Gamed System

I caught up with my friend M a couple of days ago. She left her FAANG job a few months ago and is now working for a large, messy company with some of the same problems she escaped from, except the culture is not nearly as toxic. Over the years, I've heard a lot of stories from M about the teams she'd been part of and the insufferable culture defined by top-down rot. Yet, people stay through their vesting schedule to make the most of a deeply miserable employment situation. Such was the case with M as well, and she was desperate to leave as soon as her vesting clock ran out. As luck would have it, she could not find a place to land for another two years after that. She often talked about how her sole accomplishment was not allowing her job to make her physically and emotionally unwell.

She'd read a post doing the rounds on LinkedIn about how leadership games the system to build and grow their territory, and the unexpected benefits to those who further that leader's cause. Her former boss was a VP as well; we'll call him C. This guy made it a point not to promote anyone at all, ever. So if you landed on his team, that was the end of the line for you. However, he made your job layoff-proof, and miraculously, that did not require that you work hard to deliver anything of value. Instead, everyone in his chain of command needed to pantomime performance to his precise direction. There had to be the appearance of slow but incremental progress, immovable obstacles that made delivery impossible, and a cadence of highly advertised miracles when this team had apparently done the humanly impossible. 

C was a master storyteller, and he did not abide people who had trouble playing their part in his precise theatrical production. M was one of those overzealous individuals who wanted to do the job they were hired and paid to do. She was not happy with the elaborate performance theater that she had to participate in every day. So she went around actually doing things, and C was deeply unhappy about it because she was actively undermining his finely tuned brinksmanship that had saved his team from a dozen rounds of layoffs over the years. M was refusing to be a team player. She was asked to stand down. The conversations were surreal and she was accused of not doing the real work of bringing the cross-functional teams along and maintaining alignment with his peer VPs. Her actions had actively undermined the complexity storyline C has been meticulosuly framing. According to M, what C had done successfully through his two-decade tenure at the company was not that different from the VP in that LinkedIn post. They were each gaming the system to optimize for their personal outcome.