Ask HN: Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?

I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.

I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.

Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. And in a crisis you'll find out how they're different real quick.

There's a fallacy that we all fall into: We think that our job is about turning the crank, and that the best crank turners will stay around the longest.

It's not: I've been involved in quite a few projects that get abandoned, (or otherwise miss their target) for one reason or another. There's a few things that you (or your partner) can do to protect yourself.

Most important: Make sure that your role (as an engineer) in your company is in the most critical part of the company as you can handle. When budgets get cut, it's not the best "crank turner" who keeps their job; its the people in the most critical roles for products (and projects and processes) that the company no longer can fund. (Note that this isn't foolproof, because foolish management can still goof and let you go.) (Note that in large companies, this is much harder because you can become critical in a niche that the company decides to divest from. To handle this, move into a subsidiary that would be sold as a unit.)

Secondly: Understand the business cycle. All products (and projects and processes) have a lifetime, and at a certain point they are "done." (As in, not worth investing in paying the best crank turner or the most critical person to keep working on it.) When you smell this happening, let it be known that you're open to severance when the budget gets cut. It's always easiest to let go of the person who's willing to take severance because they're ready for a change in scenery.

Next: Make sure you can get a feel for how the product (project, process, ect,) is actually used. You might have turned the crank really well, but if no one is using the result, it's time to be proactive and move on.

Finally: Learn to judge your management, and build relationships with your boss's boss. This will give you a lot more insight into the company so you can learn when to move on or how to position yourself in the most critical part of the company.

> how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

Because they don't believe the disasters were inflicted by them.

The other aspect is managing the manager. This comes in form of delivering something what their manager needs. So, their manager has a goal of reducing costs they will act as a yes-man despite their abilities. They might come up with ridiculous ideas and convince their managers that it is a good idea because they are the ones executing on the ground. If and when it fails the issue isn't because the idea was bad it was because circumstances.

Also, it is a fallacy that many engineers think being smart is enough. We tend to debate efforts - how much work we put in - but for management, company and even shareholders the outcome matters. People who figure out sooner thrive a lot.

If an army general orders a disastrous assault that completely fails, they might get demoted or relieved of command. The infantry that were ordered to charge the machine guns pay a much higher price (as do the junior officers that lead the charge). Hell, perhaps nowerdays they'll have a 'blameless postmortem' to 'learn lessons' and there won't even be a demotion.

Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.

Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.

Is it just? No - it's just the nature of work.

Have you read the Gervais Principle?

=> https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

This is a more general question, which is "Why don't people take accountability for their actions?"

Because it's hard work and it's easier to let someone else bear the costs.

Those people who are responsible for the chaos? They're also the people who gets to decide who is punished for the chaos.

Just to add another item to the list others have brought up :

Goal displacement -> Goal displacement occurs when an organization or individual shifts focus from original objectives to secondary goals, often prioritizing procedures, metrics, or internal processes over intended outcomes.

In large corps, people who are good at staying in a company, and people who are good at serving the company's objectives are typically two different skillsets. And one of those skillset helps you stay inside the company more than the other.

My humble view: at high level in large firms, everything is politics. Even assuming high-level managers with the common good in mind, someone will sponsor with millions of dollars 10 useless but good-looking and inoffensive projects, just so they have the political capital to start one that is useful but may ruffle feathers. Your direct subordinate's failure is _your_ failure, and that will set back your ambitions. Peers turning against peers is frowned upon, for the same reason. And besides, you know them, maybe you even like them, the lower-level people are just anonymous faces, it's emotionally much easier.

And assuming they have the common good in mind is of course ridiculous.

Corporate world is tribal, if not feudal. Reason why the Nobles can do nothing wrong by default, and the Villagers are always the villan. If I may have a suggestion, Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a short and great perspective over these dynamics.

The higher up you go in the corporate pyramid, the more your ability to navigate politically becomes a distinct and valuable skillset beyond talent or hard work - or, more dangerously, competence.

"Power: Why Some People Have It — and Others Don’t" by Jeffrey Pfeffer is a good read on the topic.

Being ruthless can help if you are that sort of person, but it is more just a function of how large groups of humans work. You can learn to navigate politics better if you wish to keep ascending, but it is not something that comes naturally to a lot of people, especially technical types.

It can come as a shock when you realize that the world is not run by people who are smarter or more competent than you are - but that doesn't necessarily make them bad at leadership. Doubly hard realization when coupled with finding out that the corporate scythe can and will come for you at any time without regard to your past performance or dedication.

Sorry your partner got laid off. Having been in a similar place a number of times - it isn't punishment, neither is it personal or a reflection on your (her) self-worth or abilities, it is just the cold reality of business. Keep your resume fresh, don't drink too much of the corporate Kool Aid, and always take those vacation days.

1. Being too good in an organization makes you a threat to those above you.

2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job.

3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.

Sorry to hear about the job loss.

>> They're clearly not smart people

Nope, they're cunning and if it offers you any solace they usually lead miserable lives which is also a natural outcome.

Great question. I think these people are good at spinning narratives _and_ the people above are not doing the work they should be doing to check whether the narrative checks out: I think good leaders (and every manager below) should be doing inverse skip and skip-skip meetings often enough to have a good sense of whether what their reports are saying is accurate. But most dont

The purpose of a system is what the system does. -- Stafford Beer

This trend in corporate America is called failing upwards

It is an interesting subject - but so much have been written about it in the past. I would like to read what are the new angles.

And for the past discussions see:

HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION LINKS

THE GERVAIS PRINCIPLE

* The Gervais Principle Main Submission (October 2009) https://ycombinator.com

* The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office" (August 2024) https://ycombinator.com

MORAL MAZES

* Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work (February 2020) https://ycombinator.com

* Moral Mazes and Emotional Labor Comment (October 2019) https://ycombinator.com

MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH

* Meditations on Moloch Systems Discussion (April 2019) https://ycombinator.com

* Meditations on Moloch Main Discussion (March 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Context from Scott Alexander's Blog (June 2025) https://ycombinator.com

THREADS INTERSECTING MULTIPLE CONCEPTS

* Best books for dealing with workplace politics and dishonesty? (December 2020) https://ycombinator.com

* Analysis comparing Gervais Principle to Moral Mazes (April 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Ask HN: Stories of political intrigue in large companies (December 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Things I want to say to my boss (December 2025) https://ycombinator.com

The people who do good work are typically orthogonal to the people who spend all their time bragging about what they did and taking credit for other people's work, and blaming other people for their mistakes - and the squeakiest wheels get the grease.

If you compare with work that’s contracted out, it’s quite similar. When a company does poorly, it will cut its budgets and spend less, so its suppliers lose business. Whether or not anyone at the company takes the blame for it is a separate issue.

Because the executive class _is_ a class, with class solidarity. Even failure comes with a golden parachute.

Never work tirelessly for anything that isn’t yours.

You're under the assumption that corporations (especially big ones) are some form of meritocracy. Don't believe the bullshit, it's all about politics, timing, and luck (in that order).

Publicly-traded companies always put short-term profits over anything else; if they don't demonstrably do that, the leadership exposes themselves and the company to shareholder lawsuits. I've been at a BigCorp where layoffs happen at the end of each quarter to look good on the balance sheet, only to hire most of those people back. Rinse and repeat.

Again, this has nothing to do with "doing a good job" or being a model employee. The days of working hard and getting rewarded are dead and buried, and the MBAs are the ones with the guns and shovels.

My question is if this power dynamic is different in organizations with strong unions?

> how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

Well, being at the top of the org chart in the first place is naturally insulating. But since HN is a forum attached to a startup fund, I wanted to put two cents in for how this happens even when there’s no incompetence.

Before I do that, I’ll be clear that I’ve personally seen incompetent execs make massive mistakes and survive. Working for a game studio acquired by Disney for a decade, we had a new one every 2 or 3 years and they’d shut down studios on a whim just to make their Excel sheets look good. One closed our small research division one day because he didn’t see revenue. He got reamed by the board for it and whined the reaming had been the worst day of his career. Boo hoo. But didn’t get fired. Disney tried to shut down the studio on the heels of a billion dollars in profit from this studio because they couldn’t figure out how to make a sequel or think of a new game, and because there were was some big tax incentive to getting the hundred or so people off the payroll. It seemed short sighted in the extreme.

Anyway, the complete answer to your question also needs to acknowledge that planning business is difficult, and whole companies and departments both fail all the time. As a worker, we don’t always see how the sausage is made and where the income is coming from, but management can be pretty messy, it’s not clockwork and people can’t predict the future. There are a lot of reasons that departments or companies can be closed for no fault by anyone, worker or manager. And, while there are plenty of incompetent decisions made, it’s also true that sometimes best effort managing still results in people losing jobs. In those cases, it’s possible and occasionally the right thing to do to keep a manager who tried hard to save things, even if they couldn’t. And there’s a gray area, and a lot of narrative, in between competence and incompetence too. I have no doubt in your case there was incompetence, but whether the disaster was self-inflicted or was even a disaster is viewed differently from the top. They might be talking about it as having averted a larger disaster.

I think it’s the same pattern playing out as in politics - even the dumbest people get too powerful, too lucky or too influential to even realize the problem. But its often beneficial to large enough amount of bad actors who play along and support.

Suppose some top executive has a choice - do something right for long term success of a company vs something sketchy and detrimental but get huge yearly bonus in the pocket.

Are you rock solid you yourself would always go with the right thing?

The easiest (but not necessarily best or most effective) way to survive corporate life is to give your boss quiet, make your peers happy, and your direct reports miserable. Therefore, naively, people look very different depending on whether they are your direct reports, your peer, or your boss. Your partner is below him looking up; he looks very different from the standpoint of the executive looking down at him.

Case in point: budget cuts and layoffs are not fundamentally speaking failures from a business perspective. Sometimes, an executive just wants the money spent elsewhere, on some shiny new project. Often enough, failures to produce expected revenue do not have unambiguous scapegoats. Frequently, executives just suck at oversight - determining for themselves how things are going instead of letting their direct reports control the narrative and tell them how things are going.

There are further reasons: the consequences are harder for mid-level fires than for low-level fires. For one, there are much fewer open positions the more senior of a title you expect, and termination may simply result in early retirement. The personal consequences are worse compared to firing people with less seniority, who are perceived as having many more jobs open to them to find (for the sake of argument, leave aside for the moment the continued enshittification of hiring processes and actually getting hired anywhere, for any job). This is important both internally - executives don't want junior employees to perceive promotions as notice they'll soon be terminated - and externally, as disgruntled ex-employees have more influence on bad-mouthing their ex-employer if they are more likely to belong to the same upper socioeconomic groups. Firing 30 lower-level employees, by contrast, doesn't have the same effect on internal morale, or on external reputation among executive peers (just look at how many layoffs happened in the last few years).

The advice for most people is the same, because employment stability is an illusion:

  * Love your calling, not your employer.
  * Live below your means. The key challenge in life is how to desire less.
  * Stay in touch with recruiters and take an interview loop at least once a quarter.
  * Have a backup plan. It doesn't need to be fleshed out, just real enough in your mind.

My feeling is that modern US corporate structure/attitude is a direct extension of the Norman conquest of England and it's power structure. Those at the top are not 'of' those below them. All below them, along with all markets, are purely their for their exploitation and benefit. Corporate officers are given a charter by the owners, just as the Sheriff of Naught Ingham was granted a charter, to give them power to do maximum extraction at the owners benefit, not because that sort of organizational structure is optimal. The executive offices and the people in them are very much seen/treated/behave in the same was as the castle on the hill and the Norman lords. Isolated from impacts. Systems/walls/castles to protect THEM from their actions but to punish those below who don't fall in line.

First and foremost, massive sympathies on your partner's plight. It sucks, it's stressful, and has real world impacts.

To your general question, I feel it's a variation of the "why do bad things happen to good people", and philosophically we (humans) do not have a satisfying answer that I've ever arrived at, especially if you're not religious :(

To your more specific question, it seems that like myself and probably many of us here on HN, you approach large corporations as a meritocracy and you assume that key skills / merits are the ones that produce, create, support, deliver to customers, etc. It is my observation that these are loosely correlated with corporate success. There is a specific set of skills that are more associated with corporate success, including crafting your perception/eminence/image with key people, networking, being aware or appearing to be aware of the big picture, strategy, finances, and true goals/product of your company, as well as clever career management. Even many people who are aware of the required skillset, and are in principle capable of acquiring said skillset, struggle to put it into practice - it could be due to ethical frameworks, personal preferences, or just a hope/belief that "it shouldn't be this way" (For better or worse, I largely count myself in that group).

One of the things I've observed in myself and others: We assume it's our job to do a good job, and our bosses' job to notice and reward a good job. In North American corporate, that rarely works, particularly in remote, fast changing scenarios. Your boss is a human being and will notice some people & activities, and not notice some people & activities. If you care about your career, "Managing Up", taking control of your career and image in the way that your corporation requires (not "the way that I think should work in ideal world":) is, for better or for worse, key success criteria.

Note: I would NOT fall into the easy trap of saying "These are not smart people"; that leads to underestimation / expecting results from them which differ from reality. They may or may not score highly on a standardized IQ test, they may or may not have the same kind of intelligence and knowledge as you value, but clearly they are "smart" in some specific ways, and clearly very practical/useful ones.

All the best to you and your partner!

They are accidentally smart. They have stumbled across the behavioral patterns that get rewarded without consciously thinking much about how to find the behavioral patterns that get rewarded. Which is mostly getting the people above you in the power pyramid to like you, and no relationship to technical skill.

The overall problem can be summarised as we don't live in a meritocracy.

Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.

You clearly care way too much about what is just a job. 15 years at a big 5 you should be quite wealthy. A layoff is just a vacation. I say this not to be glib but because your anger here belies a way of thinking that is unhealthy and unproductive. Work at a big company is just a random coinflip each layoff cycle regardless of anything you can control. Everyone should internalize and prepare for this to the point that being layed off is met with just a shrug.

I don't believe that your description of your partner or your partner's boss have any relation whatsoever to objective reality. You even admit this yourself - "I've only heard of a few things as it is (literally) none of my business, but..." The only thing I can take from this is that someone you like got fired and someone you didn't like did the firing.

So to answer your question "Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?" They don't. People just don't post about it when a bad boss gets pushed out or some incompetent on their team gets offed in a round of layoffs that they survive.

I am surprised that you even ask this question. Do you expect it to be different?

It is the oldest story in any kind of human community, from tribes to empires, from marriages to enterprises: they're ruled through is politics not justice.

Meritocracy and justice is just the order that we want the world to be, the ideal state. Its entropy and normal state is politics and this as nothing to do with justice.

here is the system.

break everything up, "official" lines of comunication, phone, email, that are essentialy black holes, then a maze of second, third,fourth level worklings who always refer you to someone else, who may respond with company and title in a voice call from a private number, reluctantly giving a first name. In person meetings with the brass that are glad handing and zero information, second level meetings where YOU sign contracts giving them vague authority and power. Further in person meeting with underlings who are very agressive and commit to nothing. Fucking shark tanks, right, and you are everybodys, chum. But if need be they will quickly turn on there own and put someone on the hook. There is more, a whole lot more, but non of this is new, or any particular mystery, just exceptionaly out of controll right now.

I mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.

Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.

Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.

Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.

There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.

Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.

Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.

Talk to an expert on relationships.