It's a part of why Republicans actually have some grounds for calling Harris corrupt - Willie Brown's office when mayor of SF was notorious for being a pay-to-play situation, she worked there (and even dated him).

  > Or, as Supervisor Aaron Peskin described it, “mind-boggling.” He said
  > the “city family” that grew up under Mayor Willie Brown, continued
  > working under Mayor Gavin Newsom, flourished under Mayor Ed Lee and
  > stayed on under Breed “were all doing favors for one another and
  > living in their own little bubble.”
  >
  > “They all convinced each other that they were like a family, and
  > family can give gifts to their children,” Peskin said, noting those
  > same family members took the city’s required annual ethics training
  > like everybody else and must have known what they were doing was
  > wrong.
  >
  > “They just got too cozy over too much time, and they lost their way,”
  > Peskin said. “Now I have to look at everybody going, ‘Are you a
  > crook?’ It’s not the way I want to see the world.”

It's trivial to find articles about the conflicts of interests between Brown and PG&E, I think even to this day he still represents their interests.

how old are you?

I often fall into this role, and historically have made some quite large impacts because of it. But I take issue with TFA's position of doing nothing being a critical component of being effective and available to attack these problems.

I'm practically never doing nothing when employed. But I'm often looking like nothing is being done through the lens of ticket-oriented accounting. If the author means doing nothing by the metrics, ok, I can agree with them there. But it better be because you're too busy down in the weeds becoming one with the product and grokking details of created messes past and present.

If you're literally doing nothing, you won't be positioned well to understand the implementation details, and you won't be positioned well politically/socially within the org to thrive and be genuinely appreciated by your peers.

This is a complicated precarious path to take if you have any intention of lasting in the org. It's difficult to not accumulate enemies with every win you take at the expense of everyone else being too busy being the substrate you're scavenging. Management and your peers must come to appreciate you're filling a critical void, but the void is implicit and unaccounted for, making this tricky - it's built on trust.

They can see your selective work as exploitation while they take up the slack you create. From their perspective they're overworked because people like you don't do enough to balance the workload.

You need to be recognized as an enabler, the one minding the details, omnipresent - not AWOL doing nothing. Catching the fuckups early, preventing incidents while the green-field chaos monkeys carry on. The win is for the team, and you're effectively being a self-directed janitor cleaning messes nobody knew existed.

The reward for this role, as it really is otherwise somewhat thankless, is the autonomy. It's a management failure when these people get put on a pedestal and promoted more than the people doing the grunt work. That creates animosity within the ranks.

disclaimer: not a manager, not a lead, but often the guy in the corner course-correcting and fixing/preventing horribly broken customer-impacting mistakes. These are just some observations based on decades of startups and in recent years FAANG experience as an SDE.

I wonder what it will be referred to as, after the dust settles?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

As a bald man my experience has been the main determining factor is how hard am I working on maintaining an athletic physique that year.

IME the manager just approves the PR themself to "bias for action", someone else will pick up the pieces

Extreme wildfire risks? let everyone else shoulder the cost, don't deny our fire insurance.

Power delivery infra costs (and associated risks, see wildfires)? don't make us actually pay for this, we're all in this together guys!

Americans in particular tend to have a highly entitled and confused "time is money" view governing their existence that enables them to do nothing except when paid by employers, which obviously results in doing absolutely nothing in retirement.

PCs were so dynamic at the time, half my paychecks were spent on discounted upgrades before I ever saw the paper. EDO ram? sign me up. 512K of pipelined burst L2 cache? yes please. HX chipset? of course. Dual socket pentium pros? I need a raise.