[majormajor]

You're missing any mention of alignment and as a result I think you're leaving out a very key situation where someone can be in your group (A) but actually working against the overall company goals.

If you hire someone to solve problem X but they get sidetracked and spend all their time on problem Z instead... they can be excelling at driving solutions and still be doing the wrong thing in the eyes of the company.

Caring about completely different things than your boss can get you in trouble even if you excel at everything you do.

[whiskytango111]

That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.

That said managing a large organization is extremely hard. I don’t think most companies have the overall business dynamics to sustain a large company where teams can do things that don’t matter. Usually those companies, which there are a lot in the tech world, have something else going on (no product market fit and too much cash) that leads to those symptoms

[majormajor]

> That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.

I mean, it's worse, IME, it usually slows down the rest of the org.

But it is worth mentioning in the discussion of "why should I care if my employer does great or not when there's no direct reward in it for me" - otherwise you could just wave that whole question away with "that's just bad management" more generally. Yet it's mathematically implausible to suggest that everyone can escape bad management; some number of managers are going to be subpar, so the situation remains relevant to people.

[whiskytango111]

I agree that it’s worse in like 99% of cases that 1% though overly influenced my word choice :)

To your other point, I wasn’t trying to be as hand wavy as that came across.

There will always be people who make mistakes or are not good fits for their job (engineers, management, execs, investors, etc).

Maybe a better way to say it is that low impact work happens at the tail end of bad management. It’s usually a luxury problem (pet projects from a company that makes too much money but has too little maturity) or a symptom of terrible management (no clue what is valuable or worse unable to actually get team to work on what is valuable)