this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Another great example of why engineers should not be in charge of people, nor people's wellbeing.
Who else is an example of this? This seems like something that comes commonly from the MBAs that cosplay as techies. And while Brin is one of the few tech leaders who actually has any claim to technical brilliance, he has now been in management far longer than he ever was in a technical role.
this almost always an MBA, buzzword(you arnt working , if you are not busy)
Generally the actual term used is technocrat.
People opposed to them would generally say they get focused on the end result and neglect the human aspect.
Where did you hear that? Technocracy means rule by specialists and technical experts. For example, in a technocracy, career bureaucrats aren’t in charge of ecological policy.
You can have a technocrat without a technocracy. There is no reason a technocrat cannot be a career burocrate.
Is this guy called a technocrat because he actually wants his engineers to rule?
This doesn't seem different than any other business dude exhorting his employees to do an extra grind for "the company mission" when it's really just for his ego and profits. Grind culture exists in law, finance, sales, etc. Anywhere that employees are not paid overtime for overworking (mostly, hourly plus commission jobs might have a low base rate and not care about the extra overtime expense).
Techies are particularly vulnerable to it as they're usually younger salaried employees who aren't as apt about demanding a personal upside if they're asked to sacrifice their personal lives for the company's benefit.
That's quite sweeping.
People like Brin may be engineers - or have roots as engineers - but the heads of these tech companies are first and foremost entitled 1%-ers, who function as businessmen more than anything else.
The problem really is not that he's an engineer - the problem is that he's an asshole.
The Venn diagram of engineers and entitled equity-seeking assholes has been becoming more and more of a circle since the mid 90s (or earlier, I would have been too young to notice )
Funny because I've worked on and off in Tech Startups since the 90s and what I've seen is the very opposite of your statement: post year 2000 Crash Tech has become more the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance (i.e. no-rules hyperspeculative) and that has been reflected on how most of the Founders and Investors are people with backgrounds in areas heavy towards Sales practices (i.e. Finance, Marketing, actual Sales people and, more in general Grifters) and very few have backgrounds in actually making things.
The Techie with an Engineering background coming up with a new Technology or twist on Technology and making a successful company out of it that was common in Tech boom of the 90s has been replaced by money-men and those whose main skillset is to find and keep investors (so, those good in spinning a good tale, not making something that actually works).
If engineers have become more equity seeking, that's because of the truly insane amount of situations over the last decade or two of people working their asses of to make a company big expecting to win big via options they got and when the company does get big the founders and investors do some kind of financial swindling to make those options worthless and the more those founders and investors are grifters and similar, the more it happens.
People demand equity because the rules around it are a lot more tight than the rules around options which are a total joke and hence those who get options as motivation often end up with nothing when the company does make it big.
I really think you fail to understand how many engineers there are out there. Or how many disciplines of them there are. Let alone that many come across stand-offish in the fields of say, Civil Engineering because they are ultimately responsible for human life, yet people want to argue with them about "overbuilding" things.
i mean kinda generalist there? are you using any piece of hardware that has an engineer as a ceo? (e.g nvidia, amd qualcomm all have ex engineers as CEOs)