[lwo32k]

The "best" programmer you work with can be fired on any day of the week if corporate wonderland doesn't hit its quarterly numbers. They know this and the ones who survive get quite good at getting others fired, especially people better than them.

I stopped caring too much about who the best in the room was after 7-8 rounds of this. As Nietszche would say these are not Ubermensches but the last men in a nihilistic swamp. Creatures who have attacked and destroyed older moral frameworks without replacing them with anything new. For their own comfort and survival.

The kind of people who pretend they have mastered complexity, but in reality its just survival theater and political/power games. Ubermensches haven't emerged yet.

[user453]

You misunderstand the übermensch. It's not a kind of person, not some state you can achieve. Rather, it's the future potential of humanity, Nietzsche's suggestion for a new guiding star to give purpose and meaning. You can also view it as an inversion of the christian god; god is our father, created us, lives above us, while we create the übermensch through our actions. God exists in some seperate dimension/layer and christianity tells you to look up, away from the material world, while the übermensch, as the result of your and everyone elses actions, focuses you on your actual, physical life.

[ainllauh]

    The opposite of the overman [Übermensch] is the last man: I created him at the same time with that. Everything superhuman appears to man as illness and madness. You have to be a sea to absorb a dirty stream without getting dirty.

— eKGWB/NF-1882,4[171]

[rootsudo]

Unfortunately highly relatable.