However, I don't think that it makes any difference.

The entire industry has now shaped itself into a transient, mercenary, loyalty-free community.

It will take a long time to change that.

A lot of the trouble is the "You go first." mentality. Who will be the one to stay at a company for many years, getting only 3% raises; regardless of their performance, as their company's CEO keeps raking in millions of dollars, and lives a lavish, high-profile life?

Who will be the company that starts to treat their employees in a manner that proves they are worth staying at? This may mean higher pay raises, the CEO taking some of their profit (and the shareholders and VCs), and sharing it with the employees. Letting employees unionize, etc.

As people or companies are doing that, their competitors are running riot; acting as selfish, destructive and greedy as always. Many times, the competitors can crush the people trying to do the right thing.

So that generally means that governments need to step in, and help the people and companies to do the right thing.

As everyone knows, that's pretty much a non-starter, these days.

The tech industry makes crazy money. When an industry makes money like that, everyone "looks the other way," at truly awful behavior. The finance industry has been like that, for decades. Whereas industries that don't make much money, like public education, social services, etc., are regulated up the wazoo, with an iron fist.

I was a manager for over 25 years. I feel that I was a good one. My employees seemed to agree. I kept many of them on board for decades, and these were folks that could walk out the door, and get huge pay raises (my company paid "competitive" salaries). I certainly never made that much, compared to what people are doing, these days. many new hires out of college make more than I ever did, as a senior manager.

I worked hard at being a good manager; and that often meant working around a company with a fairly rapacious HR policy (HR was run by lawyers). Most folks here, would (and have) sneer at me, for staying so long, and for doing the things that I needed to do, in order to be a good manager.

In my case, it was personal Integrity thing. I have a really stringent Personal Code. I know that's unusual, and we can't expect it from most managers.

It's absolutely true that large tech companies throw massive amounts of compensation and perks to lull workers into a sense of security. How do you think people go into Facebook day after day while new stories about their abuses come out?

If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week.

If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.

There are a lot of small to mid-size tech companies that actually make money, though maybe not unholy mountains of it, where work-life balance is great and people just want to make something customers love. There are also many agencies that fit that bill.

This risks sounding too simplistic, but in life I've found that work tends to fall into three categories:

1. People who want to get as rich as they possibly can. 2. People who want to make a living and enjoy life. 3. People who want work to be their passion.

I've learned to avoid #1 and #3.

Re: #1, Many of the best ways to get as rich as possible involve screwing other people over. The people who play that game and enjoy it end up being pretty cutthroat, because that's kind of the point. If that's not you (and it's not me), then it's not fun to be part of.

Re: #3, vocational "passion" is just hard. Sometimes this is because the dream is so big -- end world hunger, or something. Sometimes the dream is so popular -- become a world-famous artist, etc. This is where you'll find the dreamers and the starving artists. The people who thrive here sort of live in their own world where the more mundane concerns of life don't matter to them, otherwise they'd burn out and give up.

A lot of people think they need their work to be either about Riches or Passion (or worst of all, both), and so they go down those paths and find stress, exhaustion, and misery instead of happiness.

Meanwhile, in boring old Path #2, you have a whole lot of people who work from 9-5 and then go home. They think their job is kind of interesting, but they don't think they're "changing the world," and that's okay. The happiest folks here tend to be craftspersons who know how to make some kind of thing, and whatever it is, they make nice ones.

As for me, I spent years that I look back on now as a sad waste of time hunting for #1 and #3, before one day having basically no choice but to take a "kinda okay" job so I could buy groceries. I was badly burned out, and I decided I needed a break, that I'd take six months and just "work a stupid job" to recover and pay off my credit cards after my experiment in running my own business fizzled out. And after six months I realized I was the happiest I'd ever been.

Life is kind of weird. It's not glamorous or sexy to just work a regular job and go home at 5pm. But it can be the foundation of a really happy, satisfying life.

I don't know if that will help you or not, but, I hope some part of that is useful to you. Many people have been where you are now. It'll get better.

Good luck!

But i'd guess i'd say as a member of the likely scumbag group, i feel like you aren't really trying to see the multiple perspectives here. As someone else said, we all create value. It's rare successful companies can afford to keep people around who don't. It's much more likely "they don't create value in ways that you value", or value that you see. I think one of the things definitely holding you back here is the inability to see it from these other perspectives. You are telling yourself you understand people's motivations and goals (you think they are ambitious and trying to sell themselves to get ahead), but i don't think you really understand the perspective, just your story of it. And you definitely, even in these few sentences, have a clear bias and story about a ton of people.

" i wish it layed out a path of how to build an industry that doesn't attract all those ambitious selfish (executives) people"

I think you need to question your assumptions a lot here. You are assuming that such an industry could exist, or that it would be successful. You are assuming (as mentioned above) that your group is the only one that creates value. If that was really true, do you really believe the other groups would still exist?

Why wouldn't someone, in each industry, already have made a successful company that doesn't have those roles, and because they produce much more value, taken over?

I could believe you don't value what they do, but like the author, i don't believe that deserves the judgement you seem to. Assuming your definition of value is the right one, or better than others, is not a good place to start a real discussion from.

I think you would do well to rely less on personality stereotyping and more on understanding if you want to get to the place you desire (where the ambitious, selfish people you see, aren't causing you the annoyance they apparently do)

It's hard work keeping people engaged, everyone wants a different carrot. Everyone understands and fears the stick and it's easy to hire for - can you threaten people with a stick? Yes? Hired :)

We live in a wage slavery society with fewer jobs than there are people, on purpose.

It's not that CEOs are failing software engineers, it's that the current system of beliefs humans hold in sum, seems to be failing humanity as a whole (but then again, if we think this way, has it ever not failed humanity?). Consider children digging through trash for food while billionaires fine dine discussing AI and space travel. I don't know what them rich folks believe, but it's inconsiderate of most of humanity's pain it seems.

a) Companies may be formed, operated, and controlled by people, but they are complex systems that do not have feelings and do not care about individuals no matter how much the culture warriors say otherwise. They are systems designed to survive, with or without you.

b) We are not defined by our jobs

I'm not making a case one way or another for capitalism, or layoffs, or the meaning of life, rather pointing out that this is the reality in which we live and once you realize these two points, things will make more sense.

Now what happens in a lot of publicly-traded large companies is, the inmates start running the asylum. The workplace primarily starts to exist for the benefit of the employee. Since internally most companies are structured as an oligarchy or dictatorship, most of these benefits accrue to "management" - another type of employee. Harmonious behavior and not creating too much trouble become the premium value. Everything seems to be going great, until you implode and fire thousands of people, or get acquired and the same things happen. The lucky ones retire before that. All of this, of course, happens to the detriment of shareholders.

Look at Microsoft. Great employee satisfaction. They missed out on the internet, on search, on social, on mobile, all the while bringing in HUNDREDS of BILLIONS in revenue over the last 20 years. Ballmer gets a lot of the blame, but everybody else also kind of just went with it. Asleep at the switch.

A company doesn't exist for the employee to have good work-balance, to get self-worth, nurture your creativity or whatever. It exploits your very human needs and desires to create wealth for its shareholders. Google would like you to think it's just like college, and to give you great social opportunities and make as many friends as possible, so it replaces your original parent-in-standing, The College Campus. The more of your psyche and social world is tied to the corporation, the more meaning you'll ascribe to your work, the more likely you'll stay.

To truly grow as a company you need to grow as teams. Cooperation, trust, empathy for your customers as well as your coworkers. Positions of leadership should be given to those who show an aptitude to lead through problems to desirable outcomes, regardless of who/where they are. Flatter org structures to prevent this chasm of salary difference which creates this toxicity in competition for those spots.

Netflix pays their engineers a ton, because they provide the value. Everyone is compensated at a level that everyone is happy working there (for the most part, happiness is relative, I digress). Companies should be providing everything they can to those who provide value to the company. If an individual wants more responsibility, they must provide more value as a result.

Personally speaking, I made about 300k at a FANG adjacent company - and I hated every moment of it. I quit to make less money at a startup. And I'd do it again.

Today, especially today, what is there to be proud of in working for a FANNG company? Google is working with the Pentagon on war technologies and new ways to abuse their users privacy with Internet spyware and spam; Facebook is a master of fake news and Donald Trump; Amazon is an anticompetitive monopoly.

If its only about money, check out mikekij's comment:

> "If you are a smart, quantitative person looking to maximize your income, you should go into investment banking, not software engineering. Partners at an investment bank can make $5M a year. You won't make that as an engineer at Google."

Hacker news is the place to be positive about startups, the future, and technology.

The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO.

Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later.

I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it.

The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.

Told you I was a cynical whatnot! :D

In this post I felt that you held back what you are really trying to say to the extent that it rendered the piece meaningless. You just spilled 800 words worth of ink on the same vacuous platitudes you seem to accuse companies of.

So I am curious what the real message here is. What change do you want?

Companies didn’t arrive at the culture of giving workers more perks, independence, respect, etc. for no reason. CEOs don’t wake up and think “You know we should be nicer”. No it was through competition. Companies spent recent years fighting for talent and talent could make choices so they chose companies that best fit their lifestyle, represented them, actualized them, and so on. We get paid very well so salary is not the chief concern, other things are.

Maybe as we enter more austere times we’ll see a shift. Certainly Elon’s behavior hasn’t gone unnoticed. But I think your advocacy for _whatever_ should be clarified so it can be properly critiqued.

That would lead to a more interesting article.

Nobody in my network has much money so there is no network value there.

The only very successful people I know who like me were acquired by a big company for millions but they're not allowed by their new HQ to hire me. They still send me emails asking for advice and tell me that they appreciate my work which is great but for some reason I can't get any opportunities.

It's almost like I've been labeled as a member of the untouchable class.

2. If you become large enough, you will end up doing some shady shit. The question then becomes, is most of the company shady? Is it the CEO who is shady and the culture permeates from that? And so on.

So its not surprising to have a neutral/negative attitude w.r.t to these companies.

None of this is hyperbole, btw. A lot has been uncovered about what actually happened within the companies v/s what they like to promote themselves as; mostly from lawsuits but also by some excellent, professional journalists examining these companies more closely than they would let on.

But yes modern corporations can be abusive, but whatever abuses you'll find at Elon's companies will likely also exist at Microsoft, doubt his companies are all that unique in that regard.

So the companies reaped what they sowed. They wanted to have their employees stay at work and did so by making the office a desirable place to not only work but live at, and their employees start wanting to bring their lives into work.

This totalistic capture of big tech over employee lifestyles mirrors what these companies are also seeking to do at the marketplace. When a company manages not only the technological needs of their customers, but everything from entertainment, to healthcare, to home security, to shopping, logistics, and everything else, then they set themselves up to be veritable empires. That's why big tech companies are now dealing with every issue including free speech, environmentalism, worker's rights, what activities should be eligible for payment services. That's just the price of being a business that wants to be involved in all facets of human society. It includes politics. You can't be an empire and still pretend to be above it all. Both your customers and your employees are going to treat you as one.

In fact, I would wager that not a single VP or higher at any major tech co isn’t a self-serving, backstabbing asshole. You simply don’t get into those types of positions on merit alone. You need to play the game.

That type of environment, where it’s almost impossible to do good work because you constantly need to be watching your own back is so unappealing to me that I can’t fathom why anyone with self worth would work at a FAANG. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know yet, but Blind exists, and it’s more horror stories than not.

Not having to deal with office politics and deranged managers is worth a hell of a pay cut imo.