Sure - I'll give you my real world example. Apologies in advance for the long story. I was "poached" into another company in a relatively large company in fina

Sure - I'll give you my real world example. Apologies in advance for the long story. I was "poached" into another company in a relatively large company in finance as a linux admin along with a PM coworker who I viewed as a good person and incredibly technically savvy. She was brought on by the AMRS CTO of the previous company. In a lot of ways, when we joined, we were viewed as a single unit with a single agenda by many of the other folk at the company. I tried steering of it as hard as I could, but it got pretty hectic for the entire company when the two "agendas" didn't work that well together. It might've just been the culture, but a few other things at the company gave me an off feeling that threw an enormous Machiavellian vibe all throughout, but that's a different story. The guy who brought me in, though. He pulled me to the side after they decided that the dynamics were too much and switched me to a different team where my old PM coworker would act as my boss. The idea was nice and I had more freedom (they never took away my root access), but he completely confirmed that people can, and do, take advantage of "teams" to push an idea. He told me three things all paraphrased, but not inaccurate things: "You're my fall boy. If something happens, I want you to fall in my place." "I want you to outperform all of the other teams in the company." No pressure, right. "You're here to push my agenda." I believe that his end goal with his 'agenda' was to become CTO, which.. thankfully.. didn't happen. Instead, [edit: very large company]'s head of tech stepped into that position. --- The reason this gets to me and how I can see that attitude being incredibly expansive if adapted, is because this is a well known name in finance right now with increasingly large names from other companies coming in. Nobody's really batted an eye at it. This also isn't the first time I've seen this kind of attitude before. It's incredibly systemic finance and I see the same attitudes in SV. It doesn't seem like a leap of faith to say that the same bleedingly charismatic and moralistically dead attitudes exist there, too. There's a certain attitude and behavior from those who feel that they're at the top that distorts the way they act. Watching House of Cards felt all too familiar. It was all very creepy, and I don't see that behavior going away any time soon. My 2c.