Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
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Large corporations are just groups of people with conflicting incentives, and that means they are basically incapable of performing certain kinds of tasks. It also means that when the incentives do align, some tasks are very likely to be completed, even with other corporations or governments working in opposition.
Some of those tasks might be things you care about, like making a product of a certain quality, or furthering some other goal you have. In all those cases, it is best to to first think about what is most likely to happen and what is unlikely to happen. You have to think of the organization as just another phenomenon that you could exploit if you properly understood it. Unfortunately, how to manipulate complex systems of humans is an open problem, and if anyone had effective, repeatable solutions, then investors would demand that they be implemented.
As it is, most corporations don't act in the interest of the investors a significant amount of the time, even though they are supposed to. The only thing we can reliably bet on is: all organizations tend towards dysfunctional bureaucracies, the longer they live, and the bigger they get.
Cynicism is specific trait and has only negative connotations. It cannot be “good” for a social structure by definition.
Realism is neutral. But we often assume that realism implies cynicism which is not true.
Parrhesia (tact) is the only worthwhile, long term goal in terms of attitude. And that doesn’t include cynicism. It’s about being honest without feeling like betraying yourself.
“Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - (supposedly) Isaac Newton
That's certainly very extreme, but a tempered, measured belief in the negative aspects of human nature is necessary, I think.
You might say, "that's just realism", but I think they are just separate axes: some amount of cynicism (and idealism) is necessary in order to be realistic. Possibly different amounts in different contexts, depending on the other people involved.
Then when they eventually outdo even your worst expectations, you will be less disappointed by the gap between your original impression and the fresh dose of reality. I've adopted a motto that I could finally put words on about a decade ago. "You are not cynical enough."
And no, not even after accounting for the above.
It's no surprise or secret that I have since left the country.
Never heard of this quote, but I could certainly use a large dose of tact as defined above! The quote seems to be due to an advertising executive though, Howard W. Newton, not Isaac Newton [1].
[^1]: My idea of Isaac Newton comes from Stephenson's novel. But I trust that Mr Stephenson's research because it aligns with Newton's other quotes (i.e. "standing in the shoulder of giants" is nice but he's calling another man a moron, eloquently) and the his relationship with Leibniz wasn't the one I would expect.
Advertisers probably understand people better than physicists.
Is 'good for the social structure' the metric to use for defining good? Should we be serving the social structure to be 'good'?
> Is 'good for the social structure' the metric to use for defining good?
No.
> Should we be serving the social structure to be 'good'?
Yes.
Does that make sense? :-)
But, imagine the case where I do not think serving the social structure is good. And I make what sound like cynical jokes about serving the social structure. For those that believe in serving the social structure, that cynicism only had negative connotations. But for those who don't believe all that, the bitter joke might accurately reflect their understanding according to reality.
IMO that is a "series-B" type of argument. We know empirically that great things come out of putting trust on the hands of "unlikely candidates". So even if God doesn't exist, ppl are still capable of "good" just because they chose to do so, given the chance.
At the same time, it would be unwise to blindly trust ppl when there are warnings all around. So why not take a tempered approach? Trust a little, then trust a little more. The "applied answer" (e.g. social policies) falls within a spectrum that might change based on circumstance, there's no absolute representation as if we're picking a point in a Y/X axis, only optimal answers (like NP-complete problems).
I wouldn't call the tempered approach "cynical", I would call that "wise".
It sounds like you've never met a narcissist or psychopath. I hope you never do. I think your tempered approach is fine, but still doesn't work for some types of personality.
No one experiences their own beliefs as “cynical” or “optimistic.” Everyone believes they are being realistic. A cynic does not think “I am distorting reality negatively.” He thinks “this is how things really are.” The labels cynic and optimist are almost always imposed by observers, not chosen by the believer. When someone calls himself a cynic, what he usually means is that others perceive his conclusions, which he believes are factual, as negative.
So the core claim is not that cynicism is a mood or an attitude to aspire to. The claim is that reality itself is often negative, and that people who arrive at pessimistic conclusions are sometimes closer to the truth than people who default to hopeful narratives. Calling that “realism” instead of “cynicism” does not change the substance of the argument.
There is also actual empirical work here, not just vibes. In psychology this shows up under what is sometimes called depressive realism. Multiple studies starting with Alloy and Abramson in the late 1970s found that mildly depressed subjects were more accurate than non depressed subjects at judging contingency, control, and likelihood in certain experimental settings. Non depressed subjects systematically overestimated their influence and future outcomes, while depressed subjects were closer to objective probabilities. Later work refined this and showed the effect is bounded and context dependent, but the core point survived: positive mental health is often associated with optimistic bias, not neutral accuracy.
More broadly, a large literature on optimism bias and self serving bias shows that psychologically healthy people tend to overestimate success, underestimate risk, and interpret ambiguous evidence in their favor. That bias is adaptive and motivating, but it is still a bias. People who lack it tend to have more internally consistent and stable world models, even if those models are less emotionally pleasant.
So saying “realism is neutral” is true in the abstract, but psychologically misleading. Humans do not converge on realism by default. They converge on motivated belief. When someone repeatedly reaches pessimistic conclusions across domains, it is at least plausible that they are sampling reality with fewer affective filters, not merely indulging in a negative personality trait.
That does not mean cynicism is virtuous, or that it should guide social behavior. Tact and parrhesia are social strategies. They are orthogonal to whether your internal model of the world is accurate. You can be accurate and tactful, accurate and abrasive, inaccurate and pleasant, or inaccurate and hostile. Mixing those axes together is what creates confusion here.
The real disagreement is not about tone or attitude. It is about whether optimistic distortions are a feature or a bug. Psychology suggests they are a feature for well being, but a bug for accuracy.
The definition of cynicism as per Google "an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest".
This statement has nothing inherently negative. It's science, backed by evolution. The whole economic system is based on incentive analysis, the concept of invisible hand. Software architects are taught the Principle of least privilege, why? Because of cynicism, not trusting motive of others. But for everyday life people can't handle it mentally coz they love to think everyone giving them without any expectations.
I know this sounds counterintuitive but this space is limited to write more. If you have clarifying question you can ask me.
Emotions are influencing your thinking, whether you realize it or not. It's better to include them in your model of reality.
It's like modeling the lens you use in your camera. If you do that - you can correct for at least some distortions.
A corporation is not a person with beliefs, emotions, or a unified model of the world. It is a distributed optimization process composed of agents with local incentives, asymmetric information, and weak feedback loops. What looks like irrationality at the system level is often perfectly rational behavior at the component level. The result is behavior that would be pathological in a human but is structurally normal for an organization.
This is why corporations often resemble what we would call psychopathic traits if observed in individuals. Lack of empathy is not a moral failure, it is an emergent property of decision making that is mediated through abstractions like metrics, quarterly targets, and legal responsibility shields. Harm is externalized because the feedback is delayed, diluted, or borne by parties not represented in the decision loop. There is no felt guilt because there is no felt anything.
Humans update beliefs through direct experience and social feedback. Corporations update through KPIs, incentive realignment, and legal or market pressure. Those signals are coarse, lagging, and often gamed. So you get persistence in obviously harmful or stupid behavior long after any individual inside the company privately knows it is wrong. The system cannot feel embarrassment or regret. It can only respond when the gradient changes.
This also explains why appealing to realism at the individual level often misses the point. Understanding what is likely to happen is useful, but the likelihoods themselves are shaped by incentive topology, not by shared understanding. Even when everyone agrees something will fail, it can still proceed if failure is locally optimal or diffused. Conversely, things that seem impossible can happen quickly when incentives snap into alignment, regardless of prior beliefs.
So cynicism versus optimism is not about mood here. It is about whether you model organizations as intentional agents or as blind selection processes. Once you adopt the latter view, a lot of so called dysfunction stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like exactly what the system was designed to produce.
The depressing part is not that corporations become bureaucratic. It is that they often become very good at optimizing for the wrong thing, and there is no internal mechanism that prefers truth, coherence, or human values unless those happen to coincide with the gradient.
All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional. But ultimately, the basis for any society - family, community, company, nation, human race, etc - is a common good.
So it makes sense to ask: what is the common good of a given large corporation? Why are we all here, together? I suspect many people don't have a good answer. Having the answer, however, gives you a certain agency and intellectual freedom.
I don't agree with the 'because' part of this. It misses my point about why organizations are dysfunctional. Even if the organization was made up of perfectly rational, perfectly functional individuals, it would still be dysfunctional. The people running large corporations, are individually, very rational, and very functional. They are among the most capable humans at achieving their goals. Any explanation of organizational dysfunction has to also explain that data.
The dysfunction (which means actions not aligned with the shareholders) comes from the fact that 1. preferences cannot always be aggregated coherently and 2. that the people operating the corporation do not necessarily have incentives aligned with the shareholders. The first is a mathematical impossibility which cannot be fixed, and the second is a failure of mechanism design. That's the "open problem" I mentioned.
A basic example might be approaching external requirements (or change in general) with a "what is all this bullshit?" point of view, but then listening to the explanations and taking notes.
I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.
> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.
Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.
Collaboration and communication are key parts of politics, though.
At its core, politics is simply the dynamics within a group of people. Since we innately organize into hierarchies, and power/wealth/fame are appealing to many, this inevitably leads to mind games, tension, and conflict.
But in order to accomplish anything within an organization, a certain level of politics must be involved. It's fine to find this abhorring and to try to avoid it, but that's just the reality of our society. People who play this game the best have the largest impact and are rewarded; those who don't usually have less impact and are often overlooked.
What you’re describing is a particular form of manipulative and divisive politics which is performed by insecure, desperate or selfish people.
Many engineers are not good at building relationships (the job of coding isn’t optimal for it after all), so painting the people who are good at is as narcissistic may be comforting but isn’t correct.
However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
Win.. what?
> enough oomph to get lucky.
The underpaid cargo cult mentality is alive in well in corporate America.
Nothing but pseudo "grindset" cargo cultists as far as the eye can see writing worthless technical platitude posts.
It feels like a parody site of itself these days.
stealing this. ;-)
Depends what you want to win?
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
The negative replies to this comment are ironic.
Feels like cynics are right and optimists get rich.
I definitely lean more to cynic, my very good friend is def more optimist. He’s worth more than 10x me.
But the right optimism in the right situation can really pay off. Imagine you're pitching your non-technical carmaker CEO on a proposal to make a new pickup truck, and the CEO asks if you can make the entire thing with 0.1mm accuracy.
If you say "Yes sir, in fact many parts will be even more accurate than that" your project gets funded.
If you say "No, thermal expansion alone makes that impossible, it's also unnecessary" you're gambling on him respecting your straight-talking and technical chops.
A lot of people missing that cynicism isn't the same as sneering grumpiness.
You can be perfectly pleasant and charming while being utterly cynical about how you approach professional relationships.
This is a problem with at least two axes. The cynicism part relies on accurately calibrating the distance between official narratives and reality.
If you're a pessimist, you overshoot. An optimist undershoots. A realist gets it more or less right.
But if the distance is huge, that automatically makes the realist a cynic, because the reality is a lie, and in most orgs failing to take false narratives at face value is considered dissidence.
The strategic part depends on how you handle that. You can be sneering and negative, you can play the game with a fake smile and an eye for opportunity, or you can aim for neutrality and a certain amount of distance.
Sneering negativity is usually the least effective option, even when it's the most honest.
A realist in a functional organisation won't be cynical at all.
Cynicaler take: That's how some companies fill their management with people who don't know when they're lying.
A person who knows how much 5m of steel expands with a 30°C temperature swing has to say "No" to the boss. A person who doesn't know that, but does know the production line uses a $250,000 Leica laser tracker thingummy that's real accurate can say "Yes Sir" and find themselves in charge of a funded project.
survivorship bias.
That's not been my experience. Optimists also tend to assume the best motivations behind the actions of others, and that will nearly always bite you in the ass in any sizeable organization.
I've been the ultra-cynic before, and agree that doesn't work either. People don't like working with you, and don't trust you.
I think we need to be realistic on order to be successful, and neither ultra-cynicism nor optimism fits the bill.
I would suggest that a healthy, reasonable amount of cynicism is a part of being realistic about how the world works.
Start optimistic. Stop if it doesn’t work. In the long-term you don’t need to win every iteration, just enough for a positive expected value. And make sure you don’t get wiped out in any single iteration.
The weeks are short but the decades are long and the industry is smaller than you’d think :)
Is the issue being that one isn't being cynical enough? If you are very cynical about how things will turn out, and share that with others who don't appreciate it (even if you are right), then you are being optimistic in thinking it will change things. Controlling one's displays to others to appear as whatever gets one their best outcome is being even more cynical, to the point of abandoning any attempts at open honest relationships, but it likely works the best if one can pull it off.
Though that might be a very big if, and getting caught faking this likely is worse. Then again, is forcing oneself to adopt optimism just an attempt to do this indirectly, a sort of 'fool yourself so you can better fool others' approach when more direct manipulation doesn't work, given that drive for the optimism is to get better outcomes?
Its baffling to see US engineers repeatedly being shat on by the company, and yet still retain belief in the chain of command.
But, to be a good cynic, you need a rich information network to draw on to see what the wider business is doing and thinking. You must understand the motivations of the business, so that you can be correctly cynical.
But they are the best paid and everyone wants to move to the US.
I was paid exceptionally well when I was at a FAANG, but that didn't extend to me blindly following my leadership team into the same obvious bear trap every 6 months.
Improved morale significantly.
Not really, I prefer less pay but way more affordable cost of living over a dying country rapidly moving into fascism. What's your money worth compared to a life worth living without tyrannical maniacs ruling over your every move. Fuck the USA.
I think this is only true within certain bubbles. Within my bubble there’s a considerable amount of cynicism towards the US. No one wants to move to the US because of gestures broadly.
We know that C-level doesn't understand the tech they are evangelizing at all, and we know that at some point, they end up approving a lot of new middle management hires that are just as power hungry as they are, so the feedback loop from the shop to the top is sealed off. These two catastrophes seal the fate of any company.
If your company is still not infected with these, you can still call plausible deniability or oversight or whatever excuse for them, and true, they are human. But if I look into their eyes and see nothing but desire for power, that's a toxic company and no amount of "healthy cynicism" will help me with that.
The sole reason I am hired for my position as an engineer is that I am expected to make the life of my hiring manager easier. Not to save the world, not to do "the right thing" (whatever this means), but help my manager. During the interview, I had a chance to a get a rough idea what I am going to be responsible for.
If the organization or the mission changes to the extent that it is no longer consistent with my values, I start pinging my former colleagues working elsewhere.
So where is the intrigue?
If you want to save the world, join the Peace Corps or at least a non-profit.
What an ignorant way of working. Guess that's who they hire to build the software spying on Amazon drivers so they have to piss into bottles to make deliveries on time.
What is your approach?
You have responsibilities, which ideally should be stipulated in some form in a contract, and if you are vaguely senior they hopefully go beyond "do whatever steeve needs to feel good".
I would argue that it is in fact your manager whose job entails making your (and your peers) professional life easier, by identifying the roadblocks, escalating problems if need be, etc...
Indeed, it was assumed that the manager is intelligent (per Carlo Cipolla). One would not take or stay in the job otherwise.
This has happened with other technologies as they matured. Bridges. Electrical power. Radio. (The story of Roebling, the Tweed Ring, and the Brooklyn Bridge is worth knowing. Tweed tried to steal too early in the history of the technology, and it backfired on him big-time.)
This happened to software a while back. Semiconductors had it less because keeping up with Moore's Law dominated the politics.
Learn more about the history of technology and this pattern reappears.
The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.
If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.
It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.
Upton Sinclair
Getting older is worse than travelling near light speed dammmit.
I have found that mentioning that, elicits scorn and derision from many in tech.
Eh. Whatevs. I'm OK with it (but it appears a lot of others aren't, which mystifies me).
I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.
Also, religion and philosophy are alike in that some people have a rich inner life that they are not willing to share with most of the world. Your acquaintance who works for a defence contractor is not going to explain why he believes propping up the Pax Americana (or helping ICE deport migrants, or working for a social media company, or any other example of something you don't like) is morally right unless he feels safe in doing so.
I don't really think of it that way.
I didn't work for "not-bad" companies. I worked for a good company.
The attitude makes a difference. If the only way I can feel good about myself, is to define myself by what I'm against, I find life is bleak.
I prefer to define myself by what I'm for.
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
Maybe because I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others, for working at a company that isn't a "moral high ground" company, but isn't exactly NSO or Palantir (I used to work for a defense contractor). I feel profoundly lucky to have found a company that made me feel good about what I did. It was worth the low salary (and other annoyances). I understand that I'm fortunate, and I'm grateful (not snotty).
I find that people take the mere existence of others that have different morals to be a personal attack.
I know that it happens, but I'm not really sure why. It's not like I'm thinking about comparing to others, when I say that I worked for a company that inspired me. I was simply sharing what I did, and why.
I read comments about people that are excited about what they do, and even how much they make, all the time (I spend a lot of time on HN), and never feel as if they are somehow attacking me. They are enthusiastic, and maybe even proud of what they do, and want to show off. I often enjoy that.
> I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others
Earlier:
> I chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
Put more succinctly:
"I work somewhere that is morally acceptable. I could have made double or more if I had worked at a 'more dodgy', less morally acceptable place. Like where you work. No judgement though."
Honestly, I would have more respect for your sentiments if you would just stick to the logical conclusion of your position. Perhaps the scorn you meet is simply a reaction to this inability to simply follow the logical course of your own viewpoint. It has nothing to do with the mere existence of your morals it has to do with the fact that they are incompatible.
You want to have it both ways - you want to make a moral judgement and yet not make a moral judgement. Or you want to bound your moral judgement simply to yourself as if it is at all logical to not extrapolate it to others. If others can work for wherever they please, then what do you even mean by "morally acceptable" or "dodgy"? Simply places you prefer? That's not what morally acceptable means.
For someone who speaks of moral judgements, you don't seem to grasp their implications. I would suggest reflecting on this if you actually care about the reactions you elicit in others. This brief back and forth with you is certainly suggestive of a picture far different from the one you originally painted.
From a purely consistency perspective I don't think you're incorrect, but humans aren't purely consistent
We are able to accept that our personal preferences aren't the same as others and still like, respect or love them anyway
I read the GP as stating:
- he wanted to work for a place that made him happy
- he voiced that pleasure to others, "I'm glad I work at a place I find inspiring"
- they took that as an implicit attack on them
There are at least two parties to a conversation, each of them gets their own opportunity to interpret what occurs
It sounds like in this instance they interpreted his position much more negatively than he intended
Now to answer why is in my opinion is much more complicated and I honestly wouldn't hazard a guess without either being there or knowing both parties very well
That's not what he said though. His version included a comparison to others:
> I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
That's where the offense comes from.
Most posts are "I worked at a company that did stuff I really liked, and was honored to work with some really inspiring people."
That's usually enough to cause people to assume that I'm insulting them.
I do my best to not be offensive, but some folks live in a world, where everything is a personal slight, and there's really nothing I can do about that.
To me it's like with vegetarians. If someone tells you out of the blue "I am a vegetarian because I find it completely irresponsible to not be vegetarian. No judgement though", it's not the same as someone saying "I would like to inform you that I am a vegetarian, given that we are going to eat something and it is relevant for you to know it right now". Yet that latter situation will regularly offend non-vegetarians just the same.
People feel like if they want to climb the prestige ladder, they need some way of justifying the business practices of the megacorps.
In contrast, I feel like it’s well established that gigs in big law or finance or medicine have found a way to decorrelate pay from social status. You can make a choice between chasing money OR prestige.
I’m glad for the antitrust litigation. It’s very obvious that this was a collusion effort that was self serving to each party involved, as a means of overcoming a negative (for them) prisoners dilemma type situation.
The fact that it depressed wage growth was a welcomed side effect. But framing that as the intended outcome as a way of discrediting original author is telling. I don’t know if you’ve understood corporations to be rather simple profit seeking entities, whose behavior can be modeled and regulated to ideal societal outcomes accordingly.
What military action is GitHub involved with.
I didn’t make that same naive assumption when describing corpos as simple profit seeking entities, you just misunderstood what I was saying.
How exactly would you frame major corporations colluding to suppress wages?
> What military action is GitHub involved with.
GitHub has been part of Microsoft for the better part of a decade now, and Microsoft is pretty broadly involved with the military (across a wide swathe of countries)
I will leave this world with no meaningful legacy, but that's preferable to exiting knowing that I'd directly helped Big Tech get bigger and even more evil.
If I'd had kids, maybe my calculus would have been different. Maybe I'd have been motivated enough for their futures to sacrifice my conscience for them, but I did not, and so all I had to consider was whether or not I'd be able to live with myself, and the answer for me was no.
There have always been enough decent, even well paying jobs in software outside of the Big Tech companies, even in Silicon Valley, and so paying my bills and saving for a good retirement didn't require the soul sacrifice.
I don't begrudge anyone who bit that lure but I am entirely content to have said no myself.
If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.
I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.
I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.
I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.
There is no set future to what kind of technology we will build and end up with. We can build something where everything is locked away, and poor stewardship and maintenance means everything gets jankier or less reliable - or we can build something like the Culture novels, with technology that effectively never fails - with generations of advancement building off the previous, ever improving debugability, redundancy, failsafes, and hardening, making things more modular and cleaner along the way.
I know which world I'd rather live in, and big tech ain't gonna make it happen. I've seen the way they write code.
So if some people see my career as giving a middle finger to those guys, I'm cool with that :)
Saying that he is morally bankrupt is like saying that you are morally bankrupt for continuing to live in the US because the current administration is a dumpster fire. It is financially profitable to live in the US; you basically cash in a 6 figure check (perhaps translate the metaphor by taking the monetary value that a significantly increased quality of life is worth to you) by living here rather than some other, lesser developed country with more morally aligned politics. Why not leave? I submit that the calculus that goes through your head to justify staying is roughly equivalent to the one that goes through his when he thinks about continuing to work at big tech. I also don’t think that either of you are wrong for having some justification.
Democratic voters are culpable; their politicians are all about keeping the system going but tweaking it. No, the system is bad. A system that results in trump being elected a second time is prima facie evil and must be torn down. If you have power and aren't working to treat down this system, you are culpable.
I don't live in the US. But if I did, and I was capable enough to be a successful software engineer, I would try to work for an organisation that was not implicated in abhorrent behaviour. If I was to work for one, I would not attempt to dismiss criticisms of it as cynicism.
I'm also not really asking that people leave these roles - everyone has their own path to take. Just that they don't make posts dismissing criticism of these structures as silly cynicism. Or else they will have to contend with me writing a comment disgreeing with them.
A lot of people say this, while collecting 6-7 figure cheques. I've not seen that much evidence that it is correct - certainly, I might as well have been pissing into the wind, for all the effect my influence had on the direction of various FAANG
I do agree that it's not easy even given the correct conditions.
The cynicism the post is talking about is the argument that your chain of command doesn't want to make good software but you do, not anything related to the use of said software.
Not to take a stance on the issue either way, but I think the author is only referring to the politics involved in building products, not the broader political/moral issue of what the company does with all of the money it earns from those products. I don't see their post as defending or even referring to the latter.
Everything is political, though. Establishing a barrier for cynicism so it doesn’t have to tackle the tough questions is understandable but it’s not that justifiable.
It kinda makes me sad to see the top comment on a thoughtful piece like this expressing outrage on something the other didn't even take a stance on. I come to Hacker News to avoid this kind of rhetoric.
I definitely took an uncharitable reading, but man am I tired of being told big tech is neutral. I will continue to be cynical and I will continue to gnash my teeth at anyone who tells me otherwise.
I think this rhetoric fits seamlessly inline with the hacker ethos, and that's one of my motivators (if not the biggest) to read through HN comments at all. It's exhausting to comprehend at times, but so are any well expressed positions in the complexity of life. Otherwise, I worry that HN will complete its transformation to become just another marketing platform for the wider tech sector, like some seem to already think it is.
I think this is definitely overly charitable to corporations. Meta and Amazon both had pretty explicit policies that a modest level of employee churn was desirable, particularly when it involved folks leaving large quantities of unvested stock on the table.
I'm not sure it is really correlated? It causes a lot of the high-performers to jump ship pretty regularly too - the company is perfectly happy replacing an expensive veteran with a college hire
High churn doesn't necessarily mean low average talent, especially if the skills you need to be a high-performer are not specific to any one company.
It means having coworkers who are constantly in competition with you for survival. It's a nightmare.
Different people can have wildly different expectations for a work environment, and wildly different tolerances of social discomfort.
I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.
People who run large tech companies want one thing: to increase shareholder value. Delivering "good software" (a very, very squishy term) is secondary.
I don't even think "good" is a quantifiable or effective measure here. C-level executives are deviating from reality in terms of what they say that their products are capable of versus how their products actually perform. If you're a CEO shipping a frontier model that adds some value in terms of performing basic technical tasks while simultaneously saying that AI is gonna be writing all code in 3-6 months, you're only doing good by your shareholders.
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
That's not preferring good software to bad software, though. In order for a value to be meaningful when expressed, it has to result in some kind of trade off. If you value honesty over safety but never are put in a situation where you have to choose between honesty and safety, then that value is fairly meaningless.
A lot of very cosplay/play-pretend (and sometimes expensive!) tactics I’ve seen in high level enterprise sales made a lot more sense after being exposed to these views. Lots of money spent on entire rooms that are basically playsets for high level execs to feel cool and serve no other purpose. Entire software projects executed for that purpose. I didn’t get it until those folks clued me in.
But otherwise I think it's spot on. Especially for Cxx specialized in keeping the ball running, they'll have no interest in understanding most of the business in the first place, they seem themselves as fixers who just need to say yay or nay based on their gut feelings.
Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.
> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?
IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719
[2] https://qz.com/984174/silicon-valley-has-idolized-steve-jobs...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daught...
[4] https://www.amglaw.com/blog/2021/07/both-microsoft-and-its-f...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
It's like saying that employees only want one thing: to get their paycheck.
It's a fundamental truth of capitalism, deeply interwoven in the history of markets and modern capitalism. It began when the Dutch East India Company sailed to the Banda Islands and committed genocide in order to harvest nutmeg for trade. Money is and has always been the prime directive of capitalism.
To quote Tom Stoppard: War is capitalism with the gloves off.
Delivering shareholder value happens to be a consistent way to maintain the power and payouts a successful executive demands, but I'm not sure it's the motivation per se.
Delivering good software is so far down the hierarchy of motivations I'm not sure they can even see it from up there
I disagree. Cynicism is a toxicity and will fester. Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical (kinda like how people feel about Geddy Lee's voice).
>> Tech companies have a normal mix of strong and weak engineers.
Yes, that's not "a little cynical" that's a healthy perspective.
I think OP is really trying to tell people to be stoic, not cynical, and is confused on the vocabulary.
I must have a more diverse group of friends and colleagues because I see and experience the whole spectrum. Perhaps it's worth considering why your bubble is so black and white and maybe even how to change that.
You may actually have the winning strategy.
Tombstone (1993) Doc Holliday: Wyatt is my friend. Turkey Creek Jack Johnson: Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends. Doc Holliday: I don't.
> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix. The only thing an ethical software engineer can do is to try and find some temporary niche where they can defy their bosses and do real, good engineering work, or to retire to a hobby farm and write elegant open-source software in their free time.
Let me re-state this in another way, which says functionally the same thing:
> Companies are hierarchical organizations where you sell your specialized labor for money. You should do what they expect of you in order to collect a paycheck, cultivate as enjoyable of a working environment as you can, then go home and enjoy the rest of your free time and your nice big tech salary.
Is this cynical? In some sense, sure, but I don't think it's inaccurate or even toxic, and I think it's probably how something like 90% of big tech employees operate. Sometimes your writing makes it seem like this is actually what you think. If your "objective description" of big tech companies were in service of this goal -- getting along better and not fighting the organization to preserve your own sanity and career -- I don't think people would take issue with it.
But you make the analogy of public service and seem in some sense to believe in values that are fundamentally at odds with these organizations. Is your position that, through successful maneuvering, and engineer can make a big tech organization serve the public in spite of internal political and economic pressures? This seems far more idealistic than what I believe. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
However:
We DO live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape.
Large companies ARE run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power.
I have compromised my principles by giving them (or anyone) my labor.
but I don't lie to myself or anyone else about it. I don't find any need to rehabilitate the structural and personal failings I encounter. When my friends call me out for working at EvilCorp, I don't argue. I know it's like any job: it's all dirty money. Instead, I deal with reality: weigh up pros and cons. I judge each year just how much Corporate I'm willing to swallow to support my dependents.
I enjoy the author's redefinition of cynicism and optimism. These are useful ideas to consider and I've given it some thought, arriving at an attitude of Becoming that I guess some would call idealism.
PS OMFG I just realised its MS. I believe this is what the kids call cringe.
Maybe, just maybe, when any single individual is unable to propose a product improvement due to the requirement of ass-kissing and favor-dealings involved... the company is too big and should (be) split up.
Corporate inertia is what is killing many a Western company against the competition from China.
To get a reputation for being suspicious and distrustful is certainly not desirable. Nevertheless, men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to other's interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less.
-- No. 157, Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi)
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
George Bernard Shaw
Your just working for them for free rather than getting paid.
This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...
Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.
Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?
Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.
(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)
(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
It comes from negative experience and not dealing with the effects of that experience. The weight of that negativity is what tilts your views to be overtly cynical. You don’t just choose to be cynical, it’s part of your predisposition.
Idealism comes when you are younger in age and as you get older, you become more cynical about things, because you have been through many more experiences.
Young people should not be overtly cynical. They should look at the world with bright eyes and try to change things for the better. A young person who is overly cynical is a tragedy.
In regard to playing politics, I think that is just intellectual laziness. Getting people on board with your ideas requires thoughtfulness. Try to find common ground on something you both believe in is a challenge, that requires effort. Treating people as individuals, showing genuine curiosity in their beliefs and exchanging direct feedback in a respectful way, is how you get people on board with your ideas.
Idealism about one’s own behavior vs idealism about others’ behavior is an interesting tension to explore further.
If doing things ethically (not defrauding investors and customers) keeps your manager happy, then do it. If not, do it fucking anyways.
Indeed you are, for calling software developers “engineers” meanwhile software development is actually writing, so they are more closer to writers than engineers.
Consider this: math is mostly doodling some glyphs on paper, so clearly it is closer to drawing than engineering.
there are roughly 0.082% of software "engineers" that deal with these constraints or have to "think about them"
Passively contributing to genocide is still contributing to genocide. Complicity/apathy toward genocide is still contributing to genocide.
So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.
Humility involves accurate assessment of self and one's situation. A humble person is not a lowly person, as our contemporary use of the term would suggest. We all know the image of the hunched over, pitiable creature. No, a humble person is someone who has a rationally founded sense of his own strengths and weaknesses, the features of the situation, a sound sense of what he knows about it, and where discernment is needed, how the first combines with the latter. So, a humble person is neither arrogant nor small-souled.
Prudence is the ability to recognize what ought to be done given the circumstances, and what means ought to be used. This presupposes humility, because without accurate self-knowledge and knowledge of circumstances, you cannot determine the correct course of action. You cannot even determine what the true good is that you ought to be pursuing in the first place.
Words like "cynic", "optimist", "idealist", "realist", or "pessimist" are fairly useless here. They describe willful and emotional dispositions. Sometimes, people will paint a thin veneer of "rationality" over these. They will rationalize their small-mindedness and mediocrity, or their grandiosity.
Now, you need to recognize the state of world as it is. That is not the same as recognizing how it ought to be. And the truth is that the world is a mixed bag. Each of us is a mixed bag.
Let's say the Nazis performed medical experiments on people to develop a cure (which they did). Let's say you have the disease for which that cure would work. Do you use the cure? Is it morally licit? It certainly can be (the key term here is "remote cooperation with evil"). Making use of the good effect of an evil of another's actions is not the same as committing the evil action itself. In this world, there is nothing that has not in some way benefited from an injustice. Nothing. Benefiting from these things downstream is not categorically evil. What matters are that the reasons are proportionate to the gravity of the evil, and the proximity of the act. And participating in imperfect institutions is not necessarily evil, either. It depends on what you are contributing to and how. The principle of double effect [0] is an excellent guide here.
It's not cynical to recognize that people are morally flawed. We are. We do good things and bad things, and some people are worse than others. That's just an obvious fact. But that's not an excuse to commit moral evils. That's the old defense children use: "But everyone else is doing it!" You need prudence to help you determine what you ought to pursue and how. You need prudence to be just. And you need justice to have the courage to do the right thing.
This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
Isn’t this the most prosperous, peaceful, and just period in history like ever? What “hellscape”?