes. This is elementary economics. Giant companies have far higher revenues and profits which their executives can skim. >I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country. I apologize that I over-generalized and didn't cite a valuation or something, but I thought it was pretty obvious that I'm not complaining about business owners across the board, just the richest, most powerful ones. They're the ones I see with the worst behavior. Of course, with their greater size comes greater visibility, but you'd think that as a class maybe they'd take this into account and act better, but apparently not. >I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground I think at the upper end, and in American companies in particular, this is very often the case. No, I don't believe it to necessarily be the case for some person with a little $1M company with a handful of employees; that's a totally different situation. Now there are some real jerks even at that level, but there's jerks everywhere, but at least the small company execs/owners can't hurt that many people with their actions the way someone like Carly can with massive layoffs and totally ruining the culture of a formerly-great company (ask any old-time HP engineer what they think of her), or worse getting involved in politics or influencing politicians to pass bad laws and policies which favor his billionaire buddies and screw the lower classes. >I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault. CEOs (again, the very rich ones, not some small businessperson), combined with their politician cronies, are at the top of our socioeconomic hierarchy. They basically run our society, they write the laws, the control the enforcers, and they have all the power, and benefit the most from their positions in society. So yes, it really IS all their fault. In any hierarchal organization, the failure of the organization is always the fault of the leaders and those who control all the power. >and criticise everyone in leadership positions. Why shouldn't we? Again, they have all the power. The people at the bottom have nearly none. As for why women are lacking in this profession, that's another discussion from our little argument here but personally I think it comes down to culture: American culture does not assign much prestige to STEM workers (like it does for doctors and lawyers and executives), parents and society steer young girls away from it ("math is hard!"), and recently it's gotten a rotten reputation for poor treatment of women (thank CEO Kalanick and his cronies for part of this, plus plenty of other tech companies). Smart young women in college have a lot of options available to them these days, such as in medicine, so perhaps they're steering clear. Has anyone tried interviewing a bunch of college women who are in other "hard" majors/career tracks, and asking them if they ever considered STEM/tech and why they didn't go that route, and instead chose medicine/law/finance/etc.? I've worked with a fair number of female engineers, and one thing I'll point out is that in my experience, most of them were not white American women, they were Asians of some sort (some East Asian, some Indian/Bangladesh/Pakistani). So why is it that those Asian cultures seem to have more women interested in these jobs than the supposedly "more liberal" American and European cultures? I'm not a sociologist, but I think it's definitely a cultural problem, and that's not something you're going to fix by encouraging girls to major in CS; by that age, you're already too late. >female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure. Unfortunately I'm sure that's true, but it's not just female execs, it's women everywhere. You just see it a lot with CEOs because they're high-profile. There's a lot of shitty men out there.