alt Hacker NewsThe entire post devolved into a treatise on playing politics and trading political capital in a specific corporate culture.
I’ve seen people who played the game well at Google or Amazon fall completely flat on their ass at a different company, thinking the game hasn’t changed (or that there even is a game), barely lasting a few months on the C suite before being softly moved along.
Someone who succeeds at a game with arbitrary rules without realizing that it's a game - it sounds nonsensical, but I've seen it too. It's some kind of selection bias for people who naturally operate that way, plus the Peter Principle.
When the game rules shift, those people flail. Recent example was that in 2021-2 nobody could hire fast enough, but now staff expansion is not common. Managers who excelled at coming up with reasons to spawn new teams did great until the money dried up. Some of them shifted gears and adapted, but others just couldn't get the message.