I agree, fire the CEO. But I have a slightly different take that doesn't involve AI. What if we indeed get rid of the entire C-suite?
Even better still: why are companies and orgs hierarchical? Why is there always a - for lack of a better word - dictator in charge? AI CEO is still an AI dictator.
We are permitted to vote, but democracy in everyday life, that's a bridge too far, chaos, riots in the streets, cats and dogs living together.
Maybe there are too many 'temporary embarrassed billionaires' here on HN, but you have more in common with the average bum in the street than any of 'that' class.
It's time that we as a people extend democracy towards the workplace and operate like a cooperation, working on the base of consensus. This is not a new idea, but it won't give you a chance to become a billionaire, and that's exactly the point.
There's really quite a lack of innovation in corporate structures.
I (still) believe that we're going to see a rejection of this MBA-short-term-fuck-the-long-term thinking, and next-gen companies will form treat their employees like the adults they are.
That employee goodwill and motivation will make them outpeform the current system. Thnk of the opposite of work-to-rule or 'quiet quitting': An actual motivated workforce.
Workers ultimately have a job because they are useful to management, and management have a job because they are useful to ownership. Top management has insane levels of compensation as a strategy by ownership to alight management's interests with their own, by turning them into owners. If there is going to be a management layer at all, for example the proposed "A-suite", then their compensation will balloon for exactly the same reasons.
CxO salary isn't the market clearing price for the labor these people perform, it's more like power-leveling your friends in an RPG so that they can quest with you. Owners want their managers' interests to be with capital, so they have to give them some.
One aspect the AxO would address, is the idea that the CEO is some sort of all-knowing, all-seeing, smartest-guy-in-the-room type that is so special and unique, they deserve it all and more.
It sorta breaks the CEO job into component parts which theoretically would reduce the executive compensations as the the replacement system is more interchangable.
I enjoy doing actual tech thought-experiment like this, so not a troll.
Everyone just accepts that software engineers are going to be pandhandling in the street for free API tokens, but what if the prevalent attitude was to start from the top down?
> Everyone agrees: AI is coming for the developers. The $200,000-a-year engineers writing CRUD apps and maintaining CI pipelines. The line workers of the knowledge economy. Trim them. Automate them. Celebrate the efficiency gains. Watch the stock pop
I very much do not think everyone agrees here, and using the Block layoffs as an example is pretty poor reasoning. It's the same kind of blind, "believe and report exactly what the companies say about these things, regardless of their incentives in saying these things" type of breathless clickbait tech journalism that is becoming extremely exhausting to wade through.
There's probably a good discussion in here somewhere but the way these flimsy arguments are presented as absolute fact is a really annoying style to read, personally.
This author wrote basically the complete opposite view barely more than a few months ago which makes it read even more like clickbait slop:
Turn it around - employ "copilot-boss" for your business and stay a grey eminence.
Perhaps a lot of indie devs hate executive and managerial stuff, then what if AEO could lead the business execution while being fed with some minimal project outcome objectives from the technicaly focused dev.
I think this actually an untapped direction more of us should explore. Maybe use change your OpenClaw from an Executive Assistant, to your Manager on the topics you are weak at.
More generally about companies and how they’re organized - Why do we have “benevolent dictator” CxOs and trickle-down ownership and decision making powers? But bottom-up responsibility for faults and mistakes? I feel like it’s high time to have more democratic systems at our workspaces as well. More of a co-op model of working than a pyramid. Doesn’t make sense at all, for example, that the core engineers who built the google search algorithm would be paid 5x (or further) less than a CEO of Google. And then if they leave Google, they immediately stop receiving “royalty” or compensation for their own code that is still being used by Google and will continue to earn it even more money while they’re gone.
The hard truth is that the technical solution really is a piece of the overall puzzle to what makes success, and its easy for technical people to overvalue it. I think we're seeing a bit of it in the current AI question of "If vibecoding is so damn good, where are all the vibe coding SaaS's?" The answer is that the code wasn't the entire answer, its the business and distribution around it as well.
My theory is that you can replace everyone with AI as long as the result (for each) is obviously better. To replace management the main edge seems to be that AI can read everything and talk to everyone all of the time. You don't need meetings if it remembers everything everyone said and is available for debate until the deadline. If someone feels the need to go all out bike-shed they can do it on their own. A different edge the AI has is that it can write everything into policy. Saves a lot of tokens.
17 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadEven better still: why are companies and orgs hierarchical? Why is there always a - for lack of a better word - dictator in charge? AI CEO is still an AI dictator.
We are permitted to vote, but democracy in everyday life, that's a bridge too far, chaos, riots in the streets, cats and dogs living together.
Maybe there are too many 'temporary embarrassed billionaires' here on HN, but you have more in common with the average bum in the street than any of 'that' class.
It's time that we as a people extend democracy towards the workplace and operate like a cooperation, working on the base of consensus. This is not a new idea, but it won't give you a chance to become a billionaire, and that's exactly the point.
I (still) believe that we're going to see a rejection of this MBA-short-term-fuck-the-long-term thinking, and next-gen companies will form treat their employees like the adults they are.
That employee goodwill and motivation will make them outpeform the current system. Thnk of the opposite of work-to-rule or 'quiet quitting': An actual motivated workforce.
CxO salary isn't the market clearing price for the labor these people perform, it's more like power-leveling your friends in an RPG so that they can quest with you. Owners want their managers' interests to be with capital, so they have to give them some.
It sorta breaks the CEO job into component parts which theoretically would reduce the executive compensations as the the replacement system is more interchangable.
Everyone just accepts that software engineers are going to be pandhandling in the street for free API tokens, but what if the prevalent attitude was to start from the top down?
I very much do not think everyone agrees here, and using the Block layoffs as an example is pretty poor reasoning. It's the same kind of blind, "believe and report exactly what the companies say about these things, regardless of their incentives in saying these things" type of breathless clickbait tech journalism that is becoming extremely exhausting to wade through.
There's probably a good discussion in here somewhere but the way these flimsy arguments are presented as absolute fact is a really annoying style to read, personally.
This author wrote basically the complete opposite view barely more than a few months ago which makes it read even more like clickbait slop:
https://boringops.sh/articles/its_the_humans_stupid/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Perhaps a lot of indie devs hate executive and managerial stuff, then what if AEO could lead the business execution while being fed with some minimal project outcome objectives from the technicaly focused dev.