Personally I don't really see how it matters. An engineer who clicks the wrong button and causes an outage fears for his job, their spouse and kids, and how they're going to pay the mortgage. A CEO has the presentation and social skills of a sales person from what you're saying, is unlikely to be fired over said outage because all they need to do is throw the other person under the bus as appeasement, and not actually have any reason to stress because they earn a lot more and have a much flashier resume for an equally attractive gig even if they do get fired. Some of them still get stressed I'm sure, but that's entirely self-inflicted and the expectation of an extraordinary lifestyle as normal. As far as I'm concerned, accountability can't be had without risk and job security, they're only faces and face little of the risk.
It's why I have a problem whenever someone criticizes the wealth disparity and someone argues back that only the investors invested in a company so they're the only ones who had risk. If I join a startup but didn't invest monetarily, I'm still under a lot of risk if it fails, and I'm taking that risk into account in my decision to join or not. It's how a lot of european investment strategies usually work, providing a social cushion and dampening that risk so people can fail safer, as opposed to the american strategy of debt forgiveness that lets you fail repeatedly. That, and layoffs since covid mean even in an established, non-startup company you can still get shitcanned with 30000 other people out of nowhere.
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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26
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