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Comment by libraryatnight | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be different.

A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.

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I don't think it's naive. That was in all of Google's marketing, and at the time I think that marketing was broadly true. It's impossible to know how long a good culture will last, certainly a high school kid wouldn't be expected to assume that.

They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.

These companies also attract that sort of person. Most software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger

Nah people with the "hacker inclination" are just as easy to buy but in other ways. There are people who will solve any interesting problem put in front of them and have a great time doing it without reflecting on why someone put it there or what it will be used for when they're done. Giving them more interesting problems, more autonomy to pursue intellectually stimulating solutions to them, is the reward you can use to keep them building your drone assassination algorithms or whatever.

In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long been that skillfully solving problems that are personally interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet significant number of the people who work at for example palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little eichmanns."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns

My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.

This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"

I don't think it's entirely wrong as a model but it struggles to explain thiel himself having degrees in philosophy and law. I think there is a certain contempt engineers can have for other domains and ways of knowing that might be closer to the source of this. But I'm not very confident in that explanation either fwiw.

I think majoring in philosophy makes people want to work on weapons and buy themselves ownership of the state.

I've heard that people who study philosophy often come away with less deeply held positions on ethics. Philosophy doesn't teach you to live ethically

I feel the exact same way about tech today as a 90s kid who embraced personal computing and who was inspired by the histories of Apple, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and other pioneering places. As late as 2014 I thought highly of FAANG and I was proud of the two summer internships I had at Google, which were enjoyable.

Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.

There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.

money corrupts

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