Why Big Tech Turns Everything Into a Knife Fight
People often ask what motivated me to leave a cushy corporate job and jump into the startup's mud pit, and how it feels now that I've done it. Honestly, I ask myself the same question almost every day.
There are the obvious reasons: curiosity, autonomy, upside, and a mild allergy to authority. Those explanations are well-covered in interviews and think pieces. But there's another reason - quieter, harder to name, and rarely discussed.
It doesn't always announce itself cleanly. Sometimes it shows up as burnout. Sometimes, as apathy. Sometimes, there's a vague sense that you've lost the thread. You start asking uncomfortable questions: Why am I doing this? What am I actually working toward?
This is my attempt at an answer.
What follows is a short, deliberately sharp story from my time at Apple. Names have been changed. Personalities exaggerated. Quotes poetically distorted for effect. But the events themselves are real - and I suspect many readers who've spent time in big tech have stories that rhyme with it.
"People are like horses… Any old horse will run when it's whipped, but only fast enough to avoid the whipping. Racehorses, though, they run because they look at the horse on their left, they look at the one on their right, and they think, No way am I second to these fuckers."
— Fonda Lee, Jade City
The Racehorse
I met two kinds of leaders in big tech. Burns was one of them. I called him that not because he was a crony or an evil old man, but because he had a habit of posting Mr. Burns memes in Slack whenever he pitched an especially shrewd plan. Off-screen, though, he was an early-middle-aged, high-energy senior leader who had recently joined Apple and was actively making a name for himself.
I didn't mind the shrewdness, or even the twisted sense of humor, and I had developed a certain resilience to his occasional brutality. All things considered, I liked working with him. Still, there was one incident that lingered - one that made me question not just his approach, but the worldview behind it.
Apple had long been intent on bolstering its machine-learning credentials, on being seen as a true AI powerhouse alongside Google and Meta. AI projects carried prestige and visibility. The three major organizations with a claim for the AI throne were in a constant tug-of-war over scope.
Senior leaders lived perpetually with daggers drawn. Frontline managers like us, however, were usually close. Our infrastructure projects were deeply intertwined - each dependent on the others - so cooperation wasn't just polite; it was necessary.
That's why I was disappointed when a fellow manager in SWE made a move on our scope. I still hoped for an amicable resolution, but the implications were strategic, and escalation became unavoidable.
Early Saturday morning, after sleeping on it - as I prefer to do before sending difficult emails - I sent a note laying out the issue. Not long after, my phone rang. It was Burns.
Meetings in tech companies happen almost exclusively over Zoom. Speaking with Burns over the phone made the moment feel unreal even before he said a word.
I walked him through a set of proposals - ways we could divide the scope cleanly, respectfully, without damaging either project. He listened, unmoved. Then, with the air of a frustrated father explaining life to a naïve child, he said:
"Dmitry, you're still looking for the correct answer. There isn't one. Growth isn't polite. You take what you can, and you keep taking until there's nothing left to argue over."
I was taken aback. Not because the argument was unscrupulous - though it was - but because I couldn't immediately comprehend it. Nothing left?
Was he talking about organizational survival? Market dominance? Some unspoken holy war against a greater evil? Or was it simply naked expansion, stripped of narrative and justification?
Explanations cascaded through my mind, each more unsettling than the last. None of them felt sane enough to hold onto.
Autonomy Without Responsibility
If Burns embodied one extreme, Tyren represented the other. He used to say, "Promotion is the ascent; mastery is becoming unnecessary." Over time, he demonstrated exactly what he meant - advancing to the highest attainable level, earning unquestioned trust from leadership, and quietly engineering himself out of the critical path.
He had reasons for being this way. We were part of an old-school hardware organization where paranoia, mistrust, and burnout were introduced by design. It was a legacy of a results-at-any-cost leadership style - one that blended Steve Jobs' genius with emotional brutality and sustained psychological pressure. That culture left lasting marks on many of its leaders.
Whatever weight Tyren carried from those years, he concealed it well. He was friendly, easygoing, and genuinely good with people. He helped me fill gaps in my own leadership - especially those involving organizational politics and relationship-building.
The arrangement worked. He stayed out of my day-to-day work while quietly helping me acquire relevant leadership skills. In return, I spared him from the critical projects I was running and worked directly with Burns instead.
But the balance didn't last. Remaining in our organization was still risky for Tyren. At any moment, he could lose the freedom to pursue research and be pulled into a mission-critical company project - one that would end his carefully constructed distance. To avoid that fate, he needed to transfer elsewhere. Somewhere safer. Somewhere like Samy Bengio's organization, which focused purely on research and had little attachment to the products Apple shipped.
To make that move, he had to let go of my team - an asset simply too central to the organization's priorities.
The transition was mishandled. There was no clear successor, and the new structure proved unstable almost immediately. The collapse was violent, and I found myself on the other side of the fence, sparring with Burns and my successor for another year. It is an even edgier story that I will save for another day. Tech Bro Saga continues…
"There was a point of equilibrium in any organization's middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility."
— J. Zachary Pike, Son of a Liche
Uncomfortable Questions
Between Burns and Tyren, I saw the full range of what leadership could look like inside a large organization, and I found myself oscillating between those extremes. At times, I was swept into the vortex of fierce political confrontation - the big players' game of thrones. At other times, I drifted through long, quiet stretches, doing very little for months, buoyed by the light responsibility that comes with slow or transitional periods.
Both lifestyles have their appeal.
The game of thrones feels like a high-adrenaline sport. On the winning side, you savor the sweetness of victory. On the losing side, you console yourself with the belief that you're protecting people from the Burnses of the world - or at least defending whatever moral high ground you can still claim.
Then there are the other times. When you slip into the crevices of the organization, hidden from the relentless pull of the corporate machine, life slows down. You find equanimity. You rediscover meaning in things that have nothing to do with headcount, scope, or escalation chains.
And yet, through all of it, there was always an itch at the back of my skull - a single, persistent question: Why?
During the intense periods, I questioned the value of what we were fighting for. Was there a better way to contribute to society than remaining locked in a perpetual tug-of-war? Was this struggle shaping me into someone I actually wanted to become - or slowly turning me into another Burns?
During the quiet periods, the doubts inverted. I felt helpless, useless, and fatigued. I wondered whether sticking my head out for something - or someone - that mattered would inevitably pull me back into conflict. And I wondered whether balance was even possible inside a large organization, or whether oscillation was the only stable state.
Critical Mass
Over time, I began to notice a direct correlation between the size of a company and the amount of infighting it generates. Apple was markedly worse than Roblox or HP; those, in turn, were far worse than mid-sized companies, which themselves were far removed from the relative simplicity of startups.
As organizations grow, people are packed more tightly together, and pressure builds between them. There is no real opting out. Even if you're amicable, even if you lack ambition, someone more driven - some version of Burns - will eventually collide with you. At that point, passivity becomes a weakness. You're forced to choose how you'll live under that pressure: confront it directly and push back, absorb it and yield ground, or carve out a pocket where autonomy is possible but never free - shielded by compromise, quiet deals, and decisions you'd rather not make. Every position has a cost, and none of them are clean.
In the end, I stopped trying to carve out a place for myself in big tech. I no longer believed the problem could be solved within its current structure. Too much energy was being consumed by necessary but ultimately unproductive confrontation, or too many compromises had to be made. Entrepreneurship felt less like an escape and more like a search for a better way.
Decompression
I had spent a handful of years in startup environments before entering corporate life, so the terrain itself wasn't unfamiliar. Still, my greatest fear was that I wouldn't find what I was looking for - that it would all feel the same. That instead of fighting other organizations from within, I'd simply be wrestling with competitors, customers, investors, and stakeholders from without. A different battlefield, perhaps, but the same logic: take from others or withdraw entirely. A zero-sum game, played until exhaustion.
It's been a couple of years now, and so far, it's been good. There are negotiations, of course - with customers, with investors - and competition is unavoidable. In many ways, it's even more cutthroat. But the difference lies in the tools available to the players.
In startups, competition is mostly about fundamentals: raising capital, attracting talent, winning customers, and building something people genuinely want. In large corporations, those same levers exist - but they're supplemented by a broader, darker toolkit: collusion between leaders, deception, reputational sabotage, quiet coercion.
If a company becomes successful enough, it may grow to a size where those tools are no longer optional: colluding with competitors, courting politicians, lobbying for policies that are anti-social or environmentally corrosive. At that scale, moral clarity becomes harder to maintain.
I don't have an answer for where that line should be drawn. That question may belong to people more successful - or more compromised - than I am. For now, I am at peace.