The man who killed Google Search?

The tech fluff pieces are wild. And that entire paragraph about how the execs for Yahoo failed horribly, hired a new one, and that one lied about his degrees, and they hired another.

People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society: basic contracts like "fail and you won't get rewarded" or "succeed and you'll get rewarded" are just not there. You see people fail upwards constantly, and it eats away at your incentive to do any sort of good work, because it just doesn't fucking matter.

Edit: WIRED is the worst about these useless tech fluff pieces. It's like they make insane money from just fauning all over whatever tech CEO is the hottest right.

Imho, the problem is scale.

At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.

What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.

Consequently, when they promote people, they're doing so on the basis of what they've seen.

Invariably, this selects for shitty business types who can spend the majority of their time ensuring their name is first on successful initiatives and scrubbed off failed ones.

You know what it would take for a technologist to match that?

200% time: 100% to get the job done + 100% to match corporate politicking

All the adulation and covers devoted to Sam Bankman-Fried come to mind.

They're not fluff pieces. They're ads. Bought and paid for.

> People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society

And it's not just "people" in general. It's certain people: It's people beyond a certain tipping point in their careers.

If I, as a low level worker bee fail in my job, to the point where I need to leave, I just leave and jump back into Resume Thunderdome to fight for the privilege of doing another 11 round interview nightmare full of code challenges and take home tests.

If my first level manager fails and leaves, he might have a bit of a tough time too, maybe a little easier since he has that all-important "manager experience" that unlocks many doors in silicon valley that are shut to me.

On the opposite side, if anyone in my company who is SVP and up fails spectacularly, they are 100% leaving with an exit bonus of $millions and are probably getting a title bump in their next job: a job that is literally sitting there waiting for them to take, no job application needed.

I visualize it as a hill. At my level, when you leave the company and let go of the rock, it rolls down and to the left, back into Thunderdome. Past a certain crest in the hill, which we'll call "Director," the rock rolls down and to the right when you fail, and you get better and better positions.

People easily see this exclusive club and yea it's demotivating as hell, and eats away at the idea that the world is just, fair, egalitarian. It's certainly corrosive to society.

Who is going to pay you more for the puff piece journamalism than a multi-billionaire conman?

https://prospect.org/article/press-release-journamalism/

> People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles.

I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.) It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?

To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.

> At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership. > What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.

Yeah but it doesn't have to be this way. I put in these details that are summarized in 1 or 2 easy to read bullet points, but asked to remove them because 'leaders are thinking about things on a strategic level'.

And don't get me started on promotion. If I find/do something that improves the teams performance by 10x, "that is just doing my job, please don't bring up stuff like that to management." "you need to have impact across teams". So every team is trying to make every other team take on their 'product' and no one wants to take on other teams product because even if it improves their quality / productivity, they don't get anything for it.

> I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.)

Your parenthesized logic is fallacious. No one is saying there's no filter of who gets to make 7 figures. What people are saying is that merit isn't the filter.

> It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?

> To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.

You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug.

I mean, do you not see how building worse products because you can get away with knowing people is worse for society?

If you cause your company to fail but you keep getting promoted because you are good at managing upward, you are incompetent in your role.

Your role is supposed to be making your company successful. Your role IS NOT supposed to be networking yourself into free money.

I don't think you refuted the underlying point so much as gave cause to it. The idea isn't that simply stupid people rise to the top, it's that people who are capable of gaming a system without providing for or attending to the system they're deftly traversing are floated by their EQ/credentials/jargon straight over the corpses of the things they were actually meant to shepherd or build. I have seen this over and over again, and frankly managed to sometimes straddle the line enough to play along and be the beneficiary of this sort of corporate backchannel -- it's a very real, very human thing.

I've watched wildly incapable people bluff their way up a corporate ladder, fail over the course of two years in an elevated role, and then use that previous title to bluff their way into better positions elsewhere (and then leave those positions before they're totally found out to move on to somewhere else with a yet better title). I've watched people come out of McKinsey into the startup world, talk a major game -- they are the best conjurors of business fantasy at strat plannings and my god, those decks -- but then utterly fail to deliver for years only to end up with SVP roles at major companies on the "strength" of their backgrounds.

I get it: play the man, not the puck or whatever...but eventually somebody has to make sure the puck ends up in the fucking net and not sold off to buttress quarterly earnings.

Potato potato

Reminds me of the Bruce Willis/Kim Basinger movie Blind Date.

In that movie, Willis plays a hard worker that is unpolished, while his slick, suited co-worker just sails on through life.

> You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug.

I guess that's where we disagree: in my view, it's definitely a feature. When I have kids, I will 100% be willing to give them opportunities over other (more qualified) people. It's not even really a question in my mind. I am much more likely to invest in a friend's company ("friends and family" rounds are a thing, you know); I am much more likely to get into business with close associates, and so on.

...which is why society needs safeguards to guard against people like you.

Applied systemically, your behavior is one of the most harmful forces in our society.

And by the way, at a personal level, I get it. You like your friends and family--everyone does. But if we're going to have any pretense that capitalism works, we need to have a system where good work is rewarded. What you're arguing for isn't a free market, it's an oligarchy.

I'll note that there's a significant shifting of the goalposts between your previous post and this one, too. Before, you were saying that networking is a valuable skill, and that's somewhat true, but now you're admitting that competence never had anything to do with it. If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent.

> If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent.

Yeah, I'm being a bit contrarian & spicy for the sake of argument (don't hold it against me, my actual position is way more nuanced), but even so: I don't really see how nepotism forges a path to oligarchy. If they are completely incompetent, they'll run the company into the ground and the free market still wins.

I'd rather have an honest discussion than a "contrarian and spicy" one. Care to present your more nuanced actual opinion?

> To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking.

The people I know who've successfully demonstrated their ability to operate at the C level are addicted to the role and have more money than time. I wonder if we can come up with some kind of prestige leveling system and just not pay them after a while.

A physical $100 million CEO coin with embedded connection to a purpose-built government blockchain. The coins are non-transferable.

Wired had a period where they were absolutely excellent, under Chris Anderson as their chief editor. When he left it was like a switch was thrown; wired almost immediately began to resemble GQ or other "general interest" magazines, with the only differentiating factor being asking the interviewee what apps they have on their iPhone