You know, with the funding numbers involved, there's at least a half dozen companies and a dozen governments that could each unilaterally say, "We're hiring 10,000 philosophers and other humanities scholars and social scientists to work on this, apply here." None of them have done so.

Worth noting that Dumbledore himself is also not the king on his own chessboard. He deliberately removes himself after setting things up so that, in some sense, he continues to get to make more moves anyway, possibly even up to and including his own future return.

If the job interview was too easy, perhaps you don’t want the job. 

I'm curious if this is an experience most people agree with. In my experience, by the time I get an interview at all I've already passed the key filters, and usually find the actual interview(s) fairly straightforward. Otherwise companies assume I'm overqualified or decide I fail to tick some unimportant box and I never make it to the "interact with a human" stage.

AFAIK it's the origin of the saying that good fences make good neighbors. A saying the speaker pretty explicitly disagrees with, as a general principle. Yet it's the saying society remembers.

Reasonable suspicion. Empirically false, in my case.

Strongly upvoted. Great post. I disagree with most of it and would love to read more like it.

What are you trying to say here? Okay, just write that.

Literally /part of every editing session with my boss, my first two years out of grad school.

This is also a good example of something I am seeing as a general trend. In my personal experience, most visible in groceries, rising costs of things like labor and logistics relative to materials create a kind of compression that decreases the proportional cost premium of choosing higher quality. There's always ways to spend more, and usually ways to find low or average quality cheaper. But I feel like this depends more and more on where and when you shop, rather than the quality of what you buy. I have no hard data at all about this, its just perception.

This is true. I think the for OP (and definitely for me) it feels obvious enough that that 'shouldn't' be necessary, but I agree it is. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. But that only happens if you are one of the people who reads the original work.

One of the simpler, though fictional, classic examples is The Road Not Taken, which is very very short, yet even Frost himself complained about how people were misunderstanding it. And even people who do read it seem to keep misunderstanding it. Many people seem to completely gloss over the sentence structures and small-but-critical words in what they read, and end up parsing it incorrectly. Ditto for Mending Wall. I find literary examples useful because they're less technical (and therefore more accessible) and very easy to confirm.

One example I like is that Einstein wanted to call the theory of relativity the 'theory of invariants.' He understood that what matters, as a deep principle of physics, is which quantities and laws are truly fixed. Yes, he showed that some important things people had thought were invariant weren't, but what mattered were the things that were invariant that people hadn't realized. Instead even physics teachers talk about 'paradoxes' and end up confusing a lot of hapless undergrads, a century later.

To tell a story, suppose you're the CTO and you have a new engineering manager underneath you who is a mix of incompetent and vindictive.  This manager won't inform you of the personnel issue here, and the reports unlikely to reach out if the CTO feels inaccessible and the manager is vindictive. It could perhaps be surfaced with skip-level 1-1s. This can happen if the CTO manages two middle managers. What if there are six?

Conversely: This also has implications for how many direct reports the middle manager probably has. If I have skip-level 1 on 1 meetings, or some other upward review process, my response potentially looks very different depending on whether I'm one of 2 or 6 direct reports. 6, and there's a lot of people saying a lot of things, I'm part of a crowd and can be fairly open and honest. 2, and it's much harder for me to trust that my boss won't know who said what about them, if there's anything that needs to be said that might incur retaliation. 

Otherwise, overall agreed with most of this. Many companies and groups scale too quickly because they think it's what they're supposed to do, for many reasons. Some others really should scale but can't or won't.