CEOs of medium/large companies are the face of the company which means making a couple key decisions per week (a few work hours) and meeting with current/prospective clients (leisure activities). Coupled with making far more $ than the rest of the employees, I suspect they're both bored at the office and feel downgraded to a regular employee. Thus, out-of-office with nothing to show.
But if the company is _coincidentally_ doing great, then the CEO gets credit. If it's tanking, the CEO leaves for another CEO position because the main prerequisite of being a CEO is having been a CEO, regardless of performance.
I’ve worked closely with the CEOs of a few big companies. People see a few moments of glamor and think that is the job but the vast majority of what they do is an astonishingly shitty and thankless job. You have to be a certain kind of masochist to do what is required in that role day after day. You are also never off the clock, so they never really get a proper break to recharge and prevent burnout. No one with any sense would do that job for a normal paycheck and perks, it isn’t worth it.
The reality is that few people have the mental and psychological constitution required to do the job of CEO at any decent sized company. You don’t need to look further than startups to empirically know that most people, even when self-selecting, can’t do the job of CEO even when playing the easy mode of a small company.
I did a period of two years as the CEO of a smallish tech-company (~ 100 employees, turnover of 15M€) and it was stressful as hell even if we were doing OK financially. The big thing is that you're the last defender, everything difficult or uncomfortable task ends with you having to pick it up, for everyone it's a choice to pass it on to the next level but for you it isn't. This combined with the monthly "grades" in terms of commercial result which was new to me coming from a tech background was tough. In the end I chose to go back to tech but it's not something that I want undone, it was a learning experience and these days I'm a lot more careful to let things slip through to the next layer.
Yep, a lot of black and white takes. And I'm not a CEO.
A big portion of the job is just being able to not crumble apart, over a long period of time. Another metric: How prone are you to making a horrible decision when under extreme stress, instead of an average one?
The depths at which the worst case scenarios can bottom out are deep. However, when the downside does not materialize, all that is left is an average decision. And average decisions are easy to critique in hindsight, for the CEOs themselves, as well as for most other people.
In that sense, programming is similar: When you steer clear of horrible code, consinstently and over a long period of time, the plain looking stuff that comes out the other end can look like a given to somebody who hasn't been through enough code filled with bad decisions to appreciate their absence.
Everyone on this site is so anti-C-suite it's crazy. All the standard "big company CEO bad, me entry level employee good" talking points. You would think that a site based on entrepreneurship would have people on it that have more of an understanding of what running a business is actually like.
HN is fairly ideologically diverse. There is a lot of the stuff you're complaining about but there's plenty of the opposite too.
Where I work, the people higher than me (remote or not) work constantly, around the clock, to the point where I worry about their health.
I also like going into the office 3 days a week. It's a nice space, I like the separation between work and home, and there's good food nearby. As long as I'm allowed to WFH a couple days a week and when I have an appointment or something.
I'd love to shadow a CxO one day and see for myself how much hard work it is. I have a (likely flawed) picture in my mind of someone who's jetting around the world, constantly on their cell phone all day from Paris in the morning and Tokyo in the evening, saying yes and no to people but not really doing any actual hard labor or much complex cognitive thought-work. But who knows, they live in this parallel universe, physically separated from commoners like me. I've never even seen anyone in my company with a CxO title or even any of their direct reports in the SVP layer. They might as well live in the North Pole.
You can't measure a CEO's value by their hours or even effort. Their ability to recruit, raise money, sell, and how well they make important decisions are critical. Most of them are in meetings all day, everyday.
You can't shadow a CEO but you can read books written by those who have. Try reading the biographies of Jobs or Musk by Walter Isaacson. He had long term access to them and shadows them throughout their day for years.
You can argue that these two aren't representative and put in more effort than the average CEO, but you can't argue that their experience of being CEO isn't extremely intense.
Good CEOs are constantly juggling all kinds of complex thought-work, to a much greater extent than the average line worker would be happy doing. Programmers in particular get stressed and unhappy if you ask them to context switch between unrelated tasks, deal with interruptions and regularly make decisions that are completely ambiguous. They also probably won't be happy if they have to spend a lot of time on relationship building, performance evaluations or managing the performance of people under them.
A good CEO's typical day will easily switch between a dozen different things - a product review in the morning where they're expected to give immediate and ideally insightful feedback to a team that's been preparing for months (remembering to manage their own expectations and happyness, you wouldn't want your star designer quitting on you), then immediately after a meeting with the finance team about some complicated tax issue, and then a recruiting call with someone to replace the head of sales who you just had to fire because they {missed their targets, leaked confidential info to the press, insulted a key customer, got targeted by a woke mob} and then you move on to lunch, briefly, which you probably eat alone because none of your immediate reports particularly want to hang out with the boss and anyway you need to read a report on your competitor's new product launch. Oh and then it's time to go to the airport because {a key customer the other side of the country is upset, the government is demanding to question you, your PR team set up a speaking event at a conference and only told you yesterday}, so hopefully your spouse isn't too upset that you won't be home for dinner tonight. On the way to the airport you'll have to be on the phone with a lawyer because your company is getting sued, again, and so you need to know the status of the case but couldn't find time to fit an in-person meeting (which you'd have much preferred). You'll probably also need to plan for how to pay if you lose that case, which realistically means who you'll have to lay off or break comp promises to.
And then dawn breaks, and it all begins again. That's a good day, when you didn't have to do layoffs or explain to the board why the new product you'd hoped would turn things around is now subject to a recall.
I've seen how this stuff affects people up close. You do need to be very tough, and even then it can grind people down pretty catastrophically. There's nobody to blame at that level and you can't just quit because you don't like it anymore. If it starts going wrong you're sort of trapped.
There's running a business with under 50 employees, running a business with under 100, and then there's running a coorporation with several thousand and more employees.
The FAANG (and other letter group) global mega corp survivors have one or two valid grievances.
> We’ve seen the secret sauce at the top, it’s not special.
I'm not at all saying all FAANG bosses are great, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue that all they do is "make a couple decisions a week and then play golf." Anyone that says that is just showing how clueless they are as to what goes in to running a large company.
> Everyone on this site is so anti-C-suite it's crazy. All the standard "big company CEO bad, me entry level employee good" talking points.
This condescending "entry level employee good" thing is total nonsense. It's absolutely common for many 30 year career stretches to never actually see a decent hard-working executive out in the wild. And if you do actually encounter one, then there's a decent chance that you also got to watch that person get dethroned and replaced with someone worse by political machinations of the rest of the executive suite!
What is crazy is dismissing thousands of man-years of lived experience with completely broken "leadership" as.. what exactly, jealousy? But most of the people that hate the C-suite probably don't want to work there, and probably don't even really expect fair compensation at this point, they just want a little more accountability, and a little less hypocrisy.
And just in case you actually want to understand the angst and the zeitgeist around this stuff, I'll add this more subtle point. Engineers that work in tech today are increasingly seen by outsiders as roughly equivalent to, IDK, blood-diamond tycoons. But the fact is that lots of engineers are struggling too, and anyway we didn't ruin the world, the MBAs did while they told us (and everyone else) they were building something different. There's a strong reluctance to shoulder all this blame for the executive class, because at the end of the day or the end of our careers, most engineers actually still have to live next to normal people and won't get to fuck off to the Hamptons or whatever monied enclaves executives use to insulate themselves from the world.
> It's absolutely common for many 30 year career stretches to never actually see a decent hard-working executive out in the wild.
Really? In my bubble this is far from common and more likely ignorance to what executives are doing. Execs tend to become so because they are highly motivated people willing to dedicate themself to their jobs.
I had an employee once would would constantly complain about their old bosses, all of them as far as I could see. He was a really smart guy with potential but so negative about anyhting leadership. One day I decided to roll the dice and said something like "you always talk about how bad your bosses are, and no doubt you'll add me to the list when you move to the next company. Have you ever considered we all get a bad boss or two, but when every boss is bad maybe you're the problem not them". I knew this was a risky move but it worked. He took it on board and became a much better contributor and dropped this 'all bosses are bad' type approach.
I bet your bubble congratulated you when you used your soft skills to encourage a problem employee to become a better contributor. Just curious though, could you actually do the job of this contributor? And if that employee had your own job in leadership, do you think they could maybe also come up with the creative idea that for solving personnel problems, one need only loom threateningly, and declare quietly "Maybe You're the Problem"? Very subtle. It's almost like a power difference solved the problem all by itself, without needing any problem solving skills.
I've had great bosses, but that's not what we're discussing. This is about executives. And while I agree that executives are certainly highly motivated, I just think that at a certain level mostly that is motivation to lie, misdirect, deflect, and steal. This also isn't about small businesses, which are much more likely to have legitimate entrepreneurs or merit-based processes, even at the top. For most medium-sized businesses and certainly for large ones, everything is different and anyone can see that pedigree, nepotism, and failing upwards all become more dominant factors. Take an honest look at yourself and your bubble and the line workers. Who can do who's job, really? Which work is more skilled?
Are you actually on call? Like, do you have a beeper next to you? Will you suffer consequences if you don't respond? There is "oh things aren't going great I guess I need to cut my vacation to Austria short" and then there is "I cannot go out for drinks, I cannot take a nap, I must have my company laptop with me and with good Wi-Fi" on-call. Oh, and for the latter you're getting paid a few hundred an hour at best. Just putting that out there.
I think executive pay has gotten out of control as much as the next guy, but "CEOs only do a few hours of work per week, plus playing golf with clients" has to be the least informed take I've ever heard. And that's putting it the nice way.
These comical caricatures of CEOs "making a couple decisions a week intermixed with 'leisure activities '" bear no resemblance to any CEO/senior exec I've ever worked with.
Yes, I can imagine in some odd situations (say family businesses) you might have "figurehead" CEOs, but every CEO I've ever worked with put in a huge number of hours. I think there is plenty to honestly debate regarding CEO compensation, especially when it comes to egregious wealth inequality, but this idea that CEOs are just a bunch of lazy schmoozers sounds like an r/antiwork fever dream to me.
I work for a medium (~$10B) public company and when I check the CEOs calendar he's booked 12 hours a day, and it's a lot of hard staff meeting with complex outcome. Not sure where this idea that CEOs don't work come from
This might be hard to believe, but yet another steak dinner at the expense of time with your family/house/hobbies/whatever gets old fast for some, and some of those key decisions can affect the livelihoods of hundreds of people as well as your company's value, if publicly traded.
I've never been a CEO of a big company, but I've been the CEO of a company that did $5m a year in business. I've also worked for $6 an hour sweeping, busked on the subway, and been the lowest paid person at a few companies besides. The CEO role had by far the most stress, to the point it caused me debilitating health issues.
I would take the physical job any day over the leadership type manager roles if pay was the same. Way less stress and conflict. I volunteered for a sports club for the last decade plus, was president for half that. Did amazing things, hired tens of coaches etc. I have way more fun now that I've passed the torch and just help out at events. I got PTSD and burnout one particularly bad season while prez.
> I would take the physical job any day over the leadership type manager roles if pay was the same.
Nobody is suggesting this but you. It’s understandable that leadership would make more money. But 39x more money is harder to justify, especially with historical context.
I honestly wonder if the secret to quality of life is just to save up money and buy a profitable small or medium sized business mostly financed against the business. If you want to grow it, you can. Otherwise, you can get relatively passive income out of it and experience as a CEO that allows you to apply to other CEO jobs if it fails.
The "saving up money" part is the bottleneck for me right now because of the state of the tech job market but I was originally planning to save up money and launch a self-funded startup once I had enough runway. After discovering the "buy an already profitable business" route though, I have been thinking about it. I know I don't want to spend the rest of my life constantly competing in the interview Olympics for the privilege of writing code to make somebody else rich.
IBM entered the personal computing market on the basis of non-proprietary duplication of existing tech - part of the reason for the company's success was its name. Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM. Once the name is established, officers can remotely defy the FUD factor.
But if the company is _coincidentally_ doing great, then the CEO gets credit. If it's tanking, the CEO leaves for another CEO position because the main prerequisite of being a CEO is having been a CEO, regardless of performance.