6 ms·

What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. Someimes the claim is to priori

by edoceo 2mo ago

What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right? Making resources available to the team? AI. Coordinating between teams? AI. Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals? More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory. One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.

nullorempty 2mo ago
Well, as soon as they start being replaced is there a network to bring.
andsoitis 2mo ago
> Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
- Freedom2 2mo ago
  Like RTO mandates which were definitely made with wisdom.
  - andsoitis 2mo ago
    Not all CEOs did that. Just like all software engineers aren't great or excellent, all CEOs aren't. But to categorically denounce seems rigid.
- sandeepkd 2mo ago
  This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down. My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
  - andsoitis 2mo ago
    > This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down. I believe that the average are average. I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
inkyoto 2mo ago
In the current legal framework, AI can't be held accountable, a human being is required. That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
- valleyer 2mo ago
  Good point. CEOs of companies are often held personally accountable for corporate malfeasance by "the current legal framework".
  - fooker 2mo ago
    I understand your sarcasm but that’s what the limited in LLC is for. Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes. Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
    - valleyer 2mo ago
      I agree. I just thought it was funny that someone was pointing out the legal unaccountability of an AI in this context.
      - inkyoto 2mo ago
        There is no need for two penny sarcasm. I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff. My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
        vasco 2mo ago
        The sarcasm was pretty funny so it has some utility, no need to be so serious
stale2002 2mo ago
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
- rideontime 2mo ago
  Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.
  - matchbok3 2mo ago
    Workers are not legally or financially accountable for any of that. That is the whole point of a "job". I think you are confused.
    - rideontime 2mo ago
      Are you confusing CEOs with founders, shareholders, etc.? Chief Executive Officer is, in fact, a "job."
    - NegativeLatency 2mo ago
      Neither are CEOs in our present society
    - JDups 2mo ago
      When the worker loses their jobs over bad executive decisions, they sure feel like they were pretty harshly financially penalized for those decisions.
      - matchbok3 2mo ago
        And they can get a new job? Or should people be in the same job all their life?
  - 2mo ago
jaggederest 2mo ago
To paraphrase Andy Grove: > The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions. (And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions) To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
- bronson 2mo ago
  > AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not Well, so do most CEOs.
  - parineum 2mo ago
    There are hundreds of thousands of CEOs of companies you've never heard of.
- edoceo 2mo ago
  If the operation is to distill options into a few choices, and then pick the "best" one then, I think hivemind can win there too. Real-time democracy running a business. For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
  - vasco 2mo ago
    > Real-time democracy running a business This is not a competitive advantage
    - DoctorOetker 2mo ago
      Neither is dictatorship?
      - jeezfrk 2mo ago
thelastgallon 2mo ago
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out. These are all impossible tasks for AI. AI can't play golf.
- conductr 2mo ago
  It’s going to be funny when the Tesla robots start showing up at tee times because the CEO couldn’t make it. Like a meeting agent taking notes for people who didn’t attend
- a34729t 2mo ago
  Chinese humanoid robots are 3 years out from playing a decent round on a par 3 course.
  - psd1 1mo ago
    Full self-drive and self-putt?
- newyankee 2mo ago
  See, the issue is CEOs capture a fair amount of value but ultimately it is the owners and the main shareholders who hire them for that value to insulate themselves from day to day running of the company. The maximum value of the company is accruing to the shareholders in a public company anyways. While the morality of the right nos compared to median 'worker' can always be debated, I still find CEO earns 500x that of median worker type comparisons a little bit disingenuous and it totally insulates the owner class.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
forestrywat 2mo ago
Managers coach and develop people. Helping them grow, nurturing their strengths and connecting them with opportunities that help them achieve more. At least the good ones do.
- mulderc 2mo ago
  Yes, that is a good manager, but in my experience, it is better if the culture of the team is about ensuring everyone has opportunities to grow, build on their strengths, and connect with opportunities. When that is considered the manager’s job, and not the job of every member of the team, people get neglected, and many strengths and opportunities go to waste.
  - forestrywat 2mo ago
    Best managers make this the core culture in the team.
    - mulderc 2mo ago
      "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." — God
swader999 2mo ago
Marketing and they hire and fire important people. That's about it though, where we should take the product, what features to do next, partnerships, these are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
- collingreen 2mo ago
  I don't think these things are obvious. I've worked at many places that have had big, company-changing forks in the road available to them and navigating those forks wasn't easy (and in my opinion several times we chose wrong). The crowd wasn't always right or even well aligned and sometimes the only agreement was that a middle of the road approach would be worse. My intuition says getting that right takes a lot of luck, good momentum, and a lot of departments working well together (bringing in and communicating market info, broadcasting marketing that works, making good partnerships, etc). The cynic in me thinks one big impact of a ceo is the various cheating and corruption tools that can make some of those things easier or at least less critical to get right (you don't need to make good cybertrucks or convince people to buy them if the government agrees to buy 450k of them as "armored vehicles", for example). If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
expensive_news 2mo ago
At my current job, a 10 person startup, the CEOs job is to generate leads, talk to potential customers, and close deals. He, along with the other founders, shape what we work on based on what he thinks it’s possible for us to sell. He’s essential to the business. At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
- cybrox 2mo ago
  Similar, yes, but instead of finding out who else can give you money at 10 people, they have to find out who else they have to give money at 10k people. Leads and lobbies.
- vintermann 2mo ago
  That's a sales person.
  - nkmnz 2mo ago
    A sales person is usually trained on an existing product or portfolio of products (including services). A good sales person might use their exposure to customers for gathering valuable information to feed back into their upstream org. But this is completely different from someone who has to actively shape a both sides of the company, value delivery and value creation, because both need to mature in a choreographed manner. So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
  - moregrist 2mo ago
    There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales. In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business. Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
volkercraig 2mo ago
CEO's exist as a sink for liability. When something goes wrong, they are the fall guys, that's ultimately their job. That's why CEO compensation is generally correlated strongly to earnings and they usually have golden parachutes. Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
SlightlyLeftPad 2mo ago
They manage people. They’re people people.
baalimago 2mo ago
They ensure the company is funded.
- gib444 2mo ago
  This! They sell the company and vision to potential investors
hansvm 2mo ago
> can AI do <hard thing> Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines. > What do CEOs do No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing. > and other managers There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
penguin_booze 2mo ago
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago
  If you were legitimately suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a typical ‘CEO’, chances are you’d shit your britches within a month. Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing. Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
  - meta_gunslinger 2mo ago
    Exactly, as also evidenced by the guy who was brutally murdered just because he was the CEO of a company someone had an axe to grind against.
    - e36 2mo ago
      This account is posting comments every 0.01 seconds.
Zylokloto 2mo ago
Good ones actually are quite aware of the industry, connect the dots and setup the company to be sustainable, growing and ready when its time to be ready. Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood. Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it. Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
bob1029 2mo ago
> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours. This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back. I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip. CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.
- Covenant0028 2mo ago
  Ah yes, the unbearable burden of sipping fine wine at a Michelin star restaurant with a less than stellar company. That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.
missedthecue 2mo ago
In companies large enough to have a board, the CEO's job is to manage relationships with customers, vendors, and wall street. If his company is big enough, he'll need to manage relationships with the government too. In fact, among founders whose business became big, the number one complaint you hear is how little of their busy day is spent on their actual product anymore. AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
raymond_goo 2mo ago
https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=82 https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=82
sensanaty 2mo ago
They siphon away as much money as they can get away with , screw over their underlings and hop onto their golden parachutes whenever shit hits the fan, which with their short-sighted coke-fuelled decisions always happens.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago
Their job is to create an environment where people with a view as narrow and naive as yours can actually do something wholly productive.

by edoceo 2mo ago

nullorempty 2mo ago

Well, as soon as they start being replaced is there a network to bring.

andsoitis 2mo ago

> Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!

Freedom2 2mo ago
Like RTO mandates which were definitely made with wisdom.
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  Not all CEOs did that. Just like all software engineers aren't great or excellent, all CEOs aren't. But to categorically denounce seems rigid.
sandeepkd 2mo ago
This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down. My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  > This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down. I believe that the average are average. I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.

inkyoto 2mo ago

In the current legal framework, AI can't be held accountable, a human being is required. That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.

valleyer 2mo ago
Good point. CEOs of companies are often held personally accountable for corporate malfeasance by "the current legal framework".
- fooker 2mo ago
  I understand your sarcasm but that’s what the limited in LLC is for. Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes. Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
  - valleyer 2mo ago
    I agree. I just thought it was funny that someone was pointing out the legal unaccountability of an AI in this context.
    - inkyoto 2mo ago
      There is no need for two penny sarcasm. I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff. My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
      - vasco 2mo ago
        The sarcasm was pretty funny so it has some utility, no need to be so serious

stale2002 2mo ago

> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.

rideontime 2mo ago
Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.
- matchbok3 2mo ago
  Workers are not legally or financially accountable for any of that. That is the whole point of a "job". I think you are confused.
  - rideontime 2mo ago
    Are you confusing CEOs with founders, shareholders, etc.? Chief Executive Officer is, in fact, a "job."
  - NegativeLatency 2mo ago
    Neither are CEOs in our present society
  - JDups 2mo ago
    When the worker loses their jobs over bad executive decisions, they sure feel like they were pretty harshly financially penalized for those decisions.
    - matchbok3 2mo ago
      And they can get a new job? Or should people be in the same job all their life?
- 2mo ago

jaggederest 2mo ago

To paraphrase Andy Grove: > The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions. (And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions) To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.

bronson 2mo ago
> AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not Well, so do most CEOs.
- parineum 2mo ago
  There are hundreds of thousands of CEOs of companies you've never heard of.
edoceo 2mo ago
If the operation is to distill options into a few choices, and then pick the "best" one then, I think hivemind can win there too. Real-time democracy running a business. For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
- vasco 2mo ago
  > Real-time democracy running a business This is not a competitive advantage
  - DoctorOetker 2mo ago
    Neither is dictatorship?
    - jeezfrk 2mo ago

thelastgallon 2mo ago

> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out. These are all impossible tasks for AI. AI can't play golf.

conductr 2mo ago
It’s going to be funny when the Tesla robots start showing up at tee times because the CEO couldn’t make it. Like a meeting agent taking notes for people who didn’t attend
a34729t 2mo ago
Chinese humanoid robots are 3 years out from playing a decent round on a par 3 course.
- psd1 1mo ago
  Full self-drive and self-putt?
newyankee 2mo ago
See, the issue is CEOs capture a fair amount of value but ultimately it is the owners and the main shareholders who hire them for that value to insulate themselves from day to day running of the company. The maximum value of the company is accruing to the shareholders in a public company anyways. While the morality of the right nos compared to median 'worker' can always be debated, I still find CEO earns 500x that of median worker type comparisons a little bit disingenuous and it totally insulates the owner class.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

forestrywat 2mo ago

Managers coach and develop people. Helping them grow, nurturing their strengths and connecting them with opportunities that help them achieve more. At least the good ones do.

mulderc 2mo ago
Yes, that is a good manager, but in my experience, it is better if the culture of the team is about ensuring everyone has opportunities to grow, build on their strengths, and connect with opportunities. When that is considered the manager’s job, and not the job of every member of the team, people get neglected, and many strengths and opportunities go to waste.
- forestrywat 2mo ago
  Best managers make this the core culture in the team.
  - mulderc 2mo ago
    "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." — God

swader999 2mo ago

Marketing and they hire and fire important people. That's about it though, where we should take the product, what features to do next, partnerships, these are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.

collingreen 2mo ago
I don't think these things are obvious. I've worked at many places that have had big, company-changing forks in the road available to them and navigating those forks wasn't easy (and in my opinion several times we chose wrong). The crowd wasn't always right or even well aligned and sometimes the only agreement was that a middle of the road approach would be worse. My intuition says getting that right takes a lot of luck, good momentum, and a lot of departments working well together (bringing in and communicating market info, broadcasting marketing that works, making good partnerships, etc). The cynic in me thinks one big impact of a ceo is the various cheating and corruption tools that can make some of those things easier or at least less critical to get right (you don't need to make good cybertrucks or convince people to buy them if the government agrees to buy 450k of them as "armored vehicles", for example). If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.

expensive_news 2mo ago

At my current job, a 10 person startup, the CEOs job is to generate leads, talk to potential customers, and close deals. He, along with the other founders, shape what we work on based on what he thinks it’s possible for us to sell. He’s essential to the business. At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).

cybrox 2mo ago
Similar, yes, but instead of finding out who else can give you money at 10 people, they have to find out who else they have to give money at 10k people. Leads and lobbies.
vintermann 2mo ago
That's a sales person.
- nkmnz 2mo ago
  A sales person is usually trained on an existing product or portfolio of products (including services). A good sales person might use their exposure to customers for gathering valuable information to feed back into their upstream org. But this is completely different from someone who has to actively shape a both sides of the company, value delivery and value creation, because both need to mature in a choreographed manner. So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
- moregrist 2mo ago
  There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales. In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business. Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

volkercraig 2mo ago

CEO's exist as a sink for liability. When something goes wrong, they are the fall guys, that's ultimately their job. That's why CEO compensation is generally correlated strongly to earnings and they usually have golden parachutes. Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao

SlightlyLeftPad 2mo ago

They manage people. They’re people people.

baalimago 2mo ago

They ensure the company is funded.

gib444 2mo ago
This! They sell the company and vision to potential investors

hansvm 2mo ago

> can AI do <hard thing> Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines. > What do CEOs do No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing. > and other managers There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.

penguin_booze 2mo ago

> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago
If you were legitimately suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a typical ‘CEO’, chances are you’d shit your britches within a month. Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing. Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
- meta_gunslinger 2mo ago
  Exactly, as also evidenced by the guy who was brutally murdered just because he was the CEO of a company someone had an axe to grind against.
  - e36 2mo ago
    This account is posting comments every 0.01 seconds.

Zylokloto 2mo ago

Good ones actually are quite aware of the industry, connect the dots and setup the company to be sustainable, growing and ready when its time to be ready. Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood. Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it. Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)

bob1029 2mo ago

> What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours. This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back. I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip. CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.

Covenant0028 2mo ago
Ah yes, the unbearable burden of sipping fine wine at a Michelin star restaurant with a less than stellar company. That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.

missedthecue 2mo ago

In companies large enough to have a board, the CEO's job is to manage relationships with customers, vendors, and wall street. If his company is big enough, he'll need to manage relationships with the government too. In fact, among founders whose business became big, the number one complaint you hear is how little of their busy day is spent on their actual product anymore. AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.

raymond_goo 2mo ago

https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=82 https://youtu.be/UOYi4NzxlhE?t=82

sensanaty 2mo ago

They siphon away as much money as they can get away with , screw over their underlings and hop onto their golden parachutes whenever shit hits the fan, which with their short-sighted coke-fuelled decisions always happens.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo ago

Their job is to create an environment where people with a view as narrow and naive as yours can actually do something wholly productive.