For every example of smart, thoughtful, effective senior leadership there are 10 or 100 of the opposite sort. Most corporations are a living proof of Peter's principle, where senior management is a country club of old* people covering each other's incompetence.
* It is not about ageism, but about people that are in their 5 years before retirement and have zero motivation to do any work, keep skills in shape or give a damn. I worked with a lot of people that were more than decent in their careers, but dropped the ball completely in the last 5 to 10 years before retirement with huge negative impact for their employers. How can this happen? In big companies the inertia covers for these people.
That honestly sounds like a lot of tech "gurus" too, like Mudge and Carmack. These people made a name for themselves with incredible skill as an IC (usually in a hot field, too), and never made the transition beyond that level, towards being leaders with the ability to grasp the full picture.
There is a completely different set of skills involved. In fact, the best wide-area tech leads I met at Google were not great engineers, but they were very good at inspiring other engineers.
I think this is where Steve Jobs actually deserves a lot of credit, and honestly Elon Musk too.
While I agree with the idea, I think John Carmack illustrated he was capable as more than an IC but also a team leader for several projects while at Id.
So, probably a very able leader of a small-ish team. Which is OK and can still lead to huge impact and I wish he'd stayed in that zone in anything he was doing (probably started that way at Occulus?).
Some of us can't acquire (or haven't acquired yet) the skillset and daily gumption of leading bigger orgs and I guess it's fine.
I hope his next endeavour gets him back to a manageable high-impact I-decide-most-things job. I just want to see what a happy and free Carmack can still do.
