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.
That's the envy speaking. You have something they wish you have, so they hate you for it and enjoy your misery.
I get that you need internal controls or whatever, but just log my queries, and if I'm stalking an ex then fire and sue me. It's hard to optimize conversion rate for superchat or whatever if it's a 3-month process to find out if the source of data I plan to use is actually the right source of data.
Is Apple any better? My friends on the inside say it's worse, but I'm also just one guy, and their stock is going up and to the right. Make your own decisions.
First:
The thing that really made me disenchanted with the company came down to an incident where I replied back to a previous email chain with <REDACTED> (one of the higher-ups at Apple) with a topic that wasn't directly relevant to the subject of the previous emails, and then that asshole thought it was best to complain to every single manager between me and him, which was six people.
The next day every one of those managers decided to schedule a half-hour meeting explaining to me how inappropriate it was that I emailed <REDACTED> directly, instead of going through the bureaucratic channels. It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first.
Three. Fucking. Hours. They wasted basically half a day just to make sure that I didn't send an email to the wrong people in the wrong order. It was worse than that scene in Office Space.
Second:
There was also another incident, where my manager's manager's manager emailed me, I hadn't replied in two hours, so he called my cell phone and yelled at me for not checking my emails more frequently. I tried explaining that email was asynchronous and that if he needed my attention immediately he should message me with HipChat or call my phone, which he clearly knew how to do, only for him to tell me that I have an attitude problem.
Not as bad as having my day ruined for emailing the wrong person, but still really rubbed me the wrong way.
There were a lot more annoying things that happened, and my understanding is that a lot of it was an issue with my team; Apple has thousands of software engineers and I think some teams are better than others.
Big salaries thrown at young people are bait. They don't need wild animals, but circus animals that are obedient, dependent and consistently perform tricks without too much thinking about why. Over time this involves such animals to loose all sense of self. Naturally this won't work on everyone and causes all kinds issues for both sides.
You can land a poor career path and sometimes you just have to take a hard turn.
There was a post a few weeks ago that kind of encompassed the feeling pretty well, worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43089150
Also, hardship. I have learned so much from that, that it feels almost hypocritical not to heartily recommend it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
(A child is a placeholder for any hard decision).
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.
So the basic idea is to get an audience and then monetize it. For that, there are different ways. In my opinion it's easier to buy something that gets traffic through this and then monetize it, then to buy a whole business, at least for the purposes of this conversation. Why? Because it's much easier to verify something is getting the traffic a platform's stats confirm, and then build a business on top of that, then to extrapolate correctly from a business someone is selling with a thousand moving parts.
With that being said: plenty of people buy complicated Internet businesses and achieve great results with them.
Also to reiterate from my earlier comment: if you can buy an account (some platforms do allow this) and start with traffic that's already earning a trickle of dollars, psychologically I believe that's 100 times easier than starting from nothing and painfully waiting months to earn a dollar. I recommend it whenever possible.
So without further ado here's how I rank the ways to get traffic. Notice how fractured this landscape this is; most people specialize in one, or perhaps two.
Google SEO: avoid avoid avoid. Not only is it saturated but the search arm of Google is a hard taskmaster. The most frustrating and abstruse of all the ways to make money online imo. I would only do this if I started by buying a niche content website business (aka one with prebuilt traffic).
YouTube: much more appealing than Google SEO but still a grind. However what you will learn here is all useful and the YouTube algo is, in a sense, a great marketing teacher. Unfortunately it takes so long to get off the ground that I'd also only enter this by buying a channel with traffic.
FaceBook: said to be lucrative but I don't know it. This is a great example of what I was saying about secret knowledge. How many people do you know who are enthused about creating FaceBook groups and attracting traffic to them? Yet this is, based on the available evidence, a solid business, maybe even the best of the ones listed here.
Instagram: seems tougher than YouTube in my opinion.
Pinterest: the new hotness, and currently being overrun by AI content lol. But AI + mass producing content is a viable strategy, and your North Star as someone looking to make money online is viable straegies.
TikTok: for profit, most likely better than Insta, and even YouTube. I just don't know enough about specific strategies for it unfortunately.
Newsletters: a good niche but kind of opaque (not easy to learn about and getting crowded). But said to be good.
In general though on YouTube think about a business you'd like to enter, then search those keywords and start grinding through videos. If you're not sure what business to enter than start your search with "how to make money online" and again grind through videos. (Note: this won't be very fun). Some of the best videos are by no name guys with like 100 views precisely because they're starting from nothing and are more like you than the big names.
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.
how did you switch if you don't mind me asking? if someone is very unsocial has no network is it doable
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.
It’s easy to say no when the money is not needed.
He should invest it in something else, that he believes in, so that any dividends are thus just.
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.
It’s bonkers stupid
It may change or it may not; but it’s a valid feeling, especially for right now.
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.
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".
I'm also commenting beyond the privacy matter. It's the combination of everyone being afraid to just be themselves because they need the job, and HR/leadership constant b.s. claiming it's an open and safe space. I should also say I'm mostly talking about large companies.
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.
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.
...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.
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
For website owners, as soon as you run or load Google Analytics, you are participating in surveillance capitalism for Google.
Same with email tracking links, IoT devices sending tracking data, product analytics or any identifying information.
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.
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.
"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,"
(highly relevant @dril quotes, for those out of the loop)
Does Visa Insights save lives?