[ThrowawayR2]

> Just stop pretending that working at {Google, Facebook, Amazon, ...} is the highest goal that a tech person can strife for. A see a lot of students who seem to have that as their goal in life.

It's not, you have to admit, a terrible goal. Granted, a lot of the people at the big 4 do rather mundane things but there are also opportunities at those places to build software that (literally) affects the whole world and leave lasting contributions to the software engineering field for those with the talent and drive.

> Also, we have to be honest with ourselves. While we (as a community) were hating Microsoft, we made Google our tech darling. Now they are ethically probably as rotten as Microsoft were in the early ~2000s.

I'm incredibly amused to see people starting to say this because I've been around enough to remember when IBM was the "ethically rotten" behemoth and Microsoft was the tech darling who saved us from their evil clutches; the more things change, the more they stay the same. I don't think people will stop putting companies on a pedestal; it makes for too compelling a narrative.

Who will be the new tech darling to save us from Google's evil clutches?