>The inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff.

I see this mindset in Seattle very often. A lot of my friends have recently been quitting their jobs to do something other than tech because of the overly inflated egos and the need for software engineers to constantly "do something new" instead of just maintaining & fix what they already have.

Or they get tired/can't keep up with having to continuously learn and adapt, which cognitive dissonance defensively turns into disdain for 'something new'.

As a web developer I've even come across other web devs who are chasing "hard problems" and claim CRUD apps are easy and boring. Yet many of them still manage to write nearly-unmaintainable and rigid APIs etc. They haven't even figured out the "basics" but want to go straight for the "hard problems".

One doesn't need to save the world. But not making it worse through ads and ubiquitous tracking would be nice.

So is not pushing negative externalities inherent to web apps to customers just because it makes web devs more productive.

Today's web is a monster.

> So is not pushing negative externalities [...] to customers

Same could be said of bailouts, recycling, MLM, and other sucker games...