I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…
Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he’s been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He’s basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That’s what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him
Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it’s success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone’s life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.
Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude’s entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force
Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…
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Because tech is capitalism, and it goes hand in hand with fascism
Shareholders want the CEO that gets them more money. If that person doesn’t deliver, they don’t ask why, they ask when. If they don’t like the answer, they get a new CEO. Rinse repeat, here we are.
Except Zuckerberg, of course. He’s just evil.
Leaders in tech have to be good at raising money from rich investors, lenders, etc… Most of these people aren’t tech people. They’re hedge fund managers, bankers, or just people with lots of money. So consider the following 2 strategies:
Strategy A: Be realistic. Explain the positives and the negatives. The tech looks promising, but the future is uncertain. It’s a risky investment that could pay off massively, but it probably won’t. You the CEO know a lot about the topic, but you’re still just a guy, not a miracle worker.
Strategy B: Just focus on the plus side. It will succeed, and it’ll succeed way more than anyone expects. Not only that, you the CEO are an unstoppable hardworking galaxy brain genius who sleeps on the factory floor. They should be so lucky to get to invest in your company.
Which of these is more likely to work with investors who don’t know tech? And which is most likely to be the strategy chosen by leaders who are narcissistic and deceitful? The answer is the same.
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It’s better to assume good humans don’t exist, they just haven’t shown (to you) their bad side yet
You can look back to Lee Iacocca. The Ford Pintos caught on fire because he sat back at his desk and laughed at the engineers who wanted to add a safety bar back there, the car had to be 2000 dollars no matter what.
Then he was at Chrysler and pioneered the idea that CEOs could set their own bonuses. At the time it was a shocking idea, called unethical.
Now the personal tech world comes along…
Power corrupts people. On top of that, the capitalist machine isn’t satisfied with “just okay” performance. It’s infinite growth, or nothing. Once you hit the upper limit of what you can deliver, you start delivering the same, but with a lot of cut corners
Their job is to maximize shareholder profit. That is their only and one true job as CEOs. If you want a CEO that is not evil, look for companies that are not public even though they could be.
Years ago, I was hanging out with a manager of finance and asking a few basic questions about finance. After a little while, i guess she got tired of the conversation because she handed me her old finance textbook.
Anyway, I was mostly interested in the foundational ideas of finance, not the details, so I went away and started reading the introduction. It turns out that the introduction was very short, no more than two pages. It was extremely well-written, simple, and to the point.
The foundational idea of modern finance, according to this standard textbook, is very simple and highly reductionist: the one and only goal of finance is to maximize shareholder value, and share prices are the ultimate way that goal is measured. I’ve never seen a whole discipline reduced to such stark and prosaic terms with absolutely no attempt to articulate ethics or justify it in relation to some wider public good.
Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.
Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of “human” in the company’s choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be “good”, or they leave.
Because sociopathic tenancies are useful when on your way to the top. It lets you step on everyone else in your way and then do whatever you want without having to care about others.
Yep!
Tech is absolutely a space where people who break the rules get rewarded. Every tech company I’ve worked at has had a situation where they turned the other cheek on laws. And if they broke it, the fine was just the cost of doing business.
A example at my old job (with fake numbers), they broke laws in some EU countries. It took them like a decade to finally catch up with them. And the fine was like $8 million dollars. But during that law breaking, they made $100mil in sales, while also destroying the competition and solidifying they position in the marketplace, guaranteeing more profits for another decade.
If they followed the law, they wouldn’t be this major player in the industry.
And the job I worked at is one of thousands of companies that think like that.
Shit like this doesn’t deserve to remain anonymous. Just name the company.
The link below isn’t the fundamental reason, but I think it helps to explain the shift in mindset. With the best of intentions and a desire to innovate and help people live better…the ersartz movement became corrupted by conspicuous consumption and a “disruptor” capitalist mindset:
It’s not just tech, but leadership positions in general.
Short answer is that the traits you need to climb the ladder have significant overlap with the traits of legit psychopathy.
To add to this, there’s been evidence that as an individual accrues more wealth, their empathy response lessens over time.
My arm chair psychologist hypothesis is that: as the individual sees their quality of life increase, they look at other human beings in deplorable conditions, and their empathy response atrophies in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.
There’s a concept in the study of wealthy individuals which goes over their desire to hide impoverishment from their view.
Any good books or other articles on this? I’d be legitimately interested.
The more money I make or the better off I am, I actually just end up feeling more guilty and giving more away. Frankly, one only needs so much, after that if you can improve the quality of life of those around you it makes everything better.
Needs vs wants… Power corrupts.
Yeah I feel you. To echo your last sentence, there’s that old study of money leading to increased happiness but only up to a certain point (I think it was like 75k USD pre-covid)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/rich-less-empathetic-than-poor-study-says.html
You haven’t named a decent person in your post.
The Google founders are simply more secretive in their lifestyles compared to Musk. They dropped the “Don’t Be Evil” motto a long time ago.
Honestly, Google back in the day was a great company. They were focused on putting the best product for consumer, supported open standards, kept ads at a minimum… A bit like Valve today. They really were “good guys”.
Then I’m not sure what happened, they stopped caring and left the MBAs in charge maybe.
They went public, simple as that.
It was the serifs in their logo. They ditched those serifs and all bets on morality were off
Don’t be evil came from an ad agency that did tobacco ads.
Bill Gates, a decent person? LMAO is OP literally a kid or something.
Americans are the most propagandized people in the world and simultaneously genuinely believe they are not propagandized, it’s incredible.
It’s incredle how public perceptions change, huh? Bill Gates was considered the devil back when MS was steamrolling against open source software.
MS’s patent protection racket and monopoly practices continue. They have had no conversion, they are just adapting. Buying GitHub and LinkedIn to stay relevant. WSL and VSCode are to slow the bleed of developers away from their platform and tools. Azure Linux is because they have to. They are under pressure by the market and because all the bright young things coming in will all want Linux. They are still a closed source company trying to get people stuck into their webs and paying.
Agreed, the foss-friendly image is just a facade. MS is never going to commit to open source as it directly threatens their bloodline.
They should be made to open Office. Too much is in those formats for a for profit company to own the reference implementation. Let alone for that reference implementation to be closed.
Reading about this “standard” makes me angry every time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook are all tech bastards too. But Microsoft has not gone away or been solved.
If I had a dime for every time I had to struggle because of subtle rendering changes between libreoffice and ms office over a single ooxml doc…
Your not meant to be able to render it outside of MS software. The whole ISO thing was high level game to make a monoply look like a standard. It’s a super long standard with closed binary bit that were meant to be temporary. It only got through at due to outside corruption. Governments are as much at fault as MS for being a sleep at the wheel of stopping monopolies and keep the market functional. ISO is broken if something can be a standard where the reference implementation is closed, let alone have any closed bits.
I agree. Someone already put links showing how bad Jobs and Gates were earlier in this thread.
But you see he invest 0.1% of their money to save some people in the world, sometimes. He is so generous.
I remember when I was growing up
You can basically stop right there. You were young and naive, viewing the world through the rose colored glasses of youth.
For real, all those guys were always cutthroats. How do you think they dominated the markets? It was not because they shared and encouraged competition. No, they stole, lied, and cheated their way to the top.
People haven’t really changed. As always, power corrupts. When the rewards are great enough, it seems people are often enough willing to compromise their integrity.
