I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.
↫ Emily Bressler at McSweeney’s
The tech industry is full of people like this.
Is this article a satirical piece of fiction?
Emily Bressler, the author, has a profile that doesn’t match the details in the article whatsoever…
The website also suggests the author is into satire and humor, so I think this entire piece uses a literary device to make it’s points, written from the perspective of a fictitious tech worker. Heck maybe this is already obvious to others but while reading it I didn’t know whether to take it literally.
McSweeney’s is a satire site in the vein of the Onion that’s been around since the late 90s, first in print and then in website form.
You shouldn’t take things literally.
That’s stealing.
“Daily humor almost every day since 1998”
Of course, tons of humor also contain kernels of truth, making you laugh *and* think.
anevilyak,
Mote,
Never heard of this site before, I guess I was out of the loop.
Alfman,
(Others mentioned this was satire. The site was also new for me)
It is mostly a blatant strawman argument. Working for a mustache twirling evil company, and doing virtue signaling by buying NPR bags.
Almost nobody is like that. I would even suggest 99% of tech, outside of specific intelligence and weapon tech, comes nowhere close to being objectively evil, and as for “doing good” people actually engage in constructive activities.
For example, back then when I was in Google, they would “match” our volunteer hours. For example, if we were to give a free lecture, hand out soup in a kitchen, or in any other way physically engage in charitable work, they would also donate funds to that very charity.
(This is in addition to regular monetary contributions and matches, but obviously being there in person has much higher value).
Is Google evil? No. Even though they have removed the “don’t be evil” motto, and literally subjected me to layoffs, it is just another company.
If we were to call everyone evil, basically nothing will be left on Earth. (We can easily extend a flexible definition of evil even to include charitable work, so we don’t do that. We have objective measures).
sukru,
I see your point of view. However since you did bring up google we should acknowledge that they actually have been criticized for those things with project Nimbus.
https://time.com/6964364/exclusive-no-tech-for-apartheid-google-workers-protest-project-nimbus-1-2-billion-contract-with-israel/
Hundreds of google insiders joined protests fearing their AI work was being used for not only surveillance tech but also military targeting applications. Some employees quit over it, and significantly more lost their jobs for speaking out against project Nimbus. Who knows how many more remained quiet because they were afraid of being punished.
I am in agreement that painting companies as “evil” can stem from hyperbole and oversimplifications that miss the mark. Yet I think calling google specifically “just another company” does not do justice to how much power and influence they have in the world. This is not just another company, it’s a company wielding enormous power worldwide.
Alfman,
To be fair, that sounds concerning. And might fall into
Back in my day… (I know, I know) Google fired a top level exec for trying to do something similar. Maybe some things might have changed.
Things have changed substantially in the last decade. First it was promo driven development. Then the repudiation of any appearance of respect for users in favor of me-too FOMO product strategy if not purely bottom line and stonks level optimization. When employees moved from the asset section to the liabilities section for the company’s accounting, you could tell the transformation into a soulless corporation was complete.
Android Auto (from 2015) might be the last consumer benefiting tech out of Google that didn’t become some sort of treasonous act (yet).
There’s a lot of art (and chaos) built into its technical core, and enough cash and captured ads income to keep the inertia for decades, even if the worst decisions keep being made. Google will likely follow a decline path like IBM’s. Any further net positive impact on the world will be purely accidental.
skandalfo,
Yes, I think it was my highest ranked memegen (“promo oriented engineering”). Trying to catch a launch by the next quarter, and leaving the technical debt behind…
It did not help the company at all.
I would argue it was Stadia, which was an excellent technological and operational success. However it was a complete marketing disaster, and at least Google offered full refund for all purchases; hardware and software.
It allowed people to play games like Cyberpunk 2077 when Xbox and PlayStation was impossible to find on the market. Even gaming media had praised it at that point.
(I still have my controllers back from those days)
I think I have become more optimistic after Sergey’s return, and Gemini’s becoming a proper product. Of course there is no way to make a profit with language models, yet. And that was one of my pain points back when I was still at Google (way, way back).
However they at least have a platform that works.
The same was true for Search back in the day. Before Google managed to succeed in ads, it was also a cost center. However having employed so many smart people they turned it around — big time.
Is it okay to work for an evil company if you aren’t particularly successful there?
I worked for a leading global ultra mega corp for 15 years. The pay was incredible, the perks great, and I already commanded quite the reputation.
At some point, I was trying to fix a major security fuck up and the project manager called me saying at 5am that my work was damaging his reputation, delaying the go-live day. He literally threatened accusing me of racism, during the height of the BLM protests.
Then I realized I had climbed too high to remain clean. I went all in, full nuclear. Unburied tons of mess about him: sexual harassment, aggression, and throwing others under the bus to cover up his mess. And he would always play the race card.
After a few months of intense stress, they gave me a 35% raise to shut up. I couldn’t handle it. I was already dealing too much with the most pretentious and incompetent overpaid fraudsters ever. Seriously, zero output.
Now I work for a company of 7 people, took a 40% pay cut, will probably never own a home, but I sleep at night. If we would all, together, say NO, the charade would end.
To me, accepting money to enshitify the world is the very definition of corruption. The opposite, solidarity, is usually getting ridiculed within societies and groups that are evil.
Boiling the frog… It was the only place I’d known of that would sponsor my work visa. Then, yes, I was too young and had never heard of them, and believed the message. Then suddenly you make more money you know what to do with, get addicted to the perks and excellent health insurance, and lose track of yourself.
Then the fact that I protected their financial information, future plans and IP meant nothing. It was more important to throw me under the bus than risking being on the “wrong” side of a racial issue. I went out with a bang, though, with a smile, and dragged two more good souls with me. Then you make sense of all the news articles pointing out how evil they are and the scandals that pop up every couple of years, you feel disgusting, and you are happy to be gone.
Now we are 7, so there’s no one to be replaced by AI, and we fail or succeed together. And what we sell makes sense. So yes, it feels nice.
I’m Burke. Carter Burke. I work for the company. But don’t let that fool you, I’m really an okay guy.
It’s worth mentioning that AI data centers don’t use water in the same way a car or a plane uses fuel: even in evaporative cooling solutions, the water is contributed back to the water cycle. That said, evaporative cooling should be outlawed since it’s inherently wasteful and can create temporary shortages of drinking water, but it’s not a fundamental problem with datacenters (AI or otherwise) and water is not permanently consumed.
The true issue with AI datacenters is fossil fuel use. Hyperscalers build datacenters in countries with lax CO2 emissions regulations such as China or US states with lax CO2 emissions regulations such as Texas or Tennessee and are using on-site gas turbines to get online as fast as possible, undoing years of CO2 emissions reduction efforts. This is in contrast to normal datacenters that are connected to the grid and may even have their own supplemental wind or solar.
This is funny in a George Carlin type of way.
The world isn’t black and white and shades of grey in between. There are other colors outside the painting you are looking at.
I turned down a job offer from Apple to work on sepOS in part because I really don’t like them or any of the other MAGMA companies (or for that matter, a lot of startups as well). I feel that whenever they change something these days, it’s usually for the worse, and I don’t want to be a part of that. And in addition to that, they probably would have demanded I move to the Bay Area. Also I want to work on my own OS because I want a better desktop OS, rather than just wanting to work on an OS/kernel of some kind.
sepOS?
Secure Enclave Processor Operating System, derived from the L4 microkernel.
Yeah, they wanted to recruit me because both UX/RT (the OS I’m writing) and sepOS are based on L4-like kernels.
Ive been working in the worst reputation tech companies, IBM and Oracle for start with. Now I work for a chinese super company, which is listed in the NY stock exchange, and has a lot of potential to become evil, if it is not already.
I feel almost like a Sith.