[greatpost]

Thank you for this aphyr.

My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.

[aphyr]

I am, oddly enough, the chief executive officer of two (trivially small) tech companies.

[Quarrelsome]

Btw why am i as a brit, blocked via my traditional routing because of the OSA? What possible features do you have on that site to make that relevant?

[vermilingua]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757803

[theredleft]

cheers. I think you're doing a good job and ruffling some feathers here! Your content has been great.

I highly recommend reading Marx. Your content has related Marxist topics like the 'Fetishism of Commodities' (Software as Witchcraft) and the Labor Theory of Value.

[aphyr]

There's a copy of Das Kapital on the shelf behind me right now, though I don't count myself conversant enough to go super deep on class critique. Figured I'd point a few very vague fingers in that direction and let folks with more experience talk about it.

[svilen_dobrev]

i read the other day this: https://jacobin.com/2026/03/work-deskilling-labor-capitalism...

brushing the socialism aside (been there seen that), it talks about the deskilling as inevitable technology consequence. IMO LLMing puts that on steroids, and eats higher up the mental-chain

[nancyminusone]

When companies do something terrible (and they do, all the time) who are you going to blame for it? It's not at all surprising that CEOs have earned the reputation they have.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form

Might I suggest a viewing of the 2025 film "Bugonia"?

[evan_a_a]

spoilers

[DonaldPShimoda]

It's in the trailer.

[tencentshill]

>My

And who are you? An account created for one post? There is a pattern of green account with usernames vaguely related to the subject matter of their comments.

[Aurornis]

Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.

An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO after years of reading “CEOs bad” content online, they can go into a learned helplessness mode because they think the behavior they’re seeing is normal. They don’t believe changing jobs would help because they’ve learned from social media to believe that their CEO’s bad behavior is actually normal.

This has becoming a frequent topic when in a rotational mentorship program where I volunteer: Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this. We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.

[headcanon]

> Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this.

I literally did this 12 years ago based on this reasoning, its good you're trying to counter that with the next generation.

With that said, I do wish there was more discourse around systemic issues rather than the usual finger-pointing towards rival social groups. Unfortunately I feel like our language gets in the way, systems issues are more abstract, but "bad people" are more visceral and easy to talk about.

[miyoji]

I think it's true that there are more bad CEOs than good CEOs. I've seen good CEOs turn into bad CEOs, but I've never seen a bad CEO turn into a good CEO. I assume it does happen, but there's a strong cultural pressure (and many hundreds of millions of dollars) pushing bad CEO behavior and very little other than personal ethics pushing good CEO behavior, and when the incentives look like that, swimming upstream is hard.

> We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.

Not everyone does have options, though. This is why instead of telling people to just avoid the bad CEOs, workers should unionize and collectively bargain against the bad CEOs. I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot of class warfare generalizations about "unions bad" in response to this suggestion.

[dlev_pika]

“No war but class war” rings as true in 2026 as it did 40 years ago

[neutronicus]

Sure, although the obsession with "CEOs and billionaires" does have the ring of the 300k HHI software-engineer class hoping to play class enemies above and below them against each other.

[gilfaethwy]

Software engineers are in the same class as the people below them - the working class. The entire concept of "middle class" originates from a time when the middle class were non-nobility who were, nonetheless, sufficiently powerful that they needn't worry about things like "keeping their jobs", whether because they were their own employees (as were nearly all doctors, lawyers, etc.) or because they had sufficient social capital not to worry about such trivial things as paid labor.

I want to be clear here: Eton boys were (and are) predominantly middle class, not upper class. In the US, we allowed the idea to be perverted, perhaps because we do not have nobility, and so there is no true "upper class". Given this, the reality is that we are bifurcated into a working class and an owning or capitalist class - though, many would argue (correctly, in my view) that we are in a feudal regime now, rather than a capitalist regime.

To put perhaps too fine a point on it, software engineers are house slaves, and, yes, CEOs and billionaires have done a good job of convincing the field slaves that the house slaves are their enemies, and of convincing house slaves that the field slaves are inferior and just want to take what the house slaves have without working for it.

[neutronicus]

That is an, uh, unfortunate choice of metaphor. Would recommend leaving that club in the bag the next time this comes up.

Anyhow. Software engineers, like, hire nannies when their kids are young. Have cleaning services. Accumulate nice little slices of the S&P500. Generally own houses.

Minor nobility is a better comp than anything to do with chattel slavery.

[coldtea]

>Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.

Mainly because "CEOs and billionaires" have fucked us over time and again, with their with their lobbying and bribing, with their power grabs, with their consolidation of news, entertainment, streaming, and social media properties, with their participation in the millitary industrial complex, with their censorship and partisanship, and with their rent seeking and worsening of their products...

[camgunz]

I don't think monopolies are the root of all evil so I'm on some level disqualified as a neo-Brandeisian. But it does seem plain that power corrupts, so we shouldn't give so much of it to so few people, which likely means limiting the size of companies (market share, staff).

[forgetfreeman]

The downvotes in absence of any reply suggest there's a group of individuals who think your position is so correct it's functionally unassailable but are offended you said it out loud.

[pixl97]

>normalizes bad behavior of CEOs

>They don’t believe changing jobs

Um, yea, where did you get these ideas.

Most CEOs want to be CEOs for the potentially vast amounts of wealth they can make from the position. When you're making 20-200x the average person going back to a regular job is pretty much out of the question.

Then when you start making that kind of money you quickly become disconnected from the rest of humanity. [Insert meme: "How much does a banana cost? Like $10 dollars?]

Vast wealth disparity commonly causes the issues that you are saying being normalized by people online, so I think you'd need quite a bit more evidence that is the case then with the already existing hypothesis.

[philipallstar]

> Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.

The endless re-rise of Marxism has made people assume that any punching is appropriate in the first place, and it's just a question of who. Saying "these are the people it's okay to punch" is dystopian.

[gilfaethwy]

And yet, the ruling class seems quite happy to punch the poor - and this is not dystopian? Let's not get into the tolerance paradox here, because if someone is already getting punched, and the puncher refuses to stop... well, yes, it's okay to punch the puncher.

[atomicnumber3]

Ah yes just go start a company. Let me just ask my father for a small business loan of a million dollars.