Getting free of toxic tech culture

The two are somewhat correlated; kind people are often nice. But it's easy enough to be nice without being kind at all, and sometimes being kind requires being visibly not nice. As an example, if you see a coworker being abused, confronting the abuser is a kind thing to do, but you probably can't be nice doing it.

As someone who has worked through a lot of social anxiety, I definitely encourage you to throw off the yoke of your fears about not being nice enough. But that doesn't entitle you to be unkind.

You see, my resume is so solid that it gets me into any tech company I want for at least an interview or a tour. I make it a point to get onto their corporate inter/intranet and make a HackerNews account and post a valid contrarian position that you're guaranteed to always find a way to distort as a violation of guidelines. I repeat the process until your systems automatically ban/shadowban the entire IP/network from creating new accounts. And when I'm not doing this, the people I've trained to do this are out there doing the same. There's a whole lot of people who really don't like the colonial intentions of HackerNews moderation and censorship.

You don't even know how many opinions of potentially "correct people" you've preemptively stifled because of my efforts. :D

I've been doing this for years. The more overtly activist Silicon Valley gets, the more effective I become at disguising myself as a socialist, the more network access I get to the "correct people" with "correct opinions", the more networks your system automatically prevents from creating new accounts.

Seems petty? Perhaps I could be more efficient? Why am I even doing this? I'm sure you could conjure up a myriad of reasons that make sense to you, so there's no need to give you anything more beyond that. You're a smart guy, you'll invent something. In fact, I'm relying on that amazing capacity to defer to that self-healing moral plasticity you bathe your ego in.

You'll never see how you are part of the toxic tech culture. I have absolutely no interest in ever making you see this or changing your mind. The only interest I have is exploiting your moral plasticity.

Thanks for building and maintaining those censorship tools over the years. I can't wait to hijack the psychology behind these tools and steer it against the people you claim you're protecting. And I'm truly looking forward to how your moral plasticity justifies it.

Don't forget to leak the IP address, psychographic signatures, and behavioral profile of this account to your "secret" network of resistance collaborators. My honeypots are waiting to map your support system. <3

People have jobs because they have to work, not because they would like to do it. If they leave the industry, it's because they don't find jobs in the industry worthy enough to endure. I'm sure more would stay for better rewards.

I continued building some biological image analysis software on a part-time basis after leaving grad school because I found it interesting, thought the science was important, and enjoyed the feeling of contributing in some small way to science. I stopped because a tenured professor got really aggressive and extraordinarily rude about his needs not being addressed in what he considered a timely manner -- to an unpaid contributor who now had a full time job. There's nothing like being yelled at for daring to take a vacation by someone who isn't paying you.

I've also virtually stopped contributing to open source for similar reasons. It only takes a couple demanding lazy assholes helping themselves into your inbox to poison any interest I have in sharing my work.

Our industry is really willing to actively exploit people. See eg the difference in financial returns to founders vs employees, even (particularly!) when the startup doesn't succeed. If you have an enormous bias against non-tech jobs, and all your friends actively reinforce that, you really need new friends.