Comment by vovavili

>These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved.

I would argue that you have an unreasonably optimistic view about corporate culture. There is a substantial amount of adverse selection and political maneuvering going on all the way up to the top. Tokenmaxxing just goes to show this.

That's part of the reason why this website is hosted under the YCombinator name, after all. Hackers are strongly meritocratic, which is not something you will find in a big company.