ditonal

It may be a fact that the Google spokeperson said that, but parroting it without any context does seem to imply you have trust in Google. I don’t think that’s an unfair take on what you posted. Google has eroded a ton of trust over the years so to emphasize (with your italics) a public statement does seem to brush over the lack of credibility of the source you’re repeating.

I have no idea how Stripe became the low paying non prestigious startup job in this conversation. They are a big prestigious company that pays a ton and is soon to IPO. I actually consider Stripe to be FAANG as far as the original acronym was for stocks but in practice is for “high paying prestigious tech companies.”

A better pick for “non prestigious but good company “ might be Khan Academy, which has an amazing service with great engineers but as far as I know doesn’t make or pay a ton.

I bought a house in San Francisco a year ago and it’s estimate has gone up 100k.

I rarely see needles unless I get pho in the Tenderloin, which is the neighborhood that some people seem to think is the only one in the city. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve lived in by a mile.

My SO works at Twitter and was shocked to see journalists say they were permanently WFH. What Dorsey actually said was that if managers approve certain roles can stay remote, but most managers plan to bring teams back to the office, with 2-3 day WFH being the most popular option.

Rents went down downtown, because everything is closed. It’s a huge leap to assume that will stick and rents are still astronomical given everything is closed.

I can’t tell you the reason, but people are just obsessed with this “end of San Francisco” narrative despite a ton of hard evidence to the contrary. I studied CS after the dotcom and people were convinced all programming jobs were going abroad since programming can be done anywhere, instead Bay Area engineering comp quadrupled. Now instead of going to Mumbai it’s going to Denver or Montana, doubtful.

People saw companies like Reddit, Yahoo, and Twitter lay off all their remote workers. They saw Googlers in MTV get the most promotions. There is understands skepticism “this time is different.”

It’s funny how there are so many articles about how Silicon Valley is leaving the Bay Area but not a single one about how Wall Street is leaving New York. People just get hung up on “code monkey work can be done anywhere “ and ride the media wave. There’s been a tech bubble waiting to pop and an exodus from Bay Area for 10 years now, in the minds of journalists and the blogosphere. In the real world, not so much.

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.

Google’s minister of misinformation Laszlo Bock explained it at TGIF as

1) Google did nothing wrong because 2) Outbound recruiting has no effect 3) So execs just spent a ton of time working out a complicated arrangement to prevent outbound recruiting

It amazed me that Google would brag about hiring “the smartest people” then feed them directly contradictory information and expect them to buy it, which shockingly many did. For all the typical criticism of Trump supporters being a misinformed cult coming from Googlers, I saw a ton of similarities in the logical brain turns off when dear leaders explain things.

Feels like every week someone here is touting the idea of ADHD meds being this solution, all these people are just undiagnosed, there’s an unfair stigma against, and I feel compelled to bring up that I bought into that thinking, got a legit diagnosis and took meds as prescribed, they triggered mania in me and nearly ruined my life.

I tick all the ADHD boxes but I managed to make it through college without meds so never should have started.

Psychiatry is broken and handing out prescription amphetamines to everyone who can’t focus is as bad as an idea as it initially sounds.

One reason for that is way more variability in developer compensation. A company hiring a senior SWE in SF might be paying 130k or 400k. But until recently there wasn’t much transparency.

My buddy is a nurse in Bay Area with a CRNA, it’s pretty much understood you make 225k plus any overtime so there’s not much more to discuss.

One of the reasons I find your story relevant is that advice-pieces like the OP kind of assume a ton of factors are in place that are actually often largely out of your control. It kind of paints this clear career trajectory path for engineers when I think the real world is infinitely more chaotic and random.

For one thing, just the existence of titles like Staff Engineer seems to have exploded in the last 5 years or so, at least from my perspective. My first few jobs out of school, it seemed like the progression was Junior, quickly to just "Software Engineer", eventually to Senior, and then nowhere particular, maybe management. I guess everyone in the industry can't help but steal Google's structure so these new levels of Staff, Senior Staff, Principal seem to have grown in popularity, but I think it's a more recent idea than not. I'm glad that standardized IC tracks are growing but it's hardly a given and the first factor is that your company offers them in the first place.

Still, it's incredibly unstandardized. Having insight into both companies, I know a place like Twitter, Staff Engineer is handed out more lightly than a place like Google and can be more reflective of political prowess than engineering impact.

A dynamic I've seen over and over again is orgs expect more senior engineers to work on more senior stuff but inevitably there is a massive amount of work that's individually low impact but collectively high impact to be done. In a dream world you'd figure out ways to automate it but that's not always feasible. So often times there are political wars fought over access to high impact projects which are perceived as necessary for promotion, while core, critical work that's less sexy but critical to good product gets left undone. If you want to know why a lot of tech companies that pay engineers massive amounts can launch shiny new things with ease but struggle with the basics, look no further.

One of Google's approach to this problem is to create a massively complicated ladder system of engineers, where you have employees that would be labeled Software Engineers at any other company by nature of their job responsibilities, but at Google are called something else and are specifically boxed out of more desirable projects by nature of their non-SWE title. And of course the contractor vs full-time distinction exists as well.

Another dynamic that can happen is that you have huge engineering impact but your company's product strategy fails so its all for nought. You can impact your company's chance of success but ultimately a company works in a given industry on certain problems and if for whatever reason the company's big picture strategy fails then that has a high chance of undermining and overshadowing your individual impact.

Or you were born in the wrong country or run into major health issues that block access to high impact work.

Overall, I just find advice like "work on high impact stuff, don't snack" to be oversimplified to the point of pandering when, there's so many variables outside the scope of your control as to whether you'll even get access to the opportunity to do high impact work in the first place. And while, of course there's almost certainly a correlation between strong engineering IC career trajectory and skill, work ethic, and good career decisions, there's also undoubtedly a massive amount of all sorts of bias that make me skeptical of a cookbook on how to get there.

Totally agree, and let's also mention Stack Overflow and the plentiful learning resources on Youtube etc. In 2000, I was a teenager trying to learn C++ and the Win32 API, and when I got stuck I got really stuck. These days, the amount of resources to help you with a problem or learn a new technology are infinitely higher which removes one of the most frustrating aspect of software dev.

That's fair, but before I spent a lot of time in industry, I thought most tech entrepreneurs were genius engineer/business types.

I was shocked that a LOT of startup founders are well-connected rich kids who have no skills or ability to lead a tech company. I learned that, while saying that you have a huge trust fund isn't very cool, saying that you're a tech entrepreneur CEO is perceived as cool. So the rich family uses their connections to raise a few million (often indirectly) and suddenly the kid is an "entrepreneur", despite lacking any relevant skill sets. It's not like there's any expectation for these companies to make a profit anyway.

Yes, you can avoid these companies, but it's worth warning younger engineers that this is maybe 50% of tech startups. It's more of a problem with NYC based companies than SF based companies (as NYC has more old money and less emphasis on tech companies actually building real tech) but I've seen it in both cities.

I could not agree more.

In many technical interviews, they want to talk about "scalability", using fancy big data software for horizontal scalability etc

But I also know from experience that many, many of these problems would be more elegantly solved by more traditional tools like Postgres, especially since servers have gotten more powerful, the cloud service options more plentiful and reliable, and the software more optimized. The "scalable" approach can lead to massive amounts of wasted person hours unless you're sure you really need it. But if you say, "just use RDS or CloudSQL, or maybe BigQuery", you get perceived as a newb by the 24 year old who just got his MS doing Spark work on toy problems.

Respectfully this is awful advice, as someone who’s worked at FAANG and early stage startups. The idea that working for early stage startups will help you start your own is a myth propagated intentionally by founders/VCs to recruit SWEs with lowball offers.

FAANG is actually way better to meet cofounders. At Google you can have lunch with a talented person every day (there’s internal apps to network like this), plus countless other opportunities to network both formally and informally.

In contrast, at an early stage startup you’ll mostly work with the same people every day and your network will stagnate.

Furthermore, early stage startups tend to have a ton of work that needs to be done that they hire there engineers to do. Unless you get CTO title, you’re probably not going to get exposed much to the BD side or get investor access.

Finally, being able to work full time on your startup to get demo ready to pitch is super helpful. A nest egg from FAANG RSUs is key here, startup ISOs are probably worth nothing and will reduce your cushioning.

If you want to do a startup, go to networking events, apply to YC, etc but leaving FAANG to be an early stage employee w goal, not closer, especially if you don’t at least get CTO title.

To his point about finding undiscovered talent, VCs are obsessed with finding people they can underpay via selling them on their “vision” and “impact”. They claim they can’t compete with Google and Facebook on comp, but the truth is they don’t even try to do so by offering fair equity deals. Instead they use rigged instruments like common ISOs with liquidation preference and 90 day exercise windows to intentionally screw early employees over. If they offered fair terms, many talented people would love to be involved in small companies over FAANG, but these types insist on screwing people over and paying them with speeches about “visions.” The vision of these VCs is always enriching themselves.

It’s also absolutely hilarious that his example of finding undiscovered talent at PayPal was by looking at Stanford students. He’s trying to make a point that you should do out of the box thinking on recruiting and his best example is recruiting from the most prestigious university in Silicon Valley. It’s almost difficult to distinguish from satire.

Thank you so much for saying this. Bipolar disorder is badly misunderstood by the general population, but one of the most common misconceptions is that mania is the opposite of depression and therefore good. For me, mania was hell on earth. The risk of self-harm is a lot higher in mania than depression and doctors are far more concerned with stopping mania than depression, to the extent they won’t treat depression if the risk of mania is too high.

One source of this misconception is the stereotype of people creating art while manic (probably hypomanic). Another is that bipolar disorder is a big spectrum and many type 2 people having hypomania with some euphoric aspects. But I don’t think I’ve met anyone who isn’t type 1 or knows someone who is that has a good understanding that mania is very often a nightmare. After my last manic episode finished I pretty much laid in bed for 6 months doing nothing but fantasizing about killing myself and I’d much rather relive that then relive the mania that preceded it.

It's very common for people on HN to tout the benefits of their ADHD diagnosis and I feel compelled to point out that getting on ADHD meds was one of the worst mistakes of my life. They triggered a manic episode. The psychiatrist solutions to all my problems was always more meds, different meds, etc. I've mentioned this a few times and I'm always accused of abusing them but the truth is I took a small dose as prescribed. Of course I was "pre-disposed" to mania but how was I supposed to learn that without finding out the hard way? I believe that if I just avoided all the psychiatric pill I never would have gone full manic (hypomanic, but not manic).

The article is right that "chemical imbalance" is a myth as there's no sort of blood tests or normative chemical ranges for any of these mental conditions that people get diagnosed because they are outside of. A quick Google search would show there's no scientific support for chemical imbalance theory, just some pills that affect brain chemicals that people report depression improvement on self-reported survey so a huge, unscientific leap is made that depression is some chemical shortage in the brain. All the psychiatrist diagnoses are basically glorified personality tests, and the criteria are based on the DSM-5 which was made closed door and with heavy influence from pharmaceutical company lobbying.

Mental health is probably one of the most complex aspects of health, things like placebo have a huge impact, it's hard to study, and there's huge bias introduced by a for-profit pharmaceutical industry that pushes treatments to pills.

The field of psychiatry is not that scientific, it's not so long ago it was forcing people into lobotomies and I see the unscientific rush to diagnose everyone into these boxes of depression and ADHD as a similar gaffe that will be looked back on poorly.

I am diagnosed with GAD, ADHD, and bipolar type 1 and I'm doing MUCH better since I went against-medical-advice and quit all meds. For bipolar disorder/anxiety, meditation, yoga, exercise, sobriety, journaling are my key treatments. Mindfulness is key, but not the Hacker News McMindfulness variety where you try to emulate a celebrity monk from Tibet so you can reach Zen all so you can write more code for your startup.

For ADHD, meditation, techniques like pomodoro, and most importantly, just accepting that maybe it's better to achieve less peak productivity than take prescription amphetamines.

I just wanted to provide some counter-perspective as someone who's followed advice like yours much to my detriment.

It's not an apt descriptor at all because there's no test for a normal range of a chemical that depressed people are outside of.

What’s frustrating to me is clearly you’ve spent 10+ years on the industry, worked at big cos like Google and startups, passed Google onsite twice, and still got rejected by all those companies. Which would be fine if industry execs weren’t constantly bemoaning about talent shortages and difficulty hiring engineers. They’ve established a cultural pattern of talking about how acceptable it is to reject highly qualified engineers, labeling them “false negatives”, then refuse to introspect on that when discussing why they find hiring challenging. (I’ve also spent 10+ years in industry, 3+ years as a Google SWE, and got zero feedback rejections from companies like Stripe and many many others in the last few years.)

In 2020, free speech is most often attacked under three false premises:

1. "It's a private company, they can deplatform whoever they want!"

This is obviously true to an extent, but as all communication is increasingly dominated by a few private companies, leads to a situation where free speech is effectively stifled not by the government but by an oligarchy. This is especially true since internet infrastructure like DNS is implemented by private companies.

2. "It's freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences of speech!"

Clearly this argument is absurd and wrong, yet I've seen it get touted nonetheless, notably in an XKCD comic. If the government threw you in jail for political speech, and defined that as "allowing free speech but simply having consequences of that speech", most would agree that's not true free speech. Yet people accept that flawed logic in other contexts.

If you can lose your livelihood for a political opinion, you don't really have free speech, yet that's increasingly the precedent set by Silicon Valley as a reasonable consequence of unpopular political opinions.

3. "We can't be tolerant of intolerant opinions!"

Again, perhaps some truth here in the most extreme cases, yet increasingly we label all but the most anondyne opinions as intolerant. The range of acceptable opinions gets narrower every day, and the consequences for diverging from it increasingly harsh.

To me it's an objective reality that there's a massive attack on free speech in 2020, especially in places like Silicon Valley and primarily by people who identify as "the left", usually using the fallacious arguments noted above.

The difficulty of all that stuff on plain old Linux is overstated and the difficulty of doing that on K8s is understated. And I agree with grandfathers point that if you don’t understand how to do that on plain old Linux you will struggle on K8s. K8s is ok for huge enterprises with tons of engineers but somehow K8s advocates make it seem like learning and operating nginx on ubuntu is this huge challenge when it’s usually not.

Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing. Zuckerberg does not care if 50% of his engineers skip a video meeting. He would greatly care if he found out 50%+ of his SREs were going on strike. But the word union is stigmatized even though doctors/lawyers/police/actors/teachers unions all wield massive political power, engineers accept their market based compensation and micro kitchens and decide that’s enough then are shocked that on political issues they get pushed around by the execs and VCs. If you want to have any voice in what your work does in the world, step 1 is collective organization of Silicon Valley engineers, anything besides that is smoke and mirrors and a waste of time.

Many people are upset I called antidepressant placebo. It’s obviously a huge discussion out of the scope of this thread. But keep in mind that companies make a ton of money selling SSRIs and _still_ have trouble differentiating results from placebo, despite arguable massive publication bias influenced by big pharm.

Furthermore the metrics for these things are the most subjective thing in the world, surveys of humans. Most statisticians consider that data very low value but it’s the foundation of modern psychiatry.

Placebo is great if it works, sure, but psych meds have a long list of side effects. It’s be better to get placebo healed by your local witch doctor than a medical doctor, if you’re just relying on placebo.

Again it’s a big discussion and of course I’m open minded to learning more but on the flip side a lot of people take modern psychiatry as infallible medicine despite a lot of flaws.

I largely agree with all the advice here. I dropped out of college due to depression, then I torched my tech career with a manic episode that led me straight from a FAANG SWE job to an involuntary psych ward patient for a month, which was followed by a half year brutal depression.

I’ve done a lot of research and I think psychiatry is pseudoscience and antidepressants are largely placebo.

I’m really on the mindfulness bandwagon but don’t believe it’s “positive thinking.” The opposite, it’s less thinking, more acknowledgment of how you feel. If you feel depressed, maybe that’s ok, maybe that’s part of the human experience. If it endangers your life that’s perhaps not ideal, but if it endangers your goals, perhaps that is ok. I think modern society pathologizes feelings and acts like anything that detracts from your ability to be “successful “ must be cured. It’s ok to feel bad feelings it’s how we react to them that’s more often a source of frustration. Meditation gets mislabeled as some way to reduce stress and clear your mind when I believe it’s training for how to learn to react to difficult thoughts and feelings.

I have many more thoughts on this topic for when the time is right but as much as self-care advice gets responded with “thanks I’m cured” self-care is the foundation to recovery. I have many more strategies to do this even when thoughts/feelings are giving resistance.

I got interested in programming in 2000 and graduated with a CS degree in 2009. Throughout the 2000s (remember this was post-dot com) I got told software was a bad field to get into for two reasons:

1) The advent of advanced tooling would make software engineers unnecessary. Tools like Visual Basic and UML diagrams were the tip of the iceberg of "visual coding" where a business person could just specify requirements and the software would be automatically created.

2) Jobs were all going to go overseas. There is no reason to pay a programmer in California 10x what you can pay someone in Mumbai. It's better to study something like finance where the secret domain knowledge is held within the chambers of ibankers in Manhattan. The future of tech startups is a few product managers in NYC outsourcing the coding work to India.

There's also a 3rd argument that gets floated around that the field will be oversaturated, "everyone" is learning to code, etc. In 2015 I asked a startup for 125k and they told me, while that did seem to be market at the time, they thought salaries had peaked and were going in the opposite direction. In 2020 you probably can't hire a bootcamp grad for 125k.

Since then the field has exploded and wages have gone off the charts, but I still hear the same type of arguments over and over.

In 2020, you hear stuff like:

1) AI is the future, it's going to automate away all of the menial programming jobs.

2) Bay Area is overcrowded, all the jobs are going remote. The future of tech startup is a few marketing execs in SF outsourcing the menial tech work to flyover states.

Personally, I didn't believe the hype then and don't believe the hype now. I find it amusing that the author questions the wisdom of Google for not using AI to automate development, as if that's never occurred to Google.

Of course the author is right that tech is a treadmill, new skills move into the spotlight while old ones become outdated, although even then the mass of legacy code means consultants will have lucrative jobs taking care of it for a long time.

In my experience, new tooling always creates more software jobs, not less. Software is not like high frequency trading, the more people that compete to make software, the more people we seem to need to make software.

Sure, Bay Area is getting insanely expensive, but Google still tries to fit as many as it can into Mountain View, Facebook still crams as many as it can into Menlo Park. Every 3 months some VC will have the bright idea that, what if we just pay people to do the lowly engineering work somewhere else and just have execs in the Bay Area? And 99% of those startups go nowhere and Google is worth a trillion dollars.

There is a very intuitive line of reasoning that goes, software can be done my machines and software can be done anywhere. There is a thread of truth to both those narratives, but it leads people to very incorrect conclusions that there won't be as many software jobs in the future and they will be done in cheap places.

Despite all intuition, and all the logical narratives about costs and automation, a group of people dedicated to technology in the same physical room have defied that intuition. Virtually every extremely important software company grew in the West Coast of the USA, in some of the most expensive places in the world, and the more software tools have improved the more headcount these companies have had. So take all this intuition about the end of days for software engineers with a huge grain of salt.

Startup ISOs are totally broken, and VCs and founders would rather write 30 page treatises on all their complexities (of course, glossing over the 99 ways to screw employees), than actually try to improve them.

A small percentage of people got rich off options a handful of times a long times ago, and since then countless people have been screwed.

Public RSUs for stock you can sell immediately on the open market are fantastic.

Common ISOs are toilet paper. At a _minimum_ you should get a 10 year exercise window, and if the CEO tries to say that would make it so early employees can hurt cap tables for future rounds, he's basically saying he doesn't consider your equity grant to be real equity as it deserves to be clawed back for the sin of not wanting to stick around for the 15 years it takes startups to IPO these days.

These exact same people will try to convince you that their ISOs are a valid subsitute to liquid RSUs, THEN say that they don't deserve to be "preferred" instead of "common" because the VCs put in actual money (hint: so did you if you turned down a public company to work at the startup. Biggest difference is only that you're way less diversified).

Am I ranting? Of course, but if VCs and founders are going to continually "educate" engineers on their equity offers, engineers need to stand up and inform each other of the pitfalls. I know countless people, myself included, who have been screwed by ISOs. You can actually lose money because the 30 day window forces you to pay strike price + taxes on gains, then you find out that the CEO sold the company at a bargain so liquidation preference kicked in and he just took a huge retention bonus instead.

The way out of this mess is not Github treatises on how to evaluate your equities. The way out is for engineers to continually tell founders/VCs that they will pick public companies instead of startups until ISOs get fixed. If ISOs screwed over VCs instead of engineers, they would have gone to DC and gotten this fixed 10 years ago. At an absolute minimum you shouldn't have to pay a dime in taxes until you've actually realized some money in your checkings account. VCs/founders don't care because they don't have to care because engineers are still too gullible and accept these bogus deals.

Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs? It’s not true.

I live in the SF Bay Area, have worked as a SWE for 10+ years including at top companies like Google, and changing jobs is NOT easy and I’m sick of the implication it is.

There are also a LOT of younger kids on HN who have never worked through a recession.

Finally, just because you make an ok salary doesn’t mean a political voice is worthless. Why do doctors have the AMA?

Engineers desperately need to stop boxing themselves out of the discussions, we absolutely need to organize, badly.

First of all Google affects a lot more than just the USA and while HQed in the USA is in many ways an international company.

Secondly, even if you take a US centric view of things, just because someone at the Pentagon claims something is the US best interests doesn't mean it is. People say, "oh we need these dangerous AI based weapons or other countries will win an arms race". Arms races benefit military contractors but few other people. The 20th century taught us lessons about arms races and we should learn from them. The USA does not build nuclear weapons anymore, instead it invests heavily in diplomacy to prevent other countries from building nuclear weapons. For some reason, few people seem to consider that we could take the same approach to AI weaponry.

People simply underestimate the dangers of AI weaponry. Suppose you are an evil dictator who wants to oppress and enslave a group of people, and you can choose between a nuclear bomb, or a drone that has enough intelligence to hunt down journalists, political opponents, and any other dissidents that dare defy you. Which weapon would this hypothetical tyrant pick?

Yes, wealthy, powerful people at the top ranks of politics and business in this country, who stand to gain more wealth and power via the development of these weapons, support Google developing them. However, your position that since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.

Well, I admit I'm biased because I started taking ADHD meds and then had a manic/psychotic episode, that involved me getting involuntarily committed to a psych ward and burning all my career bridges, and also got diagnosed with heart failure, and I attribute a huge chunk of the blame to the ADHD meds. Both my psychiatrists and cardiologists insisted I needed even more meds or things would get worse, but instead I just said, I'm going to disregard medical advice, I'm going back to a no meds baseline, and focus hard on lifestyle changes, and everything improved. I've been emotionally stable and my echocardiogram and cardiac MRI showed my heart is back to normal. So that's my bias.

I am just a bit of a psych meds skeptic these days - I don't think the comparison to drugs like insulin carry as much weight as their advocates would like them to. For one thing, there's no brain scans or blood tests for any of these diagnoses. The diagnosis criteria is basically a "personality test", called the DSM-5, a manual heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical companies. Stimulants at least do in fact have research supporting they actually outperform placebo (unlike the massively prescribed antidepressants), but they come with a host of negative side effects.

If you're predisposed to mania, you shouldn't take stimulants. If you're predisposed to heart problems, you shouldn't take stimulants. My question is, how was I supposed to know that I was predisposed to these things short of finding out the hard way by taking the stimulants and having those negative side effects almost ruin my life/kill me?

Previously, on HN people have accused me of "doing it wrong" in some sense with the ADHD meds, but the truth is I got the diagnosis from the doctor and took the meds as prescribed.

The whole idea that we can neatly categorize this person as ADHD, this person as MDD, this person as Bipolar-2, this other person as bipolar-1, this other person as BPD, after doing a ton of investigating into mental health, I just no longer buy it.

I do think the answer is in lifestyle changes, the person who is at risk of cardiac arrest, yes they should exercise for 30 min a day and reduce sodium intake before relying on a pill if that pill carries with it a ton of other dangerous side effects.

I also agree with that other commentor, that our society, and my past self, is a bit obsessed with "success" metrics, usually judged by things like career success. The idea that, maybe if you just accept that your career won't be what it could be but that's better than drugging yourself up to achieve those goals, seem foreign to some people. Becoming "somebody" important becomes more important than just being stable and healthy.

Well, if you find yourself in my position, where you get diagnosed with heart failure and learn that ~50% of people in your position die within 5 years of diagnosis, all the sudden that big N promotion doesn't seem as important anymore. And the drugs that help you get there don't seem as worth it. So nowadays my mind still wanders constantly, my wife gets frustrated by how often I start day-dreaming mid-conversation with her, and I know that intellectually I'm capable of more career success but I'm held back primarily by my lack of focus and discipline. But I've come to just accept all that, being on stimulants to fix it, is not worth the downsides.

The other favorite arguments are, "if we don't do <unethical> thing, someone else will, therefore it's ethical". I call it the "selling crack to teenagers" argument but it was the go-to by Google employees defending the autoaim killbot project Maven.

There was also an idea that, Google employees are the "good guys" compared to "evil Amazon", therefore when Google does something, it's de facto good, and it's better for Google to do the unethical thing since they will do it less unethically than Amazon.

Google employees care a lot about their "TC" and "GSUs" - that's it. What bugs me is that at least Goldman employees and their ilk kind of have that tacit acknowledgement that they are in it for the lucre. A lot of Googlers really act like they are in it for the greater good even when the company picks money over ethics at literally every junction.

Founders want employees to have the founder mentality without giving them founder equity. AngelList (which this author is shilling) salaries and equity grants are pathetically low. So they write fluff pieces about how you’ll learn so much doing a founders laundry. I learned a lot more, faster, as an employee at big tech than at early stage startups. Startup VCs and company need to get out of the business of writing fluff pieces about how great it is to be a startup employee and get into the business of fixing early employee equity grants. The “standard” is pathetic.

I had a psychotic break and almost torched my career and I had a similar epiphany that emotional stability trumps everything. My only critique is if you frame emotional stability as a foundation to achieve all these other ambitions then to some extent you’ve circled back right to where you started. The emotional stability is it’s own reward and worth infinitely more than a successful business.