Comment by seph-reed
6 years ago
When you work for a giant corporation of any sort, you are inherently breaking capitalism as it is.
There's no foreseeable way around this , it's irresponsible, and all the suffering you're seeing it the world is the cost of many many millions of people giving themselves a pass on this.
I strongly urge you to recognize that any of the life benefits you get from working at one of these places are reaped from the lives of others. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQEO2P9j_vU)
Please don't take HN on generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive, tedious, and off topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As opposed to working for a small money losing company backed by VCs who hoped to be bought out by big tech companies....
Well this is why it's important to work on something that you believe in. I think there is a fatalism to think all small companies are going to fail. Individual employees should use their own judgment when thinking about whether a startup will work— they are often more right than not since startups tend to be self-fulfilling prophecy. If lots of smart people like you want to join too, then it actually becomes a lot more likely.
That being said by the numbers most startups fail, and there is no guarantee a startup role will get you a positive outcome vs other alternatives.
It’s not about the company “failing”. Very few tech startups are bootstrapped. At some point they take investor funding. At that point it doesn’t matter what the “smart people” want or the founders. The only thing that matters is what the investors want - they want “an exit”. Statistically:
- the chances of a company not just closing their doors are low.
- out of those, the chances of a company becoming a “lifestyle business”, a profitable ongoing private business are close to zero once you take investor money. Investors aren’t looking for profitable private companies hoping to get a minor dividend. They are looking for their investment to get acquired or go public.
- speaking of which very few companies exit with going public instead of being acquired by big tech. Look no further than YC. Only two YC companies have ever gone public.
- Out of those that do go public, even fewer don’t end up getting acquired by big tech and/or are profitable. Again look at YC. Two public companies and Dropbox has admitted that it has no idea whether it will ever be profitable.
As far as “smart people”. All startups think they have “smart people.”
I don't disagree with you in theory, but when an article is suggesting that you should instead make $200M in equity by working for a venture capitalist - and not just any venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, the man who is sad about women's suffrage because it means unchecked libertarianism is less likely to be chosen by free elections - for spy firm Palantir?
Go work for a big tech company, it's far more ethical if you think capitalism is bad.
Also keep in mind that there simply isn't $200M to go around for every software engineer, let alone every human. These concentrated payoffs only come at the expense of others. It's not universal advice and it can't be.
> These concentrated payoffs only come at the expense of others
Capital creation is not zero sum. It's positive sum and makes us all better off. This idea that if one person succeeds, it's because he's stolen from someone else has led to immense misery in history.
So all the suffering in the world is the fault of giant corporations? How giant do they have to be to go from being the building blocks of capitalism to breaking it?
Obviously not all. You know how english is with these words.
There's a gradient. The point at which there's no point in going up against them is definitely too far. Competition is important to a healthy capitalist economy.
And yet I'm unclear on where any of the big tech companies have a lock on their market such that there's no point in competing with them. Google has huge market share in search, but Bing and DDG and others are still competing.
I think... I think if it's not obvious to people why supporting companies that undermine competition is bad.. I think maybe I should stop commenting here entirely. I'm going to log out, and not log back in. I'll be happier, you guys can enjoy yourselves too.
Cheers and good luck.
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