Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

> I have spent time with the founders of all the Big Tech companies. In their hearts, they all seem to believe they are still idealists. They dismiss the charges that they are society-destroying monsters as noise. Only hard data convinces them that their companies are being destructive, and when that happens, they course-correct rather than tearing things apart and starting from scratch. But there is no escaping one fact: The giant public companies they built are no longer dream factories but hard-edged businesses, optimized for profit and serving shareholders who push for even bigger yields.

Things rarely change because most (all?) founders and CEOs truly believe they're doing good. Whether it's just attachment to their vision despite it being an overall loss for society, or doing the math and concluding there's marginally more good than bad, or maybe just justifying a small "bad" as a price for the big "good". They are never the ones paying the price for that bad so that won't disturb their world view.

That's one common trait I discovered in almost every successful CEO or founder, the capability to brush aside any criticism in their pursuit of their vision, as long as the price highlighted by that criticism fell on shoulders outside of the company.

It's not just founder and CEOs, though.

Nobody believes he's the bad guy no matter the outcomes. It's a convenient cliche for movies but just that

Here’s looking at you Facebook.

It's a lot more obvious for those categories because the money rolling in with barely any negative consequence strengthens their view beyond anything that a counter-argument can counter.

Unlike normal scale issues where you may be convinced (or even see yourself) you were doing wrong even with the best of intentions, with successful founders and CEOs that's nigh impossible. They genuinely cannot acknowledge this because even hard numbers will look like "it needs a small tweak but my vision and implementation are still great".

It’s a big task to calculate the net benefit/harm of one person, much less something like a large company.

It is, especially for the people who are harmed.

DuPont CEOs surely see it as a net benefit that everyone can cook in teflon pans even if the price was heavy pollution. Same for big oil companies. Because they will always sell the narrative that "the bad had to come with the good". In reality the bad can almost exclusively be traced back to the desire for more profit, not to the ability to survive to deliver the good.

A warehouse worker or truck driver don't need to be squeezed for every drop of productivity or underpayed just so you can get your Amazon package on time. They're squeezed so Amazon can make an even bigger profit while you still get the package on time.

Turns out that while you can't necessarily come up with a perfectly accurate estimate of benefit/harm, you can come up with obvious candidates for improvement that are consistently disregarded by those successful founders and CEOs who saw the money rolling in and everything else stopped mattering. The bad stopped mattering or even existing in their view.

It's not a matter of calculating benefit/harm, it's a matter of them not acknowledging the harm even exists.

Or it's just an adverse selection issue: most people don't engage in things that they believe to be malicious or not worthwhile, especially for a founder who has looked at all other opportunities and decided this is the best option to risk it all.

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