Comment by paulddraper 21 hours ago
You’re going to have lots of disgruntled naysayers, but this principle is 100% true.
The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.”
Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
The principle applies to a world where people work in offices doing serious long term R&D work. The quote is entirely irrelevant to people in working open offices for projects that change direction quarterly building features designed to make PMs look busy.
Idiots run things for a lot of reasons.
Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it.
Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity.
Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
> Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
Maybe because idiots usurp all power and ostracize those loners?
Ever tried to really go against the grain in a relatively big corp? And I’m not talking about writing a couple angry emails/slack messages.