I swear there was a story like this 7-8 years ago on HN where a young fella had tried to barge his way into big pharma via data science. As I recall, he had his

I swear there was a story like this 7-8 years ago on HN where a young fella had tried to barge his way into big pharma via data science. As I recall, he had his lunch eaten and his spirit beaten, just like this one. I remember thinking about how sad it is that companies could succeed, or fail, off the basis of good, or bad, marketing. There's a weird effect where data-driven decision making becomes essentially unstoppable given a big enough sized company, and it essentially condemns companies small enough when they believe that their decision making and technical prowess alone can earn them respectful competition against the "big boys." And then they find out everything is corrupt, everything is about money, they don't have nearly enough money for the real players to even stop laughing at them for a moment, and they quit and cut their losses.