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Comment by kleinsch | Hacker News Reader

Go outside the SF/HN bubble and try to find people with a negative view of Google. Out in the real world nobody cares about ad tracking. In 2020 I walked around suburban Colorado wearing a FB Messenger hoodie and had multiple people comment on how cool it was that I work there and ask what it’s like.

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I’m on the opposite coast working for $BigTech remotely. Just to keep the answer simple, when people outside of tech ask what I do I just say “I am a software developer” [1] and leave it at that. The same answer I’ve given for 25 years across 8 jobs. If they then ask where I work I say where I work, I tell them.

They usually just shrug and the conversation continues. Most people outside of the tech bubble just think a job is a job, many don’t even know the compensation of the large tech companies.

[1] The title isn’t strictly correct. But close enough. It beats droning on with the longer explanation

I know and work with a lot of people outside of the tech sphere, and nowhere near SF, who have quite negative views of Google and Facebook. Mainly in the Chemistry and Biology spaces, though to be fair those people are generally very highly educated and tend to maintain a high awareness of what goes on in the world in general.

Your claim about the "real world" sort of boils down to "people are less likely to dislike Facebook and Google if they do not understand what they are doing", which isn't really a great thing to be able to claim.

>Go outside the SF/HN bubble and try to find people with a negative view of Google. Out in the real world nobody cares about ad tracking.

I wasn't speaking specifically to ads/tracking. Out in the "real world" there are plenty of people who decry "big tech censorship" and have strong views about said tech firms that are tied to their political views.

Yeah but that’s like 1/100 people you meet. Most people don’t care about the stuff you care about, jjulius.

>Yeah but that’s like 1/100 people you meet.

Depends on where you live and who you're frequently around; my experience seems to be quite a bit different from yours. I also don't expect that people care about what I care about, appletrotter.

For the general population, it is a whole lot less.

The Verge has done some surveys on this[1] (not of their audience but of a national sample) and in 2021 90% of respondents had a positive view of Google, 89% of Netflix, 87% of Amazon, 79% of Apple, and 66% of Facebook (Instagram was 72%). I think plenty of people might have some kind of negative opinion about each of those companies, but view the jobs there as prestigious.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22702798/verge-tech-surve...

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