> These are the sort of things that are supposed to lead to commendations and promotions. Maybe I live in fantasyland.

I had a bit of a feral journey into tech, poor upbringing => self taught college dropout waiting tables => founded iPad point of sale startup in 2011 => sold it => Google in 2016 to 2023

It was absolutely astounding to go to Google, and find out that all this work to ascend to an Ivy League-esque employment environment...I had been chasing a ghost. Because Google, at the end of the day, was an agglomeration of people, suffered from the same incentives and disincentives as any group, and thus also had the same boring, basic, social problems as any group.

Put more concretely, couple vignettes:

- Someone with ~5 years experience saying approximately: "You'd think we'd do a postmortem for this situation, but, you know how that goes. The people involved think they're an organization-wide announcement that you're coming for them, and someone higher ranked will get involved and make sure A) it doesn't happen or B) you end up looking stupid for writing it."

- A horrible design flaw that made ~50% of users take 20 seconds to get a query answered was buried, because a manager involved was the one who wrote the code.

> A horrible design flaw that made ~50% of users take 20 seconds to get a query answered was buried, because a manager involved was the one who wrote the code.

Maybe not when it is as much as 20 seconds, but an old manager of mine would save fixing something like that for a “quick win” at some later time! He would even have artificial delays put in, enough to be noticeable and perhaps reported but not enough to be massively inconvenient, so we could take them out during the UAT process - it didn't change what the client finally got, but it seemed to work especially if they thought they'd forced us to spend time on performance issues (those talking to us at the client side could report this back up their chain as a win).

I've seen into some moderately high levels of "prestigious" business and government circles and I've yet to find any level at which everyone suddenly becomes as competent and sharp as I'd have expected them to be, as a child and young adult (before I saw what I've seen and learned that the norm is morons and liars running everything and operating terrifically dysfunctional organizations... everywhere, apparently, regardless how high up the hierarchy you go). And actually, not only is there no step at which they suddenly become so, people don't even seem to gradually tend to brighter or generally better, on average, as you move "upward"... at all! Or perhaps only weakly so.

Whatever the selection process is for gestures broadly at everything, it's not selecting for being both (hell, often not for either) able and willing to do a good job, so far as what the job is apparently supposed to be. This appears to hold for just about everything, reputation and power be damned. Exceptions of high-functioning small groups or individuals in positions of power or prestige exist, as they do at "lower" levels, but aren't the norm anywhere as far as I've been able to discern.

I would get fired at Google within seconds then. I’m more than happy to shine a light on bullshit like that.