The man who killed Google Search?

(www.wheresyoured.at)

1884 points elorant | 1 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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fireflash38 ◴[23 Apr 24 17:40 UTC] No.40134737[source]▶

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.

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dvt ◴[23 Apr 24 18:02 UTC] No.40135029[source]▶

>>40134737 #

> 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.

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1. thenberlin ◴[23 Apr 24 18:22 UTC] No.40135319[source]▶

>>40135029 #

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.

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