> I’ve tried to discuss this with my mom, and she kept telling me how “lucky” I am for working at Microsoft...
I don't think I worked on any unethical part of Apple, I just worked on the indexing and caching for iTunes, but I really hated working there, and it was frustrating that whenever I complained about it, people would remind me how lucky I was to have a job at Apple.
I survived 2.5 years there, but eventually I had to quit (taking a fairly substantial pay cut in the process). I think my parents thought I was nuts, but my mood improved almost immediately.
I mean, a post on Reddit had a fresh 21 year-old out of college making a TC of $120,000/year - 2x the median annual salary of ~$60,000/year. So, yes. You're lucky
I'm neurodivergent and working at a small company lead to me being the CTO and forcing myself to understand (and operate successfully with in) the social and political aspects of business for the first time.
Large companies are all about neurodivergence in the workforce nowadays, but they expect them to conform to neurotypical-friendly, neurodivergent-hostile operating procedures like Scrum.
I can say it's been far easier for my neurodivergent ass to survive at a small company where everyone knows each other and can see the work put in. Difficulties with socialization and consistency of working hours—both things I struggle with—are much easier to deal with when you clearly have each others' backs and won't shirk the work.
Sadly starting my own company, I realized how hard it is to work with founders who are neurodivergent in a different and incompatible ways. Just be prepared to examine the culture closely to figure out if it's a fit for you.
I'm now at a massive household brand name company and every day I want to rip my eyeballs out and give up on capitalism forever. Whoever thought big government was incompetent needs to understand the colossal waste and inefficiency of private enterprise will always dwarf that of the public sector.
Kind of a strange sentiment? It seems like you're willing to take a paycut, so there's no shortage of jobs that will pay you a sustainable, but not FAANG, income to work on something respectable.
I get wanting to take a break after working on something distasteful - I've been there! - but I can't say I'd give up on the field entirely after one job.
Neel, based on your linkedin, you're 27 or 28. You're a grown adult. Stop following your mom's orders. Quit your job, take some time off to decompress and recover from your clear burnout, then figure out what you want to do. Life isn't Microsoft or flipping burgers. There's a lot of things in between. You have one life, don't waste it trying to please others. But simultaneously, don't assume that your burnout is permanent. Just take a break my friend.
Neel, don't crawl into a hole. Use your skill. Fuck big tech.
Let's use these LLMs that they think will replace us all to create browser agents that remove ads, tracking, click bait, attention stealing... heck, we could even de-engagement farm the internet. No more trolling, hate, or toxicity.
If we all get personal assistants at the edge on our own pane of glass and hardware, then they have to pay us for access.
Want to show me an ad? Pay up.
Neel, quite often in life it turns out that your burning problem is also a thousand other people's burning problem. In your case, it's billions.
Appreciate the moral stand against surveillance-tech and totally sympathize with leaving big tech to do startups (I did the same!) but I don't get the title. Isn't OP still coding his software startup [0]?
I've got this sentiment reading a few such goodbye letters like this. They often end by saying something like, "I quit software engineering. Because I can't make money at it, under these conditions." As if the options were work for Big Tech; work for a YC company (aka embryonic Big Tech); or be poor.
So I'm gonna say it like this, to get the vibe across:
It's pretty easy to run some Internet businesses and equal your software eng salary, as the owner of those businesses.
Not in year one, but if your goal is to hit ~40k in the first year and then scale up over a couple years, you can do it.
Also it is vastly easier if you have the capital to jump to the front of the line and skip the horrible 1 year of waiting for traffic/users to come, and just buy a business. Then you're in business from day one and can complete this more quickly and less stressfully. Elon did it with Tesla and he's now the world's richest man; learn from his example.
It's funny that this ends up being a kind of "secret knowledge" because it falls between the cracks of tech and corporate incentives. Big companies won't teach you this, because lol why would they teach you how to screw them and quit. VC's won't (exactly) teach you this, because while they are generically supportive of entrepreneurship and while it is easier to earn less money than more money (obviously), they want you to go straight for the billion dollar ideas and discourage small money thinking. Which leads to this outcome of like 100 engineers trying and only 5 making it through the gauntlet and becoming rich, rather than >90 making it if only the incentives were different.
Incidentally I recently bought a business and, after spending a lot of time in the nitty gritty "weeds" of making an Internet $10 as opposed to "zero to one" thinking, this is all coming into focus. But as I said, it's a kind of secret knowledge, which you have to piece together from YouTube, newsletters, and doing the effort - that last part of which is like 80% of the real learning. In my case I bought something and then learned on the job; fortunately the profits did not suffer.
So I'm here to tell you this is doable; it's definitely doable. If you're a software engineer of average intelligence for a software engineer, you can do it. Figuring it out isn't easy, but it's very far from impossible.
This hits very close to home and I'm very glad to see I am (and you are) not alone. Thank you for writing it.
I'm currently in the process of leaving my "big tech" job. While I won't name my company, it is somewhat similar in some ways -- though ethics isn't my primary reason.
> I’ve decided that in the shitty job market, it’s not worth being a software engineer even if I make much less.
is a thought that has run through my head countless times over the past year, and when I finally gave my notice
>she kept telling me how “lucky” I am for working at Microsoft saying “it’s big tech” and “you’re neurodivergent” and “you won’t survive at a smaller company.”
was the loudest thing I heard, over and over again.
I once worked for a start-up that perpetuated inflated social status symbols in a way I found repugnant. Transitioning to an academic non-profit environment was the best career decision I could have made for my mental health. Less money, yes. Less stress and self-loathing, absolutely and entirely worth it for me.
If the author is reading this: thank you for having the strength to say no to morally wrong work, despite the money, despite pressure from your family.
Good for you. You stood up for your morals. I wish that more people had your strength.
You are experiencing an identity crisis over this, which is normal. Writing about it is good. Talking to a therapist would probably be good too, if that works for you.
If I can give one piece of advice, it would be to stop talking in absolutes. Instead of "I'm done with coding", which is final and sets a stake in the ground which is hard to come back from, why not say "I'm putting down coding for a while to focus on my startup". For many people, myself included, it's normal to have many different interests over a lifetime. This is a good, and normal, thing.
I fear I am done with it as well. I am trying this AI thing and it's really good at it. So I can't motivate myself, to spend the mental energy to code it myself. But starting new tasks is very difficult for me and every new prompt feels like a new task.
In the past, when I finally managed to actually start coding I would eventually get in the zone and be productive. Now with this AI stuff, the constant back and forth, the constant waiting for the output to complete, it does prevent me from getting into the zone.
In terms of neurodivergence, I’ve found for myself over 27 years, that working at large companies is in fact the problem, and smaller places with more flexibility and broader responsibilities is far more rewarding.
This is the case for non-neurodivergent people too. Large companies these days are, largely, an exercise in corporate politics rather than solving technical problems.
Coding is one of my favorite things when I get to do it on my own terms which I’ve achieved while growing up and learning/playing as well as working for a few small startups. I would die if I had to write API frameworks all day and I struggled as a sysadmin when I was expected to be on 24/7 (but loved some aspects of it like ansible and pentesting). I’m currently a businessman and miss coding so I’ve just started using cursor for personal projects while on vacation and am having an absolute blast.
I’d never heard of viva insights. Looked it up. Do people actually use this stuff? Who? Why? It looks like something middle management would use to generate a few plots in order to justify their useless jobs. I’d run from any employer that seriously bought into something like this.
The market for tools, data and services which provide a helpful and comforting fuzzy veneer of activity and intentionality to the work of individuals, companies, and educational systems that are floundering is exceedingly large.
It’s not employer it’s HR. They love this sort of human metrics collection stuff and how giving people access to „insights“ about how they used their time will somehow make things better. Employee wellbeing and all that corporate lingo
I don't know you, but it sounds like you have principles you stand for and that's rare. If you have a talent for something that can do good in the world it's worth pursuing. I'd take a break and find a place that aligns with your values. Best of luck.
Respect for standing up for what he believes in. A lot of people in this industry would have no problem building drones that bomb children if it gave them a good “total comp”.
Clicked on this post because the domain name sounded familiar from the Tor mailing list. I knew you ran a large set of relays but didn't know you were also a pretty extensive contributor over many years! You're definitely smart and if you were able to get a job at Microsoft you're capable of getting a job at most other places, so this doesn't really have to be a permanent decision if you don't want it to be. You can work at Let's Encrypt, Tor, Signal, etc while making an impact and still doing pretty well for yourself. Anyways, in the spirit of this forum, I wish you luck with your startup.
I think it’s worth trying for ethical coding jobs for a bit. I think with your resume you could work at a lot of places, and you may be able to rekindle passion for something that you used to love and make six figures.
What a cynical view. You can switch jobs! Nothing is going to force you to work on surveillance software! I spent nearly a decade working on Salesforce. It’s not even on my resume and you couldn’t pay me to do it!
Yeah surveillance never works, at least not in the long term. Either people like what they work on or they don't, and adding a layer of corporate hypocrisy, where you need to pretend to be excited about every single tiny change, does not help.
Some products are just boring and I can't fathom how some people get excited about it. The cynic in me tells me everyone is faking it, and that is soul crushing to think about. The alternative is that some people are that boring and have nothing else in their lives going on so they look forward to adding yet another button or boring feature for the Nth time.
But if it pays the bills such that your kids can eat for another day and that your family have a roof over their heads, wouldn't it be worth it?
I don't see any other FAANG level jobs that do not do surveillance in some way or are 100% ethical, as the author wants.
He said it himself, it is a "shitty job market" so surely not everyone in the job market will be paying over 6 figures and be 100% ethical with no surveillance.
Sure, you can build your own startup without surveillance and that is fine, but the compromise is a pay cut and if you have family, rent and children, it would be hard to explain to them why you left your 6 figure job, because "privacy" and "the woes of surveillance capitalism".
>After all, Edward Snowden had a “stable” federal government job (...) and he gave it up to stand up for the right to privacy
Edward Snowden was primarily critical of Obama era foreign policy in the Middle East not being notably different from Bush. That is also why he send the data to writers and journalists whose work was primarily critical of US foreign policy.
Of course he understandably pivoted to become a privacy activist when the Internet overnight wishcasted him into that role and ignored his criticism of US foreign policy.
"> I’ve decided that in the shitty job market, it’s not worth being a software engineer even if I make much less. Part of it is being “specialized” in over-glorified surveillance so even if I change employers, what’s the guarantee I won’t be working on another surveillance product. Assuming I can even get another job.
...While six figures is certainly nice, it’s only nice if it’s ethically done. I’d much rather flip burgers or bag groceries than work on surveillance for six figures.
"
Almost all companies, startups and corporations have surveillance in some way shape or form, if it is product analytics, webpage views, tracking, etc, even Mozilla has got into tracking, although the pay isn't FAANG level.
Unless you don't want to make over 6 figures in the US (assuming that is where he is from), perhaps work at a non-profit e.g. EFF or governmental work.
It's really expensive to be very principled, I'm sure your rent, family and children would thank you, especially if you leave the ENTIRE field and have no means of income other than savings which will certainly be spent on them rather than your startup.
What? How much money did this person make working on software they consider surveillance, before deciding they were comfortable enough to leave? Looks like they made enough money to live off “dividend income.” Something about their dad? The hell is this?
Thanks for sharing man. I think quite a few of us are fed up with the status quo in tech.
I was also at Microsoft until fairly recently, and although I didn’t feel like my immediate work was “unethical”, I’ve felt for quite some time that leadership is completely out of touch with workers. The copilot push in 2022, coinciding with firing the AI ethics team, is a prime example of actions that felt reckless.
I wonder what it’s going to take for tech workers like us to collectively say “enough is enough” to the grotesque avarice we see from tech leadership. I’m not holding my breath, and have essentially no desire to find another role in the industry.
I’m nearly 40 and have threatened quitting over things that violated my conscience within the last 5 years. They recanted.
Belief systems, convictions and morals don’t have an age limit. They may have a “I need to not die” limit, but that’s the American lack of a social safety net.
Calling young people stupid and idiots is a very poor way to get this point across, even if it's meant in an endearing way (which I'm suspicious of).
This cynicism is also entirely unwarranted, especially when your own personal example is, frankly, far more childish than anything in the OP. A company actively harming society through surveillance projects is a societal/ethics concern with the company essentially being a malicious actor. A company not properly securing their (presumably-internal) NFS is, at worst, a flaw/misconfiguration that was obviously not high priority.
The audacity of making some IT department's lives harder, people who are trying to tick a box, sends up so many red flags -- you can laugh about the inefficiencies in private with your mates, you can quit like the OP to find more efficient places to work, but you don't hold up other people trying to get that "god damn retirement money."
Don't compare your 20 years of technical tiffs with someone's desire to do what's right for their people.
I challenge you to rewrite this so that you're making a strong, optimistic argument for surveillance from your perspective, instead of shitting on a young person for trying to navigate a path through legitimately complex tradeoffs.
The onus is on you to make a thought-provoking case, not for them to convince you that their internal ethical alarm bells are reasonable.
tombert|1 year ago
I don't think I worked on any unethical part of Apple, I just worked on the indexing and caching for iTunes, but I really hated working there, and it was frustrating that whenever I complained about it, people would remind me how lucky I was to have a job at Apple.
I survived 2.5 years there, but eventually I had to quit (taking a fairly substantial pay cut in the process). I think my parents thought I was nuts, but my mood improved almost immediately.
nunez|1 year ago
JKCalhoun|1 year ago
7bit|1 year ago
That's the envy speaking. You have something they wish you have, so they hate you for it and enjoy your misery.
ivewonyoung|1 year ago
tennisflyi|1 year ago
hahajk|1 year ago
tracerbulletx|1 year ago
keyle|1 year ago
I'm fairly certain I'm not the smartest guy around, never was, but my mother never put anything in my path to make me believe I wasn't.
bitwize|1 year ago
ForTheKidz|1 year ago
Sadly starting my own company, I realized how hard it is to work with founders who are neurodivergent in a different and incompatible ways. Just be prepared to examine the culture closely to figure out if it's a fit for you.
I'm now at a massive household brand name company and every day I want to rip my eyeballs out and give up on capitalism forever. Whoever thought big government was incompetent needs to understand the colossal waste and inefficiency of private enterprise will always dwarf that of the public sector.
gunian|1 year ago
Philpax|1 year ago
I get wanting to take a break after working on something distasteful - I've been there! - but I can't say I'd give up on the field entirely after one job.
threatofrain|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
mgfist|1 year ago
cmdtab|1 year ago
echelon|1 year ago
Let's use these LLMs that they think will replace us all to create browser agents that remove ads, tracking, click bait, attention stealing... heck, we could even de-engagement farm the internet. No more trolling, hate, or toxicity.
If we all get personal assistants at the edge on our own pane of glass and hardware, then they have to pay us for access.
Want to show me an ad? Pay up.
Neel, quite often in life it turns out that your burning problem is also a thousand other people's burning problem. In your case, it's billions.
throwaway314155|1 year ago
> Neel, based on your linkedin, you're 27 or 28. You're a grown adult. Stop following your mom's orders.
And be a lot less patronizing, more convincing.
(It appears you mean well though, and I do understand the point you're making in spirit).
rgbrgb|1 year ago
[0]: https://www.fourplex.net
julianeon|1 year ago
So I'm gonna say it like this, to get the vibe across:
It's pretty easy to run some Internet businesses and equal your software eng salary, as the owner of those businesses.
Not in year one, but if your goal is to hit ~40k in the first year and then scale up over a couple years, you can do it.
Also it is vastly easier if you have the capital to jump to the front of the line and skip the horrible 1 year of waiting for traffic/users to come, and just buy a business. Then you're in business from day one and can complete this more quickly and less stressfully. Elon did it with Tesla and he's now the world's richest man; learn from his example.
It's funny that this ends up being a kind of "secret knowledge" because it falls between the cracks of tech and corporate incentives. Big companies won't teach you this, because lol why would they teach you how to screw them and quit. VC's won't (exactly) teach you this, because while they are generically supportive of entrepreneurship and while it is easier to earn less money than more money (obviously), they want you to go straight for the billion dollar ideas and discourage small money thinking. Which leads to this outcome of like 100 engineers trying and only 5 making it through the gauntlet and becoming rich, rather than >90 making it if only the incentives were different.
Incidentally I recently bought a business and, after spending a lot of time in the nitty gritty "weeds" of making an Internet $10 as opposed to "zero to one" thinking, this is all coming into focus. But as I said, it's a kind of secret knowledge, which you have to piece together from YouTube, newsletters, and doing the effort - that last part of which is like 80% of the real learning. In my case I bought something and then learned on the job; fortunately the profits did not suffer.
So I'm here to tell you this is doable; it's definitely doable. If you're a software engineer of average intelligence for a software engineer, you can do it. Figuring it out isn't easy, but it's very far from impossible.
bix6|1 year ago
SoftTalker|1 year ago
GrumpyCat42|1 year ago
I'm currently in the process of leaving my "big tech" job. While I won't name my company, it is somewhat similar in some ways -- though ethics isn't my primary reason.
> I’ve decided that in the shitty job market, it’s not worth being a software engineer even if I make much less.
is a thought that has run through my head countless times over the past year, and when I finally gave my notice
>she kept telling me how “lucky” I am for working at Microsoft saying “it’s big tech” and “you’re neurodivergent” and “you won’t survive at a smaller company.”
was the loudest thing I heard, over and over again.
Best of luck with Fourplex.
eibhinn|1 year ago
gunian|1 year ago
how did you switch if you don't mind me asking? if someone is very unsocial has no network is it doable
esperent|1 year ago
Good for you. You stood up for your morals. I wish that more people had your strength.
You are experiencing an identity crisis over this, which is normal. Writing about it is good. Talking to a therapist would probably be good too, if that works for you.
If I can give one piece of advice, it would be to stop talking in absolutes. Instead of "I'm done with coding", which is final and sets a stake in the ground which is hard to come back from, why not say "I'm putting down coding for a while to focus on my startup". For many people, myself included, it's normal to have many different interests over a lifetime. This is a good, and normal, thing.
harryquach|1 year ago
It’s easy to say no when the money is not needed.
_ink_|1 year ago
In the past, when I finally managed to actually start coding I would eventually get in the zone and be productive. Now with this AI stuff, the constant back and forth, the constant waiting for the output to complete, it does prevent me from getting into the zone.
skywhopper|1 year ago
GrumpyCat42|1 year ago
bix6|1 year ago
WD-42|1 year ago
Nevermark|1 year ago
Havoc|1 year ago
esco27|1 year ago
abc-1|1 year ago
zombiwoof|1 year ago
It’s bonkers stupid
costco|1 year ago
infinitebit|1 year ago
vips7L|1 year ago
t-writescode|1 year ago
It may change or it may not; but it’s a valid feeling, especially for right now.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
proc0|1 year ago
Some products are just boring and I can't fathom how some people get excited about it. The cynic in me tells me everyone is faking it, and that is soul crushing to think about. The alternative is that some people are that boring and have nothing else in their lives going on so they look forward to adding yet another button or boring feature for the Nth time.
colesantiago|1 year ago
I don't see any other FAANG level jobs that do not do surveillance in some way or are 100% ethical, as the author wants.
He said it himself, it is a "shitty job market" so surely not everyone in the job market will be paying over 6 figures and be 100% ethical with no surveillance.
Sure, you can build your own startup without surveillance and that is fine, but the compromise is a pay cut and if you have family, rent and children, it would be hard to explain to them why you left your 6 figure job, because "privacy" and "the woes of surveillance capitalism".
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
stuaxo|1 year ago
glitchc|1 year ago
assimpleaspossi|1 year ago
Calling oneself a coder is only a recent occurrence. I never heard the term until a few years ago; possibly due to all the hobbyists getting involved.
Coding is the end result of programming. I'm a programmer and proud of it.
preaching5271|1 year ago
dtquad|1 year ago
Edward Snowden was primarily critical of Obama era foreign policy in the Middle East not being notably different from Bush. That is also why he send the data to writers and journalists whose work was primarily critical of US foreign policy.
Of course he understandably pivoted to become a privacy activist when the Internet overnight wishcasted him into that role and ignored his criticism of US foreign policy.
colesantiago|1 year ago
...While six figures is certainly nice, it’s only nice if it’s ethically done. I’d much rather flip burgers or bag groceries than work on surveillance for six figures. "
Almost all companies, startups and corporations have surveillance in some way shape or form, if it is product analytics, webpage views, tracking, etc, even Mozilla has got into tracking, although the pay isn't FAANG level.
Unless you don't want to make over 6 figures in the US (assuming that is where he is from), perhaps work at a non-profit e.g. EFF or governmental work.
It's really expensive to be very principled, I'm sure your rent, family and children would thank you, especially if you leave the ENTIRE field and have no means of income other than savings which will certainly be spent on them rather than your startup.
j16sdiz|1 year ago
If i understand correctly, OP was working on surveillance-enabling AI technology. Unlike traditional surveillance, it can actually scales.
and no, how high the false rate the AI is doesn't really matter. What really matters is is the fear of being constantly watched
stevebmark|1 year ago
harryquach|1 year ago
medhir|1 year ago
I was also at Microsoft until fairly recently, and although I didn’t feel like my immediate work was “unethical”, I’ve felt for quite some time that leadership is completely out of touch with workers. The copilot push in 2022, coinciding with firing the AI ethics team, is a prime example of actions that felt reckless.
I wonder what it’s going to take for tech workers like us to collectively say “enough is enough” to the grotesque avarice we see from tech leadership. I’m not holding my breath, and have essentially no desire to find another role in the industry.
breakitmakeit|1 year ago
[deleted]
ClownsAbound|1 year ago
[deleted]
recursivedogs|1 year ago
[deleted]
gunian|1 year ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee|1 year ago
[deleted]
t-writescode|1 year ago
Belief systems, convictions and morals don’t have an age limit. They may have a “I need to not die” limit, but that’s the American lack of a social safety net.
Zamiel_Snawley|1 year ago
GrumpyCat42|1 year ago
This cynicism is also entirely unwarranted, especially when your own personal example is, frankly, far more childish than anything in the OP. A company actively harming society through surveillance projects is a societal/ethics concern with the company essentially being a malicious actor. A company not properly securing their (presumably-internal) NFS is, at worst, a flaw/misconfiguration that was obviously not high priority.
The audacity of making some IT department's lives harder, people who are trying to tick a box, sends up so many red flags -- you can laugh about the inefficiencies in private with your mates, you can quit like the OP to find more efficient places to work, but you don't hold up other people trying to get that "god damn retirement money."
Don't compare your 20 years of technical tiffs with someone's desire to do what's right for their people.
tinyhouse|1 year ago
peteforde|1 year ago
The onus is on you to make a thought-provoking case, not for them to convince you that their internal ethical alarm bells are reasonable.
nimish|1 year ago
"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"
botanical76|1 year ago
Does Visa Insights save lives?
waspleg|1 year ago