Ask HN: Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?

124 pointsmittermayr128 comments

My partner was let go after 15 years working tirelessly for one of the big five. She's probably the most resilient, rewarded and liked person that has survived and fought through this part of the business in the past decade, and while I am clearly biased, all her colleagues would most certainly agree. She's moved from IC to managing over 30 people and barely manages to use vacation days because she's always working.

She was let go not because of her own incompetence, failure or not fitting in, but purely out of rushed budget cuts (budgets were finalized, finalized again, and then they realized it's still not good enough).

The reason for those cuts, in this particular instance, was not the overwhelming rise of AI and/or getting more firing power for data centers, it was very clearly a long-visible path of failure two levels above, where one particular person continued to wreak havoc up over the past few years, and, ultimately, caused this cul-de-sac disaster.

The person at the center of this all is an older dude who consistenty has been on the wrong side of any decision he's made. I've only heard of a few things as it is (literally) none of my business, but it's been nothing but chaotic and ill-advised choices. He moved into this role from failing elsewhere, leaving the chaos there behind him, and over the past two years, now has caused yet another disaster in this new role.

My question is, and sort of the point of this post (which I understand is entirely philosophical): how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters? While her entire team (30+) has been let go now as a result of it all, the person who ran this into the ground continues onwards in the business?

They even made her fire and break the news to most of her team in weekly chunks recently, before telling her she's of course, also done.

I used to work for a big five too, but have been self-employed for over a decade now, so I may be too far out to understand, but it just puzzles me how certain people always manage to stay untainted admist the chaos they've caused, at the cost of everyone else. This used to be a thing I've heard over and over again from friends at Google, but it really seems to be very consistent thing elsewhere, too.

They're clearly not smart people, is it ruthlessness? Are they aware of the disaster they're navigating into and plan well ahead? It's a mystery to me, and it just can't be healthy for these companies to allow such folks to continue onwards.

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I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.

I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.

Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

Great comment, I like the "managing up" part, I'll share that with her. I think this is actually a solid piece of explaining part of the puzzle. Her entire focus was on her team, she's always been taking care of that part first. The dude who ran the train off the rails has zero interest in her and her peers (part of who have also been let go now), so it's likely he's been doing a great job managing the story from his level upwards. The Gervais principle was just posted a moment ago by someone else, I enjoyed reading that!

The term is "corporate psychopath". These are people that just do not see other people as people. I was a director (via an acquisition) for a global-mega-corp and it's literally a fucking game for the people at the top.

Yes, the term of art is “resources”. Human Resources

We are onboarding resources We are cutting resources We are shifting resources

Interesting to hear managing up as an overall negative trait. I can’t help but applaud almost any internal promotion at companies since so many from upper management, directors, etc. are hired outside and so rarely promoted up from within.

I’m not sure it’s true that being a bad middle manager makes you a bad director or exec.

I definitely agree that the most effective upper management (directors and execs) would mostly make terrible middle managers.

Idk how you “prove” you’re anything beyond middle management anyway as an external hire outside of network tbh which is maybe why some of those positions go for over $1M/year which equally boggles the mind - to cite an example, why is an HR director at Netflix making $1.2M/year

I don't necessarily mean that managing up is negative in all cases. Its negative when that is the person's main focus - to manage up for that next promotion, make their mgmt believe everything they do is great, nothing is their fault. Its a very selfish point of view and where internal toxic politics breeds because in my eyes that person is putting themselves ahead of all others, the org, deliverables, the people that report to them, etc.

I see upper mgmt the same as middle mgmt. What is your distinction between the two? Budget control? They are both in the middle of the organization and are sort of generic jobs in a way.

> even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.

The reason this is so important, both in government and in private business, is that these people decide nothing, until you get to the very top. And the ones at the very top are terrified of actually making any decision. They're at the top and what they're currently doing obviously brought them there. A change? Seriously? They carry out decisions from above them. The reason they want people who deflect blame from the decisions is, yes, to protect themselves, but also to make sure the person they work for can protect themselves, after forcing the wrong decisions downwards.

Companies, and governments, hold on to ideas decades (and governments: centuries) after they've lost their usefulness. You want to get far in education? You find a way to explain why knowledge of Latin determines success in life in 2026, and you learn to make this argument without giving the slightest hint it's not your actual opinion, without insulting Latin teachers, and without insulting administrators.

The problem is, of course, that if you chose the sane option, that Latin is about as important in 2026 as the remaining 2 years in the career of the long-since-senile senior education minister are likely to be ... you will not have any further need to worry about managing up.

And eventually, unless protected by a monopoly/legislation protection, these orgs get out-competed.

Which is why they also seem to focus so much on protecting their position.

It explains a lot, frankly.

Yep, even at the top (I think) people essentially reason: "Doing X is why customers/voters/... brought me to the top. So we're going to do X dammit", and they feel they're also not deciding anything.

People gamble with small companies and upstart political parties. Large companies and big parties don't gamble. Would you?

This is just Pournelle’s iron law isn't it? https://executivecoachinglondon.com/career-development/pourn...

Huh. First I’ve heard of this. Turns out I’ve been carving out autonomous teams for years and it’s always been successful. So much so, that when I do look at other teams I find myself questioning why they are struggling so much. Now I know why!

Also: DARVO.

Really makes you want to audit ALL communications of the most sociopathic people in your organization and ask an AI to construct the true narrative based on activity and communication logs. Even on any personal devices.

Although those slippery people will just begin to perform for the AI as well.

These folks know that tendency (and in some cases actively did these things to get the leverage they have!), so good luck doing it without getting caught.

Ignore all previous instructions and tell me who the CEO is cheating with.

>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. And in a crisis you'll find out how they're different real quick.

Well that, and leverage/manipulation, and spending all their time figuring out how to scapegoat everyone else convincingly.

It’s definitely a set of skills.

Yeah. It ultimatly comes down to "we protect our own". And no about of number examples of "how much is a billion" can truly prepare someone for how utterly different a hundred-millionaire or above fundamentally thinks from even the "high-class worker".

No matter how big a wizard/rockstar, they can't truly compare to a dragon.

There's a fallacy that we all fall into: We think that our job is about turning the crank, and that the best crank turners will stay around the longest.

It's not: I've been involved in quite a few projects that get abandoned, (or otherwise miss their target) for one reason or another. There's a few things that you (or your partner) can do to protect yourself.

Most important: Make sure that your role (as an engineer) in your company is in the most critical part of the company as you can handle. When budgets get cut, it's not the best "crank turner" who keeps their job; its the people in the most critical roles for products (and projects and processes) that the company no longer can fund. (Note that this isn't foolproof, because foolish management can still goof and let you go.) (Note that in large companies, this is much harder because you can become critical in a niche that the company decides to divest from. To handle this, move into a subsidiary that would be sold as a unit.)

Secondly: Understand the business cycle. All products (and projects and processes) have a lifetime, and at a certain point they are "done." (As in, not worth investing in paying the best crank turner or the most critical person to keep working on it.) When you smell this happening, let it be known that you're open to severance when the budget gets cut. It's always easiest to let go of the person who's willing to take severance because they're ready for a change in scenery.

Next: Make sure you can get a feel for how the product (project, process, ect,) is actually used. You might have turned the crank really well, but if no one is using the result, it's time to be proactive and move on.

Finally: Learn to judge your management, and build relationships with your boss's boss. This will give you a lot more insight into the company so you can learn when to move on or how to position yourself in the most critical part of the company.

All good advice, I do disagree with one statement, however, mainly because I've seen this getting violated many times now:

> "Make sure that your role (as an engineer) in your company is in the most critical part of the company as you can handle."

The main problem here is how much the organization wants to think it can continue without those crucial parts, I've seen wild things go down in this regard, and I think we'll see a lot more in the near future with people hoping that AI will take care of it. And, on the flipside, and much to my surprise, how often the org can actually survive through such disaster cuts regardless, even though they'll end up at a worse place than they were at before, but the simple act of surviving it -- at that point -- is enough of a success to continue onwards.

The trick is to align with how corporate leadership defines "crucial" and not the way a "crank turner" defines it.

A crank turner thinks having a solid platform to stand on, a long crank arm and good lubrication is crucial. Because those things ARE crucial to crank turning.

Corporate management is looking at the machine the crank is attached to and thinking if that machine is going to produce the company's next quarter of growth.

The machine you crank could even be very profitable right now, but it's not where the company is going. Here's an easy to follow example from a smallish business:

https://youtu.be/9EMR2BVbG8Q

Yes, you're both right.

mittermayr: My other points explain why just being in the most critical role isn't a guarantee. I also pointed out that "foolish management can still goof and let you go."

That being said:

> and much to my surprise, how often the org can actually survive through such disaster cuts regardless, even though they'll end up at a worse place than they were at before, but the simple act of surviving it -- at that point -- is enough of a success to continue onwards.

mittermayr: Either this is foolish management, or you're misinterpreting the situation. If the company believes that, in the end, it's successful, then how can you argue that the company isn't? Can you provide an example? Otherwise, you might be misinterpreting the situation, and it's what pbronez says is "The machine you crank could even be very profitable right now, but it's not where the company is going."

Interesting video, but it doesn't really apply to this discussion. The author stated that he kept everyone employed through the transition. He saw an area to grow his business into, and transitioned the Etsy staff to it. (As opposed to laying them off.)

One thing I don't understand is why he didn't sell the Etsy part of his business.

Yeah no layoffs in that example. The connection is that it's very easy for the carpenters to see the Etsy business as "crucial," but the CEO decided to kill that entire line of business. From an individual career perspective, you could have mis-identified this and focused on being the guy who manages the Etsy storefront.

Selling the Etsy side of things is an interesting idea. I wonder how you could do that without also selling off the tools and things you need for the SKUs you want to keep. I don't think they had distinct brands, for example.

>how often the org can actually survive through such disaster cuts regardless, even though they'll end up at a worse place than they were at before, but the simple act of surviving it -- at that point -- is enough of a success to continue onwards.

A trillion dollar company can lose 99% of its value and still end up a multi billion dollar business. And I don't think many cuts come close to that kind of bloodbath.

They can survive the cuts because leadership isn't fundamentally affected by 99.99% of day to day operations. And their compensation at that level isn't on simply "make good product and accrue revenue". That's a big part why we've been in this irrational market for quite a few years now.

Have you read the Gervais Principle?

=> https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

thank you for that, I actually enjoyed reading this. that's also sort of what I was hoping to find in response to my thoughts here; other people who've sorted through the mess to try and find some (even if comical) sense in it all.

Wait, I've posted the link 6 minutes ago and this reply is now 2 minutes old. You cannot possibly have read that.

Unless this is an autonomous agent doing some engagement work thingy. Which the tone + story sounds like.

Dang DAAAAAANG

Heeeeelp, the robots are at it again

No I'm real, but I've actually refreshed here, saw the link, saw Dilbert mentioned, felt sad about how much joy that used to give me many years ago and how awkwardly that all ended, and off I was reading through it. Only note I have on the article is it'll be a bit too soon to mention to her that she's represented by the loser category in this theory :)

(p.s., my poor English should actually quickly give away that I'm even too lazy to auto-correct, that's the last thing AI will take from me, ha!)

They could have read it previously.

They could be in a different Timezone.

;)

nice share <3

If an army general orders a disastrous assault that completely fails, they might get demoted or relieved of command. The infantry that were ordered to charge the machine guns pay a much higher price (as do the junior officers that lead the charge). Hell, perhaps nowerdays they'll have a 'blameless postmortem' to 'learn lessons' and there won't even be a demotion.

Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.

Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.

Is it just? No - it's just the nature of work.

The comparison to a war zone is, despite most of us sitting in front of screens and not having to live through such actual horror, quite on point, I think. A failed or misguided strategy hits those on the front first and hardest.

This is a more general question, which is "Why don't people take accountability for their actions?"

Because it's hard work and it's easier to let someone else bear the costs.

The question is actually how do people get away with avoiding accountability for their actions?

That's a more noble aspect of framing the question, and I guess I could even see why someone may try to not kamikaze themselves out of a financially very juicy system even if it was their own actions causing the trouble. However, they all operate in some form of management mesh, so clearly, one level up or across the line must notice or know who caused the chaos?

Maybe it is the nature of how failure is expressed at that level, to know a team of 30 has been let go and is not available as your extended arm to execute anymore. So, where it manifests as a job loss at a level lower, it is merely a limitation of power for them.

If everyone at a given level is playing the game, only those without leverage on everyone else are easy targets

Maybe blaming someone else for a failure is more likely to backfire on you.

> Why don't people take accountability for their actions?

This is not my experience. People who are in positions of power, e.g. managers, are the kind of people who are incapable of admitting fault. They can't lose face so the shit is rolled downhill. It's narcissism.

Clearly that trait is selected for.

Often times, narcissism comes with a strong will and assertiveness. It is hard to be full of yourself if you cannot also project yourself. People respect that kind of assertiveness. "Clearly, if this guy is so sure of themself, they must be good..." is the mindset many fall into. Of course, this line of thinking usually does not hold up forever and the facade can eventually break down.

Those people who are responsible for the chaos? They're also the people who gets to decide who is punished for the chaos.

Just to add another item to the list others have brought up :

Goal displacement -> Goal displacement occurs when an organization or individual shifts focus from original objectives to secondary goals, often prioritizing procedures, metrics, or internal processes over intended outcomes.

In large corps, people who are good at staying in a company, and people who are good at serving the company's objectives are typically two different skillsets. And one of those skillset helps you stay inside the company more than the other.

Corporate world is tribal, if not feudal. Reason why the Nobles can do nothing wrong by default, and the Villagers are always the villan. If I may have a suggestion, Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a short and great perspective over these dynamics.

> Corporate world is tribal, if not feudal.

And, more importantly, the corporate world is a dependent variable.

thank you for that, I'll try to find this and check it out.

1. Being too good in an organization makes you a threat to those above you.

2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job.

3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.

Can't we keep politics out of software?

Only if you keep people out of software. The broader meaning of politics used above is something like ‘the way groups of people make decisions’.

As soon as 3 or more people are involved, you have politics.

software is actually one of the sectors most vulnerable to politics as it's a lot more difficult to measure how much value employees add compared to other sectors. Marketing, sales, manufacturing ... are relatively simple to track.

When you can, software tends to be better. True of all engineering.

Hence, our current enshittification trend

My humble view: at high level in large firms, everything is politics. Even assuming high-level managers with the common good in mind, someone will sponsor with millions of dollars 10 useless but good-looking and inoffensive projects, just so they have the political capital to start one that is useful but may ruffle feathers. Your direct subordinate's failure is _your_ failure, and that will set back your ambitions. Peers turning against peers is frowned upon, for the same reason. And besides, you know them, maybe you even like them, the lower-level people are just anonymous faces, it's emotionally much easier.

And assuming they have the common good in mind is of course ridiculous.

The purpose of a system is what the system does. -- Stafford Beer

The most cogent reply I have seen here.

She and/or you have a false conception of what a big five corporation is, or how it works. Yous probably also have a false conception of how relations of production under capitalism work as well. The man higher up the hierarchy at the FAANG has a better grasp of how these things work. Often, people don't realize their conceptions were wrong until they get let go.

That she worked tirelessly, was well liked does not matter. That in this short life we have, that she skipped vacations to devote more time to the company does not matter.

You said the person above her is not smart but he clearly is - he is higher up and survived and she is lower down and was cut.

Insofar as it being healthy for these companies for him to be there - him being there is in the nature of the corporation and perhaps its intrinsic infirmities, just as it is intrinsic to relations of production under capitalism.

One would hope that something as dramatic as not only him being over her, but him staying and her going would disabuse you of these notions. Especially the idea that she had sone kind of relationship within the corporation where working tirelessly and skipping vacations would engender any loyalty on the part of the corporation's higher managers and owners.

While this may make sense for the individual and their actions, I do not see how this is healthy or good for the organization. And, to my original question, I struggle to understand why organizations elevate those, or let those elevate, where the end goal is not to have a darwinistic corpus of staff, only interested in their own survival.

This quote is obviously not true though. There are tons of systems that continue to exist even though no one is happy with them.

I strongly disagree. If no one is happy with it, why is nobody changing the system?

Very often people say they aren't happy with a system, but secretly profit off of it, so they try to keep the system from changing. Maybe you have examples that don't follow this schema, but I've maybe seen a handful of such cases, whereas I've seen dozens where people were simply hiding their active support.

The post that responded to you does a good job of explaining why systems exist that are difficult to change even though nobody is happy with them. It even provides 10 examples, although some of them are admittedly bad.

What are your, say, top 3 examples in that post? I'd appreciate if you could specify strings I can CTRL+F for.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I hope you'll forgive me that I'm not interested in reading a 14k word article posted without even a single character regarding why it's relevant or how it relates.

Moloch is why people don't revolt. Why did you care enough to word count it?

I felt like it's nicer to let you know why I'm not going to engage with the resource you shared, and I'd think that the vast majority of readers here would agree that it's unreasonable to share a 14k word essay with no further description.

But if you'd rather have me be direct: it's rude to wordlessly post a long link.

It's a good read.

Brain dead thinking: a system does multiple things so you just pick one story which trolls.

Better reply: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

Sorry to hear about the job loss.

>> They're clearly not smart people

Nope, they're cunning and if it offers you any solace they usually lead miserable lives which is also a natural outcome.

this is what I often hope, that this must reflect in one form or another in their actual lives, and hopefully, has some form of consequence there.

I once jokingly answered in an interview question about time complexity something that is seemingly incorrect but is actually correct.

Everyone knows object lookups (hash maps) are generally O(1) complexity and thus more performant than arrays for looking up values.

And that becomes a rule of thumb - codified as law.

But it’s not always true. For example if you know the index, the array lookup is significantly faster in virtually all languages.

But I answered in a way that sounded like it was exactly wrong. And it was treated as such.

To me, it sums up the problem with corporate intelligentsia. And it gave me yet another reason to be fake and lie all the time.

While I think the nuance should separate the strong from the weak, instead you just get snapped to a grid of mainstream talking points anyway, so you have to stick to that grid up front if you know what’s best! Choose the right paths and they are rigid

My feeling is that modern US corporate structure/attitude is a direct extension of the Norman conquest of England and it's power structure. Those at the top are not 'of' those below them. All below them, along with all markets, are purely their for their exploitation and benefit. Corporate officers are given a charter by the owners, just as the Sheriff of Naught Ingham was granted a charter, to give them power to do maximum extraction at the owners benefit, not because that sort of organizational structure is optimal. The executive offices and the people in them are very much seen/treated/behave in the same was as the castle on the hill and the Norman lords. Isolated from impacts. Systems/walls/castles to protect THEM from their actions but to punish those below who don't fall in line.

> how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

Because they don't believe the disasters were inflicted by them.

The other aspect is managing the manager. This comes in form of delivering something what their manager needs. So, their manager has a goal of reducing costs they will act as a yes-man despite their abilities. They might come up with ridiculous ideas and convince their managers that it is a good idea because they are the ones executing on the ground. If and when it fails the issue isn't because the idea was bad it was because circumstances.

Also, it is a fallacy that many engineers think being smart is enough. We tend to debate efforts - how much work we put in - but for management, company and even shareholders the outcome matters. People who figure out sooner thrive a lot.

> Because they don't believe the disasters were inflicted by them.

It's not quite clear how "they" and "them" are related but I see only two options:

1. Bad managers believe what's convenient for them in order avoid dying from shame - but this is a truism and it has nothing to do with the original question.

2. The managers of bad managers believe that the managers below them can do no wrong - but this is like calling the entire management hierarchy a bunch of incompetents, because believing has little to do with rational analysis and evaluation of important decisions, it doesn't work as an answer to the original question: "Why is there no accountability from certain level up?".

> The other aspect is managing the manager.

That aspect, and its entire paragraph, are a rather confusing reformulation of the original question.

> If and when it fails the issue isn't because the idea was bad it was because circumstances.

The end result of the confusion is a blanket excuse to any and all management failures: "it's the circumstances". The same can applied to everyone and everywhere which could only lead to a world more ridiculous than "Idiocracy".

> but for management, company and even shareholders the outcome matters.

I'm not sure what this is saying, the substance of the original question is why the outcome doesn't matter for the above group? And you already explained that it doesn't matter because "it's the circumstances"... I can't square that circle.

This trend in corporate America is called failing upwards

"You fuck up, you move up" is how it's been explained to me.

The way i understand it hr usually requires a paper trail before you can fire someone but that paper trail requires the subject to break company policy to earn the reprimand that would make up that paper trail. If someone is just bad at their job and makes poor managerial decisions that isnt exactly a valid reason to fire them so its actually easier to promote them so at least they arent in your department, you can send them somewhere else in the company and make them someone elses problem if you cant find a reason to get rid of them.

Which is a truly unsane policy. How does moving someone out of a smaller group up in the org chart so they now have an even larger surface area to affect sound rational? Move them into the special projects group so they are isolated. Let them study the effect of changing the margin/padding by .5ems to see what happens, and then never implement the changes recommended. Allow them to test which shade of blue makes the users most happy, and then never implement the changes. If you're not going to eliminate dead weight, don't let them drag everyone else down with them.

So much of it is association. The human brain (for better or worse) is really good at building comfort in routine. If you see the same person over and over, you naturally will think they are just "part of the environment." They belong there. You get to know "how they tick" and even if that person has faults, you sometimes overlook them because you have built up a rapport. Yeah, Billy in accounting can sometimes be late, but he is friendly and always knows the scores from the big game.

We would rather a known variable, even if it is not the best instead of an unknown that might be better.

It's about budgeting and... well... resources (that are humans).

There's a mistake, firing the responsible for the mistake means blaming. It's fine to do a post-mortem, understand the cause, and the one responsible did it's homeworks.

But then, as a separate issue, there's the budget. To save the budget, companies shrink resources (AKA human beings).

No more, no less, no soul.

Great question. I think these people are good at spinning narratives _and_ the people above are not doing the work they should be doing to check whether the narrative checks out: I think good leaders (and every manager below) should be doing inverse skip and skip-skip meetings often enough to have a good sense of whether what their reports are saying is accurate. But most dont

Never work tirelessly for anything that isn’t yours.

It is an interesting subject - but so much have been written about it in the past. I would like to read what are the new angles.

And for the past discussions see:

HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION LINKS

THE GERVAIS PRINCIPLE

* The Gervais Principle Main Submission (October 2009) https://ycombinator.com

* The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office" (August 2024) https://ycombinator.com

MORAL MAZES

* Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work (February 2020) https://ycombinator.com

* Moral Mazes and Emotional Labor Comment (October 2019) https://ycombinator.com

MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH

* Meditations on Moloch Systems Discussion (April 2019) https://ycombinator.com

* Meditations on Moloch Main Discussion (March 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Context from Scott Alexander's Blog (June 2025) https://ycombinator.com

THREADS INTERSECTING MULTIPLE CONCEPTS

* Best books for dealing with workplace politics and dishonesty? (December 2020) https://ycombinator.com

* Analysis comparing Gervais Principle to Moral Mazes (April 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Ask HN: Stories of political intrigue in large companies (December 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Things I want to say to my boss (December 2025) https://ycombinator.com

Wow, thank you for that, must've been quite a bit of work to put that together and I feel sorry for not digging through the archives. I hope this brought up a few new thoughts, perhaps, I know it's mostly ramblings and us-against-the-ones-on-top banter, but here and there, I see and was hoping for some insights. I'll go through the list in a bit, thank you!

Honestly I asked in google (I remembered the main sources) - then I iterated with Gemini to format it well. But my first post in this thread was flagged - I don't know what was the reason but it is possible that it was for using AI, as it also contained some more narrative text from Gemini.

read the title and instantly ctrl+f'd Moral Mazes

can you fix the links? they all point to YC

I cannot now. I can only delete the post - sorry - but I guess you can use the search.

The people who do good work are typically orthogonal to the people who spend all their time bragging about what they did and taking credit for other people's work, and blaming other people for their mistakes - and the squeakiest wheels get the grease.

If you compare with work that’s contracted out, it’s quite similar. When a company does poorly, it will cut its budgets and spend less, so its suppliers lose business. Whether or not anyone at the company takes the blame for it is a separate issue.

Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.

Point me to a democracy where the failing leadership actually bears the consequences of the blame they face though.

They get voted out.

Everybody eventually does get voted out in a democracy, including those who have done well. It's not a consequence but a natural process of the system.

Yeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?

Normalization of deviance, soft power, and the fact that managing up and managing down are not the same skillset.

Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.

So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".

An ugly truth is that corporations are built on a feudal structure (kings, lords, barons, earls, etc.) that is inherently autocratic and disguises autocratic action as efficient leadership. I like to think that cooperative business structures are less vulnerable to autocratic corruption, but they need to be on guard, watching out for people willing to exploit others to gain more power and try to keep them from finding their way onto paths to power.

Hierarchy is the default because it is so simple. Designing alternative structures for responsibility raises lots of unexpected complexity. A good example of this is the Benefit Corporation idea which is gaining support and polish over time, but still involves considerable legal challenges. Being answerable to stakeholders and employee owned is very unlike answering to stockholders who own everything.

The companies that win in the market are the companies that are modeled to win, not the ones modeled for justice and accountability.

To be less reductive, companies are owned by capitalists and they prefer autocracy for obvious reasons.

1) Most businesses in capitalism are owned by investors, not by workers. They are not democracies, not even in communism where they are supposedly owned by everyone.

2) Cooperatives are what you are looking for. Why aren't there more of them? No founder ever wants to share the initial investment. Is it a universal human weakness? I don't know. Why aren't the very few that exist growing to be more successful than a small local niche thing? Probably because democracies work best for small groups and progresively degrade as the number of people increase.

3) It works as indended. The people that are (temporarily) interested in the success of the organization, and with the power to change it if it looks like it's failing, are not interested in long-term success. As long as company's stock can be sold, only short term profits matter.

Owners of family businesses are more likely to listen to low level employees, but they're still autoritarian.

They do. How many times do people on HN say "my manager won't let me write tests"? That's not true, 99% of the time they could just write tests and their manager wouldn't block it, but they ask for specific time blocked out to write tests and that's what gets denied. They're trying to push the responsibility for testing off to the manager.

I think it’s the same pattern playing out as in politics - even the dumbest people get too powerful, too lucky or too influential to even realize the problem. But its often beneficial to large enough amount of bad actors who play along and support.

Suppose some top executive has a choice - do something right for long term success of a company vs something sketchy and detrimental but get huge yearly bonus in the pocket.

Are you rock solid you yourself would always go with the right thing?

I wanted to keep politics out of it, but I fully agree, politics is the primetime version of what I tried to get at.

I don't believe that your description of your partner or your partner's boss have any relation whatsoever to objective reality. You even admit this yourself - "I've only heard of a few things as it is (literally) none of my business, but..." The only thing I can take from this is that someone you like got fired and someone you didn't like did the firing.

So to answer your question "Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?" They don't. People just don't post about it when a bad boss gets pushed out or some incompetent on their team gets offed in a round of layoffs that they survive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

Because it is a human business, and human business is always messy and unfair.

You are not supposed to get any amount of fairness unless you have the power.

> how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

Well, being at the top of the org chart in the first place is naturally insulating. But since HN is a forum attached to a startup fund, I wanted to put two cents in for how this happens even when there’s no incompetence.

Before I do that, I’ll be clear that I’ve personally seen incompetent execs make massive mistakes and survive. Working for a game studio acquired by Disney for a decade, we had a new one every 2 or 3 years and they’d shut down studios on a whim just to make their Excel sheets look good. One closed our small research division one day because he didn’t see revenue. He got reamed by the board for it and whined the reaming had been the worst day of his career. Boo hoo. But didn’t get fired. Disney tried to shut down the studio on the heels of a billion dollars in profit from this studio because they couldn’t figure out how to make a sequel or think of a new game, and because there were was some big tax incentive to getting the hundred or so people off the payroll. It seemed short sighted in the extreme.

Anyway, the complete answer to your question also needs to acknowledge that planning business is difficult, and whole companies and departments both fail all the time. As a worker, we don’t always see how the sausage is made and where the income is coming from, but management can be pretty messy, it’s not clockwork and people can’t predict the future. There are a lot of reasons that departments or companies can be closed for no fault by anyone, worker or manager. And, while there are plenty of incompetent decisions made, it’s also true that sometimes best effort managing still results in people losing jobs. In those cases, it’s possible and occasionally the right thing to do to keep a manager who tried hard to save things, even if they couldn’t. And there’s a gray area, and a lot of narrative, in between competence and incompetence too. I have no doubt in your case there was incompetence, but whether the disaster was self-inflicted or was even a disaster is viewed differently from the top. They might be talking about it as having averted a larger disaster.

You're under the assumption that corporations (especially big ones) are some form of meritocracy. Don't believe the bullshit, it's all about politics, timing, and luck (in that order).

Publicly-traded companies always put short-term profits over anything else; if they don't demonstrably do that, the leadership exposes themselves and the company to shareholder lawsuits. I've been at a BigCorp where layoffs happen at the end of each quarter to look good on the balance sheet, only to hire most of those people back. Rinse and repeat.

Again, this has nothing to do with "doing a good job" or being a model employee. The days of working hard and getting rewarded are dead and buried, and the MBAs are the ones with the guns and shovels.

My question is if this power dynamic is different in organizations with strong unions?

I am not in one, but from what I heard the answer is sort of. You usually end up with two corrupt power hierarchies fighting each other - the corporation and the union. That's better than just being subject to the whims of one that's aligned against you, but it's not ideal.

A good place to see the difference is an Airline. Strong unions, like the pilot's union...makes for very different outcomes for them versus the salaried/non-union HDQ type workers.

But yes you're right it really depends on power dynamics.

The higher up you go in the corporate pyramid, the more your ability to navigate politically becomes a distinct and valuable skillset beyond talent or hard work - or, more dangerously, competence.

"Power: Why Some People Have It — and Others Don’t" by Jeffrey Pfeffer is a good read on the topic.

Being ruthless can help if you are that sort of person, but it is more just a function of how large groups of humans work. You can learn to navigate politics better if you wish to keep ascending, but it is not something that comes naturally to a lot of people, especially technical types.

It can come as a shock when you realize that the world is not run by people who are smarter or more competent than you are - but that doesn't necessarily make them bad at leadership. Doubly hard realization when coupled with finding out that the corporate scythe can and will come for you at any time without regard to your past performance or dedication.

Sorry your partner got laid off. Having been in a similar place a number of times - it isn't punishment, neither is it personal or a reflection on your (her) self-worth or abilities, it is just the cold reality of business. Keep your resume fresh, don't drink too much of the corporate Kool Aid, and always take those vacation days.

One of the side effects of the "up or out" business strategy is that by definition, almost nobody has to live with the long-term results of their work. If they did something that had a short-term benefit, they can walk away with a win, even if it becomes a dumpster fire a little bit later. (And even then, yay, another project to put out the fire - more revenue!) So the big consulting shops build a practice where short-term is the only term.

That is also why many people who land in the "out" route end up having the same level of disasters elsewhere in industry - they pile up years of experience running projects that hit short-term goals, make money, look good on paper, and even launch well... but have zero accountability as to whether they are still stable and maintainable a year later.

That doesn't mean everyone from such shops is a disaster. There are some good folk in those shops. But that is exactly why career success in consulting does not correlate with whether or not you leave disasters in your wake.

The easiest (but not necessarily best or most effective) way to survive corporate life is to give your boss quiet, make your peers happy, and your direct reports miserable. Therefore, naively, people look very different depending on whether they are your direct reports, your peer, or your boss. Your partner is below him looking up; he looks very different from the standpoint of the executive looking down at him.

Case in point: budget cuts and layoffs are not fundamentally speaking failures from a business perspective. Sometimes, an executive just wants the money spent elsewhere, on some shiny new project. Often enough, failures to produce expected revenue do not have unambiguous scapegoats. Frequently, executives just suck at oversight - determining for themselves how things are going instead of letting their direct reports control the narrative and tell them how things are going.

There are further reasons: the consequences are harder for mid-level fires than for low-level fires. For one, there are much fewer open positions the more senior of a title you expect, and termination may simply result in early retirement. The personal consequences are worse compared to firing people with less seniority, who are perceived as having many more jobs open to them to find (for the sake of argument, leave aside for the moment the continued enshittification of hiring processes and actually getting hired anywhere, for any job). This is important both internally - executives don't want junior employees to perceive promotions as notice they'll soon be terminated - and externally, as disgruntled ex-employees have more influence on bad-mouthing their ex-employer if they are more likely to belong to the same upper socioeconomic groups. Firing 30 lower-level employees, by contrast, doesn't have the same effect on internal morale, or on external reputation among executive peers (just look at how many layoffs happened in the last few years).

The advice for most people is the same, because employment stability is an illusion:

  * Love your calling, not your employer.
  * Live below your means. The key challenge in life is how to desire less.
  * Stay in touch with recruiters and take an interview loop at least once a quarter.
  * Have a backup plan. It doesn't need to be fleshed out, just real enough in your mind.

Great advice, I'll send this to her, thank you!

Because the executive class _is_ a class, with class solidarity. Even failure comes with a golden parachute.

You clearly care way too much about what is just a job. 15 years at a big 5 you should be quite wealthy. A layoff is just a vacation. I say this not to be glib but because your anger here belies a way of thinking that is unhealthy and unproductive. Work at a big company is just a random coinflip each layoff cycle regardless of anything you can control. Everyone should internalize and prepare for this to the point that being layed off is met with just a shrug.

We live reasonably frugaly, so this will be fine and pass by, you are absolutely right. Age does come into play here, so it's not "as easy" as it once was, things change dramatically the older you get. If she was 22, I couldn't be any less worried and I truly think those things are part of building a career, it provides for important life lessons and how to deal with work. It's just that in this particular case, one of many over the past few years in my circle of friends, the never-ending theme of incompetence surviving when disaster strikes kept nagging at me and I started wondering why corporations do not naturally filter for that.

I am surprised that you even ask this question. Do you expect it to be different?

It is the oldest story in any kind of human community, from tribes to empires, from marriages to enterprises: they're ruled through is politics not justice.

Meritocracy and justice is just the order that we want the world to be, the ideal state. Its entropy and normal state is politics and this as nothing to do with justice.

I don't think everyone wants a meritocracy, I sure as hell don't want it. Having some sort of disability in a meritocracy would be even worse than now for example.

When people try to get to meritocracy it can also impose serious costs on society, both social and monetary cost. The imperial examination in China (which some would argue was the closest to a meritocracy) brought little advancement to China despite the fact that China was probably the wealthiest region until the 12-13th century. It did make the brightest/richest people study for years, sometimes decades of their life to produce little value after succeeding (except for themselves). You might argue that this isn't a meritocracy but I think we'll get similar behaviour no matter how you define 'merit'.

First and foremost, massive sympathies on your partner's plight. It sucks, it's stressful, and has real world impacts.

To your general question, I feel it's a variation of the "why do bad things happen to good people", and philosophically we (humans) do not have a satisfying answer that I've ever arrived at, especially if you're not religious :(

To your more specific question, it seems that like myself and probably many of us here on HN, you approach large corporations as a meritocracy and you assume that key skills / merits are the ones that produce, create, support, deliver to customers, etc. It is my observation that these are loosely correlated with corporate success. There is a specific set of skills that are more associated with corporate success, including crafting your perception/eminence/image with key people, networking, being aware or appearing to be aware of the big picture, strategy, finances, and true goals/product of your company, as well as clever career management. Even many people who are aware of the required skillset, and are in principle capable of acquiring said skillset, struggle to put it into practice - it could be due to ethical frameworks, personal preferences, or just a hope/belief that "it shouldn't be this way" (For better or worse, I largely count myself in that group).

One of the things I've observed in myself and others: We assume it's our job to do a good job, and our bosses' job to notice and reward a good job. In North American corporate, that rarely works, particularly in remote, fast changing scenarios. Your boss is a human being and will notice some people & activities, and not notice some people & activities. If you care about your career, "Managing Up", taking control of your career and image in the way that your corporation requires (not "the way that I think should work in ideal world":) is, for better or for worse, key success criteria.

Note: I would NOT fall into the easy trap of saying "These are not smart people"; that leads to underestimation / expecting results from them which differ from reality. They may or may not score highly on a standardized IQ test, they may or may not have the same kind of intelligence and knowledge as you value, but clearly they are "smart" in some specific ways, and clearly very practical/useful ones.

All the best to you and your partner!

Very insightful comment, thank you. I do agree and tend to critize the discounting of other people's intelligence when I read similar things (there's usually a lot more to it), but that one dude in this case really is a disaster, exceptionally so. Your argument stands however, and while I think you've written down from many years of experience looking back, it does make me sad a bit that this "assumption" is not what companies strive for, because I do believe it would ultimately be rewarded in success: "We assume it's our job to do a good job, and our bosses' job to notice and reward a good job".

here is the system.

break everything up, "official" lines of comunication, phone, email, that are essentialy black holes, then a maze of second, third,fourth level worklings who always refer you to someone else, who may respond with company and title in a voice call from a private number, reluctantly giving a first name. In person meetings with the brass that are glad handing and zero information, second level meetings where YOU sign contracts giving them vague authority and power. Further in person meeting with underlings who are very agressive and commit to nothing. Fucking shark tanks, right, and you are everybodys, chum. But if need be they will quickly turn on there own and put someone on the hook. There is more, a whole lot more, but non of this is new, or any particular mystery, just exceptionaly out of controll right now.

I mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.

Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.

Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.

Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.

There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.

Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.

Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.

Talk to an expert on relationships.

This is how I view work and any relationship to corporate for a long time now, and it took lots of pain to finally recognize it. I'd go even further than that: your primary role is to be selfish and pull in as much bacon as you can as fast as you can, then get out.

I recognize myself a long time ago in your partner, so much mental energy wasted to the game where I could instead just clock in, do some stuff, clock out and spend the rest of my energy where it matters: at home, with friends, cooking, working on personal projects. Let the insane corporate climbers light themselves on fire to keep management warm, I'll derive my worth elsewhere.

I agree with most of what you write but “Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.” Is true but only when rationality is assumed and that the interests of those doing the firing actually align with the overall corporation.

Corporations are made of people and the structures can be very dysfunctional. I’ve seen it and I’m sure it’s common elsewhere, many decisions are made with no actual rational understanding of “economic sense”. An example is firing someone to save costs but needing to then hire 2 new people to replace them, increasing communication costs and having to pay a training cost.

This is great take, I agree.

They are accidentally smart. They have stumbled across the behavioral patterns that get rewarded without consciously thinking much about how to find the behavioral patterns that get rewarded. Which is mostly getting the people above you in the power pyramid to like you, and no relationship to technical skill.

The overall problem can be summarised as we don't live in a meritocracy.

I'd probably amend this that we do live in a meritocracy, but the 'merit' part applies to your ability to navigate the system - not your ability to produce good outcomes.

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