On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
xander.ai
On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
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Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#2Funny. I think I trip the filter on generally distrusting people, but not because I assume they're lying. I mostly distrust people because most people love to talk and give advice on things they aren't knowledgeable enough to be trusted on. They don't necessarily mean harm. Ray Dalio's take on this is that most individuals that give advice have low believability weighting.
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#3[flagged]
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#4Yep. I always see more psychopath-tendencies/assholes associated with MAANG megacorps. Just one example: At Habitat for Humanities build, most of the Meta people left an hour early, didn't help cleanup, and didn't communicate with the site manager. Former boss drove a white Mercedes SUV: (You already know what that means because there's a correlation of purchase to driving behavior beyond stereotypes.)
The biggest signal of narcissism: Inability to take feedback constructively. Unless they've been somewhat socialized for professional behavior, narcissists tend to react explosively and aggressively at anything other than praise.
A secondary signal of narcissism: Always having to be "right", usually by gaslighting the other person or slippery lawyering.
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#5The work culture and environemnt is an important factor here. In my recent experiences for example, an environemnt where people are constantly pitted against each other and appearing weak/not-smart can have dire consequences (e.g.: seen colleagues fret over visa issues) results in an environment where there are a lot of people with a smile on their face while holding a sharp knife behind them, waiting to stab whomever they can in the back. Loyalties and betrayals, doing things for the sake of appearances,etc...
I have also seen environemnts where all that matters getting prominent people in prominent cliques to like you. When I had more manual work, meeting your metrics exactly, not less or more, showing up on time and being friendly/chatty mattered the most.
Everyone has their personalities and I will leave it to the psychoanalysts to asess people but since the subject is specific to work environments, my opinion is that sociopathy, egocentrism and machavellianism are esentially traits you are forced to develop to make ends meet or move up the corporate ladder. These horrible perosnalities are a problem only if you have a healthy top-down environemnt and culture to begin with.
For example: work environments where people like to argue about politics every single time have egomaniacs influencing cliques. But this is tolerated by management and rewards these people.
Humility being rewarded,a "no stupid questions" culture, firmly and strongly enforcing separation between personal and professional lives and being fair to everyone (really gets under my skin when people gossip/slander, managers use back channels to dig info about candidates and bullying people) is what I consider a good work environment.
It is good for workers and it is good for productivity and the bottom-line. But people are short sighted and care about ego stroking and sociopaths become managers all the time and the problem with these people to me is that they care about things other than money and people. At work, everyone is there to make money, help the company maximize profits and do so ina sustainable way (treat coworkers and subordinates right).
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#6The work culture and environemnt is an important factor here. In my recent experiences for example, an environemnt where people are constantly pitted against each other and appearing weak/not-smart can have dire consequences (e.g.: seen colleagues fret over visa issues) results in an environment where there are a lot of people with a smile on their face while holding a sharp knife behind them, waiting to stab whomeve…
The backstabbing culture you have described is encouraged by FAANG-like companies.
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#7Yep. I always see more psychopath-tendencies/assholes associated with MAANG megacorps. Just one example: At Habitat for Humanities build, most of the Meta people left an hour early, didn't help cleanup, and didn't communicate with the site manager. Former boss drove a white Mercedes SUV: (You already know what that means because there's a correlation of purchase to driving behavior beyond stereotypes.) The biggest si…
funny where i'm from it's mostly middle-aged mom or stay at home wives driving in their white mercedes SUVs
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#8The "what to do" and "tests" sections of this article is spot on! As for the sociopath/psychopath distinction, I think both terms refer to people with a Cluster B personality disorder. Since this is such a mouthful, I just call them predators, or if I don't want to scare people: vogons.
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#9The work culture and environemnt is an important factor here. In my recent experiences for example, an environemnt where people are constantly pitted against each other and appearing weak/not-smart can have dire consequences (e.g.: seen colleagues fret over visa issues) results in an environment where there are a lot of people with a smile on their face while holding a sharp knife behind them, waiting to stab whomeve…
The backstabbing culture you have described is encouraged by FAANG-like companies.
Can you give some examples? What was the job function and approximate level of the characters in your examples?
In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies. But I have zero insight into what happens at the managerial or director levels.
Re: On Dark Triads in Silicon Valley
#10The work culture and environemnt is an important factor here. In my recent experiences for example, an environemnt where people are constantly pitted against each other and appearing weak/not-smart can have dire consequences (e.g.: seen colleagues fret over visa issues) results in an environment where there are a lot of people with a smile on their face while holding a sharp knife behind them, waiting to stab whomeve…
The backstabbing culture you have described is encouraged by FAANG-like companies.
I have seen it more in regular companies. The commom denominator is a company with low profit margins using hostile environments to squeeze out productivity.