> This is especially true for friendly, competent, reasonable-seeming managers – people want to commiserate with winners

Interesting. My experience working inside big tech was thinking of managers as mostly losers who are neither technically strong but psycho enough to think they are better and can manage other engineers.

So I think of them as loosers who can't build a company from scratch but have parasitic tendencies to manage other people's money and time without having skin in the game.

Especially the ones who think they know better. And are active in LinkedIn.