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Comment by Redoubts | Hacker News Reader

> This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.

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I interpret this as strong circumstantial evidence that companies who start out as engineering centric and claims to be meritocratic eventually deteriorate into good ole nepotistic power play and a sea of bureaucracy. It’s quite entertaining to observe even John Carmack go through this very relatable frustration.

I see it more as the simple truth. There's only so much influence you can wield working one day a week as an executive advisor. By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved, but he didn't want to be more involved. He's got his own startup to work on.

Oh yeah I was assuming we were talking about when he was actually working there. That whole consulting gig felt like a slow quit.

> By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved

My reading is that back when he was full time, he was busy with actual product work and coding, and he could have possibly made a difference by going political, but there would have been no guarantee and it would have taken a lot of his time.

It's interesting how universal this pattern seems to be.

It only seems universal because the management universe has ben captured by the MBAs. All upper management feels the same way because they were all largely trained at the same few MBA schools.

Do you think the schools taught people to think that way, or is there a selection bias for people with that personality to do an MBA?

I don't see that distinction mattering all that much. What matters is that people with a specific mindset come out of these MBA schools that also have formed strong networks there which help them win the power and status games later on.

Reckon the cost of doing an MBA has a big role to play in this. MBAs are just stupid expensive. If you’re 200k in debt at graduation, you’re likely going to make conservative choices in your career.

Siding with the in-group and perpetuating the bureaucratic structure is one way to ensure that you stay employed.

I don't want to sound rude nor elitist, but at the end of the day most workers don't care about the product the work on. They care about the prestige, or the money, or some other meta-factor (no pun intended) that comes with the role.

Even those that really resonate with a product they work on don't necessarily view said product as their dream calling or calling in life. Maybe the knowledge and ideas from the industry are useful but not necessarily what they are used for (for a topical exmaple: I'm sure meta has top VR engineers working on some of the most boring, least ambitious apps you can imagine).

If all that can happen at the non-1% level of society, I'm not surprised it happens amongst the wealthy elite, especially those whose job is to try and make the most money for the next quarter.

We’re just uppity primates so our group dynamics are always going to be dominated by our social instincts.

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