I work at a big tech company in the Bay, but I’m a pretty early in career designer. Do you ever feel like there’s a very prevalent hypocrisy with the high-earning class of big tech workers that are very vocal publicly about social issues? It feels strange. I‘m talking about the progressive tech worker types on the coasts (SF, Seattle, NYC) that seem to dominate big tech discourse, because I feel like a SWE in like Florida or Utah will often have very different feelings from what you mostly get here.
I know designers and engineers who have shit talked Facebook over the last few years to their peer audiences on Twitter (which gets you a lot of ‘wow thanks for speaking out 👏’ replies), about how FB is so corrosive to our democracy, while working at Facebook and collecting that sweet sweet very high TC and waiting until their RSUs vest. like dang that’s convenient!
I’ve seen feisty twitter threads during heated moments over the past few years where non-FB tech twitter was like “Anyone working at FB now is complicit in X bad event that just went down”. And the argument that some FB SWE‘s made in response was that they felt there’s more value in having allies stay in the company and try to change it from the inside instead of resigning.
I saw something recently from a union labor activist about how can you expect a very comfortable Amazon software engineer collecting like 200K+ in his/her TC, to go out of their way to speak up more or actually take action for their overworked manual labor “co-workers” that are in the warehouse making $15/hr.
Ya know what I mean? A ton of these people love to signal their virtue and support for some of the domestic problems in the US (and these same people seem to really own the discourse at these companies internally), while completely overlooking what’s happening internationally (which you know to be frank is often much more sad!!) Ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, lynchings in India, investments from MBS, forced Uighur labor... the list goes on!
I don’t know.... it feels like way too many of my peers don’t care enough about these downstream issues that don’t really affect their own lives day-to-day. It’s so much of climbing the TC ladder (Blind!!), did you hear how much X raised in their series A??, so many ppl day-trading on Robinhood, talking about getting into bitcoin, and such. Did you get that sense too of how disappointing it really all is?
youtrynewthings15 karma
I work at a big tech company in the Bay, but I’m a pretty early in career designer. Do you ever feel like there’s a very prevalent hypocrisy with the high-earning class of big tech workers that are very vocal publicly about social issues? It feels strange. I‘m talking about the progressive tech worker types on the coasts (SF, Seattle, NYC) that seem to dominate big tech discourse, because I feel like a SWE in like Florida or Utah will often have very different feelings from what you mostly get here.
I know designers and engineers who have shit talked Facebook over the last few years to their peer audiences on Twitter (which gets you a lot of ‘wow thanks for speaking out 👏’ replies), about how FB is so corrosive to our democracy, while working at Facebook and collecting that sweet sweet very high TC and waiting until their RSUs vest. like dang that’s convenient!
I’ve seen feisty twitter threads during heated moments over the past few years where non-FB tech twitter was like “Anyone working at FB now is complicit in X bad event that just went down”. And the argument that some FB SWE‘s made in response was that they felt there’s more value in having allies stay in the company and try to change it from the inside instead of resigning.
I saw something recently from a union labor activist about how can you expect a very comfortable Amazon software engineer collecting like 200K+ in his/her TC, to go out of their way to speak up more or actually take action for their overworked manual labor “co-workers” that are in the warehouse making $15/hr.
Ya know what I mean? A ton of these people love to signal their virtue and support for some of the domestic problems in the US (and these same people seem to really own the discourse at these companies internally), while completely overlooking what’s happening internationally (which you know to be frank is often much more sad!!) Ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, lynchings in India, investments from MBS, forced Uighur labor... the list goes on!
I don’t know.... it feels like way too many of my peers don’t care enough about these downstream issues that don’t really affect their own lives day-to-day. It’s so much of climbing the TC ladder (Blind!!), did you hear how much X raised in their series A??, so many ppl day-trading on Robinhood, talking about getting into bitcoin, and such. Did you get that sense too of how disappointing it really all is?
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