Posted by zdw 12 hours ago
Large corporations are just groups of people with conflicting incentives, and that means they are basically incapable of performing certain kinds of tasks. It also means that when the incentives do align, some tasks are very likely to be completed, even with other corporations or governments working in opposition.
Some of those tasks might be things you care about, like making a product of a certain quality, or furthering some other goal you have. In all those cases, it is best to to first think about what is most likely to happen and what is unlikely to happen. You have to think of the organization as just another phenomenon that you could exploit if you properly understood it. Unfortunately, how to manipulate complex systems of humans is an open problem, and if anyone had effective, repeatable solutions, then investors would demand that they be implemented.
As it is, most corporations don't act in the interest of the investors a significant amount of the time, even though they are supposed to. The only thing we can reliably bet on is: all organizations tend towards dysfunctional bureaucracies, the longer they live, and the bigger they get.
Cynicism is specific trait and has only negative connotations. It cannot be “good” for a social structure by definition.
Realism is neutral. But we often assume that realism implies cynicism which is not true.
Parrhesia (tact) is the only worthwhile, long term goal in terms of attitude. And that doesn’t include cynicism. It’s about being honest without feeling like betraying yourself.
“Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - (supposedly) Isaac Newton
Never heard of this quote, but I could certainly use a large dose of tact as defined above! The quote seems to be due to an advertising executive though, Howard W. Newton, not Isaac Newton [1].
That's certainly very extreme, but a tempered, measured belief in the negative aspects of human nature is necessary, I think.
You might say, "that's just realism", but I think they are just separate axes: some amount of cynicism (and idealism) is necessary in order to be realistic. Possibly different amounts in different contexts, depending on the other people involved.
Is 'good for the social structure' the metric to use for defining good? Should we be serving the social structure to be 'good'?
> Is 'good for the social structure' the metric to use for defining good?
No.
> Should we be serving the social structure to be 'good'?
Yes.
Does that make sense? :-)
Its baffling to see US engineers repeatedly being shat on by the company, and yet still retain belief in the chain of command.
But, to be a good cynic, you need a rich information network to draw on to see what the wider business is doing and thinking. You must understand the motivations of the business, so that you can be correctly cynical.
But they are the best paid and everyone wants to move to the US.
I was paid exceptionally well when I was at a FAANG, but that didn't extend to me blindly following my leadership team into the same obvious bear trap every 6 months.
I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.
> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.
Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.
What you’re describing is a particular form of manipulative and divisive politics which is performed by insecure, desperate or selfish people.
Many engineers are not good at building relationships (the job of coding isn’t optimal for it after all), so painting the people who are good at is as narcissistic may be comforting but isn’t correct.
Collaboration and communication are key parts of politics, though.
At its core, politics is simply the dynamics within a group of people. Since we innately organize into hierarchies, and power/wealth/fame are appealing to many, this inevitably leads to mind games, tension, and conflict.
But in order to accomplish anything within an organization, a certain level of politics must be involved. It's fine to find this abhorring and to try to avoid it, but that's just the reality of our society. People who play this game the best have the largest impact and are rewarded; those who don't usually have less impact and are often overlooked.
However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
That's not been my experience. Optimists also tend to assume the best motivations behind the actions of others, and that will nearly always bite you in the ass in any sizeable organization.
I've been the ultra-cynic before, and agree that doesn't work either. People don't like working with you, and don't trust you.
I think we need to be realistic on order to be successful, and neither ultra-cynicism nor optimism fits the bill.
I would suggest that a healthy, reasonable amount of cynicism is a part of being realistic about how the world works.
Start optimistic. Stop if it doesn’t work. In the long-term you don’t need to win every iteration, just enough for a positive expected value. And make sure you don’t get wiped out in any single iteration.
The weeks are short but the decades are long and the industry is smaller than you’d think :)
Feels like cynics are right and optimists get rich.
I definitely lean more to cynic, my very good friend is def more optimist. He’s worth more than 10x me.
But the right optimism in the right situation can really pay off. Imagine you're pitching your non-technical carmaker CEO on a proposal to make a new pickup truck, and the CEO asks if you can make the entire thing with 0.1mm accuracy.
If you say "Yes sir, in fact many parts will be even more accurate than that" your project gets funded.
If you say "No, thermal expansion alone makes that impossible, it's also unnecessary" you're gambling on him respecting your straight-talking and technical chops.
A lot of people missing that cynicism isn't the same as sneering grumpiness.
You can be perfectly pleasant and charming while being utterly cynical about how you approach professional relationships.
This is a problem with at least two axes. The cynicism part relies on accurately calibrating the distance between official narratives and reality.
If you're a pessimist, you overshoot. An optimist undershoots. A realist gets it more or less right.
But if the distance is huge, that automatically makes the realist a cynic, because the reality is a lie, and in most orgs failing to take false narratives at face value is considered dissidence.
The strategic part depends on how you handle that. You can be sneering and negative, you can play the game with a fake smile and an eye for opportunity, or you can aim for neutrality and a certain amount of distance.
Sneering negativity is usually the least effective option, even when it's the most honest.
A realist in a functional organisation won't be cynical at all.
survivorship bias.
The negative replies to this comment are ironic.
Win.. what?
> enough oomph to get lucky.
The underpaid cargo cult mentality is alive in well in corporate America.
Nothing but pseudo "grindset" cargo cultists as far as the eye can see writing worthless technical platitude posts.
It feels like a parody site of itself these days.
Depends what you want to win?
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
We know that C-level doesn't understand the tech they are evangelizing at all, and we know that at some point, they end up approving a lot of new middle management hires that are just as power hungry as they are, so the feedback loop from the shop to the top is sealed off. These two catastrophes seal the fate of any company.
If your company is still not infected with these, you can still call plausible deniability or oversight or whatever excuse for them, and true, they are human. But if I look into their eyes and see nothing but desire for power, that's a toxic company and no amount of "healthy cynicism" will help me with that.
The sole reason I am hired for my position as an engineer is that I am expected to make the life of my hiring manager easier. Not to save the world, not to do "the right thing" (whatever this means), but help my manager. During the interview, I had a chance to a get a rough idea what I am going to be responsible for.
If the organization or the mission changes to the extent that it is no longer consistent with my values, I start pinging my former colleagues working elsewhere.
So where is the intrigue?
If you want to save the world, join the Peace Corps or at least a non-profit.
The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.
If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.
It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.
Getting older is worse than travelling near light speed dammmit.
Saying that he is morally bankrupt is like saying that you are morally bankrupt for continuing to live in the US because the current administration is a dumpster fire. It is financially profitable to live in the US; you basically cash in a 6 figure check (perhaps translate the metaphor by taking the monetary value that a significantly increased quality of life is worth to you) by living here rather than some other, lesser developed country with more morally aligned politics. Why not leave? I submit that the calculus that goes through your head to justify staying is roughly equivalent to the one that goes through his when he thinks about continuing to work at big tech. I also don’t think that either of you are wrong for having some justification.
I don't live in the US. But if I did, and I was capable enough to be a successful software engineer, I would try to work for an organisation that was not implicated in abhorrent behaviour. If I was to work for one, I would not attempt to dismiss criticisms of it as cynicism.
I'm also not really asking that people leave these roles - everyone has their own path to take. Just that they don't make posts dismissing criticism of these structures as silly cynicism. Or else they will have to contend with me writing a comment disgreeing with them.
The cynicism the post is talking about is the argument that your chain of command doesn't want to make good software but you do, not anything related to the use of said software.
Democratic voters are culpable; their politicians are all about keeping the system going but tweaking it. No, the system is bad. A system that results in trump being elected a second time is prima facie evil and must be torn down. If you have power and aren't working to treat down this system, you are culpable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/technology/microsoft-nvid...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/sundar-pichai-saty...
I have found that mentioning that, elicits scorn and derision from many in tech.
Eh. Whatevs. I'm OK with it (but it appears a lot of others aren't, which mystifies me).
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
Maybe because I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others, for working at a company that isn't a "moral high ground" company, but isn't exactly NSO or Palantir (I used to work for a defense contractor). I feel profoundly lucky to have found a company that made me feel good about what I did. It was worth the low salary (and other annoyances). I understand that I'm fortunate, and I'm grateful (not snotty).
I find that people take the mere existence of others that have different morals to be a personal attack.
I know that it happens, but I'm not really sure why. It's not like I'm thinking about comparing to others, when I say that I worked for a company that inspired me. I was simply sharing what I did, and why.
I read comments about people that are excited about what they do, and even how much they make, all the time (I spend a lot of time on HN), and never feel as if they are somehow attacking me. They are enthusiastic, and maybe even proud of what they do, and want to show off. I often enjoy that.
> I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others
Earlier:
> I chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
Put more succinctly:
"I work somewhere that is morally acceptable. I could have made double or more if I had worked at a 'more dodgy', less morally acceptable place. Like where you work. No judgement though."
Honestly, I would have more respect for your sentiments if you would just stick to the logical conclusion of your position. Perhaps the scorn you meet is simply a reaction to this inability to simply follow the logical course of your own viewpoint. It has nothing to do with the mere existence of your morals it has to do with the fact that they are incompatible.
You want to have it both ways - you want to make a moral judgement and yet not make a moral judgement. Or you want to bound your moral judgement simply to yourself as if it is at all logical to not extrapolate it to others. If others can work for wherever they please, then what do you even mean by "morally acceptable" or "dodgy"? Simply places you prefer? That's not what morally acceptable means.
For someone who speaks of moral judgements, you don't seem to grasp their implications. I would suggest reflecting on this if you actually care about the reactions you elicit in others. This brief back and forth with you is certainly suggestive of a picture far different from the one you originally painted.
To me it's like with vegetarians. If someone tells you out of the blue "I am a vegetarian because I find it completely irresponsible to not be vegetarian. No judgement though", it's not the same as someone saying "I would like to inform you that I am a vegetarian, given that we are going to eat something and it is relevant for you to know it right now". Yet that latter situation will regularly offend non-vegetarians just the same.
From a purely consistency perspective I don't think you're incorrect, but humans aren't purely consistent
We are able to accept that our personal preferences aren't the same as others and still like, respect or love them anyway
I read the GP as stating:
- he wanted to work for a place that made him happy
- he voiced that pleasure to others, "I'm glad I work at a place I find inspiring"
- they took that as an implicit attack on them
There are at least two parties to a conversation, each of them gets their own opportunity to interpret what occurs
It sounds like in this instance they interpreted his position much more negatively than he intended
Now to answer why is in my opinion is much more complicated and I honestly wouldn't hazard a guess without either being there or knowing both parties very well
I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.
Also, religion and philosophy are alike in that some people have a rich inner life that they are not willing to share with most of the world. Your acquaintance who works for a defence contractor is not going to explain why he believes propping up the Pax Americana (or helping ICE deport migrants, or working for a social media company, or any other example of something you don't like) is morally right unless he feels safe in doing so.
People feel like if they want to climb the prestige ladder, they need some way of justifying the business practices of the megacorps.
In contrast, I feel like it’s well established that gigs in big law or finance or medicine have found a way to decorrelate pay from social status. You can make a choice between chasing money OR prestige.
I will leave this world with no meaningful legacy, but that's preferable to exiting knowing that I'd directly helped Big Tech get bigger and even more evil.
If I'd had kids, maybe my calculus would have been different. Maybe I'd have been motivated enough for their futures to sacrifice my conscience for them, but I did not, and so all I had to consider was whether or not I'd be able to live with myself, and the answer for me was no.
There have always been enough decent, even well paying jobs in software outside of the Big Tech companies, even in Silicon Valley, and so paying my bills and saving for a good retirement didn't require the soul sacrifice.
I don't begrudge anyone who bit that lure but I am entirely content to have said no myself.
If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.
I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.
I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.
I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.
There is no set future to what kind of technology we will build and end up with. We can build something where everything is locked away, and poor stewardship and maintenance means everything gets jankier or less reliable - or we can build something like the Culture novels, with technology that effectively never fails - with generations of advancement building off the previous, ever improving debugability, redundancy, failsafes, and hardening, making things more modular and cleaner along the way.
I know which world I'd rather live in, and big tech ain't gonna make it happen. I've seen the way they write code.
So if some people see my career as giving a middle finger to those guys, I'm cool with that :)
I’m glad for the antitrust litigation. It’s very obvious that this was a collusion effort that was self serving to each party involved, as a means of overcoming a negative (for them) prisoners dilemma type situation.
The fact that it depressed wage growth was a welcomed side effect. But framing that as the intended outcome as a way of discrediting original author is telling. I don’t know if you’ve understood corporations to be rather simple profit seeking entities, whose behavior can be modeled and regulated to ideal societal outcomes accordingly.
What military action is GitHub involved with.
I didn’t make that same naive assumption when describing corpos as simple profit seeking entities, you just misunderstood what I was saying.
Upton Sinclair
Not to take a stance on the issue either way, but I think the author is only referring to the politics involved in building products, not the broader political/moral issue of what the company does with all of the money it earns from those products. I don't see their post as defending or even referring to the latter.
Everything is political, though. Establishing a barrier for cynicism so it doesn’t have to tackle the tough questions is understandable but it’s not that justifiable.
It kinda makes me sad to see the top comment on a thoughtful piece like this expressing outrage on something the other didn't even take a stance on. I come to Hacker News to avoid this kind of rhetoric.
I think this rhetoric fits seamlessly inline with the hacker ethos, and that's one of my motivators (if not the biggest) to read through HN comments at all. It's exhausting to comprehend at times, but so are any well expressed positions in the complexity of life. Otherwise, I worry that HN will complete its transformation to become just another marketing platform for the wider tech sector, like some seem to already think it is.
I definitely took an uncharitable reading, but man am I tired of being told big tech is neutral. I will continue to be cynical and I will continue to gnash my teeth at anyone who tells me otherwise.
This has happened with other technologies as they matured. Bridges. Electrical power. Radio. (The story of Roebling, the Tweed Ring, and the Brooklyn Bridge is worth knowing. Tweed tried to steal too early in the history of the technology, and it backfired on him big-time.)
This happened to software a while back. Semiconductors had it less because keeping up with Moore's Law dominated the politics.
Learn more about the history of technology and this pattern reappears.
I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.