Kind of sick of these "I quit tech to do X" articles when the author clearly made more than enough to retire. Same vibe as Tim Ferris showing you his daily routine of working out, reading books, and answering 3 e-mails.
>It was the same period in which I started to become politically active:
I often hear this from people who are struggling with their work environment or have some mental health issue. My suspicion is that it probably isn't very helpful for them. It seems harder to get anything done in politics than the typical enterprise. If you are having difficulty with your work the last thing you need is another brick wall to bang your head against.
> In the few months before I resigned, I was working maybe two hours a day. Yet, those two hours were terrible. I was forcing myself to accept them because they were enabling a lot of good things for myself and for the people around me.
Imagine saying that to anyone born a generation prior and expecting sympathy.
> Imagine saying that to anyone born a generation prior and expecting sympathy.
The fact that older generations accepted something doesn't mean there are no better ways. In the past, children as young as 7 worked in the coal mines, and doctors treated patients with blood-letting and leeches for all kind of ailments. The fact that old generations accepted things because there were no better alternatives shouldn't leave us blind to the fact that there are, in fact, better ways of doing things.
In fact, many of the older generations saw the futility of their workplaces and have written about it, and their works became bestsellers, most likely because many people of the time recognized the crushing soullessness of the workplace.
Kafka's The Metamorphosis:
"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."
And Bukowski's Factotum:
"How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"
So, yeah, I do imagine saying that to anyone born a generation prior. I might even write about it and become famous, because that's relevant and important. If nobody objects to it, be it in works of fiction, or with their actions, nothing will change.
> My first client was one of the biggest banks in the country: a hellish circus of inefficiency, coked-out managers, feudal power dynamics, and pre-GDPR surveillance marketing. My job was to cross real-time credit card transaction data with bank data, score some machine learning models, and send ads for predatory loans to families about to have a baby, couples about to get married, and so on and so forth. People who are poor enough to need a loan to live their life, but stable enough to pay it back with a lot of sacrifices. An SMS or a bank app notification should have been delivered after a few seconds of doing an expensive transaction, in the moment of their, supposed, psychological vulnerability.
I can predict the tech-libertarian defense of that right now, built on the fallacy of homo economicus and treating the market as its own evaluation metric.
> The problem is that I was part of a profession that was benefiting from an anomalous amount of privilege, built over decades by the expansion of the market, and this privilege was built on solid grounds. Now such privilege is crumbling, and it’s always going to get worse, at least until the unionization of the tech sector reaches good levels and it will take a while.
In the face of that, I wonder how long software-engineer libertarians will keep LARPing being billionaire capitalists, because they've got a comfortable job and a little money in a 401k.
It's sad. Because they've been propagandized, they're squandering their real economic power when they have it, instead of taking action to be prepared for the day when that power won't be there to protect them.
That said, unions (tech unions in particular) need to be hyper-focused on the broad interests of all workers in their remit, so as not to be defeated by decide-and-conquer tactics over polarizing political issues.
I was waiting for the punch line where the author gives all that sweet money back to the terrible system they despise, and finally washes their hands clean of it.
Unfortunately, such a line never came. I guess the money was just too good.
Give it 2-3 weeks we’ll see another article like this. Might be FAANG, might be not. But it seems like nobody is willing to truly sin against the capitalist god with proper repentance. Take a wheelbarrow, put the money in, hand it back and say “no thank you.” Until a person does this, their words are meaningless.
> Until a person does this, their words are meaningless.
Heavily disagree! The author actually did a lot of meaningful work for less than meaningful money, so they did put their money where their mouth was. They made a lot of effort of disentangling as much as possible from a system they, like many others, see as amoral and corrupt. Sure, realizing capitalism is rotten is often accompanied by having the financial means to shun it, but it's an achievement nonetheless.
> But it seems like nobody is willing to truly sin against the capitalist god with proper repentance
The proper repentance against the capitalist god is to get as much money you can out of the system, and then use it in various anti-capitalism measures: like establishing communes, unions, doing pro-bono work, etc etc. Which the author thought about, did, and discussed at length.
> I was waiting for the punch line where the author gives all that sweet money back to the terrible system they despise, and finally washes their hands clean of it.
What good is done by dismissing the positive efforts people are actually willing to take, and demanding sacrifices so extreme they'll be very rare?
No one can actually escape capitalism, even through dramatic personal action.
> It’s hypocrisy. Give the money back if you don’t like the way it tastes.
That's a very misguided take. The author actually took the money, and spent it in non capitalist pursuits: doing lower paid but meaningful work, helping organizations unionize, in a way using capitalism's money against itself. Nothing hypocritical without that. By the way, the whole post is about the author struggling with seeing the hypocrisy of realizing how rotten capitalism is and participating in it at the same time.
> It’s hypocrisy. Give the money back if you don’t like the way it tastes.
To whom?
And, like I said before, no one can actually escape capitalism (except, I suppose, through suicide), so there's no "finally wash[ing] their hands clean of it" which you are demanding.
Edit: there is a kind of defense of capitalism that exploits its inescapably: a demand to either 1) support it (usually unstated), 2) neutralize yourself totally to show your commitment (e.g. smash all your things and somehow live without capitalism), or 3) have your critique rejected as hypocritical and therefore invalid. It's a blanket rejection of critique that's obscured, so its unreasonableness isn't so obvious.
TL;DR European with a masters's degree, free healthcare and no children has the freedom to jump around in their career and even take extended breaks to indulge in hobby projects.
What an amazing thing - "free healthcare" results in regular people being able to do what they want with their lives rather than being stuck doing something they don't want to!
"Free" healthcare is actually massively subsidized by our own taxes, which can reach as much as 52% where I live. We also have paid parental leave (maternal and paternal), good public transport, paid sick leave, and all the goodies that make a society civilized.
I mean, it's not nonsense. Anyone who is familiar with either health or defense policy details knows that the US taxpayer is absorbing an absurd amount of cost which enables other countries to do things we cannot. When it comes to healthcare, other countries can mandate price caps on services and drugs because their economies are merely importing, not developing, the medical equipment and drugs. When it comes to defense, the safety provided by the US military and nuclear umbrella allows other countries to spend less -- this was so obviously a problem that even Donald Trump could see it.
> Anyone who is familiar with either health or defense policy details knows that the US taxpayer is absorbing an absurd amount of cost which enables other countries to do things we cannot
That, too, is nonsense. The price of insulin in the US is roughly 10 times than the price of the same drug, produced by the same company, in Canada. Same applies for many life-saving drugs which are price-regulated in the rest of the civilized world, while in the US they are left to be determined to a large extent by the "free market". Whether you import the drugs or services or not, you can still put a price cap on them, but the US govt simply refuses to do so, by choice.
