[telltruth]

They had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.

[Bjorkbat]

He also left DeepMind because of allegations of bullying employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Suleyman). Between that, what you just brought up, and the strange PR blitz he went on to promote his book, I kind of predicted Inflection would run into major trouble well before OpenAI and Anthropic

[Workaccount2]

Some of the most damaging people I have met are people that you are absolutely enthralled with when you first get to know them.

[baq]

There’s a whole extremely famous book series on this very topic, you might have heard about it. The first volume’s title is ‘Paul is bad’ but it’s more widely known as ‘Dune’.

[rqtwteye]

That would apply probably to most famous entrepreneurs. Whatever I have read about Jobs, Musk, Gates and others, they all are very willing to abuse people to achieve their goals.

[coffeebeqn]

First impressions is a sales skill

[spaceman_2020]

True, and some of the most effective people I know haven’t been impressive when you first meet them.

I’m now extremely wary of blusteringly confident, glib talkers. Experienced a high correlation between these traits and sociopathy.

[skepticATX]

Mustafa wasn’t exactly on his best behavior at DeepMind, if the allegations are to be believed. It really is surprising that Microsoft would hire him.

[refulgentis]

It's crazy there's zero accountability for bad behavior in tech. I went through my own story at Google, and seeing them say it was vaguely bad before promoting him to VP mirrors exactly the "intervention" I saw.

The deck is completely stacked against you based on hierarchy. Behavior that a fast food manager would proactively solve in 30 seconds gets ignored in white collar tech. No one above you will even mention it - they know you can't win and they just hope you'll quietly give up.

If someone above you in the informal hierarchy is messing with you, there's massive confirmation bias if you complain. They'll spin it to whoever you complain to make you the bad guy. HR never helps - their job is to investigate, and then give the results to someone 2-3 steps above you to do something with.

The higher ups control the outcome, and they designed the power structure in the first place, their confirmation bias is accept the spin.

If you want to survive, avoid conflict 100% of the time. Let people blame you, fail reviews undeservedly.

My Google career ended from just doing exactly what I was supposed to do in order to get a 3 year delayed project done, that 4 separate VPs had been asking for all those years. I spent 6 months warning my manager fuckery was afoot. Didn't matter. TPM witnessed and defended me, didn't matter. Guy who led it hired his unqualified childhood buddy to replace me. Didn't matter. All on me. Everyone wanted to do it, and gee whillakers, refulgentis went mad and dropped the ball completely for some reason.

Of course, 6 months later they delayed the project a 4th year because they could, documenting the only downside being a strained relationship with a less influential partner team. (my orgs managers didn't realize their...unvarnished...takes were in a doc shared with all of Google)

At the end of the day, HR will funnel you into taking mental health leave -- 6 months worth, exactly long enough that an EEOC complaint can no longer be filed. (took me 6 years to realize why "disgruntled Google employee" news articles always included a bit referencing leave/6 months off as if it was a bad thing. go/mh-leave if you're at Google. You don't actually need to talk to HR, and I don't recommend going to them ever. I didn't for this, but they wouldn't have helped.)

The whole system is broken.

[toomuchtodo]

Never underestimate the power of soft/social skills.

[rqtwteye]

That’s where the real money is. Even the best technologists won’t make it very far if they don’t know how to play politics.