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.
"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.)