Managing Up

“I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class”

“Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta, a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction with their products”

“Since 2009, Facebook’s core products have reliably become more profitable as they decay, with every founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired—including Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp—leaving the company and almost immediately talking about how much it sucked”

“Facebook had replaced Instagram’s VP of Product Kevin Weil with the former VP of Facebook News in May 2018—a man named Adam Mosseri who would over the next six years absolutely destroy everything that Systrom and his co-founder Michel Krieger had built”

“Mosseri became the head of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable business units in history while destroying its basic functionality as an app that showed you photos and videos from people you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm’s ability to interrupt what you want to see with ads or sponsored content”

“Adam Mosseri is not a creator, or an engineer, or a founder, but a designer that found a way into product management, escaping the doldrums of doing actual work into the pantheon of management”

“Mosseri, like many of the most powerful men in tech, is a glorified management consultant incapable of creating anything of note”

“according to reporting by Elizabeth Dwoskin and Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post, Altman was well-known, and I quote, ‘for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture’”

“it’s critical to note that Altman is not and was not ever an engineer or a technologist, he was a figurehead and a fundraiser that was able to convince actual academics and engineers like Durk Kingma, Wojciech Zaremba and Ilya Sutskever to do the actual work”

“Much like ChatGPT, Altman is capable only of loosely approximating the output requested, because at his core he lacks any of the substance or technical history required to do so”

“Like ChatGPT, he’s a know-nothing that, through deterministic measures completely detached from the meaning of the underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the right time”

“Musk and Altman are similar creatures—managers wearing engineering costumes, and both are credited as having ‘expertise in AI’ without actually appearing to have written a single line of code in over a decade”

“In Altman’s case, I can find little evidence of actual work and a great deal more of a guy who multiple people have tried to fire”

“This is Silicon Valley’s king. A lobbyist roleplaying as a founder. A diplomat masquerading as a technologist. A charming, capricious, abusive and untrustworthy man that has proven time and time again that his only reliable trait is that whatever happens must benefit Sam Altman”

“When the center of attention at a company isn’t really on the product but the idea of what the product could do, very little about a company’s culture is focused on building useful things for real people”

“Humane was founded by a Bethany Bongiorno, a former management consultant for PwC and Imran Chaudhri, a former ‘Director of Design’ from Apple that refers to himself as an ‘inventor’ and ‘innovator’ that was fired in 2017 for sending out an email about his planned exit from the company that suggested that Apple could no longer innovate”