The author seems like a nice guy, but perhaps a bit naive regarding the efforts big tech companies go to to crush employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...). They appear to be a staff level engineer at a big tech company - I don't know how much money they make, but I suspect it's an ungodly amount.
The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.
If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.
It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.
It seems a bit too much to assert that every developer should be fully responsible for every moral slight their company commits. It is entirely possible to make a positive impact on the world from a large organization - in fact for some people it may be the most direct way that they can make such an impact.
Saying that he is morally bankrupt is like saying that you are morally bankrupt for continuing to live in the US because the current administration is a dumpster fire. It is financially profitable to live in the US; you basically cash in a 6 figure check by living here rather than some other, lesser developed country with more morally aligned politics. Why not leave?
The dude works for GitHub. I don’t doubt there is some rotten code on there, but what you’re saying seems like a stretch and exactly what he’s describing.
Microsoft is currently a target of BDS, which calls it "perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza." This isn't about some hobbyist's wonky code. https://bdsmovement.net/microsoft
I couldn’t agree more. I also work in tech but I’m incredibly cynical which makes it difficult to see the authors post as anything but a combination of self promotion / self soothing.
I spent 25 years in Silicon Valley, 100% of it working on making OSS happen, and 90% of it for a non-profit, while my peers from the early days almost all moved on to Big Tech by 2005-2010, most for 2x+ what I was making and a few for outrageously more than that. But I couldn't do it. The lure was attractive and I spent uncountable hours over about a decade debating whether to bite, but in the end I knew I couldn't feel good about myself if I was working for the absolute worst companies in the world.
I will leave this world with no meaningful legacy, but that's preferable to exiting knowing that I'd directly helped Big Tech get bigger and even more evil.
If I'd had kids, maybe my calculus would have been different. Maybe I'd have been motivated enough for their futures to sacrifice my conscience for them, but I did not, and so all I had to consider was whether or not I'd be able to live with myself, and the answer for me was no.
There have always been enough decent, even well paying jobs in software outside of the Big Tech companies, even in Silicon Valley, and so paying my bills and saving for a good retirement didn't require the soul sacrifice.
I don't begrudge anyone who bit that lure but I am entirely content to have said no myself.
If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.
I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.
I hear ya. Thanks for the reply. I'm glad you chose OSS and I fully share your views as expressed here.
I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.
I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.
OSS is even more important today. The days of the Unix vendors, early Google, when we had tech companies that were engineer focused - those days are gone. It's MBAs running the show, and that's how we get enshittification.
There is no set future to what kind of technology we will build and end up with. We can build something where everything is locked away, and poor stewardship and maintenance means everything gets jankier or less reliable - or we can build something like the Culture novels, with technology that effectively never fails - with generations of advancement building off the previous, ever improving debugability, redundancy, failsafes, and hardening, making things more modular and cleaner along the way.
I know which world I'd rather live in, and big tech ain't gonna make it happen. I've seen the way they write code.
So if some people see my career as giving a middle finger to those guys, I'm cool with that :)
I chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
I have found that mentioning that, elicits scorn and derision from many in tech.
Eh. Whatevs. I'm OK with it (but it appears a lot of others aren't, which mystifies me).
I believe what you are running up against is a tendency to externalize shame as anger.
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
Your comment really resonates with me, I’m in a similar position though much more junior. My colleagues in tech can’t fathom that I actively choose to stay where I am and make 50% of their salary.
I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.
For what it's worth, I personally have a lot of respect for people who do this (or at the very least, people who forego higher salaries to avoid working for companies they find morally objectionable).
Framing an agreement between companies to not poach each others top talent as a means to “crush their employees” is very discrediting.
I’m glad for the antitrust litigation. It’s very obvious that this was a collusion effort that was self serving to each party involved, as a means of overcoming a negative (for them) prisoners dilemma type situation.
The fact that it depressed wage growth was a welcomed side effect. But framing that as the intended outcome as a way of discrediting original author is telling. I don’t know if you’ve understood corporations to be rather simple profit seeking entities, whose behavior can be modeled and regulated to ideal societal outcomes accordingly.
Perceiving corpos as "simple profit seeking entities" is some of the most naive Milton Friedman crap. Corporations operate as an amalgamation of the desires of a group of powerful enough influencers, of which your rank and file investor is NOT making a meaningful contribution. Milton Friedman has done more harm to capitalism than Marx has done to socialism.
Friedman abstracted away feedback loops between corpos and the social/regulatory environment they operate in. We agree that that is beyond fucking useless.
I didn’t make that same naive assumption when describing corpos as simple profit seeking entities, you just misunderstood what I was saying.
Just wanted to pop in and say that I think Sean is absolutely right here. I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
> I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
It's important to note that many of those people aren't winning. What you're witnessing is the marketing equivalent of what random government software engineers produce. A good number of the people on HN would be trivially outearning those nerds
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.
People who run large tech companies want one thing: to increase shareholder value. Delivering "good software" (a very, very squishy term) is secondary.
I don't even think "good" is a quantifiable or effective measure here. C-level executives are deviating from reality in terms of what they say that their products are capable of versus how their products actually perform. If you're a CEO shipping a frontier model that adds some value in terms of performing basic technical tasks while simultaneously saying that AI is gonna be writing all code in 3-6 months, you're only doing good by your shareholders.
I can tell you that everyone I’ve met whose job it has been to communicate with and guide C-suiters across many companies has regarded them as basically super-powerful young children, as far as their reasoning capacity, ability to understand things, and ability to focus. Never met more cynical people about the c-suite than the ones who spend a lot of time around lots of them, without being one of them or trying to become one of them (any time soon, anyway). Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners, and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
A lot of very cosplay/play-pretend (and sometimes expensive!) tactics I’ve seen in high level enterprise sales made a lot more sense after being exposed to these views. Lots of money spent on entire rooms that are basically playsets for high level execs to feel cool and serve no other purpose. Entire software projects executed for that purpose. I didn’t get it until those folks clued me in.
There's exceptions to this. Usuallly founders who've made it past many mergers and kept a central role in the company. Insulting their intelligence will bite you back very quick.
But otherwise I think it's spot on. Especially for Cxx specialized in keeping the ball running, they'll have no interest in understanding most of the business in the first place, they seem themselves as fixers who just need to say yay or nay based on their gut feelings.
> Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners
Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.
> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?
IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.
This is a terrible take. The people who have sacrificed their ethics/morals/souls to reach the top absolutely optimize for different things than the people who passed an interview and put in their 40-80 hours knowing they'll never be in the c-suite. Suggesting otherwise is naive or intentionally deceptive.
Oh, I glossed over that in my response. I've had people at the C-level admit that they don't care about ethics to me, and I especially see startup CEOs lie a lot, or otherwise be so self-deluded to make sales easier that it's hard to tell if they know they're lying.
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
> they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status
That's not preferring good software to bad software, though. In order for a value to be meaningful when expressed, it has to result in some kind of trade off. If you value honesty over safety but never are put in a situation where you have to choose between honesty and safety, then that value is fairly meaningless.
That's fair. I overstated my point a bit -- if a project was on schedule and it could be delayed by one day to improve something nebulous, many would agree. It's just that the tradeoffs are never that small, so you never actually see it happen, i.e, the preference is extremely minor.
Its baffling to see US engineers repeatedly being shat on by the company, and yet still retain belief in the chain of command.
But, to be a good cynic, you need a rich information network to draw on to see what the wider business is doing and thinking. You must understand the motivations of the business, so that you can be correctly cynical.
> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.
I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.
> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.
Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.
It's always worth being skeptical when someone appeals with the term "good". I'm sure there are people who run large tech companies who want to deliver "good software", but it's such a meaninglessly vague designation that it being true doesn't matter. I can't speak to the motivations of C-suites I've never met, but I can say for sure that my idea of "good software" is very different to theirs.
> It is just a plain fact that software engineers are not the movers and shakers in large tech organizations. They do not set the direction of the company. To the extent that they have political influence, it’s in how they translate the direction of the company into specific technical changes. But that is actually quite a lot of influence!
I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.
They should at least understand why they are getting paid and basic business logic instead of thinking they are above it because they are 10x or whatever. You are a cost center unless you are making that line go up.
>> Cynical writing is like most medicines: the dose makes the poison. A healthy amount of cynicism can serve as an inoculation from being overly cynical.
I disagree. Cynicism is a toxicity and will fester. Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical (kinda like how people feel about Geddy Lee's voice).
>> Tech companies have a normal mix of strong and weak engineers.
Yes, that's not "a little cynical" that's a healthy perspective.
I think OP is really trying to tell people to be stoic, not cynical, and is confused on the vocabulary.
>Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical
I must have a more diverse group of friends and colleagues because I see and experience the whole spectrum. Perhaps it's worth considering why your bubble is so black and white and maybe even how to change that.
If we're doing cynicism - even if you write lovingly hand crafted free range OSS code - EvilCorp can still come along and use it as part of the EvilCorp backend.
Your just working for them for free rather than getting paid.
I too am an aussie swe (just 3700km up the road) who likes lots of things about working (on a much lower rung) in big (well, mid) tech. I have learned so much more in large orgs than startups, and I'm not done with it.
However:
We DO live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape.
Large companies ARE run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power.
I have compromised my principles by giving them (or anyone) my labor.
but I don't lie to myself or anyone else about it. I don't find any need to rehabilitate the structural and personal failings I encounter. When my friends call me out for working at EvilCorp, I don't argue. I know it's like any job: it's all dirty money. Instead, I deal with reality: weigh up pros and cons. I judge each year just how much Corporate I'm willing to swallow to support my dependents.
I enjoy the author's redefinition of cynicism and optimism. These are useful ideas to consider and I've given it some thought, arriving at an attitude of Becoming that I guess some would call idealism.
PS OMFG I just realised its MS. I believe this is what the kids call cringe.
> > We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, [...]
This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...
Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.
Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?
Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.
(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)
(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)
A very good piece. Balance always. Ultimately, everything is politics, and always will be - that's reality; it's always people. Pick your poison, idealism or cynicism; in any organization you'll have to deal with the people. That's the balance. It's not easy.
Props to Sean for this post. I have found his writings to be much closer to how I’ve learned to understand my career and companies than many standard reddit/HN posts portray things.
> For instance, you might think that big tech engineers are being deliberately demoralized as part of an anti-labor strategy to prevent them from unionizing, which is nuts. Tech companies are simply not set up to engage in these kind of conspiracies.
It always sounds so ridiculous to me when people working for Meta, Microsoft or Google talk about idealism, or solving good problems, or really any kind of values. The likes of you have very much sold your soul to the devil in exchange for a lot of money.
Any kind of idealism you may hold is nothing but a carefully crafted illusion to keep you from thinking too hard about what you are a part of, what are you are doing. If it hasn’t made click after big tech fell on their knees in front of Trump, there’s nothing left to say anymore.
So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.
> There are very few problems that you can solve entirely on your own. Software engineers encounter more of these problems than average, because the nature of software means that a single engineer can have huge leverage by sitting down and making a single code change. But in order to make changes to large products - for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
Maybe, just maybe, when any single individual is unable to propose a product improvement due to the requirement of ass-kissing and favor-dealings involved... the company is too big and should (be) split up.
Corporate inertia is what is killing many a Western company against the competition from China.
>cynical: concerned only with one's own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them
Indeed you are, for calling software developers “engineers” meanwhile software development is actually writing, so they are more closer to writers than engineers.
I disagree with your view. It’s the thinking needed that makes it engineering, especially when you have a lot of constraints (massive scale, low latency, etc.).
Consider this: math is mostly doodling some glyphs on paper, so clearly it is closer to drawing than engineering.
To be fair most actual engineers just copy paste from a previous project (MEP engineers in architecture) or just look up numbers or equipment in a table (every structural engineer I’ve known). A vanishingly small percentage of any engineer (software or otherwise) are actually doing what most people think as “engineering”.
> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix.
This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.
Why do you say it's a strawman? All of those claims seem pretty familiar to me, even if, as the post says, the full exact combination might not be. You say you never assume it's in bad faith. Well, great! But that doesn't mean it's a strawman, it seems that other people do!
I say it’s a straw man because it’s a caricature that is easy to knock down. The point of my comment was that I would be surprised to find out that even 20% of people think this, much less a majority.
20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
The author seems like a nice guy, but perhaps a bit naive regarding the efforts big tech companies go to to crush employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...). They appear to be a staff level engineer at a big tech company - I don't know how much money they make, but I suspect it's an ungodly amount.
The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.
If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.
It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.
It seems a bit too much to assert that every developer should be fully responsible for every moral slight their company commits. It is entirely possible to make a positive impact on the world from a large organization - in fact for some people it may be the most direct way that they can make such an impact.
Saying that he is morally bankrupt is like saying that you are morally bankrupt for continuing to live in the US because the current administration is a dumpster fire. It is financially profitable to live in the US; you basically cash in a 6 figure check by living here rather than some other, lesser developed country with more morally aligned politics. Why not leave?
The dude works for GitHub. I don’t doubt there is some rotten code on there, but what you’re saying seems like a stretch and exactly what he’s describing.
It's been almost 8 years now since the Microsoft acquisition, should it still be seen as an independent culture ?
Jesus, what is up with time? I thought this was max two years ago, and the "8" was unpleasantly surprising to read.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft which covers most of what GP is alluding to…
Microsoft is currently a target of BDS, which calls it "perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza." This isn't about some hobbyist's wonky code. https://bdsmovement.net/microsoft
I couldn’t agree more. I also work in tech but I’m incredibly cynical which makes it difficult to see the authors post as anything but a combination of self promotion / self soothing.
I spent 25 years in Silicon Valley, 100% of it working on making OSS happen, and 90% of it for a non-profit, while my peers from the early days almost all moved on to Big Tech by 2005-2010, most for 2x+ what I was making and a few for outrageously more than that. But I couldn't do it. The lure was attractive and I spent uncountable hours over about a decade debating whether to bite, but in the end I knew I couldn't feel good about myself if I was working for the absolute worst companies in the world.
I will leave this world with no meaningful legacy, but that's preferable to exiting knowing that I'd directly helped Big Tech get bigger and even more evil.
If I'd had kids, maybe my calculus would have been different. Maybe I'd have been motivated enough for their futures to sacrifice my conscience for them, but I did not, and so all I had to consider was whether or not I'd be able to live with myself, and the answer for me was no.
There have always been enough decent, even well paying jobs in software outside of the Big Tech companies, even in Silicon Valley, and so paying my bills and saving for a good retirement didn't require the soul sacrifice.
I don't begrudge anyone who bit that lure but I am entirely content to have said no myself.
OSS is your legacy!
If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.
I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.
I hear ya. Thanks for the reply. I'm glad you chose OSS and I fully share your views as expressed here.
I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.
I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.
OSS is even more important today. The days of the Unix vendors, early Google, when we had tech companies that were engineer focused - those days are gone. It's MBAs running the show, and that's how we get enshittification.
There is no set future to what kind of technology we will build and end up with. We can build something where everything is locked away, and poor stewardship and maintenance means everything gets jankier or less reliable - or we can build something like the Culture novels, with technology that effectively never fails - with generations of advancement building off the previous, ever improving debugability, redundancy, failsafes, and hardening, making things more modular and cleaner along the way.
I know which world I'd rather live in, and big tech ain't gonna make it happen. I've seen the way they write code.
So if some people see my career as giving a middle finger to those guys, I'm cool with that :)
I chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
I have found that mentioning that, elicits scorn and derision from many in tech.
Eh. Whatevs. I'm OK with it (but it appears a lot of others aren't, which mystifies me).
I believe what you are running up against is a tendency to externalize shame as anger.
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
Your comment really resonates with me, I’m in a similar position though much more junior. My colleagues in tech can’t fathom that I actively choose to stay where I am and make 50% of their salary.
I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.
For what it's worth, I personally have a lot of respect for people who do this (or at the very least, people who forego higher salaries to avoid working for companies they find morally objectionable).
its because it hurts peoples feelings to confront the truth
Evergreen: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
except they do understand it of course but choose not to accept it :)
Framing an agreement between companies to not poach each others top talent as a means to “crush their employees” is very discrediting.
I’m glad for the antitrust litigation. It’s very obvious that this was a collusion effort that was self serving to each party involved, as a means of overcoming a negative (for them) prisoners dilemma type situation.
The fact that it depressed wage growth was a welcomed side effect. But framing that as the intended outcome as a way of discrediting original author is telling. I don’t know if you’ve understood corporations to be rather simple profit seeking entities, whose behavior can be modeled and regulated to ideal societal outcomes accordingly.
What military action is GitHub involved with.
Perceiving corpos as "simple profit seeking entities" is some of the most naive Milton Friedman crap. Corporations operate as an amalgamation of the desires of a group of powerful enough influencers, of which your rank and file investor is NOT making a meaningful contribution. Milton Friedman has done more harm to capitalism than Marx has done to socialism.
Friedman abstracted away feedback loops between corpos and the social/regulatory environment they operate in. We agree that that is beyond fucking useless.
I didn’t make that same naive assumption when describing corpos as simple profit seeking entities, you just misunderstood what I was saying.
Just wanted to pop in and say that I think Sean is absolutely right here. I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
> I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
> but optimists win.
Win.. what?
> enough oomph to get lucky.
The underpaid cargo cult mentality is alive in well in corporate America.
Have you logged into LinkedIn lately?
Nothing but pseudo "grindset" cargo cultists as far as the eye can see writing worthless technical platitude posts.
It feels like a parody site of itself these days.
It's important to note that many of those people aren't winning. What you're witnessing is the marketing equivalent of what random government software engineers produce. A good number of the people on HN would be trivially outearning those nerds
> > but optimists win. > Win.. what?
Depends what you want to win?
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.
People who run large tech companies want one thing: to increase shareholder value. Delivering "good software" (a very, very squishy term) is secondary.
I don't even think "good" is a quantifiable or effective measure here. C-level executives are deviating from reality in terms of what they say that their products are capable of versus how their products actually perform. If you're a CEO shipping a frontier model that adds some value in terms of performing basic technical tasks while simultaneously saying that AI is gonna be writing all code in 3-6 months, you're only doing good by your shareholders.
I can tell you that everyone I’ve met whose job it has been to communicate with and guide C-suiters across many companies has regarded them as basically super-powerful young children, as far as their reasoning capacity, ability to understand things, and ability to focus. Never met more cynical people about the c-suite than the ones who spend a lot of time around lots of them, without being one of them or trying to become one of them (any time soon, anyway). Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners, and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
A lot of very cosplay/play-pretend (and sometimes expensive!) tactics I’ve seen in high level enterprise sales made a lot more sense after being exposed to these views. Lots of money spent on entire rooms that are basically playsets for high level execs to feel cool and serve no other purpose. Entire software projects executed for that purpose. I didn’t get it until those folks clued me in.
There's exceptions to this. Usuallly founders who've made it past many mergers and kept a central role in the company. Insulting their intelligence will bite you back very quick.
But otherwise I think it's spot on. Especially for Cxx specialized in keeping the ball running, they'll have no interest in understanding most of the business in the first place, they seem themselves as fixers who just need to say yay or nay based on their gut feelings.
> Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners
Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.
> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?
IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719
[2] https://qz.com/984174/silicon-valley-has-idolized-steve-jobs...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daught...
[4] https://www.amglaw.com/blog/2021/07/both-microsoft-and-its-f...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
This is the type of cynicism the post is talking about and it's just trivially untrue.
It's like saying that employees only want one thing: to get their paycheck.
This is a terrible take. The people who have sacrificed their ethics/morals/souls to reach the top absolutely optimize for different things than the people who passed an interview and put in their 40-80 hours knowing they'll never be in the c-suite. Suggesting otherwise is naive or intentionally deceptive.
Oh, I glossed over that in my response. I've had people at the C-level admit that they don't care about ethics to me, and I especially see startup CEOs lie a lot, or otherwise be so self-deluded to make sales easier that it's hard to tell if they know they're lying.
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
> they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status
That's not preferring good software to bad software, though. In order for a value to be meaningful when expressed, it has to result in some kind of trade off. If you value honesty over safety but never are put in a situation where you have to choose between honesty and safety, then that value is fairly meaningless.
That's fair. I overstated my point a bit -- if a project was on schedule and it could be delayed by one day to improve something nebulous, many would agree. It's just that the tradeoffs are never that small, so you never actually see it happen, i.e, the preference is extremely minor.
Being british, I am cynical by default.
Its baffling to see US engineers repeatedly being shat on by the company, and yet still retain belief in the chain of command.
But, to be a good cynic, you need a rich information network to draw on to see what the wider business is doing and thinking. You must understand the motivations of the business, so that you can be correctly cynical.
> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.
I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.
> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.
Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.
It's always worth being skeptical when someone appeals with the term "good". I'm sure there are people who run large tech companies who want to deliver "good software", but it's such a meaninglessly vague designation that it being true doesn't matter. I can't speak to the motivations of C-suites I've never met, but I can say for sure that my idea of "good software" is very different to theirs.
> It is just a plain fact that software engineers are not the movers and shakers in large tech organizations. They do not set the direction of the company. To the extent that they have political influence, it’s in how they translate the direction of the company into specific technical changes. But that is actually quite a lot of influence!
I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.
They should at least understand why they are getting paid and basic business logic instead of thinking they are above it because they are 10x or whatever. You are a cost center unless you are making that line go up.
We're all just trying to do a good job. I think it's very rare for someone to be earnestly malicious attempting to block the company from doing well.
>> Cynical writing is like most medicines: the dose makes the poison. A healthy amount of cynicism can serve as an inoculation from being overly cynical.
I disagree. Cynicism is a toxicity and will fester. Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical (kinda like how people feel about Geddy Lee's voice).
>> Tech companies have a normal mix of strong and weak engineers.
Yes, that's not "a little cynical" that's a healthy perspective.
I think OP is really trying to tell people to be stoic, not cynical, and is confused on the vocabulary.
>Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical
I must have a more diverse group of friends and colleagues because I see and experience the whole spectrum. Perhaps it's worth considering why your bubble is so black and white and maybe even how to change that.
Well, I -do- only know two people, so I got that going for me.
If we're doing cynicism - even if you write lovingly hand crafted free range OSS code - EvilCorp can still come along and use it as part of the EvilCorp backend.
Your just working for them for free rather than getting paid.
I too am an aussie swe (just 3700km up the road) who likes lots of things about working (on a much lower rung) in big (well, mid) tech. I have learned so much more in large orgs than startups, and I'm not done with it.
However:
We DO live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape.
Large companies ARE run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power.
I have compromised my principles by giving them (or anyone) my labor.
but I don't lie to myself or anyone else about it. I don't find any need to rehabilitate the structural and personal failings I encounter. When my friends call me out for working at EvilCorp, I don't argue. I know it's like any job: it's all dirty money. Instead, I deal with reality: weigh up pros and cons. I judge each year just how much Corporate I'm willing to swallow to support my dependents.
I enjoy the author's redefinition of cynicism and optimism. These are useful ideas to consider and I've given it some thought, arriving at an attitude of Becoming that I guess some would call idealism.
PS OMFG I just realised its MS. I believe this is what the kids call cringe.
> > We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, [...]
This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...
Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.
Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?
Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.
(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)
(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)
A very good piece. Balance always. Ultimately, everything is politics, and always will be - that's reality; it's always people. Pick your poison, idealism or cynicism; in any organization you'll have to deal with the people. That's the balance. It's not easy.
Props to Sean for this post. I have found his writings to be much closer to how I’ve learned to understand my career and companies than many standard reddit/HN posts portray things.
Some of the HN comments iver the years though are really in line with this post. They have protected me from a lot of emotional anguish.
plain and minimally styled UI is going to make a huge comeback in 2026. i think people are tired of all the maximalism in web dev
I appreciate that the author looks specifically at what elements of a given viewpoint are idealistic vs cynical.
Idealism about one’s own behavior vs idealism about others’ behavior is an interesting tension to explore further.
This reads like a pickme LinkedIn post.
> For instance, you might think that big tech engineers are being deliberately demoralized as part of an anti-labor strategy to prevent them from unionizing, which is nuts. Tech companies are simply not set up to engage in these kind of conspiracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
It always sounds so ridiculous to me when people working for Meta, Microsoft or Google talk about idealism, or solving good problems, or really any kind of values. The likes of you have very much sold your soul to the devil in exchange for a lot of money. Any kind of idealism you may hold is nothing but a carefully crafted illusion to keep you from thinking too hard about what you are a part of, what are you are doing. If it hasn’t made click after big tech fell on their knees in front of Trump, there’s nothing left to say anymore.
So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.
A little bit?
> There are very few problems that you can solve entirely on your own. Software engineers encounter more of these problems than average, because the nature of software means that a single engineer can have huge leverage by sitting down and making a single code change. But in order to make changes to large products - for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
Maybe, just maybe, when any single individual is unable to propose a product improvement due to the requirement of ass-kissing and favor-dealings involved... the company is too big and should (be) split up.
Corporate inertia is what is killing many a Western company against the competition from China.
i genuinely believe the correct response to a post like this is: "shut the fuck up"
> "you should do things that make your manager happy"
If doing things ethically (not defrauding investors and customers) keeps your manager happy, then do it. If not, do it fucking anyways.
>cynical: concerned only with one's own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them
Indeed you are, for calling software developers “engineers” meanwhile software development is actually writing, so they are more closer to writers than engineers.
I disagree with your view. It’s the thinking needed that makes it engineering, especially when you have a lot of constraints (massive scale, low latency, etc.).
Consider this: math is mostly doodling some glyphs on paper, so clearly it is closer to drawing than engineering.
> especially when you have a lot of constraints (massive scale, low latency, etc.)
there are roughly 0.082% of software "engineers" that deal with these constraints or have to "think about them"
To be fair most actual engineers just copy paste from a previous project (MEP engineers in architecture) or just look up numbers or equipment in a table (every structural engineer I’ve known). A vanishingly small percentage of any engineer (software or otherwise) are actually doing what most people think as “engineering”.
this type of comment will get you downvoted here faaaast… ;) bunch of “engineers” here engineering and shit
Do you also say this shit in real life?
> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix.
This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.
Why do you say it's a strawman? All of those claims seem pretty familiar to me, even if, as the post says, the full exact combination might not be. You say you never assume it's in bad faith. Well, great! But that doesn't mean it's a strawman, it seems that other people do!
I say it’s a straw man because it’s a caricature that is easy to knock down. The point of my comment was that I would be surprised to find out that even 20% of people think this, much less a majority.
20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
> late-stage-capitalist hellscape
Isn’t this the most prosperous, peaceful, and just period in history like ever? What “hellscape”?