On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
xander.ai
xander.ai
The biggest signal of narcissism: Inability to take feedback constructively. Unless they've been somewhat socialized for professional behavior, narcissists tend to react explosively and aggressively at anything other than praise.
A secondary signal of narcissism: Always having to be "right", usually by gaslighting the other person or slippery lawyering.
Depends on the culture and situation.
First: What's at stake with the "feedback"? Is this a peer trying to help you? Or is this a hostile boss, and is the "feedback" part of a "performance management" process? You can call something "feedback" all you want; context and intentions matter.
(As a mostly-harmless demonstration, I was tempted to play a game here where I just quoted your sentence "The biggest signal of narcissism: Inability to take feedback constructively" and then wrote "I think this post is pretty bad" right after it. Then, assuming you attempted to defend yourself, I would have been able to point to those defensive behaviors as "narcissism". And, if in the face of that accusation you again defended yourself, I could then double down. I'm not going to troll like that, but you see the dynamic you can set up this way. Recognizing this, I am skeptical of people who wave these words around. That said, it's also clear that, when there's as much money around as there is in Silicon Valley, there are going to be people you need to defend yourself against, so I won't discount the idea entirely.)
Second: How will your response be interpreted? Are you working with someone who has your best interests at heart? Then recognize that they're trying to help you, and of course appreciate that they're taking the personal risk with you of offering criticism. Or are you instead in an adversarial situation -- think the justice system -- where a failure to argue your case is seen as an admission of guilt? That again matters. Then -- don't lose emotional control -- but also don't just roll over.
> A secondary signal of narcissism: Always having to be "right", usually by gaslighting the other person or slippery lawyering.
I think this stems from perceptions about the consequences of being wrong. For example, at Amazon, they say something like "leaders are people who tend to be right". And of course, being a "leader" comes with financial rewards. So of course you'll want to avoid the perception that you're "wrong" in that environment. But the problem is as much the toxic environment -- intentionally set up by leadership -- as it is the personalities of the workers who've been thrown into the Hunger Games against each other.
One of the things that concerns me about these psychological weapons -- like, the labeling of another person as "narcissistic" -- is that they seem like they can just as easily be used against the innocent as against the deserving. In particular, when people in positions of authority wave these words around in reference to underlings, it can just mean "don't know their place". I have heard, for example, that when patients demonstrate knowledge of their conditions (or worse, push back, ask for second opinions, and so on), doctors sometimes label them as "narcissistic". I'm skeptical that "failure to defer to me" is necessarily a personality defect.
I would offer another way of thinking about things: Does the person stay out of other people's psychological space? Do they try not to work against others' material interests? Do they engage in more win-win or more zero-sum interactions? An idea like that seems less likely to be abused to me.
I'm also a little wary of the binaristic trend I see in these labels: People are classified as "being dark triad personalities" or not. I feel you're probably going to be more humane if you see shades of gray.
That said, all this means that I do agree with you when you write:
> I always see more psychopath-tendencies/assholes associated with MAANG megacorps
I agree that those environments bring out the worst in people. But I think it's as much about the environment as it is some inherent feature of the people who end up in those jobs.
I have also seen environemnts where all that matters getting prominent people in prominent cliques to like you. When I had more manual work, meeting your metrics exactly, not less or more, showing up on time and being friendly/chatty mattered the most.
Everyone has their personalities and I will leave it to the psychoanalysts to asess people but since the subject is specific to work environments, my opinion is that sociopathy, egocentrism and machavellianism are esentially traits you are forced to develop to make ends meet or move up the corporate ladder. These horrible perosnalities are a problem only if you have a healthy top-down environemnt and culture to begin with.
For example: work environments where people like to argue about politics every single time have egomaniacs influencing cliques. But this is tolerated by management and rewards these people.
Humility being rewarded,a "no stupid questions" culture, firmly and strongly enforcing separation between personal and professional lives and being fair to everyone (really gets under my skin when people gossip/slander, managers use back channels to dig info about candidates and bullying people) is what I consider a good work environment.
It is good for workers and it is good for productivity and the bottom-line. But people are short sighted and care about ego stroking and sociopaths become managers all the time and the problem with these people to me is that they care about things other than money and people. At work, everyone is there to make money, help the company maximize profits and do so ina sustainable way (treat coworkers and subordinates right).
In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies. But I have zero insight into what happens at the managerial or director levels.
The system is BS because a lot of projects work better when more than one engineer/team is involved. But by making it a zero sum game, most engineers (and their managers) spend more time backstabbing others to save themselves. Zero productive work gets done. It is all about backstabbing and BS optics to make themselves look good to the director.
Strongly disagree. Yes, there are fairly good standards about how you communicate with other people. But competition between peers is higher in these companies, and you can see it. It's hard to form friendships in a SV company for this reason. Less-competitive industries are different. Most people don't really want to be in this kind of competition, and will be friendlier in other situations. But they'll endure these environments for the money.
One of my concerns is that, if this is the only kind of environment you experience as an adult, you're going to start to carry this kind of competitive behavior out into the larger world. And as this corporate culture starts to eat larger and larger parts of the economy, this increasingly will be the only thing people know. This seems deeply corrosive to society as a whole.
It's one of the reasons I like to get out of upper-middle-class professional milieus when I can. People act differently. They're friendlier.