Jay Thoden van Velzen ☁️​🛡️​May 24, 2025

As a result, the higher you get up in an organization, the further you get from the customer, the problem you've solving, and any of the actual work, and the higher up you get, the more power you have to change the conditions of the business.

On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget further vibes, where managers only kind-of-sort-of understand what's going on, and the more vague one's understanding is, the more likely you are to lean toward what's good, or easy, or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Show threadNeil Carpenter 

@jaythvv It's important to find ways of listening. When I started at Microsoft in 1997, nobody listened much to the support organization -- the wins that we had were hard fought and always at a remove or two.

By 2001, that had started to shift and we were having regular meetings with PMs and engineering leaders. I owned supportability for NetBIOS browing at Microsoft, which was a technology that MSFT had publicly said it was deprecating in 1999. (I'm still not sure which sin I was being punished for...)

I was sitting in a meeting when a VP of engineering expressed a desire to just rip it out of Windows and be done with it. I had to speak up and point out that every enterprise backup solution in the market at the time relied on NetBIOS browsing and that killing the feature would break everybody's backups, everywhere.

Thankfully, the feature lived on long enough that nothing significant broke when it finally was killed.

May 24, 2025 at 9:31pmWeb