This article is spot on, I've seen all of it play out in the office environment. I used to work with a guy who had little technical chops but managed to become a department manager through a series of such manipulations.
When he first started out as a dev, he would endlessly call useless meetings where he would talk for hours on end about marginal and tangentially relevant things and try to project authority by looking important by hijacking these meetings. No one could tell him to stop calling these meetings because no one wanted to look like they were avoiding work.
Then the upper management mistook his behavior for proactivness and competence and he got promoted to a "tech lead". That made the situation worse because not only did he not back down, but he progressively got even more aggressive and would actively micromanage and derail technical decisions made by the architect simply to exercise authority and to let people know that he was THE decision maker there. Everything he did was based on scoring social points and not doing the thing that had the most merit. Furthermore, he would often have these arguments with people in front of the entire office in a very loud/aggressive tone, which made a lot of people reluctant to disagree, because honestly, what normal person wants to have a huge argument in front of the entire cube farm. He knew this very well and used it to his advantage.
I remember a number of occasions where he would actively overrule other's (very sound) technical decisions with his half baked nonfunctional crap simply to be "right" and to make other people "wrong". Again, all to score points and buy even more authority.
Long story short, he has done a lot of damage and made a number of people quit because of stress and humiliation. He is now one of the higher ups in the company. Mind you, this is a very corrupt old-school company I'm talking about and is barely staying afloat these days. People like this get found out and filtered out very fast in smaller companies run by hackers instead of old socipathic farts with no understanding of technology.
When he first started out as a dev, he would endlessly call useless meetings where he would talk for hours on end about marginal and tangentially relevant things and try to project authority by looking important by hijacking these meetings. No one could tell him to stop calling these meetings because no one wanted to look like they were avoiding work.
Then the upper management mistook his behavior for proactivness and competence and he got promoted to a "tech lead". That made the situation worse because not only did he not back down, but he progressively got even more aggressive and would actively micromanage and derail technical decisions made by the architect simply to exercise authority and to let people know that he was THE decision maker there. Everything he did was based on scoring social points and not doing the thing that had the most merit. Furthermore, he would often have these arguments with people in front of the entire office in a very loud/aggressive tone, which made a lot of people reluctant to disagree, because honestly, what normal person wants to have a huge argument in front of the entire cube farm. He knew this very well and used it to his advantage.
I remember a number of occasions where he would actively overrule other's (very sound) technical decisions with his half baked nonfunctional crap simply to be "right" and to make other people "wrong". Again, all to score points and buy even more authority.
Long story short, he has done a lot of damage and made a number of people quit because of stress and humiliation. He is now one of the higher ups in the company. Mind you, this is a very corrupt old-school company I'm talking about and is barely staying afloat these days. People like this get found out and filtered out very fast in smaller companies run by hackers instead of old socipathic farts with no understanding of technology.