> For a long time I couldn't pin down why this stuff bugged me, but I think I finally have it: it considers people to be static and one-dimensional. Great poin

> For a long time I couldn't pin down why this stuff bugged me, but I think I finally have it: it considers people to be static and one-dimensional. Great point. These articles also assume that companies are static, one-dimensional, and only get worse over time. These articles are designed to resonate with people who left some previous job in the past that didn’t go well, which is a common enough experience that most engineers will experience it at least once over a career. The problem is that they take this generic experience (which the reader likely recognizes as valid because they’ve seen it before) and try to present it as if it’s a law that all companies are doomed to follow. In reality, companies ebb and flow over time as management changes over and many good companies get better, not worse. Unfortunately articles like this create a fatalism or doomerism that creates some very cynical engineers. Ironically, those cynical engineers often become the “B players” that lead to a decline of a company, all while they imagine themselves as the “A players” because they think they’re the only ones who see it like it is.