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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> 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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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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