[foltik]

It’s so jarring to hear this reality-detached writing style coming from someone who’s otherwise a great systems thinker.

This is like my worst nightmare as a systems engineer: that years of navigating bureaucracy at a place like Intel slowly brainrots me into prioritizing politics and self-promotion over the technical truth.

I hope this is just PR reflex and not an actual loss of grounding.

[webdevver]

imo the engineers who stay in their nuts-and-bolts lane - those are the ones who are at a real risk of 'brainrot', who sometimes at the ripe age of 50+ continue to misunderstand what motivates management, the executives, seemingly unable to model anyones minds other than their own (or that of a very predictable entity, like a computer.)

infact, you could argue that politics is in some sense the biggest, most complex dynamic system of them all, and thus poses the greatest 'engineering' challenge. and it invariably involves promotion of oneself, or an idea, or a certain direction, with real trade-offs that have positive impact on some people, and negative on others.

[foltik]

Sure, some PR and self-promotion are usually required to move things forward. That doesn’t make it a grand or particularly deep problem, and certainly not the primary thing to optimize for.

[watwut]

None of what you wrote is contradiction to what OP wrote. They found self delusion, emptiness of claims and outrught lies of certain class of people to not be worth of respect.

Just explained it can be fun and involves trade offs. Well ok, but these claims of saving world are still empty bullshit. It is perfectlt fine to be aware of that fact.

We dont have to pretend grandiose claims of Musks and Altmans and Bezos and whatever management trues to please them are reflections of their search of positive impact.