[awanderingmind]

Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable.

Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code.

I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.

[asimpletune]

The counter agreement often made is that if there was a better alternative to this then, like a company run by people who understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving business people. My observation however has been that in fact many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced.

It’s frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out there. Still work doesn’t have to be one’s whole identity. If one happens to be there at the right place and at the right time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their lifetime. But if not then it’s ok! I think we can all do work that we’re proud of still, and it’s probably best to not get too worked up over this stuff. I don’t think Julius has that same option.

[Earw0rm]

There are two possible outcomes:

- The Julii infiltrate and take over,

- A company run by Julii from the outset comes to dominate the market.

This is because "what we actually make" is a specialist skill, whereas business, sales, operations, financial planning and governance, HR, culture, legal are broadly generalist; and the bigger you get, the greater the important all that stuff becomes, relatively, to core execution on the product and its tech.

Which is not to say the importance of the latter ever goes to zero, but as a ratio it's like 1/log N or so.

[epicureanideal]

I would argue it’s because the whole economy is basically an oligopoly and there aren’t really enough opportunities for competition. Once a company reaches a certain level, it focuses on pulling up the ladder rather than climbing the ladder.

[Earw0rm]

"enough" is a value judgment, it depends what field of endeavour we're talking about (and whether the types of bug that proliferate in large firms are preferable to those that proliferate in small ones).

Uber, for example? Dreadful company, but a lot of the small local outfits they displaced were in some ways worse.

Local news media? This seems a more cut and dried case where small is preferable to large, and yet.. small firms are by no means incorruptible, and if the local vested interest succeeds in doing so, history will record only his point of view.

Cars are an interesting one, it looks like the EV transition is going to allow a whole new generation of (mostly Chinese, it must be said) manufacturers to establish a foothold. That's a pretty rare event for modern consumer products, the barriers to entry are huge and in general the reasons why are good.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced.

Did you see PG's Founder Mode essay by any chance?

>The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people... I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that the market can reward autistic technical leaders who piss everyone off.

Recent viral video of Andrej Karpathy describing Elon's management style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM

Obviously Elon's character flaws are well-documented. I don't think anyone should venerate him. I'm just skeptical that conventional management practices are over-determined by incentives.

[awanderingmind]

Well, assuming I agree with your premise (I'm not sure I do), what percentage of all the companies in the world does Elon run?

I can also assure you that Julii exist at e.g. Tesla, which employees over 100000 people.

I don't want to start an Elon flame war, but from what I've read I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen (which is not to deny that SpaceX builds very cool and impressive rockets, or that the businesses he own employ very smart and motivated people).

[_t9ow]

> I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen

If you don't mind elaborating, what would you attribute his success to?

[awanderingmind]

As I said, I'd rather not start a flame war ;)

[_t9ow]

I understand your reservations. Just to clarify, I wasn't trying to bait you -- I was genuinely curious. But I absolutely get why you'd rather not have this conversation. :-)

[johngossman]

Read Liftoff by Eric Berger about SpaceX. Musk is not an rocket engineer, but he was great at hiring engineers, motivating them, and willing to take risks in an field allergic to risk (for good reason, people die when planes and rockets crash.) most interesting to me was Musk’s management of their suppliers: he really streamlined the procurement process, which sped up development enormously. He was smart enough to understand what the engineers were doing and make decisions when they deadlocked, but he wasn’t the technical genius behind everything. Nothing wrong with that. In this day of specialization, he wouldn’t be human if he was doing all the technical work.