by dvt on 5/21/25, 4:43 PM with 127 comments
by lenerdenator on 5/21/25, 5:54 PM
> We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.
Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number.
We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.
by mikestew on 5/21/25, 5:54 PM
by neom on 5/21/25, 5:54 PM
by VOIPThrowaway on 5/21/25, 6:26 PM
Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits.
Same with good customer service, environmental regulation following, and other things.
by jxjnskkzxxhx on 5/21/25, 7:23 PM
To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved.
This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.
by tim333 on 5/21/25, 7:10 PM
>The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI
The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.
by reverendsteveii on 5/21/25, 5:35 PM
by beloch on 5/21/25, 5:57 PM
by jxjnskkzxxhx on 5/21/25, 7:20 PM
I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it.
He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism.
This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.
by janalsncm on 5/21/25, 8:54 PM
by evanjrowley on 5/21/25, 6:52 PM
Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?
by jahsome on 5/21/25, 6:59 PM
I don't even know what this article is about but I'm so irritated by the insinuation people write and receive well-written emails I am too irritated to finish the article.
Communication is (beyond frustratingly) not a highly valued skill in most of corporate America.
by floydnoel on 5/21/25, 7:23 PM
wow. i've met his son David and interacted a small amount with a couple of his grandchildren. this was in very poor taste. and i really hate some of the things he was responsible for!
by cannabis_sam on 5/22/25, 12:01 AM
by abetusk on 5/21/25, 6:58 PM
At the cost of 10x in time cost? The argument is against the notion of summary?
> ... — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.
And yet the world's population probably creates loads of important yet not well-written emails. Different contexts will also require different information to be extracted, so no matter how well-written an email is, the context might determine what the relevant information is.
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI.
Really? Are written articles not meant to be "spoken aloud"? Are plays not meant to be "turned into a movie"? Who cares cares if someone can get information about media that they want to consume with a new method?
> Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."
There was no statement about requiring AI. It was about leveraging AI as a benefit.
I use email instead of snail mail. I often watch technical talk videos at 2x speed to shoot past the filler. I read books in digital format instead of their physical counterparts because of convenience and access. I read online newspaper articles, rather than holding a physical newspaper, for the same reason.
None of these require technology, they're enhanced by them.
What a piece of shit article. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. This should read "The Era of the Technical Moron".
by patrickmay on 5/21/25, 6:50 PM
I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html).
If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.
by ninininino on 5/21/25, 7:30 PM
I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not.
If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand.
If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know".
The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier.
I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.
by atxtosh on 5/22/25, 4:39 PM
by bambax on 5/21/25, 6:40 PM
That's pretty funny, but the book is actually called "Capitalism and Freedom".
by triceratops on 5/21/25, 6:01 PM