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thewebguydHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography)

… I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is doing, I want to do the opposite." and it's worked for me so far. The area doesn't need yet another "dark and moody" photographer with boring sepia edits, blurry photos with a film preset, and the same exact font and colors on the website as everyone else. You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. It's low effort leadership and if I were on the board it certainly would not inspire my confidence in their ability to run a company. You're telling me not a single person at the table asked "Do we have these engineers' institutional knowledge documented somewhere before we fire them all??"

Original discussionFord rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors555 source comments · at import
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DR
drob518HN

There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?”

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ffsm8HN

> You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. You usually don't become a CEO of a long established company by being a pioneer either though... You may be able to argue this particular case though, as he is a marketing guy and he was a pioneer in marketing as few others capitalized on social media/YouTube when he did. But I feel like that's completely unrelated to how adjacent that's to what I'd consider a pioneer in a CEO position. Hence me pushing back a lil

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DR
drob518HN

Let’s be honest about how the incentives work at large companies. The CEO probably has a $10m/yr comp package. The EVPs under him are $3m-$5m each. Nobody is really interested in making the company wildly successful, because that would entail lots of risk. Better to just keep everything moving along at the market average, don’t get fired, and collect the package every year. If you’re lucky, you do this for 3-5 years and you collect another $10-$20m termination package when they fire you. Then you hire an executive headhunter to get you the next gig and you repeat it. So, your main goal is to play defense. Don’t do anything risky that would get you fired. Pay McKinsey to bless whatever you want to do and if it blows up, blame them and call Accenture or Deloitte next time. Rotate between management consultants as required. Buy your tech from IBM, because nobody gets fired for buying IBM. Y…

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