Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

Saffron is still in school. This is patronizing, but she doesn't know anything about real disillusionment yet.

Real disillusionment comes after the elite education.

The stuff that crushes your spirit comes later when you go to work at a FAANG and realize that the modern tech sector is fueled not by lofty ideals of innovation and altruistic visions of technological utopia, but by the same cynical profiteering, exploitation and rent-seeking as every other capitalist enterprise.

Your attitude changes once you understand that the high-paying tech sector jobs you spent years of your life training to perform all require you to compromise your beliefs about what is good/fair/just. The jobs require you to build things which hurt people for people who only care about money. Imagine working 40-60 hours a week to make good money doing something you know is at best a complete waste of time and talent.

Real disillusionment comes after you've lived in San Francisco for a while and you realize everyone you know also works in tech and thinks, looks and talks the same way you do and likes the same things you do. And maybe on your way to work at the glossy tech campus that gives you free lunch that your coworkers are always complaining about you pass a tent city littered with needles and human shit.

Eventually you realize that an enormous number of the public figures who went to your university and succeeded in "changing the world" didn't change it for the better. And you may wonder if a lot of the things you've been told about meritocracy and the virtues of intelligence and achievement and wealth accumulation are true at all.

> The jobs require you to build things which hurt people for people who only care about money.

Can you please elaborate on this bit more? How is FANAG hurting people?

Eroding privacy, driving "attention economy" addictions, promoting the shallowest content, influencing politics, devastating small businesses, and ruining mental health mainly.

Well everyone I knew at Google saw those problems and explicitly worked to improve those things. I didn't see a single message or objective to hurt those things. So I don't see how you have to compromise your ideals to work there, most people don't and Google encourage people to work to fix those problems so Google gladly welcomes them.

In a coal power corporation, you will not find anyone who actively promotes pollution. It is merely a side effect of their normal business.

I'm not suggesting that people at any of the FAANG companies do those things on purpose. Those aren't the company goals. Even I wouldn't go that far. I'm saying that those things are outcomes of building systems to do mass surveillance to drive advertising or sell phones or broadcast information.

People at FAANG companies may well strive to minimise the negative impact of their activities but it clearly doesn't work very well given, well, /me gestures broadly at the tech industry.

But Google tracks people - their primary business is to identify individuals, and follow their activities online and in the physical world.

This information is then used to judge, to predict, to sell and more.

Their profits are enormous, so useful new services are created, but coincidentally they involve new ways to track.

I think this makes it worse.

You have companies full of smart people working hard who want to make the world a better place -- and the result is still eroding privacy, driving "attention economy" addictions, promoting the shallowest content, influencing politics, devastating small businesses, and ruining mental health.

Not because that's what some of the people working there want. (In that case you could at least think "OK, I'll work extra smart and hard, get to the top, and change things for the better.") But because that's what the system as a whole produces, even when the individuals in it don't want that.

See also: Slate Star Codex's "Meditations on Moloch", https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ .

Some people take longer than others to fall into disillusionment. Some never do. The people who work at a place are generally the ones who survived this selection process. The disillusioned have all walked away from Omelas [1].

[1] https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf

This sounds like it is written by someone who has never worked at a large tech company, and understands them primarily through the FUD spread about them by other large tech companies.

It really doesn’t. It sounds super detailed and convincing to me, somebody who knows nothing to prove or refute GPS comment. If it’s a lie, god damn it’s a good one.

All of the large tech companies create valuable and beloved products, and most of the people workings at those companies are working on improving and maintaining those beloved products.

This is not my view from the outside, not even close. Perhaps it’s a perception issue.

Which part do you disagree with? The fact that the products are beloved, or the fact that people are working to improve them?

I've worked on beloved products and I also disagree. These orgs are full of cutthroat psychopathic politicians much more than people who care about the products. They often run on their monopoly status and fail to create any new value.

Does it? How so?

Not in my experience. Modern “tech” companies are underpinned by advertising. It has a corrosive nature which rots the very core; employer and employee alike.

If you're unsatisfied with the state of the industry, do better.

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