[michaelochurch]

Although to be fair, there are a few "rich people in tech suck because they're rich" articles which are more hostile.

Not because they're rich, but because they've departed so far from the founding values of technology.

Picking on the average "Google bus" rider is mean-spirited and pointless, but the "leaders" of private-sector technology really are rapacious assholes. This sector of the economy really is run by horrible human beings and pointing out is not mindless hostility, but confronting one of the most important issues that our generation faces.

[jrochkind1]

I'm curious what you think "the founding values of technology" are, and when they were established (the founding of "technology"? Like the wheel? Or just transistor-based technology?), and by whom/what.

[michaelochurch]

I'm curious what you think "the founding values of technology" are

I'm talking about the pay-it-forward culture of the 1950-70s Valley when it was cheap to live there and people did everything they could to help each other out. This was the era when Hewlett-Packard refused to do a layoff: instead, it cut costs with a 10% pay cut and a day off work every other week. There was a time when software had an R&D culture, and Northern California was full of people trying to do something new and interesting.

Now, startups are a safety career for failed McKinseys and Goldmanites, whose VC friends put them into executive positions and let them boss nerds around, but it wasn't always that way. You didn't go in thinking you'd be a billionaire, but you could get what would now be an upper-middle-class lifestyle and work in the sort of R&D environment that doesn't exist anymore, because the slimeballs killed it.