These people are not the smart ones, but the ones who are really good at doing "company politics" and "playing political games" (which are very different skills from being smart).
My personal opinion is that it is rather a sign of smartness to see through all of this. But unluckily the people who are capable of this lack the political power and backing of other people to get "dangerous" for these "ladder climbers" (or if they do become dangerous, it is for the same reasons easy to "get rid of them" (e.g. fire them)).
If they were actually smart they’d figure out how to set up an employment situation that they don’t mind that also has the pay/status that they want.
Congrats, you are very smart and know how to manipulate symbols real good. Try cashing that check at the bank.
"I'm so much smarter than them."
"Well they have a yacht and 3 homes."
Who used their smartness better?
Was it a new space startup in the Bay area?
What you describe sounds like a "founders just came together" trying to impersonate the IBM org chart without having figured out product-market fit yet, or even earlier than that.
If you get the wrong people in the beginning, it can throw you into a wrong trajectory that's almost impossible to correct later.
When hires have no skin in the game besides their wage (which they're legally bound to receive until terminated, regardless of business outcomes), and have minimal material share in success, they are going to play different games to preserve that wage
If you want people to act like partners in the business, make them partners
Everything was done by committee in increments of the 1-hour recurring meeting once a week. You could be on 10 of these recurring meetings for 10 different projects.
The first part of every meeting was a recap of last meeting. The middle part was about 20 minutes of trying to make progress on blocking items while the ex-BigCo managers came up with excuses for why they didn’t do their part yet (usually it was because they had too many meetings). The last 20 minutes was a performative exercise where we decided on action items for the week which we all knew were unlikely to get done.
The company went on like this for years after I left until they ran out of extra funds to keep the charade going. The management scattered to other “startups” where I’ve heard they’re continuing to repeat the same games.