It also reminds me of stories I had heard from inside Microsoft in the pre-Nadella era. Tales of power brokers and entrenched lifers who could make things easy

It also reminds me of stories I had heard from inside Microsoft in the pre-Nadella era. Tales of power brokers and entrenched lifers who could make things easy or impossible on a whim. What is the nature of the organisations that allow people like these to take root? At some point when a company gets large enough the actual product it produces stops being something sold outside the company and instead the product becomes one’s increased status within the organization and that of their immediate manager. Status seekers who contribute less technically but spend all their time producing “good optics” for the people above and selling/exaggerating their achievements get promoted a lot more, even if the good optics were achieved by doing something that makes the product less sellable. Eventually status seekers get promoted into management and then promote upward like people who are also status seekers. The people who spend all their time doing the heaviest engineering aren’t often spending much time selling their achievements to busy executives who don’t have time to look at their accomplishments at let their work speak for itself. Which is why they tend to stay in the lower levels of the company.