Part of why it is so difficult is that these C-level executives have mastered the art of sounding good with minimal set of accomplishments. Sometimes I listen to these presentations and it feels like a solid story and presentation, but there is nothing behind their rodeo when you sit back and dig deeper. A fucking mirage.
It's not the person who does excellent work that gets promoted or climb up the corporate ladder, but the person who knows how to sell their work, as sad as this is.
There's the "grass is always greener" phenomenon, too. Companies are struggling to figure out the next step, so they hire an exec from some other org that's equally struggling but looks shiny from the outside.
Another pattern I see a lot in the tech world is people who jump up the corporate ladder quickly by jumping from the tech side of companies in some industry, e.g., widget-making, to working at tech companies trying to sell software to the widget industry to startups convinced they can use AI to make better, cheaper widgets and then back to some big widget company that just put out a press release saying they're really a tech company that happens to produce widgets. The widget people figure the exec knows tech, the tech people figure they know widgets.
Well, it's also the people still on the ladder are the ones that aren't smart enough to realize there's diminishing returns on personal wealth and a diminishing supply of personal time.
In less than two years I went from my second job out of college to being offered to come up with any role for myself in a 10B cap company in order to retain me as I was getting bored, and after a night's sleep I came back and gave my notice.
The person that offered that position later turned down an offer for CEO of a 100B+ company for similar reasons.
There absolutely are people out there that shoot up the ladder based on skill. But when the people holding the ladder don't realize at a certain point time is worth more than any amount of additional money, it's hard to keep those that do realize it from jumping off.
The problem with filling the C-level positions isn't just that good candidates are obscured by founder Dunning-Kreuger, it's that generally the pool of candidates is going to be biased towards people echoing the BS toxic work culture that is the startup world, and the good candidates are going to have grown past participating in that charade.
WFH and changing attitudes about work life balance may reduce achiever churn moving forward, but I still see the "I'm so busy" posturing with C-levels and their wannabes here and there when I still have to interact with them, so I doubt it's going away soon.
Yes there can be diminishing returns on time, but C-suite positions are almost always on the declining side of time taken to do their jobs across their careers.
The C-suite of a 100B+ company shouldn't be spending more than a few hours a day really working hard. Compare that to something like a staff engineer who's become the lynchpin for more layers of their engineering org than anyone could ever list.
In fact I'd almost say no one has their WLB respected as much as people in the C-suite. Who's time in the entire org is considered more valuable?
And who has more autonomy to define that WLB to begin with? The chair isn't going to complain because the CEO left at 3pm to catch his kid's baseball game...
I think the other commenter is correct and you don't know as much about what you are talking about as you think.
I'm not talking about small business CEOs that answer to themselves.
I'll talking about CEOs that answer to the board and shareholders.
One of the reasons I turned that position down was watching my mentor and boss offering it having just spent a week away from home flying red eye flights to China and then Europe and then the Midwest and then back to Europe for various meetings and events.
I hated having to do a flight every other week even.
This guy was in the office before anyone else and left after most were gone.
Would put in at least a 60 hour week and MAYBE 10-15 hours of that was stuff someone else couldn't have done just fine. We were constantly having to run interference to hide work from him so he'd finally take a bit of time for himself.
Yes, I think a much better infrastructure would have had him working 15 hours a week on what only he could do, and the rest of the time for family.
But that's not what the reality was, and I saw that workaholism among most of the F500 C-levels I encountered, from the ones that were good, to the ones that had five great faking it.
You simply can't hold one of those positions not being like that, and I am skeptical it is as much because of the workload as the work culture.
> I am skeptical it is as much because of the workload as the work culture.
Hmm, my leader told me I had to work more if I wanted to advance. I told him that I think someone (leader or otherwise) is doing something wrong if they or their team are working/forced to work more than 40 hours per week.
I’ve mostly had visibility into engineering VPs not C-suites and from my anecdotal observation there’s a wide range of hours they put in from 80hrs/week down to 40 vacation days every year. There seemed to be no easily observable correlation with actual output. I suspect a lot of suites are only as good as their admins and their managed orgs (duh)
I’m going to go out on a very short limb and guess you’ve never actually worked closely with one of these people. I have, twice, and they work so hard they make me sad for them. Nonstop, there is no such thing as downtime. Yes they may go to their kid’s baseball game at 3, and proceed to answer 5 critical emails during it, take one or two calls, and then have a meeting on the drive home. After two more meetings from their house they have a quick dinner and do four more hours of work before they go to sleep, get up at 5am and work out, then work another 14 hours. During this entire day they may actually get 10 minutes to themselves, not all in one go of course. Their day is planned out in 15 minute increments and they have to constantly change gears as they go from one meeting to the next. Unless they want to be perceived as an asshole CEO they have to learn to keep a constant poker face, and always be the last to give an opinion for risk that they’ll never hear what people really think. Weekends are reserved for talking to investors, board members and key partners.
It’s a super shitty life, but hey, they get to make more money than the rest of us, which mostly just causes them more headaches, like not knowing if anyone they meet is actually their friend or just looking for a handout.
The person I was talking about started as a retail store employee stocking shelves and we had to bring in a fashion consultant because the suits he'd buy for himself looked like they were from the discount rack (and may have been).
Hands down the smartest person I ever met though.
Yes, there is a fair bit of nepotism in the corporate world. But there are people who claw their way to the top on merit, and they are often incredible people, and there's more than you'd think.
The problem is 85% of the room can't tell the difference (or looks at the suit to discern), and the best and brightest are stuck dancing on the strings for nepotistic idiots, often even when in C-level positions.
In my experience those types of folks are the ones who create some of the most cutthroat environments and perpetuate poor working conditions among their companies. They are the least equipped to hire, promote, and model in ways that and maintain any semblance of having personal boundaries or that personal time is important. Sometimes it’s much nicer to work for someone who doesn’t pretend they are as important as a head of state, and makes sure it’s not required of them to be.
I guess there are both kinds, and the person you describe is usually someone who's company you'd prefer working in, as it's more likely they reward work over politics.
I've known more than a few CEOs between my father with his PhD in Business and specialization in strategic management and my own start in the startup world...
but if we're just going out on condescending limbs, I'm going to go out on one and guess you're just coping with the "more money than the rest of us part" by convincing yourself CEOs have a horrible lonely lives?
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The reality is nothing you described doesn't somewhat apply to anyone approaching higher levels of a career.
For every study showing how depressed CEOs are compared to the peons, you'd find 10 more about how staff engineers/vps/product leads/etc. are too if anyone actually cared to study them.
It's success that brings pressure and stress, not the title of C-suite.
For example... "not knowing if anyone they meet is just looking for a handout"
The median household income in this country is $67,000. If you're working in tech long enough to be turning down C-suite positions and don't already have this problem I'd start searching for a new job about 5 years ago.
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Your vision of a CEO is either that of a founder CEO who lives like they're guiding their child (and will be replaced if the company ever grows large enough), or a Disney Channel movie you took too seriously.
The "career C-suite" is not hired for their inability to commit to WLB.
They're not hired to kiss ass on weekends.
They're not hired to play psychologist to coax out your "true feelings".
They definitely don't tend to hang around people who need handouts.
They're not putting the company before themselves because at the end of the day the next job is waiting in the Rolodex.
It is pretty hilarious that you think that though! Honestly you're describing what they wish people would see them as. I know plenty of C-suites would be over the moon with your characterization :)
I’ve been a C suite exec at four different companies, and decline to consider more than that every month for at least the last four years. My taxes are more than the average American earns in their entire lifetime for over 10 years running. I’m not dumb enough to believe every single CEO fits the description I gave, but CEOs of $100B companies do not phone it in, and anyone who believes that is both ignorant and sadly lacking in both observational power and imagination.
The only (good) CEOs I have seen 'phone it in' are career replacement CEOs whose job is to come in, sprinkle magic dust (fire & hire & slight rebrand), and use that to sell the company within 18mo. They have a very specific and narrow mission.
The rest I met have too big a mission to phone it in. (A lot of signs of premature aging, ...) I understand it a lot less after $1B/yr in revenue though, so can't say much from experience there.
Yeesh, martyring yourself while trying to awkwardly flex your tax bill? Career C-suite to a tee!
Now we know where I got the vibe of "I know plenty of C-suites would be over the moon with your characterization :)"
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Ignoring the fact there are millions of people would gladly trade their double shifts with no childcare for having to answer emails at the 3pm ball games. I do wonder what would have happened if you just, didn't answer emails during the kid's games? (in case I need to spell that out, it's a synecdoche for putting work over personal life...)
I guess it'd just be a very "career CEO"-esque to wax poetic about how you shortened your life doing a bunch of stuff to keep companies afloat when the reality is you just chose not to be present in your own personal life.
After all, a small team working through a Series B is one thing... but what 100B ship is relying on any single person (or even a room of C-suites) to keep floating?
I agree 100% with your take on CEO at $10B+ revenue companies. I worked closely with a handful of them and it’s a brutal role in terms of WLB.
As you said it wasn’t unusual to be flying international 2 or 3 times per week. Late night/early morning calls with Europe/Asia and not to mention the PR aspects of it.
C-suite at large companies typically have horrific work schedules that preclude a real life, and it is largely unavoidable. That's the job, and one of the reasons most people can't do it. A handful of people are wired to live that way but most aren't. The C-suite is a job for a special kind of masochist that wants to live their role.
Average people that want those roles likely don't understand what they entail. A staff engineer has sinecure by comparison.
IMHO for start-up to hire a C-level manager the best way is to look at VP / director level at a large company, preferably director level. If a start-up looks for a VP look at senior manager / director level. Basically hire people from large, established companies that a re currently at least 2 level below the senior position you are looking for. Those people are high enough to bring the seniority and low enough to still, maybe, do some of the actual work. Select from this population for the ability to cope with non-existing structures, be hands on themselves and the ability to calmly guide an organization.
The last thing you want is those career politicians that tend to climb the corporate ladder and rely on others to actual do the work.
Work is a type of performance art. Bosses pay to see you suffer. And if you do not act like you are suffering enough, more work will be added to your desk for proper amount of suffering.
I’ve experienced that it suffices to give constant updates on things I’ve shipped and where I’m stuck. In meetings, I regularly give a short show and tell of what I’ve built. So far, that has worked out well.
Using a display of suffering as virtue signal sounds not like a recipe for an uplifting workplace.
I didn't downvote but I think sometimes work is just plain fun, sometimes been looking forward to go to work. And nice coworkers, was looking forward to see. Not so much suffering here :-)
(Sometimes boring++ too of course, especially once at a big corp)
I believe that if I tried playing the game, I'd make a pretty good CTO. But as PG is aluding to, there are a lot of really talented people out there (including myself) who hate playing the politic/self-promotion game. For small startups, you can be an effective C level player while avoiding these "soft skills" but the bigger the org the more important these skills get. Avoiding the game, or worse: playing it badly, can kill a startup. I think this is why a lot of founders struggle as their org grows.
It’s a different skill set. When companies are small, advancing the agenda is the most important thing. As companies get bigger “advancing the agenda without pushing anyone off” is what’s important.
When companies get huge, the balance gets lopsided. So many people have explicit or implicit veto power that the “don’t piss anyone off” becomes more important than getting things done. And that’s why you see execs failing forward with content-free messages of glorious buzzwords. It’s also why it’s very dangerous to hire Big Company execs into a startup where it’s still important to advance the agenda.
A good CTO lives and dies on "soft skills". At two places I've been I've seen competent engineers with solid technical pedigree brought in as CTO and completely flounder since, for whatever reason, they could not get the managers below them to execute his (in my opinion very sensible) plans.
> [...]C-level executives have mastered the art of sounding good with minimal set of accomplishments
I mean, they get hired to do the same for the company (internally to potential and current employees, and externally to partners and financiers). The ability to sell is a crucial skill in the C-suite: it's no wonder they can sell themselves.
The CEO is the greatest salesman of the company. So they better excel at selling snake oil. There are positions for technical people, CEO is not one of them.
People believing their own hype are the worst. As a sibling pointed out, the CEO is the main sales person. that's fine, unless all the CEO and the company is doing is selling some vision. That approach might have worked in the past, it seems to work a lot less lately. Especially when it comes to investors, as those are the main buyers of these visions. Actual product is secondary in a lot of cases. At those places that manage to do both, like flexport (just to mention one that came to mind), great thongs are done. At those other places, not so much...
The people doing good work are too busy doing working and increasing related skills that they have no time to improve their skills in selling themselves.
Those without skills have nothing to do other than sell themselves so that is what they get good at.
I'm very mixed on this as I agree a lot of C-Levels mostly have mastered the art of selling themselves and I find most announcements of new C-Levels in my company to just be a waste of an email and likely salary.
But your last part strikes me as falling to a common misconception that climbing up the corporate ladder from inside is best done based on merit, as leadership is not always compatible with the actual work being done at the lower levels.
C-Level leadership tends to be more about company growth and being able to understand which parts of the company do need to change/evolve to reach that next level, sometimes with hard decisions. I've gone up the ladder like this from a very low level to a few reports away from the CEO and definitely it changes your perspective a bit on how you approach things.
The simplest example is realizing you have a lot more decision power over how you interact with your customer base, and options like "we simply won't support this" are a viable option when before you didn't have such options. How you allocate your people towards projects becomes far different when you introduce a new product/feature, and so on. It becomes a lot less about the minutia of the day to day work and instead about the long-term sustainability and health of the people and the company. Learning to take in a larger scope of understanding is not easy and not everyone naturally learns it, yet many companies still follow the time-based seniority model or promoting to leadership persons who really don't have basic leadership qualities.
You also have to consider your top people and how to evolve your strategy without ostracizing them or causing disinterest; too much workload on your top-tier team members and you'll start to bleed such people. Same with adding in too many things not related to their interests. Ideally, in such a high level position you're listening closely to the feedback from the lower managers and making decisions that try to balance both aspects and pushing only on situations where the growth is very essential, but there in is the catch: how can you know what is essential until you try it and see the result? What worked for one company doesn't work for another as no matter how similar the product/services might be. I've seen this happen tons of times with support and RND teams that were basically modified to include professional services aspects which is not what any of those people signed up for, and there was a huge exodus. The justification was that the C-Level who made the call had success with this at another company X, but the scope of what had to be managed was far more narrow at X and the client base with a support package was significantly smaller. The results at X were undeniable, but the conditions under which such a change were effective were quite different, and the C-Level just failed (refused?) to recognize this.
Leadership is very hard to grow properly, and personally I'm of the opinion that people who seek leadership are to be treated sceptically, as it's something that grows with familiarity and organically, not in a classroom. The Classroom helps with the fundamental skills (statistics, financial studies, etc), but my personal observation is that what gets lost in these classes is that such knowledge then needs to be heavily customized to the environment you're in. It doesn't really matter how many tools you have for leadership if you're using the tools incorrectly.
I worked for a large, late stage, Softbank backed company. They brought in some C-suite execs while I was there. A CTO paid several million annually with large, public company experience. They were totally clueless, and the engineering org was almost revolting within 6 months, trying to stage a coup to the CEO. No technical experience, no leadership, installing cronies, speaking in opaque platitudes.
I'm not angry about it, though they did oversee us being on the cusp of a promising IPO to a pretty bad outcome that cost me a lot of money, but I'll say that any illusion that you have to be competent to be a C-suite exec, and any imposter syndrome I ever had, went out the window after that. Ironically it increased my personal confidence, if these idiots can do it I certainly can.
I think the old saying "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" kinda applies to some execs maybe, like nobody gets fired for hiring some stellar resume exec with lots of experience, but they may get fired for taking a chance on an upstart.
This company has uniquely terrible CEO leadership who systematically have a track record of very poorly choosing senior leadership, recklessly changing the culture and doing zero to curate innovation, people development.
All of the talent left, mostly to direct competitors who will now be super charged to annihilate them.
This May one day become one of the saddest case studies, along with how Intel has shaped up, but the damage is going to show up everywhere for years to come.
Having burned very significant energy at this company, I am deeply sad to see the most garbage humans left in charge and also deeply glad to see the talented people effusion to great roles where they will mop the floor with this company.
The interesting thing about that company is how badly it failed at filling executive roles with promotions from within OR experienced hands.
Fundamentally, the CTO failed because in their previous success, they built it from the ground-up. They had zero experience trying to take over a large org, came in like a bull in a china shop, and worst of all, made a lot of very costly, morale-destroying mistakes.
But see also the Chief Product Officer who left in disgrace or the quasi-COO who also left in disgrace. They were both promoted from within well past their level of proven competence.
The common thread? The CEO who made all of those decisions. Executive hiring requires a CEO with the ability to reflect on their personal shortcomings and those of the team. And then, they need the ability to attract and evaluate candidates. And even if they do that successfully, they need the ability to meld a group of these execs into a highly functional team.
Our CEO only had the ability to hire people he saw as junior versions of himself.
I joke. I probably wouldn't have called us "large", but otherwise your story matches my experience word-for-word, which says something about the industry...
That's because you shouldn't hire them but you should grow them internally. Outside hires for executive positions are usually a great way to de-stabilize your company, early hires tend to be loyal to the founders and if you then hire some 'suit' to sit between them and you you risk them breaking off.
So the solution to this problem is to ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite, and to treat them as generously as you can when it comes to equity.
And if you're really smart you stick to that mantra: hire quality over quantity, it will allow you to push back the typical organizational struggles until you've achieved an order of magnitude or more in revenues (assuming product market fit).
It’s insane how many don’t realize this when it’s so obvious. Seen so many big shot c-levels wander in from Amazon, Microsoft and the like, institute some changes to make a mark and hit promises they made coming on, then leave 8 months or under 2 years later with the thing they were in charge of in disarray only for another to roll in and do the same.
Company I work at was almost ran into the ground until we fired all the c-levels for hire and empowered the top levels of individual contributors instead.
Push for us to move out direct to customer business into putting out product in stock in physical stores like Walmart, which really just ended up with our product being shifted at great discount.
Pushing us to build our product line around IP partnerships with major companies, diminishing our brand value and compromising the product experience.
> ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite
Are we talking about developer early hires, or sales, or whom?
The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level. Thr training required to get there is a lot. Finding the right people and keeping them is hard enough.
But all means try to grow them internally and probide training, but as a 'solution' it is not realistic.
> The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level.
The skills required to be a Lead and/or Principal developer seem to overlap quite a bit with those that an executive needs.
I’m sure there must be some, but I certainly haven’t noticed any extra skills in the executives I’ve met except a larger willingness to compromise and do things that are globally suboptimal (e.g. bad for the company in the long run, but good in the short one).
Is it possible you didn't actually have that much insight into what they do day to day? I'm currently running a small company (<10 people) and I was working as a developer (including lead) for about 15 years before that & the skills required are indeed quite different. There's a lot more planning and decision making, the impact of your decisions are much greater, a lot more uncertainty and your people skills are a lot more important.
> The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level.
I would disagree. Hiring for a small company/startup typically leans towards people with a breadth of skills. You need the first set of engineers to be thinking about the product and the business in addition to how to build something. Good leaders will also emerge from those early hires, otherwise the company will struggle to grow. Those early hires are often well suited to eventually move into executive roles.
I think the bigger issue is whether the early engineers want to stop coding and be in management where their primary job is hiring, strategy, and sales (everyone sells all the time in a small/medium sized company).
let me put this another way - we are in a thread, where the headline is 'founders suck at hiring C level execs' and your solution is to make founders find people who are simultaneously C level execs and engineers?
Takeovers and special circumstances aside, "promote, don't hire externally" should be way more common and the prefered approach (imo).
I think there's a three question protocol that should work reasonably well.
Q1: Do we actually need this CxO role?
Q2: Who will report to this CxO?
Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hireing externally?
If someone is already handling the functions of the CxO role internally and doing it well, they should be considered as a forerunner for the position.
Anyone hired externally must be expected to meet a substantially higher bar than the existing employees. Bringing in an external CxO who is less qualified than internal candidates will destroy morale and lead to attrition.
However, there’s a lot to be said for bringing in an external CxO who can take the team and the company to the next level.
A CxO role is quite different than a traditional manager role. You can’t expect good managers to automatically be good C-level executives because the work is just too different. It’s the same story as promoting ICs to managers - Different responsibilities and different skill sets.
But internal employees should always at least be considered and given a fair shot.
Eric Schmidt was a great example of bringing in outside help to take the company to the next level.
Sheryl Sandberg is another example, probably more famous mostly because I think Schmidt almost seemed like he was a founder whereas Sheryl’s story is always about coming in as the Adult to be #2.
Where the CxO role interfaces a lot with external parties is where an external hire often is better suited because they have prior experience dealing with external facets of their roles. An internal person in Finance may not have the requisite experience regarding dealing with public company reporting requirements, for example.
You’re very right on the bar. They have to be so clearly better (in reality as well as resume) that they can move skeptics from the bias of “I could do the job better” to “I can learn from them.”
Well one of the problems is that you're often hiring a CxO to bring characteristics of a bigger company to your smaller company as it grows. For example, if you have a haphazardly grown sales team doing about $10 million in revenue, you might want to bring in someone who has been a Director in a $100m sales org to be your Chief Revenue Officer to bring some of the sales force management and compensation practices that you need to develop as your sales team gets bigger. There's nobody in your organization who really knows that.
I must disagree. What I have seen is what you are saying enables bad internal culture, decision making and technical habits to become more ingrained into the very soul of the company.
I see well meaning senior technical people disregard my advice on technical matters because that's just not how things are done there ever, some things are so far out of the box they can't even conceive of it as a possibility. Manager after manager telling you the same answer because that's what whoever they ask about tells them because everyone at that dept/company is 15+yr tenured.
If you want to keep things as they are but maybe slightly better or to make different internal people happy you promote from within. If you want fresh thinking and new directions you gotta hire from the outside.
I can't emphasize this enough. The only analogy that comes to mind is eskimos that have to traverse a desert but only want other eskimos in their team.
If we are going to go to extremes to illustrate the disadvantages then let me point out what happens with the opposite.
When you choose to hire outside for every single leadership position especially senior ones you send the message to the people that their effort and sacrifice is not appreciated and you don't trust and that they won't be growing with the company.
The people who built the company then get disaffected and leave, eventually no one is committed and things go to hell because there is no loyalty or personal interest.
You are right, extremes are bad and balance is good. But if you have a startup and nobody in the 10 person company has managed people let along other managers for more than 5 years, yeah, hire from outside and create more management roles internally so your people can get promoted and gain experience. There is no substitution for experience, especially political experience for a political role.
> Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hiring externally?
To offer a few potential answers:
* Because the existing company culture is not conducive to taking a step forward, and you intentionally want to bring in outside ideas (e.g., bigger-company experience).
* Because the people who are the answer to Q2 don't get along all that well, or are worried about their individual career paths, and promoting one of them above the others will make them upset in the short term.
* Along the same lines - because you don't trust the people from Q2 to level up and handle the full scope, and will instead always favor "their" organization.
Anecdotally, I've observed that man CxO roles are created at the behest of the board or to acquire prestige for some purpose. It would not surprise me that it's easy to find highly successful people who will trade Prestige for money and WLB after a certain point in their career.
Promoting internally won't buy your firm more prestige/credibility.
Spoke to the founder / CEO of a wildly successful now-public (former startup) company about his exec-level hires. He confided that 1/3 of executives were net positive (i.e. should retain), 1/3 were net neutral (i.e. should be fired) and 1/3 were net negative (i.e. separate ASAP!).
Gentleman also indicated that his peers on similar trajectories were even less successful at exec hiring. So there's a point of anecdata for you: "Good" at exec hiring might just be a 33% success rate. YMMV.
That seems unsurprising. It reminds me of that bit from one of Ben Horowitz's old articles [1]:
> Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.
This reminds me of how one of the most disorienting feelings is when you've taken five steps on a journey of self-improvement. Miles ahead in the distance, you see your inspirations. Looking back, you see that those first five steps already put you in the 99.95th percentile of all humanity.
I think a lot of people fall for this kind of fallacy (no offense meant to your acquaintance).
1/ You really cannot grade absolute values on a curve. As others have pointed out, your A players are only in comparison to others in your team. Maybe they are actually C players, who knows? Maybe they are A players only in the environment you created etc, etc..
2/ And a more important point is that a lot of work is being done by people that are not A players. Whom I would call net positive is only in relationship to what I can measure. I know of many people in my team who were not exceptional at software, but got things done due to building relationship with other teams, ability to see things to completion etc. I think Amazon fell into the trap that only type A personalities get things done and I see it in other places too. It is easy to see the extremes, but a lot of times the glue that holds things together is almost invisible.
It is hard to gauge value and I personally am refusing to judge anyone (to the extent possible).
Projecting the exec's effectiveness onto the exec (e.g. "A/B/C Player") is woefully unfair, and my acquaintance & I would never intentionally suggest otherwise. Their effectiveness (positive, neutral, negative) is determined by a great many factors outside the individuals control -- e.g. company's size, growth rate, org structure, personnel, industry, etc.
The exec's success or failure isn't an indictment of their abilities, just that they're (in)effective in this organization at this particular moment in time. It's on the founders / CEO to recognize this, manage expectations, continuously communicate, and ultimately to force a transition if necessary. Luckily, most execs know the score. This is also why exec's have such generous exit packages: both parties can admit they made a mistake & separate amicably.
I would say this is true of almost any position. Ask any manager and they will probably say this is usually how it shakes out. 33 percent of hires are A players, 33 percent are B players, and 33 percent are C/D/F players.
It is grading on the curve. An A player at one company might be a B player at another. If someone is an excellent CxO they are probably a good candidate for a bigger and better company or the CEO job somewhere else and so will leave after some time unless given large incentive to stay or otherwise have reached their career ambitions.
Thing is, in many job positions "A players" add a lot of value, "B players" add reasonable value, and "C players" still do some useful work, it's only D- that are worthless.
However, for CxOs the dynamic is as the grandparent post mentioned, that mediocre CEOs add trivial value and the weak CEOs are actively harmful; so the expected tolerance to B-players should be quite different.
It's like any employee, vitality curve and all. The top 10-20% are responsible for 90-80% of positive results and the bottom vice versa while everyone in betweek keeps the boat afloat.
As long as you can identify which are which quickly and action then 33% hit rate can stack your roster pretty quick. Hiring takes time though, in most cases.
It also takes time to see results: the higher up the ladder, the more the work is second or third order effects which take time to show up.
If I hire someone to be a JS grunt, I’ll know very quickly if they can make a CRUD form because their job is to produce tangible assets which are immediately usable. In all but the most extreme cases, it takes months to years to tell whether a C-level hire is making good decisions, policies, hires, etc. and repairing the damage can be a substantial amount of work in its own right.
Sounds simple, but C suite executives have a high profile, high turnover at the C suite can spook the board, investors, etc. you don’t want too much turnover.
Hiring takes time and not having people in roles can be worse than a mediocre performer and sometimes worse than a bad performer who generally gets the job done.
usually there are lawyers involved when hiring a c-suite and there are negotiations and contingencies. if you fire a c-suite you might have to send them off with a lot of cash and/or legal fees. it might even cause a little stir in the public image and hurt the stock or investor perception. It might be cheaper or less of a headache to just work around them.
one of the better scenarios is to have a candid, open conversation about their offramp and give them a couple quarters to find a good spot somewhere else and then they "resign".
I think there’s all kinds of problems that intersect to create the problems we see with these hires:
- founders, especially first time founders, often have middling experience hiring for any role, and zero experience hiring execs.
- the absolute best execs often have no shortage of offers, and hence it can be quite hard to identify and attract these people
- founders often don’t want to pay what the really good execs are worth. Not that I’m even “really good”, but there’s a number of startups where I’ve been recruited because things are a disaster, can’t figure out how to scale the business, etc etc, and then after speaking with everyone they turn around and offer half a percent of the company, and act like they’re being generous.
- founders want to hire someone who’s the right person for the long haul, because of all of the above pains - except that those people often are accustomed to two stages ahead of where the company is now and may not be prepared for what’s required right now
And then, sure, there are the people who have failed up enough, or gotten lucky enough to win the startup lottery, and then coasted from there.
But look at it this other way - 50% of engineers are in the bottom half in skill and talent. It’s just that you do your best to optimize for the upper half, and since you’re hiring lots of them, you trust in the numbers to pay off for you. When you are hiring one, and just one, head of sales - the margin of error is really thin.
I guess you comment as an exec but this comment does not help make the case. Without being an engineer myself, I would be very frustrated with the last paragraph. It uses a statistically true fact to make a meaningless argument (how is optimising for top 50% different to e.g. optimising for bottom 50%?). Furthermore it demonstrates a view of a team of engineers as a bag of individual contributors. In a team, skill and talent are only one factor in optimising team dynamics. You don’t trust in numbers, you trust in dynamics and collaboration and in people growing within your organisation. I recently hired a PhD and a bored junior admin whose most exciting piece of work was scripting his boring work away at the same day. Also to your core intended argument, you hire an engineer in a couple of interviews, an exec would go through an extensive round of meetings and interviews and therefore you would optimise the process across different dimensions. The margin of error should be pretty similar, given fundamentally organisations have an underlying risk appetite even if it is implicit. The issue is that execs have more experience manipulating your perception of risk and therefore you should go with your eyes open, because this is part of the skillset you are probably looking for anyway.
Be careful of misaligned incentives though. A PE invested in a company (not a software company) I worked with recently, the PE placed execs and those execs proceeded to:
- professionalize the company by switching everything to SAP and outsourcing all IT to India (and from our interaction with that company in India, they didn't chose a very good company)
- increase revenue in the sort term by devaluing the brand
- lower the quality of products through cost saving
As a result after 2 years, the company sold to one of its long term partner for double the price of the valuation the PE invested in. Since the increase of revenue was done though temporarily dumping inferior products, the revenue is now slightly below the levels before the PE investment.
Customers loved the company before and would evangelize for their products. Now it's no longer the case, a lot of customers have turned on it and openly criticize it. And most of the execs the PE brought in were either fired by the new acquirer or resigned to move on to new opportunities.
So, were the execs the PE brought in bad hires? No, they succeeded in the PEs objectives. Were they good for the company? Not in the long term but, in the short term, they helped the founder get a very good exit (although the founder is pissed because it taints his legacy).
Can we turn it around and ask what we actually want from a (good) C-level. Cos I suspect it's not what most of us imagine.
At some point what we want from C-level is putting in place (bespoke) systems that achieve the "strategic" goals -
Is the monthly churn growing? Are you not able to get high touch sales to take off? Is the European product not ready?
All of those are the sort of "strategic" things people tend to hire CxOs for - but any good analyst can get you 80% of the way to identifying the problems, and then you have to pick a solution. At that point you are hiring someone for a very specific job with a clear roadmap. Maybe you can hire internally ?
Edit: on the other hand this article (from the frontpage) is an excellent example of hiring for a job, even though the person doing it is not going to be building the ditches etc. Walt hired for experience and focus on the job he wanted done. And as that job was going to have to be a negotiation with all the other agents building the park, he needed a high level advocate for the job (minimalmmosquitoes) he wanted
From this I suggest that hiring a CxO is hiring a person to act as advocate for the outcome you are hiring them for - very similar to politics
This is sort of the discussion I wanted to hear from this thread. What separates a a product manager paired with a data analyst from say, a CEO or CPO (product)? Surely the PM and DS are better armed to make decisions with data and talking to users, etc.
In big orgs it’s making decisions based on the totality of the business, not if we should spend $X on ads to grow revenue 50%.
If any company is being honest with itself, there are more good ideas than time or money.
A good CEO sets a course for the company, and most importantly gets everyone on board then relentlessly squashes distractions and basically clears the way for everyone to actually do their job.
CEOs need business sense, but as you said, the people who know the details report to the CEO. At the heart of it, the CEO is a salesperson and people manager.
But you need both. You need someone saying "we're going in this direction", then people down the chains making decisions how best to get there.
I've worked at places that had no leadership from the top and it was incredibly frustrating. 10 different teams pulling in 10 different directions usually means no progress at all.
Henrique De Castro's hiring and firing at Yahoo is one of my best examples of this. But $60 million for a year and change of work sure is a great way to fail!
as a fellow skeptic, this oversteps. your mistake is that smart = value. connections do have value, as does experience and other leadership qualities than domain expertise. your criticisms will be stronger if you recognize this.
I worked at a company that was relatively successful because of the connections the CEO brought to the table.
Objectively, the company would have been far less stressful to work at - and more profitable - if we had a better leader, but it wouldn’t have existed without his connections.
You're lucky the CEO had connections that somewhat panned out. I've experienced the "connections" based C-suite hire that was a complete and total net negative. It took 3 years for the removal to happen. It was a painful 3 years.
Yes, to be clear the CEO was also a founder, so he didn't just parachute in.
I have, unfortunately, also seen something similar to your experience. This is why hiring for a role like that is tricky.
I want to say for the record I also once hired an awesome CEO who was humble, sincere, reasonable - and very effective. We're still friends after 25+ years.
They do that in government. You just get different cliques.
You hire executives for different reasons. Sometimes loyalty or incompetence to a degree is valuable as the person isn’t a threat. Other times people are hired to drive a particular agenda and can be relied upon to do that because they are too dumb to do otherwise. And sometimes they are sacrificial lambs.
There is a video of Steve Jobs promoting an accountant or such to C-level and she tells how she grew into the job.
Why is it necessary to hire external C-levels? What do they bring to the table? Why not promote leaders from within? If you stumble upon an exceptional person who could improve the company it's still possible to hire them.
One aspect is that companies can grow much faster than people do. Someone who's decent at managing 5 people will need many years of experience to become capable at properly managing 500 people, and a company can grow to needing such a manager much faster than that. Just as you can't expect a skilled individual contributor to be able to instantly become a good manager (they can, but that's a different skillset that needs both learning and practice which will take some time), so if you suddenly need a bunch of good managers now then you have to hire them instead of promoting your contributors; and in the same manner you can't expect a skilled team-lead to become a good CxO in a large organization (the difference in the daily work and skillset is comparable to that of IC to manager), so if you suddenly need CxOs to become a larger organization from a small one, it's exceedingly likely that none of your managers are qualified at the moment - they might become qualified with, say, two years of personal growth if targeted at that, but a fast growing company likely can't wait those two years and need a CxO that can start doing these things properly now.
"What do they bring to the table? Why not promote leaders from within?"
Both carry risks: the former can cataclysmically change internal culture and make a cascade of errors rapidly (usually during the idiotic 'empire building' phase many start from), the latter can sometimes be pushed up on questionable grounds and do much the same (e.g. worked for a firm where the CRO left abruptly after 18 months and because executive search was so expensive and lengthy, opted to promote the head of a region to CRO, who proved to be at best a mediocre sales leader in terms of actual revenue, but proved perpetually toxic to everything they touched. An almost cartoonishly corpulent and caustic incompetent from central casting. When he was regional lead he was problematic but contained, but when promoted turned into a total 'Enfant terrible')
If he was already problematic then why the would you give him more power? This sounds like they got what anyone should’ve expected. Anyone is not better than no one.
I never got a distinctly good answer on that, but the rubric was that the number one pick was not willing to relocate to corporate HQ and was content performing quite well in their lane (a rare case of astute self-awareness, but he was ultimately ousted by the new CRO because he only saw him as competition), and the number two choice was already in range and as I said, previously contained...maybe they thought he'd "grow into the role"?
Seen it all from start ups to public. It's not every C-Level but when one does join it doesn't take long for everyone to know know they've clearly failed their way to the top.
It's striking how one will be hired to a non-traditional C-level title for a department they have no experience in and run it into the ground. I've even witnessed department leads beg not to hire one from the start and be fully ignored. I guess the fact they've been at the top for so long makes them untouchable?
What's outstanding is how often it happens and how both hiring and keeping them around never makes a lick of business sense. Even once exposed as incompetent, founders will dig their heals in and find any excuse to not bear responsibility of their bad hiring decision. They eventually leave on good terms and continue the cycle elsewhere.
These people need to be publicly named and shamed, enough to show up as a huge black eye in their Google/due diligence results.
I have suffered under a few such C-levels and their incompetence is maddening. It is hard not to see the C-level social network as one big circle-jerk, and they get to walk away scot free. These folks are only worthy of spending the rest of their life as a clerk at a gas station, not (mis)managing million/billion dollar companies.
The defamation lawsuits will be overwhelming. They don't even need to win, they can just lawyer you into submission. It's just like when you end up firing a regular employee for cause, the best course is to say nothing so nobody has a reason to get litigious.
Because it is too easy to degenerate into evil types using accusations to snipe at competitors, or other fuckery.
As another comment notes, accusations need evidence and solid claims. I have neither... I don't know the super deep internal politics of where I worked, only whispers from overhead conversations. Plus a number of sudden, "cordial" departures, and a bunch of napkin math estimating the costs of this person's antics.
Don't forget these are wealthy folks accustomed to using the legal system for their own ends. Ending up in the crosshairs of these folks could destroy a man, and as far as martyrdoms go you wouldn't even be making a larger impact as it changes nothing about the situation of other bad actors.
So, I'm going to grumble, and if I ever decide to bring her down I would do so in a place far, far from here.
But does hiring for merit really makes sense at C level?
Ideally a C level executive should have deep connections with government/large companies.
This is how entire capitalism functions at the moment. Connections make you money, not merit.
Even if you hire the best CEO there is, without connections there is no possible way to make money. How do you think people get good contracts for their companies?
The reason for hiring someone you know is because you presumably know them well enough to know that you can trust them and that they aren't a fake or otherwise incompetent. Even then, you can do an additional vetting for competence to give the decision more credibility. Plenty of vetting is possible, and recommended, even if you eliminate all candidates that you do not know at all.
If that leaves you with no candidates, only then does it become an either/or tradeoff. Don't conflate the plan A with the plan B.
1. C-level execs are given massive compensation, with the justification that a good one is well worth the price.
AND
2. There's no good objective way to measure C-level performance.
That alone should make people deeply suspicious about these compensation packages. On top of that, the best person for a given CXO job often just so happens to be a golfing buddy and/or have outside business dealings with half the board.
I'm not surprised by ambitous execs grabbing what they can, it's what they do after all, but I am pretty disturbed by how many people outside of those elite cliques will carry water for them and pretend like the C-level hiring market is some sort of efficient meritocracy.
- If I recommend this guy and he's at least acceptable, my network grows
- If the guy I recommend is not that good, all three will make excuses: my mate who hired him (will blame chemistry/randomness or me), the dude himself (will blame chemistry/randomness or me), and me (will blame chemistry/randomness). Since we're all adults, you can't blame someone else for your lack of due diligence, so it's a shame their styles were so different and the market turned against their brilliant plan.
- Nobody ever gets blacklisted for bad recommendations
- Everyone is complacent about who they will recommend
- My network grows, and I don't need to grill everyone. So my network grows.
Of course what this also means is if you don't happen to be in one of these networks of mediocre people, you are totally out of luck because those networks are big enough that someone will be found, just not you.
Your compensation is determined by your power within an organization, not your contribution to it.
What blows my mind is the degree to which people believe that perfect competition exists everywhere and “the market” will fix all inefficiencies.
Edit: I want to make clear that I am not denigrating the value of markets, I’m only looking to point out the idealization that exists in many people’s minds, especially as I have encountered on this exact forum.
Market theories don't claim everyone makes efficient decisions just that over time, people tend to pay for their inefficiencies. In contrast, systems based on status, family lineage, etc, provide little to no natural force against similar inefficiencies.
There are plenty of market theories that claim that in the long run decisions will converge towards an optimum.
In practice, this is a tautology. People pay for inefficiencies, but inefficiencies are defined as what lose money. You didn't say anything, you just diluted a (wrong) theory to make it correct and as a result don't have a theory anymore, just a rhetorical trick.
> There are plenty of market theories that claim that in the long run decisions will converge towards an optimum.
Do you have an example of an economist making that argument, outside of theoretical modeling?
I don't see the tautology. One person in a leadership position may value certain things and be willing to lose money on them. The cost gives their peers and supervisors at least one reason to question that practice.
The tautology is that business inefficiencies are costs, either future, current, or comparative. Saying that inefficiencies will be punished in the long term is tautological, you're just restating the definition business inefficiencies.
As far as economists making that argument, take a look at the strong and semi-strong EMH. Plenty of economists agree with the semi-strong version.
The gap between the actual theories and the popular conception is what I’m commenting on.
Note that these theories are actually generally descriptive, no one wholesale invented capitalism. For the entirety of human history we have had systems based on a combination of markets, status, family lineage, etc. this applies both to the past and to today.
What I’m taking issue with is the degree to which all of that is glossed over and people assume that the market will evolve naturally if left unspoiled/untouched.
That is not the end game because small companies, startups, etc. are more efficient than big ones and have no ingrained culture that prevents innovation.
Eventually some of those small companies become inefficient big companies. We see this struggle recently in the news, with the CEOs of Facebook and Google talking about how they need to become more efficient, maybe certain people shouldn't be there, etc. -- they got big when times were good and now they struggle with the inevitable consequences of bigness.
This has happened many times. Nobody saw Microsoft coming in the 1970s to dethrone IBM. Microsoft didn't see Google coming and still can't beat them on search, they didn't see AWS coming and is catching up on cloud years later, etc. Most of the automotive industry thought Tesla could not scale and would go out of business years ago.
That happens sometimes. Many times, the variance in launching a small company is so high that the risk premium and payoff for challenging the inefficiencies has a negative expected value.
I would dispute that claim. Business and organizations have never been larger, more powerful, more wealthy, or more politically connected. Small business has been shrinking drastically for generations now all across the globe. Especially outside of tech. But even in the tech world how many of the workers are operating primarily under the direct employment or contract of some 50,000+ employee company along with thousands of other contractors? And how many 20 person tech businesses have been operating consistently for 15 years?
> Small business has been shrinking drastically for generations now all across the globe. Especially outside of tech.
I am not saying it is not true but it would be good to have some data about this.
Cafes, bakeries, small restaurants, lawyer offices, flower shops are all small businesses, a lot of them run by 1 or 2 people.
I guess it depends what we consider a small business.
If a CEO or other C-level sets some targets, then you’d think they would be held accountable for missing them. But from what I’ve seen, this is very rare. So the board is just as responsible for what happens as the CEO.
I have seen cases where the board holds executives accountable, and that results in a better company lead by competent executives. But that kind of accountability is unusual in small companies because the board and executives are often one and the same group.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over my career it’s that the theoretical structure of a company has no inherent relationship to reality. If the CEO, chairman and board members are all mates then they will pat each other on the back until well after the iceberg has ripped a hole in the side of the ship.
This also makes it so that they care less about any one particular company failing when they decide to hand out a leadership position to an incompetent buddy
C suite comp is largely stock, so they are held accountable financially, their compensation literally rises or falls directly with the company's value.
> 2. There's no good objective way to measure C-level performance.
> On top of that, the best person for a given CXO job often just so happens to be a golfing buddy and/or have outside business dealings with half the board.
> C-level hiring market [isn't] some sort of efficient meritocracy
Those 3 things aren't contradictory, they each follow from the other. In absence of an objective way to measure performance, the best thing is "I have experience with this person, and can vouch that they're good." And so it totally makes sense that this sort of network-based hiring is what we see instead of a meritocracy.
It’s game theory and asymmetric information at its finest. Throw in a healthy dose of survivorship bias, a pinch of appeal to authority, and you get a perfect recipe for astronomical out of whack compensation packages.
I am convinced that we need to move companies from effective hierarchical dictatorships to more democratic institutions. A CxO should be like an elected politician - representing some manifesto that is a coherent (!) package of measures and gets appointed maybe by an election amount employees / shareholders.
As such they need to persuade a majority of people who will supply the (human / financial) capital that their manifesto is the best option. They essential earn their way into the office.
Edit: I am also semi convinced that the hierarchical thing is half the problem. Having a single person make "the hard decisions" is usually a way to have the wrong decision made about 50% of the time. Somehow humanity has found science as good means of improving those odds. But for the sort of decisions we make in business (very little hard science) then I suspect democratic consensus might be a much better way to get a good decision.
This is a bit of a weird take IMO -- CEOs already need to persuade most employees (human capital) and most investors (financial capital) that their manifesto is the best option, or the employees will quit and the investors will take their money elsewhere.
With some exceptions, no one is really forced to invest / remain employed as they might be in an actual dictatorship.
Observe the benevolent-dictator-for-life phenomenon in open source software -- I fully support democracy but it's not obvious to me that its benefits scale down (or perhaps transfer sideways) to corporations; if they did, wouldn't we see a lot more organizations structure this way? Most of government is already not organized around democratic norms, with one extreme being the military.
I'm curious -- what convinces you of the need for this shift?
I've seen this in a startup that grew to around 500 people, and it wasn't pretty. The office is full enough of politics as is, and it only gets worse when you have to campaign for your job.
Hiring externally side steps all of that, and can bring a fresh perspective.
So, I know my initial comment above was pretty snarky. My follow-up reply here will probably sound a bit argumentative. For what it's worth, I mean to engage genuinely in the below comment, and try to offer a little bit of whatever wisdom I've managed to acquire -- so that maybe your :-( can turn into a :-) as you engage with office politics.
I would put to you that it already is quite transparent -- to folks who know how to speak the language. Look closely at who is speaking, what is being said, and (perhaps most importantly) what isn't being said. Power in a corporation is measured in information and resources. So, a simple definition of office politics could be: the art of influencing the flow of information and resources.
If it doesn't feel transparent, the most obvious causes are (in rough dependency order): not being in the right rooms, not knowing what to listen for, or not knowing how to talk the talk.
Can I ask if this definition or mini-framework resonates for you? What have you tried to make things more transparent for yourself? How has it gone so far?
But that same argument was made in the real world of politics - I expect both Cardinal Richelieu and Talleyrand have quotations on it.
The point is not that there is a framework that advantages certain people (usually just being in the room requires certain advantages from birth) but that we should get rid of the framework and replace it with a new fairer one.
I have been in the rooms - and the people in them are not as smart as inciteful or as informed as many outside. We can do much better.
I will keep my idealism as it warms me during the long dark winter of selfishness
This makes sense in theory, but seems insanely weird in practice.
1. I start a company. It’s just me. Obviously, I lead the company.
2. It’s successful!
3. I hire two more people to help with some of the low-hanging fruit that I don’t have as much time for.
4. Do I need to be careful now so that they don’t just conspire against me, elect one of themselves to “run the company” and just take the assets and run?
Or is this too small of a company for this to make sense? Do we make it law for companies with more than 500 employees? So most companies will stay at 499 employees for as long as possible?
> 4. Do I need to be careful now so that they don’t just conspire against me, elect one of themselves to “run the company” and just take the assets and run?
If your company was structured as a co-op, yes. Of course you'd probably make them buy in at a certain level, or else their ownership would be lower than yours by enough that they wouldn't be able to vote you down (or at least not until their share vests several years down the line). But fundamentally you should have some skin in the game; they're putting their time and effort into the company too, you owe it to them not to fuck it up and they deserve to be able to replace you if you go off the rails.
> Or is this too small of a company for this to make sense? Do we make it law for companies with more than 500 employees? So most companies will stay at 499 employees for as long as possible?
We don't need to mandate the co-op model, just allow it to compete and let the best model win. Tweaks to antitrust enforcement, tax treatment, and securities laws would be a good way to level the playing field. IMO it's past time to start pulling back on limited liability too (which was meant to be something granted to corporations that promised significant public benefits, not something everyone gets by default).
Frankly we're already starting to see a rise in co-ops; traditionally they found it a lot harder to raise capital than traditional corporations, but nowadays there's a lot of capital sloshing around at the same time that cheaper communication, outsourcing and SAAS means lots of businesses (especially in tech) can be run in a more capital-light fashion than ever before. And who knows, maybe the CEO-as-dictator model will still win out. But we should let them fight on a level playing field so that the best model wins on its merits.
> If your company was structured as a co-op, yes. Of course you'd probably make them buy in at a certain level, or else their ownership would be lower than yours by enough that they wouldn't be able to vote you down (or at least not until their share vests several years down the line). But fundamentally you should have some skin in the game; they're putting their time and effort into the company too, you owe it to them not to fuck it up and they deserve to be able to replace you if you go off the rails.
Hang on, this sounds just like a C corp with shares that employees are required to buy. No?
Agreed completely. And perhaps it helps to think of the "invested value" of the company as a form of financial and human capital invested so far - when you hire those two people you have invested maybe a year of work. A year later you have invested two years, and so have they!
If you were all panning for gold (not terrible analogy for searching product market fit) then while you share the gold, you have doubled your chances
How does make sense in theory? They’ve just reinvented partnerships or cooperatives, which have not exactly outcompeted corporations despite long having had enough time to do so.
You run it like a co-op and get a stake in the company no matter how your position or job changes. And you can leave and sell off your stake when you want.
See the other thread about humans taking too long to make decisions between roughly equal options.
Requiring consensus for business decisions is a guarantee of slow decisions. With a good process, you can make the easy decisions in a timely manner, but the hard decisions will still take a long time, and there's going to be a lot more effort spent on coming to decisions.
You kind of said it by accident here:
> I am convinced that we need to move companies from effective hierarchical dictatorships to more democratic institutions.
You want to move from effective leadership to something else. ;p
It's much better, IMHO, to work towards making sure decisions can be made quickly and reconsidered if necessary, than to try to make sure decisions are made correctly at the cost of finding consensus.
Set time limits on decisions and revisit under certain circumstances.
I bet there is / will be a lot of fertile ground for research
Frankly just being transparent about such decision making will almost certainly put that company in the top quartile for good decision making - most large companies make many decisions - and anecdotally make them badly
The org chart is hierarchical but large companies don’t run on the org chart in practice. Executives do need to sell their vision into the org, even their own direct reporting division. There are millions of ways for staff to subtly or not so subtly sabotage executive plans.
The ability to succeed at aligning and motivating staff is one of the big differentiators between an effective C-level leader and an over-promoted manager. An effective C leader does need public leadership skills similar to a politician’s.
As does Putin or Xi. And they are good at it. But that does not mean the people under them are free or able to influence resource allocation in a fair equal manner.
Maybe being a golfing buddy does qualify for being a good CXO. To be a "golfing buddy", you need money and connections. Connections are important for that job, and wealth correlates with success and good finances, again important. Some of them are just born in wealthy families, but this is a positive, not a negative: wealthy family often give their kids good education, have lots of connections, and are used to being leaders. Golfing buddies also need to make good conversation, including on business topics, otherwise they won't stay buddies for long, again a valuable skill.
Being a golfing buddy certainly isn't an objective criteria, but it is not completely worthless, and it is easier to detect fakers when you spend a lot of time with them, or at least, it requires more effort from the faker. Objective criteria typically include past work, and CXOs usually have that too.
Maybe a good solution for CEOs in that situation is to be pretty clear about that - make the CxO role a purely "public face" role, and leave day to day operations to VP / SVPs.
In my experience that rarely happens, the "golfing buddy" types may be good at the golfing buddy stuff but also exert a lot of influence (often quite forcefully) on the overall org where their actions tend to be mostly negative.
In theory a good leader does exactly this. I once heard leadership defined as creating consensus. It is only when two VPs can’t make a decision does the good CxO step in to make a judgement call based on the arguments of all sides.
Even Steve Jobs talked about losing arguments at Apple and not getting his way. He hated it, but he recognized he maybe didn’t always know best and trusted people to make the right call if they could defend their rationale.
Too many leaders think their job is to be a decider, when it is really their job is to hire people they trust to make most decisions and then they make a few critical ones.
There is a history into the 2020s of blacks excluded from golf country clubs (most private clubs are exempt from discrimination laws). I believe the PGA didn't stop holding events at whites-only country clubs until 1990.
A unrelated item from the department of bad ideas that might be good ideas:
(Horns on)
Maybe voter ID laws aren't such a bad idea. Getting an ID and presenting it is like a "bare minimum" litmus test for whether or not you can comprehend and navigate government bureaucracy. If you can't comprehend and navigate the simplest form of it, how could you be qualified to make decisions on it?
(Horns off)
An unfortunate side effect of both these is that they keep one group in and everyone else locked out.
> If you can't comprehend and navigate the simplest form of it, how could you be qualified to make decisions on it?
Surely it's the reverse? People who are poorly served by existing government bureaucracy are those who most need to have input into the running of that bureaucracy.
It's also pretty hard to measure the performance of software engineers at the senior level. When hiring, I don't feel like it's wrong to encourage good software engineers to refer former colleagues they think are good.
I don't see why that would be wrong for C-level executive jobs either. It's really the same thing -- trusting the opinion of people you know and think are good is a better bet than drinking from a fire hose of job applicants of widely varying quality.
At any job where your purpose is "leadership" and "impact" it is difficult to quantify success. People have tried to measure with things like OKRs, but ultimately a lot of what successful senior people bring to the table is hard to measure.
One measure of a high-quality C-level performer is the quality of their teams. The best C-level people can bring in very high-quality managers and individual contributors underneath them. Below average C-level people really struggle on this front.
Also, for some C-level roles there are good and objective ways to measure performance. For example, for a Chief Revenue Officer you have (obviously) revenue. There are a ton of confounding variables of course but in general CROs who consistently out-perform plan are better than those who consistently under-perform plan.
I've definitely seen CEOs with enormous amounts of success (in the companies they led previously) bring in dogshit teams to their current company. I've also seen dogshit CEOs bring in amazing people.
1. The board is constantly dealing with the CEO, and CEOs are very good at taking credit for things regardless of their actual impact. So they create a subjective impression of being very important.
2. The CEO is only one person, so throwing (say) 1% of the company's profits at them seems like a great investment for all that stuff they're "doing".
If enough boards play this game, CEO pay is driven through the roof.
I think it's about risk aversion and social proof. The CEO can usually persuade the board that they're important, and the board can easily pay them a lot, so why not do so, rather than risk them leaving? Once enough boards do that, it becomes the "going rate for CEOs" i.e. social proof / herding takes over.
Also, the aforementioned difficulty of measuring CEO performance perversely becomes an asset. When people don't know the quality of what they're buying, but they feel that quality is very important, they'll turn to any proxy (Harvard on resume, butt was in chair while previous company was doing well) and pay top dollar for that. You can't pay for quality, but it's extremely easy to pay for scarcity if you really want to.
It just comes back to... if you have a lot of money to spend, and the purchase might matter, you'll often be willing to spend a lot for the "best", even if there's no evidence or reason to believe the "best" is really of great value. I've seen this in my own behavior and that of my spouse (what if the most expensive preschool actually is the best one?)
This is a tough topic, in the same way that it’s hard for non-technical founders to make their first technical hire. How do you hire a CFO if you don’t even know what a CFO does day to day? Your board will likely be of help, but it’s ultimately your decision and you will earn the lumps from a bad decision.
I’d argue that it’s very hard to hire C-level executives outside of your core competency. Not that it’s inherently hard to hire at the C-level, but because it’s very hard to hire for skills you don’t have, can’t understand and can’t select for.
I think part of the reason it is so hard with C-level executives is that they are not under the same scrutiny and control as a person as the rest of the employees. Everything else stems from this: the corruption, incompetence, abuse of other employees.
Serious red flags about C-level executives:
* Refuses to follow rules set by Security and Compliance.
* Pulls people from existing projects without talking to their managers or require work to be done without logging a ticket or whatever the process is
* Hires a lot of people that report only to the executive and are unaccountable to the rest of the organization; doesn't use any of the established hiring practices in the company.
* Ignores people they didn't hire and the deals they've made with their managers
* Mechanically imports practices and processes from another organization
* Uses arguments from authority to justify their decisions
* Behaves inappropriately in a workplace environment, including abuse and harassment
All of this is hard to define, but the point is the same standards apply to everyone. I know that as an organization grows bigger getting organizational work done becomes that much harder, but it is the executive's job to foster a good culture not bypass it or worse have habitual rule-breaking to hide more serious offenses, incompetence or abuse.
If I were a founder that needs to hire C-level execs I would also hire secretaries for them to ensure paper trails were left and processes were followed; I would want to make sure the secretaries record and ensure:
* who they are meeting and that there are MoM of the important meetings, the execs can work flexibly but they need to record their calendar. They also need to get help scheduling internal and external meetings they are required to attend
* all their requests are filed correctly
* help them with preparing reports
* file all documentation as per guidance by Security and Compliance
* immediately tell me if anything inappropriate is happening
All of these things are typically done for regular employees by their team-leads and managers. If C-level people feel like the bureaucracy is too much they need to reduce it for everyone, not just themselves. You don't need to give each C-level exec a personal secretary - a team of two (so they can also take vacations and sick leaves) is enough for the whole C-team.
This is a really great list, and matches most of my "corporate" experience.
I would add one simple caveat, though. It's usually difficult to observe and measure all the listed items, unless you have been working with such executive for a long period of time.
The hard part is to figure this out in months, not years.
Edit: or possibly, to figure it out before actually hiring the fraud.
The bottleneck is the CEO as this is the role that is supposed to figure it out and more often than not the CEO's attention is on 120% percent is on sales, investors or a fire to put out.
That is why I think a small secretarial/admin staff working very closely with the C-level can be a useful as a police + help with ordering the chaos bad behavior usually hides behind.
Hey let’s not forget the founders who hire a buddy or two and give them C-level titles when they’re woefully unqualified for that role and proceed forever drag the company down.
That happens, but I don't think that's really relevant to pg's tweet. I mean, if a founder is willing to hire a buddy and deliberately overtitle them, that's easily the fault of the founder and, for better or for worse, shouldn't be a mystery if things go south.
That's very different from what pg is referring to, where, even through all the best of intentions and due diligence of a founder, a shitty C level is hired because they excel at bullshitting.
It depends on the stage of the company. Hiring a buddy early in the company's life might make total sense, especially if willing to work for primarily sweat equity compensation.
I think it’s funny when half the employees at tiny startups have C-level titles.
At other companies I worked at before I got into tech, you’d just be a project manager or accountant. But in tech your the COO or CFO.
I’m not sure if it’s instagramifcation/peacocking and this is common in all industries now or if it’s tech culture where every start up is just the next unicorn-in-waiting.
I wonder about titling conventions at smaller Mittelstand companies or other places where they are content to just work and make money.
Isn't part of the problem actually that we're hiring at all for these kinds of positions? Why isn't it possible to invest in the people who already showed up and demonstrated motivation to get things done?
The cynical (but maybe also realistic?) part of me wants to say that we hire for these roles to satisfy the class of people who feel entitled to occupy them. That is, we have this big educational apparatus churning out MBAs and so we better have some place to put them.
I'm not convinced that the old stories of climbing up through the ranks somehow originated in a world that worked really any differently than the world we live in today. We've just built up a lot of momentum moving in the direction of bad business culture. But there's no real reason we can't begin moving back in the right direction right away!
Because you need specific skills and experience, not only motivation?
When you need an accountant, you don't invest in a motivated office assistant to learn accounting, you hire someone who already spent the years to do it properly, since there are many steps between a random person and an accountant and most likely none of your current employees are "almost-accountants" who are ready to take the next step. And when you need a CFO, you don't invest in a motivated accountant to learn how to do that, you hire someone who has already spent the years to do it properly, since there are many steps between an accountant and a CFO and most likely none of your current employees are "almost-CFOs" who are ready to take the next step.
Startup founders hiring random "good people" without competence at the appropriate scale as their CxOs is a good way to disaster.
Because Executives are (besides other things) the voice of the client in a company. Engineers typically have a very bad understanding of the clients they are made to serve. Of course that doesn't make them bad engineers.
I wasn't really talking about the engineering/management divide. I was more talking about the culture of management as a profession and how misguided it's become. It's just like Paul G said. You have this whole class of workers who often act as though it's mostly their job to develop and market a personal brand. And the people left in their wake ask themselves dumb questions like, "How come that person who knew nothing about our business but looked good on paper couldn't end up walking the walk?"
Ive always wondered why executives get such generous compensation packages. Are most people unwilling to take these roles at "pretty damn good" incentives packages, so companies are forced to give "crazy lucrative" incentive packages? Are there really VPs that would pass up a CEO position if it didn't come with a 25 million golden parachute clause? If it was only 5 million, they walk?
have now encountered two C-level execs who came from big names, were airdropped into our startup, and then proceeded to completely mangle the parts of the company they ran. always takes at least a year for people to realize (i didn't realize it myself for the first one until AFTER he was fired seemingly out of the blue, and then you start to pattern match the subsequent ones. my personal reflection is this is a horrendous waste but is part of the benefit of being an early employee at a startup, that you get to see other pple's costly mistakes while having a lower stake in the cost. I didn't know to trust my instincts then, because org chart = truth when you are new to the game).
First-time founders, CEOs, and even employees should understand the playbook of the Incompetent Leader (IL).
The IL is savvy & charismatic, and excels at 4 things:
1) Feign competence
2) Create confusion
3) Buy time
4) Fail up
The IL playbook & what to do about it
The IL’s most favorite move is simple: Buy Time
The IL’s 2nd most favorite move is: Buy More Time.
After doing this a few times, the IL’s masterstroke is: Fail Up.
The IL will repeat this a few times over a 20-30 year career to reach “spectacular success”
Here’s how it works:
Once upon a time:
IL joins a new company, with much fanfare from the CEO, who really wants this to work out.
Remember, the IL is incapable of making a significant, singular impact.
IL doesn’t want anyone to know this.
So what does IL do?
IL sets the playbook in motion.
Step 1 -
IL:
“I don’t have the right people. Cannot execute without the right team.”
CEO:
“I guess that’s reasonable. Do what you have to.”
Result:
IL has just bought 6-9 months to go hire org leaders, managers, while hiding incompetence behind charisma & confidence.
[after 6-9 months]
Step 2 -
IL:
“Have a better team now. Look how well I’ve hired! But my org doesn’t have the right structure. Not aligned with new strategy, worried execution will suffer.”
CEO:
“Hmmm… fine, go ahead.”
Result:
IL has just bought 3 months to plan re-org, 3 more to let it settle
[after 6-9 months]
Step 3 -
IL:
“Okay, that reorg helped & my people are firing on all cylinders. But I don’t have enough cross-functional alignment. We need a company re-org/Need to bring those functions into my org/Need new cross-func leaders”
CEO (pot committed):
“Fine, let’s do X, Y, Z here”
[after 6 more months]
Step 4 -
IL:
“Some of my key people left because of frustration with all of this. I need to replenish the gaps. Btw, look at these amazing results last quarter!”
CEO to IL:
“OK let me think about it”
CEO (thinking):
Those results are due to market tailwinds & not THAT amazing
[Privately, CEO makes a call to an executive search firm to begin finding a replacement for IL]
[At the next CEO/IL 1:1]
CEO:
“It’s time to part ways”
IL (after expressing some incredulity & outrage):
“I understand. I want to do what's best for the company. Let’s work on a comms plan for my departure”
[IL or CEO send an announcement to the company reflecting, thanking, looking onward/upward, etc]
Step 5 -
(most vital move for IL)
IL (in interview with hot company Foobar):
“Here’s everything I built at previous company. Company grew 70% in my 2 yrs there despite all the challenges I faced”
CEO of Foobar:
“When can you start?”
[and THAT is how our IL fails up]
THE END
---
he continues with a "what you should do about it", which if you are still reading here at this point go give him a "superfollow" ($10/month for his product/executive thoughts, very worth it) https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1339997399909994496
Most early CXO hires are for the things that CEO's don't want to do but now have to be done. They want to hire someone who can take stuff completely off their plate and get it done.
Identifying a poor CTO or CPO is pretty straightforward for technical founders. It's harder to identify whether your new CMO is shitty when they are crafting a marketing strategy from scratch.
Someone else might think they're really good. That someone else might themselves be incompetent, but might also have people who think they're good.
This gets less likely as the relationship graph grows, but I don't think people are good at judging competence without widely recognized and respected metrics.
This is why getting friends and connections is a powerful strategy, because many fields are not interested in establishing fair gatekeeping. And for some very difficult roles, it's way easier to make friends than to be competent.
This is made all the more difficult when competence is a quickly moving target. The positive referral is a rarely moving target though.
While I agree with a lot of what he says, I also think there is a bit of wishful thinking when it comes to "world class leaders".
Just like you can't hire the top 1% exclusively, your leaders won't be top 1%. Chances are they will be somewhere in the middle. Creating a "culture" that allows for initiative at different parts of the company is going to do a lot more for you than rolling the dice on getting exclusively top quality leadership.
Re: "Culture": I mean this in the group dynamics sense, not the meaningless corporate-speak sense.
The primary benefit of F-off is that if you play the game correctly you can be well compensated for doing so and maybe even get hired back to fix the mess 18 months later.
I worked for a place whose former CEO (before I joined) basically committed the company to sales contracts it had no hope of fulfilling, then gtfo'd before the delivery dates, to pump up his CV with "closed so many millions in sales with company X".
IME, these folks are hard to filter out; takes a few weeks/months to figure it out. But, because they are already somehow a CxO and you hired for CxO, then they'll still get considered for their next CxO - cause the short stint where their incompetence was detected will be just a blip - their previous gig was the fail-up that fools you (me, and others I know) and will fool those after you as well.
A lot of anger in the comments here. Not exactly sure who it's directed at: the existence of connected people? The founder who makes the bad hiring decision? The fact that their compensation is so high? All of the above?
Unless you're advocating for capped compensation or removing autonomy in who a founder is allowed to hire, if you're angry, it's probably a form of jealousy. It's somewhat natural to feel jealous at people who don't "work hard enough" (by your standards) and yet reap larger rewards than you. Or who have seemingly casual lives (by your standards), yet get more opportunities. It's also easy to pretend that jealousy is actually selfless outrage and claim offense against everyone else (for whom your outrage represents).
But the same could likely be said about you, if you talked to the right people. Where I used to live, "Go home, tech bro" was common graffiti to see. I knew a woman in the beauty industry whose partner was in the tech industry. She resented how much money that he made because, her words, "she worked harder than he did." As if her idea of work was how value should be calculated.
While your point about jealousy is a good one, MBA-ification is real and has real consequences, many of which might reasonably provoke frustration
I do agree the anger is ideally channeled into some attempt to productively frame, understand and solve the problem, but dismissing it all as sour grapes doesn't seem very helpful either
I saw the issue pithily summarized recently:
> Salesmen, in any field other than sales, are like an invasive species who outcompete the natives with their superior social polish, but who struggle to actually do anything, which leads to systemic underperformance and the erosion of trust, which only makes the competitive necessity of salesmanship even greater
We need to build social systems which don't select preferentially for relentless salespeople and smooth talking charlatans if we want to live in a prosperous, harmonious society. The optimal proportion of these is in all likelihood not zero, but does anyone believe it's as high as we see now?
>We need to build social systems which don't select for relentless salespeople and smooth talking charlatans if we want to live in a prosperous, harmonious society. The optimal proportion of these is in all likelihood not zero, but does anyone believe it's as high as we see now?
I see the good intentions here, but I don't really support it. Would I like people to lie and cheat less? Yes. Would I like a society where nobody can lie and cheat? No, because of what that enforcement would entail.
Agreed, it's better to tolerate some amount of abuse than eliminate every potential for it by force. I just think it's possible to find a better balance than we have now, if not imperative if we want to survive civilizational adolescence
Without fail, there is always one comment on HN that is faux-insightful but really just being contrarian towards the general tone of other comments without much substance.
You don't need to advocate for capped compensation or removing autonomy to be righteously angry over inept leadership. You should be angry over inept leadership, it's essentially corruption, and hurts everyone else in the organization. I don't even know what the point of this comment is.
You responded to my point about about capped compensation or removing autonomy, so I think you understand what my point is: the anger people are expressing, including so-called "righteous anger," is totally hypocritical unless you are advocating for measures that would also apply to you. If you're not willing to commit to those measures, then you're just expressing jealousy that it's not you in that situation.
But why does capped compensation help? The issue is not that people are highly paid, but that undeserving, corrupt, and even fraudulent people are highly paid. Capped compensation may well be a good idea (not sure), but it doesn't really help with corruption and incompetence. The point is that there are already double standards that apply to the average worker, but less so to the C-suite (particularly in startups).
I don't think it would be accurate to consider my anger over the CEO who awarded themselves a $25M bonus while laying off hundreds of my colleagues and tanking the company to be "jealousy".
Edit: I apologize for the aggressive tone in the original reply, though I disagree with your take it wasn't necessary.
Thanks for keeping it civil, I appreciate it! The capped compensation is for the "they're paid too much" angle. Removing autonomy in hiring is for the "they're undeserving/corrupt" angle. That way there's a different process for hiring that isn't corrupted by nepotism/cronyism.
I'm not trying to sound like I'm discrediting your experience or feelings, but I only really have your side of what happened, so of course your experience will sound justified from your perspective. There's a lot of possibilities for why that could have happened, not including ones that nobody could know about except upper management.
I may be wrong about my assessment of the leadership's competence in this case (I'm not, but I can see how you may not be able to know) but that doesn't mean jealousy is the motive. Your skepticism should be equally applied to the psychological motives of the commenters, in my opinion.
I'd absolutely commit to measures like more transparency and objectivity in hiring criteria, and of course that would apply to me as well. I've got nothing but contempt for the "senior developers" of HN who think writing fizzbuzz or coding on a whiteboard is beneath them; I have zero problem with being asked to demonstrate the concrete skills that I'm bringing to a position (and if that means I get beaten to the punch by someone with a less impressive degree/CV who happens to be better at the actual work, well, them's the breaks). I just wish the same applied at the top as well.
Jealously would imply wanting to be that guy? By that definition I for one would be jealous of a Mega Millions winner (although I probably shouldn't be) but would not be jealous of a good-for-nothing exec who accomplished nothing other than collecting huge paycheck while letting a bunch of people down who all put their trust in them.
Even though I think some people are jealous there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be mad. Often highly paid people are where they are due to nepotistic inertia. It's extra infuriating because they all pretend it's merit, and those that admit there's a broken system that enables their wealth ignore any personal responsibility for it's existence. Everyone else is working the system after all, don't want to be left behind. In general many (most?) highly paid people are in that position because of a system of exploitation that they're tacitly involved in and turn a blind eye to. So yeah, plenty of reasons to be mad.
At a startup the most common failure mode I've seen is hiring someone who, even if they were good at there last job at BiggerCo, is terrible at what the startup (in a different business development stage) needs.
Hiring a person who's been running a thousand-person org to take over a 1-10 person org is often insanity, but it can look smart because "wow, they were doing so much at such a successful place and have so many great stories to share." Run a 1000-person org and after all, even if you suck, some of your sub-departments are likely to hit on some great results that you can share in future interviews!
As a worker, I create wealth. There is also a parasitic class of heirs who are LPs for VCs, or who get dividend, rent and interest checks - rentiers expropriating surplus labor time of those who work. Yes, my attitude towards them is about what Lenin's were for the tsar and his parasitical family.
I can care less what those who are parasites off my labor think of me, and their cadre who somehow benefit off this paraditism. Workers work, create wealth and have no need of these parasites. Yes we resent them, and will eventually eliminate this parasitism.
Is the management of workers and capital not work? Where can I see workers who have self-organized (without management) to the size of a thousand-person corporation?
We live in a society ... where humans do human things. Cronyism, nepotism, and tribalism are normal human behaviors, regardless of how some people think humans should behave. Our fellow humans are under no obligation to surpass humanity and behave altruistically. I think a more useful question is how do we utilize or exploit our human behavior to improve ourselves and our societies.
I doubt that most people here are angry about this. For me, at least, my anger arises from the opportunity cost.
First, if you spend a lot of money (and time) supporting a dud executive then you you’ve lost a bunch of runway. These people are often in a position to put startups into a death spiral from which they will never recover.
So it follows that as a founder that idea is dead - it’s almost impossible to restart. If you’ve put your heart and soul into a business, spent a year raising funds and putting a team together, and then some bozo is parachuted into a position of authority and proceeds to throws all your hard work out the window as they miss their own targets and crash into the terrain, yeah that’s gonna make you pretty pissed off because you won’t get that opportunity ever again.
It’s not about jealousy. It’s about the destruction of value.
If growing a startup into a successful business was a solved problem, then there wouldn't be as many failures. My point is: why does their appear to be an assumption that only a "dud" exec fails? Where is the allowance for the fact that there are a lot of random variables?
Don't get me wrong, I know executives make poor decisions (and have seen a few myself first hand), but also I've seen decisions that nobody knew were right or not (or at least they didn't say so, at the time). Yet if it failed, of course the armchair quarterbacks come out with the "I told you so."
I don't think that's the assumption at all. Failure can - and does - happen to everyone, and doesn't on its own imply incompetence. We all make bad assumptions and bad projections, and that's part of the game.
But an incompetent executive will avoid making decisions altogether, and will pretend to lead by setting goals that are entirely detached from reality.
In my experience, the lack of decision making and inappropriate goal setting is quite obvious to those of us "in the trenches". You can't, for example, expect to triple your sales in the next quarter unless you're doing something to support that goal, like increasing the size of the sales team or doing more marketing. But I have worked for people who have set sales targets thinking that this is all that's needed to make sales. These people are good at talking about the "what" but no good at working out the "how".
There is strategic thinking, tactical thinking and wishful thinking. Incompetent executives generally operate using the latter framework.
I think there's justified anger on the part of people who have seen companies they enjoy working at be damaged, either in culture or in more direct results by a poor C-level hire, and most people have experienced situations where this has been abundantly clear from the outset.
It's completely reasonable to want to see a company you work for succeed, and it's completely reasonable to be frustrated when those companies make obviously bad decisions that put your job in jeopardy or make the company a worse place to work for. Particularly with startups, a lot of your career success is fairly closely tied to the success of the companies you work for (no one cares about hiring a eng or other role from a startup who crashed and burned).
So-Called C-level Executives do So-Called C-level work, which doesn't relate to anything in reality that founders are used to. A lot of C-level hires is about looking the part and talking the talk, but not actually doing much work. The most egregious and useless C-level hires are usually CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, CTOs, and often COOs. The CFO sometimes carries their own weight, especially in going-public or already-public companies.
The sad part is that it's usually the investors that demand the C-levels, and often when a new CEO is brought in by the investors, they bring their C-level friends. Look at the chaos caused by all those new hires (and culture) at companies like DataRobot. A perfect example of why C-levels are hard to hire by the founders, and usually is the "new team" brought in.
As a CIO/CTO, I am very hands-on, but I don't feel offended by this statement; I do agree that there are many companies where the CIO/CTO are often vendor management, and more administrative than technical.
I'm not sure I agree about COOs though. My experience with COOs is that they typically have the pulse of the company and are actually quite close to the ground.
Didn't even mention "Chief Customer Officers". We hired a CCO out of a friendly F500 with absolutely no experience. The unscalable support costs alone have him as a top contender for why we're at risk of running the whole company into the ground. Conveniently, everything in the org is the problem except him.
There are so many nonsense C-levels. I agree on CCO. I've seen "Chief Innovation Officers" "Chief AI Officers" and more and I couldn't tell you what they are actually accomplishing, and why there needs to be a separate C-level from the CIO, CTO, etc. It seems like it's about padding at the top and getting the friends of the CEO in levels of management.
Putting him in that position was absolutely about external connections and nothing else. Just pure idiocracy that the hire comes with power and they actually let him use it. Meanwhile there's a half dozen under him with decades of relevant experience who are completely stone-walled.
Someone actually has the title of "Chief Go-To-Market Officer" separate from the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Product Officer, and a bunch more. What is this all about really?
This. And situation is even worse when as a [foreign] startup(ish) company you enter a new territory / region / country. At least once you realise that your chances of getting deadbeat execs that can't get hired by any reasonable company are disproportionally high, you can start approaching the hiring more realistically. And post hiring, implement appropriate monitoring regime to avoid irreversible damage these new execs can cause.
Why I am asserting above? Because when you're a new business (at least for locale X) with little or no name recognition and often unable to pay very, very handsomely, why would any reasonable person risk their career and jump into some odd ball company whose name alone makes your pals at the golf club grin.
My personal experience has been that the only way this has worked consistently (for B2B businesses) has been to send some of the core team member or a founder to a new location; then grow your customer base there, generate name recognition, and then ideally get a hint from your customer that someone might be considering change of jobs at their other supplier (potentially in similar vertical), and then approach that person. And once things observably run 'normally' and there is accountability, rinse and repeat at a next locale.
As a side note, this is where I feel VCs with their networks of 'vetted' execs could potentially help. But haven't really seen it happening in practise either (because the VCs have always been from old locale, not from the new).
I work for a YC company called Coinbase and it is absolutely terrible here because of the C level execs. They are terrible at their jobs and from the inside, the org seems to be falling apart. I've noticed that since the layoffs there is no motivation anywhere. People are hardly on slack and it takes forever to get anything done. I hate blind but it's a constant complaint that no one is working anymore.
Seems like Brian was fooled into hiring all these leaders that don't understand people or the space but have great credentials. As for Brian himself, he is the most uninspiring leader I have ever worked under. He is a platitude robot saying nothing more than 'Crypto will lead to economic freedom' and 'now is the time to build'. Before the crypto crash it seems like the only motivator was money, now that that is gone the company is slowly spiraling and no one cares. Mostly because the execs don't care, the CFO and CPO both cashed out all of their shares during IPO. If they don't believe how can we lowly engineers.
A blind comment that really resonated with me and the few others I've shared with: https://imgur.com/a/jrA3oCL
Another thing, if Brian reads this he will probably go on another twitter rant rather than actually address the company.
> He is a platitude robot saying nothing more than 'Crypto will lead to economic freedom' and 'now is the time to build'. Before the crypto crash it seems like the only motivator was money
Yes, that's what it's always been about with coinbase. That's why they sold their equity on a traditional finance platform for USD $ and why Brian bought a $130m mansion. 10 years later what has crypto accomplished besides grifting people out of their savings through 3% commissions and scams? Do you know how useful Google, or like any other company, was after 10 years?
How else could Coinbase have ended up? It's a company for people to speculate on digital tokens. There's no grand mission to the thing, his rhetoric has always struck me as hollow and self-serving. "Create more economic freedom" lol. I have an account, the app didn't even show you your return till fairly recently.
Coinbase will die, even if crypto survives. But he's already taken out his millions.
We have a societal bias that some good/bad leader takes over and they then gain all the credit/blame. This is histories “great man” theory[1]. It seems in contrast to the “blame” free culture espoused by many in tech where we look at the full system and not place credit/blame on one person.
This bias cuts both ways. We seek out miracle worker C-level execs and simultaneously blame them when it all goes to hell. We don’t see the full ecosystem people operate in, which is typically more complicated than one leader. We overvalue the “strong man” style “leaders” and undervalue selfless, humble leadership that focuses on creating a healthy ecosystem where people don’t spend all their energies jockeying for credit or to avoid blame.
Sadly the selfless leaders don’t sell themselves as well as the egotistical sociopaths
No doubt. Any number of c-levels I have worked with are prolific climbers whose numero uno skill is Network. Lords of LinkedIn. The kind of people who will say and do literally anything to keep their fingernails dug deep. Their actions appear to align with the needs of a company, so most are tolerated if not celebrated.
I saw this first hand: company hired a "killer CEO" from a non-tech firm based on the boards insistence, he brought along his CFO. A year in, the company almost died and had to raise an emergency round. The CEO took off w/ a huge amount of equity and, meanwhile, the CFO had completely screwed the books up.
As an employer, I have seen low-performing employees resign because they found a senior/management/VP-level title elsewhere, and I think “well, good for you, I suppose”… I imagine people like this just fail their way up, learning enough jargon along the way to impress the next employer.
Would love to hear examples of companies bringing on an expensive CXO that transformed and empowered their teams to success. How high must the upside be here given the failure rate?
Having met some truly great axe-persons in the C suite over the years I toy with the idea of making it my retirement plan, as in taking ambitious but ingloriously unpopular roles crafting and executing M&A in hard tech. Former MBA profs I've worked with in school do consulting on this for these execs and its fascinating but not sure where I'd cut my teeth outside of seeking mentorship with folks engaging in those and not just regular M&A.
Another aspect of this that I observed more than once is the fawning reverence that the managerial class and other middlemen seemed to have towards the c-suite.
I remember the excitement surrounding the arrival of new execs, including details about their house and fancy cars.
There seems to be a belief that if you've made it to SVP or better, your talent and intelligence goes without saying.
My interactions with these folks were limited, but without exception, I was far from impressed with any of them.
I'm a marketing consultant that's worked with dozens of well funded startups at various stages and can attest that CMOs are useless or worse 90% of the time.
Might be a dumb question, but do C-level execs fake it till they make it ? By make it I mean actually get good at the job they get hired for. I know this is a stupid question but it happens quite a lot in tech where a person gets hired not knowing everything out of box but they learn and navigate through it to become successfull Software Engineer.
I wonder if this is also true for founders, but by virtue of selection bias "good" founders hiring "bad" executives is more common than good executives joining bad founders (because good founders' companies last longer and hire more people than bad founders)
I've worked with multiple people like this that have disastrously crashed and burned, and to a one without exception, they're always at some new company with the same title. Absolutely nothing seems to stick to them.
This is not so unusual compared to other jobs - I've worked with crappy engineer coworkers who went on to bigger and better jobs. Always a fun day when your peer who you thought was slowing the team down announces they're leaving for Google, say! Most people fail sideways at worst, vs flunking out of the ability to tackle a role again ever in the future.
If the assumption is that other people would be better at these roles and the hiring is broken (this is PG's assumption, as far as I can tell from the tweet), how would we better identify those people who'd do better?
(Personally, I think we're under-estimating the amount of it that's caused by "it's fucking hard.")
Are there actual examples of high-ranking engineers transitioning into tech company C-Suites? Maybe these kinds of roles shouldn't be careers, but something you do for a period of time.
it happens with CTOs. At many companies, CTO is less of a management role and more of "the leader of all of the principal engineers and source of innovation for the company". VPE reports to CTO and does the administrative side of things, CTO sets technical vision. Most other c suite type roles are generally bucketed into sales, marketing, operations, and if you are particularly unlucky: product, "Information", and human resources.
I’m just past the year Mark in being a CTO after a career as an engineer / architect. I won’t claim to be an amazing exec, but I still don’t understand how anyone could succeed in this role without having significant engineering experience. I approach this as “my turn” at playing the executive role - because I finally said to myself that there has to be someone who can code in the exec team of my next job. I intend for this to be my one and only time in a role like this - to do it well just requires more time and energy to sustain it for decades.
I've seen extremely sales / marketing oriented CTOs that worked well despite having not much / very outdated tech skills. It usually works pretty well when you have a lot of enterprise sales, and the CTO is often there to help get through procurement, relay technical requirements from sales calls, bizdevvy stuff re: integrations / platform, etc.
Every time I've seen that pattern work though, it's been paired with a very effective VP Eng, and quite a lot of autonomy on teams owing to the lack of a technical vision, or at least a technical vision that can be directly implemented (i.e. the CTO might have vague directional goals, but there's a lot of legwork required to turn that into something real).
do they actually have a hand in day to day technical decisions, setting technical tone or otherwise impact the technical environment or are they mostly doing abstract management? is it a role that is good for people who aim to have extensive impact in creating a technical culture or is it mostly people management and exec stuff but at a high level?
Define decent size? I’m CTO a a ~450 person company, but the the tech team is more like ~60.
My job is to set the technical tone about how we’re building software for the engineering teams, to determine our technology strategy from the business strategy set by the CEO, sometimes to just be a technology handy man for the rest of the company.
I stay quite close to what my teams are doing, and I call out hopefully helpful direction from the sidelines to make sure that they’re all pulling in the right direction and don’t get pushed off course by other stakeholders.
I dealt enough with C-Level (was one myself some 20+ years ago). They come in all kind of shapes. One was very entertaining. Whenever I try to schedule something with him he would look into his book and start reciting - in 3 days I am of to Hawaii for vacation, in 5 days I am driving my kid to XYZ championship, in 7 days I am driving my other kid to art classes, I am off to my pilot's classes etc. etc. I just prayed - please, please do not tell me that you've scheduled sex tomorrow at 3PM. I've had enough details of you private life to last me lifetime and when the fuck do you actually work?
>“I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the
industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses
two of these qualities.
>Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General
Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are
stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the
highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental
clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious
must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
He also put together the Schlieffen plan that led to Germany wagining a 2 front war against superior adversaries that had time tables planned down to the hour that ended up not taking in to account numerous factors that ended up leading to the most horrible experiences in human history.
... but in the military, it's generally not possible to 'fail up' into a similar role in another organization when things become uncomfortable. A clever lazy Prussian officer can't build out their resume for a couple years and then go work for the French, so they have to actually stick around and make those difficult decisions. Whereas in tech, it's not just possible but normalized to change companies with some frequency, and a lazy clever C-level exec may not stay around long enough to see the outcome of their difficult decisions.
There are more than enough positions in the military for officers to fail up for decades. They don't usually end up at the highest ranks, but it happens. Often the path upwards is to be hired by a defense contractor, oil company, financial company. Usually it's a reward for getting a specific company a nice contract and the promise of good connections/lobbying.
My grandfather used to say "there are two types of people in the world: lifters and leaners."
I was skeptical when I first heard it. I still question the many special cases or situations that fall somewhere in between. That said, the longer I live and work, the more I see (or hear of) the leaners ... and their enablers.
Indeed. And the worst part, leaning is contagious. At some point, good people start wondering why they should lift if everybody else is leaning. They either quit, or start coasting.
It's not the person who does excellent work that gets promoted or climb up the corporate ladder, but the person who knows how to sell their work, as sad as this is.