It's so wild seeing people making claims like these on hn, considering people here also get treated similarly. Are you going to get fired from your job for minor mistake? Would you go work for a company that will fire devs over minor issues? Why should CEO be treated differently?

I'm not sure what's wild about it. As far as I've seen, what I said is entirely true.

- If someone very low on the totem pole (ex. factory worker) is late a few times, they're far more likely to be fired than someone higher up.

- If a low/mid level manager at a company screws up a project so bad that a bunch of people under them get layed off, they're far more likely to lose their job then a VP that does the same.

The point isn't that everyone should get laid off for every mistake. The point is that, the higher up you are, the less likely you are to face _any_ consequences at all for any mistakes. And it's also not a certainly; just a probability.

It's wild because it's completely separated from realities of the business. If you fired CEO over any minor mistake (overhiring sucks, but for CEO it is a minor mistake), the company would die much sooner, because people wouldn't want to work there. You as a developer also are quite high on that pole, and you (probably) won't get fired if you bring down prod for a moment due to mistake in migrations, why should CEO be treated differently?

me> The higher up on the totem pole you are, the less it seems to matter how well you actually do your job.

you> If you fired CEO over any minor mistake

Do you see the disconnect here? At no point did I call for a CEO to be fired over a minor mistake. Rather, I pointed out that, no matter the size of the mistake, the higher up you are the smaller the repercussions. You are responding with what is a perfect example of a straw man argument.

To be clear; no, I don't think a CEO that makes a small mistake should be fired. But I also don't think that a CEO that causes the downfall of a major company should walk away and into the arms of the next company, doing the same job, for just as much (or more) money. And, in between those two, there's a large area where repercussions are currently few and far between.