April 15, 2026
Real-time or real-try?
Show HN: Every CEO and CFO change at US public companies, live from SEC
Cool CEO tracker, but “real-time” claims and site outages spark snark
TLDR: A new site tracks every CEO/CFO change from SEC filings and estimates pay, but it buckled under traffic. Commenters split between excitement and sarcasm, debating “real-time” claims, how pay is parsed from messy filings, and urging a simpler, static setup—because leadership moves matter, and timing and accuracy are everything
A new Show HN post promised a live feed of every CEO and CFO change at US public companies, pulled from SEC filings and press releases, with average pay figures. The pitch: real-time leadership churn, straight from official 8‑K forms (those are company “big news” reports) and Form 3 disclosures. The reality, according to the crowd? Mixed.
Skeptics pounced on the “real-time” boast, with one commenter dropping the two-word eyebrow raise: “Real time”. Then the site tracksuccession.com started freezing under the surge—classic HN “hug of death” (when an internet crowd unknowingly crushes a site). Cue the dunk: “Another downside of vibe programming,” joked one user, turning a loading spinner into a meme.
But it wasn’t all roast. Builders and data nerds dug into the hardest part: how do you pull pay data from messy 8‑K prose? Is it a rules-based parser or an LLM (a large language model, the AI that reads text)? And what about later amendments where the real numbers show up? Meanwhile, practical voices suggested: batch the data and serve static pages so the site doesn’t melt.
So yes, the tool’s promise—live leadership shakeups and pay scoops—has people curious. But the comments made it clear: the big drama isn’t CEOs leaving; it’s whether this “real-time” tracker can survive its own buzz—and turn vibes into verifiable, load-proof data
Key Points
- •The service tracks CEO and CFO changes at U.S. public companies with live updates covering the past 30 days.
- •Compensation figures shown are averages derived from disclosed data in SEC 8‑K filings, with equity values based on grant-date estimates.
- •Actual compensation varies by company size, industry, and geography, and not all filings include compensation details.
- •Data sources include SEC EDGAR 8‑K filings, Form 3, and public press releases, with figures updated as new data is filed.
- •tracksuccession.com offers a full historical feed, real-time alerts, search, filtering, and detailed compensation data for account holders.