I have yet to see a CEO in any of the companies I've worked at do more than 8 hours a week of work. I had a startup where I knew our CEO and he worked hard I guess, but 100+ employees and I think it's more or less a useless position
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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I guess I've been lucky enough to work at companies where the CEO worked hard and provided significant benefit to the company. Of course, working hard for a CEO is different than for people lower. Going to dinner with customers, schmoozing with other CEOs, and getting updates from managers, etc. are all important CEO tasks. In every company I've worked at in the past 25 years, the CEO puts in more than 40 hours a week, but that 40 hours may be travel or going to nice dinners, etc. I've also seen them provide good leadership, good direction, and have been relatively good people. "Relatively good". Maybe I've just been lucky.
While I do mind the insane wealth gap, and I refuse to believe that a CEO is working that much harder/better than the ones on the factory floor, there is one aspect that is often overlooked. Especially in my country where workers' rights stand really strong: It needs to be possible to fire a CEO with little to no notice. And getting someone to agree to that, and ignore any termination rights other employees (usually and should) have, costs money.
Remember the DeepWater Horizon oil spill when the BP CEO made PR blunder and was replaced almost instantly, so that BP could at least try to save some face? They don't get fired. They get paid to leave. And you can bet your ass a new job isn't exactly waiting around the corner in these cases, so the increased pay and severance package will have to account for the long unemployment afterwards too. While i consider CEO pay to be outrageously high, part of it does make sense.
The hardest jobs I've ever worked were the ones that paid the worst. As I've gone through my career, I keep getting paid more and the work gets easier. Now "easier" is really "easier for me" because I have the skill and experience I didn't have in the past, but there is no real correlation between getting paid the most and working the hardest across job functions. That's a nice lie so people making less money can explain why those other people are making sooo much more than they are, and those that are making more money can feel good about themselves.
In principle that's true for me as well. I had a "truck driver job" once that turned out to be 5 minutes of driving, followed by hours of hauling huge copiers/printers, usually several flights of stairs, and most of the time hauling one that was replaced down again. It paid like shit. On average it was the worst and hardest job I ever had.
Luckily for me, I started a proper job with career opportunities about a year later. That job managed to have both the worst and the best days, hence my reference to average above.
That's fine if the buck actually stops with them. The problem is they reap the profits when the company does well, and suffer none of the consequences when it goes bad. How many times have we seen companies fuck up because of the decisions by the people in charge only to have a lowly employee suffer for it, while the executives get golden parachutes? You can argue that CEOs earn as much as they do because they are ultimately responsible for the company, but that's not the case when they get all the benefits and experience none of the negative consequences.
Another example of an actually unpopular opinion in Unpopular Opinion getting downvoted. 🤡