She was let go not because of her own incompetence, failure or not fitting in, but purely out of rushed budget cuts (budgets were finalized, finalized again, and then they realized it's still not good enough).
The reason for those cuts, in this particular instance, was not the overwhelming rise of AI and/or getting more firing power for data centers, it was very clearly a long-visible path of failure two levels above, where one particular person continued to wreak havoc up over the past few years, and, ultimately, caused this cul-de-sac disaster.
The person at the center of this all is an older dude who consistenty has been on the wrong side of any decision he's made. I've only heard of a few things as it is (literally) none of my business, but it's been nothing but chaotic and ill-advised choices. He moved into this role from failing elsewhere, leaving the chaos there behind him, and over the past two years, now has caused yet another disaster in this new role.
My question is, and sort of the point of this post (which I understand is entirely philosophical): how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters? While her entire team (30+) has been let go now as a result of it all, the person who ran this into the ground continues onwards in the business?
They even made her fire and break the news to most of her team in weekly chunks recently, before telling her she's of course, also done.
I used to work for a big five too, but have been self-employed for over a decade now, so I may be too far out to understand, but it just puzzles me how certain people always manage to stay untainted admist the chaos they've caused, at the cost of everyone else. This used to be a thing I've heard over and over again from friends at Google, but it really seems to be very consistent thing elsewhere, too.
They're clearly not smart people, is it ruthlessness? Are they aware of the disaster they're navigating into and plan well ahead? It's a mystery to me, and it just can't be healthy for these companies to allow such folks to continue onwards.
I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.
Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.
[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/
We are onboarding resources We are cutting resources We are shifting resources
The reason this is so important, both in government and in private business, is that these people decide nothing, until you get to the very top. And the ones at the very top are terrified of actually making any decision. They're at the top and what they're currently doing obviously brought them there. A change? Seriously? They carry out decisions from above them. The reason they want people who deflect blame from the decisions is, yes, to protect themselves, but also to make sure the person they work for can protect themselves, after forcing the wrong decisions downwards.
Companies, and governments, hold on to ideas decades (and governments: centuries) after they've lost their usefulness. You want to get far in education? You find a way to explain why knowledge of Latin determines success in life in 2026, and you learn to make this argument without giving the slightest hint it's not your actual opinion, without insulting Latin teachers, and without insulting administrators.
The problem is, of course, that if you chose the sane option, that Latin is about as important in 2026 as the remaining 2 years in the career of the long-since-senile senior education minister are likely to be ... you will not have any further need to worry about managing up.
Which is why they also seem to focus so much on protecting their position.
It explains a lot, frankly.
Although those slippery people will just begin to perform for the AI as well.
It's not: I've been involved in quite a few projects that get abandoned, (or otherwise miss their target) for one reason or another. There's a few things that you (or your partner) can do to protect yourself.
Most important: Make sure that your role (as an engineer) in your company is in the most critical part of the company as you can handle. When budgets get cut, it's not the best "crank turner" who keeps their job; its the people in the most critical roles for products (and projects and processes) that the company no longer can fund. (Note that this isn't foolproof, because foolish management can still goof and let you go.) (Note that in large companies, this is much harder because you can become critical in a niche that the company decides to divest from. To handle this, move into a subsidiary that would be sold as a unit.)
Secondly: Understand the business cycle. All products (and projects and processes) have a lifetime, and at a certain point they are "done." (As in, not worth investing in paying the best crank turner or the most critical person to keep working on it.) When you smell this happening, let it be known that you're open to severance when the budget gets cut. It's always easiest to let go of the person who's willing to take severance because they're ready for a change in scenery.
Next: Make sure you can get a feel for how the product (project, process, ect,) is actually used. You might have turned the crank really well, but if no one is using the result, it's time to be proactive and move on.
Finally: Learn to judge your management, and build relationships with your boss's boss. This will give you a lot more insight into the company so you can learn when to move on or how to position yourself in the most critical part of the company.
There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. And in a crisis you'll find out how they're different real quick.
It’s definitely a set of skills.
Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.
Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.
Is it just? No - it's just the nature of work.
=> https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
Unless this is an autonomous agent doing some engagement work thingy. Which the tone + story sounds like.
Dang DAAAAAANG
Heeeeelp, the robots are at it again
(p.s., my poor English should actually quickly give away that I'm even too lazy to auto-correct, that's the last thing AI will take from me, ha!)
Because it's hard work and it's easier to let someone else bear the costs.
Maybe it is the nature of how failure is expressed at that level, to know a team of 30 has been let go and is not available as your extended arm to execute anymore. So, where it manifests as a job loss at a level lower, it is merely a limitation of power for them.
This is not my experience. People who are in positions of power, e.g. managers, are the kind of people who are incapable of admitting fault. They can't lose face so the shit is rolled downhill. It's narcissism.
Goal displacement -> Goal displacement occurs when an organization or individual shifts focus from original objectives to secondary goals, often prioritizing procedures, metrics, or internal processes over intended outcomes.
In large corps, people who are good at staying in a company, and people who are good at serving the company's objectives are typically two different skillsets. And one of those skillset helps you stay inside the company more than the other.
And assuming they have the common good in mind is of course ridiculous.
Case in point: budget cuts and layoffs are not fundamentally speaking failures from a business perspective. Sometimes, an executive just wants the money spent elsewhere, on some shiny new project. Often enough, failures to produce expected revenue do not have unambiguous scapegoats. Frequently, executives just suck at oversight - determining for themselves how things are going instead of letting their direct reports control the narrative and tell them how things are going.
There are further reasons: the consequences are harder for mid-level fires than for low-level fires. For one, there are much fewer open positions the more senior of a title you expect, and termination may simply result in early retirement. The personal consequences are worse compared to firing people with less seniority, who are perceived as having many more jobs open to them to find (for the sake of argument, leave aside for the moment the continued enshittification of hiring processes and actually getting hired anywhere, for any job). This is important both internally - executives don't want junior employees to perceive promotions as notice they'll soon be terminated - and externally, as disgruntled ex-employees have more influence on bad-mouthing their ex-employer if they are more likely to belong to the same upper socioeconomic groups. Firing 30 lower-level employees, by contrast, doesn't have the same effect on internal morale, or on external reputation among executive peers (just look at how many layoffs happened in the last few years).
The advice for most people is the same, because employment stability is an illusion:
>> They're clearly not smart people
Nope, they're cunning and if it offers you any solace they usually lead miserable lives which is also a natural outcome.
2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job.
3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.
Hence, our current enshittification trend
Well, being at the top of the org chart in the first place is naturally insulating. But since HN is a forum attached to a startup fund, I wanted to put two cents in for how this happens even when there’s no incompetence.
Before I do that, I’ll be clear that I’ve personally seen incompetent execs make massive mistakes and survive. Working for a game studio acquired by Disney for a decade, we had a new one every 2 or 3 years and they’d shut down studios on a whim just to make their Excel sheets look good. One closed our small research division one day because he didn’t see revenue. He got reamed by the board for it and whined the reaming had been the worst day of his career. Boo hoo. But didn’t get fired. Disney tried to shut down the studio on the heels of a billion dollars in profit from this studio because they couldn’t figure out how to make a sequel or think of a new game, and because there were was some big tax incentive to getting the hundred or so people off the payroll. It seemed short sighted in the extreme.
Anyway, the complete answer to your question also needs to acknowledge that planning business is difficult, and whole companies and departments both fail all the time. As a worker, we don’t always see how the sausage is made and where the income is coming from, but management can be pretty messy, it’s not clockwork and people can’t predict the future. There are a lot of reasons that departments or companies can be closed for no fault by anyone, worker or manager. And, while there are plenty of incompetent decisions made, it’s also true that sometimes best effort managing still results in people losing jobs. In those cases, it’s possible and occasionally the right thing to do to keep a manager who tried hard to save things, even if they couldn’t. And there’s a gray area, and a lot of narrative, in between competence and incompetence too. I have no doubt in your case there was incompetence, but whether the disaster was self-inflicted or was even a disaster is viewed differently from the top. They might be talking about it as having averted a larger disaster.
But yes you're right it really depends on power dynamics.
Suppose some top executive has a choice - do something right for long term success of a company vs something sketchy and detrimental but get huge yearly bonus in the pocket.
Are you rock solid you yourself would always go with the right thing?
To your general question, I feel it's a variation of the "why do bad things happen to good people", and philosophically we (humans) do not have a satisfying answer that I've ever arrived at, especially if you're not religious :(
To your more specific question, it seems that like myself and probably many of us here on HN, you approach large corporations as a meritocracy and you assume that key skills / merits are the ones that produce, create, support, deliver to customers, etc. It is my observation that these are loosely correlated with corporate success. There is a specific set of skills that are more associated with corporate success, including crafting your perception/eminence/image with key people, networking, being aware or appearing to be aware of the big picture, strategy, finances, and true goals/product of your company, as well as clever career management. I find I personally am intelligent enough but not smart enough / "something enough" (perhaps ruthlesness, to your point; I'm literally having conversations with my therapist on how to be more Machiavelian - I know and can see actions that would benefit my career and therefore my family who I love, but struggle to actually implement them because they do not align with my internal goals/values/approach) to aggressively pursue that skillset and corporate success.
One of the things I've observed in myself and others: We assume it's our job to do a good job, and our bosses' job to notice and reward a good job. In North American corporate, that rarely works, particularly in remote, fast changing scenarios. Your boss is a human being and will notice some people & activities, and not notice some people & activities. If you care about your career, "Managing Up", taking control of your career and image in the way that your corporation requires (not "the way that I think should work in ideal world":) is, for better or for worse, key success criteria.
Note: I would NOT fall into the easy trap of saying "These are not smart people"; that leads to underestimation / expecting results from them which differ from reality. They may or may not score highly on a standardized IQ test, they may or may not have the same kind of intelligence and knowledge as you value, but clearly they are "smart" in some specific ways, and clearly very practical/useful ones.
All the best to you and your partner!
The overall problem can be summarised as we don't live in a meritocracy.
Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.
So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".
To be less reductive, companies are owned by capitalists and they prefer autocracy for obvious reasons.
So to answer your question "Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?" They don't. People just don't post about it when a bad boss gets pushed out or some incompetent on their team gets offed in a round of layoffs that they survive.
It is the oldest story in any kind of human community, from tribes to empires, from marriages to enterprises: they're ruled through is politics not justice.
Meritocracy and justice is just the order that we want the world to be, the ideal state. Its entropy and normal state is politics and this as nothing to do with justice.
break everything up, "official" lines of comunication, phone, email, that are essentialy black holes, then a maze of second, third,fourth level worklings who always refer you to someone else, who may respond with company and title in a voice call from a private number, reluctantly giving a first name. In person meetings with the brass that are glad handing and zero information, second level meetings where YOU sign contracts giving them vague authority and power. Further in person meeting with underlings who are very agressive and commit to nothing. Fucking shark tanks, right, and you are everybodys, chum. But if need be they will quickly turn on there own and put someone on the hook. There is more, a whole lot more, but non of this is new, or any particular mystery, just exceptionaly out of controll right now.
Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.
Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.
Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.
There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.
Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.
Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.
Talk to an expert on relationships.
Corporations are made of people and the structures can be very dysfunctional. I’ve seen it and I’m sure it’s common elsewhere, many decisions are made with no actual rational understanding of “economic sense”. An example is firing someone to save costs but needing to then hire 2 new people to replace them, increasing communication costs and having to pay a training cost.
I recognize myself a long time ago in your partner, so much mental energy wasted to the game where I could instead just clock in, do some stuff, clock out and spend the rest of my energy where it matters: at home, with friends, cooking, working on personal projects. Let the insane corporate climbers light themselves on fire to keep management warm, I'll derive my worth elsewhere.