Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated.
Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic.
Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate.
The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.
1. nobody likes their job
2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid
In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important.
But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.
And, sure, SWE is full of Clueless (you don’t have to be a manager to be clueless) who think they’re going to be millionaire CEOs inside five years because they were promised “meritocracy”.
I do agree that those models are specific (and therefore limited) to the private-sector corporation, and don’t really hold in mission-focused organizations where there is an actual reason for it to exist. Thing is, most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people, with zero or negative net social value, so that’s where most HN posters are going to end up.
Sorry what companies/jobs are you talking about specifically?