I tried to do this out of undergrad (graduated last year). Many companies do both good and bad things to me, some more good than bad. The "best of the best" companies to me require many years of experience and are still competitive. I didn't really want an entry level job at an "evil" company, so I'm going to go do a PhD (in something unrelated to my original interest in operating systems, as I don't want to be a 30k/yr automaton part of Meta's R&D machine).
My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests (lots of OS work is in the datacenter, which leads to jobs with hyperscalers; I consider many of those companies evil). I'm trying. It will probably make my QoL worse for some time, and I'll probably give up eventually.
Also, evil is undefined in some sense. Is it wrong to do something "good" at a company that has an "evil" aspect?
> My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests
It is very, very, very hard because you're making it hard by insisting on finding a strong intersection with your set of interests.
Half the jobs I've had aligned well with my interests. They were also in the lower half of jobs I liked. The best jobs I've had were the boring ones. It turns out, there's a lot more to jobs than just what you work on.
The most important thing is to keep a roof over your head. Next is saving for retirement. And then there are things like work environment, the people you work with, team dynamics, the actual technical work, etc.
I've found that the most intellectually fun/challenging work was usually coupled with the most dysfunctional teams. It's likely just a coincidence, but it was a good lesson that other things matter at least as much.
I honestly think is it bad for you to be that morally insistent against "evil" companies.
I also think it's not as easy as most people make it. It's not the poor and innocent people that are oppressed by all this evil companies. These companies are just a reflection of the people and the society we live in.
Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.
No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).
Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)
It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".
Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring.
Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.
I'm not unemployed right now, but in the past have applied to literally every one of those companies and been declined from every one of those companies.
It's hard to find jobs at companies that aren't run by monsters; even if you can identify a company that isn't terrible, there's still a relatively low likelihood of getting a job there.
I'm not blaming the companies for not hiring me, I'm sure they have their reasons for their terrible decision of passing up on someone as handsome and smart as me [1], and I am certainly not entitled to a job, but when I run out of companies that seem ethical, what do you do then?
It's easy to say "well start your own company!", and sure if you have the ability to do that then that's great, but I don't even really know where to begin with finding investors for stuff I'm working on, and I'm not sure that anything I'm working on would be interesting to investors anyway.
Because for profits have the most employment opportunities? All of the companies named in replies to my initial comment hire a minuscule number of people.
If you're looking to scale, then you're looking for companies that scale, and if you're looking for companies that scale, you're not looking for angels. I used to think Cloudflare was an exception to this belief but today I'm not so sure.
I tried to focus on for-profit, but I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with non-profits either. In fact I don't think I consciously mentioned a non-profit but I might have.
Counterpoint, work for companies that pay a lot regardless of good/evil. I worked for an evil company and got paid an insane amount. Got laid off. Am now happily retired in my early 40s.
Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list of literally every company you think is ok, and I were declined by all of them, then what?
This isn't a theoretical question for me. I've applied to and been declined from all the companies you listed (except tarsnap because I didn't see a careers page). What exactly do I do then? Do I then just decide that food is overrated and be content with not having paycheck?
Ok, great. Let's say I agree that that's a good response. I would still likely need investor money, which I don't even know how to get but even if I did then I have a similar problem of having to make sure that I only have ethical investors. I'm not saying that they don't exist but I'm not exactly fond of the big institutional VC firms.
Let's not also forget that most companies go broke, and realistically most of us don't have any ideas that are likely to make a sustainable business.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and find an ethical place to work for or start a business, I'm just saying that it's not as easy as "just apply to places that don't suck".
Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the steam store are probably second only to the apple store's, another heinously immoral product.
Just starting with "Not totally abhorrent and aiding the destruction of democracy in the US" would be fine.
Instead of working for Zuck or Google or Larry, you can work for Garmin, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard, most banks (they are soulless but some aren't always evil), grocery chains, pretty much any local business, car companies, non-weapon or surveillance based government work, IDEXX, hell even Apple imo and I dislike Apple, nearly every business that isn't "Tech"
Basically just stop pretending that the industry is only Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle. There's something like millions of jobs that aren't in those companies.
Easier said than done. Most of us end up working for monsters if you go high enough up on the ladder.
I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't have boundaries; there are certain companies that I will absolutely not work for no matter what they pay me (e.g. Palantir). I'm just saying that if you draw the line at "don't work for bad company", it's going to be hard to pay your bills since due to the lovely world of capitalism the people on top are usually sociopaths.
To be clear, I do agree broadly; if you can find a company that has decent people running it and doesn't appear to be evil to you, you should probably work for that company. The problem is that the job market is very competitive and you often have to take what you can get.
I'm in a privileged position to where I can be a little choosy with my work (for now!), but I can't really judge someone who has a family to take care of for doing what they need to to pay the bills.
I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies.
Was this AI modified or something? The writing is very odd. I wish it could go for more than 3 sentences without talking about how great our genius billionaires are.
Also this isn’t that interesting: billionaires have access to the best teams and clinical trials available. Of course?
The author is a partner at a VC firm[0]. One purpose of content like this is to inspire future founders-to-be to make the jump to start their own companies (and consider working with the author's firm). To do this, one necessarily must glorify the end state of such a journey. Also, founder-centric VC firms tend to attract people with an optimistic view of founders.
hard to pinpoint, it's not the traditional AI voice but feels very weird indeed, maybe dumbed down to not give AI telltales? the paragraph mentioning Magic Johnson is somewhere between a kid's recounting and name-dropping for the sake of it
You're probably not old enough to remember when Magic Johnson was diagnosed with AIDS. I was in college and I remember the moment when I heard like a flashbulb memory. I was in my dorm cafeteria near the windows eating dinner with my friends. It was an extremely significant event because AIDS was a huge deal at the time and the fact someone like Magic Johnson got it was utterly shocking. Everyone thought the same thing, that he was going to die soon. There was even a controversy later on about him playing basketball where he could get a cut and potentially pass it along to others. The fact he was still alive after many years and then his HIV count went down to zero is a miracle of modern science.
South Park made a parody about that where the cure is injecting literal money into his veins. I don’t know if you’re aware, but most Americans don’t have access to these kind of things. If anything, it’s simply demoralizing to know your loved ones get to die and the billionaires and their families get to live.
And why is that the case in America? You'd think that something as simple as Medicaid for all (I'd say Medicare but that's clearly socialism and we can't have that!) would be simple. But it's not and I doubt it's ever going to change here.
So in the meantime, in this glorious land of temporarily embarrassed billionaires, who vote to perpetuate a system that is killing them (hand in hand with their own choices) I'd prefer people to have access to the miracles if they can find a way to afford them over taking them away because most people can't.
I used to be a lot more progressive. The re-election of Voldemore took care of that. American needs an intervention. But chin up, I guess, now that we have gutted federally funded STEM, the pipeline of miracles here will soon run dry. I guess that takes care of your concern.
Hey you’re welcome to your view. In my view that’s an insanely disgusting devaluation of human life that’s been put into peoples brains by propaganda. Capitalism and materialism sure is great huh.
And Christians founded a nation where Black people were counted as a 3/5th of a person and my still living parents grew up in the segregated south - that was upheld by a Supreme Court made up of people who were religious.
Well here's a thing - I don't think it's capitalism which made me think this way, or even living in the first world. The first world in my experience is big on preaching the dogma that we're all special and valuable (whether it practices what it preaches aside).
Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.
We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.
And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).
But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.
On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.
But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.
Nobody should have these types of problems in the age of AI agents. This kind of clean up and grunt work is perfect for AI agents. We don’t need new abstractions.
I haven’t seen tinygrad used for any mainstream production project or thing of value, yet.
Besides a lot of self congratulatory pats on the back for how elegant it is. Honestly, when I read it, it looked confusing as all the other ML libraries. Not actually simple like Karpathy’s stuff.
All that to say, I do really want it to succeed. They should probably hire some practical engineers and not just guys and gals congratulating themselves how elegant and awesome they are.
Maybe they meant "Not hard != quickly done". I don't think many people think bureaucracy is especially difficult. It's just time consuming.
But frankly if they meant that, the statement doesn't really say anything at all. Because what in this world is hard if you stop taking shortcuts and spend time doing it correctly?
A lot of that comes down to the costs associated with not being compliant and/or the requirements of existing contracts/insurance policies, where having dedicated FTEs to compliance is a requirement. Compliance might not be hard for the person/people managing the program, however it might seem difficult or complex to the FTEs that have to build to those standards if they do not have a security or governance background.
I assume they mean "getting a SOC2 report", which is the part that Delve attempts to automate. The maintenance of controls, adoption of new policy as the company evolves, etc, is what someone will do in the full time role and that Delve et al would do nothing to assist with.
There are more productive ways to vote with your money than tax evasion.
You can make tax-exempt donations, or start your own non-profit organization.
Some people hoard money without building businesses, without participating in government, without contributing to welfare. People who take more than they give are assholes.
In my state (NY), I pay income tax to the feds and NY state. I pay property tax to my county and town. This pays for things like roads, cleanup and maintenance, the school district, the library, the parks and sports recreations. The community trails and wildlife preserves.
You’re not wrong, unchecked inflation is bad for most people though. Stable currency is pretty important for trade and economic stability. Unless you prefer heating your home by burning stacks of cash
Oh, I agree. I never said unchecked inflation was at all desirable or even ok.
My point was that local and state governments do need your tax dollars, in the sense that that is literally their income. But for the federal government it's different. If federal tax revenue declines, they can just sell more treasury notes and continue to spend as much as before. In that sense, federal tax revenue has no direct effect on federal spending.
You know that’s not the entire budget right? You’re being an asshole by denying funding for disaster relief, schools, healthcare, roads, scientific research, all the public goods and services that don’t work on a profit driven model, but you still get a direct benefit from.
If you want to play concerned citizen get out and protest, vote with your dollars by not throwing them at big tech companies who kowtow to politicians and fund their campaigns. But if you think you’re sending kind of message by withholding your taxes, it’s really just that you’re a selfish asshole.
> vote with your dollars by not throwing them at big tech companies
Abstaining is not voting. If you want to vote with your dollar, spend it actively undermining big tech companies. Get out there and blind some cameras or something.
Fair if you’re already not giving them money. But if you manage a sizable chunk of cloud spend at AWS, GCP, Azure etc, you can send a meaningful signal by taking away that revenue and shifting it to a company that’s not aiming for neo-feudalism.
This reads like a scattered mind with a few good gems, a few assumptions that are incorrect but baked into the author’s world view, and loose coherence tying it all together. I see a lot of myself in it.
I’ll cover one of them: layers of management or bureaucracy does not reduce risk. It creates in-action, which gives the appearance of reducing risk, until some startup comes and gobbles up your lunch. Upper management knows it’s all bullshit and the game theoretic play is to say no to things, because you’re not held accountable if you say no, so they say no and milk the money printer until the company stagnates and dies. Then they repeat at another company (usually with a new title and promotion).
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