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Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
You've already forgotten the content of his post now. Right?
Sometimes it’s fine to see a topic and tell yourself “I have no relevant knowledge in this area so I won’t comment”.
Also, Google is a multi-billion dreadnought with hundreds of millions of dollars for PR, lawyers and lobbying every year. I'm sure they can take a post about someone "whining" and quitting their job in disagreement. Something tells me Google be fine...
You don't make your own food do you? Build your own car? Make your own git repos?
Seems like you might want to have a better view about who you work for.
Sometimes not.
I left with more than 4 million in RSU's left.
Pretty much any Googler who leaves will be leaving lots of money on the table.
This is because they are usually 3/4 year grants, so it's pretty much impossible to leave without lots of unvested RSU.
There are some 1 year grants, but those are much more uncommon (~1%)
Not just the facts but the frame. Amazing.
https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...
scroll to the bottom
that illustrates the point nicely...
Company mottos, principles, slogans and values are all fake fronts to lure in these sort of people alongside the free food with the carrots on those sticks.
Once that all runs out or the company goes south and stops being a daycare, then they start doing silly virtue signalling posts like this.
Now you are seeing who was there for the 'good vibes', free food, rest n' vest and who was there to keep the company alive.
...And finally we know that this is a love letter to get themselves hired at Anthropic. I think you might need more than that honestly.
<rant> I am so tired of reading these stupid "why I am leaving my job after making millions". One thing I can say about myself: I work for money. That's it. Lots of things the companies that I work for (normally 25,000+ employees) do immoral and unethical things. Still, I stay, earn money, and I don't write stupid fucking self-righteous blog posts after I leave. At this point, blog posts like this look like an "own goal". </rant>
I tell employers I’m clearly a mercenary and I am only here for the money. I do great work, but I’ve been compensated well.
Something. $omething. something. $teinbeck?
"Security" vs Openness
> “make things so secure that we ourselves can’t break them, whether the device costs $1000 or $100, or the user is a celebrity or a refugee“
That can mean different things to different people in different contexts. Could easily mean building a software platform with security features that banks will build their apps to require.
One of my favorite 80's movies was Real Genius with Val Kilmer. He accidentally helps develop a weapon and then goes to extreme measures to prevent its use. For some people creating weapons is a line they wont cross and that's not a bad thing.
This is surreal.
Yet most startups are just b2b AI sass or whatever.
And it worked --- for a while. Until the path became impossible to deny.
It used to be a dream job. Now I've relocated back to Europe and want nothing to do with American Big Tech. It's become toxic and completely counter to my values.
America has become a much darker place that has a very different place in the world. American tech companies have not just accepted, but actively embraced this transition. I am not interested in joining them and being complicit.
The CIA instigated a coup in Guatemala in '54 which led to a civil war and the Maya genocide.
While we vote for our leaders we don’t exactly get a say or have awareness of what sort of covert bullshit some over eager Yale graduate is doing as a top secret operation.
Ultimately it all probably goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union and with that the loss of the clear 'good vs. bad/us vs. them' distinction which could be used to distract people on both sides from the rot in their midst. Politicos have always been corrupt no matter their colours or stripes but when the world was a simpler place - the Free West versus the Evil Empire, before that the Allies against the Axis - there was a common enemy for the people to refer to. Yes, some "democrats" already tried to take the side of the Soviets but they were in a minority while most of the Democratic party considered the politics and culture of the USA and the western alliance to be preferable over those of the Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as Communist China. They preferred "our" corrupt politicians over "their" corrupting ideology, i.e. they might be assholes but they're OUR assholes. When the eastern bloc dissolved the western alliance was like the dog which had caught the car: clueless as to what to do next. Fukuyama thought we were at the end of history but as anyone who had read a bit of (real) history could then already see this was a nonsensical idea. We're now experiencing the effects of that lack of vision which led to a 'Free West' which has taken over a number of the bad habits "we" accused the eastern bloc countries of and with that the term 'Free West' deserves to be quoted.
It is up to us, those living in the western alliance countries to try to keep the authoritarians at bay and no, I'm not only talking about Trump. I'm talking about the Communists (who call themselves 'democratic socialists') taking over the "democratic" party, the the "woke right" (for lack of a better term, i.e. right-wingers who adopt progressive-style shaming, tribalism and purity tests to defend distorted conservative values [1]) attempting to make inroads, the authoritarians on all sides who see works like 1984 and Brave New World as instruction manuals, those who read Howard Zinn and believed all he wrote, etc.
[1] https://newdiscourses.com/2025/07/a-beginners-guide-to-the-w...
Whereas the feature of these platforms - their incredible power - was always the same. The outrage is then just a function of a person's preferences.