Oh yeah definitely not advocating just taking whatever job that pays the highest. Like I'd probably only take a job with the military if I thought I could get away with sabotaging it for a reasonable amount of time. But if the choice is between say joining the Google Docs team for $150k vs random local tech company for $70k, I'd take the Google job. Obviously, if there was a better company that paid highly or a company that didn't pay as high but is building an open source worker-owned Uber alternative, then that would be ideal but especially for new grads, those options often aren't available due to limited openings or lack of experience.
I guess the way I see it is that while $70k is good money, I'd still be exploited by capitalists and it would take me 8 years before I'm comfortable enough financially to start working full time on building open source, non-profit, worker-owned Uber whereas with $150k, it'd take less than 4 years. Also, for new grads, I imagine the experience that they'd gain at Google/FB would be more relevant to building open source worker-owned Uber than Random Local Tech Company.
While Google and FB are indeed the big bad, I'm not sure working for them, especially at entry level positions, will necessarily cause much harm. Like working on a product that got killed, you'd basically be paid to work on something that was causing them to lose money. Also, like I mentioned, I believe there are a lot of reasonable people working at these companies so if you do get put into a harmful project, then you could switch teams or at least blow the whistle/radicalize folks before getting canned.
I believe the actual working conditions there vary from team to team like with any other employer although I've heard Google is more chill in general compared to other places.
Oh yeah definitely not advocating just taking whatever job that pays the highest. Like I'd probably only take a job with the military if I thought I could get away with sabotaging it for a reasonable amount of time. But if the choice is between say joining the Google Docs team for $150k vs random local tech company for $70k, I'd take the Google job. Obviously, if there was a better company that paid highly or a company that didn't pay as high but is building an open source worker-owned Uber alternative, then that would be ideal but especially for new grads, those options often aren't available due to limited openings or lack of experience.
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I guess the way I see it is that while $70k is good money, I'd still be exploited by capitalists and it would take me 8 years before I'm comfortable enough financially to start working full time on building open source, non-profit, worker-owned Uber whereas with $150k, it'd take less than 4 years. Also, for new grads, I imagine the experience that they'd gain at Google/FB would be more relevant to building open source worker-owned Uber than Random Local Tech Company.
While Google and FB are indeed the big bad, I'm not sure working for them, especially at entry level positions, will necessarily cause much harm. Like working on a product that got killed, you'd basically be paid to work on something that was causing them to lose money. Also, like I mentioned, I believe there are a lot of reasonable people working at these companies so if you do get put into a harmful project, then you could switch teams or at least blow the whistle/radicalize folks before getting canned.
I believe the actual working conditions there vary from team to team like with any other employer although I've heard Google is more chill in general compared to other places.