tl;dr

I’ve noticed a trend as I prepared to exit Sandia. The system of management was corroding the basic character of some individuals. It didn’t ruin everyone, but many. Some people seemed to resist the system and remain good. Others became raging assholes where once a decent person existed. Ethical lapses were commonplace. It became something I worried about when a good person entered the system. I would warn my friends who entered management to guard themselves. I had seen it enough to suggest a trend. If the system and demands of leadership make you a terrible person, is it a terrible system? In all likelihood, yes, it is. How commonplace is this? I suspect Sandia is not an outlier, but reflects society as a whole.

“Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.” “What causes the other ten percent?” asked Kizzy. “Natural disasters,” said Nib.” ― Becky Chambers

This is a huge problem

I managed to pop out a couple of blog posts all about deeply technical issues. Lying in the background of these posts are terrible leaders who stand in the way of solving these problems. If I step back and see the reasons why I wasn’t actively working on these problems, it is shitty leadership. Shitty leaders who act like assholes standing in the way of genuine progress are a plague. They don’t simply stand in the way; they actively undermine it. American science is in disarray and generally collapsing. The era of dominance is functionally over. Terrible leadership is much of the reason for the precipitous decline. The institutions that select them, then tolerate them, are losing their edge.

The end of my career was punctuated by terrible leadership. I started to see obvious and common ethical issues over and over. The combination of (at least) two incompetent and unethical managers ended my career. One of these managers was someone I had worked with before. He seemed like a pretty decent person back then. Then ten years later, I worked with him again. Those ten years as a manager seemed to corrode him. He turned into a fuckhead, and a general “piece of shit”. An outwardly nice person with a passive-aggressive soul. He was a much worse person having been a manager.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Why had the previous decade been so harmful to his basic character? Did the system harm him directly? What went wrong? What corrupted him? He is not an isolated case, but rather an example of a trend.

The promotions did not improve him; they made him worse in every way. I saw this almost immediately. This is with someone I was predisposed to think well of. The experience of having greater responsibilities had hurt his character. The person I used to know would not have violated ethics so casually. He seems to have lost all his technical and scientific sense as well. I would surmise that the feedback as a manager nudged him toward less competence and lower ethics. I know that several of his superiors over those 10 years were monstrous individuals. They demonstrated many ethical lapses that I personally witnessed. I would assume this was the tip of the iceberg. Their shitty examples might be enough to explain what I saw. He was mentored by assholes (and a sociopath in one case).

By putting these sorts of people in positions of responsibility, they are engineering more assholes. This is the easiest explanation of my question. We are then left with concluding that bad judgment in hiring and promotions leads to the problem. Assholes often like other assholes and systematically choose them for positions of authority. These people naturally demonstrate the sort of terrible behavior the asshole leader favors. Likely, the story isn’t quite this simple. Assholes are having a societal moment. The President is one of the biggest assholes imaginable. Many people seem to think this is a good thing. Maybe the same people believe the same thing holds for other leadership positions. This is a bit deeper and indicts large swaths of society.

The fact that these people were promoted to higher positions leads me to believe this is a systemic problem. I also think the problem is getting worse. This led me to ponder the reasons for this. First, we should get to the bottom of what leadership looks like these days. Why is being a raging asshole prized in leadership? Why does leadership today make someone an asshole? Fundamentally, is it generally bad for us to be led by assholes?

I will get to a genuine personal concern. If you look at the leadership of the DOE labs, it is marbled with people I know. I have personally known many of the Lab directors, deputy or associate directors. There were a great number of really good people. They had good character. They were technically excellent in most cases. I now wonder how many of them have become assholes. I certainly see some examples amongst them who have degraded as humans. It would seem that power corrupts. Power doesn’t corrupt everyone, but many. I have also seen some who remain excellent humans with power.

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” ― Simone Weil

Nonetheless, asshole leadership seems to be having a moment. This is obvious simply by watching the news. I remain convinced it is corrosive and destructive for all they lead. All of us will suffer from the direct effects.

Leadership by assholery

There is a really good way to detect an asshole. Go to a meal with them at a restaurant, and see how someone treats the wait staff. If a person treats their wait staff like shit, that person is probably an asshole. The lower the bar they have for treating people poorly, the worse they are. Someone nasty to people in low-power positions is abusive. They are likely to be someone to be avoided in general. If you give them power over others, they will treat them like shit, too. It is a real tell. This doesn’t always work, especially if you have a passive-aggressive person as the asshole. At Sandia, the managers are predominantly passive-aggressive, and the assholes are prone to being a bit Machiavellian. These are backstabbers.

During my last year at Sandia, there was one specific case that solidified my point of view about this particular issue. I was sitting in on a meeting where we were preparing for a meeting where young scientists would be introduced to their program managers. I was providing feedback and watching it online (Teams). My wife had come out to the table where I was working so that she could work on her quilting. I had things on mute, and she made the comment about the manager during the meeting. Her question was, “Who is this asshole?” I sat a little shocked as the manager who had asked me to sit in on the meeting was one of the nicest people I knew at Sandia. I’d known him as a staff and he was definitely not an asshole. Yet, when I step back and let go of my preconception, she was right. He was being a controlling jerk to all these young people. Being a manager had turned him into an asshole. This is a trend.

Later on, I went to the meeting, and I decided to have a conversation with this guy, and I subsequently found out that he was incredibly stressed by the job. I should state that the previous two managers who had held the same position were definitely assholes. Both of them were definitely made much worse by being in the job. One of them, in fact, rose to the ranks and is ultimately the very likely person who caused the first blog shutdown. He’s also someone whom I very strongly suspect of being a complete sociopath. There’s lots of evidence in his behavior. The second, who succeeded him, was grossly distorted by his time at the job. He swallowed his true personality and became a shell of himself. When I talked to my friend, I found that the job was having the same effect on him. It was eroding him, putting him under stress, and, what I can surmise, the position and his resistance to it were slowly undermining his health.

Thankfully, he stepped down from the job not long after this. I sincerely hope he’s making a swift recovery. He will forget the impact of his job and everything it taught him. It very clearly made him a worse person rather than a better one. If this were the only time I saw this and the only job that did this, there wouldn’t be much to write here. It could be just an idiosyncrasy of this particular position and the people that it serves, which happens to be some of the more highbrow academic blind and research at Sandia. Another friend noted that the program manager at DOE was an asshole. As I dug in, I began to find out this was hardly an isolated case. The number of managers involved and ethical lapses is far larger and more widespread. The Lab is full of sleazy managers who do gross things with their power.

This leads me to the question of: How does this happen? What is it about the job that actually corrupts people? What needs to change? And why do some people succumb to it while others seem to resist and retain some sense of decency?

A Case Study in Assholery in Leadership

“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.” ― Stephen King

At Sandia, the lords of the various fiefdoms are called Center Directors. They are the ones who manage Sandia’s basic molecular unit called Centers. In my time at Sandia, which spanned 19 years, I worked under six different center directors. Looking back at it, exactly half of them were assholes, and half of them weren’t. My first Center director ended up being incredibly successful and ultimately the director of Sandia National Laboratory. He’s somebody I like; he definitely has a hard edge, but I wouldn’t consider him an asshole. It is also clear that the job took a huge toll on him. He was the lab director during Covid and the first Trump administration. These events took a huge toll on him. Rumor has it that he eventually withdrew from the job as a result. Upon reflection this is not a surprise.

He was definitely replaced by an asshole. This guy was just the sort of person who thinks that they’re really incredible, thus producing an arrogance and an air of superiority that they lord over everyone. By and large, he wasn’t a horrible person. Just kind of a completely insufferable one. He had been a White House fellow. You would hear this all the time. He was also the sort of dimwit to wear a light colored suit for a somber 911 event. He was the kind of executive who would show you all the wonderful shots of his expensive and wonderful ski vacation. He issued forth an air of superiority over all around him and seemed completely and utterly unaware of just how completely over the top his self-image was. Moreover, how much his self-image actually exceeded who he was, and made him actually far less of a person. He lacked any air of humility or vulnerability. He also had no sense of humor that could be detected. He was far from the biggest asshole to have that job.

He was succeeded by someone who was an incredibly good person. Now I say this as someone with whom he often would get into disagreements. In fact, the fact that we disagreed, yet he was kind and respectful to me at all times, still stands out. We didn’t see eye to eye, but he was open to conversation. He could admit that he could be wrong, and he treated people with an uncommon degree of decency. This includes sitting down and being very vulnerable with me at a time when he was trying to help me succeed better professionally. I will always treasure the sort of personal touch he provided. He was a great example of vulnerable, humble leadership from someone amazing. That second guy could stand to model his character to great effect.

I do remember the time when he moved away from Sandia to another Lab. I ran into him on a visit. He invited me to his house to dinner. I had an absolutely phenomenal evening with him, his wife, and his dinner guests. In my time at the labs, he stands out as one of the kindest and finest individuals I have met. He was extremely intelligent and well accomplished professionally. He showed humility where the other guy had nothing but hubris. I would say he was the model of the sort of person who should be leading.

“Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.” ― Frank Herbert

True to form, he was replaced by a complete and utter sociopath. In all my time in the lab, he is amongst the worst I have met. He practiced horrible manipulation and abuse of his underlings and staff. One of his direct reports told me about the awful loyalty tests he would subject them to. He was a consummate liar and rarely uttered anything honest. He was constantly working on shading every statement, “We need to get the messaging right.” He was given great responsibility.

He was also the supervisor of my recent manager, who was so corrupt. I am convinced he served as an example to him. This example destroyed his character, making him a significantly worse person. Maybe other things happened to corrupt him. He became a horrid manager and quite incompetent. Worse for the experience. Several of his outstanding underlyings were driven away by his awfulness. The lab was harmed deeply by his tenure.

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” ― John Steinbeck

I will say there might be a genuinely worse person who was ultimately the director of Sandia. He was an abysmal person with all the characteristics of a sociopath, plus arrogance and hubris. He is the person who threatened X-Division with the death penalty at the meeting about the missing hard discs. “Remember what they did to the Rosenbergs.” After uttering that gem, he should never have held a position of authority ever again. When I dealt with him in person 15 years later, he was still an asshole. He had been promoted to higher positions. He was still an abusive person. Thankfully, he’s retired and no longer in a high position. God only knows how much institutional rot he has contributed to.

What I cannot understand is how people like this succeed. How are people so completely and utterly unsuitable for leadership positions chosen? Then they are promoted. The people above them are either assholes or terrible judges of character. Even a modest exposure to them shows how deeply unfit for any position of responsibility these people are. Yet we see these people as successful and exemplars of the institutions. No wonder the USA is falling apart.

How the System Corrupts People

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” ― John Stuart Mill

I will state the obvious to begin with. The system corrupts people by putting people who are assholes into positions of authority. Then, let them mentor other people. Letting them serve as examples of professional success. The last two guys I mentioned are prime examples of this. I saw the result of the mentoring and influence on the manager I worked for last. He was worse for it. His time as a manager corrupted him. An asshole in a position over him probably caused this. His example made this guy worse. One would think a position of authority would improve someone. When the opposite happens, one needs to pause and understand why. Modeling a bad example is a key mechanism. This mentoring is similar to that of an abusive parent whose children become abusers too.

As I noted several blog posts before, one of the other things that breeds problems are ethical lapses. One ethical lapse will breed another, especially when those ethical lapses go unpunished and uncorrected. This is certainly the issue that I talked about with the community around the code CTH. The CTH team was treated unethically repeatedly by the lab. The impact of this is to breed more unethical behavior in response. It doesn’t help that the code was put into a hand-to-mouth existence where they were fighting for every dollar. The struggle to survive can push people to engage in behavior they wouldn’t otherwise. All of this creates a mentality where ethical lapses are simply considered to be part of the business and common. It becomes acceptable. The upshot of all of this is the ethical standards slide, and bit by bit, the integrity and quality of the lab go with it. Now the work on CTH is untethered by technical fundamentals. They simply become ignored and optional instead of a foundation/

A clear driver in the corruption of people is the desire for success. When the system makes you successful by being an awful person, that is, an asshole, the system is the problem. This is a fair conclusion. There’s widespread bad behavior that leads to a reasonable conclusion is that being successful requires you to give up something of yourself. This is a source of corruption, and we should ask those who are in charge of the system and served by it whether or not the system itself is worth retaining. It seems we need to chart a new path before we drive everything off a cliff.

One of the other keys is the centrality of money in the system. The quality of the people and the work is not what’s important. A manager is rated more and more by their ability to get money to become an empire builder. Success in the technical ladder is optional, too. Getting money and building programs is what gets rewarded. I would state that a great deal of the problem at the laboratory is the degree to which empire-building is rewarded. Somebody who is a “rainmaker” is viewed very highly. How you treat people, whether it is to build them up or show the best in humanity, is meaningless. So the institution gets what it values. The result is the choice of assholes for leadership.

“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.” ― Adam Smith

I would be remiss in not mentioning how our national culture plays into this. I have come across this T-shirt that seems to be popular with a certain segment of the population. The T-shirt says “Assholes live forever.” There is a segment of the population that seems to revel in asshole-ery. We see this in the current president and his entire administration. There’s a large segment of the American population that believes that assholes make good leaders, that they’re strong and powerful. Leadership by assholes is the way it should be done. They are fine with an asshole until they turn on them. The only way to deal with an asshole is either to knuckle under to their behavior or become an asshole yourself. This is a vicious cycle, and it leads nowhere good. I fear that this vicious cycle is consuming our country.

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” ― Frank Herbert

What Can Be Done?

“Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” ― John Maxwell

A clear path to getting past this problem is servant leadership. When I arrived in Los Alamos, this was the mantra among managers. They were servants to the staff. Their job was to get obstacles out of the way to allow work to proceed. The manager would wrestle with the system to allow the staff to focus on technical things. Hand-in-hand was a value of the technical staff’s work. Managers were there to enable and find resources. Managers took an effort to allow staff to focus. They also worked to develop people and guide professional development. The core principle was service. For the most part, this mode of management is a relic today. We should come to terms with why this ended. Part of it is CEO worship, whether it is the awful Jack Welch or Elon the asshole.

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” ― Milton Friedman

At the heart of much of this is our shared incentive system. Money and compliance have replaced quality and service. In a system where finances and regulatory subservience replace technical excellence and people, assholes reign. I still found managers who held to the former value system, but institutional norms have changed. Those who have embraced the new system are worse to work for. This is the common thread to all the asshole managers. The new system is corrosive and seems to engender ethical lapses. With peer review in full retreat, technical quality is optional. Personal development is also waning. I suffered greatly from both changes. With the changes in incentives, we have gotten what we prioritize: money and rules. Gone is quality and great people. Until the incentives change, the decline will continue, and the assholes will run free.

“Androids with Artificial Intelligence have no heart or soul. They will make our perfect masters.” ― A.R. Merrydew

I will note that our current incentives are horribly arrayed against society with the advent of AI. Low quality and devalued people will allow AI to do far more damage while limiting the good. Valuing high-quality work, human beings, and ethics will provide a hedge against AI. It will guide decisions far more favorably. Money, ruling the view of efficiency and little respect for humanity, will allow AI’s damage to be maximized. We are on a collision course with a disaster of our own making. The assholes in leadership positions are the shock troops of societal carnage. We need to blunt these ideas before they unleash awful side effects.

The biggest issue is the tolerance for awful behavior on the part of managers. This is the real bottom line here. Sandia is tolerating assholes with stunning regularity. Managers who treat their staff with little respect and engage in sleazy behavior are allowed to continue to lead. There are mechanisms to resist these people, and the institutions don’t use them. Corporate ethics is a good example. Rather than actually enforcing ethics, they are simply a corporate police force. I saw this. A manager used it to attack me. A true ethics enforcement would have rejected this step and forced him to manage. A proper feedback would be “don’t be a passive-aggressive asshole, and use your authority.” Instead, the whole case was used in a dysfunctional and damaging way. It should have been a mark against him. It was just par for the course.

Another excellent example of acceptance of an asshole was my last interaction with a Lab Director. He had invited a group of senior staff to talk about problems with the research environment. Instead of graciously accepting the critique and working to improve things, he lashed out. He went forth to engage in a soliloquy full of arrogance and hubris. Then turned to directly attack the staff. He did this in front of another executive. It was disgusting. He lost all respect in the process. He basically identified himself as a complete asshole. Worse yet, there was never an apology or mea culpa from anyone. His horrendous behavior was tolerated. He covered himself and his office in disgrace. The Lab put someone awful in power and did nothing to fix the problem. We see the same thing happening at the National level every day.

This gets to the answer to this problem. Remove the assholes from leadership. Quit choosing them (or electing them). Prize leadership that empowers others. Prize leadership that has humility and values, people. Prize leadership that can admit fault and mistakes. Prize leadership that admits problems and faces these head-on. Do not tolerate, much less reward, leaders who are assholes. When they lie (and they always lie) call them on it. When one is chosen, admit the mistake and do something about it. As long as assholes are successful, we will get more of them. If we don’t change this course, we are fucked. I have little hope for Sandia; the passive-aggressive culture is the ideal incubator for assholes.

My conclusion now is that the general system that I saw at the national laboratories is in precipitous decline. The same conclusion should be drawn: the USA had global supremacy, and today we are ushering in a time of abject mediocrity. Those who successfully resist the corruption of power are the special ones. A person who can rise to a great level of power and not become a monster is the special one. Those who fall and allow corruption to swallow them are contemptuous. Those who are corrupt to begin with must be cast out. They will corrupt everything they touch.

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ― Peter Drucker