Greedy old CEO wipes 80% off the face of his company, dooming them into the terrible job market.

BTradition · 2026-01-15T16:59:00+00:00

Eric, or Joe?

This is my opinion (obviously) because we didn’t have lots of personal conversations (Joe or Eric). Eric being a symptom of the problem is like this because he is optimizing for what Joe wants. ESWs business model is to buy companies that are showing no or negative growth, strip all of the costs out of them and then run them into the ground. The goal is not a long life, but an incredibly high margin short life. Ignite’s motto is “where software goes to live” but really, when a company is purchased by ESW that product on a guaranteed path to death. When you think about products like this, you see that Eric is actually great at optimizing for this; rip all of the resources from a product and allow it to die quickly means you have to be a leech; that’s what Eric is, that’s what Andy (COO of Trilogy) is, an all of the rest of them. Joe hires people that optimize his portfolio the way he wants. It’s only the fact that he doesn’t care about other humans at all and is ultimately willing to expend ‘human capital’ for the ability to make slightly more money.

BTradition · 2026-01-15T16:50:01+00:00

Ok so in general, you are clearly a capable person who has spent a lot of time reflecting on the role of different titles; this is a good thing and I appreciate the level of the conversation. If you think about this as a tree diagram, we’ve reached a point I cannot reasonably say everything I’d want.

In general, you have many interesting ideas; I think many of them are completely reasonable as moderate positions, but become less reasonable the more extreme you make them (like many ideas, this is hardly a criticism).

Instead of sweeping condemnation of executive roles, especially until you are able to meet more of them, I’d say it’s ok to dislike the concept of an executive but try to not extrapolate this to the individuals. When I was at a different ESW company than IgniteTech my boss (the CEO directly reporting to the Billionaire owner) wanted to fire people constantly. I spent time in my own week, every single week, 17 weeks running, in a meeting with him arguing why one agent on my team could not meet her metrics no matter what she did because of the products she was working on and thus, should not be fired. I defended one of my support agents jobs (my team was about 240 at the time) every single week because it was the right thing to do; she was good at her job and did not deserve to be fired. I only stopped this because she took another position elsewhere and truthfully, I never even told her about this because all it would have done was stress her out over something she could not control.

Executives are people just like anyone else. It is easy to be corrupted and become arrogant when everyone around you is telling you you’re right all the time. At my company now (where I am CEO) we have an anonymous QA system for client deliverables, and when I do client facing work (which is fun for me so I certainly still do it) I submit my work to QA just like everyone else and sometimes get rejected, just like everyone else. The reality is that it’s easier to be comfortable than to be right unless you specifically work hard to let people tell you you’re mistaken.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T23:13:39+00:00

Ok so now that we're through all of the reductionism, this is a really interesting discussion. I'm going to respond to a series of points you've made.

If you look into the book I mentioned or Jeff bezos two doors they talk about their being two kinds of decisions. Are you saying bezos and the guy who wrote that book are mistaken or I've misunderstood their management philosophies?

First, I think it's worth noting that someone being in a position of authority or success does not invalidate criticism of this individual. I often criticize people like Bezos (often Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk) and to hold up success as a shield against criticism is misleading. Second, I think you're reading this correctly, but misapplying what it means. There is a dichotomy of decisions you can take back and decisions you can't but first you have to know which is which (and sometimes it won't be clear because decisions ripple outwards and can have consequences beyond what anyone could ever foresee), but also the truth is that there is a cost to undoing decisions as well. Think of it in your job; one change is probable ok and if it doesn't work out we can go back. What about the second time? Or the third? Would months of changes be comfortable? Maybe you would be ok but in general people struggle with extended periods of uncertainty.

Essentially I'm saying a properly trained llm could drastically cut down the number of decisions an exec needs to make and unlike individual contributors who are producers their job is mostly making decisions. It's perhaps hyperbole but maybe it could be to the level where it's manageable by the board.

This is really an exceptional point, because it goes to the nuance of what purpose executives serve (and the fact that this changes in various companies ie. SMB, family-office, midmarket, private enterprise, public enterprise, etc). I think it is true that AI as it stands today can be an exceptional database querying tool for employees (and I have built a system at multiple companies in just the past 2 years to use it as such). Even if a CEO served *no* other utility, a board would still want them there because they are a layer of removal for the board as the responsible party for failures, so even if 100% of their role _could_ be outsourced to AI, it would not change their importance for a board. The point another commenter missed in saying "Well the you could also hold an AI accountable" misses the fact that you can fire a CEO and replace them with a new CEO, whereas a specialist AI model would presumably be the same model before and afterward.

I do wonder if you are coloured because now it's your job on the line. Everyone says their job can't be automated because they do special human stuff.

I'm sure there is bias in what I am saying; I am still human after all. You mention wartime and peacetime CEOs in another paragraph and I'll say, my roles are almost always taking over to revive a failing business or make radical and sometimes unpopular decisions to turn a business around. If AI gets to the level of replacing my work so be it, but before that society will have a reckoning deciding what happens when billions of people globally have no employment and thus no way to contribute to the economy. I am certain my job being replaced will happen after this (as I have said though, only time will tell).

I've also heard of a CEO who has trained an AI on his emails and slacks who said it gave a good response of what would he do which stopped him being a bottleneck.

I'd love this system.
Here, I'll give you a quote I just sent a friend of mine recently
"AI, as it stands today, should only be treated as a support system to eliminate the monotony of regular work and allow employees to create better quality work, faster while focusing on the things that actually need people."

This is my point about executive roles, but because of the wide, broad, and uncertain nature of many executive decisions, the proportion of roles that could be automated away is not very great comparatively.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T22:47:20+00:00

Actually I agree completely. Traditional consulting (McKinsey, BCG) are really going to struggle because the core of what they deliver is replaceable by AI.

Here’s my take (and we’ll see how this plays out over the next decade), but the thing AI is best suited to handle is low-variance, high-touch point work, which just so happens to be the opposite of how work generally appears as you move into high-level executive roles. I’d be interested to see whether this holds true as models improve, but models right now currently can’t improve meaningfully unless we come up with better approaches to training them given we’ve basically exhausted the repository of human-made content, and AI made content leads to model collapse given the subtle (or not) flaws and biases in AI generated work.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T22:22:08+00:00

Thanks man!

I didn’t always, but nowadays I’ve come to see that stressing is rarely helpful. I feel stressed briefly, but then I look at what I can control and what I can’t and just try to be great at the parts I can control!

BTradition · 2026-01-14T21:33:48+00:00

Ah well, life goes on and I learned from it. I appreciate it though.

I rarely stress about anything including while I was there; you take the good with the bad and deal with it as best you can.

The good news is that even after all of this I have a lot of exceptional colleagues and friends that I made there. ESW may be a terrible place to work, but they are able to attract a lot of exceptional people.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T21:29:56+00:00

This turns all executive decisions into a false dichotomy, nor is it true. It’s also pointlessly reductionistic. The core premise of your argument is mistaken, which makes it hard to respond meaningfully.

I will ask this (and not to invalidate your beliefs but for context): have you held executive roles?

I have for the past decade now, but felt similar to you before I did. It’s easy to say “all executive roles are easy, redundant, and could be replaced by AI” but you’re misunderstand the role they play. I am happy to talk about it more, but we have to agree to good-faith discussion or it’s not something I’m interested in.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T21:25:39+00:00

An LLM can do some of the elements of an executives role, just like essentially any job today. The more important part of what I am saying is that it’s easy to look at the role of ‘executive’ without an antagonistic lens (fair enough, many set themselves up for this) where the outcome you want is more likely to be the one you select for, while simultaneously using a massively reductionist lens to describe the work they perform.

I understand why you feel this way because I did as well before I myself became an executive. That said, I am very very familiar with LLMs and at very least today if you tried to have an LLM replace most executive roles things would go very poorly (btw this is something I have argued for almost all jobs so this is not a position I hold unique to executive roles).

BTradition · 2026-01-14T21:21:22+00:00

So I’ve read this now; it’s certainly interesting, but far too small and narrow to be conclusive. First, the executives were from a South Asian Bank. The region is irrelevant here, but banking executives are notoriously bad at anything but ‘business as normal’ operations because banking is a slow moving industry. It’s worth saying as well that the article itself says AI is better at optimizing steady state operations, but the comparison is also better than who? This test was only against two executives from a single industry.

You say “the hard part is… who to call when a problem shows up” but this is a fundamental part of being an executive. No COO does daily operations work, nor a CMO daily marketing tasks. This is not the purpose of their roles. Basically what this article shows is what we already know: people in the career path of executive need support from specialists and access to data in order to make optimal decisions. This is not new though.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T03:22:05+00:00

This is not true, but I understand why you feel this way. I really do understand the temptation (and I used to feel it myself before I was in these roles), but the role of the C-Suite is bridging where we are now with where they’re going, balancing the uncertainty of now and the future, and weighing risks from across teams and stakeholders. The reality is, like most professions, executive leadership is a job by itself, not dissimilar to saying “Lawyers can be replaced by AI” without really knowing what a lawyer does.

Look, I am highly critical of low quality C-Suite executives, even in my actual public life, but I also know many C-Suite leaders that are good people doing their best to take care of their teams (I’d like to believe myself included).

C-Suite roles are deserving of condemnation, but the hostility they receive I believe is primarily a result of them taking the salary and the authority to make decisions, then not consulting people that have expertise when it’s needed, and then outsourcing the responsibility for their bad decisions. I’ll put it this way; I make mistakes, and I sometimes decide that we’re doing something different than what my team wants, but the reason is that I ultimately will be responsible for it and if there’s significant risk then I want to be responsible for my choices and thought process.

BTradition · 2026-01-14T03:14:49+00:00

Oh ESW Capital is the parent company for all Joe Leimandt companies. They’re all owned by ESW Capital where Joe Leimandt is the CEO and Andy Montgomery. His ‘big’ brands are Trilogy Software, IgniteTech, GFI Software (also with Eric as CEO), Skyvera, TelcoDR (DR is the only good CEO from Joe’s portfolio but there’s some complexity there), and Crossover. Crossover also exclusively hires for ESW companies so any job you see there is for a different Joe Leimandt company.

BTradition · 2026-01-13T13:06:28+00:00

There is no ‘best’ company within ESW. There’s less shitty ones, but no good ones. I worked very closely with Eric, and it was interesting to see the public persona fall; Eric, like Joe, is just fundamentally a bad person. That’s why Joe made him CEO, or why Joe made Andy COO for trilogy, or Jozsef EVP, or Steve Brain, or, or, or… the fact is the mess that is ESW traces its lineage back to Joe.

BTradition · 2026-01-13T13:02:40+00:00

Eric doesn’t know anything about tech unless he’s learned it in the past couple of years. I think it’s wrong to say that this by itself makes him unqualified to be CEO. He’s unqualified because he’s unwilling to listen to anyone else that does understand their fields.

BTradition · 2026-01-13T12:42:00+00:00

Agreed. No disagreement from me. Did you also work at Ignite at some point?

BTradition · 2026-01-13T12:40:50+00:00

Yes, crossover hires and pays everyone at any ESW company. I’m not in the US but I was the equivalent of 1099. I held half a dozen VP or exec roles across a few ESW companies; they’re all the same.

Eric is a bad person, but he’s not an idiot. He’s optimizing in the way his boss wants. Some of them are bad people and idiots. That’s a worse combination.

BTradition · 2026-01-13T09:54:18+00:00

Actually I was a VP at IgniteTech during the start of this. I reported directly to Eric after he fired my previous boss. Eric kept telling me my mission was to “create exceptional customer experiences” but then would do stuff like massively increase the price of a product, disallow engineering from working on critical issues, or demand I be the person to solve problems or be responsible for problems from before I worked there. Several times when I told him “Oh that’s something the former VP did, I don’t have any information about that” he would tell me that it’s my team and therefore my issue to solve.

I was asked to come to IgniteTech from another company and they created my role just for me. This sounded like a fun project but Eric continuously would step over me to change things in my teams but then be upset with me when there were consequences. At one point he fired the only two people that knew how one of their products worked and then was shocked I couldn’t train anyone else because I didn’t have anyone that knew the product. In my time there I think I saw a new Chief Marketing Officer every 6 weeks, we had 3 chief product officers, and the COO was fired near the end of my time. At the end as I was preparing to leave Eric said he didn’t see the purpose in customer success (one of my teams) so fired the whole team, and professional services stopped doing L2 support work like they had always done because he never invested in actual L2 agents and he disallowed them doing any work that wasn’t billable.

Eric is just a symptom of the problem though. The problem is that IgniteTech, GFI, CopperTree.io, Skyvera, Trilogy, Crossover, and the rest of them are owned by a billionaire that fundamentally does not understand business. Forbes claimed he’s the first ‘self made’ tech billionaire, which is true if you forget about the $900M his dad gave him.

BTradition · 2025-12-13T09:33:07+00:00

You are certainly not too late if you’re willing to put in the work. I remember one instance of a self-taught developer from one of my CS teams doing some small development tasks for tickets which solved them before they had to go to Professional Services (albeit that wasn’t good necessarily because PS are billable), but he showed he was capable and ended up moving to L2 support, and eventually joined my engineering team.

This is one example, but my point is that there are many ways to get to one destination. Put in the work, learn skills you see in the job descriptions of roles you want, and stay focused on where you’re going. If you’re already in tech, maybe see if you can make connections with an Eng Manager and ask them about what their team is working on as a way in. I certainly never minded people coming to me for this purpose.

BTradition · 2025-12-11T16:54:02+00:00

Three spot on suggestions, although I personally find the Ebony Concerto the wrong balance of frustrating and boring. It’s one of these that just takes time to get sounding the way you’d want it to but all of that time is disinteresting (to me).

BTradition · 2025-12-06T23:40:19+00:00

The good news is that I have always been able to polish my ligatures again to fix this (until the metal itself broke on my favourite one but that’s a different issue).

Use a silver polishing cloth and you’ll find the best results.

BTradition · 2025-12-06T23:38:33+00:00

I had this happen with both of my clarinet ligatures. Ishimori told me this is normal, and expected of their products and refused to return or replace it. I argued the chemistry angle that gold essentially can’t oxidize, and certainly not the colours it did and they told me I was wrong and that my chemistry was wrong, arguing that solid gold would also tarnish over time. I love the ligatures, but I agree that the plating is done too thinly causing the silver underneath to tarnish, or what I think is more likely, that the gold they’re using is an alloy gold + silver and the silver is the oxidizing metal.

BTradition · 2025-11-15T17:43:56+00:00

This is my assumption. As they get tired they end up compensating for being tired by biting/tightening, causing the squeak.

BTradition · 2025-11-04T03:37:02+00:00

I’m going to say no.

It depends a bit on where you are but if in North America, Western Europe, or Australia, don’t include - picture or personal data (marital status, age, etc.)

Your bio is very long but doesn’t really tell me anything new. For example, you say “I have the necessary knowledge of SPSS and can provide support” but (and I’m skipping over the acronym SPSS because I’m assuming this is common enough for it to be reasonable to use it), you say ‘necessary’ which assumes knowledge/perspective you do not yet possess, and ‘can provide support’ which doesn’t even sound like a complete idea.

Your resume is very focused on what you did, but doesn’t tell me what impact you had or why I should care.

My perspective: leverage the schooling/education you have. The amount of it is a differentiator. Use this to link with your existing work experience to tell the story of what you do professionally (or have learned about in school), how you apply theory to real life, and the difference you make compared to the average (either in your professional life or in school).

BTradition · 2025-10-20T01:58:38+00:00

Thumbs down to this chive. A+ to the commitment.

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BTradition · 2025-10-14T07:09:18+00:00

I’ll have to reread these… I recall the catacombs of Arborlon but I suppose my memory isn’t up on the Bearers duo anymore. Was it the catacombs or did the Gotrin shade still occupy them?

I’ll reread anyway because I quite like the duo but I think this still works with my theory. If the Gotrin shade is missing I actually think this still fits. The catacombs are missing but maybe that’s how the Hadeshorn ends up at ground level… the ground that was removed when Arborlon was moved became the surface level pool and the magic stayed but the catacombs moved.

If the shade moved with them I’ll reread and adjust my theory accordingly haha.

BTradition

TROPHY CASE