As tiresome as Trump.
It’s all TABS vs SPACES over there, now.
Spoke a Lone Musk, spiteful and petulant.
“While this stack remains listless and slack,
Not a one one of you will wipe your crack!”
Somebody should submit their code as an mp3 of a synthesized voice reading “… one, zero, zero, one, zero, one, …”
I once worked under a guy with a similar “management” style. It was fucking exhausting. It would take weeks of clean up after he took the stage at a national conference and spouted nonsense, or broke into a meeting that was going well and threw everything into chaos.
So often, these “charismatic leaders” are neither of those things. They’re good at glad-handing, and that’s it. Everyone would be better off if they stuck to that.
I really feel for the people who feel trapped into staying there.
I sometimes find myself convinced that, in business, extroverts have two primary purposes: to talk to each other instead of achieving anything, and to continually get in the faces of introverts to stop them ever achieving anything.
Eh, I’ve worked with a lot of delightful and effective extroverts. I think people often misinterpret that personality trait. It just means you get energized from being around people, whereas introverts rejuvenate with some solo time.
These guys we’re talking about are more in the realm of narcissistic borderline sociopaths, not to armchair diagnose or anything. IME, they thrive on creating or prolonging chaos, because then they don’t have to do any actual work, just go around “making deals” with other agents of chaos. Endlessly frustrating to the rest of us who actually want to get things done and sorted so we can move onto the next thing.
Is that what they call seagull management?
It’s partially a throwaway joke, and partially kind of serious cri du coeur.
I’m still working on my Grand Unified Theory of Workplace Personality Archetypes, and probably will be the rest of my life, but my observation is that the higher up the ladder you go, the more likely you are to be an extrovert (or successfully able to imitate one), and the best ground level people are introverts.
The higher you go, the more of your job involves talking to people and evaluating people and persuading people and keeping in contact with people and marketing things to people, and if you’re extroverted then you’ve got a natural leg-up, because that’s all energising and interesting, if not fun.
If you’re at ground level in a technical job, then more of your job involves thinking hard about things and building mental models to find how to improve things and how they might break.
Neither is exclusively that thing, of course. Good senior managers should still know how to shut the door and focus on a thing, and good ground-level bods still need to talk to people. And the other trick is that as you rise in management, you need to at lease pretend to be more of an extrovert. If you’re supervising a team, it’s more than just being primus inter pares, there are new skills to supervision: you do have to go to more meetings, you have to talk to more people, you have to manage disputes and disagreements, you can’t just ignore your emails, you have to be in continual contact with your team, and your own manager, and your peer supervisors.
And one of the undervalued aspects of being a technical manager is to be the person who goes to the meetings so your team doesn’t have to (which also means you have to communicate with them what happened, communicate up what your team think, and be trusted in both directions). It’s to be the person to whom people speak, so they aren’t annoying the people doing the work. (And so that people aren’t set to working at cross-purposes.)
Which is a lot more thought and explanation than the joke (or “joke”) probably merited.
Was the same in the previous president’s administration. There was a never-ending amount of memos and such mentioning that were leaked that specifically mentioned going after the leakers.
I used to do programing and I figure having an itchy unclean butthole would not help me produce better code. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer being clean.
I wonder how much of that is survivor bias. How many libertarians crashed and burned in the 60s and are now little remembered.
I’ve always said a boss doesn’t have to know how to DO the jobs of their underlings. But they do need to have a pretty good grasp of what the job of their underlings IS.
Unless he builds the rocket and just launches himself to Mars. Then he can be as “hardcore” as he wants.
The Kochs are generational, plus they shiv the less ideologically pure family members. (Not that the two other Koch Bros are nice people.)
Robert Mercer made his money in finance, so he’s a lottery winner.
Richard Uihlein (Uline) had generational money.
Some of them probably become libertarian true believers afterwards to justify where they are. (“I’m on top, so I must be a member of the best people, entitled to best people privileges.”)
Musk’s problem seems to be that he has no long term plans, and can’t keep his eye on the ball.
I think that does happen at times. However, I believe that most of them, especially billionaires, are sociopaths who have always been willing to do anything to get what they want. Being a Libertarian is merely a convenient cover for how they have always done things. It gives them a justification for their climb to the top as they are climbing.
