CxO salary isn't the market clearing price for the labor these people perform, it's more like power-leveling your friends in an RPG so that they can quest with you. Owners want their managers' interests to be with capital, so they have to give them some.
I very much do not think everyone agrees here, and using the Block layoffs as an example is pretty poor reasoning. It's the same kind of blind, "believe and report exactly what the companies say about these things, regardless of their incentives in saying these things" type of breathless clickbait tech journalism that is becoming extremely exhausting to wade through.
There's probably a good discussion in here somewhere but the way these flimsy arguments are presented as absolute fact is a really annoying style to read, personally.
This author wrote basically the complete opposite view barely more than a few months ago which makes it read even more like clickbait slop:
Even better still: why are companies and orgs hierarchical? Why is there always a - for lack of a better word - dictator in charge? AI CEO is still an AI dictator.
We are permitted to vote, but democracy in everyday life, that's a bridge too far, chaos, riots in the streets, cats and dogs living together.
Maybe there are too many 'temporary embarrassed billionaires' here on HN, but you have more in common with the average bum in the street than any of 'that' class.
It's time that we as a people extend democracy towards the workplace and operate like a cooperation, working on the base of consensus. This is not a new idea, but it won't give you a chance to become a billionaire, and that's exactly the point.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104898432...
Why is management paid so much? Because they can make the argument "give me more, or I'll destroy the company", and actually be believable.
THAT is why it's so critical for CxOs to be aligned with owners' interests.
I work for a cooperative in an upper management role. My goal is for us to sustainably produce great products that serve the needs of our community while being a great place to work for our employees. I couldn't possibly care less what our market capitalization is, other than from the perspective of wanting to serve the biggest slice of our community that I can. But if another co-op stepped in and did that instead, I'd be equally happy.
That is not correct.
Owner's don't align top management's interests with the owner's interests by giving them 'insane levels of compensation', they do it by giving the managements compensation in the form of shares of the company. It's not the volume of the compensation that aligns their interests, it's the type. Otherwise the 'top management' could just invest in the competitor and torpedo their own company making multiples of the original cash compensation as clients leave for the competitor.
Workers have a job because their labour produces value
If that "bait" caused you to stop reading despite the fact that you probably agree with the author's sentiment, it's not very good bait.
IMO, if incentivizing good performance was really the goal, then companies would hire CEOs who are not already wealthy, pay them only enough base salary that they accept the job and can focus on it without worrying about paying bills, and compensate them mainly using illiquid, very long-dated stock options, which become worth a fortune if and only if the company is still around and profitable far into the future. It turns out that this is basically how founders are compensated, and it's a wonder that shareholders allow public-traded companies to be run in any other way.
I mean, the shareholders would most likely sue them out of existence for doing something like that.
How good, non-slop writing usually works is - you lead with your main point, and break it down further throughout the main article. The fact he contradicts his leading hook indicates slop and bad writing, not failure for me to understand whatever the hell the point of this nonsense is (other than to get clicks).
This doesn’t seem rare to me.
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia (can't find any discussion related to their coop model - there is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37799973 without any comment )
Both statements can be true.
Parliamentary systems do not always have a President per se, but generally have a similar role of an individual who can quickly make decisions in emergencies and crises.
So in practice I’m not sure democracies are all that different in practice.
Um no, this doesn't happen. Nobody is paying useless people just to "show growth".
“A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.”
– Jack Dorsey, announcing 4,000 layoffs at Block, February 2026
Everyone agrees: AI is coming for the developers. The $200,000-a-year engineers writing CRUD apps and maintaining CI pipelines. The line workers of the knowledge economy. Trim them. Automate them. Celebrate the efficiency gains. Watch the stock pop.
Nobody asks the obvious question.
Why is nobody coming for the CEO?
Meet the A-suite. AI replaces the CEO. The AI Executive Officer (AEO) is the human who operates alongside it. The rest of the C-suite becomes the A-suite (AxOs).
Median S&P 500 CEO total compensation in 2024 was $17.1 million. That is 85 senior software engineers. One person. One salary. Eighty-five engineers worth of payroll.
But salary is the small number. The real cost of a CEO is what happens when they are wrong.
Jack Dorsey tripled Block’s headcount from roughly 3,900 to over 12,000 between 2019 and 2022. The stock peaked above $275 in 2021 and has since dropped over 75%. He built two separate company structures for Square and Cash App instead of one, a decision he now calls incorrect. He spent $68.1 million on a single company event in September 2025. Five months later, he cut 4,000 people and blamed AI.
None of that is an AI story. All of it is a management story.
Dorsey is not unique. He is just the most recent example of a pattern the industry refuses to examine: the efficiency standard always flows downward.
When a company deploys AI to replace developers, the pitch is simple. These tools can do what humans do, faster and cheaper. How about applying that logic upward?
A CEO sets strategy, allocates capital, communicates with stakeholders, makes high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, projects confidence, and takes credit when things work. Most of that reduces to pattern recognition, modeling, and communication, all of which AI already handles with less ego and fewer pet projects.
The one function that genuinely requires human judgment is choosing between futures you cannot model. That happens a few times a year. The rest is coordination and calendar management. You do not need a $17 million executive for that. You need an AI with good models and a small team of AxOs who can execute.
When a developer writes bad code, the blast radius is a feature, maybe a service, maybe an outage that lasts hours. We have spent decades building infrastructure to make individual developer failure survivable. Code review, CI pipelines, staged deploys, automated rollback. The entire modern engineering stack exists to contain the damage of any single human decision.
When a CEO makes a bad decision, no such system exists. The blast radius is the entire company. Years of engineering capacity consumed. Billions in shareholder value destroyed. Thousands of jobs lost. The failure is in command, and there is no rollback mechanism for command.
We build elaborate systems to contain the mistakes of $200,000 engineers. We build nothing to contain the mistakes of $17 million executives.
So let’s build something.
An AI system handles strategy synthesis, capital allocation modeling, performance monitoring, stakeholder reporting, and operational coordination. It processes information continuously, without ego, without pet projects, without the need to justify its own existence through activity.
The A-suite works alongside it. AxOs are the humans who replaced the C-suite. Same caliber of person, different relationship to power. They handle what the AI cannot: relationship judgment, regulatory navigation, crisis decisions that require a human face, and the handful of annual choices where genuine uncertainty demands human intuition.
Total cost: maybe $3 million fully loaded for the A-suite. That is $14 million in annual savings against the median CEO package alone, and significantly more when you account for the C-suite ecosystem it replaces. Replace the decision-maker with a system, and the entire executive layer simplifies with it.
The people who would need to approve this change are the ones being replaced.
CEOs set strategy. Boards approve CEO compensation. Boards are populated by current and former CEOs. The entire governance structure exists to perpetuate itself, and every stakeholder around it has a reason to play along. Consultants need executive engagement. Analysts need access. The financial press needs CEO narratives to drive clicks.
The AI-replaces-developers story persists because developers do not control the narrative. They do not sit on boards. They do not write shareholder letters. They do not go on CNBC. The people who control the conversation about who gets automated will never volunteer themselves.
BoringOps exists to ask one question: where is the actual drag on your organization?
Every layer produces friction. Engineers write bad code. Infrastructure drifts. Processes decay. Those problems are real, and they compound. But the decisions that create the most expensive, hardest-to-reverse damage originate at the top: decisions to triple headcount without discipline, to adopt complexity without justification, to build empires instead of systems.
If AI is powerful enough to eliminate 4,000 engineers, why is it not powerful enough to challenge one executive?
boring (adj.): Applying the same efficiency logic to executive compensation that leadership is so eager to apply to everyone else.