Competence Theater

I have worked at many places. Without exception, the biggest challenge every one of them faced during my time there was either:

1. not enough people wanted what we were selling, or didn’t want it badly enough
2. collectively, we continually did stupid things, or did good/neutral things in stupid ways

That’s it. When we addressed these things, we did better. When we didn’t, we did worse. Heck, even my own company was like this! I continually refused to address the first problem, and as a result, my company was not (and continues to not be, to this day!) very successful.

Thing number one really is an important problem, but to be fair, it’s also hard to solve. You have to know what to make (anyone saying “JUST LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER” can log off right now and go back to LinkedIn, thank you very much), be able to make it, and be willing to make it. Man, I get tired just writing that and thinking about it. Thing number two — doing stupid things, or doing non-stupid things poorly, or in a stupid way — isn’t as existential or exciting, but it’s usually more solvable, and boy is it absolutely everywhere.

My hilarious, fulfilled, and generally very successful Dad has given me various bits of advice over the years, but none better or more applicable to everyday life than my favorite:

“Don’t be an idiot“.

It’s really an amazing philosophy, and I’ve put a lot of effort into living it every day, even in the face of investors, coworkers, managers, customers, vendors, and countless others almost constantly pressuring me to, in fact, be an idiot in some way. It doesn’t always make me the easiest person in the world to work with, but in the end my dogged insistence on not being an idiot has done wonders for me and many — if not all! — of the companies I’ve worked for.

Despite this, “don’t be an idiot” has not caught on with the business community. Maybe it’s not sexy enough. Maybe it sounds too harsh (although I thought it was cool to be harsh again, I dunno). Maybe, just maybe, high-visibility business ventures increasingly require key stakeholders to act like idiots more than we’d like to admit. But either way, “stop doing important things in stupid ways” just doesn’t seem to be a rallying cry employers are comfortable building their workplace cultures around. Instead…

For whatever reason, we keep coming back to this fantasy that if people work EXTREMELY HARD (not just “hard”, but “so hard that a description of the work makes the Wall Street Journal think people will stop and read about this and feel like something significant is occurring in the world”) the things they do will be extremely, powerfully not-stupid, and thus those things will have value and progress the business forward towards, you know, glory and what-have-you.

Well… let me assure you, as a seasoned professional with 20 (!) years of high-tech (well, mostly high-tech), growth company experience — working super hard and being a counterproductive idiot are not, I repeat, not mutually exclusive. In fact, the whole reason work-life balance even exists in a country where everyone is obsessed with their career and terrified of not being rich in the event they ever encounter even a moderate medical challenge, is because working too hard actually causes you to become an idiot and do stupid, counterproductive things at work. These things range from bad ideas, to yelling at people, to forgetting important things, to major industrial accidents, to being Boeing. All of them are bad, and businesses would almost certainly make more money and deliver improved customer experiences if we did/had less of them.

“Companies are in control again!” Eh, I dunno. I think companies were kind of always in control, since most people work for companies not because it’s fun, but because they are financially dependent on those companies for survival. Really, companies have just gotten tired of trying to create environments where their employees don’t do stupid things, probably because doing so is a vague, difficult and emotionally unsatisfying process.

Sending a picture of yourself pretending to sleep in your office to the Wall Street Journal is pretty stupid — you might even say “idiotic” in the context of building a successful technology product — but it’s not vague, it’s not especially difficult, and to people who feel limited in their ability to actually improve the performance of their businesses, it’s probably somewhat satisfying.

Again, I’ve been working for a long time. And I know that overworking can be a thing really competent, awesome people do that, if managed very carefully, sometimes leads to amazing results that are hard to get in normal working cadences. I totally concede this, and I have allowed myself, my wife, and even some direct reports to occasionally overwork, knowing that I am running the risk of encouraging idiocy in myself or the people I care about. I do understand the tradeoff, I have pulled all-nighters, and I have in fact produced things that came out so good, and so cool, that they made me laugh deliriously at some ungodly hour of the morning. I’m sure I sounded not unlike… an idiot.

BUT, in general, most idiotic things aren’t the wild-eyed second-order effects of genius leaving the body. They are just… stupid, and bad. Things like the worst kind of bloated PowerPoint, hundreds of poorly considered, off-the-cuff Google Doc comments, charts in SaaS apps that don’t make any sense, the entire HubSpot user interface, and other unfortunate outcomes.

Making overworking a requirement, instead of something to manage effectively and with some degree of caution, doesn’t open the floodgates to genius. It opens the floodgates to charlatans and delusional go-getters who are willing to sleep in the office after a long, exhausting day of making bad, impulsive decisions and generally making everything harder for everyone else, including you and your customers. If that’s what you’re going for in 2025, I’m neither all that surprised nor especially interested in hitching my wagon to your future success.

Work is Weird, Weird is Hard

One cool thing about life, or at least my life, is that as I’ve gotten older and moved around, I’ve gotten to know some people who do jobs that I’ve always been aware of, but actually know very little about. The challenge with these kinds of jobs (and there are a lot of them) is that people tend to conflate awareness that the job exists with any sort of actual knowledge about how to do the job, or at least what the challenges of doing the job are. In reality, other than things that affect all jobs (“we are overworked, our boss is an idiot who hates us”, etc.), most of us have no idea.

“Air traffic controller” is a great example of a job like this, although to my knowledge, I don’t personally know an air traffic controller. But it checks all the right boxes for confusing the public — air traffic control as a concept makes sense, we’ve all been affected by it directly, it’s in the news, it’s in movies, we play little video games about it, and so forth. When I think “yeah, I get what they’re going through up there” (and sometimes I do this) I’m obviously wrong about that, but I think my misplaced confidence is at least understandable.

The thing is, I’m just a guy. The fact that I lack high-level self-awareness of my gaps in how the national air traffic controller network works (or does not work) is not a huge problem for society, as long as I don’t vote for idiots, I guess. Unfortunately, there ARE people who are in charge of large, sweeping decisions that affect — and are affected by — the actual work of being an air traffic controller. It does matter if they lack this kind of situational awareness, and according to the Verge, evidently they do.

Because of this whirlwind of activity, Rocheleau expected that Newark would soon be able to increase its flight volume by 25 percent, or nearly 12 additional flights per hour. 

Or, as Kirby put it, “This is such a seminal turning point for not just the near term but the long term of Newark.” 

Within two days, all three men were proven wrong. On the evening of June 4th, a shortage of air traffic controllers forced Newark to issue a ground stop, delaying more than 100 flights for several hours. Another staffing-related delay occurred four days later. Optimism alone cannot solve infrastructure problems that have been decades in the making.

The Verge piece continues, explaining that despite a brief, reactive surge of technical resources and equipment, a massive shortage of air traffic controllers — people — ultimately took down the system almost immediately.

“If your job is so complicated, how come you work for me?”

People’s fundamental misunderstanding of on-the-ground effort feels like the root of so many problems today. We have strong opinions about manufacturing, but we don’t know how actual things get made. We have strong opinions about immigration, but we don’t know who these people actually are or what they actually do. The management class (a group I belong to, theoretically) is in the throes of a truly bizarre delusion that has them convinced content parsing and generating algorithms are about to take over useful, necessary work from people, and have actually started preemptively reducing headcount needed to do this work today.

The blind spot I’m describing is really just human nature, I guess, but it does seem to dominate problem-solving more than ever before. Some potential social factors encouraging this are well-documented, like the fact that modern America was built by a generation that collectively participated in a giant global conflict where everyone left was just glad they didn’t die, whereas today the military is highly professionalized and most people never serve in it at all. Maybe that’s it — Stephen A. Smith Hot Take Culture ™ and every other modern example of people popping off without feeling the need to really understand the topic at hand can all be traced back to that, but I don’t know, and it does seem like it’s getting worse. Algorithmic, short-form-video-world isn’t helping, but I can’t tell if it’s a cause, or an effect of this whole thing that just happens to reinforce the trends that inspired it.

I’m not sure what the solution here is. It’s equally absurd to restrict opinions or observations to people with direct experience in something, so to me that’s a non-starter. We can’t all become experienced in everything (this is why the “I do my own research” thing is such a problem), either. For me, getting into management was really helpful because it was in a field and with a team that had me as a direct contributor, so I was under no illusion I suddenly knew how to do my former peers’ jobs better than they did (they were also not under this illusion, and more than happy to express it to me when I needed to hear it). But authority actually seems to have the opposite effect on a lot of people, where it instead makes them comfortable dictating the larger strategy or resources behind a function without even a basic, existential awareness of the work itself. For me, leadership was consistently very humbling, but instead I frequently see leaders using their position as a leader itself to justify whatever their decisions turn out to be.

And maybe that’s ultimately the issue. There will always be a need for someone to make decisions they don’t have a lot of first-hand experience with. How things go for a business, or a society, or even a family are going to be determined in large part by how those decisions get made, and more specifically how those decision makers handle not knowing enough to make the right one.

Life is not a real-time-strategy game. It’s not designed to be solved by one, brilliant person. The pieces are way more complicated, and unique, and weird, and sometimes the same piece that literally doesn’t do anything for half the game becomes incredibly, existentially important when you least expect it. So many things that need to get done are weird, and specific, or stupid and broken and require someone to make a decision or concoct a good-enough solution that simply doesn’t exist in any “training data”, whether its used by a machine learning model or an MBA candidate. Trust me, I work in digital marketing right now. If I’m being honest, I do a lot of repetitive administrative work that should be automated, in theory, but the reality is that most of the automations built (by me or by vendors) with the intention of doing so are broken and unreliable because the inputs (and outputs) are bespoke and inconsistent. No one wants to do this work less than me, but I keep doing it, because I know how to ingest a typically random scenario and cobble together an environmentally-appropriate answer. Whether you’re sponsoring an event or landing a plane, that’s… that’s the work, man! Forget it at your peril.

Wholly Lawless

This is an insane sentence to read in a story on a federal court ruling:

There is little to no evidence to support a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once in the MS-13 street gang, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis wrote. And in any case, she said, an immigration judge had expressly barred the U.S. in 2019 from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs. 

“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” Xinis wrote.

I’ll put this bluntly. There are many policy positions you can hold that — even if crazy — can fit inside the framework of American society and government prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. You can call different ideas “left-wing”, or “right-wing”, or talk about the importance of “liberty” or “security”, and in most cases that can fit inside some still-defensible idea of how the United States could/would work.

However, the idea that the executive branch can unilaterally declare someone removable from the country, provide no proof, ignore the laws and procedures that legally require them do so, send them to a prison in El Salvador, and then declare that the person cannot be returned because they are now outside U.S. jurisdiction is fundamentally incompatible with not only the U.S. Constitution, but the basics of western law and morality that predate the formation of the country. It is, with zero exaggeration, a blank check for the administration to do anything they want to anyone with no repercussions. They just have to say you are in this gang, and you can be whisked away and never seen again.

For America to function as you expect it to (whether you are aware of this or not), the executive branch absolutely must provide some justification for what they are doing, and there absolutely must be a defined, pre-described forum for providing it and allowing for some form of pushback or counter-argument from the person that it is being done to, and all of this must be overseen and adjudicated by someone who is not the executive branch. It doesn’t matter if the person is a citizen or not, because if the government isn’t required to do this for everyone, they can just declare that someone is not a citizen and do whatever they want to them, because in that world ICE or the Army or the State Department or the USDA or whoever would apparently have the right to simply take any action they want and then wash their hands of the situation because the person has been sent off to some godforsaken prison hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

This is so stupid and obvious I can’t even believe it needs to be stated. If you can’t understand this, I sort of feel bad for you, but mostly I am enraged you are such a useless, non-contributing member of our democracy, because it is so unbelievably uncomplicated that I struggle to see any reason other than willful, borderline malicious ignorance for not finding this completely outrageous and unacceptable. You absolutely do not need to be some political egghead to wrap your arms around the idea that the people and institutions who get the guns and the keys to the prisons need to have absolutely ironclad limitations placed on them and that those limitations cannot be defined or interpreted by them. If a bunch of farmers and shopkeepers and blacksmiths were able to figure this out and do something about it 300 years ago (at tremendous personal risk!), I feel like you can get there too.

And hey, if for some reason you can’t get around the idea of non-citizens having rights of any sort (that’s your problem to figure out, but I won’t die on that hill here), remind yourself that this is not about anyone’s positive rights, this is about fundamental restrictions on what the government can do. It’s a check on them, you dummies, not a perk of being a citizen, because if they can do this they can just take away your perks whenever they want and they don’t have to give a reason or explain anything about that reason to you, a judge, or your freaking family, who will never see you again.  

Good lord. I spent four years sort of lazily piling up credits and stumbling out of college with a political science degree, and for the most part I felt silly because it seemed like all I learned was “how America works”, which I sort of knew anyways, and which seemed like something everyone here would have to learn just walking around and living life, or else society would collapse. And maybe I was right, because now that most people don’t seem to know any of this, the Republic does actually appear to be in some form of collapse. 

The Employees You Want

Max Read has a secondary potential motivation (other than sucking up to an incoming Presidential administration) for Mark Zuckerberg suddenly reinventing himself as the least intimidating, least plausible right-wing tough-guy reactionary ever conceived:

“News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context–as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like “legacy media” and “virtue-signaling”–but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite).”

Honestly, I have no real reason not believe this. It’s not a stupid theory — it’s a fairly compelling theory proposing that someone weird (and maybe, in their own way, stupid) is doing something stupid.

It’s stupid for a couple reasons. It’s stupid because you can already get whatever kind of workforce you want, and Facebook has been hiring what it wants for twenty years now. It wants “100x engineers”, best in class, A-player, blah blah blah. That’s what it’s been hiring for better or worse. Never in Facebook’s notoriously money and power hungry history has it said “we want this place staffed by a bunch of bleeding heart liberals”. That was always the price of getting the people they wanted, and it was a price they paid happily to print money for, again, two decades.

This bring us to the second reason this is stupid. This is America — as much as corporations (especially tech companies, for whatever reason) seem to love coming up with elaborate, too-cute-by-a-half justifications for dumping workers, it’s not really necessary. Americans have very few labor protections, and it’s not hard to get rid of tens of thousands of workers. Traditionally, that sort of thing has hurt the stock price of public companies, but who knows if that would even happen now. So if you don’t want most of your employees to be Facebook employees anymore (and the posturing of the last two years sure makes it look like he doesn’t), just do your job and get rid of them. You don’t even have to pay severance! I’m sure most of these people, like me, are at-will employees.

But… there is one little problem. These are still the kinds of workers you want — you just don’t want them to be annoying or have principles or make you consider things you don’t like. You want truly talented engineers and smart, technical business people who just love money and winning and crushing it, but… also people who thrive working inside a massive organization with huge egos, interdepartmental conflict, and often incoherent or incompetent upper management.

See where this is going? The first set of problems is very real, I get it. I once watched an intern launch into a rant at an all-hands meeting about how our executive team’s answer on diversity “was frankly not good enough”, and she was only there for the summer and didn’t even do any work. But that’s an extreme outlier. I’ve been working at tech companies for almost as long as Facebook has existed, and the best, most innovative, most effective employees I worked with (other than the occasional ruthless salesperson or actively hostile DevOps guy) were all basically kind, thoughtful, intelligent people. There’s a type, man, and it’s not AI-crypto-libertarian edgelord. Some of those people really are very intelligent and potentially very productive, but they generally don’t scale well, they hate the bureaucracy and rules inherent in running a billion dollar business, and honestly, they’re just a different kind of a pain-in-the-ass, and one you tend to run into a lot quicker. In other words, they’d all love to work with Mark Zuckerberg, as long as they can have his job where they can say and do whatever they want, change their mind on a whim, and never be held accountable for anything. As my uncle reportedly said when they reinstated the draft — “sure, I’ll go to Vietnam. Just make me a general.”

That’s not who Zuckerberg and the rest of the “I’m a libertarian because I’m winning” crew actually want as mid-level product managers and data scientists. It’d be chaos, and far more insufferable than the occasionally eye-rolling left-wing status quo. Instead, these guys are just delusionally pining for their manic pixie dream girl — in their case, a brilliant, kind, innovative, competent professional who puts customers first, is willing to disagree and commit, and who also has absolutely no problem watching terrible, amoral shit go down on their watch as long as their boss says it’s fine.

A few of these magical employees might exist, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to staff Silicon Valley, which is why the only fantasy more appealing to these guys than a tech company staffed by obedient, professional, submissive right wing sociopaths is one staffed by large language mod– sorry, I mean “AI Agents”.