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Anyone surprised by this? I remember my first programming job it was FREQUENT that the execs would fly to other offices ~12+ weeks a year. Of course our office
by bearjaws 2y ago
Anyone surprised by this? I remember my first programming job it was FREQUENT that the execs would fly to other offices ~12+ weeks a year. Of course our office was in Orlando so every exec would also magically have their family flown in as well to go to Disney World.
5 jobs later, its been the same at any company that isn't a startup. Execs have never been in the office, they have "offsite" meetings.
- zooq_ai 2y ago[flagged]
- itake 2y agoThe way I have started looking at it is CEOs/founders won the lottery. They control the keys, but they share a tiny fraction of the gold with the employees. I come to this conclusion, b/c I think its extremely rare that the 'best' person to be the executive on day0 is rarely the 'best' person to be an executive in every stage of a company's lifecycle. but the executives can cling on, b/c they have low accountability (especially when they are the board). Is it easy to win the lottery? No. Once you win the lottery, is life easier? Yes.
- fsckboy 2y agoif it's not equally easy for all people to win, not a lottery.
- kolbe 2y agoChipotle's stock dropped 10% and Starbucks's rose 25% when the CEO switched from one to the other this past week. If this guy is just a meritless lottery winner, then you can make a lot of money betting against the market and the extremely large group of heavily motivated and intelligent investors who think otherwise.
- saagarjha 2y agoAh yes, the "if you're truly right clearly you would be rich using that information to trade" argument. Would you be willing to consider that the market is not always smart or a good measure of how we should value things?
- kolbe 2y agoWould you be willing to consider that some half baked theory about why CEOs are the manifestation of luck is actually just an unhealthy way of coping with failures?
- saagarjha 2y agoConsider? Sure. I see a lot of evidence that points away from it, though.
- swader999 2y agoMore like survivor bias. For every eBay, amazon, Starbucks ceo, there's a multitude of failures that weren't as good or lucky.
- kolbe 2y agoSo, bad CEOs are bad? What a revelation. We're not isolating this analysis to bad ones (who generally don't last very long). We're talking about a blanket, overarching, ill-informed and bitter "analysis" that contends CEOs are meritless lottery winners. Have you ever seen any process of filtering job candidates that doesn't have massive failures? Look no further than sports. There is no profession with more accessible information about candidate qualifications, and we still see significant failures, signing people to hundreds of millions of dollars who never produce any value over a replacement player. Does that mean the process is no better than throwing darts at phone book? No. There are still actual skills that are hard to attain, and are decent predictors of performance. When it comes to CEOs, despite the fact that this process doesn't value YOUR skills very highly doesn't mean it's purely random. It means you've either chosen to ignore this filtering process, you never learned what the process is, or you aren't good enough to stand out within it. But that doesn't mean it's a zero-signal filtration.
- zooq_ai 2y agoThere are plenty of CEOs who came out of nothing, grinded and took risks. They also didn't act entitled, played victim and blamed luck
- cycomanic 2y agoI don't understand your point are you saying that most CEOs are founders who started the company? I am willing to bet that this not even true for startups but it is certainly not true for your average CEO. Also funny thing, typically people consider the "golden area" of US capitalism on which most of current prosperity is built the 50s and 60s, the ratio between exec pay and average employee pay is orders of magnitude different now. Interestingly, the US has lost most of its engineering and manufacturing abilities in the same time. Not sure if that is an indication of the greatest country in the world.
- biglyburrito 2y agoNot surprised in the slightest. Rules for thee, not for me.
- LiquidSky 2y agoA friend of mine is an attorney and during the pandemic as soon as in-office work was allowed again the entire firm was ordered to return immediately to their Manhattan office only to find that the managing partners were still calling in from their homes in Long Island or Connecticut.
- garciasn 2y agoYes? To counter your anecdote, I have never worked for a company (6) where the CEO wasn’t local. My team and I are fully remote but our execs are not and are not permitted to be.
- whatshisface 2y agoThe use of the word "permitted" makes me think about how working for individual investors is a lot more like a normal job than heading a public company.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 2y agoI second this, everywhere I have worked the executives have been local, but I’ve also never worked anywhere with more than 200 employees. I wouldn’t be surprised if execs at big companies need to travel to different offices all the time, and frankly that sounds worse than just staying in one place
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- darth_avocado 2y agoNot only are directors and above immune to the RTO directives in most companies, they are also immune to location specific pay ranges in most companies. And for the few times they do require to go to the office, they can expense the entire trip, including airfare, dinners, hotels and more. The class asymmetry is ridiculous, but unfortunately most workers don’t know this fact. Edit: In case it wasn’t clear, this is not just about CEOs and “executives”. A director level can sometimes be just “manager of managers”. I’m talking about upper middle management here.
- hnthrowaway0315 2y agoNo, they know. They can't do anything about it under the current legal framework, though.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoI don’t see why you should be able to do anything about this legally as an employee. As a shareholder you have more of a claim.
- soulofmischief 2y agoAn ethically aligned company goes to reasonable lengths to allow employees to become shareholders.
- jarsin 2y agoOne company I worked for expanded to an Europe office that consisted of just 1 employee. A coworker tried to get the office address, but could never get a straight answer. When layoffs came around the COO was so out of touch at that point he literally complained about having to fly his family back from Europe.
- sidewndr46 2y agoWait, can you explain this? I don't understand it at all.
- jarsin 2y agoExecutives used a Europe Office, that was really just one employee with no actual physical office, as an excuse to take europe vacations with their families, and expense it to the company. A few executives were over there when they got word that mass layoffs needed to happen and were called back to HQ in the states. The COO complained in the office that these layoffs ruined his families Europe trip. Confirming what we all suspected.