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I'm not a Silicon Valley CEO, but I like hearing this sort of thing because I don't think my work is going away even if the social impact of the industry is kno

by nperez 8y ago

I'm not a Silicon Valley CEO, but I like hearing this sort of thing because I don't think my work is going away even if the social impact of the industry is known and controlled. As a kid, I was in love with software because of the possibilities for it to make the world a better / more interesting place. I grew up and saw a darker side. I still want the tech industry to be an industry that makes the world a better place. I don't think that's out of the question for CEOs either.

xoa 8y ago
>As a kid, I was in love with software because of the possibilities for it to make the world a better / more interesting place. I grew up and saw a darker side. I still want the tech industry to be an industry that makes the world a better place. I don't think that's out of the question for CEOs either. Yeah, a lot of folks both at C-level and in the trenches may feel, even if they run an individual company, that they're a bit caught in mutual escalation and wouldn't actually mind some level of imposed disarmament. Ie., it wouldn't be bad if there were in fact some more consideration forced so long as that applied to everyone all at once, but that it's harder to do unilaterally on their own, particularly taking into account VC/investor/customer pressures. Having someone challenging the entire industry intelligently could actually help take things in a direction many wouldn't mind moving anyway. One example I think where this already happened was sales taxes. Yes there were some people ideologically opposed to all taxes even after the industry matured, or were seeking out some individual advantage, but I also know plenty of people who had no specific problem with taxes per se but just didn't want to be put at an active disadvantage vs competitors. Compared to other tech companies they didn't want them to have zero while they didn't, and compared to local retailers they didn't want any gotchas of getting screwed by hard to parse local composite tax numbers and figuring out where to send the money nationwide and all that with many states/counties have terrible scaling archaic systems. If there was just a database to consult and an orderly system to send to then no problem. So there was a win-win potential there as far as they were concerned and people challenging "nothing" weren't unwelcome, but it was still hard to do alone.

by nperez 8y ago

xoa 8y ago

>As a kid, I was in love with software because of the possibilities for it to make the world a better / more interesting place. I grew up and saw a darker side. I still want the tech industry to be an industry that makes the world a better place. I don't think that's out of the question for CEOs either. Yeah, a lot of folks both at C-level and in the trenches may feel, even if they run an individual company, that they're a bit caught in mutual escalation and wouldn't actually mind some level of imposed disarmament. Ie., it wouldn't be bad if there were in fact some more consideration forced so long as that applied to everyone all at once, but that it's harder to do unilaterally on their own, particularly taking into account VC/investor/customer pressures. Having someone challenging the entire industry intelligently could actually help take things in a direction many wouldn't mind moving anyway. One example I think where this already happened was sales taxes. Yes there were some people ideologically opposed to all taxes even after the industry matured, or were seeking out some individual advantage, but I also know plenty of people who had no specific problem with taxes per se but just didn't want to be put at an active disadvantage vs competitors. Compared to other tech companies they didn't want them to have zero while they didn't, and compared to local retailers they didn't want any gotchas of getting screwed by hard to parse local composite tax numbers and figuring out where to send the money nationwide and all that with many states/counties have terrible scaling archaic systems. If there was just a database to consult and an orderly system to send to then no problem. So there was a win-win potential there as far as they were concerned and people challenging "nothing" weren't unwelcome, but it was still hard to do alone.