Why Big Tech is not About Business
Power and the illusion of corporate rationality
When you think about a large Silicon Valley tech company, what do you see?
Brightest minds gathered, working on the most challenging industry problems? Ruthless businessmen maximizing shareholder value? Bureaucrats ordering creative people around?
After spending ten years inside three big tech corporations, none of those descriptions felt true anymore.
Now, I can't see them as anything but an imperial court. There are enclaves, wars, and palace intrigue. There are fair and unfair leaders. And for commonfolk, nothing left but to fight someone else's wars.
Author's note:
Names, identifying details, and dialogues in this essay have been changed. Scenes are reconstructed from memory and stylized to convey emotional moments.
The Queen (Hera)
My first contact with Apple leadership was a new-hire lunch with Hera, a vice president in the organization I was joining. At the time, she had roughly a thousand engineers under her.
It was a small group. She gave an overview of Apple and her organization, then opened the floor for questions.
She was confident, polite, and conversational. I was impressed. And yet, some of her answers felt shallow or superficial.
Someone asked about Apple's policy on publishing scientific papers. Apple was notoriously secretive, and for researchers, this was a major pain point.
Hera dismissed the question without hesitation.
"We reward product contributions and are not interested in helping researchers with their self-promotion."
I grinned. Having worked closely with researchers, I had my own frustrations with academic ego. But the remark lingered. Publishing is not vanity in science - it is the point. In a single sentence, she had reduced an entire profession to narcissism and moved on as if nothing happened.
She then explained the virtues of Apple's functional organization.
Hardware engineers are in one hierarchy. Software in another. Design, marketing, operations - each has its own vertical. Independent organizations that converge only at the CEO.
This tripped me off. Her organization was responsible for shipping iPhones, MacBooks, and other hardware products - and yet it was aggressively hiring machine learning engineers. If the structure were truly functional, why were ML teams being built within hardware rather than within AIML or software?
As a fierce truth warrior, with reckless disregard for my own career, I've been annoying her with uncomfortable questions.
My questions caught her off guard. She was unaccustomed to being challenged by subordinates and eventually closed the thread in a generic way.
"The world isn't black and white. There are exceptions to every rule."
The lack of an answer struck me at the time. She was aggressively growing the ML arm in her organization. This was clearly a strategic priority.
Apparently, there was no need to come up with a coherent story.
Survival of the Fittest (Burns)
A couple of years later, I met Burns.
He was a senior director who had recently joined Apple. I called him Burns, not because he was a crony or an evil old man, but because he liked to post Mr. Burns memes in Slack whenever he pitched an especially shrewd plan. Off-screen, he was an early-middle-aged, high-energy executive, ambitious and clearly intent on making a name for himself.
He backed our project. He liked to describe it as a "startup inside a large organization."
I was skeptical. I had worked in startups before, and they operated very differently. But Burns had spent most of his career inside large corporations. Perhaps he had forgotten what the word meant.
I didn't mind the shrewdness, or even the twisted sense of humor, and I had developed a certain resilience to his occasional brutality. The thing I liked the most about him is his zero-bullshit attitude and raw transparency. Burns didn't pretend that corporations were something they weren't.
Before important meetings with other organizations, we would gather senior engineers and managers for a prep meeting. We discussed questions like: who was likely to oppose us? Where were the traps? How might we be undermined? What leverage did we have, and what retaliation might look like?
"In Gaffney, we had our own brand of diplomacy. Shake with your right hand, but hold a rock in your left."
― Frank Underwood, House of Cards
At the time, my team had grown large enough that I began considering a move onto the management track. At Apple, even individual contributors can have direct reports. I asked Burns what he thought.
He paused, then spoke with a kind of tired candor.
"Dmitry, is that really the path you want to take? Doing lip service to stakeholders, colluding with temporary allies, gaslighting your enemies - just to climb the ladder?"
My logical brain protested. This can't be the only thing that leaders do! I opened my mouth to argue, but nothing came out.
My emotional brain translated his message to its silly logical counterpart:
"You're too soft for this!"
I didn't have a response.
Business Values (Ray)
Over time, I grew close to AIML. Ray led the infrastructure organization there, with which I worked closely. For most of his career, he had been an engineer and an entrepreneur. He came to Apple through an acquisition and led several hundred people.
When discussions became heated, Ray loved to say:
"We're going to make the right decision."
Sometimes people were confused, so he would clarify
"We'll make it right by the business. Then we'll make it right by the people."
In a corporate setting, it wasn't obvious.
Most debates I had seen devolved quickly into incentives, optics, hidden agendas, and perceived alignments. Essentially, mapping a convoluted interspersion of tongues in one or another stakeholder ass. Ray cut through that and returned the conversation to the actual business or technical problem at hand.
Hearing someone stand for business and people was like a breath of fresh air.
Also, don't mistake his compassion for softness. During my time working with him, I watched him kill a project with duplicated scope without hesitation. I watched him apply quiet but relentless pressure to force a stubborn manager to back down. He was decisive. Business came first.
And yet he was also kind.
He looked like a strange mixture of a shrewd businessman and a loving grandpa.
The combination was rare, and people responded to it. Senior leadership is almost always polarizing. Ray wasn't. People trusted him. They followed him. They defended him.
I did too. Eventually, I began working to move my team into his organization.
Knives Out
I used to wonder what would happen if I ended up on Burns's bad side.
I found out soon enough.
"The exact ratio of irony to matter in the universe is known as Nove's Constant, and by definition it's more than you'd expect."
― J. Zachary Pike, Son of a Liche
Burns and his circle didn't take kindly to my gravitating toward AIML. Tensions rose and at its peak. A metaphorical execution followed. I was reclassified as an individual contributor overnight. It was presented as my voluntary decision.
Ray pulled me out, along with others who wanted to defect. We continued working on the AIML project. For a moment, it felt like the situation had resolved itself.
It hadn't.
The old organization wanted us gone - not just sidelined, but erased. The goal was simple: remove the people who understood the system so they couldn't interfere with its direction.
Ray provided air cover, so the conflict stayed mostly invisible. On paper, nothing was wrong.
It was a strange situation. All senior engineers left, so they still needed our involvement for any meaningful feature while they trained our replacements.
They applied pressure through my former teammates who stayed, via customers, partner organizations, and sympathetic leaders. Meanwhile, they would claim achievements, gloat on our missteps, and badmouth us, given the opportunity.
We could do the same.
That was the year my thinking narrowed. I analyzed organizational dynamics constantly. I slept poorly. I became harder, sharper, more suspicious. I learned how to anticipate moves, how to counter quietly, how to hurt without leaving marks.
We were winning the narrative. I didn't care.
I wanted justice. I wanted retribution.
One thought kept returning, uninvited and persistent:
Burns - am I still too soft for you?
End of the Chapter
Ray was retiring. He was already advanced in age, and the timing wasn't a surprise. We knew well in advance, and he spent his remaining time briefing the incoming leadership on our situation and his other projects.
After he left, his organization was folded under Bob, a seasoned vice president within AIML. To make the structure more manageable, a new director, Jenny, was brought in. Most of the teams, including mine, ended up reporting to her.
Nice Person (Bob)
Bob was an experienced vice president. Most people I knew described him simply as a nice person.
He told stories about major Apple rollout failures, such as Apple Maps. In passing, he would mention that Tim Cook's guidance in executive meetings had missed the mark, and that those misjudgments had led to major problems.
None of it sounded scandalous. Or reckless. Or even particularly incompetent.
It sounded normal. Just ordinary people making ordinary mistakes at extraordinary scale.
Sometimes, being normal is more than enough.
Red Pill Not Included (Jenny)
Jenny was different.
Bob ignored corporate bullshit. Ray fought it. Burns accepted it. Hera used it.
Jenny was the only one who truly believed in it.
She had spent her entire career in Big Tech and upheld corporate principles to the letter - encouraging visibility, pushing for alignment, and faithfully promoting the rituals that were meant to keep the system healthy.
I liked her. Her optimism was genuine. But I was often frustrated by her devotion to corporatism itself. She viewed corporate customs as safeguards; others treated them as tools.
She made concessions to Burns. Not because she liked him - she didn't like Burns or Hera - but because she believed in the possibility of peaceful resolution. In goodwill - in the idea that reason and process could prevail, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
She was visibly upset when she learned that I hadn't hidden from the team the fact that Burns had removed me from the project.
"As managers, we have mechanisms to cope with stress," she said. "We need to protect our engineers."
I understood the impulse. But I had come to prefer awareness to opium. I couldn't see why grown adults needed to be shielded from reality, especially when that reality shaped their careers.
Empire Strikes Back
When Ray left, Burns, Hera, and their circle moved quickly. Our temporary lack of organizational cover was enough. The decision was made to remove us from the project entirely and prevent us from contributing in any capacity.
Bob and Jenny were responsible for protecting us.
I don't fault them for a lack of effort. Negotiations dragged on for weeks. We weren't allowed to participate. We waited outside the room, trying to reconstruct events from the fragments executives chose to share and from what our informal "spies" managed to overhear.
Nothing moved in our favor.
The executives couldn't agree on our case. At some point, Burns suggested they "align on principles." I remember thinking he was either being cynical or sincere in a way that bordered on delusion. How do you negotiate principles when the only principle you follow is the rule of power?
Hera was even less flexible. Bob summarized his frustration with her bluntly:
"Hera seems to think she can just throw people at the problem. She doesn't understand that projects need more than muscle - they need brains."
I understood her logic. Everyone is replaceable. It would take time, but she had it.
Eventually, Bob stopped fighting. He told me they had spent nearly forty hours in meetings with Hera, Burns, and other leaders.
"It's not the right decision," he said. "But there's nothing we can do. They own your project."
It was a quiet ending. A bitter reminder that our "startup" had been acquired long before it was ever born.
The Choice
It didn't make business sense. The team was hollowed out. Talented engineers left on bad terms. Timelines slipped. The project stumbled.
But corporations are not about business. They are about power.
If we had been smart, we would have walked away the moment the hardware organization made its position clear. We were never in a position to win that argument.
I'm glad we weren't smart.
"Not all battles are fought for victory. Some are fought simply to tell the world that there was someone on the battlefield."
― Ravish Kumar, Magsaysay award speech
