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For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
The point of business should be for the betterment of humanity, not money
At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum." In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise. Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPh…
For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources that feed us are being destroyed. What’s…
It is still plenty good enough but employee want to be paid in the currency their employers uses.
If you trust your employer to do things for the greater good, you can accept less money, or even no money at all like with the charities. If your employer is simply pursuing the highest profit, employee want the biggest amount of money.
Banking never could claim a "Moral High Ground", so they compensated with cold hard cash. SV is loosing its and needs to align its salaries accordingly.
Now?! Tech is not only about coding away in a cubicle, what the company does is part of the job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> despite living in a rich planet people are starving A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...
No, poverty is not decreasing everywhere. The graph shows absolute poverty decreasing.* Meanwhile in most developed countries, inequality is grotesque and the consequent poverty is on the rise. *Absolute poverty would decrease much faster if we exploited and expropriated from developing countries a little less.
if you don't know what your company is doing, and your intricate part in that dance, you are not really providing value to the company, or more importantly to yourself.
/bold statement
How can you make decisions if you don't understand the business impact? How do you know what if that optimization is worth the cost of implementation? If you don't know the impact of a product release on your customers, what are you really doing?
To say that as a tech person "I don't know the business side" you are being deliberately ignorant. "business" is simple[1]. You are being just as annoying at those useless managers who demand x feature yesterday and don't bother to think about the ramifications.
1)It really is, you are trying to make people give you cash for something. that might be things like food, or vapour (ie initial coin offerings). The mechanics are the same, monetary units in exchange for goods or services. To attach a special mystique to the process is to give power to charlatans. (see repacking of subprime debt)
TL;DR:
If you don't know what your buisness does, you are like the idiot manager dilbert.
For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
Say I have an idea for how I want the world to be. I don't care about money at all, but my vision is too big to execute by myself. How do I get people to help me without forming a company?
Let it grow from being just your vision to become a small group's vision.
For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
Personally, it should not negatively impact lives. For example, I can't see myself saying "I will take this job for the money, and the gun I help engineered is used to kill humans during combat".
If that is the case, is it moral to refuse to work on the Manhattan Project if asked?
(I also agree that working on the next generation of the atomic bomb or the next revision of the M16/AK47 does not hold the same promise of saving lives, of course...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily true. There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries and stock options for top talent. And also, I think he/she means if you can't get behind what Facebook is doing, maybe jump to Apple who "supposedly" have security and privacy as their top priorities and in the mean time receive a raise.
>>There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries and stock options for top talent. Not everyone is top talent though - and I don't think there's anything wrong with being an average programmer and not wanting to work on morally wrong projects.