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by asdff 2590 days ago
That's a terrible mentality. Exponential growth is not sustainable. The worst thing about technology companies these days is that putting out a polished product and covering overhead + emergency funding is seen as a failure. Products must be modified to extract money from the consumer at every turn, and the market cap must rise and rise. If engineers would leave a company because its no longer growth driven, then our universites have failed to teach empathy in their engineering curriculum.
2 comments

That focus on increasing shareholder value above all else is definitely a regrettable inevitability of publicly-traded companies.

I know my engineering curriculum hasn't focused on empathy, or ethics much at all. Unfortunately you can't educate the selfishness out of humanity.

Last time someone tried to teach me empathy, all I learned is that they had a poor understanding of how emotions connect to actions. They assumed that if I had a real, true, genuine emotional experience of empathy then I would be compelled to take some specific action. Generally the action assumed is either something directly to alleviate the perceived pain or the one prescribed by the person evoking the empathy.

I find these notions curious, and rather at odds with how I expect thinking humans to interact with the world around them.

Perhaps there's something else you think our universities might be failing to teach?