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"Even among American citizens, some tech workers are in the business simply to make money, gain power, and solve problems—even if they create just as many new o

• matt_s 6y ago
  I don't know if you could say school teachers are doing it to make money. Facebook and Google are advertising companies primarily. They will be taking money from advertisers for nearly anything that isn't in their TOS. I'm sure most employees would object to something in that list not lining up with their personal beliefs. The concept that your employer should conform to your ideas around politics or the environment seems to only happen in SV.
• smacktoward 6y ago
  Schoolteachers (in the USA, anyway) get paid next to nothing, and frequently have to buy classroom supplies out of pocket because their school system doesn't have the budget to buy them. Nobody becomes a schoolteacher to get rich.
  • mc32 6y ago
    They didn’t say get rich but rather it suggests “to get a paycheck.“ People do whatever they can for a paycheck —some do it out of altruism, sure, but some do it because it’s what they can do.
  • MintelIE 6y ago
    As the amount of administration support staff and special needs paraprofessionals skyrocketed, the resources allocated to regular students and teachers have dwindled. People feel good about having students with special needs included in regular classes but it has caused an enormous reallocation of resources, shifting massive cash and attention to the lowest performing students. There was a book about this once, Harrison Bergeron.
    • sharkmerry 6y ago
      Is it entirely due to re-allocation to special needs education? Seems like with population growth, we are trying to educate more and more kids, and unlike in the past, we dont just discard that parts that would be expensive or difficult. In the past, we ignored the problem so it wasnt factored into budgets, head counts. There needs to be more money overall for education. It returns more than $1 for every $1 invested over the long term.
      • MintelIE 6y ago
        It varies by district but my wife is a teacher (now) and she has worked in several schools where the special education budget met or exceeded the non-special, while serving only 3-5% of the school's enrolled children.
        • sharkmerry 6y ago
          I understand that. but what is the suggested alternative? These students simply cost more to educate, is that the students fault though? Leave them behind and underfunded like in the past? Lock them up?
          • thejynxed 6y ago
            My wife also teaches these sorts of children and the vast majority of them seldom improve beyond a 5th or 6th grade level, and many of the "smarter" ones with milder disabilities end up in jail at some point after being graduated (most typically for sexual, theft, violence, and drug offenses) out of the system since they can no longer be failed, yet they basically can't truly be taught how to properly function in society since they can't even properly comprehend laws or how they work, as they only have basic reading capability and comprehension of even simple children's books. Closing institutions insteading of reforming and modernizing them for these sorts of people was indeed a mistake.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  The whole paragraph is awful: > These “equity engineers,” as I’ll call them by one of their goals, cashing out, might have studied computer science in order to solve problems, or to live a good life. It would be a caricature to say that these archetypes don’t care at all for politics, but their radicalism tends to be an inward-facing one, lured by technolibertarian fetishes such as blockchain. For this group, technology is politics, and seeing the two at odds becomes incoherent. It says that it's explicitly avoiding a caricature, but these people who just want to be paid to do work are still radicalized, technolibertarian fetishists for whom technology is politics. I hate this view of silicon valley and tech workers as characters you'd expect to see in a cyberpunk story, rather than, like, normal people who happen to live in the bay area and work with computers, or even alongside people who work with computers. Instead everyone has to be radicalized in some direction or another. If they don't appear to be radicalized, then "their radicalism [must] be an inward-facing one." That's not a caricature?
  • Avicebron 6y ago
    I think because from an outside perspective, many seem to make caricatures of themselves as these massive intellectuals making more money than anyone else in the US while while engaging in some sort of futuristic fever dream of silicon, hallucinogens, and money. Not saying I particularly agree, but coming from a more traditional work background, seeing the ball pits/slides/wave pool college campus like billion dollar companies, hearing (probably exaggerated stories) of bizarre costume parties etc seems to be very much an isolated (radical) group. There is also the worship of billionaires and a dark dystopian vision of the future with the promotion of things like the gig economy, offshoring, and an internal class system in the companies of the "red badges" and the "brilliant engineers" I don't think it is a stretch to see this as a breeding ground for radical technolibertarianism. I mean, they made it, why can't everyone else?
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      Those folk do exist here, but they most definitely aren't the ones who are just here for a paycheck "to live a good life." Most people I know here are just like everyone I know elsewhere, except that their rent is higher, their houses smaller, and their paycheck larger. I've been working here in tech for over a decade now, ranging from the wildest tiny startups to big billion+ dollar public companies, and I've never worked anywhere with a ball pit, slides, or wave pools. They exist. They just aren't what most of us actually experience. Silent majority, I guess. Almost everyone I know here thinks the people and company practices you're describing are as crazy/dumb/awful as you do. Sorry, I just get really frustrated when the media labels the kookiest loudest of us as what Silicon Valley is. Especially when they're trying to describe the boring ones without caricatures.