[mmmpetrichor]

I've found it very weird observing how CEOs across many companies behave as if they're part of some hivemind. When to do layoffs, how to implement office policies, and now pushing AI in the same way as if they have no brain of their own. It's very offputting. I can't tell if its collusion or whether maybe capitalism has its own goals that are pursued in lockstep by its creepy agents. I think the end goal is definitely to eliminate workers as much as they possibly can. And they think whoever can do that first will "win".

[Yoric]

Having worked with CEOs of a few start-ups, I suspect that many CEOs feel like they belong to a small circle of people "in the know".

Part of it is going through the VC gauntlet, I believe. Let's face it, to get money from VCs, you need to abase yourself, to learn how to lie to them and to yourself, to focus only on the survival of your company and pretending that you're going to make lots of money, regardless of your original goals and ideals. If you're a bit of a techie, you have just entered a world of appearances, where [it feels like] pretending to be successful and knowing something more than others matters more than actually doing something. And being kicked out would mean losing funding, which means everything for which you've twisted yourself into something you were not.

I think that this strongly favors hivemind/mob thinking.

[ThrowawayR2]

That's not any different from programmers clamoring en masse to switch to the latest cool framework or fashionable coding trend.

[lucyjojo]

but programmers do not switch "en-masse". that's a HN bubble.

[username223]

"Programmers" exist on a (not always "the") spectrum. At one extreme, there are frontend developers changing JS/Ruby frameworks every few months. New stuff is fun to play with. At the other, there's there's Tony Hoare's quip that "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." (https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computing...). In 2025, quite a few of the numerical routines powering LLMs are built on top of BLAS, LAPACK, and other frightening FORTRAN IV code that shouts at you using very short words like SGEMM and DGESV. It's a big tent; get comfortable.

[conorcleary]

Bootstrap and HTML5 had fanfare and cool gfx on launch so people on-boarded themselves real quick

[mlhpdx]

Just like CEOs…

[wartywhoa23]

> CEOs across many companies behave as if they're part of some hivemind.

This hivemind is called Blackrock.

[conorcleary]

Aladdin, even.

[roenxi]

You might find some inspiration in this video of metronomes synchronising and desynchronysing [0]. It doesn't take much to cause things to happen at the same time, in the case the CEOs are likely all responding to the same market signals at the same time for the same reason. Probably interest rates.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxw4zbULMs

[chartered_stack]

What makes you think that it's only CEOs who look like they're part of a hive mind? It's got nothing to do with capitalism or it's "creepy agents". It's simply the human condition. It's literally company/human see company/human do. One company/management loudly kangs whatever their position is and others simply follow it because they think it's either "industry standard" or it's convenient somehow to them. That's all it is - people trying to be safe.

Let me give you a technical parallel. A couple of engineers/architects from Big Co. that's hugely successful leave and go to Hot Startup. There they proselytize their One True Way because honestly that's all they know. Everybody in Hot Startup goes along with it because they are Senior Engineers from Big Co. who are now plotting the course and Big Co. is HUGE so they know what they're talking about. Now because Hot Startup is suddenly using the One True Way everybody else in the market tries to copy them because that's obviously why Hot Startup is Hot. This leads to a job market where people optimize for things used by Hot Startup. This tilts the skill set of the general tech market towards the One True Way making it gospel to a lot of people. So hiring managers who don't know the first about anything suddenly start optimizing for One True techs and ask for 20 years experience with React. They think they're doing the safe thing by using the same tech stack used by everybody else - the industry standard. Never mind that the "industry standard" changes every time it's convenient.

This is the same thing for CEOs. Oh you're having a slightly down quarter and have to answer to investors? Say you're using AI. That's the in-thing and will give you that bump to ride out the quarter. You screwed up in 2021-22 and hired a fuckton of people who are just sitting on their hands costing the company money? Say AI and get rid of them because they're not productive. It's got nothing to do with collusion or anything like that. It's just that people have mismatched expectations and things happen downstream of these unmanaged expectations.

[sublinear]

> This tilts the skill set of the general tech market towards the One True Way making it gospel to a lot of people

That lot of people literally cannot get hired anywhere but startups because everyone else isn't so naive

> things happen downstream of these unmanaged expectations

It sounds like a metric fuckton of people need to retire or get out of the way already if they can't set expectations despite being in the exact position where they should be able to talk to multiple audiences

None of these excuses appease the investors nor the heads-down employees. Shit will have to change sooner rather than later. Many factors will make it so. This is exactly what defines a tech bubble.

[chartered_stack]

Sure, plenty of incompetence out there, but nobody wakes up thinking they’re doing wrong. They overpromise, they play it safe. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

As Picard says, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life"

[sublinear]

We have a very different understanding of what it means to make a mistake

[tim333]

Hypothesis - your average CEO is a normal person without much more insight than you or I but they don't want to look dumb and so go along with whatever the trend is.

[Gigachad]

It’s the safer bet. If you just do what everyone else is doing and it ends up being wrong, it’s not your fault, no one could have predicted that.

[ssss11]

I’m not sure of the forum where they exchange and align on goals and approaches, it probably exists in some forms, but ultimately I think it’s CEO’s not wanting to be too far from the pack.

If you make the wrong call on one important thing and everyone else is right, your company is f_cked.