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, dampen innovation, and destroy otherwise-flourishing companies in the name of short-term market gains that benefit only the investor class. 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, a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction with their products. Since 2009, Facebook’s core products have reliably become more profitable as they decay, with every founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired — including Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp — leaving the company and almost immediately talking about how much it sucked.
