I'm a FAANG-er with a (partially) bullshit job too and I've been tired of all these engineers with fake jobs living of the teat of their money-printing corp and pretending that their little over-engineering is so essential.
How many finance workers on wall street do you think provide direct value to society?
[EDIT] I think this is true even for extremely generous values of "essential", in fact. I think the vast majority of software effort delivers marginal gains at best, with a net effect that is overall harmful in the median case, which harm is masked by the occasional huge improvement it delivers.
It's possible to do most of the useful stuff Facebook and Twitter do with very small operations.
But then most of tech arguably doesn't serve the higher rungs very well, or is outright counterproductive with what evidence we have about Instagram[1] and Facebook's[2] effects on mental health, and so on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#Scientific_studies
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Mental_and_emotional_...
I’m not of the idea that all tech is unnecessary. We need information systems for things like banking, healthcare, government and so on.
But as you pointed out there are also tech products that are definitely not essential or even counter productive to society that employ a lot of people.
People don't end where they start. Sometimes you get lucky and have an opportunity to do something really worthwhile.
The thing is, when that happens, it's often the result of series of career "stepping stones" which are often not very worthwhile when looked at in isolation.
Many of the folks who were terminated from Google, I think, will use the connections and experiences gained at Google to do really essential work. Maybe not this week, maybe in years or decades. It's not wasted, if the individual makes the best of it.