(2025-01-13) Brainwash An Executive Today

Nikhil Suresh: Brainwash An Executive Today! I. A few years ago, I had an annual one-on-one with the Chief Technology Officer of an employer with more than ten thousand staff.

Senior management absolutely fawned over this person

I had no idea what to make of this. People who I respect had only positive things to say, but I had never heard this person say anything beyond the most tepid of platitudes.

They had no technical background, were frankly a weaker speaker than I am, and a weaker writer.

This meeting was my chance to figure it out. One hour a year.

They would stare into the soul of my problem and bestow upon me the magic words that would convince my peers to have logs that worked.

We sit down and exchange pleasantries. It starts off fine. They ask the correct questions

I go so far as to mention that we just had an outage in some data processing that lasted a month without anyone noticing due to the poor quality of our codebase

*It is at this point that things begin to derail.

"Would you say that data observability is an issue?", they inquire with a tone that very clearly implies that this is a leading question.*

my specialty is building systems that move large amounts of data through companies.
Data observability is the high-level term that captures the ability of a business to go "Instead of downloading the data, it would appear the computers caught fire this morning. Would you like to fix this or pretend it never happened?"

The reason that I'm concerned is that the executive in front of me should not be using that term. They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren't specialized in my area, but I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don't understand.

"What do you think about Monte Carlo?"
What the fuck is Monte Carlo? I've never heard of that
"I don't know what that is."

"I saw it on LinkedIn last night and I think it will solve our observability issues. Do you think we should get it?"*

worse, they have been Marketed to, with a capital M.

I hadn't realized until that exact moment that people will make purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with that level of thought.
We still have fifteen minutes left, and it becomes more and more apparent that the executive desperately wants to buy Monte Carlo, as desperately as my little cousins demand another go on the machines at the arcade.
I am nothing to the C-suite but a device that emits words that will ultimately result in being able to say "Ludic supports buying Monte Carlo".

"Why do you think some of the engineers are struggling?", they ask.

"I'm sure you understand exactly how it is," I lie, "it just takes a lot of work to perform at a high level, and sometimes people fall behind."

"Yes, absolutely", they laugh, "I study on LinkedIn for up to two hours a day after work sometimes.

"We started talking about the things that I wanted, and I thought it was going well, then we somehow ended up on something else entirely. How about you two?"
"No, they just kept asking us about something called Monte Carlo. Bro, what the fuck is Monte Carlo?"
They had asked every data engineer in the department about it. Oy vey.

II.
A huge amount of the economy is driven by people who are, simply put, highly suggestible.

Consider, for example, what it would take to get you... no possible advertisement could get you to behave in such an embarrassing fashion

At the surface level, it sounds like you have a desirable characteristic in senior leadership, and that is true in the sense that you're unlikely to waste company money. Yet statistically you are not in senior leadership at an organization with ten thousand employees, someone who buys software at random and hires Deloitte is, so what gives? Don't companies want people who aren't going to be conned into purchasing nonsense?

It turns out that there are tremendous reasons to want people like this running many organizations, and social mechanisms that move the most easily-impressed of us into positions of power, those reasons just exist at the expense of the company or society in which that person is embedded. (Peter Principle)

There is a massive industry that is built around gathering people that fit the "thinks LinkedIn is studying" profile into rooms, who also have access to organizational money, and then charging sales teams for permission to get into that room.

Money now in exchange for access to credulous people who use words like synergy with a straight face later. I have no doubt that the actual attendees would vary wildly, ranging from a few savvy people, to outright grifters, to the terminally deranged.

the goal of salespeople with weak products is to find the weakest minds in the audience and lay siege

they'll happily say that they're not technical people but quantum is the future.

To quote Ed Zitron, who later on in this excellent piece quotes me, forming the mythical content promotion ouroboros:
"Whatever organization that's burdened you with some sort of half-baked, half-useful piece of shit business app (Microsoft Teams) has done so because the people up top don't care if it's good, just that it works, and "works" can be an extremely fuzzy word.

A friend who wishes to remain anonymous sent me what the prey receives:
Do you have lots of money? Are you authorized to spend that money? They're just doing lead qualification

The same person sent me the following PDF from a Melbourne-based conference which includes a sponsorship package

You can straight-up buy people tickets to attend events, and have a concierge deliver them into the eager maw of your marketing machine. I was shocked to see an absolutely trivial price tag too. A$2.5K?

III.
Up until now, the picture that I've painted is one of credulous people who are easily excited. But, of course, people are multifaceted, and minds can contain complex, self-deluded, and contradictory motivations.

There is a horrendous incestuousness to the sales cycle at large enterprises, certainly in the AI and data space where I work, and it is tied intricately with the way that jobs are distributed in most of the economy

Software engineering and other specialties of a technical bent (including artists, writers, etc.) have the additional barrier that our skills are testable (feedback) to some degree, but this is not the case for most senior management and executive roles. (see also: social science, liberal arts)

In those roles, it is essentially impossible to work out whether someone's tenure as a manager or executive was useful

Consider Elon Musk

it is surprisingly difficult to get one straight story about the man and the effectiveness of his methods

I don't have any concrete evidence for which narrative is closer to truth, or if he has ever fired an intern after a pop quiz, and that's for someone that is written about more than almost anyone on the planet.

When Johnny McManager rolls into town and assures me that he was instrumental in tweaking the widgets in a massive banking application, and that this definitely drove massive revenue for the business, what recourse do I have?

Slava Akmechet writes: Company metrics have momentum and lag. Nearly all political behavior exploits these two properties. [...] So opportunists don't worry about any of that. The winning strategy is to ignore company metrics completely and move between projects every eighteen months so that nobody notices.

Or, in other words, high-level statements like "I led a successful project" mean nothing. The project may not have been successful, or was judged to be a success for political reasons, or was successful for reasons that had nothing to do with management. This is a recurring theme across many sources.

Sean Goedecke, another writer here in Melbourne, writes:
I know it sounds extreme, but I think many engineers do not understand what shipping even is inside a large tech company. What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. (social fiction)

conversely, if you do not deploy your system to a working state but can someone make your VP or CEO happy, then you did ship. This sounds even stranger. How can you ship if the code doesn't work?
It's called lying, and it'll solve all your problems!

Recall that the platform I was working on previously had logging that was broken for months and was idling to the tune of half a million dollars, but it had nonetheless "shipped".

This happens constantly, and may be more common than projects actually working out.

Because management in large, dysfunctional (read: typical) companies is a game about promising to ship things to people further up your chain, people are broadly incentivized to say that everything has shipped no matter what has happened unless it is impossible to lie about this easily.

What ends up developing gradually is a network of people who are selected for their ability to support convenient social narratives, and if you're going to be negative at all, you aren't allowed in the club. When someone is asked to be a team player, what is really being said is "shut the fuck up and we'll let you into the club". That is precisely why people use phrases like team player — it isn't hard to pick something less clumsy and upsetting, but then you might not realize it's a threat which is the whole point!

IV. Mind Tricks Don't Work On Me, Only Status

Status absolutely fascinates me. I believe that is drives much more behaviour than even the acquisition of money.

This theme emerges everywhere I read deeply. Keith Johnstone's seminal work on improvised theatre, Impro, opens with a chapter on status dynamics.

The psychological difficulty of the status swings afforded by randomness-driven fields such as academia is a core theme in Taleb's The Black Swan..

While I like Snowflake as a piece of software, it is probably not a high priority to move to it at most large companies.
It's just a really good data warehouse, you absolute maniacs, it isn't the cure for cancer, why the fuck is it valued at $53B?
Because everyone is buying it, and this has to be driven by non-technical leadership because there aren't enough technical leaders to drive that sort of valuation.

if you buy Snowflake then you're allowed to get onto stages at large venues and talk about how revolutionary Snowflake was for your business, which on the surface looks like a brag about Snowflake, but is actually a brag about the great decisions you've been making and the wealth you can deploy if someone becomes your friend.

And the audience is full of people that are now thinking "If I buy Snowflake, I can be on that stage, and everyone will finally recognize my brilliance".

It is a bribe, straight up, and done in such a way that everyone understands that further bribes are available for anyone willing to be enthusiastic about something they don't understand. (MLM)

Matt Stoller has written at some length about how government purchasing is heavily driven by award acquisition, and it all rounds out to "this is discount Illuminati bullshit".

The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can't withdraw the money directly, so they have to spend the organization's capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else at a really, really bad exchange rate. It really is embezzling without the charm of efficiency. We'd be better off letting them withdraw $1M instead of forcing them to spend $30M so that your competitor offers them a $1M raise.

V.
If that sounds dystopian, it is! But it helps to remember that many of us are, broadly speaking, living in an era of unprecedented wealth, and that is only possible because some things work. (Most Successful Companies Get Just One Thing Right)

Things working means that there are non-fraudulent sectors of the economy, it just takes some serious looking to find the people in those sectors, and unfortunately a willingness to bury the dream of becoming a full-time employee for thirty years and never having to make course adjustments to your career trajectory.

Real work is possible! I've seen it!