Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

Pause and think for a moment. What’s it like to be a Gokul or a Boland or a Fischer? You’ve seen excellent engineers and product people come and go, as your recruiters land the best new grads from every leading school. Your privileged position inside a powerful and market-leading organization exposes you to every industry trend and player, and pads your network with a roster of power and influence. Your ability to make any company’s senior management appear and deliver fawning and revealing product demos means you know everything that’s going on in your industry, down to the color of the clickable buttons in the products. And yet there you are, lips bolted like pipe flanges onto some bigwig’s ass, plodding along like an ox yoked to a grain mill, grinding the grist the big-company machine requires. Why is that? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you are without a doubt the least daring and least innovative person at your organization, because in the opportunity-rich environment in which you live, the ambitious and capable have left to pursue it. There’s a negative selection in which the cream (or whatever it is that initially rises) gets constantly skimmed off, and you are what’s left after years of continual skimming. Changing from big company A to big company B is cosmetic, as it’s of course at least a lateral move if not a step up. You learn that what matters in a big company is to avoid falling victim to firing or layoffs, and to appear important and critical to the compan...