As a CEO I speak to other CEOs on a regular basis about what we're seeing. That means I'm clued in to my customers' trends, vendors' trends, and competitors' trends. I see stuff happening in my industry from a more holistic perspective than my employees. I can tell the difference between a revenue decline from a lack of competitiveness versus industry decline. You might not see us working but we talk. A lot.

"The reason CEOs are smarter than everyone else is because they talk to other CEOs".

Seems a bit circular to me.

It sounds like you're operating under the assumption that nothing is predictable in the economy and that we're all looking in to a crystal ball. In reality we're looking at our financials and sales trends and then comparing that data up and down the supply chain.

We're not smarter than everyone else. No, we're just more clued in to what's happening with our capital markets, vendors, competitors, and customers.

Hey! I’m currently an ml engineer and my dream is to be ceo of a mid size company one day. Do you have any advice for how I can move into that direction?

No advice but I can share my perspectives. I happened to be at the right place at the right time to start a company and be an early player in a new technology that created a multi-billion market that didn't exist before. I happened to have the cross-trained in the right combination of skills and showed up at the right time. Skill alone wouldn't have been enough.

Try to be forward thinking about what trends might be coming. It used to be easier to do this but now everyone hops on trends quickly so it's harder to maintain a head start.

I'm looking at my next venture right now and I'm mostly focused on the overall macro picture surrounding the growth prospects of an industry. Things like population dynamics are playing a bigger part of how I see opportunity. The best CEO won't accomplish much in a dying or flat industry.

Ignore people who say "X is saturated". Everything is saturated. What matters is if the market is going to grow.

Now I'm more focused on wealth deployment and preservation and trying to focus less on building new things. Building is where my passion is but it's high risk and I don't need to be taking risks anymore.

So, are you thinking more about laying people off recently? :)

Really appreciate The time you’ve put into this! I have no wealth or anything like that, so the road for me will definitely be to work like a dog for the next 10 years and hope someone wants to pay handsomely for what I build (honestly even being a senior at faang I’ll never escape the middle class paying income tax). Afterwards I’ll move to a lower tax/col country snd live like a king

The average CEO can't even figure out why they can't seem to hire new people, but somehow they are very well clued in to market fluctuation? I think it is more reasonable to assume equal competence.

Bull fucking shit. If CEOs can talk their way into predicting the economy, why the fuck are most companies firing large swaths of their workforce? Couldnt predict a tech recession after a global pandemic?

Most large corp CEOs are briefed by analysts, and they’re all probably telling them their “predictions”

Here is an interesting thought experiment: if McKinsey wanted to force a recession, could they invoke one by telling all the CEOs the worst possible news and making terrible recommendations?

This really sounds to me like CEO's preemptively torching their companies, thus creating a recession. Good luck getting all those employees familiar with the product and culture back now that they feel betrayed. Get ready to train some new less skilled employees in the future at great cost. Way to destroy shareholder value by reducing profit, lowering product quality, and not being able to ship on time! This is like trying to time investments in the markets. Unless you can manipulate the markets it is impossible to do. Wait until _your_ sector of the market is in trouble and _then_ consider whether cutting jobs makes sense, otherwise you may be shooting yourself in the foot by creating the problems you fear as you follow the herd off the cliff.

Yes they could. The economy is partly psychological. Once the everyday needs are met, spending on the stretch items can be delayed psychologically to reduce GDP.

Isn’t this what raising rates is? It’s likely more psychological than anything.

Accuracy of prediction isn’t important here. CEOs make budgets with allocations for new hires and raises. They also fire people, too. Every CEO could be 100% wrong and we’d still have the trappings of a recession.

Economists predict around a 50% chance of recession this year which seems a bit more reasonable.

That’s even funnier since the US entered a recession this past summer by the most common definition of the term.

Which came first; a recession or a meme of a recession.

This recession is a self fulfilling prophecy intentionally triggered by the Fed at the behest of Congress behind the scenes to curtail the public meta mind technology companies were creating via social media.

Don’t stop doing. There’s no reason our agency must be coupled to macro economic views of a coddled minority. The public gifts them their hallucination of being a valuable member of society. We don’t have to coddle their figurative identity.

I agree that we’re practically in a recession and that our present recession was brought about from congress via the fed. However, that particular chain of events was set in motion in the 1970s with the public mandate set for the FOMC. It wasn’t a recent secretive reaction to tech companies.

Do you mind expanding on your statement that the current actions of the fed/congress are a reaction to technology companies?

50% seems strangely like “Either there is a recession, either there isn’t, that makes 50%”.

No, really, most people have a stake one way or another, and when presented a chance to influence the populace, by making people afraid of losing their jobs and making other CEOs afraid of hiring like crazy, they’ll say the line whether it’s true or false.

This post is completely content-free. You make assertions that these CEOs don't know their hat from their ass, while you offer nothing to the contrary, no evidence or even conjecture or "Well, my cousin's dog told me their company is looking at stepping up hiring for Q4."

It's a bs factoid in the first place. Most CEOs I meet are in a perpetual "next two years will be recession" mode. I guess my counter to bs stats is leveraging my own anecdote, but whatever I think it's prevelant enough.