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Comment by warp_factor | Hacker News Reader

You want to know the other side of Silicon Valley?

Download the app called "Blind", where people talk openly while being anonymous.

What you see there is that everyone is trying to maximize their TC (Total Comp). For most people, that's the only goal. The whole "Let's make the world a better place" is something that was sold by PR people.

To talk more specifically about facebook, I have seen two attitudes in their employees:

1)They use Whataboutism when confronted: Basically they will show you that Google and Apple are also evil, so it is ok for them to work at FB.

2) They openly say that they know it is a bad company, but they treat employee very well and they are overly well paid so are ok with it.

For me, It makes me lose faith in engineering

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There's also a third attitude where people don't think FB is bad. In fact I bet a lot of people think it made/makes the world a better place.

FWIW, I found very little overlap between the opinions that were popular on blind and the opinions of my colleagues who opened up to me. The people who become active Blind users are the ones who are already frustrated and want to complain loudly.

> What you see there is that everyone is trying to maximize their TC (Total Comp). For most people, that's the only goal. The whole "Let's make the world a better place" is something that was sold by PR people.

Facebook targets 95th percentile comp. That's very good, but if you're an elite software engineer motivated only by comp you're not going to settle for 95th percentile.

Other reasons that factor into job choice for most engineers: teammates, location, work/life balance, interesting projects, engineering culture/practices

> For me, It makes me lose faith in engineering

I joined a certain tech company in the 90's when everyone said they were going out of business (if I don't call out the company it might be because I still work there). If money were what motivated me I would have learned to program Windows and headed instead to Redmond.

In fact I found that nearly everyone I met at said company were also there simply because they loved the company and its computers.

Times change? (AKA: Money ruins everything?)

FWIW, I'm an engineer and creating a stable financial environment in which to (hopefully) one day raise family is definitely a goal, but maximizing total comp sounds like a miserable way to go through life. If I wanted to maximize total comp, I'd go into finance.

I think folks generally forget that money is a tool to help you achieve what you want in life.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up about Blind, I hadn't heard of it and I'm quite curious now.

The dot com boom/bust was all about money, so not sure why anyone thought this time around was any different. People are in it for the money...it just wasn't until maybe 2010-2012 that it was confirmed that the money was really there.

Google and Facebook seem to put a premium on analytical thinking and nothing on qualitative. All this seems to lead to a monoculture of only hiring analytical people. Maybe that is why they are okay with the two options?

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