[eldavido]

I think this portends a larger culture shift in Silicon Valley tech that, in my opinion, cannot come quickly enough.

Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you".

Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.

It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.

[refulgentis]

`If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.`

That's not what's happening at Google.

I understand the intensity of your position on it in light of that being assumed.

Beyond that, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the `unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.`?

Generally people seem upset by it turning into a post-modern extremist firing: you show up to work one morning, you're locked out of your laptop, you can't badge into the building, you get an email to your personal email address on file, and that's it.

[tracerbulletx]

That's bs. There are whole industries that exist 100% because of regulatory capture and systems of control they've set up to protect themselves and are a million times more worthless. Tech is a shining star of people getting paid a lot to just try to figure out new ways of doing things and throwing off more value than any where else in the economy on an off day, and the industry was 1000 times better even with the wastefulness before than it will be if it becomes just some shit corporate world like old style companies.

[jart]

It's worth mentioning that tech didn't just invent better products. Tech also figured out a way to give them away for free. Tech also figured out how to ensure people of all classes and backgrounds got equal access to superior products for free. Tech furthermore figured out how to ensure it wasn't just the American classes that got free stuff, but that the free better products could be enjoyed by people from all nations.

[eldavido]

So I think it's worth discussing this a bit.

Maybe there was a time when this wasn't true. I spent a lot of the 2010s working in San Francisco tech jobs. It was quite enjoyable and I just got back from a guy's wedding who I worked with closely 2012-2015. Three different startups, one mine, other two as an employee. All three crashed and burned.

I think there are three possibilities.

One is that tech is somehow different/exceptional and bound to stay that way forever. I doubt it.

The second is that we were always lying to ourselves, it was always just "a job", but we were all young, stupid, and naive. This feels too cynical.

The third, which I feel is most accurate these days, is that tech was different, but now is a more mature industry, and is, as you put it "just some shit corporate world". Maybe there was a time when it was genuinely true that people got "unlimited vacation", that "titles don't matter" and that the CEO ate with the hoi polloi. But I think those days have passed. Everything's different now. The people coming into this industry today are 4.0 GPA high school kids, not misfits tinkering with computers in their basement. Competitive parents no longer feel they have to justify why their kid is going into tech rather than law, finance, or medicine. Salaries have increased 3-5x (!!). Tech influences elections, mints billionaires, and controls many facets of American life.

The problem is that the attitudes haven't kept up. These days, Google, facebook, etc are just standard American megacorps. They are some of the most valuable companies in the world with huge lobbying budgets, and tremendous pressure to deliver shareholder value.

The simple fact is that margins always get compressed as industries mature. Google has been under greater and greater margin pressure over the last decade as Apple demands higher payments to be their default search engine, OpenAI starts to steal share, and more people head directly to Amazon for search results. Google of course is going to blame the pandemic for this, but the actual issue is long-term erosion of margin. It's hard to see how any of this is going to reverse course over time.

[furyofantares]

It's actually totally OK to use the wrong part of speech if you like to. Nothing to do with being emotionally immature.