At one company I was asked to make demos of things that didn’t work and never would. I listened to the ceo lie to the faces of law enforcement and gov bigwig potential customers as they paraded themselves around the room behind us, watching the tech geniuses work their magic. I witnessed junior employees get screamed at routinely, more or less for being junior.
The company before that overrode all engineering complaints and implemented call to cancel because it made money. My boss had to do it himself.
Both companies competed in a way not unlike a knife fight, meaning throw ethics out the window and pull every lever you can think of. Both had very few happy customers, and rolled every penny into ads and cloud spend, operating at a sickening loss despite locking b2b customers into large monthly contracts.
This is my experience in the industry. The company before that didn’t even pay me and jerked me around about options that weren’t worth anything anyway.
Your response seems quite uncharitable. I mentioned getting paid on both sides, so yes it’s important. I would like to retire some day and live in modest comfort until then. I have young children and happily live in the sf bay.
I said nothing about cool toys. I like that I get to work on a passion project that will likely be open source some day. I like that my customers are engineers and that they chat with me directly.
Generally speaking, if a company isn’t doing every legal (and possibly illegal but unlikely to be enforced) thing to gain competitive advantage, it will be out competed. It is the responsibility of the government to keep the laws up to date.
Companies are not good. They can sometimes be owned by people who are willing to sacrifice profits for warm fuzzy feelings, but that’s an unstable position that will be corrected when ownership changes.
I feel secure knowing I work for a company that turns a large profit and has already pulled all the levers available to them to make more. Less nasty surprises that way.