New Year’s Eve Confession Time
It’s December 31st, 2025. Your LinkedIn feed is drowning in “What a year! Grateful for my amazing team! Excited for 2026!” posts.
Meanwhile, you’re three drinks in, wondering why your company feels like it’s run by the cast of The Office, except Michael Scott at least had heart.
Let’s talk about what nobody admits when the champagne wears off: the wrong people in the wrong places are killing your company, and everyone’s pretending it’s fine because firing people requires paperwork and uncomfortable conversations.
The Dead Horse Theorem
The Dakota Indians had it figured out: “When you discover you’re riding a dead horse, dismount.”
Modern corporations? We get creative:
- Buy a stronger whip
- Change riders
- Form a committee to study the horse
- Visit other countries to see how they ride dead horses
- Lower standards so dead horses qualify as “living-impaired”
- Hire consultants at $400/hour to ride the dead horse
- Harness several dead horses together (“increased velocity!”)
- Promote whoever’s been riding the dead horse longest
That last one isn’t satire. That’s literally every company since 2008.
We keep catastrophically bad people in roles because firing is hard and admitting hiring mistakes is harder. So we invent new titles. “Chief Synergy Officer.” “VP of Strategic Paradigm Alignment.”
Translation: “We can’t fire them, so we gave them a title that sounds important and moved them somewhere they can’t break anything critical.”
Except they always find something critical to break.
The Pareto Rehab Residents
The Pareto Principle says 80% of results come from 20% of effort.
But nobody talks about the corollary: 80% of certain people’s time is spent aggressively achieving nothing.
I call them Rehab Residents. Permanent guests in Meeting Recovery.
Their calendar looks like Tetris on meth. Thirty-seven hours of meetings in a forty-hour week. Output? One Jira comment: “Agreed 👍”
“Syncing up.” “Touching base.” “Circling back.” “Aligning on strategic priorities.”
I once watched a colleague schedule a meeting to prepare for a meeting about scheduling another meeting. It was like Inception, but instead of dreams, it’s just pointlessness all the way down.
Meanwhile, the 20% carrying the company are writing code at 11 PM after their seventh “quick sync” of the day, quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles and wondering if other companies are this ridiculous.
(Spoiler: yes. But maybe 15% less ridiculous. It’s worth a shot.)
The Ghost Roles: Organizational Dark Matter
Then there are people whose job description reads like a fortune cookie written by ChatGPT.
“I work cross-functionally to enable strategic initiatives and drive stakeholder alignment.”
Cool. What do you do?
“I facilitate synergistic collaboration across organizational boundaries.”
So… nothing. You do nothing.
These people live in the gaps between responsibilities like Neo dodging bullets, except instead of saving humanity, they’re avoiding accountability.
When projects succeed: “I was instrumental in coordinating that.”
When projects fail: “I raised concerns early that weren’t addressed by the delivery team.”
They’re Schrödinger’s employees—simultaneously essential and useless until you try to measure impact, at which point they schedule a meeting to “discuss the metrics framework.”
Moon People: Taking Credit at the Speed of Light
Someone on your team ships something brilliant. Elegant code. Critical feature. Problem solved.
Next leadership meeting, Moon Person just… takes it.
“We shipped that feature.”
“I architected that solution.”
“My vision was…”
They contributed about as much as the moon contributes to daylight. Which is to say, they reflected someone else’s work and looked pretty doing it.
The sun does the work. The moon takes the credit. And the promotion. And the bonus.
And you—the actual sun—watch this happen and think, “You know what? I could make 40% more somewhere that knows the difference between light sources and shiny rocks.”
So you leave. And the company acts shocked. “Why are we losing our best people?”
I don’t know, maybe because you promoted the LinkedIn profile picture instead of the person who actually built the thing?
Nepotism: The Original Social Network
Most companies would rather hire a mediocre friend than a brilliant stranger.
The CEO’s college roommate who “knows the space” (Googled it once).
The VP’s golf buddy who’s “culture fit” (also likes golf).
The founder’s cousin who “just needs a chance” (his fifth, but who’s counting).
You get org charts that look like Game of Thrones family trees. People in senior roles who couldn’t pass their own team’s interview but somehow direct others through it.
The people who actually interviewed, ground through leetcode, earned their seat? They watch this and learn fast: merit is a fairy tale we tell ourselves so nepotism doesn’t taste so bitter.
It’s not what you know. It’s who you went to Cabo with in 2019.
Two Types of Noisy People
The Truth-Tellers
They raise real issues. Point out bad decisions. Ask uncomfortable questions like “Why are we building this?” and “Has anyone actually talked to a customer?”
Management hates them. “Not a team player.” “Doesn’t see the bigger picture.” “Too negative.”
Their concerns get “noted” (filed directly to /dev/null). They’re excluded from meetings. Passed over for promotions.
Eventually they leave, usually for 40% more money. The company loses a truth-teller and mistakes the resulting silence for alignment.
Right up until the thing they warned about explodes and everyone acts surprised.
The Obfuscation Artists
Then there are people who make noise to hide that they’re doing nothing.
Constant updates containing zero information:
“Making progress! Some blockers but pushing through! 💪”
Translation: “I did nothing but I’m emoji-ing through it.”
Blockers that are always someone else’s fault:
“Waiting on legal” (legal replied three days ago)
“Backend isn’t ready” (you never asked backend for anything)
They’re loud because silence exposes them. They create chaos because in chaos, incompetence is harder to measure.
Management loves them. “So engaged!” “Really cares!”
Meanwhile, they’re human smoke machines obscuring the fact there’s no actual fire.
The Circus Kingdom
Here’s what happens when you put the wrong people in the wrong places:
Competent people leave.
Mediocre people stay.
Incompetent people get promoted.
It’s reverse Darwinism. Survival of the politically savvy. Natural selection for the naturally unqualified.
Company values become punchlines. “Innovation” means “new ways to avoid shipping.” “Collaboration” means “distributed blame.”
People who cared stop caring.
People who delivered stop delivering.
People who stay are those with nowhere better to go.
And leadership stands in the ruins, genuinely confused.
If you put a clown on the throne, do not expect him to rule. Expect him to turn the kingdom into a circus.
You hired loyalty over competence.
Promoted politics over performance.
Tolerated deadweight because firing involves HR paperwork.
Rewarded noise over results.
Let moon people steal from sun people.
Chose your buddy over the brilliant stranger.
And now you’re shocked the good people left for companies that don’t operate like a Dilbert comic.
What Won’t Happen in 2026
What companies should do but absolutely won’t:
- Fire the dead horse riders
- Measure output, not meeting attendance
- Define actual roles (no more “strategic enablers”)
- Credit people who do the work
- Hire competent strangers over mediocre friends
- Listen to truth-tellers before they leave
- Remove the professional noisemakers
Will this happen? Will I get a pony?
No.
Because admitting the problem means admitting leadership screwed up.
So instead: another culture initiative (pizza Fridays!), new company values (written by moon people), a team retreat (trust falls won’t fix nepotism), and a reorg shuffling the same broken pieces.
The circus continues.
Happy New Year
To the sun people still carrying circus kingdoms:
I see you at 11 PM actually working after your seventh sync. You’re tired. You’ve been “waiting for the right time” to leave for eight months.
This is your sign. Update that CV. You deserve better.
To leadership thinking “this doesn’t apply to us”:
Check your org chart. Count the moon people. Measure actual output of your “strategic” hires.
Who’d be missed if they left tomorrow? Who’d leave a gap best described as “we’d save on Slack licenses”?
To 2026:
Maybe you’re the year we stop pretending the circus is a kingdom.
But I’ve been in tech too long for optimism.
If this made you uncomfortable, good. If you’re in leadership and it didn’t, you’re probably the problem
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