It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.
IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.
And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.
To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.
There's another possibility that the people who gravitate to "leadership" have certain personality problems that cause those behaviors, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b....
> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.
I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)
Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.
Strong agree that everyone would benefit from having a shitty service job or two when they're young to learn what life is really like for most people. I worked a bunch of different service jobs in high school and college, it's shocking how poorly most people treat someone just because they're standing behind the counter.
In the corporate world I find it's usually very obvious who has real life experience and who doesn't.
It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.
Most of them with law degrees and education in domains far removed from CS/math.
CS/math has nothing to do with this. It's just boring biological self selection. Why would I listen to you of all people?
Your existential dread is for you and your therapist. Not on others to coddle your ego.
The problem is Americans believe(d) all the televised to the spec of network censors propaganda about their exceptionalism. Tens of millions of 50+ year olds really came to believe they are the center of the universe. Nope, just more randos who never had a say in their existence because the messy and irrational aspects of reality don't care you exist.
because they're smarter than everyone else and
there is nothing of value to be learned from others
Especially since everybody in the industry tends to be pretty smart.
When two people with intelligence within a single standard deviation of each other, each of them is going to have competencies and expertise the other does not. There are going to be specific skills where one truly is 10x or even 100x the other, but not too many efforts boil down to one specific narrow skill.
We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.
- Attributed to Nasrudin
There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered.
I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.
You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. Driving people to burn out is not the answer. Probably an unpopular take here though
Classic.
Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.
It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition.
Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase).
What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer.
It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.
Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished?
Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies.
(this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)
Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.
The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing.
We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did.
But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most.
The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..
You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5.
There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle".
As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.
Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"
I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.
It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.
They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as:
“the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard”
So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.