7 ms·

I don't think it's surprising at all, especially in a big company like Facebook. At that kind of company, at that level, it's a snakepit. The more you did for t

I don't think it's surprising at all, especially in a big company like Facebook. At that kind of company, at that level, it's a snakepit. The more you did for the company, the deeper the knife in your back will go.

wolverine876 4y ago
People seem drawn to the fantasy of sociopathic behavior, like Game of Thrones and 'reality' TV shows with zero-sum outcomes. People aren't angels, but they aren't sociopaths either. Also, Zuckerberg needs the loyalty of talented people, present and future; if it looks like even Sandberg gets stabbed in the back, then that loyalty will be hard to come by. Also, burning the bridge with Sandberg will burn the bridge with Sandberg's network, which is probably considerable. Nobody rules alone.
- lazide 4y ago
  ‘People’ may not be sociopaths. But some people are sociopaths. And some people have enough power that they don’t often consider long term consequences, or need to, for things like this.
  - vba616 4y ago
    Moreover, if someone is talented and driven and charismatic and a sociopath, then they are probably at an advantage compared to someone who is missing one or more of those characteristics. By default, one should assume the most successful people have every superlative quality, from those that are most admirable to least.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Keep in mind that it isn’t usually really sociopathicness. Sociopath denotes a particular type of negative pathology that rarely can exist in a real leadership position for any length of time. By definition it’s too destructive. That being said, low empathy/low affect for others emotional and mental state is a clear advantage past a certain (low) organizational level, if combined with decision making that does weight it at least a little. A lot of people call that sociopathic, but that is because they haven’t met an actual sociopath. Caring about people has advantages in our day to day lives (especially for others), but being able to make clear headed pragmatic decisions about people for your benefit (with sometimes severe negative consequences for others) isn’t one of them. And if someone is in a leadership position and can’t do that, they won’t be effective. The larger the scope of the leadership position, the more true it is. Ineffective leadership dooms everyone, sooner or later.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        > That being said, low empathy/low affect for others emotional and mental state is a clear advantage past a certain (low) organizational level People just love this fantasy! Think about it: Do you have any basis for it? Some research? See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31707682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31707682
        lazide 4y ago
        Oh I read it. You're responding to a strawman. I never said being a sociopath is helpful - I said it isn't, and you pretty much never see it. What I said is helpful, isn't sociopathy. What is helpful is not having a bleeding heart. Being able to make the right call, even if it hurts someone, or many someones. The higher up you go, the more necessary it is. I started out in industry at a low level, and worked myself up to senior leadership at a Fortune 50 company. I've founded several companies. I've had to fire friends who were really, really trying hard. I've had to hire folks I didn't like. I've had to lay off teams, and shut down one of my own companies (and lay off everyone I'd hired, which I did face to face) not because what they were doing was bad, but because it didn't fit the market anymore. I do care about people, and it has cost me quite a bit of emotional trauma that I see others not have. It has given me a positive reputation and general like well after the fact, but that doesn't scale or work in other situations. 1) The larger the organization, the more likely you'll run across someone who is bad and is skillful at using emotion to manipulate others (playing the victim, pushing buttons, you name it) and those people need to be removed. If you can't handle making the call and seeing it through despite the tugging at the heart strings, it poisons the organization. The problem being, most people will do it to some extent when their jobs or livelihoods are on the line. There is no 'clean' way to do this generally, though money can help (severance). It can also be very expensive. 2) The larger the organization, the bigger the impact of a layoff, change in strategy, etc. and the larger the emotional toll of doing what needs to be done. The more you are friends with everyone, the more the toll generally. But it doesn't change the necessity of it. In fact, it magnifies the cost in real terms if it isn't done. Sometimes to 100's or more of median 'life work value' (aka total economic output for a lifetime for a median person). Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder, and if it is harder, eventually that person will hit a point they can't do it. Which makes someone ineffective and prolongs and magnifies the actual damage. While the positive/great side is awesome - making things work, getting organizations working together, making everyone productive and value creators instead of destroying value - the negative/downside that can happen sometimes is much harder than most people are willing to face. A common way of coping for this is to draw emotional distance between oneself and ones reports, which also has downsides. Another way is 'othering' them, which has even more major downsides. Another way is disempowering oneself (oh, I had to do this because I was told to), but that has even MORE major downsides. Either way, the more someone feels it, the harder it is to do. Being inauthentic or out of touch with people however, makes it nearly impossible to avoid being toxic and damaging more than is required. It also destroys the ability to do the POSITIVE side of leadership, and is ultimately destructive to the leader. Rarely, someone will be empathetic AND be able to do this at a large scale. Seeing what they do up close however, they often shut off the degree of emotional exposure they get, and make sure that many of the hardest decisions are done in a clinical way out of view, so they can be effective in those situations. So think of it as a filtering mechanism. Folks who make it to a certain place, they have reasons they survived and others didn't. Sometimes it's sheer luck, but more often than not, it's certain survival traits and ways of looking at the world that happened to click in the right way.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > someone is talented and driven and charismatic and a sociopath, then they are probably at an advantage compared to someone who is missing one or more of those characteristics. As I wrote above, people seem drawn to the fantasy of sociopathic behavior. They fear it and thus try to master it, following its feared power. We fear it, and the sociopaths (of course) try to amplify that - because they are weak. Look at Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein. All it takes is one person to stand up to them. Have no fear. The world isn't perfectly just, evil happens, but humans are much more powerful as social, not sociopathic, creatures. Good is more powerful, really; we vastly outnumber the sociopaths. No dictator's dominion has ever even approached the heights of democracies based on human rights. George Washington, Ghandi, Churchill - they weren't sociopaths. Putin is; Zelenskyy is not. But good people do need to believe in themselves, to act, and to act courageously. That's almost all Gandalf did (in the books), is to remind good people of their power and courage. Right now, we are only missing a leader.
      - vba616 4y ago
        >George Washington, Ghandi, Churchill - they weren't sociopaths Oh dear...we can all agree about Gandhi and Churchill? They go together like Le Duc Tho and Kissinger. Churchill is associated with a famine in India during WWII that killed 2-4 million people. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 Many people, of course, think Stalin was one of the greatest monsters in history, among other reasons, for the Holodomor, Soviet man-made famine. I don't know what a sociopath is, ultimately, but it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin. Oh and Gandhi...Gandhi famously said in response to the Holocaust that the Jews should've committed mass suicide since they were going to die anyway, and then maybe the world would've given a shit. George Orwell (who was an apologist and ineffective propagandist for British colonialism during WWII) praised Gandhi for honesty and adhering to his principles, but claimed he didn't understand totalitarianism, that his movement could not have succeeded in Nazi Germany because it wouldn't have gotten any publicity.
        wolverine876 4y ago
        You are debating someone who said they were saints, which I didn't, or with someone who fits some strawperson profile in your mind. > it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin You might be surprised that I might know more about it than you imagine, maybe more than you. It is pretty obvious that they belong in different buckets.
- the_biot 4y ago
  Nobody said sociopath, that's your term. Sandberg was effectively co-CEO, in everything but title. Her and Zuckerberg had divided up responsibilities, it wasn't a matter of strategy vs operations i.e. CEO vs COO. That's pretty clear from articles on her. As long as Zuckerberg needed her to build up the company, which he was too inexperienced to do, that setup was fine. But at some point a king gets paranoid about having an obvious successor around, particularly as his confidence grows. So he's divided up her responsibilities among a wider group of underlings; he's not going to have another obvious successor around. I'd guess he's been taking responsibilities away from her for a while. As to loyalty, Sandberg's network etc, note that this article is about her wrongdoing, effectively attacking her reputation. These investigations have apparently been going on for a while. It's not even the first article about this that I've seen; you want to guess who's been feeding this information to the WSJ and others? With this kind of stuff sloshing around, who in Facebook's upper management is going to stand up and cry foul? Exactly nobody, that's who.
- vba616 4y ago
  This "logic" of denying that something is real by saying people wouldn't stand for it if it was, bugs me. People will stand for it if they accept this sort of denial that it's happening!
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > People will stand for it if they accept this sort of denial that it's happening! I agree completely - it's an essential point that is rarely made. I am not denying it's happening; I'm talking about the notion that everyone is a sociopath. That doesn't mean Zuckerberg isn't doing something ~sociopathic right now.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  There is research that suggests that the proportion of sociopaths amongst C level execs is much higher than among the general population.
unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
Mixed metaphors. Snakes don't use knives.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  Survivorship bias. We never hear from the victims of knife-wielding snakes.

wolverine876 4y ago

People seem drawn to the fantasy of sociopathic behavior, like Game of Thrones and 'reality' TV shows with zero-sum outcomes. People aren't angels, but they aren't sociopaths either. Also, Zuckerberg needs the loyalty of talented people, present and future; if it looks like even Sandberg gets stabbed in the back, then that loyalty will be hard to come by. Also, burning the bridge with Sandberg will burn the bridge with Sandberg's network, which is probably considerable. Nobody rules alone.

lazide 4y ago
‘People’ may not be sociopaths. But some people are sociopaths. And some people have enough power that they don’t often consider long term consequences, or need to, for things like this.
- vba616 4y ago
  Moreover, if someone is talented and driven and charismatic and a sociopath, then they are probably at an advantage compared to someone who is missing one or more of those characteristics. By default, one should assume the most successful people have every superlative quality, from those that are most admirable to least.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Keep in mind that it isn’t usually really sociopathicness. Sociopath denotes a particular type of negative pathology that rarely can exist in a real leadership position for any length of time. By definition it’s too destructive. That being said, low empathy/low affect for others emotional and mental state is a clear advantage past a certain (low) organizational level, if combined with decision making that does weight it at least a little. A lot of people call that sociopathic, but that is because they haven’t met an actual sociopath. Caring about people has advantages in our day to day lives (especially for others), but being able to make clear headed pragmatic decisions about people for your benefit (with sometimes severe negative consequences for others) isn’t one of them. And if someone is in a leadership position and can’t do that, they won’t be effective. The larger the scope of the leadership position, the more true it is. Ineffective leadership dooms everyone, sooner or later.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > That being said, low empathy/low affect for others emotional and mental state is a clear advantage past a certain (low) organizational level People just love this fantasy! Think about it: Do you have any basis for it? Some research? See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31707682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31707682
      - lazide 4y ago
        Oh I read it. You're responding to a strawman. I never said being a sociopath is helpful - I said it isn't, and you pretty much never see it. What I said is helpful, isn't sociopathy. What is helpful is not having a bleeding heart. Being able to make the right call, even if it hurts someone, or many someones. The higher up you go, the more necessary it is. I started out in industry at a low level, and worked myself up to senior leadership at a Fortune 50 company. I've founded several companies. I've had to fire friends who were really, really trying hard. I've had to hire folks I didn't like. I've had to lay off teams, and shut down one of my own companies (and lay off everyone I'd hired, which I did face to face) not because what they were doing was bad, but because it didn't fit the market anymore. I do care about people, and it has cost me quite a bit of emotional trauma that I see others not have. It has given me a positive reputation and general like well after the fact, but that doesn't scale or work in other situations. 1) The larger the organization, the more likely you'll run across someone who is bad and is skillful at using emotion to manipulate others (playing the victim, pushing buttons, you name it) and those people need to be removed. If you can't handle making the call and seeing it through despite the tugging at the heart strings, it poisons the organization. The problem being, most people will do it to some extent when their jobs or livelihoods are on the line. There is no 'clean' way to do this generally, though money can help (severance). It can also be very expensive. 2) The larger the organization, the bigger the impact of a layoff, change in strategy, etc. and the larger the emotional toll of doing what needs to be done. The more you are friends with everyone, the more the toll generally. But it doesn't change the necessity of it. In fact, it magnifies the cost in real terms if it isn't done. Sometimes to 100's or more of median 'life work value' (aka total economic output for a lifetime for a median person). Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder, and if it is harder, eventually that person will hit a point they can't do it. Which makes someone ineffective and prolongs and magnifies the actual damage. While the positive/great side is awesome - making things work, getting organizations working together, making everyone productive and value creators instead of destroying value - the negative/downside that can happen sometimes is much harder than most people are willing to face. A common way of coping for this is to draw emotional distance between oneself and ones reports, which also has downsides. Another way is 'othering' them, which has even more major downsides. Another way is disempowering oneself (oh, I had to do this because I was told to), but that has even MORE major downsides. Either way, the more someone feels it, the harder it is to do. Being inauthentic or out of touch with people however, makes it nearly impossible to avoid being toxic and damaging more than is required. It also destroys the ability to do the POSITIVE side of leadership, and is ultimately destructive to the leader. Rarely, someone will be empathetic AND be able to do this at a large scale. Seeing what they do up close however, they often shut off the degree of emotional exposure they get, and make sure that many of the hardest decisions are done in a clinical way out of view, so they can be effective in those situations. So think of it as a filtering mechanism. Folks who make it to a certain place, they have reasons they survived and others didn't. Sometimes it's sheer luck, but more often than not, it's certain survival traits and ways of looking at the world that happened to click in the right way.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > someone is talented and driven and charismatic and a sociopath, then they are probably at an advantage compared to someone who is missing one or more of those characteristics. As I wrote above, people seem drawn to the fantasy of sociopathic behavior. They fear it and thus try to master it, following its feared power. We fear it, and the sociopaths (of course) try to amplify that - because they are weak. Look at Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein. All it takes is one person to stand up to them. Have no fear. The world isn't perfectly just, evil happens, but humans are much more powerful as social, not sociopathic, creatures. Good is more powerful, really; we vastly outnumber the sociopaths. No dictator's dominion has ever even approached the heights of democracies based on human rights. George Washington, Ghandi, Churchill - they weren't sociopaths. Putin is; Zelenskyy is not. But good people do need to believe in themselves, to act, and to act courageously. That's almost all Gandalf did (in the books), is to remind good people of their power and courage. Right now, we are only missing a leader.
    - vba616 4y ago
      >George Washington, Ghandi, Churchill - they weren't sociopaths Oh dear...we can all agree about Gandhi and Churchill? They go together like Le Duc Tho and Kissinger. Churchill is associated with a famine in India during WWII that killed 2-4 million people. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 Many people, of course, think Stalin was one of the greatest monsters in history, among other reasons, for the Holodomor, Soviet man-made famine. I don't know what a sociopath is, ultimately, but it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin. Oh and Gandhi...Gandhi famously said in response to the Holocaust that the Jews should've committed mass suicide since they were going to die anyway, and then maybe the world would've given a shit. George Orwell (who was an apologist and ineffective propagandist for British colonialism during WWII) praised Gandhi for honesty and adhering to his principles, but claimed he didn't understand totalitarianism, that his movement could not have succeeded in Nazi Germany because it wouldn't have gotten any publicity.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        You are debating someone who said they were saints, which I didn't, or with someone who fits some strawperson profile in your mind. > it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin You might be surprised that I might know more about it than you imagine, maybe more than you. It is pretty obvious that they belong in different buckets.
the_biot 4y ago
Nobody said sociopath, that's your term. Sandberg was effectively co-CEO, in everything but title. Her and Zuckerberg had divided up responsibilities, it wasn't a matter of strategy vs operations i.e. CEO vs COO. That's pretty clear from articles on her. As long as Zuckerberg needed her to build up the company, which he was too inexperienced to do, that setup was fine. But at some point a king gets paranoid about having an obvious successor around, particularly as his confidence grows. So he's divided up her responsibilities among a wider group of underlings; he's not going to have another obvious successor around. I'd guess he's been taking responsibilities away from her for a while. As to loyalty, Sandberg's network etc, note that this article is about her wrongdoing, effectively attacking her reputation. These investigations have apparently been going on for a while. It's not even the first article about this that I've seen; you want to guess who's been feeding this information to the WSJ and others? With this kind of stuff sloshing around, who in Facebook's upper management is going to stand up and cry foul? Exactly nobody, that's who.
vba616 4y ago
This "logic" of denying that something is real by saying people wouldn't stand for it if it was, bugs me. People will stand for it if they accept this sort of denial that it's happening!
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > People will stand for it if they accept this sort of denial that it's happening! I agree completely - it's an essential point that is rarely made. I am not denying it's happening; I'm talking about the notion that everyone is a sociopath. That doesn't mean Zuckerberg isn't doing something ~sociopathic right now.
cycomanic 4y ago
There is research that suggests that the proportion of sociopaths amongst C level execs is much higher than among the general population.

unyttigfjelltol 4y ago

Mixed metaphors. Snakes don't use knives.

CoastalCoder 4y ago
Survivorship bias. We never hear from the victims of knife-wielding snakes.