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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

I’ve worked in tech long enough to tell you that leadership being completely inept isn’t as far-fetched as you think.

Can confirm. The people at the top in tech are a) primarily driven by personal advancement, b) focus all their attention on getting a promotion (or higher share price), c) if user welfare and personal ambition are in conflict personal ambition comes first.

It’s just normal humanity stupidity and greed, and these aren’t like head of the class intellects, it’s just boring people who love money and status and get no satisfaction from helping others.

It is not just Tech, but similar in every other industry. Only those industries with cut throat competition would have better leadership ( Because they are forced to compete ).

The problem with Tech is that they are the primary beneficial of hyper growth with zero interest rate era and Smartphone revolution. In the space of 10+ years tech have grown from an unthinkable Trillion dollar market cap to now we have a single company with close to 3 trillion, two other company with close to 2 trillion and other rushing to trillion dollar club. And this is unlike previous bubble they have actual profits and balance sheet for their market valuation.

People working in tech, especially within BigTech are not only partly dictating the world and media's attention, they are also so out of touch they became aristocracy in the old era.

I wouldn’t say it’s so much “greed” as business models that don’t actually make money. Take investor money until you’ve gotten as big as you can with billions in valuation while making little to no profit, change business models to try to make yourself actually profitable, and in doing so “ruin” what was only possible while being supported by hopeful patient investors.

Thus begins your decline and the gamble for who gets stuck holding the bag.

Yes, but you can flush billions down the drain and if you get a nice title along the way it doesn’t matter in Silicon Valley.

A VP who oversaw a billion being set on fire will still be hired as a VP at the next company as long as that money was burned on the tech trend of the moment.

I think that qualifies.

I wouldn't want to say that "he's at the top in tech", I'd want to reserve that for good programmers, engineers and researchers

Maybe more: "he's trying to be at the top in business/value extraction/rent seeking"

top of org charts?

That’s what I was referring to. What I’d call “top talent” is rarely the same as “top of the org”.

The topic has been analyzed quite extensively in my small bubble of very experienced people (mostly software developers, some with management experience, but also other people from various fields). We asked ourselves why so often such strange decisions are made out of management and our basic attitude was that we simply don't have the necessary information to be able to evaluate these decisions reasonably.

So we gathered a lot of information, as much of it as possible directly from management itself. We have indeed found information that explains some managerial decisions, but so far only of the variety that have benefited individual managers themselves, and always with negative consequences for the majority of others.

However, the overwhelming majority of what we consider peculiar (up to catastrophic) decisions are due to a combination of hubris, impostor syndrome and absolute incompetence. In one case where we could least explain the decisions at first, a manager under the influence of alcohol virtually admitted that they were not only aware of their own incompetence, but that they intentionally got rid of overly competent people so that they wouldn't make them look so bad. It's a mess.

Anecdotally, my experience is different. In my case this usually means that I am unaware of some other factors at play, usually business constraints that haven’t been made public.

I mean in the reddit case the business reason is "monetize the platform as much as possible", which clashes with a platform that's nothing without its users and the content they create. A good business strategy would be to build trust and have dialog and increase monetization in small steps that the majority of the userbase can tolerate (after all people understand that things cost money).

By taking a huge jump to early on and shitting on volunteers/3rd party app developers, they lost what little trust they had. Doubly sad that the same playbook played out with Digg and showed reddit exactly what not to do.

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