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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious."

Big Tech in a nutshell

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Any company in a nutshell. I've worked retail, warehousing, IT, and engineering, and every company I've worked for has had a big problem with owners hiring charismatic psychopaths who end up causing some degree of harm to the employees around them. I worked with a guy who was very favored by the bosses at one company, and he instructed employees to break company policy and then went to me in IT and told me to install a camera in the areas he told the employees to break policy in. When I inadvertently learned the truth, I ignored his request. But... yeah. It's not unique to google or tech companies.

Reversal to the mean.

Works across many levels, not just higher up management.

Maybe I lucked out, but I found perhaps one or two psychopaths in two decades working tech, before big tech, and both were VP-level and non technical. But yes, I guess corporate ladders tend to reward psychopaths and narcissists by design

"If only the czar knew."

Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.

Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary.

So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.

Sorry, I was (trying to) use the same term as the person I was replying to.

Should have answered to that then, sorry. Was just a quick lunch break thought.

That was quoted from the article. I think they mistook the words

"psychotic" seems to have been a typo as the subheading is "Psychopaths".

To be fair, with the rampant drug abuse in Silicon Valley (particularly hallucinogens) I would not be surprised if a lot of those execs have experienced psychosis.

"psychotic" is being thrown around as the new "narcissist".

Basically anyone with some personality trait that I don't agree with is now a "psychotic".

but that's wrong. psychopathic is less wrong.

Socialism rewards psychopaths even more than capitalism does. In that system, the psychopaths quickly become the ones who define what those "guardrails" are, for their own personal benefit; and then use the full weight of state enforcement power to prevent any dissent.

At least under capitalism, the decentralized free market eventually erodes the ability of a corporation run by psychopaths to continue to operate, if not as fast as we might like.

Erhn… you’re saying the government of Vietnam has more psychopaths than a big corporation? I sincerely doubt it. No upside for them.

The psychopaths in a government have a monopoly on violence, though.

You mean the cops. Yes, police force has a large number of sociopaths and psychopaths: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Government official roles likely tend to attract those types too, although I don’t think the president of Portugal or any nordic country are more of a psychopath than the past presidents of the USA for instance (like, all of them) “because socialism hurr durr”

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