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by lenerdenator 523 days ago
They're not expected to have predicted the next pandemic; rather, they're expected to come up with novel ideas of how to do business. That's the point, or, rather, the justification for why just one year of one job can have them set for life. You get paid an insane amount of money - many multiples of the median lifetime income of Americans - because you make the right bets that either save the company massive sums of money, create new revenue streams, or both.

We were having "disaster recovery" days at my old employer in 2015. You found a place outside the office to attempt to do your work from, and made adjustments to make your various pieces of technology work. It worked, and the implications of it working should have been obvious to our betters.

2 comments

>They're not expected to have predicted the next pandemic; rather, they're expected to come up with novel ideas of how to do business. That's the point, or, rather, the justification for why just one year of one job can have them set for life. You get paid an insane amount of money - many multiples of the median lifetime income of Americans - because you make the right bets that either save the company massive sums of money, create new revenue streams, or both.

Taking this at face value, what does that have to do with getting an office in 2015? It seems like the same "hindsight is 20/20" problem as before. Maybe the CEO was busy transforming the company to use blockchain or something. You can't expect a CEO to nail every bet. Microstrategy is (was?) doing great because of their bitcoin treasury strategy, but I doubt many boards are getting upset that their CEOs didn't buy bitcoin, even though that would arguably be a better return than not leasing an office.

> Taking this at face value, what does that have to do with getting an office in 2015? It seems like the same "hindsight is 20/20" problem as before. Maybe the CEO was busy transforming the company to use blockchain or something. You can't expect a CEO to nail every bet.

Odds are, if they were "busy transforming the company to use blockchain" they blew absolutely massive amounts of money.

Someone being payed 100 million dollars is expected to have 20/20 foresight. Ludicrous sums of money come with ludicrous expectations.

The presumption that we're all rational actors with access to reliable information is not borne out by history. Anxiety and ego trump reason every time, and those at the top are often trapped in misinformation bubbles that make them think a fire is nothing but smoke.

>Someone being payed 100 million dollars is expected to have 20/20 foresight. Ludicrous sums of money come with ludicrous expectations.

Sounds like you're more upset about CEO compensation than anything else.

>The presumption that we're all rational actors with access to reliable information is not borne out by history. Anxiety and ego trump reason every time, and those at the top are often trapped in misinformation bubbles that make them think a fire is nothing but smoke.

Except in this case, you don't even have to invoke "Anxiety and ego trump reason every time", because even someone who was perfectly rational couldn't have predicted covid 19 and the wfh revolution.

> They're not expected to have predicted the next pandemic; rather, they're expected to come up with novel ideas of how to do business

Do you have a single example of a CEO being fired or even chastised for this?