[nirui]

> but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company

This feeling is probably shared by many lefties people. They love to work, they just don't like to be restricted/manipulated into working under a highly specified and standardized environment, especially when every bit of their performance is measured for competition.

But I have grown to understand the environment of the "big tech" companies. It is hard to manage a project as it expands, and the result of human work is hard to predict, so often there's two ways to choose: 1) only hire people who's "on the same channel", highly talented "rock star" programmer, or 2) regulate everything to the detail, and "filter out" (a.k.a. firing) those who's incapable of fitting. Both are brutal, but effective and cheap to implement at scale.

If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own. But then of course you'll have to find some kind of financial support, maybe it's from "value extracting", but maybe it's something else.

BTW, I don't think "value extracting" == "user hostile". A lot of people go overboard with their religious beliefs, thinking rich is bad. But your time on this Earth is limited, and this is the only adventure you'll ever have. Thus your labor must be fairly compensated, so you can continue your journey a bit more freely. Otherwise it's a zero-sum game, more you "give out", less chance for yourself. How can you be so sure that other people would utilize their time better than you?

Selling your produce for financial isn't "user hostile". It will be if you're predatory, but it won't be if you're being fair.

[seba_dos1]

> If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own.

There's a huge landscape of things in between these two options.

[dlenski]

Agreed. There are a lot of companies with a few to a few thousand employees which are not aiming for the kind of rapid growth that attracts VCs, but at the same time doing interesting and challenging and productive work.

[dlenski]

I've worked for two huge tech companies.

At one (Intel from 2010-2015), I was on the hardware and manufacturing side. I was one of the hamsters keeping the Moore's Law Treadmill spinning. It was a great place to work. Almost without exception, my colleagues and managers were smart, well-intentioned, hard-working, good communicators, conscientious. We were "extracting value" as you put it, but we were doing rational and systematic things to produce great products: lower energy consumption, more capabilities, and more reliable with each new generation of semiconductor process.

At the other (Amazon 2020-2024), I was working on cloud service software. The internal processes were a mess, and the quality of the products--particularly in terms of reliability and documentation--was frankly horrible. AWS seemed to be coasting on its existing near-monopoly status in a lot of areas. With a few exceptions, I found the managers to be terrible. It was difficult to develop new things and to advance career-wise, and everything got tangled up in internal politics and poor communication even though Amazon claims to be averse to such things unlike "legacy" companies.