Sure - I&#x27;ll give you my real world example. Apologies in advance for the long story.<p>I was &quot;poached&quot; into another company in a relatively large company in finance as a linux admin along with a PM coworker who I viewed as a good person and incredibly technically savvy. She was brought on by the AMRS CTO of the previous company. In a lot of ways, when we joined, we were viewed as a single unit with a single agenda by many of the other folk at the company. I tried steering of it as hard as I could, but it got pretty hectic for the entire company when the two &quot;agendas&quot; didn&#x27;t work that well together. It might&#x27;ve just been the culture, but a few other things at the company gave me an off feeling that threw an enormous Machiavellian vibe all throughout, but that&#x27;s a different story.<p>The guy who brought me in, though. He pulled me to the side after they decided that the dynamics were too much and switched me to a different team where my old PM coworker would act as my boss.  The idea was nice and I had more freedom (they never took away my root access), but he completely confirmed that people can, and do, take advantage of &quot;teams&quot; to push an idea. He told me three things all paraphrased, but not inaccurate things:<p>&quot;You&#x27;re my fall boy. If something happens, I want you to fall in my place.&quot;<p>&quot;I want you to outperform all of the other teams in the company.&quot; No pressure, right.<p>&quot;You&#x27;re here to push my agenda.&quot; I believe that his end goal with his &#x27;agenda&#x27; was to become CTO, which.. thankfully.. didn&#x27;t happen. Instead, [edit: very large company]&#x27;s head of tech stepped into that position.<p>---<p>The reason this gets to me and how I can see that attitude being incredibly expansive if adapted, is because this is a well known name in finance right now with increasingly large names from other companies coming in. Nobody&#x27;s really batted an eye at it. This also isn&#x27;t the first time I&#x27;ve seen this kind of attitude before. It&#x27;s incredibly systemic finance and I see the same attitudes in SV. It doesn&#x27;t seem like a leap of faith to say that the same bleedingly charismatic and moralistically dead attitudes exist there, too.<p>There&#x27;s a certain attitude and behavior from those who feel that they&#x27;re at the top that distorts the way they act. Watching House of Cards felt all too familiar. It was all very creepy, and I don&#x27;t see that behavior going away any time soon.<p>My 2c.