Comment by everdrive

> CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases.

I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships.

Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills of a CEO.

> It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t ... I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job.

But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors and all the VPs and SVPs, if something goes wrong.

For most companies, especially large companies, it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering, business development, etc. That, at least in principle, can be handled by other parts of the hierarchy.

Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

I’ve worked with CEOs in multiple large companies. I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. Nonetheless, someone needs to do that job and the intersection of difficulty and masochism is beyond what most people can do or endure. Many people try and fail. Their job, at the end of the day, is to eat an endless stream of shit sandwiches with a smile and a plan.

Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time.

The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.

I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people:

Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.

Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working

Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.

I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.

So, we live in the economy where everything is done by labour that receive minimal acceptable wages, while all the profits are collected by the ruling class who do nothing except constantly kissing each other asses.

>convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them

And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.

To be fair, raising money takes a certain skill, that few people possess; and in many cases, it’s essential for a startup to even exist.

Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions.

This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.

Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.

I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.

I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror.

Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.

Quite frankly speaking and acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success. It might be fine to say that this is not a skill, but people can definitely tell and they select for it.

I spent most of my time in government, and I was quite shocked in private industry how enthusiastically nearly everyone had taken to the class divide. It was a bit like A Brave New World. Even when resenting it, the lower class totally bought into the mythos of the upper class. It was very clear I would never be an executive at my company, but at the same time, my particular company was riddled with incompetent and corrupt executives.

I didn't feel or sound like one of them, and I refused to lie or bullshit. And every one of them could tell, and it forever marked me as an outsider.

It's difficult in the sense that it's rare and much of it is out of your hands. That's a very different kind of difficulty than honing a technical skill. I'm happy to call it something other than difficult, but most of those engineers would not succeed in becoming CEOs -- whether or not they would actually do a good job at it.

What about him?

  have to do politics -> bad ceo

doesn't mean

  NOT(have to do politics) -> NOT(bad ceo)

He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.

The Winkelvoss twins would beg to differ.