"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs told his newly-minted VPs. "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."
"In other words,' (Jobs continued,) "when the employee becomes a vice president, he or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say."
I've heard some economic analysis that indicates that this is why executives are paid so much. As an exec, you're responsible for company performance, and if the company underperforms, you will get fired, and this could be for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with anything you did. To get people who actually understand & respect the risks (you don't want anyone who doesn't in an exec position), you have to pay them enough that they're basically set for life after a few years in the job, because in a few years they may find themselves unemployed and unemployable.
(Of course, this creates another moral hazard issue, where once you've paid them all this money and given them this generous severance option, they have no incentive to actually do well, because they're already collecting their retirement plan. C'est la vie - this is why you get execs that make superficial changes while the company lumbers on to its demise, and then cache out with 9-figure parachutes when everything goes bankrupt.)
My father used to captain ships, and once explained to me that if the ship runs aground, it doesn't matter that the captain was asleep in his bunk at the time. He was responsible and would be court martialled for it. That meant he made damn sure his XO standing the night watch was competent and sober.
It doesn't matter if you didn't do anything. You should have done something. That's the job. You're responsible.
Yearly pay for an O-6 is between $87,984 and $155,754, by the way: https://www.federalpay.org/military/coast-guard/captain
"In case anything goes wrong, call me so that I can see the end of my career."
[0] As reported in the ProPublica article linked to in this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094762
There's off ramps from that career with bigger money if you want that, there is such a thing.
It's just a cool thing to do. Like flying a spaceship.
Are they really though? To take just one example, Sheryl Sandberg would still make a perfectly good senior product manager or something. Lots of places would hire her and it has great wages and benefits (by the standards of us mere mortals).
Fidji Simo (who was 1-2 levels under Sheryl on the org chart) is now the CEO of Instacart.
People in this thread are dramatically underestimating the position and compensation she just left.
Unless an exec is fired for financial fraud or serious misconduct (and even the latter isn't always a barrier, there are many counterexamples) they'll pretty much always find another role of equal status, if maybe not equal comp, if they want it.
Marissa Mayer is running a startup lab now, Amit Singhal is doing philanthropy, Travis Kalanick is starting ghost kitchens, Eric Schmidt is also doing philanthropy plus venturing into politics & punditry, Andy Rubin is a venture capitalist, Chris Sacca retired to Montana and occasionally appears on Shark Tank. While they may have the skills to take lower-level corporate jobs, the folks who reach those levels generally don't have the personality or inclination for it.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/6/9/23160588/eric-schmidt-am...
When you're that rich you buy insurance policies so that if any one state goes down, you don't go down with it.
Smart managers seem to understand this dynamic and simply "hide" extra head count to allow for the "high risk" projects without external scrutiny.
IMO these people always fail upward.
It's your job to do something effective. The outcome can't 'have nothing to do with anything you did.'
This tangentially reminds me of the gas price stuff. I (while not a Democrat) see Biden et al getting a lot of flack for gas prices, while realistically there is not some magic lever that the US could throw that would change the overall economic conditions - I'm sure they could do better or worse, but prices would still be higher. The subtlety either gets lost on people, or they just use it for political gain and pretend its because of something the government did.
Same for executives, you're presumably constantly fighting back attempts to take your spot, and any perceived problem will be leveraged to try and push you aside.
Of course, it's not intended as a logical extreme. People make adjustments in their expectations based on circumstances. But ultimately, you are responsible, especially at that high level (VP of Apple). If you can't deliver the results, why should people pay you?
Government is different: A businessperson controls a business, someone governing can't control reality. But they also can't throw up their hands - again, if they can't do the job, they shouldn't take it.
Can you expand on this? I’m sure I’ve made mistakes in the past that had I had some mentorship or was more receptive I would’ve faired better.
Not ‘don’t get too close to your boss’.
Can you please elaborate on this with some concrete examples, if possible?
It's almost like you live in a hierarchy or something. Like every other person in history.
You should talk with some actual 'leftists'! They aren't at all what your sources say. Just read some leftist blogs or news sources or talk on HN. It turns out that the great majority of people of all stripes are reasonable, normal humans, and the those who tell you otherwise are the threats, the ones trying polarize and control others through hate - if people started having civil, respectiful conversations, the polarizers would be done.
As we vote, we don't strike a ±10 on some symmetrical scale; rather we decide between 0-10 on some speed range.
It correlates with the strong observation in poli. sci. that the older we get, the more we tend to vote conservatively (the younger we are, the less we stand to lose since a life has yet to be made and wealth be accumulated; conversely the older we get, the more stakes we have to lose if we upend the status quo). This seems true across cultures and generations, and corroborated by a slew of psych. data.
Your "normal" range of people (able to have a reasonable discussion etc.) is a fat 70-ish % of the population, centered on some '5' speed mark. Astoundingly, these people both left and right are ignored by insanely polarized politics who mostly focus on the edges, the extremes, where electoral battles are seemingly won in a dirty side-effect of the uninominal voting scheme. Hint: rank-based choice is one easy solution to this problem, but notice how most parties around the democratic world seem to ignore that yet simple and easily computable fact as of the 21st century.
What I mean is that we choose to mislabel and misunderstand the problems and their solution; somehow this insane polarized and wildly suboptimal situation is maintained by whoever's in charge at most political forces as we speak.
I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance, because we might just have been too busy making the internet to notice that the people in charge are no wiser than most of us; in fact they're pretty much the very type of human beings we usually don't listen to for serious matters —at least when we're on the 'good' timeline of humanity.
Please stop thinking the "democratic world" means the US. The countries with that broken system are US, Canada, UK and former colonies. Meanwhile in the EU the norm is proportional representation, which doesn't have that problem.
Furthermore, i disagree with the notion that social or economic progress means "losing" something to significant amounts of the population ( higher taxation of the highest income individuals would be a loss for them, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the population), and i disagree even more with the notion that younger people have less to lose, especially on the social axis.
I'd love to see that, but for engineers (who generally value things like accuracy), being involved in politics is particularly distasteful. Instead, we live in world run by lawyers and moderated by marketing consultants, where the truth is unimportant, and discarded completely if it's a hurdle to winning.
There are ways to fix this, even simple, well known ways (your suggestion of ranked choice voting being one of them), however the paradox is that those who have the power to implement them, are the ones who are benefiting from the status quo, thus have no incentive to fix things.
Look at Facebook, adtech, cryptocurrency, etc. and tell me how honest and accurate engineers are.
If you really care about the truth, discard these simplistic notions about lawyers, marketing, engineers, etc. They are fodder for Internet discussions, a distraction for the public, but serious reality is a very different thing.
This is a classic mistake, thinking you or your tribe (in this case your profession) are a special case that will save others. You're right that 'the people in charge are no wiser than most of us', but also you are no wiser than they are. It's humanity all the way down!
It's the people who think they are superior and will help everyone else that are the danger - in fact, the magic of democracy is that it give the power to the everyone else. Often, those superior people are blind to and disregard the needs of others - they are superior and know better, after all - and they have another big problem:
The only way you (or I) can really help is to realize that, and realize we are prone to the same mistakes, biases, corruption, systemic influence, etc. If you don't, then you won't anticipate and manage those risks, and they will sweep you up like so many of your predecessors.
To put it in engineering terms, you would be like a developer who expects that they, unlike everyone else, will write bug-free software and therefore schedules deadlines that way and worse, doesn't provide for any tests, documentation, debugging, failure modes, etc.
Many of your predecessors thought the same as you, and were eaten alive and swept away by the systems in place. Those systems haven't survived by being easy to overcome; plenty of smart people have tried. And there are plenty of hardened veterans of it who will be licking their lips when they see you coming.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't get involved - do, by all means! But please go in with plenty of humility.
I don't think the only problem with dictatorships is that they don't allow their subjects to leave...
I’m not pushing any opinion on whether she did something wrong or unacceptable. But this is happening, just as Dave Clark “resigns” from Amazon, who also doesn’t have the same economic outlook they benefited from during the pandemic.
Amazing how quickly these execs fall out of favor.
The closest comparison I can think of from my big tech experience is the show “Man in the High Castle”, not an amazing show or anything, but I see parallels in the way it captures how Nazi henchmen were sitting high one minute and potentially murdered the next minute, or as soon as they fell out of favor.
Yeah I know I sound absurd drawing any kind of comparison with Nazi Germany.
But in my experience, it doesn’t matter who you are. You always have some boss, if you don’t deliver and meet their expectations, you’ll get thrown under the bus pretty rapidly. There’s more empathy in first level and skip level managers at Amazon than any director level.
In my time at Amazon, I was actually trained and coached on removing myself from certain situations and not interfering or establishing certain relationships because it would help me ultimately do better whatever is right for the company.
(I was a 11 year Amazon veteran before I left last year).