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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, while money is a really important factor, that's not the final. Personally, I've changed to lower paid job to work on something i am more interested in.
I agree with you, but I don't think the parent post was arguing for money being the only factor, just a big one. Would I work 9-5 for no money: No! Would I move from a shitty 9-5 to a less shitty one while taking an affordable pay cut: Yes.
I, as an engineer, shall work for a mission and not (so much) for money. But as soon as the mission can possibly be completed without me using the latest shiny AI tool, it is okay for the company to get rid of me.
It's hard to think notions like company loyalty have ever meant something in Silicon Valley. Amodei himself would have never subscribed to a "mission" in the entirety of his career, having jumped from Baidu to Google to OpenAI and finally backstabbing them to form their own company. It's all just a performance; inevitably the same thing is going to happen to Anthropic too.
Hewlett-Packard under its founders believed in loyalty, and even had a philosophy dubbed The HP Way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HP_Way) that seem like an interesting cross between some of the positive aspects of working for a Japanese company (loyalty, sense of care by the company) and the positives of working in Silicon Valley (flexible work hours, profit sharing), plus some other ideas (Friday afternoons devoted to personal projects).
This philosophy was not commonplace even in Silicon Valley at the time; the founders lamented “hire and fire” companies in Silicon Valley. Eventually HP abandoned the HP Way once HP started hiring outsiders as CEOs instead of hiring from within, beginning with Carly Fiorina.
Here's an idea: instead of paying your employees $800k, how about you cut their pay to $80k. See how many of them are truly in it for the mission.
$800k/year in the UK is "Buy nice house in commuter belt in one year without bothering with a mortgage, three years if you want somewhere or something fancy but still not aristocratic, ten years if you do want aristocratic".
Here's an idea: instead of paying your employees $800k, how about you cut their pay to $80k. See how many of them are truly in it for the mission.
Anyone who thinks people work for anything other than money is delusional. Anyone who works for "the mission" is an idiot - no company or billionaire running a company cares about you. They will let you go in a heart beat.
Main reason was a sense of mission. If I screwed up in that role, a billionaire would have been a tiny bit poorer but literally nobody else would care. My current role involves critical global infrastructure, everyone would notice if we screwed up.
Having said that, money is still very important. I am pretty well remunerated - more would be nice but I'm not hurting.
Turns out people have to pay their bills in dollars, not company mission statements.
Would "Anthropic new hires worried CEO only cares about money" be considered newsworthy?
These frontier AI companies are labor market nuclear weapons. What kind of fucking mission statement is going to inspire people when they're responsible for 50% unemployment?