Many do. More common the further up the ladder you get. But I’ve been able to gain enough influence to affect most of the things I care about without engaging in that, unless you consider being friendly and supportive (something that did not come remotely naturally to me) to be brown-nosing.
If you want to significantly influence a lot of high-level strategic decision-making at very large companies, then you do probably need to engage in nasty things like that. But most of us don’t work at that scope.
If that’s all you see, you probably need to level up your soft skills.
Certainly the things you’re talking about are real, and particularly severe in some environments, but there’s a lot of room to improve your influence without engaging in any of that.
It will take no time. I made three purchases this weekend where I started my search with ChatGPT because it gives me better results than Google, and it can also pull in or link me to Reddit comments.
I have it running a background research task now where it’s producing a comparison table of product options with columns for different attributes I’m interested in, including links to purchase it, so it can help me make a decision tonight. If this feature is available for what I want, I’ll be using it in a few hours.
Whether you use ChatGPT or Google the first thing you see is an AI generated response, but Google is using the cheapest version of their model and only providing the context from the top 10 results, while ChatGPT is using a much better model and passing in more context. Lots of folks are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google these days.
They get a cut for products that support this. So they’re incentivized to display those instead. It’s pretty close to standard affiliate advertising and the biases that introduces.
“Real alphabetical ordering” is incredibly nonspecific. It’s underspecified even for ASCII-US, but essentially meaningless for those of us in 2025 who need to handle Unicode.
How do capital letters sort relative to lowercase letters? How do letters sort relative to digits? How do you consider code points that can correspond to different letters in different lettering systems with different ordering? How do you handle diacritics? Do you want the behaviour to be stable through Unicode normalization? Should it differ based on the character encoding? Should different representations of the same character, such as blackboard lettering or circled numbers, be sorted with other representations of the same character or grouped separately?
You can come up answers for these questions, but there’s no unambiguously correct option. The least subjective option is sorting based on encoded byte representation (if that is even specified), but that is not “alphabetical” and would not be intuitive to most users.
Increasing the number of different possible combinations of settings your software can be running with by a factor of one nonillion is not a choice I’d make if I wanted to have any confidence in its reliability and security.
How isn’t that currently possible? In America, your bank is already required to keep a semi-permanent record of your state issued identification for anti-money laundering/terrorism financing reasons.
I can see concerns about it becoming a widely used form of SSO, potentially even mandated, and that destroying privacy. However, banks and credit are cases where you already do not have that privacy, so they don’t seem like a very compelling example to point to.