When Identity Outlives Purpose

8 min readJust now

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Over my ten-year tenure in Big Tech, I’ve witnessed conflicts that drove exceptional people out, hollowed out entire teams, and hardened rifts between massive organizations long after any business rationale — if there ever was one — had faded.

The conflicts I explore here are not about strategy, conflicts of interest, misaligned incentives, or structural failures. Nor are they about money, power, or other familiar human vices.

They are about identity. We shape and reinforce it over a lifetime. It becomes our strongest armor — and, just as often, our hardest cage.

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”

― Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones**, **George R.R. Martin

Author’s note:

Names, identifying details, and dialogues in this essay have been changed. Scenes are reconstructed from memory and occasionally stylized to convey emotional truth rather than provide a verbatim transcript.

On the Eighth Life

In the 2010s, the PC and laptop business was declining. Smartphones were steadily eating the market share, and HP was desperately looking for alternatives. Many organizations, including ours, were seeking new promising business directions.

Amid the mess of opportunists, power point warriors, bullshitters and yes-men, two charismatic leaders emerged, and the organization was divided into two camps around two vivid personalities.

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Bill and Dave tried their hands at multiple projects while they were searching for their young company’s market niche. Among the devices they pursued were an automatic toilet flusher, an electric weight-loss machine, and this device, an electric foul-line indicator they developed for a local bowling alley. Source: hewlettpackardhistory.com

Alpha

Tony was a stereotypical businessman — if not a gangster. He was the kind of personality you don’t expect to encounter in a corporate setting. Expensive cars. Off-color jokes. An effortless projection of wealth and confidence.

Once, he took a few other engineers and me on a drive to one of the facilities in his S-Class Mercedes. The car was packed with features, and we were determined to try them all. The massage seats, however, were limited to the front.

— “Hey, Tony. Not so fancy after all? Didn’t spring for the top trim?”

— “I thought about it”, — he said without missing a beat. “That one comes with a Chinese masseuse in the trunk.”

Not everyone appreciated the misogynistic, racist, overly masculine edge of his humor — even when it was clearly performative. But engineers were never a particularly refined audience, and the jokes landed. They made him feel larger than life. Approachable. In control.

For all the bravado, Tony’s life’s work was grounded elsewhere. He had built his career in custom sportswear manufacturing, and there was a tenuous fit between that world and HP’s push into scalable industrial 3D printing.

“No one could deny that Kaul Hilo has a way with his people. It came from genuine concern, and was a talent more mysterious to Anden than any jade ability.”

― **Fonda Lee, **Jade City

Virtuoso

Steve was a picture-perfect, distinguished engineer. He was charismatic, well-spoken, friendly, and deeply technical. He had delivered high-profile projects for HP and was among the most respected engineers in the office, with access to organizational leadership.

Most recently, he designed a new product for HP, actively promoting it, and was working on expanding the ecosystem. If not the biggest in scale, it was certainly the pinnacle of his career. An invention he built from the ground up, elevating it to a branded product manufactured at scale.

He was genuinely happy when talking about it. Energized. His enthusiasm was contagious.

“The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialisation.“

— Alexander Bell on the invention of the telephone

Lines Drawn

Neither Steve nor Tony had engineers reporting to them, so they competed for resources, but the line was drawn to mutual satisfaction. Steve commanded loyalty from in-house developers; Tony relied on budget and external contractors tied to his joint venture.

Their relationship remained cordial — partly respectful, partly cautious. They rarely collaborated and stayed focused on their own pursuits.

No Return

I often wondered why Steve and Tony never worked more closely together. A respected engineer and a charismatic business leader seemed like an obvious pairing.

Tony’s motivation was clear to me. Custom sportswear was his life’s work. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything else — and, in fact, he never did. Not before, and not after. His project at HP was an extension of who he already was.

Steve’s reservations were harder to understand. But when his own project began to falter, I approached him and asked for support with the work I was doing for Tony. His response caught me off guard.

“I’ve already been an engineer,” he said. “I’m not going back.”

That wasn’t what I was asking — or even implying.

Popular portrayals tend to frame powerful people as petty egoists, driven by greed or hunger for control. That explanation didn’t fit here. Both men were late in their careers, with nowhere left to climb and no immediate threat to status.

I don’t believe either wanted unilateral ownership of the project. Their backgrounds were so different that success practically required both of them.

Instead, Steve could not summon the same sense of attachment he felt toward his own invention. Tony’s project did not inhabit him in the same way.

What remained was the role of technical pillar — supporting, enabling, advising — but that was not a role he was willing to accept.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but this was my first encounter with identity as a hard limit.

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Looking back at a life already lived.*** ****Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, *Caspar David Friedrich (1818).

From Workshop to Factory

At HP, I first learned that identity could become a barrier. At Apple, I learned it could become an impenetrable rift.

Our organization sat within hardware engineering, but we had mostly worked on low-level software and systems work. We took pride in our deep understanding of hardware and our ability to ship high-quality, performant features that gave the iPhone its premium feel.

In the late 2010s, the ground shifted. Now, every meaningful feature requires running a neural network.

To its credit, the organization recognized this early. We worked closely with the hardware team that designed the Apple Neural Engine, building the software stack that allowed neural networks to run efficiently on Apple silicon. Quietly and reliably, we shipped AI-based features end-to-end.

However, success brought complexity. Around the Neural Engine, a vast AI infrastructure ecosystem began to form. Much of this work was now owned by organizations like AIML and SWE.

The workshop model no longer held.

At this point, no meaningful project could be delivered by our organization alone.

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The Apple I did not include a stock case, so customers had to supply their own. Image from Wikipedia.

Warden

Mao was the organization’s formal leader and its ideological custodian. He guarded its boundaries and upheld an isolationist model that had defined the group for years.

He had reached the peak of his career as an engineer before transitioning into management, eventually rising to senior director and overseeing hundreds of engineers.

In person, he was polite and controlled. But those who worked closely with him knew that this restraint had limits. Occasionally, the walls were not thick enough to hush his raised voice. Still, within his domain, he commanded genuine respect.

Outside the organization, that same protectiveness read less like stewardship and more like overreach. The insistence on doing everything in-house was widely seen as reactive rather than strategic.

This is My Domain

The friction began when that guarded structure encountered a world that no longer fit inside it.

That balance held until a new manager arrived and began sealing the borders. At the time, I read it as posturing: an attempt by the newcomer to assert himself in front of senior leadership.

Eventually, my grievances reached a point where I proposed transferring my team to the AIML infrastructure organization.

To me, it seemed unremarkable. Our team was a rounding error to the organization. More importantly, we had full backing from AIML leadership, all the way up to the SVP level. The transfer would have removed friction and could have been exchanged for some concession.

I asked for a meeting with Mao.

— Would you be open to transferring our team to AIML?

— No.

— Why not? We’ll honor every commitment. You have my word, and AIML leadership is aligned.

— Today we are on the same page. Tomorrow is a different chapter.

The response baffled me at first. His position was deeply unpopular across AIML and SWE leaders, and among engineers and managers more broadly. In effect, he was ousting a founder and key engineers from a project.

Still, he would not move.

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Atlas and the Hesperides by John Singer Sargent (1925). Image from Wikipedia.

Taking Offense

His motivation has become clearer from later conversations.

In one meeting with senior leaders from AIML, while discussing a potential resolution, Mao abruptly interrupted:

“I’ve spent twenty-five years in the company. Don’t tell me how it should be run.”

The remark caught us all off guard. Nothing we had said, explicitly or implicitly, challenged his authority or could reasonably be read as disrespect. It wasn’t a response to the substance of the discussion, but to something else entirely: a private sticking point, an unresolved tension that had already hardened out of view, but the tone and the setting felt familiar. It reminded me of Steve’s reaction years earlier.

It became clear that he understood the consequences. He knew the project would stall, that key engineers would leave, timelines would be compromised, and that his own reputation would take a hit. None of that mattered.

He would not let it go. He would not change his ways.

I Must be What I am

In both cases, the conflict was driven by a clash of powerful identities with mature ideologies. This is a more honorable cause than simple lust for power or money, but it is a deeper knot to untie.

Personal offences can sometimes be settled by a heart-to-heart conversation, and disputes over resources can often be resolved through trade or compromise. Identity cannot. To concede on identity feels like losing a part of who you are.

This dynamic appears at every level. A researcher grows bitter at the demands the industry makes of him. An engineer leaves after being passed over for the role he had been working toward. An executive insists on old ways long after their purpose has faded.

By no means do I suggest redeeming those who cause real harm — mental or financial — destroy value, or block progress, regardless of the underlying reason for their unyielding stance. Nor is identity the only source of conflict; there are many.

All I can say is this: when identities collide, settlement is not an option. The conflict ends only when one side no longer has the strength to carry the torch for the self it refuses to relinquish.

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When identity outlives purpose. Roy Batty in the “Tears in the Rain” scene, Blade Runner (1982).