> I’ve tried to discuss this with my mom, and she kept telling me how “lucky” I am for working at Microsoft...
I don't think I worked on any unethical part of Apple, I just worked on the indexing and caching for iTunes, but I really hated working there, and it was frustrating that whenever I complained about it, people would remind me how lucky I was to have a job at Apple.
I survived 2.5 years there, but eventually I had to quit (taking a fairly substantial pay cut in the process). I think my parents thought I was nuts, but my mood improved almost immediately.
I never worked for apple, but huge companies with established, incumbent cash flows and huge moats can bear a truly, spectacularly, mind-bogglingly incredible amount of internal dysfunction while still generally going forward. This can make it really crushing to be a sensible, well-intended single person inside this beast where you have essentially no power yourself.
Yes. And part of why you're paid exorbitantly at these places is to absorb, manage, and counteract this dysfunction. This can be exhausting and lonely work.
i worked at a FAANG for six years and this matches my experience. there's a variety of responses:
- to burn out. sometimes the flameout is spectacular, other times it's a quiet, lonely exit.
- to "go with the flow." soft-quit, accept that the dysfunction is there and narrow your own expectations within it
- (rarely) to productively challenge it, and -- through picking battles and careful resource management -- push through and make something truly good for yourself or your reports.
this is situational. all three are often present in one career at different times.
Counteract might be the wrong word.. The ongoing dysfunction doesn't fall from the sky, it is largely a consequence of people prioritizing the goals they are assigned for the betterment of their group, etc.
At YT, I hated that you needed two weeks of prep for the meeting to uncover two weeks of prep for the meeting where you could get preliminary access to the data source you needed to figure out if your job description was even viable.
I get that you need internal controls or whatever, but just log my queries, and if I'm stalking an ex then fire and sue me. It's hard to optimize conversion rate for superchat or whatever if it's a 3-month process to find out if the source of data I plan to use is actually the right source of data.
Is Apple any better? My friends on the inside say it's worse, but I'm also just one guy, and their stock is going up and to the right. Make your own decisions.
Getting data, even for live systems, wasn't too hard as long as you weren't doing anything secret during a trading blackout window, which didn't seem too unreasonable to me.
I didn't work with data science though, my stuff was generally limited to database queries and log messages.
Oh my, how long you got? There were a ton of things, but I can really boil down to a few instances.
First:
The thing that really made me disenchanted with the company came down to an incident where I replied back to a previous email chain with <REDACTED> (one of the higher-ups at Apple) with a topic that wasn't directly relevant to the subject of the previous emails, and then that asshole thought it was best to complain to every single manager between me and him, which was six people.
The next day every one of those managers decided to schedule a half-hour meeting explaining to me how inappropriate it was that I emailed <REDACTED> directly, instead of going through the bureaucratic channels. It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first.
Three. Fucking. Hours. They wasted basically half a day just to make sure that I didn't send an email to the wrong people in the wrong order. It was worse than that scene in Office Space.
Second:
There was also another incident, where my manager's manager's manager emailed me, I hadn't replied in two hours, so he called my cell phone and yelled at me for not checking my emails more frequently. I tried explaining that email was asynchronous and that if he needed my attention immediately he should message me with HipChat or call my phone, which he clearly knew how to do, only for him to tell me that I have an attitude problem.
Not as bad as having my day ruined for emailing the wrong person, but still really rubbed me the wrong way.
There were a lot more annoying things that happened, and my understanding is that a lot of it was an issue with my team; Apple has thousands of software engineers and I think some teams are better than others.
There are absolutely good teams at Apple. I left a toxic one (Photos) to follow an co-worker I liked a lot who had become a manager (and his team had an opening).
Honestly, it was a back-water project with just a handful of engineers on it. But my manager was awesome, my team was cool.
My favorite stint at Apple was when I was working on MacOS frameworks. It was chill, you got no significant bonuses to speak of, no special attention during WWDC Keynote presentation. You just did your job and the developers were grateful for the fixes and features you enabled.
I was indeed working in the Eddy Cue branch of Apple, though he wasn't the redacted person in the anecdote (someone close to him though, though I ask if you figure who it is that you do not post it here).
I tried to do a transfer to another team (the storage backend for iCloud), went pretty far, and almost got an offer to move, but I had gotten a less-than-stellar review the previous year due to my attitude problems, and they decided not to move forward with the transfer.
In fairness to them, by the time I was doing that interview, I definitely did have an attitude problem, some of it justified, a lot of it not, so I don't really hold any grudges with that particular team for not letting me transfer.
After that transfer fell through, I was pretty depressed and eventually just decided to get another job at a different company.
When I was younger, I had "attitude problems" as well. I like to think though it was because I was passionate about what we were doing at Apple — how we were being perceived by the public.
I think I eventually just stopped giving a shit and instead more or less kept my head down. And perhaps that's too bad.
I think my biggest ongoing frustration was how much time I was expected to read and reply to emails; on my first day one of the first things I was instructed to do was to use their internal email filtering system (the name of which I can't remember), because if you didn't you'd have literally thousands of emails going into your main inbox. Mostly alerts, lots of cross-team announcements that weren't relevant to me, some Radar updates on tickets that I wasn't assigned to IIRC.
Even when I got the filters more or less under control, I would still have to spend a lot of time replying to emails throughout the day, or risk getting in trouble for letting them pile up.
It was pretty depressing, and I remember the first time I pushed back I ended up kind of yelling at my boss's boss about it when I said something like "You know, during the interview you asked me a lot of really hard computer science questions, I thought that's why you hired me, but maybe we should revise the process to just be a fucking endurance test of replying to emails for two hours and see how they do." He didn't like this suggestion, for whatever reason.
So I don't completely blame them for saying I had a bad attitude, and frankly I don't think I was a good fit for the AMP team of Apple; I am far too unorganized.
I'm a so-so to possibly bad programmer, but I am very well organized, responsible (respond to everything immediately), and very good at enduring pain and BS like you describe. Lifetime of it, it's how I survive. I'd never get hired at Google due to the interview process I'm sure, but it sounds like I'd be their ideal employee. Shame that marriage made in heaven will never be consummated!
It really is amazing how uptight people are and the lengths they'll go to ensure your managers know how much you've "offended" them. I've left all non-work Slack channels as a result of such an incident. Employees will also ask you questions as if they genuinely care about you and rather than correct you or give friendly advice, will go to your manager.
I've worked at startups for most of my career so I'm used to people talking to me directly with misgivings. The passive/indirect bullshit is super frustrating.
Yeah, I think most people end up learning the hard way that there's no equivalent to "attorney client privilege" in regards to coworkers and managers.
I like all my current coworkers, I think they're nice and smart people, and I don't think they're assholes at all, but I don't really say anything to them that I wouldn't be fine with HR hearing about, even during off hours. They're not bad people, and I don't think that they'd be overly vindictive, but I've been burned enough by coworkers that I have trouble trusting them.
Personally it's pretty hard to get me to tattle on people [1], in no small part because I think that most people don't need to be reminded six times for one mistake. I also just think that unfeeling bureaucracies are capable of unspeakable evil but that's far more of a tangent that I'm not going to get to in this message.
[1] With obvious exceptions, if I were to see outright abuse or fraud or something then I'd probably tell someone.
I’m very much still an Apple fan but being on the inside and seeing how weirdly cutthroat people are (we’re not even in the same teams!!) encourages me to look elsewhere.
I have worked for a fair number of BigCos now, and they all have their own little annoyances.
As far as I can tell, pretty much all “enterprise” companies drain your life force. They’re all subtly slightly different in how they suck away your will to live, and some are worse than others, but they’re all kind of horrible in their own wonderful ways. There is almost always cutthroat shit.
I wasn’t a huge fan of working at Apple but don’t let me take it away from you if you do. If you can stomach it, stick with it, let the stock vest, and retire comfortably in your 50’s.
I don't have the skills to get hired by Apple, but I think maybe for my mental health I should just work on my side projects instead of trying to get hired by the FAANGs.
> It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first.
There is a famous scene, in the movie Office Space (1999), where the low level coder is constantly harassed about an idiotic memo because he forgot a cover sheet on his TPS reports.. he is reminded of this 3 times and then some by other people..
It's unreal how the "modern" corporate environment, remains the same as it was in early 90s..
The best part of that movie is the office is supposed to be a bleak, soul-destroying cube farm. But watching the movie now it's like "wow they have so much space and privacy."
"They bring in a rookie, throw money at him, buy the car, the house, after a couple of years, and your kids are in private schools, you're used to the good life, they tell you the truth"
Big salaries thrown at young people are bait. They don't need wild animals, but circus animals that are obedient, dependent and consistently perform tricks without too much thinking about why. Over time this involves such animals to loose all sense of self. Naturally this won't work on everyone and causes all kinds issues for both sides.
I actually wasn't that young, I was 27 when I started and I was already "senior level" before I worked there.
Also, the salary was good but not as amazing as people to think. When I started there in 2018, I was making $165k/year; certainly not "bad" but not spectacular.
The stock grants were huge though. If I were still there I'd be worth more than a million now, I think.
The second part is what I'm dealing with. I didn't even realize I was getting nearly enough the market rate until I started looking around a few months ago. Feelsbadman.
I mean, a post on Reddit had a fresh 21 year-old out of college making a TC of $120,000/year - 2x the median annual salary of ~$60,000/year. So, yes. You're lucky
I'm neurodivergent and working at a small company lead to me being the CTO and forcing myself to understand (and operate successfully with in) the social and political aspects of business for the first time.
I don't know if I am neurodivergent (on days I take my meds, eat all my superfoods, and exercise for the third day in a row (I would say "or more days", but you know)), but I can say that having a clear and motivating goal is the best way to learn anything, no matter how unnatural/challenging it seems at first. As long at it has put itself between myself and my goal.
Also, hardship. I have learned so much from that, that it feels almost hypocritical not to heartily recommend it.
Large companies are all about neurodivergence in the workforce nowadays, but they expect them to conform to neurotypical-friendly, neurodivergent-hostile operating procedures like Scrum.
I can say it's been far easier for my neurodivergent ass to survive at a small company where everyone knows each other and can see the work put in. Difficulties with socialization and consistency of working hours—both things I struggle with—are much easier to deal with when you clearly have each others' backs and won't shirk the work.
Sadly starting my own company, I realized how hard it is to work with founders who are neurodivergent in a different and incompatible ways. Just be prepared to examine the culture closely to figure out if it's a fit for you.
I'm now at a massive household brand name company and every day I want to rip my eyeballs out and give up on capitalism forever. Whoever thought big government was incompetent needs to understand the colossal waste and inefficiency of private enterprise will always dwarf that of the public sector.
Kind of a strange sentiment? It seems like you're willing to take a paycut, so there's no shortage of jobs that will pay you a sustainable, but not FAANG, income to work on something respectable.
I get wanting to take a break after working on something distasteful - I've been there! - but I can't say I'd give up on the field entirely after one job.
Neel, based on your linkedin, you're 27 or 28. You're a grown adult. Stop following your mom's orders. Quit your job, take some time off to decompress and recover from your clear burnout, then figure out what you want to do. Life isn't Microsoft or flipping burgers. There's a lot of things in between. You have one life, don't waste it trying to please others. But simultaneously, don't assume that your burnout is permanent. Just take a break my friend.
Neel, don't crawl into a hole. Use your skill. Fuck big tech.
Let's use these LLMs that they think will replace us all to create browser agents that remove ads, tracking, click bait, attention stealing... heck, we could even de-engagement farm the internet. No more trolling, hate, or toxicity.
If we all get personal assistants at the edge on our own pane of glass and hardware, then they have to pay us for access.
Want to show me an ad? Pay up.
Neel, quite often in life it turns out that your burning problem is also a thousand other people's burning problem. In your case, it's billions.
You're probably right about my tone. But I genuinely think a lot of 27 year olds don't feel like adults capable of having agency. Not long ago the average American used to have several children by that age, and today most of my friends (of similar ages) would be shocked at the prospect of having kids this young - they're just not ready yet! But that's a mindset thing. No one's ready for kids, you just do it and learn. Neel needs to be told that he's an adult, and has agency as a result of that.
Appreciate the moral stand against surveillance-tech and totally sympathize with leaving big tech to do startups (I did the same!) but I don't get the title. Isn't OP still coding his software startup [0]?
I've got this sentiment reading a few such goodbye letters like this. They often end by saying something like, "I quit software engineering. Because I can't make money at it, under these conditions." As if the options were work for Big Tech; work for a YC company (aka embryonic Big Tech); or be poor.
So I'm gonna say it like this, to get the vibe across:
It's pretty easy to run some Internet businesses and equal your software eng salary, as the owner of those businesses.
Not in year one, but if your goal is to hit ~40k in the first year and then scale up over a couple years, you can do it.
Also it is vastly easier if you have the capital to jump to the front of the line and skip the horrible 1 year of waiting for traffic/users to come, and just buy a business. Then you're in business from day one and can complete this more quickly and less stressfully. Elon did it with Tesla and he's now the world's richest man; learn from his example.
It's funny that this ends up being a kind of "secret knowledge" because it falls between the cracks of tech and corporate incentives. Big companies won't teach you this, because lol why would they teach you how to screw them and quit. VC's won't (exactly) teach you this, because while they are generically supportive of entrepreneurship and while it is easier to earn less money than more money (obviously), they want you to go straight for the billion dollar ideas and discourage small money thinking. Which leads to this outcome of like 100 engineers trying and only 5 making it through the gauntlet and becoming rich, rather than >90 making it if only the incentives were different.
Incidentally I recently bought a business and, after spending a lot of time in the nitty gritty "weeds" of making an Internet $10 as opposed to "zero to one" thinking, this is all coming into focus. But as I said, it's a kind of secret knowledge, which you have to piece together from YouTube, newsletters, and doing the effort - that last part of which is like 80% of the real learning. In my case I bought something and then learned on the job; fortunately the profits did not suffer.
So I'm here to tell you this is doable; it's definitely doable. If you're a software engineer of average intelligence for a software engineer, you can do it. Figuring it out isn't easy, but it's very far from impossible.
I know of a company and their business is basically: identify software products that have customers but aren’t really being developed any more. Buy them and reimplement the software in a more modern way. Sell it again to the existing users, who are generally happy to buy because now they’re getting updates and support and don’t need to keep that old Windows 98 box around because it’s the only thing that ran the old version.
I'll just survey the landscape, and then say it ultimately comes down to personal preference.
So the basic idea is to get an audience and then monetize it. For that, there are different ways. In my opinion it's easier to buy something that gets traffic through this and then monetize it, then to buy a whole business, at least for the purposes of this conversation. Why? Because it's much easier to verify something is getting the traffic a platform's stats confirm, and then build a business on top of that, then to extrapolate correctly from a business someone is selling with a thousand moving parts.
With that being said: plenty of people buy complicated Internet businesses and achieve great results with them.
Also to reiterate from my earlier comment: if you can buy an account (some platforms do allow this) and start with traffic that's already earning a trickle of dollars, psychologically I believe that's 100 times easier than starting from nothing and painfully waiting months to earn a dollar. I recommend it whenever possible.
So without further ado here's how I rank the ways to get traffic. Notice how fractured this landscape this is; most people specialize in one, or perhaps two.
Google SEO: avoid avoid avoid. Not only is it saturated but the search arm of Google is a hard taskmaster. The most frustrating and abstruse of all the ways to make money online imo. I would only do this if I started by buying a niche content website business (aka one with prebuilt traffic).
YouTube: much more appealing than Google SEO but still a grind. However what you will learn here is all useful and the YouTube algo is, in a sense, a great marketing teacher. Unfortunately it takes so long to get off the ground that I'd also only enter this by buying a channel with traffic.
FaceBook: said to be lucrative but I don't know it. This is a great example of what I was saying about secret knowledge. How many people do you know who are enthused about creating FaceBook groups and attracting traffic to them? Yet this is, based on the available evidence, a solid business, maybe even the best of the ones listed here.
Instagram: seems tougher than YouTube in my opinion.
Pinterest: the new hotness, and currently being overrun by AI content lol. But AI + mass producing content is a viable strategy, and your North Star as someone looking to make money online is viable straegies.
TikTok: for profit, most likely better than Insta, and even YouTube. I just don't know enough about specific strategies for it unfortunately.
Newsletters: a good niche but kind of opaque (not easy to learn about and getting crowded). But said to be good.
Two guys who I think are posting good stuff are Jesse Cunningham and Jacky Chou. I'm not doing exactly what they're doing, but I notice a lot of overlap w/my learnings and what they're teaching, in terms of principles. So I believe they're directionally correct.
In general though on YouTube think about a business you'd like to enter, then search those keywords and start grinding through videos. If you're not sure what business to enter than start your search with "how to make money online" and again grind through videos. (Note: this won't be very fun). Some of the best videos are by no name guys with like 100 views precisely because they're starting from nothing and are more like you than the big names.
This hits very close to home and I'm very glad to see I am (and you are) not alone. Thank you for writing it.
I'm currently in the process of leaving my "big tech" job. While I won't name my company, it is somewhat similar in some ways -- though ethics isn't my primary reason.
> I’ve decided that in the shitty job market, it’s not worth being a software engineer even if I make much less.
is a thought that has run through my head countless times over the past year, and when I finally gave my notice
>she kept telling me how “lucky” I am for working at Microsoft saying “it’s big tech” and “you’re neurodivergent” and “you won’t survive at a smaller company.”
was the loudest thing I heard, over and over again.
I once worked for a start-up that perpetuated inflated social status symbols in a way I found repugnant. Transitioning to an academic non-profit environment was the best career decision I could have made for my mental health. Less money, yes. Less stress and self-loathing, absolutely and entirely worth it for me.
If the author is reading this: thank you for having the strength to say no to morally wrong work, despite the money, despite pressure from your family.
Good for you. You stood up for your morals. I wish that more people had your strength.
You are experiencing an identity crisis over this, which is normal. Writing about it is good. Talking to a therapist would probably be good too, if that works for you.
If I can give one piece of advice, it would be to stop talking in absolutes. Instead of "I'm done with coding", which is final and sets a stake in the ground which is hard to come back from, why not say "I'm putting down coding for a while to focus on my startup". For many people, myself included, it's normal to have many different interests over a lifetime. This is a good, and normal, thing.
It's actually worse than that. By holding his stocks he remains invested in the company in every meaning of the word. The dividends he's living on are the literal fruit of the proverbial sin that caused him to quit. In order to be morally honest about divesting himself of this line of business he needs to sell his stock.
He should invest it in something else, that he believes in, so that any dividends are thus just.
He must rid himself of any remnants of Microsoft he helped build, therefore he still has a stake in MS through stock, which means he is still supporting surveillance capitalism.
Whether they are voting shares or not is irrelevant as he is still invested in the company.
As long as he is still invested in Microsoft he is still invested in surveillance capitalism, the very thing he is arguing against, and I am sure if he wants higher dividend payments, he would want the stock to go up.
Even if they are voting shares, he has no realistic meaningful power or say when a shareholder vote happens.
If I hated the company I worked with for over 10 years why would I still have shares in the company, I wouldn't want anything to do with it, this includes selling shares and wanting Microsoft's share price to go down.
I understand your perspective. I imagine, since they're the shares he has and it would cost a lot of money to sell them all, this could be seen as another example of "No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism".
Paying for food that Nestle makes supports their system too, for example.
Don't be dismissive of people's challenges in life, especially when they have the strength to share them. Money isn't the only cause of pressure in the world.
I fear I am done with it as well. I am trying this AI thing and it's really good at it. So I can't motivate myself, to spend the mental energy to code it myself. But starting new tasks is very difficult for me and every new prompt feels like a new task.
In the past, when I finally managed to actually start coding I would eventually get in the zone and be productive. Now with this AI stuff, the constant back and forth, the constant waiting for the output to complete, it does prevent me from getting into the zone.
In terms of neurodivergence, I’ve found for myself over 27 years, that working at large companies is in fact the problem, and smaller places with more flexibility and broader responsibilities is far more rewarding.
This is the case for non-neurodivergent people too. Large companies these days are, largely, an exercise in corporate politics rather than solving technical problems.
Coding is one of my favorite things when I get to do it on my own terms which I’ve achieved while growing up and learning/playing as well as working for a few small startups. I would die if I had to write API frameworks all day and I struggled as a sysadmin when I was expected to be on 24/7 (but loved some aspects of it like ansible and pentesting). I’m currently a businessman and miss coding so I’ve just started using cursor for personal projects while on vacation and am having an absolute blast.
I’d never heard of viva insights. Looked it up. Do people actually use this stuff? Who? Why? It looks like something middle management would use to generate a few plots in order to justify their useless jobs. I’d run from any employer that seriously bought into something like this.
The market for tools, data and services which provide a helpful and comforting fuzzy veneer of activity and intentionality to the work of individuals, companies, and educational systems that are floundering is exceedingly large.
It’s not employer it’s HR. They love this sort of human metrics collection stuff and how giving people access to „insights“ about how they used their time will somehow make things better. Employee wellbeing and all that corporate lingo
I don't know you, but it sounds like you have principles you stand for and that's rare. If you have a talent for something that can do good in the world it's worth pursuing. I'd take a break and find a place that aligns with your values. Best of luck.
Respect for standing up for what he believes in. A lot of people in this industry would have no problem building drones that bomb children if it gave them a good “total comp”.
Clicked on this post because the domain name sounded familiar from the Tor mailing list. I knew you ran a large set of relays but didn't know you were also a pretty extensive contributor over many years! You're definitely smart and if you were able to get a job at Microsoft you're capable of getting a job at most other places, so this doesn't really have to be a permanent decision if you don't want it to be. You can work at Let's Encrypt, Tor, Signal, etc while making an impact and still doing pretty well for yourself. Anyways, in the spirit of this forum, I wish you luck with your startup.
I think it’s worth trying for ethical coding jobs for a bit. I think with your resume you could work at a lot of places, and you may be able to rekindle passion for something that you used to love and make six figures.
What a cynical view. You can switch jobs! Nothing is going to force you to work on surveillance software! I spent nearly a decade working on Salesforce. It’s not even on my resume and you couldn’t pay me to do it!
Yeah surveillance never works, at least not in the long term. Either people like what they work on or they don't, and adding a layer of corporate hypocrisy, where you need to pretend to be excited about every single tiny change, does not help.
Some products are just boring and I can't fathom how some people get excited about it. The cynic in me tells me everyone is faking it, and that is soul crushing to think about. The alternative is that some people are that boring and have nothing else in their lives going on so they look forward to adding yet another button or boring feature for the Nth time.
But if it pays the bills such that your kids can eat for another day and that your family have a roof over their heads, wouldn't it be worth it?
I don't see any other FAANG level jobs that do not do surveillance in some way or are 100% ethical, as the author wants.
He said it himself, it is a "shitty job market" so surely not everyone in the job market will be paying over 6 figures and be 100% ethical with no surveillance.
Sure, you can build your own startup without surveillance and that is fine, but the compromise is a pay cut and if you have family, rent and children, it would be hard to explain to them why you left your 6 figure job, because "privacy" and "the woes of surveillance capitalism".
I'm just saying it's sad how it creates an atmosphere of "fakeness" for lack of a better word. Nobody can really voice their real opinion, and so nobody is presenting their real selves.
I'm also commenting beyond the privacy matter. It's the combination of everyone being afraid to just be themselves because they need the job, and HR/leadership constant b.s. claiming it's an open and safe space. I should also say I'm mostly talking about large companies.
>After all, Edward Snowden had a “stable” federal government job (...) and he gave it up to stand up for the right to privacy
Edward Snowden was primarily critical of Obama era foreign policy in the Middle East not being notably different from Bush. That is also why he send the data to writers and journalists whose work was primarily critical of US foreign policy.
Of course he understandably pivoted to become a privacy activist when the Internet overnight wishcasted him into that role and ignored his criticism of US foreign policy.
"> I’ve decided that in the shitty job market, it’s not worth being a software engineer even if I make much less. Part of it is being “specialized” in over-glorified surveillance so even if I change employers, what’s the guarantee I won’t be working on another surveillance product. Assuming I can even get another job.
...While six figures is certainly nice, it’s only nice if it’s ethically done. I’d much rather flip burgers or bag groceries than work on surveillance for six figures.
"
Almost all companies, startups and corporations have surveillance in some way shape or form, if it is product analytics, webpage views, tracking, etc, even Mozilla has got into tracking, although the pay isn't FAANG level.
Unless you don't want to make over 6 figures in the US (assuming that is where he is from), perhaps work at a non-profit e.g. EFF or governmental work.
It's really expensive to be very principled, I'm sure your rent, family and children would thank you, especially if you leave the ENTIRE field and have no means of income other than savings which will certainly be spent on them rather than your startup.
What? How much money did this person make working on software they consider surveillance, before deciding they were comfortable enough to leave? Looks like they made enough money to live off “dividend income.” Something about their dad? The hell is this?
Thanks for sharing man. I think quite a few of us are fed up with the status quo in tech.
I was also at Microsoft until fairly recently, and although I didn’t feel like my immediate work was “unethical”, I’ve felt for quite some time that leadership is completely out of touch with workers. The copilot push in 2022, coinciding with firing the AI ethics team, is a prime example of actions that felt reckless.
I wonder what it’s going to take for tech workers like us to collectively say “enough is enough” to the grotesque avarice we see from tech leadership. I’m not holding my breath, and have essentially no desire to find another role in the industry.
I’m nearly 40 and have threatened quitting over things that violated my conscience within the last 5 years. They recanted.
Belief systems, convictions and morals don’t have an age limit. They may have a “I need to not die” limit, but that’s the American lack of a social safety net.
Calling young people stupid and idiots is a very poor way to get this point across, even if it's meant in an endearing way (which I'm suspicious of).
This cynicism is also entirely unwarranted, especially when your own personal example is, frankly, far more childish than anything in the OP. A company actively harming society through surveillance projects is a societal/ethics concern with the company essentially being a malicious actor. A company not properly securing their (presumably-internal) NFS is, at worst, a flaw/misconfiguration that was obviously not high priority.
The audacity of making some IT department's lives harder, people who are trying to tick a box, sends up so many red flags -- you can laugh about the inefficiencies in private with your mates, you can quit like the OP to find more efficient places to work, but you don't hold up other people trying to get that "god damn retirement money."
Don't compare your 20 years of technical tiffs with someone's desire to do what's right for their people.
More seriously, I"m tired of people thinking they have principles but have no idea what they are actually fighting over. Surveillance saves so many lives. At least explain what so bad about it.
I challenge you to rewrite this so that you're making a strong, optimistic argument for surveillance from your perspective, instead of shitting on a young person for trying to navigate a path through legitimately complex tradeoffs.
The onus is on you to make a thought-provoking case, not for them to convince you that their internal ethical alarm bells are reasonable.
I don't think I worked on any unethical part of Apple, I just worked on the indexing and caching for iTunes, but I really hated working there, and it was frustrating that whenever I complained about it, people would remind me how lucky I was to have a job at Apple.
I survived 2.5 years there, but eventually I had to quit (taking a fairly substantial pay cut in the process). I think my parents thought I was nuts, but my mood improved almost immediately.