Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry

notesfrombelow.org

50 pointsjordigh21 comments

As someone who works outside the Bay Area, this article feels weird to me. The summary of the article:

- Author interned at Google. It was boring but good pay.

- Because of this, never went back. Started a startup, built a product. Product did not make enough money. Realised making money is important. Tried to pivot something they thought could make lots of money but hated (adtech) and forced themselves to network with the adtech people they despised. It did not work out.

- Concludes it sucks that in SV engineers are highly paid and well treated and that they don’t organise to stand up for a totally different group who the author believes is low paid and not well treated.

- Concludes how tech is broken.

My two cents: welcome to the real world. Companies exist to make money. People will try to work at the best place they can make it to. Governments can shape the redistribution of wealth and social responsibility with rules and regulations, among others.

While I myself was not part of a union, I have worked for a company that had a large-ish ( order of 100's) unionized software engineering team. It did not create a better dynamic. If the goal is to have a union that contains both high paid and low paid employees to that the more highly paid employees speak up for the others, that certainly didn't happen.

I'm proud to say I work for Amazon. It's not a perfect place. That doesn't mean there aren't many good things about it. Universally when I tell people that I work for Amazon, they tell me how much easier we make life for them as customers; how it's really hard to get a baby in the car to buy diapers and how Amazon's ease of use and delivery saves them many trips to a store each week; how much they love Echo, Kindle, AWS, Prime or one of the many other services we offer. I work for a team that builds primarily internally facing tools, and our team has been told that we're "doing the Lord's work" and I have been asked to hug one of my teammates by our internal customers because of a new feature my teammate pushed out.

So, no, I don't think it has to be so soul crushing as the article makes it out to be.

I don't know that there needs to be a union per-se (it's actually never brought up in the article at all), but collective bargaining can work without one, on a company level.

It would take a tremendous effort to make that change within a company like Amazon, but that company is probably one of the best examples where that change needs to happen.

Costco is an example of a company where even the lowest paid employees are still fairly compensated, are guaranteed vacation, and receive good benefits.

It's the company culture and values that dictates how the lowest paid employees are treated, and that can be directed and redefined, at least according to the author, in large part by the highest paid employees.

> What else was I supposed to look forward to, except mindless consumption? Wasn’t that the whole point of making that much money? Wasn’t that what drove people to work so hard in the first place?

If you think money is only for mindless consumption, I wonder if you have experienced life with real responsibilities (mortgage, family, kids) and little money. Because while money doesn't get you everything, it can get you a lot of important things - most important ones being freedom and time. And if you have ability to ride on this current tech boom, one should ride it to the fullest and save as much as you can (unless one is too rich already or is too young to appreciate life's constraints).

It is really really hard to buy time and freedom after the fact. I have seen many people try and eventually they tend to end up getting a slightly more expensive house instead. It is just that once you are on some track it is really hard to change, because most of the time you are giving up substance for money and they are both compounding. Or to put in tech terms, if you aren't doing what you see yourself doing in the future you are always building up some sort of debt.

I was just writing a blog post about this, that people basically just find new ways to consume all the money they earn so that they're always on the edge. And a lot of people who make $40k scoff at the idea that they would still be scraping by at $140k, but lots of people go from making $40k in their 20's to $140k in their 40's and basically nobody retires comfortably in their 50's because $140k a year provided them with so much extra money. Rather, 50-somethings work just as much or more, they just tend to have much more expensive houses, cars, and hobbies than 20 year olds, and they still put just 4% of their income toward retirement, if they're careful.

This article does a great job of highlighting how broken the message is for people coming into the market these days. From the article: Google was supposed to be the goal, the reward people worked so hard for.

When I was at Google and after I left people would ask me, "How can I get a job at Google?" or "Can you get my resume to someone at Google?" And I would always ask this person "Why do you want to work at Google?"

I can only recall one person, of the dozen or so who asked, that answered the question with something other than (paraphrased) "Because its Google dude, you know the best of the best."

Here is the thing, if the only reason you can come up with for why you should work at Google is because you want to enjoy the free food, schwag, or bus rides then you will have, like the author, a very poor experience.

Then this, "I found such an escape ... through startups.", followed by this "... it soon became clear that the only profitable avenue was to become an advertising technology startup."

Computer scientists in this role are engineers, not researchers. Engineers are people that take existing practice and solve problems that other people are having in a way that is better than the previous solution. If you decide you want to be a "data science" startup then you need to know up front who is going to pay for your data. And the people who will pay? Are most likely ones that can evaluate their own performance with and without your data and get an idea of the difference in income or efficiency etc. This is easy to do with marketing data, you sell more stuff, bueno. You sell less stuff, no bueno. It is more difficult to do with things like recycle awareness campaigns.

If you want to work at a job that has meaning, then work at a company that is solving a real problem. The definition of "real problem" is one that enough people are willing to pay enough money to support a company that is solving that problem. Public Benefit Companies (PBCs) and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are solving problems that some organization is willing to fund them to solve it.

That said, during Bubble 2.0 the latecomers especially have lacked a lot of imagination and so are just piling on solving the same problem that others are solving, whether that is intermediating between buyers and sellers (I think of these as virtual market makers) or greasing ecommerce (branding, virality, advertising, shipping/billing logistics, Etc.)

> just piling on solving the same problem that others are solving, whether that is intermediating between buyers and sellers (I think of these as virtual market makers) or greasing ecommerce (branding, virality, advertising, shipping/billing logistics, Etc.)

And yet, those are also enormously important problems to solve.

What made Amazon worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Facebook worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Airbnb worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Netflix worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Uber worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

Why did some people think computers were a fad, or the Internet was a fad?

Because they vastly underestimated the tremendous importance of automation, communication, and coordination to mankind.

A fact easily papered over by politicians or social 'free-thinkers' with an eye for scapegoats and the naivete to think they can do better by tearing it all down and doing it all from scratch.

(An interesting note is that this carries all the dangers of the oft-warned-against 'big rewrite', but on an even larger scale.)

Netflix & Amazon for sure..

> Facebook ..and being more liberal & exploitative in sharing user data than any company before

> Airbnb ..and subverting local regulations.

> Uber ..and subverting local regulations.

>> Engineers are people that take existing practice and solve problems that other people are having in a way that is better than the previous solution.

Hey, thanks for this, I'm going to have to write it down somewhere.

Hopefully my calling attention to it doesn't result in a dogpile of "That's not what 'engineer' means", because the reason I call it out is that it's what I'm usually trying to say when I use the word 'engineer'.

The article felt extremely relatable, but it did not arrive at any concrete point and has nothing original to say. It is talking about personal motivation and then leaps to describing the underpaid workers. Yes, I think most people in the valley can see your points and numerous discussions have already been had about them. So what?

Edit: what I would have liked/expected to read is a story of someone making the aforementioned $300k+ year, making enough, leaving and the difficulties/joys of adapting to their new life exploring what they want.

I believe the author, Wendy Liu, is currently working to try to find those points. She's working on a masters thesis on this subject, taking notes from a number of books on labor, tech, culture (see http://bookmarker.dellsystem.me/complete )

The piece's conclusion seems to be unions are a panacea which I am highly skeptical of.

I felt similarly about it. The piece lacked cohesion, but the author still made some good points and I think it's fine that they have been discussed frequently before.

Regarding start-ups, I think Wendy is a little bit too willing to make generalizations based on her own experience. There are some exciting high-tech start-ups out there in other spaces than advertising (Perfect Day comes to mind, which is working on synthetic milk). There are definitely opportunities out there for doing rewarding work.

Besides that, I agreed with Wendy's dismal assessment of the tech giants. I find it sad that some talented engineers choose to devote their careers working for companies like Facebook.

I was kinda hoping for: "I should stop acting like an 8 year old child" moment, but I suppose that's not happening yet. was hoping for any of the following:

businesses are made up of people. no one group of people are better than the other, since tech is also businesses, people shouldn't have inflated ideas that tech is "saving the world / making it a better place and all those other businesses are bad evil doers riding on the backs of everyone else".

We all have to do boring, non-impactful work at some point. especially starting out. We need to work hard to get to positions that make large impacts.

joining a start up isn't a great financial decision unless you really believe in what they are doing

Tangent: the way the author talks about sites like Reddit and 4chan and certain personalities as elements from a type of internet "hey day" makes me feel....old. I recall reading Atwood's piece in 2007 like it was yesterday, even though it was a decade ago now in actual time-passed.

Only brought up because I've felt similarly disillusioned with my participation in tech lately, but I wonder if that's just due to growing older and shifting priorities, assumptions and expectations of this sector of civilization.

Better: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...

Discussed twice: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=uncanny%20nplusonemag.com&sort...

I remember about 5 years ago when all my classmates were gaga over joining start ups. I was like why in the world?

- The chances of failure is really high - The pay is lower than big tech - The hours are longer than big tech - you bust your butt for someone else's dream - the benefits are non-existent

and this shouldn't be a surprise. yet she was surprised...

I was only working because the company was paying me to. In Marxist terms, I was alienated from my labour: forced to think about a problem I didn’t personally have a stake in, in a very typically corporate environment that drained all the motivation out of me. I remember thinking: is this it?

Ouch-I'm sorry to read that she feels so beleaguered. While I can certainly empathize with that conundrum, this feels to me not so much like a problem with tech (as this was presented in the context of a deep personal exploration of one's participation as a tech worker), but perhaps an opportunity to sit back and analyze one's participation with work as a concept itself.

It brings to mind this[1] letter written by Hunter S Thompson where he said:

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life

This isn't to hold the good Doctor up as some universal bearer of truth (he had his issues that probably cast a bit of a cloud over some of his pieces of advice), but this one rings loudly for me as someone who doesn't really look at his career field of software engineering as a personal definition, but simply a vehicle that enables me to do the sort of things I want. It's a parenthetical, a sidebar, it isn't the paragraph that describes who I am as `iamdave`. But as I look at my peers (older millennials-what's the new word now? xennial? I'm 35, what am I? Weren't we once Gen Y? I feel emotionally closer to Gen X. Surely the marketers will have a new term for it come next Tuesday and we'll all be using that. Hrm...I'm getting off topic here), I see so much frustration, anxiety and anger because their careers are defining them with little further introspection than that.

Said another way: I just happen to be a software engineer, it's by no means a passion, it's not where my heart is, it's not what I wake up every day thinking about-I just happen to be good enough at it to earn a living doing it and pay for school to learn about the types of things that do excite and thrill me on a meaningful personal level. I also don't inherently dread it, nor do I loathe going to work every day-either. Granted it took a long time to get to this state of mind but my personal happiness has skyrocketed once the realization took hold.

Now I say that not to accuse or suggest that my peers are wrong for this; what's good for the goose may not be good for the gander, nor am I saying my approach is universal or should be the standard for all others-but it does seem to be a mitigating factor from the type of...can't think of a better word here...existential exhaustion this young(er) writer seems to be experiencing.

Curious to hear what others think?

--- [1] https://tranquilmonkey.com/hunter-s-thompsons-extraordinary-...

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