In high school, I got a summer job installing outdoor irrigation systems. My job was to dig a hole about 8 inches deep for the plastic sprinkler. After finishing one hole, I went on to dig another one. And another one. And another one after that. The work was hot, sweaty, and tiring, and I was rewarded handsomely for my exertions at the rate of $7.50 an hour.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
Image Credit: Agencia Brasil

No one will deny that digging ditches is hard work. There are a lot of really difficult jobs out there, jobs that strain and tax the body, jobs that require strength, endurance, and a high tolerance for boredom. The vast majority of those jobs also do not pay any money. If you perform badly at these jobs, you will be fired, and maybe get a month or two worth of wages and health insurance. Even if you do well, you can be laid off, outsourced, or replaced by a robot.

Of course, the modern economy no longer favors brute strength. This is a marketplace of information and ideas, and the market rewards those people who can work hard mentally, not those who work hard physically.

From the perspective of mental effort, the set of hard jobs is completely different. Jobs like doctor or lawyer require a high level of intelligence and knowledge. At an even more rarified level, physicists, geneticists, mathematicians and others deal with ideas on a daily basis that are all but incomprehensible to the non-professional. The market rewards these professions, but not at a level equal to their difficulty. University professors are comfortably paid, but when was the last time you heard of one taking home a multi-million dollar bonus? Being a doctor or lawyer pays better, but there are only a select few who make a million dollars or more a year.

On the other hand, there are jobs that pay extremely well, and require no mental or physical skill whatsoever. Imagine a job where you were paid millions of dollars a year in salary, millions more in stock options, and you didn’t have do anything at all.

Sound enticing?

Then you should apply for a position as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Of course, some would argue that CEOs have to know about business, economics and finance, and that their jobs require a wealth of knowledge and experience.

But that’s only if they want the company to do well. They get paid either way.

In 1995, Michael Ovitz was fired after less than one year as CEO of Disney, which is impressive in and of itself. They gave him $130 million in a severance package, which is enough to visit Disneyland every day for roughly the next 7000 years.

In 2007, Merril Lynch got caught on the wrong end of the subprime mortgage crisis and suffered a quarterly loss of $2.3 billion. CEO Stanley O’Neal left, and was harshly punished for his mismanagement of the venerable company by only receiving $161.5 million on the way out. I suppose that’s what you get for being a record setter.

Now, many people receive a yearly raise of a couple of percentage points. For example, in 2005, CEO Henry McKinnel gave himself a 72% pay raise while the company’s stock was falling. When he finally left in 2006, he got an $83 million package as a reward for cutting the company’s stock value nearly in half. It looks like the makers of Viagra got fucked pretty hard.

My own personal favorite CEO is Carly Fiorino of Hewlett Packard. She managed to drastically reduce the value of the company stock and cause huge layoffs. As a result, she received $21 million in cash, and another $19 million in stock. Then, shamed by her failure, she moved out of the harsh world of making businesses fail and instead became a central economic advisor for John McCain. She now appears regularly on the Fox Business Network. I think her next move should be to write a how-to book about her success. It could be called Succeeding Upside-Down: How to Achieve Wealth, Influence and Power by Running your Company into the Ground. My guess is she would get an advance of at least ten million dollars.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some CEOs who deserve to make the big bucks. Michael Eisner took Disney from a $1.5 billion company in 1984 to a $30.75 billion company in 2004. Charles Tillinghast, Jr., who is thought to have the first contract with a golden parachute, took TWA from a $38 million loss in 1961 to a $50 million profit in 1965. Both of those people, and countless others, were paid exceedingly well. They generated profits for the company and the shareholders, created jobs for the employees and provided desirable products to consumers. If they made piles of money in the process, good for them.

But, when it gets down to it, I ask myself a simple question when deciding how hard a job is: Could I do that?

Most of the time, the answer for really hard jobs is no. If you handed me a surgical gown and told me to give someone a heart transplant, that patient would be dead, and I would be fired and sued for malpractice. If I had to defend a criminal, he would probably get life in prison for stealing gum, and I would be reduced to chasing ambulances. If I had to work all day doing construction, I would probably pass out from exhaustion about 1:00 and fall into the cement mixer.

However, could I cut a company’s stock value in half, force thousands of layoffs, set records for quarterly losses, and get fired in less than a year? Would I be willing to take even $20 million dollars to make a company collapse? I’m pretty sure I could do that. In fact, my main worry is that I might not know enough about finance and economics to make the company lose money fast enough.

There are plenty of other jobs with nice deals if you get fired. Football coaches routinely have the remaining years of their contract bought out, and they take home $5 million for having a losing team. But at least they have consequence of not being able to show their face in a certain city for the rest of their life. By contrast, CEOs are mostly anonymous. They can fail as spectacularly as they want, and their only fear is not having enough room in their vault for the money they take home.

Sounds like the easiest job in the world to me.