I'm beginning to use "going public" as my indicator to stop using a product. My decade-old reddit account was recently deleted for this reason, as they were showing all the signs before they announced their intention to go public.

I'm really hoping DigitalOcean and Gitlab prove my theory wrong. You would think that private companies would be more prone to unethical practices.

You might be able to use it as an indicator when to stop working there too. Which sucks because public companies tend to pay nearly twice as much.

I've had a mixed bag of results on this one, but as someone who works in data, the sudden crunch to bring a company's architecture into SOX compliance can certainly be stressful enough to warrant leaving.

Right. They need to show growth every year in search advertising. One way to grow is to put more ads in more places. Of course, even before going public, they still had to grow (so that they could go public), but they had natural growth then.

Does anyone else fondly remember the early 2010s. When companies at least pretended to "Make the world a better place". Now it seems they're just racing to see who can be worth the next N trillion dollar company.

The Silicon Valley TV show quite vividly portrayed that era of tech, especially in the earlier seasons.