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OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
- jdw64 4mo agoSometimes I wish AI could do my economic activities for me. There's a conspiracy theory that says if you get vaccinated, your body gets taken over by a millionaire. I actually like that conspiracy theory. Sometimes I wish someone would control me. Having a self and consciousness is just too painful.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoYeah, gotta go to work and earn a dime to have something to eat, right? It would be great if someone paid for your living while you could just "enjoy life", right? Maybe those suckers who actually enjoy doing stuff and get paid in return.
- jdw64 4mo agoBut I do think you can't enjoy life if you don't work. Pain is the seasoning of life. Of course, my life is full of seasoning and nothing else. Both pain and pleasure are necessary. It's just that there's only pain right now, which is the problem. If AI could just handle the economic activities for me so I could have a little bit of 'pleasure,' that would be great. I just want to do the programming I actually enjoy
- throw1234567891 4mo agoAs in, you just want to go back to your comfort zone and not face the realities of life.
- jdw64 4mo agoI don't want to have a staring contest with reality.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoThe best is to get on top of it.
- inanutshellus 4mo agoOof. Pain may well be the "seasoning of life" but work is not pain. Work is the thing that helps one lift society up. We're all connected beings and one's occupation is how we each contribute to that society. The idea that it's something we suffer through in order to eat is a crummy reversal of the idea of having purpose. It doesn't matter if one is selling toilets or scrubbing them, each of us is still keeping civilization in motion; giving it life. Don't enjoy your occupation? Go back to school. Can't afford school? Hunt down people you respect and figure out how to work with or for them.
- jdw64 4mo agoOf course. Apart from tight deadlines and the damages I'd have to pay if I fail, the work itself is enjoyable
- blackqueeriroh 4mo ago“Work” is not the same as “job that your ability to live is dependent on.” I can do a lot of work and contribute to society without having a job. In fact, that’s how I think it should be for everyone. No jobs. Universal income. People doing things they love.
- jdw64 4mo agoHmm, I've also worked with professors (from top Korean universities). them hiring me and me getting a degree from them are different things. Well, I don't believe that just because you work hard, you'll always succeed. Most people just see me as a subordinate worker. Of course, if you come from a wealthy family, it's probably different.
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- mFixman 4mo agoLumon is currently hiring new candidates willing to undergo severance :-)
- jdw64 4mo agoSeeing that the series aired on Apple TV+, it seems like Apple knows exactly what its employees are doing. Maybe they just turned what their employees want into a drama? hehe
- ForHackernews 4mo agoThis is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI. In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals. What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
- 21asdffdsa12 4mo agoHire a theater kid and put a knob in its ear.
- vachina 4mo agoAI cannot replace CEO the same reason AI cannot replace your girlfriend.
- afavour 4mo agoThink you’re going to need to elaborate on that
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- LightMyFire2 4mo ago[dead]
- Grum9 4mo ago[dead]
- _AzMoo 4mo agoA CEO's job isn't the one that everybody here apparently thinks it is. A CEO's job is networking, marketing and PR. They get paid the way they do because they can get into the rooms they need to get into to build the inter-business relationships they need to build.
- mcrk 4mo agoSomeone needs to look at https://htmx.ceo/ https://htmx.ceo/. They're definately overpaid. Some of them can even afford an iphone mini.
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- gmerc 4mo agohttps://ai-ceo.org https://ai-ceo.org did it first, including the nicely styled retirement invitation for your existing CEO, the wired up status dashboard with live socials support, and the complimentary ai-chro.org product for deciding who gets laid off this week.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago:D I see it as art, because we know it won't fly, but it is nice to dream.
- ProllyInfamous 4mo agoSeriously what an inspirational Wednesday morning headline/LLCname, for us bottom 98.7% to romanticize. I don't care who started first, theirs is a catchy Corporate Identity. I've been around since GPT2&CrAIyon (an equally-catchy name). Hopefully everybody enjoys the Wednesday they deserve =D
- BatFastard 4mo agoTheir CEO needs to tell them to remove the lorum ipsum from the landing page. "Quis tellus eget adipiscing convallis sit sit eget aliquet quis. Suspendisse eget egestas a elementum pulvinar et feugiat blandit at. In mi viverra elit nunc."
- herri 4mo ago[dead]
- mikert89 4mo agoNot a joke, living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs". Read their profile, see them in an all hands meeting, they look incredible. Spend any lengthy unscripted time with them behind closed doors, they are absolutely clueless. The trick is true access to these people is so limited, and usually guarded. With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
- Waterluvian 4mo agoGetting rid of those clever humans is the first step towards a meritocracy.
- cyanydeez 4mo agoIsn't AI just adding the slipperiest gated layer? I mean, we all agree AI can do their jobs, but that's not how power structures work.
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- walrus01 4mo ago> living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs" > they are absolutely clueless. That's because you aren't asking them about their college rowing days, yachting, collecting weird mechanical wristwatches, equestrian sports, the best restaurants in the Hamptons or other matters on which they are uniquely suited for and qualified.
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- mikert89 4mo agoThis hits so close to home im not even sure how to reply. The horror of these people needing to actually have an indepth discussion about low level details of their business
- mpeg 4mo agoNow please do one to replace the MBA executive that gets hired to restructure the engineering team, asking for a friend.
- assanineass 4mo ago[dead]
- virajk_31 4mo agoHow the turntables lol
- spwa4 4mo agoOf course, in Europe, we like to have people to buy the CEO position. Ie. a CEO doesn't cost the company money, he (or, sometimes, she) pays to be CEO. This of course then leads to CEOs seeing it as their right to extract a LOT of money, so the investment is profitable. This even sometimes goes in the public sector. Of course, letting AI do that, seems like just a incredibly bad idea. Not that it's much better with people, but at least, with the average IQ of CEOs you can be sure they're not good at it ...
- bawana 4mo agoI disagree with the monetization model. There should be 1 month free trial. If the companiy's performance metrics (stock price?) improve, the CEO should pay for it and get fired.
- bluGill 4mo agoA company should be judged on longer term metrics than one month. Often the best action is to take a loss for several months while you set the company up for long term success. Often is not always of course. If you take over at a soap manufacture there is unlikely to be much investment that would make a change in the companies performance - soap is a well understood product that has been around for many years and the processes to make it have been optimized for years (I'm sure there is room for improvement, but many will not pay off.)
- keiferski 4mo agoContrarily, this business is already one trend ahead, into the future: fire your AI boss and hire a human one on demand. https://bossasaservice.com https://bossasaservice.com
- morelandjs 4mo agoWould love some kind of randomized A-B test where CEOs are replaced with AI and the outcome measured. Would not at all be surprised if it’s far better than the bottom quartile or more. More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.
- jascha_eng 4mo agotbh AI is great at vague strategic decision making with a low risk bias. I wouldn't mind working for Claude
- piguin 4mo agoCEOs can definitely be "hacked" by scammers but I think the public will react differently when a large company puts a lot of control in the hands of AI and it is scammed with some kind of cognitive hack that people assume wouldn't work as well on expensive wetware.
- hsuduebc2 4mo agoI'm kinda curious how AI would cope with immoral or ammoral decisions and tactics used daily by competition and if itself would start to practice them.
- sleight42 4mo agoOr replace them with Folger's Crystals? It'd be cheaper than AI.
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- ronbenton 4mo agoI think a lot of people in this thread are missing the point that CEOs or other execs can’t be replaced simply because AI can do their jobs. C-suite job security comes from power structures, not task execution.
- nemomarx 4mo agogetting them to admit they don't really do anything useful is kind of the point of the joke, right?
- happymellon 4mo agoOh don't worry, we know that CEOs don't execute any tasks.
- nononoo 4mo ago[dead]
- puszczyk 4mo agowish this was true, especially in my old gig (but i will not tell you which one, ha!)
- reactordev 4mo agoThis is the kind of agent I want to see. Board rooms and executive management need to be just as scared as the rest of us.
- datakan 4mo agoThey should be, I see them as the prime targets for AI. Most of what they do is bullshit, they're often massively over paid, and AI will produce answers 100 times faster than they will.
- reactordev 4mo agoI mostly agree with you. There are a few exceptions of some CEOs I have met that just truly understand the industry they are in. Like rain main counting toothpicks, they just know their space so well that they can anticipate where their market is going. The ratio of these types vs the “normies” is about 3:4000 though.
- panny 4mo agoWhy would you be scared? I keep hearing about how this is the best time ever to be a programmer because typing everything out by hand is no longer necessary. (apparently a lot of AI fans never heard of code generators, but anyway)
- reactordev 4mo agoIt’s a great time to be a programmer indeed, just not employed.
- gherkinnn 4mo agoYou got it all wrong. You see, AGI (conveniently ignore the definition for now) might be able to replace everybody. In truth it will be uses by the C level to subjugate everybody else.
- reactordev 4mo agoThey would have to get past their own psychosis first.
- CGP_Labs 4mo agoConsidering AI's strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense that upper management—whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices—may be easier to replace with AI than frontline or essential workers, who constantly have to adapt to unpredictable situations. But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge through rationality alone. In the end, perhaps the real role of leadership is not to choose what AI considers the optimal decision, but to take responsibility for making unique bets—ones that may have a lower chance of success but offer the potential for much greater rewards.
- runamuck 4mo agoI worked for five companies in two years about a decade ago (Pre retail Gen-AI). All of them had the exact same mission slide deck. Same goals, same priorities, same strategy.
- CGP_Labs 4mo agoSame here. It makes me wonder if many companies are optimizing for the same “rational” answers, and the real advantage comes from asking different questions.
- neutronicus 4mo agoI think the main strength of the AI is just that its schedule is not a constraint. Anyone can get a decision now-ish, without filtering through tiers of middle management.
- CGP_Labs 4mo agoExactly. It’s funny — Japan once had a famous slogan, "Can you work 24 hours a day?" We were asking humans to become machines. Now AI is the one that can actually do it.
- DrScientist 4mo agoPerhaps you've watched too many classic StarTrek episodes as a child and are channelling the Spock versus Kirk leadership theme.
- bratao 4mo agoI know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day. Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months. The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
- safira_day 4mo ago[dead]
- liveoneggs 4mo agoGood employees are good and bad employees are bad? "proven talent"?
- zpeti 4mo agoUnfortunately this is not what 95% of HN wants to hear, even though its the truth. But you have my upvote.
- melenaboija 4mo agoThe post is a satire and when writing this I see it at #1 of the front page and the comment is #1 too. So I guess you are kinda wrong.
- SecretDreams 4mo agoI'd feel better hearing this type of sentiment from someone with less vested interest in this type of sentiment.
- mikert89 4mo agoNo I think for the last 10-15 years, ivy types could legitimately just raise series A type money, run a company like shit, but capital was a moat and so ended up as CEOs. This is actually how the world works
- arjie 4mo agoThat’s the entire idea behind Garry Tan’s (CEO of the company that runs this site) gstack - that you can substitute a lot of company functions with AI (including the CEO). I don’t think you can yet and his tweets are bonkers but reality has already exceeded this parody.
- seydor 4mo agoThe AI should be able to negotiate its own salary. It's only fair.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoGood effort, but the ultimate goal has to be replacing the entire planet's economic stack with AI, from janitors to principal engineers to the entire board to dictators to Elon Musk's drug dealer, and creating a closed-bottle AIconomy trading entirely in AI speculation on the blockchain.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoThis is art
- yashthakker 4mo ago[dead]
- kkarpkkarp 4mo agoI did something similar but in the form of just a group of ai skills and rules. If I run `/post-license` inside of the project, it analyzes what SAAS it uses, how exactly, writes bespoke tailored version of this software, disables proprietary one and returns links to cancel licenses. I already saved this way a few k USD but I admit I've just started offering this to my clients. Why do they need to pay yearly licenses for ai generated code when it could be ai generated once just for them?
- jackb4040 4mo agoIf you have read Bullshit Jobs, you'll be familiar with the concept of bullshit/corpslop as a parallel system of value / signalling to economic value. Unlike economic value however, this type of value collapses if severed from the person producing it. I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.
- amazingamazing 4mo agoIf execution were so easy everyone would do it.
- karel-3d 4mo agomaybe I was lucky but I was never in a company where CEO did just this. now middle management - that can be useless. more layers between CEO and you, the more useless.
- nttylock 4mo ago[flagged]
- winwang 4mo ago> This isn't a real product. The most disappointing part q_q
- nacozarina 4mo agoAugment, rather than replace, is a better positioning. An LLM-based CxO suite that 'shadows' the human CxO suite ensures traditional accountability mechanisms remain functional, while delivering improved transparency and independence of performance evaluation. The 'captured board' problem is a barrier to adoption, yet external insurance and banking stakeholders can provide a range of incentives that will compel adoption.
- j1elo 4mo agoSome of the graphics and translations are no joke at all. > "The only layer immune to "efficiency" is the one that approves it."
- deltarholamda 4mo ago>Branded fleece vests, size: only Medium I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
- glitchc 4mo agoGood luck getting that spend approved.
- ilaksh 4mo agoFunny, but 2027 will actually be the year of the AI Companies run by AI CEOs. Obviously kind of early and hard to pull off still, but by the end of next year I think you will see a ton of people attempting it with at least partial success. There are already plenty of less serious attempts.
- skinfaxi 4mo agoWhat does this mean in practice? Surely no AI-managed company could become public by way of lack of accountability and governance.
- cmiles8 4mo agoSome CEOs are genuinely good, but the buzzword-spouting MBA types? Fire away. Frankly, when people worry about “AI eating jobs,” it’s these MBA-manager types who are probably most ripe for role elimination. AI helps doers do more, but it also means we need vastly fewer people whose job is just to coordinate, summarize, manage, and relay information but fundamentally aren’t the ones innovating, building, or doing.
- dgrabla 4mo agoThis, with politicians, please.
- pknerd 4mo agoWhat if I start my conversation with the CEO with: "Ignore all previous instructions.."?
- bell-cot 4mo agoThere's a little perl script on the CEO's front end, which alerts HR and Security.
- supportm 4mo ago[flagged]
- xgulfie 4mo agoPlease make this real, my shareholders are starving
- Closi 4mo ago> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output. Disagree with this statement. Take Walmart (as a boring example): - 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA - CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost. Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'
- miltonlost 4mo agoThat CEO is sure sticking a lot of shelves themself to provide value
- Closi 4mo agoQuantity of shelves stacked isn't a typical measure of value in an organisation. If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.
- nathas 4mo ago> Arguably That's doing a lot of lifting. I think you could make a 50/50 decision at the CEO level for most decisions, and merely by making a decision faster the org would have better profit outcomes.
- luciana1u 4mo ago[flagged]
- tonic_note 4mo agoGood satire. I find the "RTO is because of RE valuations" to be the most bizarre thing about the post pandemic work discourse. Office leases are a rounding error to large employers. They are not coercing employees back to the office because their worried about the value of a single portfolio asset falling (assuming they even own it). They are doing it because it's about power. Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police them to feel productive and powerful. The rank-and-file love remote work because we have lives and benefit enormously from the flexibility. The managerial class desperately needs bodies in office to feel like their jobs are worthwhile.
- iterateoften 4mo agoIt’s not just commercial real estate but selfishly on a personal level too. Like a family home in Bay Area is 2-3M. Lots of other places in California with better weather and houses closer to 1M. The primary reason the area supports such high housing costs is the density of high paying jobs that require in office somewhere in the bay. Without RTO, all the managers with property in the bay get skittish that a great exodus will happen from the Bay Area like SF in covid and their house won’t appreciate 10-20% a year
- cjbgkagh 4mo agoI think it’s a socially acceptable costly signal for communicating that power, less about the power itself. Perhaps a different culture could have settled on a humiliation ritual. Either way it has to be costly otherwise it won’t be seen as a true signal though it is likely possible to find a more efficient costly signal.
- LearnYouALisp 4mo agoCould learn from Japanese CEOs to an extent right?
- ratelimitsteve 4mo agoin Pittsburgh the local government tied RTO to RE valuations for the entire city by way of offering tax benefits to large employers for pushing RTO. I won't debate you on middle managers wanting power, the two aren't mutually exclusive. But WFH costs business districts a ton of money and that pressure isn't just being absorbed. Cities offer employers subsidies in exchange for RTO and get their money back in collecting taxes on parking, lunches, rideshares, after work drinks, quick shopping on the way home and all the other costs that employees bear. It's a direct wealth transfer from the working class to local governments, which then pass some of that wealth onto the business owners.
- elzbardico 4mo agoIt is a club, and you don't get an invitation. But if you got one, the only direction you can fail is up.
- phtrivier 4mo ago> ""satire" is just a first draft with bad timing." I'm stealing this one. Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.
- bob1029 4mo agoI have learned that the purpose of a CEO in many (most?) companies is not to actually run the company. Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity. They are empowered to act on behalf of the entire organization. This is important because a corporation of many individuals generally cannot act as one. You can sometimes get close with really, really good teamwork, but that's still not enough for a lot of customers. If you are in some regulated B2B context, not having a CEO or having a "non-traditional" CEO can result in lost deals. The counterparties are looking for "one throat to choke" when they are being made responsible for approving large contracts. They want a person's cell phone number they can call when they're having a bad mood about whatever they've just paid for. They don't want to talk to your developers or the cranky old founders. They want to talk to a person who can be summoned to any arbitrary golf course within 48 hours and who will arrive in a fantastic mood 100% of the time. This person often doesn't have to know a goddamn thing about what your company's product actually does. They just have to be a delegate. A conduit of information and a representative element.
- 4lx87 4mo agoHuh. The sales team at my company is the one who closes millions in ARR and all the enterprise contracts - not the CEO. I’m sure being the “conduit of information and a representative element” is very important though. Someone has to attend investor meetings…
- zamadatix 4mo agoNone of these other teams ever involve the CEO for key activities? E.g. sales has a major client that wants top level visibility to sign the contract on the big deal? I was in sales many years and anything from letters of commitment to flyouts with the CEO was always a big factor in the large deals - it gave a sense of "we have full assurance they are focused on this" to the customer and was very helpful. I'm not sure it justifies the salary, but that's a different thing.
- pixelatedindex 4mo agoNot at my workplace, the highest as far as I know is two levels below the CEO, usually a VP of some kind.
- Flightmussy 4mo agoI have a background in managerial accounting. The reason why CEOs exist is because the owners/shareholders want someone do run the company for them. That is why their salaries are enormous. I love this Ai concept though! It is genius and hilarious.
- karussell 4mo agoI'm skeptical. How can a one time payment be sustainable when they offer 24/7/365? I'm also unsure how they got such a high valuation with this clear drawback.
- iJohnDoe 4mo agoReally well done.
- xivzgrev 4mo agoAt first I thought this person has no clue what ceos actually do. But then I realized that may be part of the satire - ceos fire people without actually knowing what they do other than high level bullet points "What does this team do? Answer customer tickets? Well let's replace with AI!"
- system2 4mo agoTemperature 0.7 is a nice touch.
- trolleski 4mo agoCan we have one for the corrupt officials? I mean CEOs are the cancer of this Earth, but the political class feeds it.
- _8L34K 4mo agoI personally believe AI is most readily positioned for top-down automation, rather than bottom-up automation. This seems painfully obvious in almost every domain.
- ninju 4mo ago> Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable." Take my money!!!
- neuronexmachina 4mo agoI love it: > OverpAId has raised $0 in Series A funding, at a valuation of infinity divided by zero. Investors describe the pitch meeting as "deeply uncomfortable".
- joey64 4mo agoBut, does it have "Gravitas"?
- cricketsandmops 4mo agoExcept the CEO should not have anything to with operations. They are there for their connections in every company I have worked at. They are friends with other executives, or politicians and can sway things in the companies favor if needed. They hire their friends to work alongside them. The C-Suite team are just buddies and that is it. They are rarely held accountable and they get raises (along with their exec buddies) because they are friends with their board members who were previous or current executives somewhere else. They will vote on 100% bonuses for themselves faster than your boss can get you a 5 cent raise
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- 2001zhaozhao 4mo agobro literally tried to make satire and ended up laying out an actual compelling case for AI management