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This mirrors my own experience as a European that worked at FAANG in the Bay Area. It used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothin
by vrganj 4mo ago
This mirrors my own experience as a European that worked at FAANG in the Bay Area.
It used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothing to do with American Big Tech. It's become toxic and completely counter to my values.
America has become a much darker place that has a very different place in the world. American tech companies have not just accepted, but actively embraced this transition. I am not interested in joining them and being complicit.
- lenerdenator 4mo agoYou're not gonna like it when you find out where, exactly, America learned those values from.
- vrganj 4mo agoLuckily, we've gone through that phase around ninety years ago in Europe. We've been trying to avoid it happening again ever since, though right now is a dangerous time here as well. But hey, at least Europe hasn't fallen yet.
- lenerdenator 4mo agoIf you think you've "gone through that phase", you're not paying much attention. European companies exist to extract profit without regard to decency, same as American companies. BP filling up the Gulf of Mexico with oil? European. Wirecard's fraud? European. HSBC money laundering? European. Dieselgate? European. I'm sure I could find more. Hell, Sergey Brin was born in Moscow and raised by Soviet parents. The US was founded mainly as an experiment in European mercantile colonialism. This is just a continuation of that. The downside of there not being any American exceptionalism is that everything you see in America is not an exception.
- rirze 4mo agoMorally fallen? Sure, Europe hasn't fallen yet. Systemically and structurally? Already on its way there. Excessive moral policing results in strangling regulations, which is exactly what Europe is facing right now. The opposite of innovation. Good luck in your endeavors.
- jonnybgood 4mo agoDarker than what other point in America’s history?
- wvh 4mo agoPerhaps darker than the initial mild optimism of the early internet.
- smackeyacky 4mo agoIt is easy to forget US history as the vast majority of us have only been exposed to the 1960s to 2000s era which in retrospect seem like an anomaly.
- gregw2 4mo agoIt's an interesting time window you chose. Why would there be an anomaly during that window (if there is one)? Perhaps it is due to the outward-facing, civic-oriented values coming out of WW2? There was a lot of reflection in America on what went wrong in German pre-war thinking and culture coming out of that period. The WW2 men in their 20s in 1940 were in their 40s in 1960s and their political power would have kept growing through peer older politicians into the 90s.
- smackeyacky 4mo agoTime window is roughly to a non US citizen from when civil rights and women’s rights were ascending there. The last 20 odd years show a marked decline in both. I often wonder when segregation in the US will be introduced.
- Laurel1234 4mo ago[flagged]
- sailfast 4mo agoBIT of a broad brush there but we can take the critique. While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation.
- g-b-r 4mo agoYou're free to protest and do many other things besides voting
- cess11 4mo agoOK, but what about the open stuff? Like the current and previous president being publicly genocidal? Like the health care system being used as a weapon against the domestic population, or the US armed forces destroying the planet by just existing and spewing so much carbon oxides and pollutants into the global environment? Either those votes are worth something, and it implicates US voters, or they're not worth something and the US political system is basically a sham deserving of revolution, which also implicates US voters who do not organise to this end. Arguably every state on friendly terms with the US is similarly morally implicated as well.
- BeetleB 4mo ago> While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation. I obviously don't know who you voted for, but anyone who voted for someone who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq is somewhat complicit (Clinton, Biden, etc). And I'm not speaking just about those running for presidency, but all the Congressmen who got re-elected over and over again.
- sailfast 4mo agoEuropean companies aren’t much different so just be sure to check where you stand first before you’re SURE you’ve actually escaped.