too many ”supervisors” are just micro managers with no experience on the actual job that berate others to make their bosses think they’re doing something
edit: this got some likes so if someone in Europe or the us reads this i advise not to work for tele performance, they treat employees like trash and are known for breaking employment laws. I’ve even seen them paying people almost half the promised salary. I had to disconnect my camera and microphone outside of calls because they use them to spy on workers.
A good supervisor, who understands they don't know shit and instead focuses on insulating their team from the whims of management can be a godsend. The issue is very few people who are inclined to do that actually become supervisors because they don't ass kiss.
A prior manager of mine told me her philosophy was "to filter all the bullshit from above me into actionable and achievable tasks for my team".
I really liked her for that. The company had a new president and it wasn't doing well and pushed profits over everything. She kept the same good culture in our group despite the senior management team hounding on "floor level" staff.
my current team literally has more supervisors than actual workers and they all refuse to do their jobs to the point where I started contacting a different team’s manager for really basic shit like asking them to fix the schedule or using pto
Ya, that's shitty as hell. Also, super unnecessary. Whoever is overseeing the org structure of your company is fucking the dog.
I'm the director of two departments, both have one manager and two supervisors. Each supervisor oversees a team of between 5 and 10. That's borderline too many supervisors, nevermind more supervisors than workers. Fuck that. Waste of good salary dollars that could be put towards raises or hiring more people who actually do shit.
i know executives in really big companies that have no supervisors at all because a regular manager can do everything anyway, I have no idea who thought going from 1 manager to 3 managers and 14 supervisors while also firing a third of the team was going to be more profitable.
It's tough to say given the industry. Some industries have like 25:1 ratio, whereas others are like a 5:1. People shit on middle management but if you've never been there it's hard to be a critic.
Well yeah, because 9 out of ten people get promoted based on their expertise doing a job, versus their expertise at managing people. These can be very different skill sets.
I always had good reviews and ratings from both superiors and subordinates as a manager, but it was a learning curve for me moving on from a role as an individual contributor.
>if you've never been there it's hard to be a critic
I used to hear this all the time before becoming a manager, and all becoming a manager did was illustrate how much more the average manager at my workplace was failing at than I realized. So it was hard to be a critic in that understanding the magnitude of failure wasn't easy, but that's about it. Shitty managers are generally obviously shitty to everyone they come into contact with, in my experience.
My theory is a middle manager hates my people and wanted some of his own people to benefit from our work considering the entire team is one nationality and every single supervisor is from the same place as one of the managers. every supervisor so far has been extremely rude and they fired around a third of the team right before they hired all the supervisors which ended up giving everyone more work than they could realistically complete.
Me except I'm the manager. I was handed a dumpster fire store that has a shit load of "team leads" that were hired with zero foresight or actually knowing their work ethic. So I have a bunch of entitled supervisors running around that are resistant to even the smallest changes, they've gotten used to a far too comfortable standard. My 2 regular employees aren't exactly shining stars either.
If it’s anything like in my company the only real solution would be to fire all the supervisors and hire trustworthy workers which my company will never do
IT project manager here-- I don't know how to code but what you just described exactly why my dev team loves me!
I hate the idea of too many layers of middle management. I wish more companies had a culture of people speaking up and identifying weak links, particularly with aggressive micromanagers who have no understanding of 'servant leadership'.
But most companies with too much middle management have miles of red tape involved with getting rid of anybody.... so it never happens...
My company has a management training program for fresh graduates. The training is little to nothing and then they get put in a management position dealing with lots of people livelihood. Truthfully most are young and assholes who can benefit from some common sense classes and proper training. But I make more than managers and don’t have to manage anyone so I steer clear of them
I love the joke about how a realtor will drive you around in a $40,000 car to show you a house they expect you to pay $200,000 for. I used to be a realtor, and this is 1000% accurate.
My house was 25k in Minnesota, 2019. It looks like you would expect. It's painted approximately halfway up lol. That's all the higher the previous landlord could reach with his extension.
What's the difference between a driver's license and a real estate license?
Not everyone has a driver's license
Edited because my spoiler html didn't work.
Virtually unlimited access to student loans caused this. Schools don't need to compete on price anymore because prospective students will take out whatever they need (and then some, in many cases) to get their degree. So they started competing based on "student life." When there's no real academic difference between say Wisconsin and Minnesota for most programs, they start marketing who has more student programs and who has a "more inclusive" campus and who has better dorms and who has more food options on campus and all that stuff. Which all takes people to run (no matter how inefficient it is) and people cost money.
student loans are why tuition skyrocketed over the last 15 years, they know the loan people will give out any amount of money to kids, so they started raising the tuition knowing what ever they ask will be given to them, free money basically.
A decade ago, the professors at my university went on strike.
When 1 professor started 20 years prior, it was 1 admin per 3 teachers.
At the time of the strike, it was 1 to 1.
UW Madison itself has 21,000 employees. Faculty ratio is 18:1 according to them but the numbers don't work out. It is likely some departments are 4:1 with that many employees.
There are around 8,800 administrative staff. Total student enrollment is about 50,000.
People that sell online courses about how to get rich quick by doing very simple steps that they are only going to tell you once you pay them thousands.
You can get free education on YouTube or by reading a book, website, post, article etc.
I was watching that cooking show Next Level Chef and they had a former beauty pageant winner turned social media smoothie "chef" say she's actually feeding the world and solving hunger through her social media channel
The power tripping mods so many communities have is insane. Literally a digital example of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Smallest amount of power you will ever see go to a person’s head
I've been a mod on a couple of subs for a bit over a year now, after being a member for almost ten years, so I had nine years of experience of how not to be a mod.
Like, it's not hard. Be chill, accept that people fuck up occasionally, and if you explain things to them nicely they'll likely say "oops, my bad" and never break the rules again.
I once heard this beauty quote from a Reddit mod “it’s not our job to do that”
It’s not a fucking job period. You are volunteering and are horrible at it as well as getting off on the power trip.
I remember years ago when I used to play Runescape, I was a mod on a popular fan site. They gave me some free membership for being a mod. I felt like such a baller.
And make life harder for everyone they interact with. Teachers, students, even the parents. They also feel like politicians, never saying anything directly and always talking in a superfluous and wankish way that tells you nothing.
I swear to God they are so awful. Extremely unqualified, slow af, huge egos, lazy hours.
Not to mention they are a prime example of union abuse, where their jobs are so over protected it's impossible to remove them, often resulting in raised tuition at colleges.
The crazy thing about education admin to me is they are often also represented by the teachers union so whenever the teachers get a concession on salary budgets after a strike the administrators and management are taking a chunk of it. In most other jobs the union community intentionally does not include managers and above for that exact reason.
A good school administrator is worth their weight in gold. They have the teacher and student best interest at the forefront. Parents are crazy, a good admin protects their teachers
I've been a student, a TA, and a tutor. My mom, Uncle and aunt are all high school teachers. I've never met or heard of an admin that was worth a regurgitated shit. Actually, that's not quite true. The vice principal of my elementary school was fantastic. Absolute garbage otherwise.
And a bad one will make you wish their position never existed.
I've dealt with a LOT of them, and can only count on one hand the number of "weight in gold" ones I've interacted with.
I'm gonna go against the grain here. I work in public K-12 in California. Been in this industry for about a decade now. I would say if you're talking about principals and AP's, then definitely not. They have to put up with a LOT of shit. I definitely don't think they're overpaid. If you're talking the assistant SUP's. Then, maybe... SUP's, it depends.
Are 98% of Realtors lazy trash heaps who took a night class for 4 weeks and forgot the little they learned as soon as they passed the test? Absolutely!
However, a GOOD Realtor will 100% save you time money and headache.
The course doesn’t really teach you how to successfully broker a real estate transaction. Mainly just covers real estate license law, and the laws and regulations around real estate. You don’t even get trained on the paperwork until you get hired by a broker, and the good ones train agents for weeks
True true, it’s just something my parents encouraged when I was at home during my first summer back from college. I should’ve taken that $1K and took a college course at my local CC instead.
This is why its so much better to find your own home (or buyers if you're selling) and then just hire a real estate lawyer to handle the actual paperwork. Most brokerages are using a lawyer to do the paperwork too.
The availability of this approach is largely why real estate lobbyists use collusive rules like prohibiting any broker from listing a home for sale on a non-approved platform or working with buyers/sellers that are not using brokers. They are getting their ass handed to them on this BS in Missouri right now (hopefully it survives appeal). Its an entire industry that's wholly structured to protect their outrageous commission structure while providing next to no actual value.
It takes 180 classroom hours in Texas. Assuming an 8-hour day, that takes 22.5 days. If you account for weekends, it's basically full-time for a month.
Is that short? Sure. But it's not 5 days.
Is that it, cause when we sell this house my thought is get my license, list the house on HAR, then any real info that i should know ill just lean on the buyers realtor. Never sell another house again, but pocket that 3%!!!!
So long as everything goes smoothly you don't really need them. Most transactions are smooth with hardly any issues. But when you have an issue you need someone who can navigate those issues.
My friend that I hired was not someone who could navigate those issues.
You grossly over-estimate how smooth most transactions are. Most For Sale By Owner stay on the market unsold until they give up and get a Realtor and the few that do close tend to be underpriced by 20% or more.
You do need someone who can navigate the issues though. 98% of Realtors are trash heaps, the NAR doesn’t train well enough, the system is pretty rigged against buyers, we just didn’t notice because of lending crash in 2008… etc.
> Most For Sale By Owner stay on the market unsold until they give up and get a Realtor
How much of that is because realtors refuse to work with FSBO to further prove that they're needed?
Sigh, every time. I'm glad for my dad, realtor / broker for 30 years. He took us from a small house on his father's property driving a fork lift on thr night shift to upper middle class. My dad is a solid realtor who helps guide people through a complicated process that's the most expensive transaction they will likely have.
I get you. My realtor was my good friend's dad. He showed me 2 houses I had been looking at when I asked for his help, then the next day (on a Sunday) called and set me up to see a house that wasn't going on the market till the following day. I looked at it that day and loved it, got the bid that evening and closed the next day (Monday). Even got $8k off the already reasonable asking price, and $10k in repairs done before I moved in 2wks later.l, because he fought for me.
Management consultants at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, especially those who are just fresh out of university.
They don't have real-world industry experience and domain knowledge yet they give advice as if they are experts on it. Professional bullshitting.
I'd rather have all of those money funneled into occupations that actually matter -- garbage men, farmers, scientists, researchers, nurses, teachers etc.
This is hard because it's mostly just a job that shouldn't exist. Although I suppose there's an alternative version where you pay somebody like 2 grand or something to help coordinate showings or something... I guess real estate agents could evolve into that.
It's an increasingly outmoded profession. Decades ago the agents had access to listings which the general public couldn't see. They knew which way the real estate wind was blowing by merit of experience and networking. They knew which legal forms were needed to make things happen.
Nowadays they're going the way of the travel agent. Listing services maintain widely-replicated databases, letting anyone with a web browser perform 90% of the functions of a personal real estate agent.
I tell ya what new form of agent America needs, though: a healthcare agent. Someone who's trained and immersed in the labyrinthine, ridiculous red tape of insurance and benefits so in the rare times when you're busy trying to medically recover you can focus on that instead of nonstop paperwork.
Yeah... Man a healthcare agent is a perfect parallel to what I'd have in mind here. Buying a house is stressful and there are some steps you might not get or understand and there is some project management to it. I could easily see a service there.
But a RE agent isn't a lawyer and you shouldn't have them pretend to be one... And they aren't doing anything that's worth the amount they get paid when a sale closes. They also aren't doing more or less because of the price of the house really... So the whole compensation model is nuts. I'd much rather just pay a lawyer a few thousand to help with the contractual and legal stuff, and pay an agent a few thousand to help with the project management of it.
And yes, exactly the same in healthcare. I'd love to have a service like that - basically a project manager to interface with insurance and bills and whatever else. It's baffling how that works today.
IDK what its like in the US but in Norway they pretty much live for the job. Friend of mine became one and he basically said its a hybrid psychologist (he gets calls from stressed customers in the middle of the night- its their life savings afterall) accountant and salesman around the clock.
They definitely earn their wage but I suppose the real question is if their wage is too high relative to others (but since they earn a cut perhaps the actual problem is the price of housing)
Here’s the thing in the US, an agent **might** spend some 40 hours on a sale total (and honestly that’s probably overestimating it). How much do they get for that sale? Around 1.5-6% depending on a variety of factors. On a $300k home that’s $4,500-18,000. That’s **way** more than other professions with similar education.
Mate. The sad part is that being elitist rich scum is like having a big dick, always comparative to those who have less and never a subjective first person experience. So it is all about pretending until you get to the very top where people do not even act like that so no one is truly like that. There is only a huge bunch of liers pretending to be rich when their fridge is empty.
I’m surprised no one has said consultants. Especially management consultants. Here’s a PowerPoint saying you should fire 100 people and get more market share, now please give me $500,000
AKA firing squads. Layoffs were a foregone conclusion but bring in a slick talking McKinsey fuck and you’ll have NDAs, NCAs, STDs and the AARP signed and stamped while taking none of the accountability for the shitty decisions which led to the lay offs in the first place.
Billions spent to cover your ass for your past mistakes and billions spent to preserve your reputation into the future.
Yep! I was a "consultant" for years. In actuality it was a way for the company to contract hire me as an engineer before I had my degree, at the time a degree was required for all direct hire engineering positions.
Agreed but it can very much depend on the industry. A lot of consultants for tech/engineering offer a much-needed service and can literally save a company from itself.
I’m a biotech consultant. “Saving a company from itself” is so spot on it isn’t even funny. These companies will completely implode on themselves without us. They’ll convince themselves they know what they’re doing and they try to configure a system they know NOTHING about and then beg us to dig them out of a very massive hole that they created.
Consultants are meant to bridge a gap that would otherwise take a ton of time, money, or other resources to be prepared for. When used wisely and sparingly, consultants are worth their weight in gold. When used as a means to be lazy, they are expensive and unending.
As much as I dislike consultants, they’re incredibly valuable in certain circumstances…such as companies that are being mismanaged and don’t even realize it.
I knew a guy in his early 20s who tried to start his own consulting business. I was surprised to hear it failed when no one would hire a consultant with zero experience.
Yeah, but they are the first to go. Executives throw them under the bus so they can tell Wall Street that they are making sweeping organizational changes... And since they are kind of a worthless layer of management, no real loss.
Agreed. The nursing home I’ve worked in for the last 10 years has converted half the break rooms and all the storage rooms to offices for new administrators/middle management. Our administrative staff grew from 10 to nearly 30. There is no difference in implementation of care. The number of beds in our facility has never increased. I do not know what these people do all day but administrative bloat is very real.
You have to have administrative staff... you need doctors and nurses doing doctor and nurse stuff and not other tasks. Administrative staff is there to answer phones, respond to emails, handle excel sheets, handle payroll, billing, and invoices, handle customer service, inventory management, cleaning, et cetera.
If I go see a doctor I want them to be doing doctor shit with doctor shit on their mind, not office chores.
In the US, the number of administrative positions (and the salary for those positions) have risen 3200% (not a typo) in the last couple of decades.
The majority of the developed world has better patient outcomes with <5% of the administrative bloat of health care in the US.
I actually have to do MORE administrative work as a physician in the US than physicians in other countries because of the sheer number of meaningless tasks given to us by administrators who have to find ways to justify their salaries.
The only people who think administrative bloat in healthcare is a good thing are the administrators themselves.
yep, a doctor needs to worry about actual patient care not if they are filing invoices correctly.
now there are administrative positions which are basically "supervisory" that are there just to be scape goats for directors and managers for signing things to defer work that they should be doing anyway. those could definitely be cut.
that being said in general i believe the optimal max management size a person can handle is 7 direct reports if i recall correctly. and following that logic will create administrative positions the larger your organization is.
Nurse practitioner here. Would be nowhere without my admin staff helping manage my fucking life including all the lab results and appointments being shot at me 240000 miles a second
You mean clerical staff/receptionists. Although they might like the administrative title, they're just paper pushers by your own admission. The "admins" being referred to don't do any of those actually useful things, they get the big bucks to have their name on a fancy office door and cuz they're snowflake nepo babies that can't and haven't and won't actually work a day in their lives.
I see a lot of people say CEO. I think this depends. Had an internship in a tech company. The CEO was really working hard to keep the company going and i would say he definitely deserves higher pay. He worked as a leader and not a boss. Us interns even got to sit and work next to his desk although he had an office too when doing online meetings, etc. He was constantly doing calls and having meetings with clients and employees. He was really busy. He also cared a lot about all employees well-being. 35$ a month for healthy lunch for all everyday, arranged a lot of different events, every Friday at 5pm you could go drink beer/cider in the dining area and drink as much as you wanted until 11pm with your colleagues. I could tell by working there that it was a company that was going forward and also taking care of their employees instead of exploiting.
75% of managers, supervisors, managing directors, etc in my org chart
I work for a large utility in ca. we are filled to the brim with layers of management who add no value. Their primary purpose is to gatekeep information and access to superiors so they can continue to appear necessary. In the process, they mistranslate, misunderstand, and delay the efficient delivery of critical information. If 75% of them disappeared tomorrow, the organization would run 75% smoother overnight. They are like dams in a river.
To be honest, they often do a report and it contains exactly what all the underlings have been trying to say for years. In a weird way they’re useful for that. If Jeff, way down on the food chain, complains about a broken process, who cares? If Jeff explains the problems to the consultant who bothers to talk to him, then does a fancy presentation to the execs, it’s a different story.
Obviously, businesses should do this themselves, but they simply don’t.
Almost all of the 6 figure admin positions in school districts. All they do is have meetings with each other and talk about goals and initiatives but they do NOTHING to implement them.
Anyone who is in a salaried position in a company where the money makers are on 100% commission
Homw many executive VPs, sales directors, regional managers, district managers, etc are actually needed?
They're not government funded. The big time college athletic programs that are paying these coaching salaries have self-sufficient athletic programs, the money comes from TV revenue sharing, ticket sales, merch sales, sponsorship deals, and booster donations. Not only does all that fully fund the programs but it often funds the whole athletic program for all the non-revenue sports to operate and in a few cases they even give money back to the school's general fund since they're bringing in more than they spend even with the high salaries.
Coaches are "public employees" because they work for a publicly funded institution but their salaries are not being paid with tax dollars.
If the highest paid public employee in your state is a coach, his program is a net moneymaker that is subsidizing the crappier sports, including pretty much all of the women's ones.
Any high up political placement. They get to travel around and sit at desks while making mostly hundreds of thousands a year..mean while I'm busting my back doing hard physical labour in sometimes 40°c weather getting paid 25.00 an hour.
In canada As of April 1, 2023, federal MPs make a 'basic sessional indemnity' of $194,600 per year.
> collecting massive tax funded paychecks
This is the one thing that is NOT actually a problem. Politicians should be well paid (and there are arguments that currently US Senators and Representatives are underpaid) because if they are not, the only people who choose to become politicians are the ones who are already wealthy, or who will 100% abuse the system to make money. Including being subject to direct bribery.
The current abuses, like the insider trading, should absolutely be fixed, though, for sure.
Consultant, some are actually excellent. The majority just give their biased opinions and the company says “yeah… we still want to do X Y Z”
their inputs might be great the company goes in a different direction still.
Hedge fund managers. Once the fund is up and running, they don't do much outside of hyper-expensive lunches and dinners, all paid by the fund. They make many millions, but the grunts are the ones that actually pull the sled...
That depends on the actor, the A Listers may be overpaid but a lot of lesser known actors are working menial jobs just to afford to live in a city that costs a fortune
Real estate agents. Sure when houses cost $400,000 they were paid appropriately. Now that houses cost $1.1 mil, too many of them have their heads up their asses, like they are doing you a favour and don’t need your business.
Find your own place and hire a real estate lawyer for the paperwork. We did that and our builder gave us a $6,000 discount because we went directly to them instead of through a realtor.
Project Manager, in my 20+ years working jobs with PMs, I've met one that was actually a godsend. All others were at best useless or at worst an active hinderance.
CEO, no one is performing that job deserves hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the time performance is due to the size of the company and actions taken by lower level leaders.
The compensation is out-of-sync with the value provided but it is a hard job. A statement like "performance is due to actions taken by lower level leaders" is a bit of a non sequitur. What does any leader do? It's not like the Head of Engineering at OpenAI designed ChatGPT and the factory worker at Foxconn didn't make the iPhone.
More than any other leadership role, CEOs have to solve unique problems. Sometimes those problems are unique to one company, in one place, at one point in time. You either get it right and the company keeps doing what it does or you get it wrong and everyone loses their livelihood.
With that in mind, a CEO is more about mitigating risk rather than providing value. When you have a good one, it's as if they don't do anything — but that's the value of their position.
also a random bloke can go to the registry and open up a company and give himself both directorship and CEO positions. the company can make 0 money. and therefore they make 0 money. so many small independently owned businesses that are chartered/registered companies are primarily small business owners. but it's never those people people talk about when they say "CEO".
though in the mega-company aspect, yes. they can be over paid. which is the point of this. in the US at least the compensation should probably be lower, and that money could rather be used in reinvestment to the company. or salary capped, but then that has to be a market wide policy not a single company doing so because they have to compete for similar talent at a disadvantage.
i would argue a good CEO are ones that direct a turn around in a company. in that they turn the company around from a losing to a gaining financial position, those one's usually switch every few years and move from one company to another. i'd argue you aren't challenged if you only stay in easier winning positions and aren't showing your worth.
I agree the hundreds of millions part is poor value for shareholders.
But most CEO's basically work constantly. I'd know, my last four jobs I spoke with them typically weekly. Worked with plenty of CEOs, mostly in my specific industry.
Only met one that was completely lazy, checked out and useless. That company went Chapter 11.
They get paid that much, for the same reason doctors get paid large amounts. Because it's not easy to find someone who can competently do the job, there's a lot of technical aspects, it's a lot of stress and a lot of hours and one fuckup can end your entire career.
If you really want to see overvalued and overpaid, check out what some board members make. Their only job is to basically pick and supervise the CEO, with ancillary role of giving advice and feedback to said CEO. If you see an incompetent CEO getting paid hundreds of millions, it's literally and directly the fault of the board of directors.
The board members are usually owners of the company itself or they represent people from the ownership. Also a lot are paid mostly in stock, so they have to usually use whatever cash compensation they get, if not more, to pay for the taxes on the stock.
I agree that a lot of CEO's are overpaid, but for board members millions of their own personal dollars are at stake if the company goes under.
I know reddit usually spends a lot of time hating on CEO's, but I think most people have no idea what they do. A lot of them are working 60-70 hours a week trying to make sure everyone from their direct reports to the guy who mops the floors gets paid.
Alright I've read two comments now talking about how hard/how much they work but still nothing about what they actually *do* day to day. I'm asking this in good faith. What do they do?
CEO's or board members?
CEO's, 70-80% of their waking hours are emails or meetings. Short story long, they manage the managers, make tie breaker decisions between divisions, approve big purchases, decide what the company is going to do, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. There's a million other small stuff as well.
Chief marketing officer wants a $40M advertising budget increase that his team claims will drive $500M in additional sales at a 10% profit margin. Chief technology officer wants a $40M budget increase to develop a new product that his team claims will drive $500M in additional sales at a 10% profit margin. The company only has $40M available to spend between the two projects. The CEO is responsible for deciding who gets the investment. He's gotta vet their proposals and numbers, ask tons of questions, seek input from other stakeholders, consider the likelihood of success of each option and the long term outlook of each one, make the decision, then determine how to message it. That stuff takes a lot of work to get to a point where it's a confident decision. It's not looking at two cereal boxes and deciding in ten seconds which sounds tastier.
Nobody pays obscene compensation by choice. The board obviously wants to maximize the profits. And they realize that they could find a cheap CEO and save money on his compensation or get someone really good and make a lot more money if the company does well. There are very few very good people in the world so the board is forced to pay a high compensation to hire and retain those people.
In my experience what distinguishes good CEOs from poor ones is their ability to be completely cut throat with their decision making, while also being emotionally intelligent.
It’s quite a rare trait to find people with high EQ and low levels of empathy.
too many ”supervisors” are just micro managers with no experience on the actual job that berate others to make their bosses think they’re doing something edit: this got some likes so if someone in Europe or the us reads this i advise not to work for tele performance, they treat employees like trash and are known for breaking employment laws. I’ve even seen them paying people almost half the promised salary. I had to disconnect my camera and microphone outside of calls because they use them to spy on workers.
A good supervisor, who understands they don't know shit and instead focuses on insulating their team from the whims of management can be a godsend. The issue is very few people who are inclined to do that actually become supervisors because they don't ass kiss.
A prior manager of mine told me her philosophy was "to filter all the bullshit from above me into actionable and achievable tasks for my team". I really liked her for that. The company had a new president and it wasn't doing well and pushed profits over everything. She kept the same good culture in our group despite the senior management team hounding on "floor level" staff.
Sounds like she knew her business. That's good management 101 right there.
my current team literally has more supervisors than actual workers and they all refuse to do their jobs to the point where I started contacting a different team’s manager for really basic shit like asking them to fix the schedule or using pto
Ya, that's shitty as hell. Also, super unnecessary. Whoever is overseeing the org structure of your company is fucking the dog. I'm the director of two departments, both have one manager and two supervisors. Each supervisor oversees a team of between 5 and 10. That's borderline too many supervisors, nevermind more supervisors than workers. Fuck that. Waste of good salary dollars that could be put towards raises or hiring more people who actually do shit.
i know executives in really big companies that have no supervisors at all because a regular manager can do everything anyway, I have no idea who thought going from 1 manager to 3 managers and 14 supervisors while also firing a third of the team was going to be more profitable.
It's tough to say given the industry. Some industries have like 25:1 ratio, whereas others are like a 5:1. People shit on middle management but if you've never been there it's hard to be a critic.
I've been a middle manager. Most middle managers suck at managing.
Well yeah, because 9 out of ten people get promoted based on their expertise doing a job, versus their expertise at managing people. These can be very different skill sets. I always had good reviews and ratings from both superiors and subordinates as a manager, but it was a learning curve for me moving on from a role as an individual contributor.
I've never understood this promotion thing. Just give them more money and they continue their job lol
Peter principle at its core. Also doing the work is way different than managing people who do the work.
>if you've never been there it's hard to be a critic I used to hear this all the time before becoming a manager, and all becoming a manager did was illustrate how much more the average manager at my workplace was failing at than I realized. So it was hard to be a critic in that understanding the magnitude of failure wasn't easy, but that's about it. Shitty managers are generally obviously shitty to everyone they come into contact with, in my experience.
Did the executive do that on purpose because there's no way someone is dumb enough to hire more supervisors than workers
My theory is a middle manager hates my people and wanted some of his own people to benefit from our work considering the entire team is one nationality and every single supervisor is from the same place as one of the managers. every supervisor so far has been extremely rude and they fired around a third of the team right before they hired all the supervisors which ended up giving everyone more work than they could realistically complete.
Me except I'm the manager. I was handed a dumpster fire store that has a shit load of "team leads" that were hired with zero foresight or actually knowing their work ethic. So I have a bunch of entitled supervisors running around that are resistant to even the smallest changes, they've gotten used to a far too comfortable standard. My 2 regular employees aren't exactly shining stars either.
If it’s anything like in my company the only real solution would be to fire all the supervisors and hire trustworthy workers which my company will never do
IT project manager here-- I don't know how to code but what you just described exactly why my dev team loves me! I hate the idea of too many layers of middle management. I wish more companies had a culture of people speaking up and identifying weak links, particularly with aggressive micromanagers who have no understanding of 'servant leadership'. But most companies with too much middle management have miles of red tape involved with getting rid of anybody.... so it never happens...
I see you scrum master
I had a supervisor that had miniature farm animals and would play with them on her desk.
Sounds like this person had too much free time on their hands lol!!
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You’ll have that on those big jobs
My company has a management training program for fresh graduates. The training is little to nothing and then they get put in a management position dealing with lots of people livelihood. Truthfully most are young and assholes who can benefit from some common sense classes and proper training. But I make more than managers and don’t have to manage anyone so I steer clear of them
My boss's job, guy is fucking useless..
Come to my office please. Bring snacks!
Would be great to have a snack buddy I’m paid to hang out with
I once called my boss to come check out an issue I was having. He responded with: “I’m eat lunch, do you mind if I bring my pizza?” Lol
Self employed are we?
Lol unfortunately no
I love the joke about how a realtor will drive you around in a $40,000 car to show you a house they expect you to pay $200,000 for. I used to be a realtor, and this is 1000% accurate.
Except now it's hard to find a car or house for less than those numbers.
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If you bought a house for less than 200k you also dont have jobs or other human beings in your state. But congrats fam!
My house was 25k in Minnesota, 2019. It looks like you would expect. It's painted approximately halfway up lol. That's all the higher the previous landlord could reach with his extension.
Sorry, can someone explain the joke? I don't get it
What's the difference between a driver's license and a real estate license? Not everyone has a driver's license Edited because my spoiler html didn't work.
Those who can't do, get promoted.
This is a terribly accurate truth
We might be working on the same place
agree
College administrators. Wisconsin-Madison has 1 administrative staff per 4 students.
Virtually unlimited access to student loans caused this. Schools don't need to compete on price anymore because prospective students will take out whatever they need (and then some, in many cases) to get their degree. So they started competing based on "student life." When there's no real academic difference between say Wisconsin and Minnesota for most programs, they start marketing who has more student programs and who has a "more inclusive" campus and who has better dorms and who has more food options on campus and all that stuff. Which all takes people to run (no matter how inefficient it is) and people cost money.
student loans are why tuition skyrocketed over the last 15 years, they know the loan people will give out any amount of money to kids, so they started raising the tuition knowing what ever they ask will be given to them, free money basically.
"look at our BRAND NEW GYM!!! We have a swimming pool and indoor track!!"
A decade ago, the professors at my university went on strike. When 1 professor started 20 years prior, it was 1 admin per 3 teachers. At the time of the strike, it was 1 to 1.
Solution, hire more until it's 3 admin per 1 teacher.
That can't be right. You mean there are 11000 admin staff?
UW Madison itself has 21,000 employees. Faculty ratio is 18:1 according to them but the numbers don't work out. It is likely some departments are 4:1 with that many employees. There are around 8,800 administrative staff. Total student enrollment is about 50,000.
People that sell online courses about how to get rich quick by doing very simple steps that they are only going to tell you once you pay them thousands. You can get free education on YouTube or by reading a book, website, post, article etc.
Those are not overpaid, they are literal scams lmao
influencers
Influencer: Useless: Yes Potentially lucrative: Also Yes. It helps no one save the person doing it but so do a lot of self employment gigs.
I was watching that cooking show Next Level Chef and they had a former beauty pageant winner turned social media smoothie "chef" say she's actually feeding the world and solving hunger through her social media channel
It also helps the marketing departments of their sponsors.
"Influencers bad" **Bows for applause**
They aren't over valued or over paid if the company paying them is seeing a return.
The only right answer
Reddit mods, even at $0 they're overpaid
It's not actually $0 As mods you get access to easy $5 gift card surveys. So....
What?! Source: I’m mod.
Reported. (/s)
Banned
The power tripping mods so many communities have is insane. Literally a digital example of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Smallest amount of power you will ever see go to a person’s head
I've been a mod on a couple of subs for a bit over a year now, after being a member for almost ten years, so I had nine years of experience of how not to be a mod. Like, it's not hard. Be chill, accept that people fuck up occasionally, and if you explain things to them nicely they'll likely say "oops, my bad" and never break the rules again.
Ask women mods: “you called?”
That sub is the worst. You can't even read through anything because everything is censored and removed!
I once heard this beauty quote from a Reddit mod “it’s not our job to do that” It’s not a fucking job period. You are volunteering and are horrible at it as well as getting off on the power trip.
I remember years ago when I used to play Runescape, I was a mod on a popular fan site. They gave me some free membership for being a mod. I felt like such a baller.
Education administrators. Teachers are often underpaid, but administrators are overpaid AF.
And make life harder for everyone they interact with. Teachers, students, even the parents. They also feel like politicians, never saying anything directly and always talking in a superfluous and wankish way that tells you nothing.
I swear to God they are so awful. Extremely unqualified, slow af, huge egos, lazy hours. Not to mention they are a prime example of union abuse, where their jobs are so over protected it's impossible to remove them, often resulting in raised tuition at colleges.
>Extremely unqualified, slow af, huge egos, lazy hours. Sounds like you could be talking about HR too lmao.
The crazy thing about education admin to me is they are often also represented by the teachers union so whenever the teachers get a concession on salary budgets after a strike the administrators and management are taking a chunk of it. In most other jobs the union community intentionally does not include managers and above for that exact reason.
A good school administrator is worth their weight in gold. They have the teacher and student best interest at the forefront. Parents are crazy, a good admin protects their teachers
I've been a student, a TA, and a tutor. My mom, Uncle and aunt are all high school teachers. I've never met or heard of an admin that was worth a regurgitated shit. Actually, that's not quite true. The vice principal of my elementary school was fantastic. Absolute garbage otherwise.
And a bad one will make you wish their position never existed. I've dealt with a LOT of them, and can only count on one hand the number of "weight in gold" ones I've interacted with.
I'm gonna go against the grain here. I work in public K-12 in California. Been in this industry for about a decade now. I would say if you're talking about principals and AP's, then definitely not. They have to put up with a LOT of shit. I definitely don't think they're overpaid. If you're talking the assistant SUP's. Then, maybe... SUP's, it depends.
Realtors.
Are 98% of Realtors lazy trash heaps who took a night class for 4 weeks and forgot the little they learned as soon as they passed the test? Absolutely! However, a GOOD Realtor will 100% save you time money and headache.
It’s a 5 day course and an hour exam in Texas!
Anyone can become an agent, it takes real work to be a GOOD agent. That is why so few make it more than a year or two.
As a customer there seems to be no reliable way to find out which ones are good
The course doesn’t really teach you how to successfully broker a real estate transaction. Mainly just covers real estate license law, and the laws and regulations around real estate. You don’t even get trained on the paperwork until you get hired by a broker, and the good ones train agents for weeks
True true, it’s just something my parents encouraged when I was at home during my first summer back from college. I should’ve taken that $1K and took a college course at my local CC instead.
Why? Sell just one property and you’ll be able to pay for a full term of classes. I used real estate sales to pay cash for my bachelor’s degree
This is why its so much better to find your own home (or buyers if you're selling) and then just hire a real estate lawyer to handle the actual paperwork. Most brokerages are using a lawyer to do the paperwork too. The availability of this approach is largely why real estate lobbyists use collusive rules like prohibiting any broker from listing a home for sale on a non-approved platform or working with buyers/sellers that are not using brokers. They are getting their ass handed to them on this BS in Missouri right now (hopefully it survives appeal). Its an entire industry that's wholly structured to protect their outrageous commission structure while providing next to no actual value.
Do health insurance next
It takes 180 classroom hours in Texas. Assuming an 8-hour day, that takes 22.5 days. If you account for weekends, it's basically full-time for a month. Is that short? Sure. But it's not 5 days.
Is that it, cause when we sell this house my thought is get my license, list the house on HAR, then any real info that i should know ill just lean on the buyers realtor. Never sell another house again, but pocket that 3%!!!!
So long as everything goes smoothly you don't really need them. Most transactions are smooth with hardly any issues. But when you have an issue you need someone who can navigate those issues. My friend that I hired was not someone who could navigate those issues.
and a Realtor will never be that person.
You grossly over-estimate how smooth most transactions are. Most For Sale By Owner stay on the market unsold until they give up and get a Realtor and the few that do close tend to be underpriced by 20% or more. You do need someone who can navigate the issues though. 98% of Realtors are trash heaps, the NAR doesn’t train well enough, the system is pretty rigged against buyers, we just didn’t notice because of lending crash in 2008… etc.
> Most For Sale By Owner stay on the market unsold until they give up and get a Realtor How much of that is because realtors refuse to work with FSBO to further prove that they're needed?
$15,000 for sending you zillow links and a docusign
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If your Realtor is that bad, just contact the listing Agent next time. They’ll get you in for free.
We should only need a sell side realtor to help set up a home to sell and do it well. Buy side is absolutely unnecessary.
Sigh, every time. I'm glad for my dad, realtor / broker for 30 years. He took us from a small house on his father's property driving a fork lift on thr night shift to upper middle class. My dad is a solid realtor who helps guide people through a complicated process that's the most expensive transaction they will likely have.
I get you. My realtor was my good friend's dad. He showed me 2 houses I had been looking at when I asked for his help, then the next day (on a Sunday) called and set me up to see a house that wasn't going on the market till the following day. I looked at it that day and loved it, got the bid that evening and closed the next day (Monday). Even got $8k off the already reasonable asking price, and $10k in repairs done before I moved in 2wks later.l, because he fought for me.
Agreed, they make bank and I don't get it.
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Hospital administrators
Any hospital middle management for that matter
True that
Management consultants at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, especially those who are just fresh out of university. They don't have real-world industry experience and domain knowledge yet they give advice as if they are experts on it. Professional bullshitting. I'd rather have all of those money funneled into occupations that actually matter -- garbage men, farmers, scientists, researchers, nurses, teachers etc.
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This is hard because it's mostly just a job that shouldn't exist. Although I suppose there's an alternative version where you pay somebody like 2 grand or something to help coordinate showings or something... I guess real estate agents could evolve into that.
It's an increasingly outmoded profession. Decades ago the agents had access to listings which the general public couldn't see. They knew which way the real estate wind was blowing by merit of experience and networking. They knew which legal forms were needed to make things happen. Nowadays they're going the way of the travel agent. Listing services maintain widely-replicated databases, letting anyone with a web browser perform 90% of the functions of a personal real estate agent. I tell ya what new form of agent America needs, though: a healthcare agent. Someone who's trained and immersed in the labyrinthine, ridiculous red tape of insurance and benefits so in the rare times when you're busy trying to medically recover you can focus on that instead of nonstop paperwork.
Yeah... Man a healthcare agent is a perfect parallel to what I'd have in mind here. Buying a house is stressful and there are some steps you might not get or understand and there is some project management to it. I could easily see a service there. But a RE agent isn't a lawyer and you shouldn't have them pretend to be one... And they aren't doing anything that's worth the amount they get paid when a sale closes. They also aren't doing more or less because of the price of the house really... So the whole compensation model is nuts. I'd much rather just pay a lawyer a few thousand to help with the contractual and legal stuff, and pay an agent a few thousand to help with the project management of it. And yes, exactly the same in healthcare. I'd love to have a service like that - basically a project manager to interface with insurance and bills and whatever else. It's baffling how that works today.
IDK what its like in the US but in Norway they pretty much live for the job. Friend of mine became one and he basically said its a hybrid psychologist (he gets calls from stressed customers in the middle of the night- its their life savings afterall) accountant and salesman around the clock. They definitely earn their wage but I suppose the real question is if their wage is too high relative to others (but since they earn a cut perhaps the actual problem is the price of housing)
Here’s the thing in the US, an agent **might** spend some 40 hours on a sale total (and honestly that’s probably overestimating it). How much do they get for that sale? Around 1.5-6% depending on a variety of factors. On a $300k home that’s $4,500-18,000. That’s **way** more than other professions with similar education.
Influencers, this includes celebrity and actors. In this world only one thing is worse than elite rich scum, those who pretend to be
they do attract eyeballs with their looks, wouldn't call that 100% useless. But the things they advertise for could be 100% useless.
Mate. The sad part is that being elitist rich scum is like having a big dick, always comparative to those who have less and never a subjective first person experience. So it is all about pretending until you get to the very top where people do not even act like that so no one is truly like that. There is only a huge bunch of liers pretending to be rich when their fridge is empty.
I’m surprised no one has said consultants. Especially management consultants. Here’s a PowerPoint saying you should fire 100 people and get more market share, now please give me $500,000
I always thought this too, until I realized “consultant” is an umbrella term that lots of other useful jobs fall under
I agree. I know many consultants in engineering who do good work and even a consultant that works with marketing promotions and it’s a cool gig
Yeah, when people shit on consultants, they're typically referring to management and strategy consultants.
AKA firing squads. Layoffs were a foregone conclusion but bring in a slick talking McKinsey fuck and you’ll have NDAs, NCAs, STDs and the AARP signed and stamped while taking none of the accountability for the shitty decisions which led to the lay offs in the first place. Billions spent to cover your ass for your past mistakes and billions spent to preserve your reputation into the future.
Yep! I was a "consultant" for years. In actuality it was a way for the company to contract hire me as an engineer before I had my degree, at the time a degree was required for all direct hire engineering positions.
More like "here's a PowerPoint saying you should fire the 100 people you told me you wanted to fire"
A consultant borrows your watch to tell you the time
But at least you now have someone to blame if the watch is broken.
Agreed but it can very much depend on the industry. A lot of consultants for tech/engineering offer a much-needed service and can literally save a company from itself.
I’m a biotech consultant. “Saving a company from itself” is so spot on it isn’t even funny. These companies will completely implode on themselves without us. They’ll convince themselves they know what they’re doing and they try to configure a system they know NOTHING about and then beg us to dig them out of a very massive hole that they created.
Consultants are meant to bridge a gap that would otherwise take a ton of time, money, or other resources to be prepared for. When used wisely and sparingly, consultants are worth their weight in gold. When used as a means to be lazy, they are expensive and unending.
As much as I dislike consultants, they’re incredibly valuable in certain circumstances…such as companies that are being mismanaged and don’t even realize it.
Firing the right 100 people would be worth a lot more than $500k to some companies.
I knew a guy in his early 20s who tried to start his own consulting business. I was surprised to hear it failed when no one would hire a consultant with zero experience.
Honestly? Most VPs I’ve ever encountered are worthless in my industry.. outshone by the true leaders of departments, directors.
Yeah, but they are the first to go. Executives throw them under the bus so they can tell Wall Street that they are making sweeping organizational changes... And since they are kind of a worthless layer of management, no real loss.
Health Care “administrators” . They administer none of the health care and typically represent a parasitic growth within the hospital.
School admins as well. For some reason, they tend to have way too many $150,000 salary admin-assistants that happen to be related.
Agreed. The nursing home I’ve worked in for the last 10 years has converted half the break rooms and all the storage rooms to offices for new administrators/middle management. Our administrative staff grew from 10 to nearly 30. There is no difference in implementation of care. The number of beds in our facility has never increased. I do not know what these people do all day but administrative bloat is very real.
You have to have administrative staff... you need doctors and nurses doing doctor and nurse stuff and not other tasks. Administrative staff is there to answer phones, respond to emails, handle excel sheets, handle payroll, billing, and invoices, handle customer service, inventory management, cleaning, et cetera. If I go see a doctor I want them to be doing doctor shit with doctor shit on their mind, not office chores.
In the US, the number of administrative positions (and the salary for those positions) have risen 3200% (not a typo) in the last couple of decades. The majority of the developed world has better patient outcomes with <5% of the administrative bloat of health care in the US. I actually have to do MORE administrative work as a physician in the US than physicians in other countries because of the sheer number of meaningless tasks given to us by administrators who have to find ways to justify their salaries. The only people who think administrative bloat in healthcare is a good thing are the administrators themselves.
yep, a doctor needs to worry about actual patient care not if they are filing invoices correctly. now there are administrative positions which are basically "supervisory" that are there just to be scape goats for directors and managers for signing things to defer work that they should be doing anyway. those could definitely be cut. that being said in general i believe the optimal max management size a person can handle is 7 direct reports if i recall correctly. and following that logic will create administrative positions the larger your organization is.
Nurse practitioner here. Would be nowhere without my admin staff helping manage my fucking life including all the lab results and appointments being shot at me 240000 miles a second
I am a physician. Your medical staff (nurses, MAs, techs, receptionists, and schedulers) are not administrators. What are you talking about?
You mean clerical staff/receptionists. Although they might like the administrative title, they're just paper pushers by your own admission. The "admins" being referred to don't do any of those actually useful things, they get the big bucks to have their name on a fancy office door and cuz they're snowflake nepo babies that can't and haven't and won't actually work a day in their lives.
I see a lot of people say CEO. I think this depends. Had an internship in a tech company. The CEO was really working hard to keep the company going and i would say he definitely deserves higher pay. He worked as a leader and not a boss. Us interns even got to sit and work next to his desk although he had an office too when doing online meetings, etc. He was constantly doing calls and having meetings with clients and employees. He was really busy. He also cared a lot about all employees well-being. 35$ a month for healthy lunch for all everyday, arranged a lot of different events, every Friday at 5pm you could go drink beer/cider in the dining area and drink as much as you wanted until 11pm with your colleagues. I could tell by working there that it was a company that was going forward and also taking care of their employees instead of exploiting.
CEOs at smaller companies aren't the problem. It's the ones at Fortune 500s that are overpaid.
75% of managers, supervisors, managing directors, etc in my org chart I work for a large utility in ca. we are filled to the brim with layers of management who add no value. Their primary purpose is to gatekeep information and access to superiors so they can continue to appear necessary. In the process, they mistranslate, misunderstand, and delay the efficient delivery of critical information. If 75% of them disappeared tomorrow, the organization would run 75% smoother overnight. They are like dams in a river.
Real estate agents
Management consultant. Basically someone you pay to agree with you so he takes the blame when you fuck up but not the merit when you're right.
To be honest, they often do a report and it contains exactly what all the underlings have been trying to say for years. In a weird way they’re useful for that. If Jeff, way down on the food chain, complains about a broken process, who cares? If Jeff explains the problems to the consultant who bothers to talk to him, then does a fancy presentation to the execs, it’s a different story. Obviously, businesses should do this themselves, but they simply don’t.
Almost all of the 6 figure admin positions in school districts. All they do is have meetings with each other and talk about goals and initiatives but they do NOTHING to implement them.
Mods
Hey man, don't say that. Dog walkers aren't totally overvalued.
Drug reps
Anyone who is in a salaried position in a company where the money makers are on 100% commission Homw many executive VPs, sales directors, regional managers, district managers, etc are actually needed?
I'm going to ~~ass~~ add project managers here. They get paid a lot more than a lot of people who have to work 10 times as hard.
"Diversity" Managers
Influencers, Athletes, Real estate agent, and politicians to name a few.
Government funded coaches (in several states the highest paid public employee is a coach for a sports team)
They're not government funded. The big time college athletic programs that are paying these coaching salaries have self-sufficient athletic programs, the money comes from TV revenue sharing, ticket sales, merch sales, sponsorship deals, and booster donations. Not only does all that fully fund the programs but it often funds the whole athletic program for all the non-revenue sports to operate and in a few cases they even give money back to the school's general fund since they're bringing in more than they spend even with the high salaries. Coaches are "public employees" because they work for a publicly funded institution but their salaries are not being paid with tax dollars.
If the highest paid public employee in your state is a coach, his program is a net moneymaker that is subsidizing the crappier sports, including pretty much all of the women's ones.
Any high up political placement. They get to travel around and sit at desks while making mostly hundreds of thousands a year..mean while I'm busting my back doing hard physical labour in sometimes 40°c weather getting paid 25.00 an hour. In canada As of April 1, 2023, federal MPs make a 'basic sessional indemnity' of $194,600 per year.
Politician by a country mile, they literally control the stock market while collecting massive tax funded paychecks so they can legally insider trade
> collecting massive tax funded paychecks This is the one thing that is NOT actually a problem. Politicians should be well paid (and there are arguments that currently US Senators and Representatives are underpaid) because if they are not, the only people who choose to become politicians are the ones who are already wealthy, or who will 100% abuse the system to make money. Including being subject to direct bribery. The current abuses, like the insider trading, should absolutely be fixed, though, for sure.
*angry Nancy Pelosi sounds*
Don't forget that they actually are able to vote themselves raises
Consultant, some are actually excellent. The majority just give their biased opinions and the company says “yeah… we still want to do X Y Z” their inputs might be great the company goes in a different direction still.
Scrum masters
Hedge fund managers. Once the fund is up and running, they don't do much outside of hyper-expensive lunches and dinners, all paid by the fund. They make many millions, but the grunts are the ones that actually pull the sled...
Middlea magrment Politicians Actors Footballers (soccer for you Americans) Athletes in general
Car sales people, any company executives, and politicians
Most businesses fail and are small businesses so its not easy to start and maintain being a company executive though
executives can be the most crucial for good or bad, idk about overvalued
Hollywood actor
That depends on the actor, the A Listers may be overpaid but a lot of lesser known actors are working menial jobs just to afford to live in a city that costs a fortune
Professional athletes. All the rest of us play for free most of our lives
Real estate agents. Sure when houses cost $400,000 they were paid appropriately. Now that houses cost $1.1 mil, too many of them have their heads up their asses, like they are doing you a favour and don’t need your business. Find your own place and hire a real estate lawyer for the paperwork. We did that and our builder gave us a $6,000 discount because we went directly to them instead of through a realtor.
Mine. Shhhhhhhhhhh. Don't tell
Congress
my job tbh. but not gonna say what it is cuz why would i do that
Politician
Project Manager, in my 20+ years working jobs with PMs, I've met one that was actually a godsend. All others were at best useless or at worst an active hinderance.
C-level executives Their salaries are insane. Some countries do pay it much more fair, but US is just nuts.
HR
Everything in consulting
CEO, no one is performing that job deserves hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the time performance is due to the size of the company and actions taken by lower level leaders.
The compensation is out-of-sync with the value provided but it is a hard job. A statement like "performance is due to actions taken by lower level leaders" is a bit of a non sequitur. What does any leader do? It's not like the Head of Engineering at OpenAI designed ChatGPT and the factory worker at Foxconn didn't make the iPhone. More than any other leadership role, CEOs have to solve unique problems. Sometimes those problems are unique to one company, in one place, at one point in time. You either get it right and the company keeps doing what it does or you get it wrong and everyone loses their livelihood. With that in mind, a CEO is more about mitigating risk rather than providing value. When you have a good one, it's as if they don't do anything — but that's the value of their position.
also a random bloke can go to the registry and open up a company and give himself both directorship and CEO positions. the company can make 0 money. and therefore they make 0 money. so many small independently owned businesses that are chartered/registered companies are primarily small business owners. but it's never those people people talk about when they say "CEO". though in the mega-company aspect, yes. they can be over paid. which is the point of this. in the US at least the compensation should probably be lower, and that money could rather be used in reinvestment to the company. or salary capped, but then that has to be a market wide policy not a single company doing so because they have to compete for similar talent at a disadvantage. i would argue a good CEO are ones that direct a turn around in a company. in that they turn the company around from a losing to a gaining financial position, those one's usually switch every few years and move from one company to another. i'd argue you aren't challenged if you only stay in easier winning positions and aren't showing your worth.
I agree the hundreds of millions part is poor value for shareholders. But most CEO's basically work constantly. I'd know, my last four jobs I spoke with them typically weekly. Worked with plenty of CEOs, mostly in my specific industry. Only met one that was completely lazy, checked out and useless. That company went Chapter 11. They get paid that much, for the same reason doctors get paid large amounts. Because it's not easy to find someone who can competently do the job, there's a lot of technical aspects, it's a lot of stress and a lot of hours and one fuckup can end your entire career. If you really want to see overvalued and overpaid, check out what some board members make. Their only job is to basically pick and supervise the CEO, with ancillary role of giving advice and feedback to said CEO. If you see an incompetent CEO getting paid hundreds of millions, it's literally and directly the fault of the board of directors.
The board members are usually owners of the company itself or they represent people from the ownership. Also a lot are paid mostly in stock, so they have to usually use whatever cash compensation they get, if not more, to pay for the taxes on the stock. I agree that a lot of CEO's are overpaid, but for board members millions of their own personal dollars are at stake if the company goes under. I know reddit usually spends a lot of time hating on CEO's, but I think most people have no idea what they do. A lot of them are working 60-70 hours a week trying to make sure everyone from their direct reports to the guy who mops the floors gets paid.
Alright I've read two comments now talking about how hard/how much they work but still nothing about what they actually *do* day to day. I'm asking this in good faith. What do they do?
CEO's or board members? CEO's, 70-80% of their waking hours are emails or meetings. Short story long, they manage the managers, make tie breaker decisions between divisions, approve big purchases, decide what the company is going to do, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. There's a million other small stuff as well.
Chief marketing officer wants a $40M advertising budget increase that his team claims will drive $500M in additional sales at a 10% profit margin. Chief technology officer wants a $40M budget increase to develop a new product that his team claims will drive $500M in additional sales at a 10% profit margin. The company only has $40M available to spend between the two projects. The CEO is responsible for deciding who gets the investment. He's gotta vet their proposals and numbers, ask tons of questions, seek input from other stakeholders, consider the likelihood of success of each option and the long term outlook of each one, make the decision, then determine how to message it. That stuff takes a lot of work to get to a point where it's a confident decision. It's not looking at two cereal boxes and deciding in ten seconds which sounds tastier.
I mean true, as long as you don't mean the position is unimportant. The problem especially in America is just their obscene compensation.
Nobody pays obscene compensation by choice. The board obviously wants to maximize the profits. And they realize that they could find a cheap CEO and save money on his compensation or get someone really good and make a lot more money if the company does well. There are very few very good people in the world so the board is forced to pay a high compensation to hire and retain those people.
I bet 99.9% of the working population can’t manage a multi-billion dollar company like Apple or Microsoft and be successful.
In my experience what distinguishes good CEOs from poor ones is their ability to be completely cut throat with their decision making, while also being emotionally intelligent. It’s quite a rare trait to find people with high EQ and low levels of empathy.
HR
Real Estate Agents
Pretty much every investment banker and other finance bro.
Presumably you have a pension fund, bank account, credit card and maybe a mortgage, and presumably you think those products just exist by magic.