[HN Gopher] DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM
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DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM
Author : gk1
Score : 200 points
Date : 2025-02-04 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| tombert wrote:
| My dad had a manager recently that he started calling "VPGPT"
| behind his back.
|
| He felt like the guy primarily spoke in truisms and with long-
| winded statements that ultimately said very little but gave the
| illusion of having depth. He wasn't a huge fan.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I had one of those. I thought he was fooling upper management
| until I started working directly with the CTO, who was very
| open about the fact that this VP was more about performance
| than execution. He explained that the guy's overwhelming desire
| to look good and be viewed as a thought leader also made him
| very receptive to incentives. You could give him a task, tell
| him it was important for his career, and he'd get it done
| because he was so afraid of looking bad. If it was something he
| could write about on LinkedIn or his personal newsletter, even
| better.
|
| The challenge was setting the incentives correctly so he
| couldn't game them. He was tasked with hiring a team to
| accomplish some specific goal once and the first set of people
| he tried to hire were not qualified at all, they were just the
| first people he could get to interview and want to join. You
| had to watch him like a hawk to make sure he wasn't running yet
| another performative game.
|
| The other weird part is that a lot of candidates were really
| impressed by him. He dressed well and had hair that obviously
| took a long time to do every morning and he spoke with
| confidence. This was remarkably effective at convincing many
| candidates that he knew what he was doing and could run a tight
| ship. Lot of disappointed people trying to leave his team after
| the first 6 months.
| mjburgess wrote:
| They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other
| people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to
| lift a finger to move them. Everything they do is done for
| people to see: They make their desks wide and the ties on
| their garments long; they love the place of honor at
| corporate retreats and the most important seats in the
| interviews; they love to be greeted with respect in the
| meeting rooms and to be called a Leader by others.
|
| ...the more things change, the more they stay the same...
| tombert wrote:
| "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
| jondwillis wrote:
| 1971 was such a good year for music (see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_in_music and Apple TV+
| came out with https://www.apple.com/tv-
| pr/originals/1971-the-year-that-mus... a few years ago)
| empath75 wrote:
| It used to be the case that speaking in that register was a
| strong signal of a social pedigree and an expensive education.
| Now it's a signal of people being brainless and easily
| replaceable.
|
| You're also seeing it in politics where politicians that don't
| think before they speak too much are seen as more authentic and
| competent than ones that hire teams of consultants to carefully
| massage every statement they make.
| babyshake wrote:
| This effect will probably be more pronounced in coming years.
| Being able to speak and act in ways that are obviously not
| AI.
| empath75 wrote:
| The thing is that AIs are also good at mimicking
| informal/off-the-cuff speech, too. And people are lazy, so
| they'll fall back on "casual" cliches, which AIs (and
| consultant-driven politicians) will be just as good at
| mimicking. It's going to be the rare person who can stay
| ahead of that. It'll be an endless treadmill.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| > It used to be the case that speaking in that register was a
| strong signal of a social pedigree and an expensive
| education.
|
| It's not the same register. There's a vast difference between
| the extemporaneous speech of the old school patricians and
| today's C-suite corp-speak.
|
| Here's Robert F Kennedy Jr. speaking off the cuff at a public
| event moments after hearing that MLK had been assassinated:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kWIa8wSC0&t=238s.
|
| That's the speaking style of social pedigree and an expensive
| education. You'll tend to find it contains lifts of poetry,
| like Kennedy's evocation of Aeschylus, and little reference
| to 'synergy', 'collaboration', 'efficiency', etc.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe our standards are rock bottom now, but that speech
| did not seem to me to be "off the cuff." It seemed
| rehearsed, polished, edited and wordsmithed, like any other
| prepared speech by a politician. If he was truly winging
| it, then wow, what a talent!
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| > _the guy primarily spoke in truisms and with long-winded
| statements that ultimately said very little but gave the
| illusion of having depth_.
|
| The term for that is deepety.
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
| siva7 wrote:
| I'm saddened to tell you fellow hackers here that the real world
| will be more like: "Replace your knowledge worker with an LLM"
| ordered by your CEO.
| tbrake wrote:
| I feel most bad for the other frogs in roles whose pots haven't
| even been put on the AI stovetop yet. I have general feeling
| they feel they're safe.
|
| Looking at you specifically, Project/Program managers with
| little output other than attending meetings and asking for
| status updates and futzing with JIRA to get reports.
|
| The dev frogs might not even be finished boiling before you
| notice your steam.
| hibikir wrote:
| This makes perfect sense when you consider who is making the
| decisions. If you are trying to, say, replace an ad-buying team
| with an AI that supposedly does the job better, your goal has
| to be to sell it at a high enough level that the political
| pressure of having the old department employed doesn't tank
| everything regardless of results.
|
| One can try to sell to a CEO than an IT department is a cost
| center, and they can bring in the same results for less. But to
| replace a CEO you need to sell to the board, and the board is
| typically full of CEOs. Even a far superior CEO that costs $1 a
| day is a hard sell when the CEO is your buddy, and you aren't
| going to be making a mint as a board member for getting rid of
| said buddy.
| woah wrote:
| If far superior AI CEOs existed then only one board would
| need to replace their CEO with AI. The company would then
| dominate the marketplace because of the far superior
| decisions being made, and the rest would be forced to follow.
|
| If AI CEOs were slightly inferior to human CEOs, but cost $1
| per year, it still wouldn't be worth replacing an expensive
| human CEO, unless that CEO's compensation was worth more than
| a few percent of revenue (it never is).
|
| I wouldn't want to invest my money in a company which was
| making worse decisions to try to save money on the CEO, when
| the money paid to the CEO is going to have very little effect
| on my return on investment. That sounds like a good way to
| for my investment to underperform. The only winner in that
| scenario is online forum posters who want to feel jealous of
| the abstract concept of a "CEO".
| jollyllama wrote:
| Yes, due to the power of the relative positions, but I'd like
| to point out
|
| >Replace Your CEO with an LLM
|
| Lossless, as they're already constrained so tightly in their
| functions by regulations.
|
| >Replace your knowledge worker with an LLM
|
| Lossy, in many cases.
| coreyh14444 wrote:
| I'm mostly curious about the decision to do fine-tuning here
| instead of synthesizing a good system message, maybe a RAG setup
| with access to the slack database, etc. I tried fine-tuning on a
| content generation case when GPT 4 first came out and we had much
| better results without it. Also, you don't get the benefit of
| upgrading to new models when they are released.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think you're putting way too much thought into what is
| basically a comedy bit.
| charles_irl wrote:
| I worked on this project a bit! These are great questions.
|
| Fine-tuning works very well for style (as opposed to factual
| knowledge), which is all we're trying to achieve here -- as
| another commenter put it, it's a "comedy bit" for a company
| Slack.
|
| In fact, fine-tuning for style works well enough that we find
| it pretty easy to just re-train when new models come out.
| There's sometimes some YAML-fiddling required to get training
| frameworks to work with different model series (e.g. a DeepSeek
| series model vs a LLaMA series model), but it's not too
| onerous. IMO, the ideal ML pipeline looks less like the bespoke
| process common these days and more like a materialized view
| (shouts to pgML). That's easy to automate and so reduces the
| gap with prompting.
|
| On the other hand, it seemed harder to craft a generic system
| prompt and a generic retrieval system that would work across
| organizations to define user communication style.
| bawana wrote:
| imagine the share price jump when the first corp announces this!
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's fun to think about, but if you want to really reign in the
| C-suite, you need to start setting up systems within companies
| that allow for the rank-and-file to replace bad CEOs.
|
| We've spent the last 80 years (ostensibly) talking about how
| great representative government is, then we let people own a
| majority of voting shares so that they can run companies like
| dictatorships. I've worked at a company that could have remained
| more competitive (and done a better job of maintaining software
| that is critical to human life) if there had been more uptake of
| ideas from workers instead of simply trying to make shareholders
| happy.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > We've spent the last 80 years (ostensibly) talking about how
| great representative government is, then we let people own a
| majority of voting shares so that they can run companies like
| dictatorships.
|
| I think it's basically admitting that the right dictator, if
| they are there based on merit, can really perform better than
| someone who wins by their skill at campaigning. Forget voting
| shares - even when a single person doesn't have that amount of
| control, you have a small board elected by shareholders who is
| essentially electing a dictator.
|
| Personally I think most companies would do far worse if rank
| and file employees selected the CEO. But I haven't thought much
| about it. Curious what ideas HN has on this aspect.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I don't see it much of an admission of anything, personally.
| The admission would have had to come as an answer to a
| question that was never asked. To me, it's more of a way to
| keep the ruling class in place. It used to be done through
| government, now it's done through corporations.
|
| And honestly, the corporation is a far more attractive model
| if you're in that racket. Rioters don't burn down corporate
| HQs, they burn down police stations. Public sector pay sucks.
| The corruption would be far too obvious... well, it would
| have been until relatively recently.
| benxh wrote:
| To prove you right, you can read up on the incredible giga-
| brained countrywide experiments by Kardelj in Socialist
| Yugoslavia [0]. The result being a country where no-one
| wanted to work, and everyone had a great standard of living
| (while the IMF didn't call in its loans). And then the entire
| country collapsed all at once under the accumulated
| mismanagement.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-
| management#Yug...
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| It's wild to me that despite tremendous resources and 100+
| years of time capitalism still kills millions of people a
| year with starvation and preventable diseases. But every
| right winger has a pet wikipedia page about a failed
| communist state with no critical examination of _why_ they
| failed beyond "communism bad".
|
| To clarify my stance I'm an anarchist and that page has a
| lot of good examples of successful worker owned
| collectives.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| To me it's equally as wild that you say such a thing when
| no system in human history did as much as capitalism to
| alleviate hunger and disease. In fact all other systems
| combined still can't touch the progress we've made to
| eradicate famine and disease while "under capitalism".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There are good critically examined rebuttals if you
| actually look for them beyond Wikipedia which is not
| designed for that purpose. I read a book recently called
| Socialism: the failed idea that never dies, and while it
| has a clickbait title, the arguments are pretty cogent as
| to why people throughout history want to enact socialism
| based systems and why they eventually fail.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The advantages of democracy are a peaceful transition of
| power and non-violent outlets for political action. That is
| to say, you don't have to worry about a succession war when
| the king dies, and if people don't like what the government
| is doing they tend to advocate and vote rather than try to
| overthrow it.
|
| These advantages don't really apply to companies. Your life
| isn't tied to a company the way it is to your government, so
| if you don't like how they chose the leader or what they're
| doing, you can leave.
| Slackwise wrote:
| > Your life isn't tied to a company
|
| Health insurance isn't tied to a company? Your ability to
| survive and feed your family isn't tied to your company?
| Lack of opportunities in the job market? Lack of equal
| salary/benefits at alternative companies? Non-competes,
| H1-B visas....
|
| > so if you don't like how they chose the leader or what
| they're doing, you can leave.
|
| Just one small thing Ben: leave to work for _who?_ Who isn
| 't hiring CEOs and running businesses the same way as
| everyone else?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Please don't quote half a sentence and then argue with it
| when the second half is an important qualifier.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Many of these are uniquely American problems, and the
| many of the people and especially the highest in power in
| the United States have chosen and continue to choose to
| bind all of that to the company you work for (or don't).
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes, it's ironic that a democracy has exactly created the
| situation they lament about, the lack of universal
| healthcare. Unfortunately there is no political will to
| do it, while ironically an autocrat could cut through the
| red tape and get it done, as it had been enacted in
| several Asian countries in the last half century.
| glitchc wrote:
| You truly do get the best and the worst with dictators, as
| history has shown.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > I think it's basically admitting that the right dictator,
| if they are there based on merit, can really perform better
| than someone who wins by their skill at campaigning.
|
| Sure. But also there are big differences between companies
| and countries/government.
|
| Companies compete in a market. There isn't much of a
| marketplace for country/government. This is a check on
| individual power, and forces the company to perform somewhat
| in alignment with what we want as a society. Concentration of
| power (monopoly) is still an issue in a market and so we
| regulate the market.
|
| The "dictator" of a company answers to both the market and to
| regulators, making it less dangerous as a concentration of
| power than an actual dictator.
|
| Related, it is totally okay for companies to fail, and they
| regularly do. We are a lot less okay with governments
| failing.
|
| Companies can also serve a niche. Governments need to serve
| their entire population. Governments are tasked with all
| sorts of collective action problems for diverse groups with
| varying opinions; companies get to pick their market. It's
| unclear that CEOs tell us much about a dictator trying to
| serve a population with a range of opinions.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > The "dictator" of a company answers to both the market
| and to regulators, making it less dangerous as a
| concentration of power than an actual dictator.
|
| Well, kind of. On occasion they participate in regulatory
| capture making them really only accountable as they care to
| be given the circumstances.
|
| If you have a market cornered on AI-powered, autonomous,
| robotic leg-equipped chainsaws, _and_ the regulatory
| environment is weak because you 've lobbied for the right
| rules and the right enforcers of those rules, you could
| very possibly just have a bad quarter if those chainsaws'
| AI sees people as trees and starts chasing them around.
| Maybe not even that.
|
| Meta would be a good real-world example. It's just less
| interesting to imagine.
| number6 wrote:
| Strange that economic power is still handed down the
| generations like political was in the days of kings
| aylmao wrote:
| +1. I do think there's certain efficiency gains in
| concentrating decision-making in companies, but nepotism and
| hereditary power are strange characteristics to keep from
| feudalism
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| A company is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy. Real
| power is kept within a small circle. Since employees can
| ascend, it might look like a meritocracy, but that is only
| allowed if it strengthens the regime.
| woah wrote:
| This is called a cooperative, and it is completely legal.
| However, they tend not to be very successful in the
| marketplace, outside of a few outliers.
|
| If you separate revenue and control (employees get to vote on
| decisions, but investors get the revenue), then employees will
| be incentivized to maintain the status quo instead making
| decisions to make the company successful. The employees have
| almost no incentive to make difficult decisions like cutting
| unsuccessful lines of business etc. I would be very uneasy
| about investing anyone's retirement savings into such an
| organization.
|
| If you keep revenue and control combined (a simple share
| structure, where each share gets a piece of the revenue and a
| vote, and employees get shares when they join), then you have
| other paradoxes. To make this work, you need to prohibit
| employees from selling their shares to investors, otherwise
| you're back to a conventional corporation. You also need to
| take the shares away from employees when they leave the
| company, otherwise former employees become a de facto investor
| class that you wanted to avoid. As an employee, I would prefer
| to work at a company where my equity does not have these
| restrictions placed on it.
|
| You may say "but if we all just tried a little harder to
| believe in a better world it could be possible". But it is
| possible now. Cooperatives work easily under existing corporate
| law, and are even incentivized in some places. They just aren't
| very successful for the reasons above. The only widespread form
| of cooperative is doctor's and lawyer's practices, which are
| legally required to be organized as cooperatives through a
| limited liability partnership structure.
|
| To make cooperatives work in the broader marketplace, you'd
| have to force employees to accept restrictions on their equity
| or force savers to put their money into cooperatives managed by
| employees who are not incentivized to invest it well.
| Hasu wrote:
| All of your points are premised on the idea that the only
| purpose of a corporation is to make as much money for its
| shareholders as possible. But that isn't true, especially in
| the case of a cooperative.
|
| Most companies make decisions based on a list of priorities:
| they care about their shareholders/investors first, upper
| management second (upper management is usually bribed by the
| investors with equity, aligning their interests with the
| shareholders, so this is maybe a distinction without a
| difference), rank-and-file employees third, customers fourth,
| and anyone not involved with the company last.
|
| The point of a cooperative is to flip this incentive
| structure on its head: the customers or workers are owners,
| so they get prioritized. The purpose of the company isn't to
| dominate the markets and become the biggest company ever,
| it's to make a better life for the people working for and
| patronizing the company, instead of just the people who own
| it.
|
| > As an employee, I would prefer to work at a company where
| my equity does not have these restrictions placed on it.
|
| Well obviously, if you're talking about _equity_ in a company
| as something you can own and profit from without ongoing
| labor, you are definitionally a capitalist and you will be
| opposed to cooperatives.
|
| > I would be very uneasy about investing anyone's retirement
| savings into such an organization.
|
| The primary purpose of a cooperative is not to make profits
| for passive investors. This is like judging a fish on its
| ability to climb a tree.
| woah wrote:
| > The purpose of the company isn't to dominate the markets
| and become the biggest company ever, it's to make a better
| life for the people working for and patronizing the
| company, instead of just the people who own it.
|
| That's perfectly fine, and also the reason why cooperatives
| are a pretty niche thing: they don't prioritize growth.
| Hasu wrote:
| They don't prioritize growth for the same reason healthy
| cells don't prioritize growth.
|
| You need to be cancer or a public corporation to think
| growth is the most important thing.
| woah wrote:
| There isn't any value judgement here. There are not more
| cooperatives because they don't prioritize growth. Who
| are you angry at?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| This oft-repeated analogy to biological systems doesn't
| make much sense, human individuals biologically stay
| homeostatic with nature, but human groups have grown
| exponentially, building civilization as you know it. If
| we didn't prioritize growth, we'd still be hunter
| gatherers.
| Miraste wrote:
| This is only half the answer. Cooperatives are niche in
| the US because they don't prioritize growth, and they
| exist in a legal and financial framework that does. If
| conventional corporations didn't receive massive amounts
| of investor cash and preferential government treatment to
| stay unprofitable for years or decades while scaling, one
| imagines coops would be more competitive.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| They are _invest_ ors for a reason, they expect a return.
| If a coop does not produce good returns, especially as
| compared to standard corporations, why would one expect
| investors to invest?
| Miraste wrote:
| Exactly. Investors will always constitute a force against
| cooperatives; countries with successful coops (Spain,
| Italy, the Nordics, even Canada) provide other funding
| mechanisms to prevent private investment from dictating
| the entire market. The United States chooses not to do
| this. It is a _choice_ , not the natural result of having
| a finance system.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The US government has a lot of funding mechanisms, the
| economy does not rely solely on private investment. It is
| just that the scale of venture investment dwarfs a lot of
| even governmental investment in most other countries,
| money made from previous ventures so of course they'd
| deploy that capital.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I've been part of a few (Canadian) cooperatives. The
| incentive structure is completely different, it's akin to
| admitting you prefer great working conditions than having a
| chance to chance it rich. If a company is startup-sized,
| anything else is a sucker's bet.
| woah wrote:
| If I didn't like my working conditions, I would look for a
| different job.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Of course, but being in such a choice position is already
| being very privileged if we take things at their global
| level.
| Herring wrote:
| Sometimes the bad jobs are crowding out the good. Like
| gig work crowding out traditional full-time positions
| with benefits, as companies prefer cheaper, on-demand
| labor. Slave labor needs to be outlawed at the society
| level, not at the individual level "why dont you just
| find another job".
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I would look for a different job._
|
| I know some experienced, socially adept, smart, etc.
| friends who have been doing this exact thing for about 8
| months now.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| How is that not the same in a coop? If they don't like
| the conditions they'd still have to leave the job and
| find a new one.
| bboygravity wrote:
| In a coop everybody's job is to always be looking for a
| job (for the coop)?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not sure what you're talking about, I was replying to a
| refutation of the following quote by the grand parent
| commenter:
|
| > _If I didn 't like my working conditions, I would look
| for a different job._
| knowitnone wrote:
| because all your friends are 10s
| ziddoap wrote:
| What's your point? That my friends aren't the literal
| best in the world in their field of study? Of course they
| aren't. If that was a job requirement, there would be
| like 20 job openings world-wide.
|
| What an odd comment.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This "take it or leave it" problem seems to be exactly
| what a cooperative seeks to solve.
| spinningarrow wrote:
| What was the incentive structure, and how was your
| experience overall (esp. comparing to traditional companies
| if you've worked at those)?
| zelon88 wrote:
| > then employees will be incentivized to maintain the status
| quo instead making decisions to make the company successful.
|
| Therein lies the problem.
|
| Capitalists believe these two things are exclusionary to one
| another. They believe that you cannot have an unsuccessful
| product line, or "status quo" _and still_ be successful. They
| want to see comfy upward trending lines on their charts and
| graphs.
|
| But nobody stopped to consider that;
|
| 1) If the business is operating with positive cashflow, and,
|
| 2) If the business is meeting it's commitment to consumers,
| shareholders, and employees, and,
|
| 3) If the business has no direct existential threat to it's
| market share, then;
|
| That business _is_ successful. By your own definition. Stop
| trying to take over the world. It 's selfish, unsustainable,
| and pedantic. Support your workers. Well. Put value back into
| the economy. Stop being a greedy POS.
| woah wrote:
| There is no secret conspiracy stopping cooperatives from
| working. They simply do not supply a large portion of the
| products and services that people want, due to the fact
| that they are by definition not set up to do so.
|
| Who are you angry at? You are yelling into the wind.
| panstromek wrote:
| If all these 3 are true, then that seems to me like a
| definition of a monopoly.
|
| Specifically the condition 3 is practically never true in
| well functioning market. If you're successful, you'll be
| copied and you'll have competitors, so you always have to
| be a step ahead. Maintaining the status quo is how you
| slowly become irrelevant
| t-writescode wrote:
| Some people just like going to their favorite chain
| restaurant, bar, corner store, etc.
|
| Not everything is a fight.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >However, they tend not to be very successful in the
| marketplace, outside of a few outliers.
|
| What would you consider to be successful, and what is
| marketplace naming here?
|
| Cooperatives are going to be the main thriving organizational
| structure when the political agenda in place favors them, and
| the very same statement apply for resource omni-capture
| oligopolies. Look at who have hands on the political
| schedule, and that's all nailed.
|
| Living in France, I never worked for any structure that would
| provide any equity (not saying this doesn't exist at all).
| But France still has a very different non-wage labour costs
| compared to US (or common-law in general I guess), so
| employment tradeoffs are very different.
| eitally wrote:
| There are a few food companies that are partially or
| completely employee owned that I'd consider "very
| successful". But this business model is not typical and
| examples are rare.
|
| https://inequality.org/article/5-workerowned-food-firms-
| riva...
| ghaff wrote:
| And most of those companies are low three-digit employee
| counts. I mean, I like King Arthur and tend to visit
| their store when I'm in the area, but it's only a
| relatively significant employer by the standards of
| Norwich, VT.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Why do folks think that is? Are there some US-specifics
| that make them less likely?
|
| For example, the Mondragon Corporation,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation, in
| the Basque region of Spain is pretty huge (70,000
| employees) and I watched a short news documentary about
| Mondragon and in general the employees there sounded
| legions happier than corporate drones in other companies.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > If you keep revenue and control combined (a simple share
| structure, where each share gets a piece of the revenue and a
| vote, and employees get shares when they join), then you have
| other paradoxes. To make this work, you need to prohibit
| employees from selling their shares to investors, otherwise
| you're back to a conventional corporation. You also need to
| take the shares away from employees when they leave the
| company, otherwise former employees become a de facto
| investor class that you wanted to avoid
|
| This describes most "partnerships" to a varying degree. Lots
| of professional firms operate that way, e.g. law firms,
| accounting firms, engineering firms, consulting
| mox1 wrote:
| Yes, a large percentage of of the consulting / services
| business that you would know the name of are organized like
| this. For services / consulting it makes a lot of sense.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > they tend not to be very successful in the marketplace
|
| ...because other companies boycott coops.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Have a look at what Mondragon does in the Basque country for a
| cooperative of coopertives.
| ActionHank wrote:
| CEOs aren't there to serve the rank-and-file, they're put there
| to serve the board and investors.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| And therein lies the problem.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's called a union. If workers unite and refuse to suddenly
| supply their labour it'll cause a lot of changes fast, and
| sometimes the capitalists just leave and the workers can
| appropriate the company.
|
| Though it is often a good idea to start small and get a little
| win, and then wait and recruit, and then push for another small
| change, and repeat. That way the union establishes credibility,
| solid membership and a reasonably sized war chest for things
| like getting rid of a CEO, which will take more time and effort
| than for example protective gear or longer pauses in the work.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Considering the state of current democracies, I don't think I
| could trust my peers to make sound financial decisions at an
| organizational level collectively. It's different from a
| democracy in government because I can, without much friction,
| leave a company at any time if I feel that the company is not
| doing well, not so with a nation-state.
|
| I personally have started and run a coop, but that worked
| because we were all friends who wanted to collectively pool our
| resources to get new clients as a software agency, if it were a
| larger cooperative, I would agree with the sibling commenter
| that they generally do not work as well as top down
| corporations.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One of my favorite attributes about left-wing activism is that
| the solution to everything is to overthrow the system. It's
| like the whole "we have tech debt; we need to rewrite
| everything". Zero threat.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| Unfortunately our CEO at a 5000 person company that heavily uses
| Slack, still hasn't activated their Slack account, so I don't
| have much to finetune the bot on.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I have gained respect for your CEO. Good for them.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Yup, no reason to sully yourself communicating with the
| rabble
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| It would be one thing if their employees didn't have to use
| it...
| kerblang wrote:
| Yet again HN gets weird with highly contradictory popular posts
| trending simultaneously
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923870 "A computer can
| never be held accountable"
| kibwen wrote:
| I'm unclear what the contradiction is? When was the last time a
| CEO was held accountable, for any value of "accountable" that
| doesn't involve repeatedly taking golden parachutes and failing
| upward?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| usa could do better but they get sentenced regularly https://
| search.brave.com/search?q=ceo+convicted+site%3Ajusti...
| wy35 wrote:
| I mean, this is clearly an unserious post. This is more of a
| fun tech demo than anything.
| e12e wrote:
| Ridiculous. No CEO worth replacing is on slack - this needs to be
| trained on, and run on teams.
| extr wrote:
| The OP is clearly just a fun tech demo to show off their
| platform, they're not seriously advocating to replace CEOs with
| LLMs.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| In my past I was the technical co-founder for a successful
| startup and eventual exit. I had a background in marketing
| automation and analytics.
|
| At different points I acted as CTO, CEO and COO and ended up at a
| CTO but with a cutout that I ran the "renevue" team.
|
| Except for glad handing VCs in the early stages the first thing
| that should be automated away is most roles in the C-Suite.
|
| You'll still need a flesh and blood figurehead for external
| meetings as well.
|
| Many software engineers seem to be extremely blind to practical
| concerns around positioning, market fit, pricing, etc. and may
| bring certain idealogical biases and "purities" into their
| decision making that sabotage their success, just put yourself in
| the hands of AI and trust it.
|
| The simple fact is most C-suite teams don't perform better than
| the macro environment they exist in, so getting "decent" AI
| decisions in place and then energetically executing you'll beat
| most teams, and in early stage startups.
|
| If some people say we can replace the bottom 20% of devs right
| now, we can probably safely replace the bottom 40% of c-suite
| roles.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Are they blind or do others get paid to do these jobs? I've
| seen it too many times, no good deed goes unpunished.
| codr7 wrote:
| Right, except who's going to be held accountable?
| jb1991 wrote:
| Or your government. See the TV show Travelers for an example.
| StarterPro wrote:
| Unrelated, but I wonder if there is a test to see how many of the
| commenters are bots vs actual humans
| Franzi4 wrote:
| Could we use it to replace our CTO when the sales team asks
| feasibility questions ?
| newsclues wrote:
| Rather than CEOs, why not mid level managers?
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I think they're burying the lede here, they released a DoppleBot
| you can train on Linus's messages from the lkml as the ultimate
| arbitrator of coding disputes.
| johnea wrote:
| Maybe some good will come from this tech afterall...
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