4 ms·

Most of us here work in tech. We know our co-workers. We know where we came from. For many of us, years growing up spent reading, tinkering, being maybe a littl

Most of us here work in tech. We know our co-workers. We know where we came from. For many of us, years growing up spent reading, tinkering, being maybe a little anti-social. A lot of us probably found a computer at a young age, and just felt a compulsion to learn how it worked. Now we're getting paid for it. I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable. You don't know the real power players. You're right. The average, middle-class tech workers (you, me, and the people you know) are not the enemy. We're upper proletariat, essentially on the same side (if a different tax bracket) as the "true" proletariat that is actually poor. I feel like this controversy is being cooked up to pit the middle class (us) and the working class against each other, in order to distract both us and them from what's really going on. In technology's upper ranks, you see malevolence and MBA culture. You see Ellis Act landlords and multiple liquidation preferences and all sorts of scumbaggery. You see closed allocation and funding based on family connections and frat boys and Clinkles and Snapchats and Tinders. The press outlet that has the best depiction of what's really leading tech right now is (sad to say it) Valleywag. However, the upper-working class, $140,000 per year, mid-career software engineer is just as worried, as the poor are, about his childrens' future and the health of the city and just trying to stay competitive in an industry that (a) does not give a fuck about him, and (b) will probably replace him with a clueless 22-year-old in ten years. The fact that he's merely adequately compensated for his skills, education and continuing effort, while the rest of the working class is even more exploited and abused, is hardly his fault. Yes, the bad guys sit atop the tech industry. They're not the lifelong engineers who top out at $140,000 or even $225,000 per year. They're the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) para-dropped into companies by their corrupt VC buddies from MBA school. They're the moneymongers who think multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred (technical jargon for "I've got the connections, so lick my taint, prole") are morally acceptable. Those are the bad guys. Not us. If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge). That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us. Going forward, we're going to need to fight the "head in the sand" impulse and fucking annihilate MBA culture. Not only San Francisco, but our own jobs (after age 40) depend on it. We have to fight. So much is at stake. We have a power that humanity will require in order to (a) move away from fossil fuels for energy, (b) cure cancer, and (c) deliver safe, cheap, environmentally sound transportation at the world scale. Humanity's survival (or, at least, the survival of civilization) literally depends on us because the current state is completely unsustainable. Unfortunately, instead of using that power for progressive R&D, we get stuck helping MBA-culture scumbags unemploy people.

jackgavigan 12y ago
> Yes, the bad guys sit atop the tech industry. They're not the lifelong engineers who top out at $140,000 or even $225,000 per year. They're the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) para-dropped into companies by their corrupt VC buddies from MBA school. They're the moneymongers who think multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred (technical jargon for "I've got the connections, so lick my taint, prole") are morally acceptable. Those are the bad guys. Not us. I'm not an engineer. I don't do hands-on technical work (e.g. coding, syadmin, etc.). I have an MBA. Are you saying that I'm one of the bad guys?
- Terr_ 12y ago
  "Are we the Baddies?" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY ) Probably not, but you may be working in a closer profession to them.
eevilspock 12y ago
optimusclimb: I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable. - michaelochurch: If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge). That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us. - Peter Ludlow on "The Banality of Systemic Evil": http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality...): The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”: "(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut." Jackall went through case after case in which managers violated this code and were drummed out of a business (for example, for reporting wrongdoing in the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant). - In my view, the perfect example of Silicon Valley's systemically banal evil is how nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising and a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. So much so that my mere suggestion of this as evil rains downvotes (as I expect for this comment). When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811). The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” -- Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera It's important to realize that Hammerbacher isn't just talking about engineers working directly on ad systems, but anyone working on any product that relies on ad revenue and thus invariably makes design and functionality choices that prioritizes ad views and advertiser value (e.g. collecting data about you) over end-user interests. The get rich quick ethos of Silicon Valley tech firms using whatever means necessary, such as showing ads, collecting user data for advertisers, coming up with viral schemes (When did the virus become our role model?), and then using those riches to take over the space (pricing everyone out) as well as the culture (money, materialism, socially vapid products, getting rich quick is destroying the counter culture, much of what makes the Bay Area special). - And now, as if to prove my point, Hacker News has killed this article.

jackgavigan 12y ago

> Yes, the bad guys sit atop the tech industry. They're not the lifelong engineers who top out at $140,000 or even $225,000 per year. They're the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) para-dropped into companies by their corrupt VC buddies from MBA school. They're the moneymongers who think multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred (technical jargon for "I've got the connections, so lick my taint, prole") are morally acceptable. Those are the bad guys. Not us. I'm not an engineer. I don't do hands-on technical work (e.g. coding, syadmin, etc.). I have an MBA. Are you saying that I'm one of the bad guys?

Terr_ 12y ago
"Are we the Baddies?" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY ) Probably not, but you may be working in a closer profession to them.

eevilspock 12y ago

optimusclimb: I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable. - michaelochurch: If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge). That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us. - Peter Ludlow on "The Banality of Systemic Evil": http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality...): The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”: "(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut." Jackall went through case after case in which managers violated this code and were drummed out of a business (for example, for reporting wrongdoing in the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant). - In my view, the perfect example of Silicon Valley's systemically banal evil is how nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising and a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. So much so that my mere suggestion of this as evil rains downvotes (as I expect for this comment). When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811). The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” -- Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera It's important to realize that Hammerbacher isn't just talking about engineers working directly on ad systems, but anyone working on any product that relies on ad revenue and thus invariably makes design and functionality choices that prioritizes ad views and advertiser value (e.g. collecting data about you) over end-user interests. The get rich quick ethos of Silicon Valley tech firms using whatever means necessary, such as showing ads, collecting user data for advertisers, coming up with viral schemes (When did the virus become our role model?), and then using those riches to take over the space (pricing everyone out) as well as the culture (money, materialism, socially vapid products, getting rich quick is destroying the counter culture, much of what makes the Bay Area special). - And now, as if to prove my point, Hacker News has killed this article.