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Alternate headline: “Man with stressful job takes vacation of reasonable length after difficult decision” Come on now. This is just a vacation. I’m all for hold

Alternate headline: “Man with stressful job takes vacation of reasonable length after difficult decision” Come on now. This is just a vacation. I’m all for holding people and corporations accountable, but this just feels designed to make you angry for the hell of it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thesuitonym 4y ago
Being a CEO is not a stressful job. It's hardly even a job. Edit: Do not tell me being a CEO of a startup is a job, that's a totally different thing.
- boringg 4y ago
  I'm surprised companies even have CEOs their role is redundant - just put chatGPT in charge /S
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  This varies wildly company to company. There's companies where the CEO legitimately is the hardest worker there...because it is theirs and their equity of course. There is absolutely companies where the CEO is basically a visitor on a walking tour and where you are right. Honestly, I would argue from Marc's missteps the last two years or so, Salesforce might be closer to the second.
- up2isomorphism 4y ago
  It is not a hard job but it is a job very hard to get. Is Joe Biden’ s job hard? No. But the chance to get it is almost zero. At least as CEO he has to stay solvent and be responsible to the board, almost he is not spending my money.
boringg 4y ago
The MSM narrative is that executives don't care about people they are robots and don't deserve breaks. They get money and power but shouldn't get time off, ever. edit: I'm also going to throw shade here because businessinsider isn't really media property with any value.
- aliqot 4y ago
  > executives don't care about people they are robots and don't deserve breaks i mean.... the only part i disagree with is the 'dont deserve breaks'. we all read the book, everybody poops.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Thankfully, their extremely cushy salaries, lack of need to take responsibility and work hours that consists of taking a few hours in the company paid sauna allow me to feel absolutely no remorse for saying that the CEOs of Salesforce, Oracle or Google are lazy sacks of shit.
nimbius 4y ago
In the all-hands call the day after layoffs, Benioff compared losing employees to layoffs to mourning people who died. Insider reported that he showed up around 18 minutes late to a company-wide meeting the day after announcing layoffs, and then, as the Times of London reported, he joked, "Did I miss something?" Salesforce is a 100bn USD company. this type of tonedeaf behavior from a key leadership position during a recession and in the midst of layoffs would be expected from a startup --heck Bird fired nearly everyone over a five minute Zoom-- but here its just pathetic. actual leadership is present and accounted for during the worst of times and the only reason youd flee to a remote island away from your "digital life" is because youre concerned you might be up next for termination.
agloe_dreams 4y ago
Meh. I'm all for taking a vacation and all that...But this take mistakes the role of CEO. The CEO's job is to be the public and private image of the company. To the employees, the CEO must rally them together when misaligned. This means praise in times of success, and owning the missteps in time of failure. Why? Because pay and stock options define this as the job. It is why they are worth the pay they get. The internal optics of this is "He laid off a bunch of my closest friends, then ghosted the company for two weeks while sipping champagne." He had no such difficult decision you describe. It is well known that he basically flubbed the whole thing. Marc is obviously destroying his legacy, shareholders are downright angry with him. This was his chance to align the company and hurt with the workers, make promises to cut his own luxuries or such to show that he stands with them. After all, it was his own failures. Instead he chopped 8,000 people and did his best to ignore internal conditions for two weeks. If it was an engineer after a project failed, I totally get the vacation. But let's not pretend that CEOs take fewer vacations than workers here. Everyone deserves vacations and almost every CEO takes far more than most workers are allowed.
paganel 4y ago
> This is just a vacation. I've never had "just" a vacation in French Polynesia, I guess many of us haven't, either.
- mi_lk 4y ago
  Many of us aren't the co-founder and the CEO of a 100B+ company either the timing of the vacation is perhaps inconsiderate, but not sure what points we are making here
  - danaris 4y ago
    The point is that not only is the timing woefully insensitive, but the duration, locale, and purported reason ("digital detox") serve to painfully highlight the inequality between the CEO and the people he just made unemployed. I don't know the specific demographics of the 7k that were laid off from Salesforce, but the chances are fairly good that some portion of those will end up homeless or near to it due to the loss of income before they can land another job. Those chances are highest for those who are already in the worst shape (particularly those with chronic illnesses or some form of disability). But the CEO is "mourning" these people so hard that he has to go on a (guesstimating) five-figure vacation to the tropics...?
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    The point, which seems pretty clear to me, is that if you are going to dramatically disrupt the lives of 7000 people while reporting profits in the tens of billions of dollars, 19% higher than the previous year[0], you are cruelly exploiting the pain of others in pursuit of needless profit. If you then show up late to meetings and make jokes about it before jetting off to an extended vacation most of us will never have the wealth to experience, you further reveal that you have no regard for what you've done to the 7000 people whose careers you've sacrificed to juice your quarterly bonus. This is more than "perhaps inconsiderate," it is pointlessly cruel, a mark of someone completely out of touch with his current and former employees, an indicator of someone who puts profit above literally everything else, which is not okay. 0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/gro...
ubertaco 4y ago
Yeah, just look at all the stress Elon Musk has to put up with all the time as CEO of his various companies, constantly neck-deep in making essential business decisions and definitely not hanging out on social media all day. Life as a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company with a set of fully-autonomous direct reports is _super hard_ you guys
tablespoon 4y ago
> Alternate headline: “Man with stressful job takes vacation of reasonable length after difficult decision” Come on now. This is just a vacation. I’m all for holding people and corporations accountable, but this just feels designed to make you angry for the hell of it. The timing and structure this vacation seems specifically designed to avoid some of the consequences of that decision, which looks selfish. Also, the optics are pretty bad: he just cut off a bunch of people's livelihoods (and likely made the work of the remaining employees more difficult), then immediately went off to enjoy himself in an extremely rich way. A better leader would do something that shows some kind of solidarity, and take the vacation later.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  The thing is, there is always a crisis. So if you operate that way, you never take vacation. Even a successful quarterly report could be met by analyst derision. At that point you behold yourself to the press which is no way to live. Layoffs are business as usual.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > The thing is, there is always a crisis. So if you operate that way, you never take vacation Maybe so, but not all crises are identical. An action that might be fine in one kind of crisis can be gauche in another. > Layoffs are business as usual. Layoffs are different, especially large and prominent ones. Definitely not the same as a "quarterly report ... met by analyst derision."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thesuitonym 4y ago

Being a CEO is not a stressful job. It's hardly even a job. Edit: Do not tell me being a CEO of a startup is a job, that's a totally different thing.

boringg 4y ago
I'm surprised companies even have CEOs their role is redundant - just put chatGPT in charge /S
agloe_dreams 4y ago
This varies wildly company to company. There's companies where the CEO legitimately is the hardest worker there...because it is theirs and their equity of course. There is absolutely companies where the CEO is basically a visitor on a walking tour and where you are right. Honestly, I would argue from Marc's missteps the last two years or so, Salesforce might be closer to the second.
up2isomorphism 4y ago
It is not a hard job but it is a job very hard to get. Is Joe Biden’ s job hard? No. But the chance to get it is almost zero. At least as CEO he has to stay solvent and be responsible to the board, almost he is not spending my money.

boringg 4y ago

The MSM narrative is that executives don't care about people they are robots and don't deserve breaks. They get money and power but shouldn't get time off, ever. edit: I'm also going to throw shade here because businessinsider isn't really media property with any value.

aliqot 4y ago
> executives don't care about people they are robots and don't deserve breaks i mean.... the only part i disagree with is the 'dont deserve breaks'. we all read the book, everybody poops.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
Thankfully, their extremely cushy salaries, lack of need to take responsibility and work hours that consists of taking a few hours in the company paid sauna allow me to feel absolutely no remorse for saying that the CEOs of Salesforce, Oracle or Google are lazy sacks of shit.

nimbius 4y ago

In the all-hands call the day after layoffs, Benioff compared losing employees to layoffs to mourning people who died. Insider reported that he showed up around 18 minutes late to a company-wide meeting the day after announcing layoffs, and then, as the Times of London reported, he joked, "Did I miss something?" Salesforce is a 100bn USD company. this type of tonedeaf behavior from a key leadership position during a recession and in the midst of layoffs would be expected from a startup --heck Bird fired nearly everyone over a five minute Zoom-- but here its just pathetic. actual leadership is present and accounted for during the worst of times and the only reason youd flee to a remote island away from your "digital life" is because youre concerned you might be up next for termination.

agloe_dreams 4y ago

Meh. I'm all for taking a vacation and all that...But this take mistakes the role of CEO. The CEO's job is to be the public and private image of the company. To the employees, the CEO must rally them together when misaligned. This means praise in times of success, and owning the missteps in time of failure. Why? Because pay and stock options define this as the job. It is why they are worth the pay they get. The internal optics of this is "He laid off a bunch of my closest friends, then ghosted the company for two weeks while sipping champagne." He had no such difficult decision you describe. It is well known that he basically flubbed the whole thing. Marc is obviously destroying his legacy, shareholders are downright angry with him. This was his chance to align the company and hurt with the workers, make promises to cut his own luxuries or such to show that he stands with them. After all, it was his own failures. Instead he chopped 8,000 people and did his best to ignore internal conditions for two weeks. If it was an engineer after a project failed, I totally get the vacation. But let's not pretend that CEOs take fewer vacations than workers here. Everyone deserves vacations and almost every CEO takes far more than most workers are allowed.

paganel 4y ago

> This is just a vacation. I've never had "just" a vacation in French Polynesia, I guess many of us haven't, either.

mi_lk 4y ago
Many of us aren't the co-founder and the CEO of a 100B+ company either the timing of the vacation is perhaps inconsiderate, but not sure what points we are making here
- danaris 4y ago
  The point is that not only is the timing woefully insensitive, but the duration, locale, and purported reason ("digital detox") serve to painfully highlight the inequality between the CEO and the people he just made unemployed. I don't know the specific demographics of the 7k that were laid off from Salesforce, but the chances are fairly good that some portion of those will end up homeless or near to it due to the loss of income before they can land another job. Those chances are highest for those who are already in the worst shape (particularly those with chronic illnesses or some form of disability). But the CEO is "mourning" these people so hard that he has to go on a (guesstimating) five-figure vacation to the tropics...?
- pwinnski 4y ago
  The point, which seems pretty clear to me, is that if you are going to dramatically disrupt the lives of 7000 people while reporting profits in the tens of billions of dollars, 19% higher than the previous year[0], you are cruelly exploiting the pain of others in pursuit of needless profit. If you then show up late to meetings and make jokes about it before jetting off to an extended vacation most of us will never have the wealth to experience, you further reveal that you have no regard for what you've done to the 7000 people whose careers you've sacrificed to juice your quarterly bonus. This is more than "perhaps inconsiderate," it is pointlessly cruel, a mark of someone completely out of touch with his current and former employees, an indicator of someone who puts profit above literally everything else, which is not okay. 0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/gro...

ubertaco 4y ago

Yeah, just look at all the stress Elon Musk has to put up with all the time as CEO of his various companies, constantly neck-deep in making essential business decisions and definitely not hanging out on social media all day. Life as a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company with a set of fully-autonomous direct reports is _super hard_ you guys

tablespoon 4y ago

> Alternate headline: “Man with stressful job takes vacation of reasonable length after difficult decision” Come on now. This is just a vacation. I’m all for holding people and corporations accountable, but this just feels designed to make you angry for the hell of it. The timing and structure this vacation seems specifically designed to avoid some of the consequences of that decision, which looks selfish. Also, the optics are pretty bad: he just cut off a bunch of people's livelihoods (and likely made the work of the remaining employees more difficult), then immediately went off to enjoy himself in an extremely rich way. A better leader would do something that shows some kind of solidarity, and take the vacation later.

theGnuMe 4y ago
The thing is, there is always a crisis. So if you operate that way, you never take vacation. Even a successful quarterly report could be met by analyst derision. At that point you behold yourself to the press which is no way to live. Layoffs are business as usual.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > The thing is, there is always a crisis. So if you operate that way, you never take vacation Maybe so, but not all crises are identical. An action that might be fine in one kind of crisis can be gauche in another. > Layoffs are business as usual. Layoffs are different, especially large and prominent ones. Definitely not the same as a "quarterly report ... met by analyst derision."