Ask HN: Which CEO should get laid off?
11 comments
I think Elon has the most cause to be laid off. Not only has he driven customers away by tarnishing his personal brand, but he has recently threatened the board of Tesla that he will "build products outside of Tesla" unless he gets more voting control. Well, he's already building products outside of Tesla considering SpaceX, Twitter/X, Boring Company, Neuralink, etc. As an investor, I'd rather get a full-time CEO than a part-time one who threatens the board over not having enough voting control.
Sundar.
Should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns.
But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too. Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.
Should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns.
But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too. Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.
Any company CEO who lays off people openly or covertly because they hire too many people in the recent years. If the management decided to hire too many people they are the ones who are responsible for bad decision or bad management. Not the people who are hired by the decisions.
In the case of Elon, please specify if as CEO of Tesla, SpaceX or X.
SpaceX is privately held. He's got shareholders, but not many of them and they know how to find him. So while starship might or might not be the space cybertruck, it's not a publicly traded company with pension funds as investors that you're monkeying around with.
if you are ceo of x number of companies you are a proof CEOs does very little in reality.
CEOs generally have to do work to make sure that everyone else is executing well and toward the right goals. Successful CEOs either need to be hands-on and skillful, or get lucky with subordinates who execute well and toward the right goals themselves. Elon's a mix of those to the degree he's successful, like any.
The work is maintaining trust from the board such that they continue to give you the keys to the kingdom. It may not be time consuming work, but still work most people are unable to do.
Mitchell Baker
Sundar. You might not like Zuck's vision but he has a vision. Sundar has a vision too which is that he can freeze things just like it is forever but that's really a choice to die.
Conservatism is a better fit for Microsoft because their users have "Who moved my cheese?" as a motto. Microsoft also mostly gets paid by its users through some circuitous path, Google's ad based model has dangerous conflicts of interests built into it quite fundamentally.
I lately read this Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
and really appreciated its viewpoint but I am wondering if in the long term it is going to be another scenario like
https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...
that is, so far we haven't seen platforms that have decayed suffering from it but there has to be some limit at which customers are so frustrated that the two sided market is broken and my guess is that when that happens a company like Google will go from "bad to nonexistent" in "internet time".
Conservatism is a better fit for Microsoft because their users have "Who moved my cheese?" as a motto. Microsoft also mostly gets paid by its users through some circuitous path, Google's ad based model has dangerous conflicts of interests built into it quite fundamentally.
I lately read this Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
and really appreciated its viewpoint but I am wondering if in the long term it is going to be another scenario like
https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...
that is, so far we haven't seen platforms that have decayed suffering from it but there has to be some limit at which customers are so frustrated that the two sided market is broken and my guess is that when that happens a company like Google will go from "bad to nonexistent" in "internet time".
>Conservatism is a better fit for Microsoft because their users have "Who moved my cheese?" as a motto.
No way. Had they been conservative they would have remained as the "Windows and Office company" and died off 10 years ago as an IBM-also-has-been.
The fact they moved into consoles, cloud, linux, Github, LinkedIn, cross platform subscription based services like Office365, entertainment IP and AI, is what kept them alive and relevant.
Staying conservative from this point on is also not a good idea. If they can push ChatGPT and Copilot further to everyone an turn it profitable it would be another major win.
Conservatism is a better fit for someone like SAP.
No way. Had they been conservative they would have remained as the "Windows and Office company" and died off 10 years ago as an IBM-also-has-been.
The fact they moved into consoles, cloud, linux, Github, LinkedIn, cross platform subscription based services like Office365, entertainment IP and AI, is what kept them alive and relevant.
Staying conservative from this point on is also not a good idea. If they can push ChatGPT and Copilot further to everyone an turn it profitable it would be another major win.
Conservatism is a better fit for someone like SAP.
I'd say cloud is basically a conservative business. The last things customers want is to get their cheese moved.
XBOX is a Google-esque side project with the exception that Google would have killed it long ago. So far as I can tell they were afraid Sony might have created a competitive "home computer" platform by broadening Playstation and Microsoft. I personally feel I made a mistake getting an XBOX ONE instead of a PS4 a few years back because there are just so many stupid things about XBOX such as you can't play couch multiplayer unless you buy multiple subscriptions. And the fact that the video codecs are deficient so Jellyfin and Plex "just don't work" despite working just fine with trash Android devices.
The most striking thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearing was that Microsoft's management came across as indifferent to games. It would be one thing if Microsoft had a business plan that really makes sense (e.g. dominate an industry so you can make money) but as it is it just seems that they want to dominate games because they are a big dominant company that dominates things.
The most notable thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearings is that management seemed absolutely indifferent to games.
A lot of other changes are less radical than they seem. With cloud they can take your money just fine if you use Linux or Windows. Microsoft has always courted developers and often been generous (it's amazing what you got with an MSDN subscription) whereas once the Mac came along Apple has consistently seen developers as money bags that they could bleed dry. It was painful for Microsoft to realize that POSIX culture is here to stay but getting behind GitHub, NPM and stuff like that is consistent with their history of winning the hearts and minds of developers. Office365 is about as revolutionary as Adobe's Creative Cloud, a product that didn't really change much, now they just bill you by the month. It was just necessary to get parts of the office suite on mobile because that's where the users are.
XBOX is a Google-esque side project with the exception that Google would have killed it long ago. So far as I can tell they were afraid Sony might have created a competitive "home computer" platform by broadening Playstation and Microsoft. I personally feel I made a mistake getting an XBOX ONE instead of a PS4 a few years back because there are just so many stupid things about XBOX such as you can't play couch multiplayer unless you buy multiple subscriptions. And the fact that the video codecs are deficient so Jellyfin and Plex "just don't work" despite working just fine with trash Android devices.
The most striking thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearing was that Microsoft's management came across as indifferent to games. It would be one thing if Microsoft had a business plan that really makes sense (e.g. dominate an industry so you can make money) but as it is it just seems that they want to dominate games because they are a big dominant company that dominates things.
The most notable thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearings is that management seemed absolutely indifferent to games.
A lot of other changes are less radical than they seem. With cloud they can take your money just fine if you use Linux or Windows. Microsoft has always courted developers and often been generous (it's amazing what you got with an MSDN subscription) whereas once the Mac came along Apple has consistently seen developers as money bags that they could bleed dry. It was painful for Microsoft to realize that POSIX culture is here to stay but getting behind GitHub, NPM and stuff like that is consistent with their history of winning the hearts and minds of developers. Office365 is about as revolutionary as Adobe's Creative Cloud, a product that didn't really change much, now they just bill you by the month. It was just necessary to get parts of the office suite on mobile because that's where the users are.
Sundar stands so far away from any of the others--he has done immense harm to Google and continues to do so:
* Few of Google's products are good anymore, new players like Kagi and Perplexity are providing high quality search with tiny teams (and Kagi is increasingly doing this against its own search corpus)
* Google dropped the ball on AI despite producing a large plurality of the exciting contemporary research. I'm honestly unconvinced that Google has the capacity to launch new successful products anymore, they cannot think long term at all and kill new products if they don't immediately look successful.
* Google's current layoffs are atrocious, and they're doing considerable harm to their brand amongst technical staff--laying off loyal employees in the middle of the night with an email in waves is positively sociopathic.
The tier list is something like:
Worst: Sundar
Bad: Elon Jassy
Fine: Cook
Good: Greg Peters Zuck
Great: Satya
* Few of Google's products are good anymore, new players like Kagi and Perplexity are providing high quality search with tiny teams (and Kagi is increasingly doing this against its own search corpus)
* Google dropped the ball on AI despite producing a large plurality of the exciting contemporary research. I'm honestly unconvinced that Google has the capacity to launch new successful products anymore, they cannot think long term at all and kill new products if they don't immediately look successful.
* Google's current layoffs are atrocious, and they're doing considerable harm to their brand amongst technical staff--laying off loyal employees in the middle of the night with an email in waves is positively sociopathic.
The tier list is something like:
Worst: Sundar
Bad: Elon Jassy
Fine: Cook
Good: Greg Peters Zuck
Great: Satya
Sundar
Altman
Musk
Altman
Musk
Sundar, Elon, Zuck, Jassy , Satya , Cook, Greg Peter's