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Great that it takes people months nowadays interviewing to get hired for a mid level role, but apparently you can offer a half dozen people unvested, unintervie
by ulfw 3y ago
Great that it takes people months nowadays interviewing to get hired for a mid level role, but apparently you can offer a half dozen people unvested, uninterviewed CEO roles at a billion dollar company on a whim.
Fun how that goes.
- Racing0461 3y agoIt's a big club, and you ain't in it.
- ulfw 3y agoIndeed. Silicon Valley's big "meritocracy" that is always so lauded.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flappyeagle 3y agoGo start a company and grow it to a billion dollars no one is stopping you
- hfjjbf 3y ago[dead]
- pjerem 3y agoOf course a lot of people are going to stop you. Most, if not all, of the group of people we are talking about were born from rich parents who could afford them to study in the most prestigious universities of America and they were in their prime years when computers expanded everywhere during the 90´s/00’s and also when the economy was booming like never before in the human history. Those people are now in positions of extreme power that never existed before that. In fact, they are all in power to decide if your future billion dollars company will live or die, and if they allow it to live, it will be under their control. And if you somehow manage to fill through the cracks, you’ll ultimately be offered some big money to sell them your company well before you have the opportunity to become one of them.
- pseg134 3y agoGood point! Better sit at home and not even try in that case. Thanks for your unique perspective that life is hard and it doesn’t feel fair.
- pjerem 3y ago> Good point! Better sit at home and not even try in that case. That's not what I said. And not even trying what ? I'm not saying you can't create a succesful company and earn a lot of money. I'm talking about power. The type of power those people have is virtually inaccessible to anyone. Because they have enough money to stop you in your way up. They have a wide range of options between destructing your business, taking control of it, or giving you enough money so that you stop your ascension.
- Racing0461 3y agoWhy do you have to be the billionaire like sam altman? Why can't you + a girl be the upper middle class professionals that create a sam altman (sr sde salary mother + derm md father) working for 30 years should easily give your son a head start like altman's parents gave him.
- lfclub 3y ago[dead]
- tbrownaw 3y agoSupply & demand sure is fun.
- varenc 3y agoThe interview was “found a billion dollar tech company” and they all already passed.
- tessierashpool 3y agoI get why this idea is appealing, but by that metric, Adam Neumann of WeWork also already passed. Occam's Razor. This is impulsive firing, with impulsive hiring on the way.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoElizabeth Holmes also more than qualifies. Her company was once valued at $10 billion. But I hear she's currently unavailable...
- red-iron-pine 3y agoonly currently. give it most of the decade and you've got a candidate
- DoreenMichele 3y agoEquality: When women can be as awful as some men and still get hired like them.
- tessierashpool 3y agothere have already been puff pieces aiming to rehabilitate her. example: “Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes...
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI'm not against her trying to figure out how to make her life work. I followed the story as it unfolded somewhat closer than I typically do. I said relatively little about it because I'm a woman on an overwhelmingly male forum and my point of view seemed wholly alien and unparseable here. I think her gender contributed to the debacle. I'm not saying that makes her innocent, but I think there were extenuating circumstances.
- huytersd 3y agoI mean they interview you because you’re a nobody off the street. Everyone already knows what these CEOs have done and accomplished because they lead very high profile public lives. What sort of imbecile tier whataboutism is this.
- zombiwoof 3y agonot sure any real 90B dollar company is hiring a CEO from a top 3 list in a weekend, making a decision without even an informal interview versus just "offering up the job" even proven NFL coaches are just offered a job
- khazhoux 3y agoThe board created a mess without a plan, and now they’ll make it worse with a rushed hire. Not sure why one would defend them.
- huytersd 3y agoThis board is a shit show. I was responding to the GPs comment which was more general and not just about OpenAI.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoOnly on HN do you see salty comments like this
- khazhoux 3y agoIs he wrong? Hundreds of employees and billions in investment would be entrusted to someone with <3 days of diligence?
- austhrow743 3y agoThey all know each other. The "diligence" has been going on for years.
- khazhoux 3y agoI get that they’ve known each other. But “diligence” usually suggests a more thorough vetting than being CEO buddies. My take: the board already demonstrated they fire badly, and here we’ll see them hire bad as well.
- austhrow743 3y agoThorough and interim seem mutually exclusive to me. The whole point of an interim CEO is to have someone in the seat while you then be thorough. Given that, being CEO buddies seems as diligent as you could possibly be. If Sam did something bad enough to warrant being removed as soon as they learned it, chucking someone you know personally and trust in the position while you then be thorough would seem the least bad course of action. If Sam did not do something bad enough to warrant being removed as soon as they learned it, then firing him without any succession plan in place was a bad move and is "firing badly", but the hiring situation seems to me as exactly the same as in the "Sam did something really bad" line. Claiming both bad hiring and bad firing for the one decision seems like double counting to me, and will lead to circular reasoning. They hired badly ergo we can assume they fired badly, therefore they hired badly.
- wand3r 3y ago
- paxys 3y agoSlight difference in urgency in hiring someone to center align some buttons on a website vs lead a $90 billion company which is in chaos.
- latency-guy2 3y agoI will absolutely hire a few people I have worked with to push out successful multi-million dollar projects over the last few decades over you.
- julianeon 3y agoI think it's worth spelling out the difference. The difference is that, for that mid level role, there are dozens of candidates who could fill it, who all look like good candidates on paper. It takes that long to sort through them all to find the person they like the most. But imagine for a moment that they write a job description, and they can only expect a few people to meet the requirements ever, and you're one of them. Also the job should've been filled yesterday. It's not going to take months to fill it. It'll take a week or less. This was that situation. But normally, those executive searches take months. You know who's a key player in this story, probably the most successful businessperson involved, who only got the CEO job after 5-6 months? Satya Nadella. And he would probably agree with you that this was a terrible way to hire a CEO that reflects poorly on the company.