I.

A few years ago, I had an annual one-on-one with the Chief Technology Officer of an employer with more than ten thousand staff.

Senior management absolutely fawned over this person — extremely politically savvy, they would say. Amazing at acquiring funding. Really cares about everyone on the team. The platform that paid my salary would not exist without their incisive mind. They're invited by multi-billion dollar companies to speak on stages about the immense success they've had deploying their products across every possible sector of the economy, and magazines would breathlessly extol their astounding virtues by placing them on lists with titles like 'Australia's Top 200 Tech Innovators!'

I had no idea what to make of this. People who I respect had only positive things to say, but I had never heard this person say anything beyond the most tepid of platitudes. Break down silos. Be more Agile. Deliver value. They had no technical background, were frankly a weaker speaker than I am, and a weaker writer, but because of the ringing endorsements I tried to understand why this person has gotten to where they are. While I was broadly aware that many people are promoted to positions they were unfit for, savvy friends saw something in this one. And I dearly wanted to understand because I was beginning to realize that either a huge amount of work is fraudulent nonsense in the style of what the late David Graeber called a "bullshit job" or I was so inexperienced that I was missing something important.

In short, what separated this titan of industry from the mere mortals? What impressed my colleagues so? What made the rest of the organization swoon over this avatar of capital, likely salaried anywhere between A$300K to A$1M, when they themselves were striking over wage negotiations?

This meeting was my chance to figure it out. One hour a year. Sixty minutes to see what their unique intelligence manifested as. I'd present some problems that weren't tractable for me as an individual contributor, which so many others had reported doing, and be blinded by their overwhelming brilliance in people management. They would stare into the soul of my problem and bestow upon me the magic words that would convince my peers to have logs that worked.

We sit down and exchange pleasantries. It starts off fine. They ask the correct questions. I raise some serious technical issues, framed in terms that are comprehensible to non-engineers, and include an outright assessment of the issues using terms like "serious, existential risk" to the work we do. I go so far as to mention that we just had an outage in some data processing that lasted a month without anyone noticing due to the poor quality of our codebase, and they adopt a very concerned expression then ask me to write a document about it for them to read, which I suppose is fair enough.

It is at this point that things begin to derail.

"Would you say that data observability is an issue?", they inquire with a tone that very clearly implies that this is a leading question.

I am immediately deeply worried. For those who are unaware¹, my specialty is building systems that move large amounts of data through companies, organize them in a way that is at least marginally less of a horrific clusterfuck than what random people without specific training will do when left to their own devices, and sometimes assist with statistics. Data observability is the high-level term that captures the ability of a business to go "Instead of downloading the data, it would appear the computers caught fire this morning. Would you like to fix this or pretend it never happened?"

The reason that I'm concerned is that the executive in front of me should not be using that term. They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren't specialized in my area, but I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don't understand. This would be like my 96-year-old grandfather asking me about Bitcoin mining—impressive if he had arrived at the question organically, but in practice I'm already dialing the bank to report a massive theft.

"...Yes," I reply hesitant, "but I think we can remedy most of that by implementing some basic testing. With some backing, I can accomplish that in a month or two."

"What do you think about Monte Carlo?"

What the fuck is Monte Carlo? I've never heard of that. I mean, I know there's a place called Monte Carlo, and I know of Monte Carlo algorithms, but there's no way this person is talking about either of those. It must be a product.

"I don't know what that is."

"I saw it on LinkedIn last night and I think it will solve our observability issues. Do you think we should get it?"

Oh. Oh no. I don't understand what exactly happened last night on LinkedIn, but I know it is dark and sad and reeks of unfulfilled wants. The executive sat before me has been marketed to. No, worse, they have been Marketed to, with a capital M.

I have a friend who is kept away from late-night telemarketing by her partner, because no matter how ridiculous the appliance is, she will become convinced that she needs it. The siren song of the Shamwow is too alluring. That is being Marketed to, and I hadn't realized until that exact moment that people will make purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with that level of thought².

"I don't think we need that," I croak, dimly aware that one wrong word could result in six months of terrible, pointless work for everyone on the team, "We can solve our problems via some simple discipline."

(The reality is that the work they had done was so poor that no product would work with it.)

We still have fifteen minutes left, and it becomes more and more apparent that the executive desperately wants to buy Monte Carlo, as desperately as my little cousins demand another go on the machines at the arcade. For the next day or so, they will wake and see Monte Carlo wherever they go, and when they close their eyes they will see the Monte Carlo sales team leering in their slumber, their tentacle sales-fingers reaching through monitors and rewiring cortices. Every word I say is potential ammunition in their case for buying this piece of software, which I know nothing about. I am nothing to the C-suite but a device that emits words that will ultimately result in being able to say "Ludic supports buying Monte Carlo".

We reach the end of the conversation, and my face hurts from the forced smile. They are doing their best to relate to some of my earlier sentiments.

"Why do you think some of the engineers are struggling?", they ask.

"I'm sure you understand exactly how it is," I lie, "it just takes a lot of work to perform at a high level, and sometimes people fall behind."

"Yes, absolutely", they laugh, "I study on LinkedIn for up to two hours a day after work sometimes³."

We are not the same.

Dazed, I leave the room and collapse into my chair. Two of the other engineers gather around to ask how it went, as time with an executive here is rare and of immense gossip value.

"We started talking about the things that I wanted, and I thought it was going well, then we somehow ended up on something else entirely. How about you two?"

"No, they just kept asking us about something called Monte Carlo. Bro, what the fuck is Monte Carlo?"

They had asked every data engineer in the department about it. Oy vey.

II.

A huge amount of the economy is driven by people who are, simply put, highly suggestible. That is to say that it is very, very easy to get them excited and willing to spend money.

Consider, for example, what it would take to get you to approach your company's lawyer and suggest software to them, totally unprompted, because you saw an advertisement last night. Scratch that, make it every lawyer at your company as each and every one of them goes "I... have never heard of that". But you just keep going because the next one might tell you that the Shamwow is an awesome product.

The answer, in all likelihood, is that no possible advertisement could get you to behave in such an embarrassing fashion. You would instead think things like "I am not a lawyer", "What the hell is this program and why do I feel fit to judge it?", and "The shame from this conversation will keep me up at night for the next five years."

At the surface level, it sounds like you have a desirable characteristic in senior leadership, and that is true in the sense that you're unlikely to waste company money. Yet statistically you are not in senior leadership at an organization with ten thousand employees, someone who buys software at random and hires Deloitte is, so what gives? Don't companies want people who aren't going to be conned into purchasing nonsense?

It turns out that there are tremendous reasons to want people like this running many organizations, and social mechanisms that move the most easily-impressed of us into positions of power, those reasons just exist at the expense of the company or society in which that person is embedded.

There is a massive industry that is built around gathering people that fit the "thinks LinkedIn is studying" profile into rooms, who also have access to organizational money, and then charging sales teams for permission to get into that room. I was dimly aware that this stuff happens, but it is now impossible from my professional profile to tell that I am one guy doing his best to write good software with a few friends, as opposed to a millionaire, which resulted in the following message:

Dear Ludic,

I saw that you are featured in an upcoming webinar as below:

A Boardroom Guide to AI: Spotting Hype and Managing Costs

Noting this, I would like to bring the below to your attention, as [REDACTED] staged this as a very successful in-person event in June of this year targeting directors.

[REDACTED] is the leading annual event for board directors from publicly traded companies across the United States, attracting directors now for the last 20 years.

Next year's event will take place at [REDACTED]

We expect around 70-80 directors to be in attendance, representing some 200+ boards.

The event is entirely in-person.

If it works for you, I would suggest a short call to discuss the specifics, including positioning Hermit Tech on the agenda (attached) with a commercial opportunity.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

With best regards,
[REDACTED]

After a quick exchange, it became apparent that the deal is as follows: I can wire them money and in exchange be granted access to the fancy room, where I would be allowed to Market to these people. I would turn up in a suit, exaggerate how successful my business is, possibly make some incredibly grotesque comments about women⁴⁵ depending on the clientele so that the male directors know that I'm one of them, and finally we will Do Business.

Money now in exchange for access to credulous people who use words like synergy with a straight face later. I have no doubt that the actual attendees would vary wildly, ranging from a few savvy people, to outright grifters, to the terminally deranged. Even the pleasant and sufficiently skeptical can feel compelled to attend because the truth is that executive compensation and funding is driven by your relationships to other people, but make no mistake, the goal of salespeople with weak products is to find the weakest minds in the audience and lay siege. They are enormously vulnerable — I know many people who fit this profile, and it is disconcerting to see people put the whammy on them. They zone out when Donald Trump is on a nearby television, eyes glazing over, and in private will say "he makes a lot of sense" without being able to repeat anything he said. They buy into things like the prosperity gospel with hardly any prompting, and can more-or-less have absolutely no ability to avoid scams — they'll happily say that they're not technical people but quantum is the future.

To quote Ed Zitron, who later on in this excellent piece quotes me, forming the mythical content promotion ouroboros:

Whatever organization that's burdened you with some sort of half-baked, half-useful piece of shit business app has done so because the people up top don't care if it's good, just that it works, and "works" can be an extremely fuzzy word. It doesn't matter that Microsoft Teams is universally-loathed and regularly threatens to crash every time you load it. A Microsoft salesperson used its monopoly power to cut your boss a deal to either bundle it with a bunch of other mediocre shit or they saw the name "Microsoft" and said "oh boy! I love Microsoft Word!" and pulled out their credit card so fast it left a gouge in their monitor.

Indeed, we've only seen one side of the coin — I get the messages aimed at sponsors, where they trust that I will don the mantle of the wolf and select the choicest morsels from the flock that they have gathered. A friend who wishes to remain anonymous sent me what the prey receives:

This is absolutely shameless. "Ensure you're guaranteed to meet and engage with an elite group in the cybersecurity space". What are the actual questions?

Do you have lots of money? Are you authorized to spend that money? They're just doing lead qualification. That's all this is. I currently run sales and marketing for about twenty hours a week — I know, I know, what have I become? — but I would not be able to ask questions this crass without hiding my face in shame.

The same person sent me the following PDF from a Melbourne-based conference which includes a sponsorship package that they call the "guy at the bar thinks you're cute and wanted to buy you this drink" package.

You can straight-up buy people tickets to attend events, and have a concierge deliver them into the eager maw of your marketing machine. I was shocked to see an absolutely trivial price tag too. A$2.5K? Even my tiny operation spent more than that last week buying hardware for one engineer — it's a rounding error to get the person that chooses what technology you're going to be using for the next five years and whether you're being laid off into my sales kill box. I just have to wave my company credit card and bellow forth a wretched miasma of lies about no-code tools and generative AI, and voilà, some of you are unemployed now!

III.

Up until now, the picture that I've painted is one of credulous people who are easily excited. But, of course, people are multifaceted, and minds can contain complex, self-deluded, and contradictory motivations.

There is a horrendous incestuousness to the sales cycle at large enterprises, certainly in the AI and data space where I work, and it is tied intricately with the way that jobs are distributed in most of the economy⁶. The main way to get a good job offer is to come recommended by someone inside of a company. Software engineering and other specialties of a technical bent (including artists, writers, etc.) have the additional barrier that our skills are testable to some degree, but this is not the case for most senior management and executive roles.

In those roles, it is essentially impossible to work out whether someone's tenure as a manager or executive was useful. Consider Elon Musk, the patron saint of dysregulated man-children — it is surprisingly difficult to get one straight story about the man and the effectiveness of his methods. I've heard stories about how he boldly decided to build a rocket from scratch when providers were inadequate and about how SpaceX's dominance is attributable to him personally stalking the halls and firing incompetents. I've heard other people say that they hide interns from him because he has a habit of firing them on the spot over irrelevant trivia, and an executive in the space sector personally told me that SpaceX succeeds despite his antics due to the work of their COO, Gwynne Shotwell. I don't have any concrete evidence for which narrative is closer to truth, or if he has ever fired an intern after a pop quiz, and that's for someone that is written about more than almost anyone on the planet.

When Johnny McManager rolls into town and assures me that he was instrumental in tweaking the widgets in a massive banking application, and that this definitely drove massive revenue for the business, what recourse do I have? Do I trust the referees he provided? Do I start cold-calling executives at the bank to try and get an assessment? Do they even know and, if they did know, would they admit that a project failed on their watch?

Slava Akmechet writes:

Company metrics have momentum and lag. Nearly all political behavior exploits these two properties. [...] So opportunists don't worry about any of that. The winning strategy is to ignore company metrics completely and move between projects every eighteen months so that nobody notices.

Or, in other words, high-level statements like "I led a successful project" mean nothing. The project may not have been successful, or was judged to be a success for political reasons, or was successful for reasons that had nothing to do with management. This is a recurring theme across many sources. Sean Goedecke, another writer here in Melbourne, writes:

I know it sounds extreme, but I think many engineers do not understand what shipping even is inside a large tech company. What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship.

And conversely, if you do not deploy your system to a working state but can someone make your VP or CEO happy, then you did ship. This sounds even stranger. How can you ship if the code doesn't work?

It's called lying, and it'll solve all your problems!

Recall that the platform I was working on previously had logging that was broken for months and was idling to the tune of half a million dollars, but it had nonetheless "shipped". And the project before that claimed the full million dollars from the sponsor, deliverable upon shipping, from the funder despite still not actual being in production several years later. This happens constantly, and may be more common than projects actually working out.

Because management in large, dysfunctional (read: typical) companies is a game about promising to ship things to people further up your chain, people are broadly incentivized to say that everything has shipped no matter what has happened unless it is impossible to lie about this easily.

What ends up developing gradually is a network of people who are selected for their ability to support convenient social narratives, and if you're going to be negative at all, you aren't allowed in the club. When someone is asked to be a team player, what is really being said is "shut the fuck up and we'll let you into the club". That is precisely why people use phrases like team player — it isn't hard to pick something less clumsy and upsetting, but then you might not realize it's a threat which is the whole point!

IV. Mind Tricks Don't Work On Me, Only Status

Status absolutely fascinates me. I believe that is drives much more behaviour than even the acquisition of money — many non-introspective people only want money because they think it will bring them respect in the eyes of others. This theme emerges everywhere I read deeply. Keith Johnstone's seminal work on improvised theatre, Impro, opens with a chapter on status dynamics. The psychological difficulty of the status swings afforded by randomness-driven fields such as academia is a core theme in Taleb's The Black Swan.

Did you know Elon Musk just got caught paying people to hit the leaderboard in games so he could lie about being so smart that he's both the CEO of all those companies and somehow crushes people at games that they spend hundreds of hours on?

While I like Snowflake as a piece of software, it is probably not a high priority to move to it at most large companies for various reasons I won't get into here. Fine, I'll get into one of them. It's just a really good data warehouse, you absolute maniacs, it isn't the cure for cancer, why the fuck is it valued at $53B?

Because everyone is buying it, and this has to be driven by non-technical leadership because there aren't enough technical leaders to drive that sort of valuation. Why would non-technicians be so focused on a database of all things, a concept so dull that it is Effective Communication 101 to try and avoid using the term in front of a lay audience? It's because if you buy Snowflake then you're allowed to get onto stages at large venues and talk about how revolutionary Snowflake was for your business, which on the surface looks like a brag about Snowflake, but is actually a brag about the great decisions you've been making and the wealth you can deploy if someone becomes your friend. And the audience is full of people that are now thinking "If I buy Snowflake, I can be on that stage, and everyone will finally recognize my brilliance".

It is a bribe, straight up, and done in such a way that everyone understands that further bribes are available for anyone willing to be enthusiastic about something they don't understand. Matt Stoller has written at some length about how government purchasing is heavily driven by award acquisition, and it all rounds out to "this is discount Illuminati bullshit".

The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can't withdraw the money directly, so they have to spend the organization's capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else at a really, really bad exchange rate. It really is embezzling without the charm of efficiency. We'd be better off letting them withdraw $1M instead of forcing them to spend $30M so that your competitor offers them a $1M raise.

And it turns out there's a market for status too! I started getting these messages after changing my title to director.

Hi Ludic,

Would you like to be interviewed by one of our journalists and talk about your work and product? :)

Xraised (www.xraised.com) is a vibrant community of industry leaders and innovators like you. We offer a comprehensive package for £99, which includes an interview with our journalist to be posted on our website, Spotify and Amazon Music, with the option to add a dedicated press release about you and your company. The content is authentic, and the potential audience is 84M readers from North America, Australia, UK and the EU.

Would you like to schedule an interview via this link? [REDACTED]

Contact us at interviews@xraised.com if you have any questions :)

[REDACTED]
Project Manager at Xraised

You can see all the confluence of all the factors above. They're targeting a demographic that exists — unwilling or unable to attract an audience by strength of quality. Desperate enough for attention to pay £99 instead of just doing some email outreach. Dunce enough to think inserting the word "authentic" makes it so, and gullible enough to think that £99 could actually reach even 1% of 84 million people. The most popular thing I've ever written has done around 2M hits, and that was enough that I can fly to almost any country in the world and have someone buy me a beer. Xraised is trying to find people that think you can purchase anything like that forty times over for £99, and those people all have employees.⁷

V.

If that sounds dystopian, it is! But it helps to remember that many of us are, broadly speaking, living in an era of unprecedented wealth, and that is only possible because some things work. Cars do work. You're on the internet right now. Things working means that there are non-fraudulent sectors of the economy, it just takes some serious looking to find the people in those sectors, and unfortunately a willingness to bury the dream of becoming a full-time employee for thirty years and never having to make course adjustments to your career trajectory. Even a great company will have people move on, or grow until it is a big company, and if it doesn't then they aren't hiring anymore so you aren't allowed in.

I'll write about it at some length in the future, but my own consultancy currently only works with startups putting together an analytics stack to conform with the requirements of an enterprise sale because, while everything in business comes with some weird incentives, startups selling to enterprise is a case where the client has immense skin in the game and failure is not acceptable. No one pays us consulting rates to fail to ship in startup land (people can fail to ship on their own, thank you very much). Real work is possible! I've seen it!

And I've so far managed to avoid becoming ensnared in the status trap by strength of will, because I am a superior being and very important executive director with the greatest team on the planet, or more humbly the strongest team in the southern hemisphere. We're going to become the strongest team in the northern hemisphere tomorrow by purchasing Monte Carlo, the best platform in the world to prepare you for becoming "AI-Ready"!

I'm very excited to talk to Olivia Miller, who Monte Carlo desperately wants me to know is a human.

What the fuck is going on?