Well said. I rocketed up the chain early in my career for inventing some truly innovative stuff (that's been published in top conferences). Then I fought against stupid shit. I spoke out. I had strong technical opinions. Eventually I was pushed aside and my career has tanked (but rest-and-vest baby...except I'm slowly recovering and still seen as a company intellectual resource). Meanwhile I watch all the mediocre managers keep rising who are "yes, sir" and don't make any enemies. They don't do shit except follow the status quo and build their empires.
This isn't just tech per se, if you look around you in society that's literally how countries are governed.
Basically a lot of people have promoted weak leaders all the way up to premierships and presidencies and have pushed out anyone that could potentially criticize them. The result is this shitshow we're in right now.
For anyone reading this deep in the thread: read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. A variations of a few simple rules result in virtually all models of government. And none of them involve technical competence.
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 112-113
Scholars who have quoted Key’s colorful phrase have mostly failed to note that he used it derisively. “The Founding Fathers,” he wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”
In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times
Even before it could be said that the national Government could do much of anything to improve their condition…. Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.
