Comment on CEOs are astatic about AI because they can train it to always agree with them.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 5 days ago
If they do that then they’re removing the “intelligence” leaving them left with only the “artificial”.
I disagree with your showerthought though. CEOs aren’t typically looking for “yes men”. That’s a stereotype. Some are, sure.
CEOs are ecstatic about AI because of the possibility of replacing expensive human labor with cheap fixed costs of hardware, software and electricity .
I think you have a niave view of CEOs. They always want people to agree with them and they certainly have a bloated ego. I think your interpretation is more the exception than the rule.
Just look at trump. He wanted to tariff he world and instead of trusting one of his advisors to do the research he just let ChatGPT spit out some garbage and went with that.
They always want people to agree with them and they certainly have a bloated ego.
Your description doesn’t match my first hand experience of working with CEOs. A couple have acted like that, sure, but the vast majority were very stressed or miserable fighting to keep their organizations going. Honestly, seeing the job, I know I don’t want it.
How many CEOs do you know or have worked with directly?
At least one.
I could sit here and lie and say a million. Fuck, for all you know I’m the CEO of chucky cheese.
The problem is, I know, and everyone else knows, work culture originates top down. We’ve all had power hungry managers and we know their games.
At least one.
I’d recommend you increase your sample size to give you additional perspective.
The problem is, I know, and everyone else knows, work culture originates top down. We’ve all had power hungry managers and we know their games.
This is too simplistic a view.
Yes, work culture originates from the top, but once in place the corporate culture is supported and re-enforced by middle managers and even the workers themselves. So once that original corporate culture is in place, swapping out the CEO doesn’t change it. It is very very difficult to change an org once it’s culture is set. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that a process can’t be changed “because we’ve always done it like this”. Sometimes purging existing culture means firing a number of managers and workers that are unconscionably enforcing the existing culture before new work culture can exit. Sometimes it means the entire org has to go.
What it sounds like you’re describing is more of a middle management problem. As in, you’ve been under micromanagers or straight up narcissistic psychos that rose to a position of power, and use their power to abuse those under them. If those kind of people ever rise to executive leadership or even a CEO that usually means the pretty quick firing of that person or the org goes under/gets acquired.
I think your interpretation is more the exception than the rule.
On the contrary; the good CEOs are just much quieter. The bad ones are in the news every other week with a new story about how shitty they are. We rarely praise kindness and successes, focusing instead on the latest screw up; so it seems like the screw ups are more prevalent because that’s all you ever hear about.
It’s hard to see the light, when you’re constantly pushed towards the dark.
No. I’m not that optimistic. Theirs a reason. The GOP is the dominat force in American politics. Its not because of MAGAts.
greenskye@lemm.ee 5 days ago
My experience with executives is that they don’t necessarily want yes men, but there’s a range of acceptable criticism or feedback that they’ll accept. As long as you’re within that range, it’s fine.
If you try to address fundamental problems that might require real change… well those people tend to get suppressed.
They’ll happily take feedback on meeting structure or project planning or whatever. But try to do a retrospective on what the true longterm costs of their decision to go with the cheap, but unreliable solution and they’ll blackball you.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ll agree with this.
Potentially true. I remember trying this too when I was really young in my career and getting sidelined. What I know now is that I had no idea what the hell I was talking about. I thought I knew enough, but really I just had a fraction of understanding. I had an older mentor give me some guidance around that time I didn’t understand until later, but after decades in the workplace I know how I screwed up.
There’s some truth to your statement, but you may be missing the bigger picture, and at a lower level, you’re not privy to information you would have needed to arrive at the decision leadership did. Your job at the lower levels is to execute on the plans of leadership. You do have a responsibility to use your mind and if you’re seeing risks (short term or long term), communicate those up the chain. However, leadership may already know those, or may know about bigger risks from not moving forward you’re not aware of.
Again, good leadership isn’t absolute. There are certainly idiot leaders and CEOs. There are also good people that are leaders and CEOs that are just out of their depth in areas. Both of these can result in the same thing that they make a bad decision and the organization and the workers could suffer.
greenskye@lemm.ee 3 days ago
You’re making assumptions that I’m some young kid, naively thinking I can change the world with overly simplistic ‘solutions’.
I’ve been in this career for a decent chunk of time, and, more importantly discussed these issues with others that have been here 40+ years. They feel the same.
You see it over and over again, management makes a short term cost saving decision, gets promoted or leaves to a new company and the rest of the people spend the next 3 years dealing with that decision. Things that used to be fixed in 2-3 days now takes 2-3 weeks. Projects that used to be completed in 4-6 weeks now take 4-6 months, etc.
These are things that I’ve noticed after 15+ years in the job and things that my 40+ year co-workers agree with and things the next two levels of my own management agree with (both 30+ years at the company). Hell, these are things executives I’ve been on better terms with have agreed with in the past (only to get let go after failing to implement culture changes).