Corporate Hierarchy Disconnect

People high up in companies think this way. People on the bottom never think things are intentionally nefarious

How old are you? All it takes is one bad experience to show you the emperor has no clothes. Corporations, executives, and middle managers are almost by definition self interested and short sighted.Just look at the over hiring during covid and the methods used to cull that workforce after they realized their mistake. Back handed and inhumane. Executives are more followers than a junior dev is. They just have a lot more terminology to obscure that fact. But they are basically professional bulls

Hey, he is the founder/ceo, so he should know what his managers did. It may be different from bosses in other companies. But, it sounds roughly correct.

Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.

Even those in “upper management” are cogs.

This isn't a few random people, it's the executives at the top...

You sound like a middle manager to me. The people at the bottom or top don't worry about this crap and will call a spade a spade.

My personal opinion is that fundamentally, upper management (but people, in general) will make decisions that positively impact the people they see and work with. In a small company (like where I work) where the CEO knows the bottom tier employees by name, they are going to have a very hard time making decisions that harm those people. In a large company, upper management works with middle managers, and therefore, will optimize decisions that work well for those people, and as they do not know p

You imply that top management at MegaCorp is somehow more meaningful work than middle management.

Right, this behavior is to be reserved for the lower-level employees. Executives should all be chummy together against the employees.