[1dom]

I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.

From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.

Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.

To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.

Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.

If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.

Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.

[onesociety2022]

This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.

Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

[1dom]

> This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful?

> Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard.

I don't feel like you're engaging with entirely positive intent here. I also don't understand how you can know the concept of FIRE and come to the conclusion that reducing your outgoings is the stupidest take on how to retire earlier. It may not be obvious, or the best, but if it's genuinely the stupidest you've heard, then I don't think you've heard much.

> You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

That is what I'm saying, for me, and it's probably an option for you and many people here if they consider it. Not really Fat or necessarily RE. But my generalisation is: doing things that more directly help your household or family members or local community is far more virtuous thing to do than what the majority of engineers at BigTech spend/spent their time doing - including us both probably. I feel like you're a bit perplexed by that.

The whole point of a job IMO is ideally to: 1. improve the world so you can 2. earn some money to 3. do what you want, ideally improve your life and those around you.

The longer I was in BigTech, the more I noticed me and a lot of people around me were overestimating 1 because of 2 and not doing the best job of 3.

> A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

I agree entirely, breaking them up is also a good contribution. I'm not sure I remember it being suggested that the only issue was the products/services they build though - there are lots of issues with BigTech, that's the big issue.