
Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry - jordigh
http://www.notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-inquiry
======
gregdoesit
As someone who works outside the Bay Area, this article feels weird to me. The
summary of the article:

\- Author interned at Google. It was boring but good pay.

\- Because of this, never went back. Started a startup, built a product.
Product did not make enough money. Realised making money is important. Tried
to pivot something they thought could make lots of money but hated (adtech)
and forced themselves to network with the adtech people they despised. It did
not work out.

\- Concludes it sucks that in SV engineers are highly paid and well treated
and that they don’t organise to stand up for a totally different group who the
author believes is low paid and not well treated.

\- Concludes how tech is broken.

My two cents: welcome to the real world. Companies exist to make money. People
will try to work at the best place they can make it to. Governments can shape
the redistribution of wealth and social responsibility with rules and
regulations, among others.

------
jkingsbery
While I myself was not part of a union, I have worked for a company that had a
large-ish ( order of 100's) unionized software engineering team. It did not
create a better dynamic. If the goal is to have a union that contains both
high paid and low paid employees to that the more highly paid employees speak
up for the others, that certainly didn't happen.

I'm proud to say I work for Amazon. It's not a perfect place. That doesn't
mean there aren't many good things about it. Universally when I tell people
that I work for Amazon, they tell me how much easier we make life for them as
customers; how it's really hard to get a baby in the car to buy diapers and
how Amazon's ease of use and delivery saves them many trips to a store each
week; how much they love Echo, Kindle, AWS, Prime or one of the many other
services we offer. I work for a team that builds primarily internally facing
tools, and our team has been told that we're "doing the Lord's work" and I
have been asked to hug one of my teammates by our internal customers because
of a new feature my teammate pushed out.

So, no, I don't think it has to be so soul crushing as the article makes it
out to be.

~~~
extragood
I don't know that there needs to be a union per-se (it's actually never
brought up in the article at all), but collective bargaining can work without
one, on a company level.

It would take a tremendous effort to make that change within a company like
Amazon, but that company is probably one of the best examples where that
change needs to happen.

Costco is an example of a company where even the lowest paid employees are
still fairly compensated, are guaranteed vacation, and receive good benefits.

It's the company culture and values that dictates how the lowest paid
employees are treated, and that can be directed and redefined, at least
according to the author, in large part by the highest paid employees.

------
RestlessMind
> What else was I supposed to look forward to, except mindless consumption?
> Wasn’t that the whole point of making that much money? Wasn’t that what
> drove people to work so hard in the first place?

If you think money is only for mindless consumption, I wonder if you have
experienced life with real responsibilities (mortgage, family, kids) and
little money. Because while money doesn't get you everything, it can get you a
lot of important things - most important ones being freedom and time. And if
you have ability to ride on this current tech boom, one should ride it to the
fullest and save as much as you can (unless one is too rich already or is too
young to appreciate life's constraints).

~~~
awucs
It is really really hard to buy time and freedom after the fact. I have seen
many people try and eventually they tend to end up getting a slightly more
expensive house instead. It is just that once you are on some track it is
really hard to change, because most of the time you are giving up substance
for money and they are both compounding. Or to put in tech terms, if you
aren't doing what you see yourself doing in the future you are always building
up some sort of debt.

~~~
ksdale
I was just writing a blog post about this, that people basically just find new
ways to consume all the money they earn so that they're always on the edge.
And a lot of people who make $40k scoff at the idea that they would still be
scraping by at $140k, but lots of people go from making $40k in their 20's to
$140k in their 40's and basically nobody retires comfortably in their 50's
because $140k a year provided them with so much extra money. Rather,
50-somethings work just as much or more, they just tend to have much more
expensive houses, cars, and hobbies than 20 year olds, and they still put just
4% of their income toward retirement, if they're careful.

------
ChuckMcM
This article does a great job of highlighting how broken the message is for
people coming into the market these days. From the article: _Google was
supposed to be the_ goal, _the reward people worked so hard for._

When I was at Google and after I left people would ask me, "How can I get a
job at Google?" or "Can you get my resume to someone at Google?" And I would
always ask this person "Why do you want to work at Google?"

I can only recall one person, of the dozen or so who asked, that answered the
question with something other than (paraphrased) "Because its _Google_ dude,
you know the best of the best."

Here is the thing, if the only reason you can come up with for why you should
work at Google is because you want to enjoy the free food, schwag, or bus
rides then you will have, like the author, a very poor experience.

Then this, _" I found such an escape ... through startups._", followed by this
" _... it soon became clear that the only profitable avenue was to become an
advertising technology startup._ "

Computer scientists in this role are engineers, not researchers. Engineers are
people that take existing practice and solve problems that other people are
having in a way that is better than the previous solution. If you decide you
want to be a "data science" startup then you need to know up front who is
going to pay for your data. And the people who will pay? Are most likely ones
that can evaluate their own performance with and without your data and get an
idea of the difference in income or efficiency etc. This is _easy_ to do with
marketing data, you sell more stuff, bueno. You sell less stuff, no bueno. It
is more difficult to do with things like recycle awareness campaigns.

If you want to work at a job that has meaning, then work at a company that is
solving a real problem. The definition of "real problem" is one that enough
people are willing to pay enough money to support a company that is solving
that problem. Public Benefit Companies (PBCs) and Non-Government Organizations
(NGOs) are solving problems that some organization is willing to fund them to
solve it.

That said, during Bubble 2.0 the latecomers especially have lacked a lot of
imagination and so are just piling on solving the same problem that others are
solving, whether that is intermediating between buyers and sellers (I think of
these as virtual market makers) or greasing ecommerce (branding, virality,
advertising, shipping/billing logistics, Etc.)

~~~
paulddraper
> just piling on solving the same problem that others are solving, whether
> that is intermediating between buyers and sellers (I think of these as
> virtual market makers) or greasing ecommerce (branding, virality,
> advertising, shipping/billing logistics, Etc.)

And yet, those are also enormously important problems to solve.

What made Amazon worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Facebook worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Airbnb worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Netflix worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

What made Uber worth billions of dollars to millions of people?

Logistics.

Why did some people think computers were a fad, or the Internet was a fad?

Because they vastly underestimated the tremendous importance of automation,
communication, and coordination to mankind.

~~~
Fellshard
A fact easily papered over by politicians or social 'free-thinkers' with an
eye for scapegoats and the naivete to think they can do better by tearing it
all down and doing it all from scratch.

(An interesting note is that this carries all the dangers of the oft-warned-
against 'big rewrite', but on an even larger scale.)

------
imbusy111
The article felt extremely relatable, but it did not arrive at any concrete
point and has nothing original to say. It is talking about personal motivation
and then leaps to describing the underpaid workers. Yes, I think most people
in the valley can see your points and numerous discussions have already been
had about them. So what?

Edit: what I would have liked/expected to read is a story of someone making
the aforementioned $300k+ year, making enough, leaving and the
difficulties/joys of adapting to their new life exploring what they want.

~~~
autokad
I was kinda hoping for: "I should stop acting like an 8 year old child"
moment, but I suppose that's not happening yet. was hoping for any of the
following:

businesses are made up of people. no one group of people are better than the
other, since tech is also businesses, people shouldn't have inflated ideas
that tech is "saving the world / making it a better place and all those other
businesses are bad evil doers riding on the backs of everyone else".

or

We all have to do boring, non-impactful work at some point. especially
starting out. We need to work hard to get to positions that make large
impacts.

or

joining a start up isn't a great financial decision unless you really believe
in what they are doing

------
dvtrn
Tangent: the way the author talks about sites like Reddit and 4chan and
certain personalities as elements from a type of internet "hey day" makes me
feel....old. I recall reading Atwood's piece in 2007 like it was yesterday,
even though it was a decade ago now in actual time-passed.

Only brought up because I've felt similarly disillusioned with my
participation in tech lately, but I wonder if that's just due to growing older
and shifting priorities, assumptions and expectations of this sector of
civilization.

------
coleifer
Better: [https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-
valle...](https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/)

~~~
dang
Discussed twice:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=uncanny%20nplusonemag.com&sort...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=uncanny%20nplusonemag.com&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

------
autokad
I remember about 5 years ago when all my classmates were gaga over joining
start ups. I was like why in the world?

\- The chances of failure is really high \- The pay is lower than big tech \-
The hours are longer than big tech \- you bust your butt for someone else's
dream \- the benefits are non-existent

and this shouldn't be a surprise. yet she was surprised...

------
iamdave
_I was only working because the company was paying me to. In Marxist terms, I
was alienated from my labour: forced to think about a problem I didn’t
personally have a stake in, in a very typically corporate environment that
drained all the motivation out of me. I remember thinking: is this it?_

Ouch-I'm sorry to read that she feels so beleaguered. While I can certainly
empathize with that conundrum, this feels to me not so much like a problem
with tech (as this was presented in the context of a deep personal exploration
of one's participation as a tech worker), but perhaps an opportunity to sit
back and analyze one's participation with work as a concept itself.

It brings to mind this[1] letter written by Hunter S Thompson where he said:

 _So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no
choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else.
But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want
to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life_

This isn't to hold the good Doctor up as some universal bearer of truth (he
had his issues that probably cast a bit of a cloud over some of his pieces of
advice), but this one rings loudly for me as someone who doesn't really look
at his career field of software engineering as a personal definition, but
simply a vehicle that enables me to do the sort of things I want. It's a
parenthetical, a sidebar, it isn't the paragraph that describes who I am as
`iamdave`. But as I look at my peers (older millennials-what's the new word
now? xennial? I'm 35, what am I? Weren't we once Gen Y? I feel emotionally
closer to Gen X. Surely the marketers will have a new term for it come next
Tuesday and we'll all be using that. Hrm...I'm getting off topic here), I see
so much frustration, anxiety and anger because their careers are defining them
with little further introspection than that.

Said another way: I just happen to be a software engineer, it's by no means a
passion, it's not where my heart is, it's not what I wake up every day
thinking about-I just happen to be good enough at it to earn a living doing it
and pay for school to learn about the types of things that _do_ excite and
thrill me on a meaningful personal level. I also don't inherently dread it,
nor do I loathe going to work every day-either. Granted it took a long time to
get to this state of mind but my personal happiness has skyrocketed once the
realization took hold.

Now I say that not to accuse or suggest that my peers are wrong for this;
what's good for the goose may not be good for the gander, nor am I saying my
approach is universal or should be the standard for all others-but it does
seem to be a mitigating factor from the type of...can't think of a better word
here...existential exhaustion this young(er) writer seems to be experiencing.

Curious to hear what others think?

\--- [1] [https://tranquilmonkey.com/hunter-s-thompsons-
extraordinary-...](https://tranquilmonkey.com/hunter-s-thompsons-
extraordinary-letter-on-finding-your-purpose/)

