This, so much this. Except I'm Russian so for me it was VKontakte, the social network used by literally everyone, before it was bought by Mail.ru Group and started being turned into a profit machine, by which time I quit. It used to be a small team, maybe 10 developers, 4 sysadmins, 1 designer, and 1 Pavel Durov. Now it's several hundred people and I can't help but wonder where is so much work coming from to keep all of them busy. It's also engulfed by advertising and most decisions are driven by KPIs, not user needs.

Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet.

Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do.

I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.