I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to make a positive change in the world. Companies are now realizing the conflict being a neutral platform poses to these people - if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
I wonder what % of SV employees actually did move there for "making a better place blabla". It always souded as a pure marketing signal , like those old Benneton ads. I can understand that people who work for wikipedia do it, but not the big tech sector. It's particularly hard to believe it considering the cynicism of the current "total compensation"-oriented generation of tech crowd.
A large group of people, maybe even a majority, believe in the general idea that technology can help solve social problems. Then you have a company that says they make the world a better place. Of course you're going to get some people who legit want to do that, and believe the scale and scope of the operation allows this to actually happen! Then they're very upset when, for instance, their spreadsheet software is used to track how to steal refugee children from their parents and sell them to adoption services. It's going to take some adjustment to convince these people that the company that says they're making the world a better place is simply constantly lying, and only exists for profit.
When you recruit starry-eyed kids out of college telling them that they’ll change the world at your company, well, some of those kids never grow up and realize that it’s just marketing.
I've worked on the east coast for the early half of my career, and no company has ever mentioned "making a positive change in the world" as a pitch for the job. I was hired to fix bugs and connect two API layers to each other so that a set top box could ship or so we could release the next version of a display driver. There was plenty of political diversity in the office: people from all across the political spectrum. Yet, we all worked together fine, and you almost never heard an actual political argument. Occasionally it would come up as a polite conversation at lunchtime. The rare minute it got heated, someone would maturely step in and say, hey, guys, let's get back to work and put it aside, and that was that. This is in stark contrast to the stories you hear out of west coast tech companies today! How have we managed to screw this up so badly?
I also worked for an east coast company like that for several years, and I went to grad school because I couldn’t take it anymore. This wasn’t because of the politics, it was more because life should be better than plugging together two API layers so that a display driver can ship.
I yearn for the return of that attitude, polite conversation of differences and the tolerance and rational discussion of nuanced issues which makes it possible.
> if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
Why the binary presentation, though?
You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people who are presumably need to be able to count on a reliable supply chain that gives them the tools/services/resources they need.
Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse -- it make fail to do the absolute maximum it could possibly to to make one specific thing better, but if that's your focus you should be working on that thing directly. In a reasonable organization there should be a lot of opportunity to put your thumb on a scale towards continually improving all sorts of things-- without inviting disruption and discord --by threading the needle and nudging all the free choices in the right direction and respecting that other reasonable people can have different priorities.
There are an neigh uncountable number of travesties and injustices in the world and finite time and resources to fight for them... but as a society we can't stand strong to face any of the big issues if the water taps aren't flowing, the power isn't on, the communications lines aren't communicating, the spread-sheets aren't spreading, the trash (literal and figurative) isn't getting collected, and whatnot. We have to prioritize, triage, and focus on what we can accomplish.
And someone-- many many someones, in fact-- has to be the shoulders we stand on as our tallest reach for the stars.
Besides, if advocacy was really what people were sold on in large numbers how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits? :) I think that asks me to believe that there were many people who's next alternative to a google role was taking a $40k/yr 501c3 job and google was foolish enough to offer that person a mid-six-figure compensation package.
> Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse
Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities.
- Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE
- FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech
- Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract
> how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits
Keep in mind that a decent percentage of employees of big tech companies are non-eng. The comp is still better than outside, but not the order of magnitude you see for eng.
In general, are you surprised that people want to have their cake and eat it too? :P There is a group for whom changing a specific issue is their top priority and they'll accept below-market comp to work at a nonprofit. There's a much larger group, especially among younger generations, who want both top of market comp and to feel like they're changing the world, and the tech companies promised they could have it all.
A number of people in big tech are facing the decision of: should I keep working at a company whose values I may no longer agree with? Or should I quit (possibly taking a cut in pay, perks, scope, caliber of eng, etc), since I may not find a big tech company whose values I completely agree with? I haven't seen a trend towards leaving yet, but the fact that the stock of big tech has been going through the roof has made it sting even harder to leave now, so I'll be curious when the market run ends how this ends up.
I suspect that when the market takes a turn for the worse we'll see a lot of attrition from the big companies to startups. When the golden handcuffs become bronze, many employees will be free to seek self actualization elsewhere.
