Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think he's going to succeed at changing the culture he intends to criticize. The people who wage these stupid political wars don't care that people of conscience hate them. If anything, it energizes them to be hated by the decent among us.

Something I found myself unprepared for is the bad-decision-as-an-assertion-of-power pattern. It literally was not until age 27 that I realized (despite seeing this behavior several times first-hand) how common it is, in business, for people in charge to make intentionally bad decisions for the sake of (a) asserting power, and (b) testing others' loyalty. I guess one could say I was too naive and hyper-rational to believe such a thing to be possible-- except in the movies.

I wish I had a solution. For the record, people who say "Startups!" don't know what they're talking about. Startups can be great, but office politics can get just as ugly in small companies.

I have a friend who used to work at Apple. He jokes (I hope) that Steve Jobs pronounced (Mac OS X 10.2) "Jaguar" as jag-wire as a "prestige hypercorrection" to test the loyalty of his followers. If someone adopted his hypercorrected pronunciation, then he knows they are a sycophant. Though I'm not sure if that means the person should be trusted or ignored..

Fun fact (possibly irrelevant, probably even true) an early example of that pattern is the river Thames that flows through London. It used to be pronounced like it's written, starting with a "Th". Then King George I took the throne in 1714. He was German, but from then onwards, the way that he said it (i.e. "Tems") was the right way. And still is.

http://www.lbc.co.uk/why-is-the-river-thames-so-called-7258

It says something about power that people still want to be treated like kings - whatever they do is automatically the right way for the courtiers and sycophants to copy.

And it says something about Steve Jobs that he would play on that on purpose.

Sometime that's what leaders do: they test the water to see if people still consider that they are their leaders. If the result is positive, they'll continue to do what they do. Otherwise, either they become paranoid (most leaders are) or they change their game plan a little bit.

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