(2024-04-29) Zitron Managing Up

Ed Zitron: Managing Up. Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), 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.

These vile management consultants — like Sundar Pichai and Sheryl Sandberg — and their acolytes who exhibit the same destructive traits (in particular Raghavan) are the faithful foot soldiers in the war to ruin technology products.

They didn’t build these products, and they certainly don’t use them - all they care about is market share, revenue and organizational power.

Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta (Facebook), a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction with their products.

According to a New York Times piece from 2018, Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Zuckerberg became jealous of the app’s success taking the spotlight away from that of Facebook itself

Despite Kara Swisher’s bloviating, it took TechCrunch’s Josh Constine to reveal the real reason that Systrom had left. 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.

According to Constine’s reporting, Systrom had also clashed with Chris Cox, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer of the time. Constine described Mosseri as a “Zuckerberg loyalist” who was “disappointed that he didn’t get the head of Facebook Gig” that went to Will Cathcart, who now heads up WhatsApp.

It’s important to remember that 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

While much of the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg, it’s important to understand the sheer damage that Adam Mosseri has done to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product, beset with scammy advertising and an aggressive algorithm

This is the management consultant mindset that dominates tech — trapping users in terrible experiences by monopolizing industries, then making their products worse once they know that their users can’t go anywhere. (Enshittification)

And as we speak, one of the more loathsome one of them all is rising to power. I am, of course, talking about Sam Altman.

2005, Sam Altman, a Stanford dropout, co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking app that raised over $30 million from tech incubator Y Combinator and VCs like Sequoia and NEA. Seven years later, Altman would flog Loopt to publicly-traded financial services Green Dot for a remarkable $43.4 million, despite the app’s inability to find traction or revenue. Altman got quite rich from the Loopt deal, despite the fact that a group of senior employees urged the board on two separate occasions to fire Altman for “what they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Altman would almost immediately become a partner at Y Combinator.

Altman also double-dipped in Y Combinator startups through Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack Atlman.

Altman became wildly rich during his tenure at Y Combinator, using his cult of personality and masses of connections to make early investments in companies like Gusto, Optimizely (which was acquired in 2018 for $1.16 billion), Patreon, Reddit and Asana.

explains why so little of Sam Altman’s promises about AI make sense, and why OpenAI has been so unashamed in steamrolling and plagiarizing the entire world.

Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don’t build software.

Just look at Humane, a company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to make a voice-activated AI-powered pin that ultra-popular YouTuber Marques Brownlee called “the worst product he’d ever reviewed.” (GenAI)

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.

If the tech industry wants to escape the public’s ire, it should push back against managerial poison, and talk to real people with real problems and focus on solving those before creating yet another growth-centric investor-friendly doodad.