No matter how visionary, proficient, and user-respecting you are as a developer, if you aren't complicit in earning all the money in the world at all costs, you're gonna get replaced by someone else who is.
There are plenty of small companies chasing a dream other than total economic world domination. Obviously if you look at Facebook etc that's all you're going to see.
Also, good luck running a business, any business of any size, without caring about money. Once you're responsible for the the livelihood of your employees and yourself (and maybe even SO and your progeny) your perspective changes radically.
That is until they are pressured to "grow" by their investors that they do have more often than not.
> Also, good luck running a business, any business of any size, without caring about money.
I've worked at a company that was alive and well without chasing profits. It did a bare minimum of monetization to cover its expenses and get a little extra, and that was it. Users were happy, we were happy too. Then the investors decided they've had enough of it, sold their shares to others and those forced the CEO to leave. It was then acquired by a big corporation. I quit in around two years after that when I realized there's no going back and it's only going to get worse over time. It took a lot of effort to make myself go to HR and tell them I'm resigning. I still miss the spirit that was there when I joined. And I'm not sure there are any more companies like this, especially in 2020.
Another point you are missing is that not all companies work that way either. Many people start their own business with their own money and don't have to answer to investors. Look outside of tech: restaurants, design studios, stores, etc.
Yes and you will eventually get it back if your company turns profit — any profit. That doesn't in any way imply growth at all costs which is what the world is obsessed with today because stocks. Practically, it doesn't make much sense to earn hundreds or even thousands times more money than what you spend, yet most companies do just that. It ends up laying idle on bank accounts, not benefitting the end users and society at large in any way.
> Would you be happy giving your money away?
Yes if that meant making the world better.
> Many people start their own business with their own money and don't have to answer to investors. Look outside of tech: restaurants, design studios, stores, etc.
And those usually respect their users/clients.
- The arbitrary deadlines that serve no purpose. Example: we have to update our app every week/month because reasons.
- The utter lack of understanding of the concept of feature completeness. Example: operating systems that update every year for no good reason whatsoever. What's the point of updating from Mojave to Catalina as a user? What new does it bring? How does it empower the user in a way not before possible? No one knows because it does not. It merely moves things around for the sake of change.
- No one wants to understand what they're abstracting away. People keep piling abstractions upon abstractions yet can't answer the basic questions about how their operating system works at low level.
- Fashion. A lot of it. Basically, if you're doing Android, you MUST want Kotlin and Jetpack and Compose. Same for web — SSR is soooo 2010, gotta make that news website a single-page application because how come would we not use React. IMO, fashion has no place in engineering.
- This "we'll always be able to ship an update" attitude. This is the worst. No one wants to make high-quality software any more, they want to move fast and break stuff at the expense of the end-user sanity. I can't understand how this way of thinking came to exist tbh.
- Business incentives. They ruin everything, but it's especially felt in software engineering.
- Priorities in general. No one is considering what they're making a tool to help the user achieve something. They're making these monstrosities that always put their own interests before those of the user. Dark patterns, purposely inconvenient and awkward UIs, spammy notifications that don't correspond to real events, you name it. In my book, that's not the way to go.