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Comment by hnlurker22 | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you hire leet code engineers and they become managers. Look at Google now. This isn't some magical outcome of big corps. A big corp is practically the people who work there.

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America has multiple examples of companies that thrived for decades until a certain type of manager showed up (of which leet code engineers are an aspect; clueless MBA grads are another; there are more). Sears. General Electric. IBM. Companies need to develop a sort of immune response to this type, as they are as charismatic as they are deleterious to company outlooks, and WILL worm their way in if not checked. A more effective Matthew Broderick to stay the Reese Witherspoons of the world.

As long as the companies have a completely autocratic structure, there is no possible way to develop any kind of immune response.

This is assuming that companies are initially led and managed by people who actually care about it and the service/product produced, and that the bean counters and corporate climbers only show up later, when it becomes clear that the business is ripe for exploitation.

It’s not really about ‘leet code engineers’ getting into management but the perverse incentives involved in climbing up the corporate ladder.

It’s as if it doesn’t matter what project you pitch and what the fallout is as long as some KPI somewhere gets a boost. Just get your promotion and ride off into the sunset, someone else will deal with the aftermath.

It's not just about incentives. It's about selecting for the kind of people who succeed under those incentive structures.

Even if you're hiring a cross section of the population or a cross section of software developers or management professionals only a slice of it is gonna stick around long enough to influence the organization.

For example, you don't find a lot of Ron Swanson types working for insurance, the court system, or health and safety. Those personality types are either gonna find a new job, turn into a bitter shell of a person counting the days to retirement or go postal and finding a new job is obviously the superior option.

The comparison between Google and Microsoft (or whatever) is gonna be similar though the differences will be more nuanced. Same thing for big banks. Same for big oil. Same for big anything. You've got these differing corporate cultures and incentive sets and they select for different people.

At Microsoft, for every Principal Engineer/Manager there’s a dead internal project that nobody uses but had “… lots of impact.”

Microsoft is built on completely different ethos and evolved from there.

(I think it was Paul Allen is who said it) "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property". So being closed source, aggressive safeguarding of IP and locking users in is the DNA of Microsoft.

Yes, company is made of people, but there's also a foundational DNA. When you keep that DNA alive, the company changes and eats the people fed into it, without evolving (See Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.). Google's DNA has been changed from the top from a powerful but gentle giant to subtle but very evil giant.

> "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property".

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

I mean time has proven over and over that Gates and Microsoft were right.

If your business is developing and selling software to businesses then you want a proprietary license and usually to give it away for non-commercial use. If your business is selling direct to consumer then you need a proprietary license, no source available, and probably DRM.

If your business is something unrelated to software, and uses software as a means rather than an end then OSS is your friend.

There is a bit of irony in this comment since many of the original Skype engineers are now seniors managers at Google still working on communication (they left MS a long time ago).

Google has many issues but I don't think technical competence is one of them.

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