tech is increasingly dominated by grifters, as they tend to sound more convincing than the classic hacker and are tend to have "fluid morals", which is important if your goal is to take a billion dollars from VC money by lying your way to riches, then become an investor in the next wave of <insert hype space here>. It's a self-selecting game.
This why I'm looking to get out of the industry entirely. It's reached the point where I no longer want to tell people what I do for a living. It's become embarrassing, and I tire of having to defend myself about it.
It's not embarrassing if you write and ship free software. You can still operate in the software industry, succeed against corporate interests, and provide value to other developers without selling your soul to the devil. The fatalism of "all software is bad" is a tautology that seems correct, but is only validated by commercially successful (and often monopoly-abusing) businesses.
By "leave the industry", I mean not doing it for a living anymore. I don't mean that I'd stop coding.
Software development itself is a joy that I'm not willing to give up as a hobby.
I'm not saying "all software is bad" at all. I'm not even saying "all software companies are bad". I know that's not the case. What I am saying is that the industry overall, mostly due to the actions of SV-style companies, has become more bad than good and the general public is noticing.
Doesn't shock me considering the hard work -> nice life pipeline is in shambles in the US and it wouldn't surprise me if that's true for other countries too
And we also chose to extend the presence of gambling in society - quite literally with sports gambling - but also adjacently with crypto markets and stock market apps
Tech has always had advantages around being able to slack off if you were good since it was a white collar desk job, but you could justify that to yourself as a sort of implied retainer arrangement. So it wasn't directly grifting or stealing.
Some people get a taste of real money relatively easily (like a $200k+ salary for slacking off) and want more though, maybe because they're afraid that good situation can't last and they need maximum value extracted before they're "found out".
And we are just not seeing major downsides to grifting unless you run afoul of the law, which can be slow to prosecute if you are on a bleeding edge like AI (like it was for crypto).
