Exactly. My main problem is that the CEO's stance is entirely hypocritical, because he would demand real equity or quit (probably even faster) if he was in the employee's position.
Once you have access to millions in funding its tough to see people who have to work for a living as human just like you. You expect them to lovingly accept terms that you would be insulted at.
Now if your talent is so great that you dwarf all your employees it might be justified. But when you are pained at losing productive workers chances are your favorable terms exist mostly because of your connections.
I think you might have lost context. The comment sub thread starts with ‘[CEO lays people off but does not resign]
“You’re not taking responsibility!”
[CEO lays people off and does resign]
“You’re shirking responsibility in order to get your bonus!”’
And the reply was similar.
My comments seem entirely appropriate in the context - which is none of this makes any difference to any CEO that is doing their job.
Sorry, I meant it to mean that the CEO represents the interests of the employees in that the employees do well as the company does well. Yeah, they get less of the yield than those at the top, but if the company isn't doing well it puts downward pressure on all of their careers. Presumably the employees are there because they support, or are at least neutral, to the goals of the company, and thus share an interest. If they oppose the goals of the business, while I can understand why they might take a job there, I would still argue it's an ethical lapse.
The goal of the business isn't to maximize employment. It's to maximize profits. Getting rid of employees doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job of maximizing profits.
You raise good points and I don’t disagree. It’s just that the tone of the letter seemed to me to be, hey, we made a whole series of bad decisions, so now we’re getting rid of the people who weren’t in charge of making decisions. He went on about how great the ex-employees were while explaining how the problems were due to mismanagement.
In a flat company, the CEO must be willing to shoulder the responsibility for making those decisions (or not making them). If they’re not, they’re missing a fundamental job requirement.
I didn't take this article as criticism, I took it as self-evaluation of when to leave. So it doesn't seem wrong to me. Employees leaving is just one of the risks a CEO takes on as part of their job. Their role is responsible for building a good place to work, and if they fail at that task, people leave, the company fails, and they don't take home a payout. On the other hand if they succeed, they enjoy greater financial success than the employees. So this article is not unfair criticism from the employee, is is just a manifestation of how risk/rewards balances play out.
I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending. Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a workaholic.
>The benefits should go to whoever is responsible for the success of the company. This obviously opens up a political can of worms: the Left will say the CEO can't get anything done without the workers, the Right will say the workers can't get organized without the CEO
And a pragmatism can say that all kinds of CEOs have driven companies to the ground, reducing their valuation even 1/10 what it was, and destroying their market share, and walked away just fine, with golden parachutes and even bonuses...
CEOs get more because CEOs get to determine what they get (and the board members and execs rub each other's back when it comes to their collective advantages).
It has little to do with performance and "whoever is responsible for the success of the company".
>See: not a single CEO stepping down for over hiring.
Wait, what? You think a CEO should step down because their management over-hired a relatively small proportion of employees and had to do some layoffs?
Some people here (there is a rude word for these cheerleaders of the feudal system, but I'll save that for less polite corners of social media) saying "he deserves a vacation".
A CEO is a leadership role - akin to being prime minister of a country, or captain of a ship.
Their ridiculously outsized rewards come with responsibilities, and they are supposed to lead by example. There was not much sympathy for the captain of an Italian cruise ship when he abandoned his post before his crew and passengers. Or a PM who partied through lockdown.
Likewise a CEO who lays off a huge number of employees and then fucks off to a Pacific island is not deserving of any sympathy, let alone nice sunsets and cocktails.
What should a CEO do? I dunno, but some CEOs took pay cuts, because they realized the impact on morale on their employees. Instead this guy just dumped more work on the employees left behind and went off on holiday.
Sure, but when you look at the history of comments around this theme (CEO, layoffs), it seems pretty clear that people want a CEO to take responsibility in some other way that laying off staff.
His entire argument is that the company must retain power in employee relationships, never the employee.
If one non-manager employee is ever in a position to show other employees they are being undervalued, the employees may do something stupid like demand the company fix the situation. Can't have uppity employees. Employees exist to be subservient to the ever-changing, unanswerable will of the CEO, not set the rules themselves.
The CEO gets to fail upward and become investor-class while shitting downwards on lowly employees who would dare to try and be paid what they are worth. How dare they attempt to confront such holy and monied highness as a CEO. Know your place, employee.
Maybe you're spot on 100% right in terms of vision, in terms of business plan, in terms of psychological blindspots, in terms of product market fit, in terms of a path to profitability. You seem pretty smart so maybe it is fairly insulting to you to not be listened to.
In what way is your world view helpful? And I want to be be gentle here, and not mean harm. In what way is it helpful for yourself, for your own wellbeing?
Let's say you could fix the company and stop the losses. Then trying to do that seems worth pursuing. Let's say you can't! We've all come across situations hard and unmoveable. So now, unless some break happens for you (because it's unlikely they will wake up and listen to you if they never did before...just a pragmatic observation), you are stuck being chronicly slightly unhappy.
It's not my place to suggest, and I'm trying to respectfully ask, would either maybe letting go or conversely doubling down and standing up for yourself and finding another job where they value you hurt you less? Completly serious question because everyone deserves to be happy.
And also, a bit of conjecture, but if you're not profitable it's that same CEOs ability to communicate a vision that's funding payroll right? I'm not saying absolve him of every misgrievance because if the company isn't doing well it's ultimately on his shoulders.
My point is maybe there's a softer path to walk here....?
Sure, maybe a better way to put it would be: at high-functioning companies, workers believe in the CEO. So if you want to create a high-functioning company, and lots of workers are never gonna believe in the CEO because they think he's a "psychopath" (term used elsewhere in this thread for Elon because he wants employees to work 40 hours in the office!), then it makes sense to encourage those workers to leave on some kind of timetable, same way Zappos offers a nice severance so they're left with only the most enthusiastic employees
Can we please avoid the "lose their jobs" rhetoric here? Eich's job was never in danger even in the C-suite, until he moved from CTO to CEO. One of the job duties of being CEO is to be the face of your company to the world. Another is to command the continued trust of your employees. Another is not to embroil the organization in unprofitable distractions.
"Lose their jobs" has emotional impact precisely because one envisions a hard-working, paycheck-to-paycheck breadwinner with minimal savings. The inability of a man who'd been around for Netscape's IPO to advance from CTO to CEO -- whatever you think about whether that's good or bad, or whether Eich had a way to recover the situation, or anything -- is a very different matter, and implying a comparison between the two cases leads to unclear thinking.
Once we've made the distinction clear, we can say, no, it's unjust for a non-management worker who's not representing the company to be fired by their manager over political activities, and no, Eich "losing his job" isn't precedent because it's not at all related.
Not much financial risk, no. But they are accountable in many other ways. Personally, I'd never want to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, even with a $10M salary.
> usually comes with a multi-million dollar severance package
Only at the top of the game at the largest companies.
> On the other hand, someone who gets laid off because of the company tanking does get hurt, through no fault of their own.
This is of course true, but you're only looking at financial hurt.
> If they don't find another job, their children are not going to go hungry.
For many CEOs, this _was also true_ at some point earlier in their careers.
>A (large company) CEO has the wealth to give them the freedom to not be an employee.
Yes but I didn't read that as "giving him his time back", I read that as "could be a manager, start a new company" etc.
I thought your post was excellent, apologies for misunderstandings. Cheers!
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