Paging Charity! How can engineering leaders avoid becoming Bond villains?
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Charity Majors responds to a question about authoritarian leadership in tech, arguing that the industry doesn't celebrate authoritarianism so much as it cultivates it through hero worship of successful founders. She makes the case that good leadership starts with winning at business — understanding strategy, product-market fit, and organizational alignment — not just prioritizing team feelings. Empathetic leaders can outperform sociopaths, but only if they're also skilled business operators. For managers aspiring to director roles, she advises learning the business deeply, seeking internal promotion, and building genuinely high-performing teams rather than cheerleading. She uses Twitter's collapse under Musk as a cautionary tale: comfortable cultures that don't run the business with excellence eventually lose the right to run it at all.
