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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Capitalism rewards psychopathy
I’m not sure about that. Nobody wants to work with psychos. Work is too much of your short life.
You don’t work with them, you work for them. The only capitalists in capitalism is the ownership class, the rest are just slaves to the system under which they are born.
But you don’t stay working for them. You move on. Then they find no one wants to work for them and they spend their whole time complaining they can’t get the staff. Psychos are bad news for a company long run.
There is a book about it, “Snakes in Suits”.
Then they find no one wants to work for them
At which point the board fires them, they add another golden parachute to their collection, and they get hired to be CEO at another company for a few years until the cycle repeats.
Precisely. Maybe small companies have decent owners, but anything with a value of over a few million is likely to be run by one of these types.
I’m sure that happens. But this why you look how long people have worked at places and get a reference.
Psychos aren’t the ‘scream in your face and belittle you’ type of people, it’s the silver-tongued devils that talk about family values and the environment and how their thing helps people, all while making backroom deals and lobbying governments to pass laws in their favour or any other number of shit. Psychos will appear on the surface as the nicest goddamn person you ever met, and you won’t think otherwise until you find the knife in your back.
I think they are more like Musk. It’s obvious if you look he’s a wrong’un. It’s not possible to stay lying about yourself, especially when the ego get boosted so much. The mask slips.
Right, but even taking Musk the mask has only slipped over the last five or so years. Before that he was often treated as a darling for pushing EVs to help fight climate change and SpaceX for reigniting people’s fascination with space. It’s only after he’s got huge amounts of wealth and exposure that its become clear to people what an awful person he is.
Not sure about that. I thought he was a nob before it was cool. He was claiming too much engineer credit for himself since forever. No humility or crediting others.
Psychopath is being used in a colloquial way here and not an exact diagnosis. Even if they are actual psychopaths they are known for being very charismatic and there are a lot of sadomasochistic people in the world who are motivated by punishment.
Further the people who work directly for these people want to be them, so they see it as just part of the process.
Another factor is money, it’s a motivator. Those who work lower down the org chart can often be desperate, struggling to get by and get used to the punishment, convincing themselves that it would be worse elsewhere.
The Idea that life is short and work just isn’t worth it comes from a place of privilege and the luxury of time for self reflection. Something not everyone can afford when one lives in survival mode.
This is tech workers. They won’t be in survival mode. They are highly employable and always have options. I think most people outside tech will have other employment options. Though if you don’t, your screwed in multiple other ways on top of has bosses.
Tech companies are operated like any other company and have a wide range of employees. Also not every tech position is highly employable. I know from personal experience in tech middle management that many employees are very easy to replace and have very common skill sets that are oversaturated in the market. Many many tech workers are absolutely operating in survival mode in 2024.
I’ve been in tech for over twenty years. About half of it in games (first half) and half Linux embedded stuff. What I’ve seen is it’s hard to recruit good people. The first job to get is the hardest as you have no experience or references. I know I’ve been lucky, falling in my feet multiple times, but so has everyone I entered industry with. A few now have their own companies. I’ve had to let a few people go myself and I hate it, but I knew they’d be fine, and they have been.
Complete explanation in three words. Well done.
Concision!
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.
Hint: it’s not just in tech…
“I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…”
They are but as usual it’s the WORKERS who are the good brilliant people, not the ownership class and 3 letter executive dirt bags. They’re the same in EVERY industry. Owner/CEO ONLY cares about profit profit profit, fuck everyone and everything else.
Workers, they’re a mixed bag as there are so many different people, but in the tech space they’re generally intelligent “good” people.
The workers also just care for profits. Nobody is working for free. Everyone needs to pay their bills. Companies will stop making profits when workers dispense with their wages, but I bet that’s not gonna happen.
Technically workers do not care about profits, they care about wages. The average worker doesn’t benefit from profit because they represent a fixed expense. The work they produce is worth more than their salary which is how a company produces profit. As long as a company breaks even and the salary is enough to meet one’s needs a worker does just fine. However a worker’s job could easily be axed in the name of profit because they are what is being profited off of, not the entitled beneficiary of the business as a whole.
Profit it just the take home winnings of the investors or owners of the business and the few jobs at the top where compensation is based off of profit percentage or lavish bonuses for making the targets.
So many people don’t understand that profit comes after all expenses which includes labor. :/
Wages are also subject to change based on performance or company profits.
But what I mean is that the company and the worker have the same interests in some way. Everyone wants to make money to pay the bills. Companies are no charities and your work isn’t either. If you dislike your relationship with the company, you can just resign that relationship any time. But one thing will never change: the worker will only do the work required from him and the company will only pay the wage required from them. There is nothing evil about that. It’s human nature for the past 20.000 years.
Idk, given how many evil mobile games and dark patterns there are, there are plenty of “bad” people, or at least people who won’t push back against bad decisions from management.
Nobody is going to “push back” very hard against the people who control their food, shelter, and other basic human needs. If they had that level of comfort, they wouldn’t be working there in the first place.
Yup, it’s very much like the prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone in tech refused to do this nonsense, we wouldn’t have dark patterns and whatnot and stakeholders would find another way. But if enough people are willing to do this nonsense, the “good” people end up worse off.
Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy),
Very very incorrect. He was a complete garbage pail of a human being from the very beginning.
Behind the Bastards: Part One: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-steve-jobs
They have a series on Gates too.
The answer to OPs question is that these people they admired were just as bad, just better at PR. Unless you think that social media has had some kind of positive effect in outing these newer bastards. Being young and naive may also have been a factor (which I can personally attest to since I was a fan of MS back in the 90s before I learned about them).
If you want to push material that completely contradicts morals (respect for privacy and free speech, for example), maybe you need this kind of people. They’ll just say they don’t give a f*** right to your face. Not that Bill Gates or Larry Page are any different, the times just changed. Do you really believe Bill Gates is that intelligent God among men? Because I don’t.
when I was growing up
This is really the key. We’re all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we’re kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn’t realize the extent of what was happening.
Yeah we’re baffled about how kids get sucked into worshipping Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I remember a brief time in my life when I thought Steve Jobs was the greatest and that he singlehandedly invented the iPhone with a rusty pair of pliers and gumption.
Oh summer child
Quick guess - as people become enormously successful, the values they had as individuals often fade. Executives forget what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck (assuming they didn’t have rich parents to begin with). They feel less need to hide (or even acknowledge) their flaws, because now they’re making “fuck you” money.
Our society values money over integrity. If you’re rich enough, you can literally get away with murder.
That assumes success under capitalism is possible for people with morals in the first place. Maybe once upon a time, but I’m firmly of the opinion that it is impossible to be financially successful and be a good person.
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.
I don’t ever remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs being good people. Or Jeff Bezos, trying to kill bookstores.
The guys behind Google seemed okay at first and I think they really wanted to do good. But the way the company culture was built was toxic.
But in the end it’s all about the greed. As soon as a company becomes public and whose stocks become available on the market, it turns to shit.
Look at how Steam is going well and actually helping personal computing progress. Gabe Newell is doing a great job because he loves that he does and ensures the people who work for him do too.
Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).
There are no saints at this level.
TBF to Valve, their lootboxes were limited to cosmetic items in a free to play multiplayer games. You can ignore those and it wouldn’t change the gameplay at all.
Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC
You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.
And in politics, too!
I mean their unwillingness to do anything about the market abuse and rampant child-gambling aside, the lootboxes for purely cosmetic items are one of the least predatory ways to do microtransactions. It’s not like EA where the only way to unlock entire characters in some games is to grind for hundreds of hours or pay, or like COD where they took the lootbox idea and made it actually affect (multiplayer) gameplay
the least predatory ways to do microtransactions
Damning with faint praise.
I don’t know much about the other guys you named, but close friend of Jeffry Epstein, Bill Gates is a demon with good PR. A lot of his outreach consists of privatizing schools in Africa and America, testing vaccines on tribal girls in India without consent, and demanding Oxford sell their covid vaccine instead of releasing it free..
But if you google anything about Bill Gates medical activities, they get drowned out by puff pieces and fact checks about microchips in vaccines instead of the.
Greed. A sane person will walk away from working once they have enough saved to comfortably retire.
$100 million can let you live comfortably forever, but there are plenty of people who want that much every year.
Those are the folks who become ‘leaders.’
And they should be eaten.
lack of “social intelligence”. They mostly rose through the ranks because their technical (or business) skill. They never had to act for benefit of others to advanve
You listed a bunch of people who were “good”, but honestly, none of them were. You just weren’t necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.
Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it’s just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.
thanks, I didn’t know anything at all about his daughter (after reading your comment) and found this pretty good article/interview with her.
