I recently ran into political science term "pockets of efficiency", which is used to explain why some part of a large corrupt organization (originally state, but I don't see why a giant corporation would be different) can work efficiently. I suspect Samsung used to have a lot of these, because they have manufactured a lot of terrible consumer products but still somehow they have had financial success and their components can be found in decent products too.
Interesting. I’ll look that up! My theory is that toxic culture worked when Samsung was mostly playing catch up (before 2010 ish) to existing products/ technologies. But now they need to innovate, and toxicity is crushing and driving away creative people.
Now that you mentioned early 2000s, at the time I was shopping for a LCD display. At the time Eizo was the go-to brand for good screens, and they used Samsung panels. As a poor just graduated programmer I bought the Samsung with the same VA panel that Eizo used, and it was awful in ways I would never expect a display could be.
