[krapp]

The position doesn't get a golden parachute, the person does. If you're CEO when things go shitty you shouldn't get anything more than your bottom-line employee would, which is to say you should just be unceremoniously kicked to the curb.

[astrange]

You need a good CEO when things are going bad, because without one they'll go even worse. You still want to make payroll and can't just randomly fire people.

(Also, if you own a failed company you're responsible for cleanup tasks for years afterward.)

[krapp]

>You still want to make payroll and can't just randomly fire people.

In the US you can.

>Also, if you own a failed company you're responsible for cleanup tasks for years afterward.

But we're talking about golden parachutes, where a CEO screws up the company and gets fired with a multi-million dollar raise. This is Hacker News, and the pro-business narrative is strong here, but in reality CEOs rarely suffer any meaningful risk or consequence for failure (unless it involves jail time, and even then they aren't doing hard time) they just wind up slightly less rich than when they succeed.

I don't care how good a CEO is, that isn't justifiable. Certainly not in a country where people can get laid off with an email and lose their access to healthcare on the whim of anyone above them in the power hierarchy.

[astrange]

> In the US you can.

Depends on the state I think. It's not Europe or Japan level.

At my employer it's very difficult to fire people for performance reasons even if as a manager you might want to.

> This is Hacker News, and the pro-business narrative is strong here,

I haven't seen such a narrative in years. Interest rates are too high to do startups unless it's AI after all. HN is mostly the same folk economics content as other forums, where all problems in the world are caused by "profits" accruing to "corporations".

(Mostly problems are caused by other things than that.)