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There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't alwa

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

willio58 4mo ago
CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
- Henchman21 4mo ago
  You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!
  - nemomarx 4mo ago
    The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
  - zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
    Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions?
    - nathan_compton 4mo ago
      Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.
    - shimman 4mo ago
      No, look at functioning democracies. They don't need authoritarian rulers, only those that want to be authoritarians argue elsewise.
      - matwood 4mo ago
        > They don't need authoritarian rulers Yet they seem still inclined to elect them.
        Henchman21 4mo ago
        Given the zeitgeist is controlled by a handful of Capitalists who also happen to be sociopaths intent on bringing back feudalism and chattel slavery... No. "The People" are so propagandized that we simply cannot know what The People would do unless we turn off the great distraction machine constantly inundating us all with propaganda.
  - nickpinkston 4mo ago
    I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc. However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops. There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using. I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
    - marcosdumay 4mo ago
      If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies. If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
    - mplanchard 4mo ago
      This seems hard to tease out from the fact that a) the majority of companies do not survive, b) the large, large majority of companies that do survive do not wind up being large or innovative, and c) there are far fewer coops than regular companies. If you assume equal chance of success between them, you’d still see vanishingly small numbers of large, innovative coops, because a small percentage of a small number is small.
    - dartharva 4mo ago
      Coops can definitely succeed and even dominate at large scales with some minimum government protections. The largest dairy producer in the world is a coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
  - oytis 4mo ago
    In software I can imagine a worker-owned consultancy, but not a product company. It would imply staying in one place working on one product for your whole life, which doesn't sound inspiring
    - dragonwriter 4mo ago
      A company need not be a single product, and working in a worker-owned cooperative need not be a lifetime commitment to a single firm (though cooperatives ideally will have less turnover than firms owned by capital separated from labor.)
    - shimman 4mo ago
      No, it implies that you give workers the means to dictate the direction of the company. That is what workplace democracy does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers. If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them). Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer. With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
      - jimbokun 4mo ago
        Where’s your real world evidence of all these benefits of coops? Because I would love for it to be true.
        shimman 4mo ago
        Well workplace democracy has only been tried in a few corporations. If you want an interesting business case look into Semco Partners in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%80%932004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8... There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it. One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen. It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it. The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible.
  - AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
    Maybe, but not necessarily for this reason. Even in a worker-owned coop, someone sets the overall direction. And how is that person going to be selected? It's still going to be largely politics.
    - jimbokun 4mo ago
      Politics among the workers vs politics among the shareholders.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    What are the concrete benefits? Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?
    - munk-a 4mo ago
      Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share. I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness.
      - jimbokun 4mo ago
        Any data to support those claims?
        fuzzfactor 4mo ago
        Not usually the kind of data that the greediest capitalists would appreciate. There are some case studies here, but it's only one professor in a largely non-capitalist approach overall: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richard_wolff_videos_on_worker_coops/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richar...
        jimbokun 4mo ago
        Thanks for the link, but Reddit is blocking it as if it’s adult content or something. But if I use the app, it will suddenly be OK. Very strange.
    - dartharva 4mo ago
      Generally, yes. Also the gap between the employee and executive class is a lot smaller instead of unnaturally inflated like it is in most private equity companies.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has.
  - bitwize 4mo ago
    Kissing ass: $1 Knowing which ass(es) to kiss when: $9,999,999 And that's how CEOs justify their exorbitant compensation
  - claysmithr 4mo ago
    not a skill i'm interested in, lol..
  - dartharva 4mo ago
    I wonder if business schools could ever start actually teaching this skill. So far they just largely operate as scams, held up purely by prestige and network value
    - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      The "network value" of a business school could be reinterpreted as "can the business school introduce you to some of the right people's asses to kiss"
- jandrewrogers 4mo ago
  I’ve worked with CEOs in multiple large companies. I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. Nonetheless, someone needs to do that job and the intersection of difficulty and masochism is beyond what most people can do or endure. Many people try and fail. Their job, at the end of the day, is to eat an endless stream of shit sandwiches with a smile and a plan. Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time. The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.
  - piekvorst 4mo ago
    Thank you for busting the myth of worker self-management.
  - cm11 4mo ago
    This feels too soft. Each of these things has truth in it, but isn't some of this self-created? Where are these shit sandwiches coming from? A lot of these problems are the result of overpromising, breaking rules and skirting regulations, underestimating the difficulty of things they have no expertise with, asking people to solve problems with no resources, hiring more chefs rather than more cooks and dishwashers, of mismatches between good profitable product and exec exit. The idea that it makes sense for the CEO's (or really any leader's) core competency to be absorbing drama and pain is something we should think more about. Sometimes you hear that a good manager blocks and shields for their team, you have to wonder why the team always needs so much protection from their own company and processes.
    - RugnirViking 4mo ago
      in a team of 10, you can know everyone's current work, their thoughts on it, etc. in a team of 100, you can maybe know everyone's name, if you're lucky. you probably have an idea of what their group is working on. in a team of 1000, you will not know most of the people who come to you with problems. A room of pale faces, all very emotional about one thing or another. they've had a long hard battle just to speak to you, and care very much about what you do, but you've literally never met them. Of course, you have subordinates, and in turn they have theirs. But how can you accurately diagnose problems in that chain? they are only telling you what you want to hear, problems may be their fault, they may but their subordinates fault, it may be a business reality, you barely have any way to know. All you know is you have another meeting at 3, and then at 4, and then at 5, and all of them will be full of people you don't know who potentially emotionally care very much about every word you say, for good and for bad. I don't hold much empathy for higher-ups, for other reasons. But its clear to me man was not meant for this. Large orgs are almost destined to be dysfunctional, as they move beyond "you have to study hard and make a real effort to remember everyone" to "no matter how much you try it is literally impossible to remember everyone, more people are being hired and fired each day than you can keep up with"
- zerobees 4mo ago
  > It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t ... I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors and all the VPs and SVPs, if something goes wrong. For most companies, especially large companies, it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering, business development, etc. That, at least in principle, can be handled by other parts of the hierarchy.
  - creativeSlumber 4mo ago
    > it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering If you are the CEO of a company, you should have expertise in whatever your company does, and If your company is primarily a software company, then you should have expertise in software engineering. You cannot effectively manage something that you don't understand.
- matwood 4mo ago
  > CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships. Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills of a CEO.
  - everdrive 4mo ago
    More engineers understand this than you may think. Many just dislike it. It doesn't fit with their disposition (for better or for worse) -- but they are not confused about the facts.
    - satvikpendem 4mo ago
      They said accept, not understand.
  - doom2 4mo ago
    > Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires Except, it seems, when it comes to the current AI zeitgeist. Then it feels a lot more like CEOs are taking a "my way or the highway" approach. Maybe they can compromise on just how necessary it is for all employees to use AI?
- dandanua 4mo ago
  So, we live in the economy where everything is done by labour that receive minimal acceptable wages, while all the profits are collected by the ruling class who do nothing except constantly kissing each other asses.
- eks391 4mo ago
  I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people: Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck. Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either. I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.
dominotw 4mo ago
what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo.
- orphea 4mo ago
  What about him? have to do politics -> bad ceo doesn't mean NOT(have to do politics) -> NOT(bad ceo)
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.
  - not_kurt_godel 4mo ago
    Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
      From your tone, it sounds like you may just be intending to warn me that it's cringe not to agree with any criticism of Zuckerberg? If that's so, I have to respectfully disagree; I think this is a bad attitude that leads towards being poorly informed about the world. If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social media, and I would love to hear your basis for claiming this. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2) is that genuine compulsive use of social media is quite rare, and most people who describe themselves as "addicted" are just regular users who enjoy it but kinda feel like it's a waste of time.
dijit 4mo ago
> it's quite difficult to become a CEO on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have. What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them. I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.
- Hoasi 4mo ago
  To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.
  - manoDev 4mo ago
    > To be fair, raising money takes connections, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. FTFY
    - noisy_boy 4mo ago
      >> To be fair, building connections takes skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. FTFY
- jongjong 4mo ago
  Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions. This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else. Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills. I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.
59nadir 4mo ago
It's not difficult at all to become one, and the work involved in being a CEO is not particularly difficult in comparison to senior technical work at all. The only thing that is harder about being a CEO is the responsibility. I'm sure being the CEO of Microsoft or whatever is plenty difficult and demanding in many ways, but most CEOs are not that, and speaking just from experience most CEOs and CTOs are clueless morons. With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt. I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting and demanding problem, and their decisions are going to be more important.
- everdrive 4mo ago
  It's difficult in the sense that it's rare and much of it is out of your hands. That's a very different kind of difficulty than honing a technical skill. I'm happy to call it something other than difficult, but most of those engineers would not succeed in becoming CEOs -- whether or not they would actually do a good job at it.
  - 59nadir 4mo ago
    Sure, I don't disagree that it's not exactly a position that you move into just like that, so I get your point.
firefax 4mo ago
What skills? I've met several. Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.
- cm11 4mo ago
  I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror. Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.
  - firefax 4mo ago
    >I think it's private schools in general. I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law) >Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors. That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously. I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else. Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many "startups" when we're really striving for small businesses. But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that. Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-)
elzbardico 4mo ago
Years of ZIRP, QE, bailouts and stymulus money muddled the waters a lot. Add to this the Old Boys (and Girls now) Networks, a culture that values getting money fast as the ultimate value, the prevalence of politics and you end up getting a boatload of bad CEOs. There was a time when I used to recommend "Out of the Crisis", a book from Demming, to business leaders. Problem is, "Out of the crisis" still assumes as a premise that companies compete on the quality of their products, that making money comes from actually making and selling stuff. That leaders are not the anti-intelectual morons that believe that absolutely any thing can be explained with a 15 minutes deck, that math and statistics are passtimes for weird geeks that don't add "business value" and because of that, is a book that could have steered us toward a better world in the 80s, but now it is completely useless, because its recipes can't handle the level of degradation things goto into.
ChiperSoft 4mo ago
> it's quite difficult to become a CEO It literally just requires filing an LLC or Corporation. There are several SaaS companies that will do it for you.

willio58 4mo ago

CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.

Henchman21 4mo ago
You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!
- nemomarx 4mo ago
  The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
- zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
  Don’t you still need someone to make high level decisions?
  - nathan_compton 4mo ago
    Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    No, look at functioning democracies. They don't need authoritarian rulers, only those that want to be authoritarians argue elsewise.
    - matwood 4mo ago
      > They don't need authoritarian rulers Yet they seem still inclined to elect them.
      - Henchman21 4mo ago
        Given the zeitgeist is controlled by a handful of Capitalists who also happen to be sociopaths intent on bringing back feudalism and chattel slavery... No. "The People" are so propagandized that we simply cannot know what The People would do unless we turn off the great distraction machine constantly inundating us all with propaganda.
- nickpinkston 4mo ago
  I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc. However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops. There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using. I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies. If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - mplanchard 4mo ago
    This seems hard to tease out from the fact that a) the majority of companies do not survive, b) the large, large majority of companies that do survive do not wind up being large or innovative, and c) there are far fewer coops than regular companies. If you assume equal chance of success between them, you’d still see vanishingly small numbers of large, innovative coops, because a small percentage of a small number is small.
  - dartharva 4mo ago
    Coops can definitely succeed and even dominate at large scales with some minimum government protections. The largest dairy producer in the world is a coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
- oytis 4mo ago
  In software I can imagine a worker-owned consultancy, but not a product company. It would imply staying in one place working on one product for your whole life, which doesn't sound inspiring
  - dragonwriter 4mo ago
    A company need not be a single product, and working in a worker-owned cooperative need not be a lifetime commitment to a single firm (though cooperatives ideally will have less turnover than firms owned by capital separated from labor.)
  - shimman 4mo ago
    No, it implies that you give workers the means to dictate the direction of the company. That is what workplace democracy does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers. If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them). Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer. With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
    - jimbokun 4mo ago
      Where’s your real world evidence of all these benefits of coops? Because I would love for it to be true.
      - shimman 4mo ago
        Well workplace democracy has only been tried in a few corporations. If you want an interesting business case look into Semco Partners in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%80%932004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8... There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it. One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen. It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it. The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  Maybe, but not necessarily for this reason. Even in a worker-owned coop, someone sets the overall direction. And how is that person going to be selected? It's still going to be largely politics.
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    Politics among the workers vs politics among the shareholders.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  What are the concrete benefits? Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?
  - munk-a 4mo ago
    Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share. I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness.
    - jimbokun 4mo ago
      Any data to support those claims?
      - fuzzfactor 4mo ago
        Not usually the kind of data that the greediest capitalists would appreciate. There are some case studies here, but it's only one professor in a largely non-capitalist approach overall: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richard_wolff_videos_on_worker_coops/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooperative/comments/1bm5s5s/richar...
        jimbokun 4mo ago
        Thanks for the link, but Reddit is blocking it as if it’s adult content or something. But if I use the app, it will suddenly be OK. Very strange.
  - dartharva 4mo ago
    Generally, yes. Also the gap between the employee and executive class is a lot smaller instead of unnaturally inflated like it is in most private equity companies.
jimbokun 4mo ago
Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has.
- bitwize 4mo ago
  Kissing ass: $1 Knowing which ass(es) to kiss when: $9,999,999 And that's how CEOs justify their exorbitant compensation
- claysmithr 4mo ago
  not a skill i'm interested in, lol..
- dartharva 4mo ago
  I wonder if business schools could ever start actually teaching this skill. So far they just largely operate as scams, held up purely by prestige and network value
  - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    The "network value" of a business school could be reinterpreted as "can the business school introduce you to some of the right people's asses to kiss"
jandrewrogers 4mo ago
I’ve worked with CEOs in multiple large companies. I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. Nonetheless, someone needs to do that job and the intersection of difficulty and masochism is beyond what most people can do or endure. Many people try and fail. Their job, at the end of the day, is to eat an endless stream of shit sandwiches with a smile and a plan. Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time. The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.
- piekvorst 4mo ago
  Thank you for busting the myth of worker self-management.
- cm11 4mo ago
  This feels too soft. Each of these things has truth in it, but isn't some of this self-created? Where are these shit sandwiches coming from? A lot of these problems are the result of overpromising, breaking rules and skirting regulations, underestimating the difficulty of things they have no expertise with, asking people to solve problems with no resources, hiring more chefs rather than more cooks and dishwashers, of mismatches between good profitable product and exec exit. The idea that it makes sense for the CEO's (or really any leader's) core competency to be absorbing drama and pain is something we should think more about. Sometimes you hear that a good manager blocks and shields for their team, you have to wonder why the team always needs so much protection from their own company and processes.
  - RugnirViking 4mo ago
    in a team of 10, you can know everyone's current work, their thoughts on it, etc. in a team of 100, you can maybe know everyone's name, if you're lucky. you probably have an idea of what their group is working on. in a team of 1000, you will not know most of the people who come to you with problems. A room of pale faces, all very emotional about one thing or another. they've had a long hard battle just to speak to you, and care very much about what you do, but you've literally never met them. Of course, you have subordinates, and in turn they have theirs. But how can you accurately diagnose problems in that chain? they are only telling you what you want to hear, problems may be their fault, they may but their subordinates fault, it may be a business reality, you barely have any way to know. All you know is you have another meeting at 3, and then at 4, and then at 5, and all of them will be full of people you don't know who potentially emotionally care very much about every word you say, for good and for bad. I don't hold much empathy for higher-ups, for other reasons. But its clear to me man was not meant for this. Large orgs are almost destined to be dysfunctional, as they move beyond "you have to study hard and make a real effort to remember everyone" to "no matter how much you try it is literally impossible to remember everyone, more people are being hired and fired each day than you can keep up with"
zerobees 4mo ago
> It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t ... I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors and all the VPs and SVPs, if something goes wrong. For most companies, especially large companies, it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering, business development, etc. That, at least in principle, can be handled by other parts of the hierarchy.
- creativeSlumber 4mo ago
  > it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering If you are the CEO of a company, you should have expertise in whatever your company does, and If your company is primarily a software company, then you should have expertise in software engineering. You cannot effectively manage something that you don't understand.
matwood 4mo ago
> CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships. Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills of a CEO.
- everdrive 4mo ago
  More engineers understand this than you may think. Many just dislike it. It doesn't fit with their disposition (for better or for worse) -- but they are not confused about the facts.
  - satvikpendem 4mo ago
    They said accept, not understand.
- doom2 4mo ago
  > Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires Except, it seems, when it comes to the current AI zeitgeist. Then it feels a lot more like CEOs are taking a "my way or the highway" approach. Maybe they can compromise on just how necessary it is for all employees to use AI?
dandanua 4mo ago
So, we live in the economy where everything is done by labour that receive minimal acceptable wages, while all the profits are collected by the ruling class who do nothing except constantly kissing each other asses.
eks391 4mo ago
I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people: Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck. Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either. I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.

dominotw 4mo ago

what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo.

orphea 4mo ago
What about him? have to do politics -> bad ceo doesn't mean NOT(have to do politics) -> NOT(bad ceo)
SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.
- not_kurt_godel 4mo ago
  Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    From your tone, it sounds like you may just be intending to warn me that it's cringe not to agree with any criticism of Zuckerberg? If that's so, I have to respectfully disagree; I think this is a bad attitude that leads towards being poorly informed about the world. If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social media, and I would love to hear your basis for claiming this. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2) is that genuine compulsive use of social media is quite rare, and most people who describe themselves as "addicted" are just regular users who enjoy it but kinda feel like it's a waste of time.

dijit 4mo ago

> it's quite difficult to become a CEO on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have. What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them. I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.

Hoasi 4mo ago
To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.
- manoDev 4mo ago
  > To be fair, raising money takes connections, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. FTFY
  - noisy_boy 4mo ago
    >> To be fair, building connections takes skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist. FTFY
jongjong 4mo ago
Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions. This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else. Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills. I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.

59nadir 4mo ago

It's not difficult at all to become one, and the work involved in being a CEO is not particularly difficult in comparison to senior technical work at all. The only thing that is harder about being a CEO is the responsibility. I'm sure being the CEO of Microsoft or whatever is plenty difficult and demanding in many ways, but most CEOs are not that, and speaking just from experience most CEOs and CTOs are clueless morons. With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt. I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting and demanding problem, and their decisions are going to be more important.

everdrive 4mo ago
It's difficult in the sense that it's rare and much of it is out of your hands. That's a very different kind of difficulty than honing a technical skill. I'm happy to call it something other than difficult, but most of those engineers would not succeed in becoming CEOs -- whether or not they would actually do a good job at it.
- 59nadir 4mo ago
  Sure, I don't disagree that it's not exactly a position that you move into just like that, so I get your point.

firefax 4mo ago

What skills? I've met several. Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.

cm11 4mo ago
I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror. Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.
- firefax 4mo ago
  >I think it's private schools in general. I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law) >Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors. That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously. I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else. Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many "startups" when we're really striving for small businesses. But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that. Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-)

elzbardico 4mo ago

Years of ZIRP, QE, bailouts and stymulus money muddled the waters a lot. Add to this the Old Boys (and Girls now) Networks, a culture that values getting money fast as the ultimate value, the prevalence of politics and you end up getting a boatload of bad CEOs. There was a time when I used to recommend "Out of the Crisis", a book from Demming, to business leaders. Problem is, "Out of the crisis" still assumes as a premise that companies compete on the quality of their products, that making money comes from actually making and selling stuff. That leaders are not the anti-intelectual morons that believe that absolutely any thing can be explained with a 15 minutes deck, that math and statistics are passtimes for weird geeks that don't add "business value" and because of that, is a book that could have steered us toward a better world in the 80s, but now it is completely useless, because its recipes can't handle the level of degradation things goto into.

ChiperSoft 4mo ago

> it's quite difficult to become a CEO It literally just requires filing an LLC or Corporation. There are several SaaS companies that will do it for you.