Reading this, I'm struck by a thought: Are we the bad guys?
According to the article, what the big tech companies have in common is engineer-led products. It's not the besuited MBA's making product decisions, it's us, the engineers.
And the big tech companies are also united in having evil products. With the possible exception of Shopify and Datadog, every company on that list of "big tech" is doing things that actively harm society.
Cue the "are we the baddies?" meme [0]. If engineers are left to build products by ourselves, do we build things because we can and not because we should?
People who sign up to work on ad services for google or engagement for facebook have already self selected as willing to do morally dubious work in exchange for more money. There's no question that engineers do work that decreases society's utility.
I don't think following incentives makes someone bad though, it's only human nature, and of course there are plenty of people queued up to replace you. The system that creates those incentives might be bad, but it can be impossible to untangle where the incentives stem from.
Pay engineers to optimize a number and they will, that is all you need to do. In this case they told engineers to optimize the number of ads clicked and then the engineers self organized and did the rest.
Maybe evil is just more profitable than good because it externalizes its costs.
Creating a sports car, or paying someone else to do so, is a lot more expensive than just stealing one, if you can get away with it. Robbing a bank is cheaper than building a bank. If you can do this kind of thing at scale, well, to the extent that you only have to spend money on capturing value instead of both creating it and capturing it, you'll be vastly more profitable than the "suckers" you're capturing it from.
Same thing is true of Fecebutt: creating the mountains of data their users go to Fecebutt for (restaurant recommendations, family photos, thoughtful essays, sexy bikini shots, social-network data) took perhaps a trillion person-hours, but Fecebutt gained control over it at a cost of under a trillion dollars. Ballparking, they had to spend less than 5% of the cost of those assets to acquire control over them. Now it can leverage them to organize genocides, rig elections, and extort photos of government IDs and use them to out promiscuous women and closeted gay people—not to mention selling you tens of billions of dollars a year of stuff you don't need through advertising.
It's hard for positive-social-value companies like Shopify and Datadog to compete on salaries with that 20:1 value multiplier. The fact that they manage it at all is not only a testament to the enormous value they're producing but also the enormous destruction of value implicit in Facebook's business model.
According to the article, what the big tech companies have in common is engineer-led products. It's not the besuited MBA's making product decisions, it's us, the engineers.
And the big tech companies are also united in having evil products. With the possible exception of Shopify and Datadog, every company on that list of "big tech" is doing things that actively harm society.
Cue the "are we the baddies?" meme [0]. If engineers are left to build products by ourselves, do we build things because we can and not because we should?
[0] from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK-kWRAVmRU