[ahefner]

Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck) to defer this cycle for even a year or two.

Depends what you mean by senior management, of course. I'm thinking mostly the "VP / SVP of Engineering" type role, and to a lesser degree, one hop down, the "Senior Director" folks, who seemed to be subject to the same phenomenon but on a slightly slower cycle.

[bjt12345]

I wish.

The higher up the rank you go in my company, the more recognizable the faces are from 10,15,even 20 years ago.

Sure, they shuffle the deckchairs, but the turnover and redundancies below them is orders of more chaotic, and I dont understand what it takes to clean house at the senior management level.

[tacostakohashi]

Usually a buyout or merger.

[HappMacDonald]

My understanding is that all corporate positions above rank and file — and especially the C-levels — live in a meat grinder where the only viabile strat is "figure out how to kill competition on the corporate chaos/ladder before it kills you".

Of course this acts as a filtering mechanism to refine psychopathy and their decision tree about how to treat their labor force, the communities their corporations exist within, their customers, and even their investors reflect how they've treated people to get where they are already: exploit and discard.

[ryandrake]

Then again, these people always fail upward. They may have the sword hanging over them, but when the sword falls and they leave, they do so with a fist full of millions of dollars in Golden Parachute, and then float over to Level+1 at the next company.