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Comment by OnlineGladiator | Hacker News Reader

I always think it's good that people research things that are considered "obvious" because there is always that rare chance you will discover something unexpected! That said, nothing interesting was really discovered here - the article does go into a bit more detail but you can really summarize it as "people don't like to work with assholes, and people especially don't like to work for assholes"

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If it were all that obvious, we wouldn't have so many abusive narcissists in positions of power. I'll leave politics aside, but just taking companies in the news this week, we can look at Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick as narcissists who couldn't even get a company to IPO due to failures of collaboration and integrity.

The article correctly points out some of the direct economic damage. It ignores the significant damage to people done by abusive narcissists; from personal experience I can say it's substantial. You can see that in the interviews with WeWork employees.

But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing. Kalanick was aggressive in killing competition; Lyft was the only one he couldn't spend into the grave. Neumann has deeply distorted the market for coworking. Or we could look at Zuckerberg [1]; what kind of open social networks could we have ended up with if he hadn't ruthlessly pursued a personally-dominated monopoly?

[1] http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/narcissistic-personality-d...

Yeah, apparently it is not that obvious as on HN these 3 you named were worshipped here, negative/critical comments downvoted, while objectively the writing was on the wall. Wework being the most obvious to me personally; that was a shitshow from the start and yet people here actually believed that would succeed.

Totally agreed. And I'd be much more comfortable if people here could split the two. E.g., "I'm not sure if that business will work, but I hope so because I just love Neumann; he's so magnetic, so compelling!"

But instead we get supposedly hyper-rational arguments that are pretty clearly highly emotional. And then when the wheels come off, the support just evaporates, with nary a "mea culpa", let alone a "here's how WeWork fooled me" post.

It's just exhausting sometimes.

My favourite is when someone points out had bad these companies are, inevitably someone else links "the Dropbox thread" as justification. This is tremendously ironic, because Dropbox hasn't made a dime yet either.

> But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing.

At least for VC-backed direct competition, nothing of value is lost. The business is commodity - driving people around in cars, delivering food, renting office space, offering rides on e-scooters, running under-the-table hotels, whatever. All that the insane amounts of VC enable is network effects and marketplace dominance - people don't call a pizza shop or a cab company any more, they open the Delivery Hero or Uber apps. But someone still has to make the pizza or drive the cab, which means until fully automated driving is reality, there is no direct loss in jobs.

The more interesting things are rather the "competition" that is entrenched companies... most obvious in taxis. Usually, taxis are regulated (meaning, their cars have appropriate insurance, silent alarm devices in case the driver gets robbed, and most importantly mandatory service areas and times). Uber/Lyft etc. can now pick the profitable cherries (airport transfers, drunk partygoers on Friday/Saturday) and leave the unprofitable times or areas to the regular cabs - who cannot run at an overall profit anymore as the business/hipster clientele is now using Uber/Lyft. Who suffers? Entire communities now underserved by taxis, old people (who don't have smartphones)... but no one really looks at which negative impact his/her company will have on minorities.

Hmmm...my experience is very different. A lot of seemingly normal people are just fine, if not happy to be led by psychopaths and narcissists. They view their "confidence" as a plus because they don't dig deeply or are just scared, wimps and like a big strong "asshole" to lead them. I honestly blame the rise of asshole CEO's and leaders on the normies, who don't want to be be held accountable.

It's not happiness, it's complacency. Huge difference. Psychopaths and narcissists do a LOT of unseen damage if not kept under a very tight leash.

People follow the path of least resistance - it's easier for most people to play the office politics game where the boss will let them than do the work before them. It's still a failure of management and leadership however.

Confidence and assertiveness are important leadership traits. I don't know what's considered "seemingly normal", but different people can make radically different judgments of character, and a lot of narcissists can exploit this. People who can and do reliably detect psychopaths and narcissists tend to develop an aversion.

I agree here 200%. People may not want to be “the asshole”, but they want to work under “the asshole” because they think it will benefit them and help them get what they want because their leaders are willing to be cutthroat, which may benefit them.

This is the truth about leadership. As long as everyone is getting their due, few will care about the overt sociopathy of the leader and those that do will have no political power to change it. That's one truth I had to discover via experience and it destroyed my morale and idealism.

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