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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I think this is definitely overly charitable to corporations. Meta and Amazon both had pretty explicit policies that a modest level of employee churn was desirable, particularly when it involved folks leaving large quantities of unvested stock on the table.

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.

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.

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.

People who run large tech companies want one thing: to increase shareholder value. Delivering "good software" (a very, very squishy term) is secondary.

I don't even think "good" is a quantifiable or effective measure here. C-level executives are deviating from reality in terms of what they say that their products are capable of versus how their products actually perform. If you're a CEO shipping a frontier model that adds some value in terms of performing basic technical tasks while simultaneously saying that AI is gonna be writing all code in 3-6 months, you're only doing good by your shareholders.

I disagree. Cynicism is a toxicity and will fester. Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical (kinda like how people feel about Geddy Lee's voice).

>> Tech companies have a normal mix of strong and weak engineers.

Yes, that's not "a little cynical" that's a healthy perspective.

I think OP is really trying to tell people to be stoic, not cynical, and is confused on the vocabulary.

> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix. The only thing an ethical software engineer can do is to try and find some temporary niche where they can defy their bosses and do real, good engineering work, or to retire to a hobby farm and write elegant open-source software in their free time.

Let me re-state this in another way, which says functionally the same thing:

> Companies are hierarchical organizations where you sell your specialized labor for money. You should do what they expect of you in order to collect a paycheck, cultivate as enjoyable of a working environment as you can, then go home and enjoy the rest of your free time and your nice big tech salary.

Is this cynical? In some sense, sure, but I don't think it's inaccurate or even toxic, and I think it's probably how something like 90% of big tech employees operate. Sometimes your writing makes it seem like this is actually what you think. If your "objective description" of big tech companies were in service of this goal -- getting along better and not fighting the organization to preserve your own sanity and career -- I don't think people would take issue with it.

But you make the analogy of public service and seem in some sense to believe in values that are fundamentally at odds with these organizations. Is your position that, through successful maneuvering, and engineer can make a big tech organization serve the public in spite of internal political and economic pressures? This seems far more idealistic than what I believe. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

However:

We DO live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape.

Large companies ARE run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power.

I have compromised my principles by giving them (or anyone) my labor.

but I don't lie to myself or anyone else about it. I don't find any need to rehabilitate the structural and personal failings I encounter. When my friends call me out for working at EvilCorp, I don't argue. I know it's like any job: it's all dirty money. Instead, I deal with reality: weigh up pros and cons. I judge each year just how much Corporate I'm willing to swallow to support my dependents.

I enjoy the author's redefinition of cynicism and optimism. These are useful ideas to consider and I've given it some thought, arriving at an attitude of Becoming that I guess some would call idealism.

PS OMFG I just realised its MS. I believe this is what the kids call cringe.

To get a reputation for being suspicious and distrustful is certainly not desirable. Nevertheless, men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to other's interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less.

-- No. 157, Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi)

Maybe, just maybe, when any single individual is unable to propose a product improvement due to the requirement of ass-kissing and favor-dealings involved... the company is too big and should (be) split up.

Corporate inertia is what is killing many a Western company against the competition from China.

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

George Bernard Shaw

Your just working for them for free rather than getting paid.

It comes from negative experience and not dealing with the effects of that experience. The weight of that negativity is what tilts your views to be overtly cynical. You don’t just choose to be cynical, it’s part of your predisposition.

Idealism comes when you are younger in age and as you get older, you become more cynical about things, because you have been through many more experiences.

Young people should not be overtly cynical. They should look at the world with bright eyes and try to change things for the better. A young person who is overly cynical is a tragedy.

In regard to playing politics, I think that is just intellectual laziness. Getting people on board with your ideas requires thoughtfulness. Try to find common ground on something you both believe in is a challenge, that requires effort. Treating people as individuals, showing genuine curiosity in their beliefs and exchanging direct feedback in a respectful way, is how you get people on board with your ideas.

This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...

Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.

Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?

Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.

(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)

(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Idealism about one’s own behavior vs idealism about others’ behavior is an interesting tension to explore further.

If doing things ethically (not defrauding investors and customers) keeps your manager happy, then do it. If not, do it fucking anyways.

Indeed you are, for calling software developers “engineers” meanwhile software development is actually writing, so they are more closer to writers than engineers.

Passively contributing to genocide is still contributing to genocide. Complicity/apathy toward genocide is still contributing to genocide.

So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.

Humility involves accurate assessment of self and one's situation. A humble person is not a lowly person, as our contemporary use of the term would suggest. We all know the image of the hunched over, pitiable creature. No, a humble person is someone who has a rationally founded sense of his own strengths and weaknesses, the features of the situation, a sound sense of what he knows about it, and where discernment is needed, how the first combines with the latter. So, a humble person is neither arrogant nor small-souled.

Prudence is the ability to recognize what ought to be done given the circumstances, and what means ought to be used. This presupposes humility, because without accurate self-knowledge and knowledge of circumstances, you cannot determine the correct course of action. You cannot even determine what the true good is that you ought to be pursuing in the first place.

Words like "cynic", "optimist", "idealist", "realist", or "pessimist" are fairly useless here. They describe willful and emotional dispositions. Sometimes, people will paint a thin veneer of "rationality" over these. They will rationalize their small-mindedness and mediocrity, or their grandiosity.

Now, you need to recognize the state of world as it is. That is not the same as recognizing how it ought to be. And the truth is that the world is a mixed bag. Each of us is a mixed bag.

Let's say the Nazis performed medical experiments on people to develop a cure (which they did). Let's say you have the disease for which that cure would work. Do you use the cure? Is it morally licit? It certainly can be (the key term here is "remote cooperation with evil"). Making use of the good effect of an evil of another's actions is not the same as committing the evil action itself. In this world, there is nothing that has not in some way benefited from an injustice. Nothing. Benefiting from these things downstream is not categorically evil. What matters are that the reasons are proportionate to the gravity of the evil, and the proximity of the act. And participating in imperfect institutions is not necessarily evil, either. It depends on what you are contributing to and how. The principle of double effect [0] is an excellent guide here.

It's not cynical to recognize that people are morally flawed. We are. We do good things and bad things, and some people are worse than others. That's just an obvious fact. But that's not an excuse to commit moral evils. That's the old defense children use: "But everyone else is doing it!" You need prudence to help you determine what you ought to pursue and how. You need prudence to be just. And you need justice to have the courage to do the right thing.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/

This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.