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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.