Tell me you don't have a mortgage and kids without telling me

But my point is that you do have plenty options in the industry! For sure if you're in charge of something like this you can have a pretty decent job elsewhere. You sound as if those people have nowhere else to continue their careers... Am I wrong?

Yeah, you're kind of a little wrong. Sure, there are options. They don't pay like FAANG, like order of magnitude difference.

Lots of people get by fine with less-than-FAANG pay.

(FAANG salaries are not an "order of magnitude" higher than salaries at other U.S.-based companies for similar jobs.)

FAANG salaries are just at the level at which those companies discovered people are willing to sell their souls, or that is high enough to attract naive people who won't question why it pays more.

Speaking as someone "getting by" on lesser money, yeah, that's certainly true.

Maybe I'm just really bad at marketing/promoting myself or I gasp have to take work "below my pay grade" because it's still work and I've got bills, but I'm not netting six figures doing highly technical work (embedded development, electromechanical development, board layout and design, etc.). In the last five years I've had one in which I grossed six figures. I'd figure I just suck and am an outlier but I keep hearing the same stories from friends who are also not at big shops.

There are plenty of 6 figure jobs outside of FAANG, and the lowest pay I'd even fathom taking for a software development role isn't far below that (maybe 85-90k for a straight-out-of-school junior dev). If you're making less than that, with enough experience to be talking about "the last five years", then you probably should start looking for roles at other companies.

Yeah, probably, but I'm stuck with the current situation for now.

Wages for developer work are not consistent, though. I was making around $45K out of college in upstate NY in 2011 or so. I left that job around $55K in 2015 when we moved from the area. Those were entirely normal salaries in the NY capital district for developers with a four-year degree and proven skills in a given language.

I'm now in central VA and am friends with the owner of a local media/web development shop. Their average pay is around $20/hour. Remote work levels the field a bit now, but that's what folks who want to work locally at a desk are offered. They have people actually working there, so I guess folks think that's a reasonable pay "for the area."

Yeah. But those often don't take your soul.

It is not an order of magnitude. I work at a software non-profit and am paid reasonably compared to my FAANG friends. Sure, they make more, but not an order of magnitude more, not even double, and I can sleep at night knowing I'm trying to make the world better for humans rather than trying to enrich a few mega-corporations.

It's certainly double or more in many cases for rank-and-file developer jobs, in my personal experience, meaning "jobs I've worked or gotten offers on." Again, maybe I just suck, but then so do a lot of folks I know.

I mean "order of magnitude" in the sense that a 6-figure salary is an order of magnitude more than a 5-figure salary.

It's possible to provide for one's children without turning the world into a ruinous corporate dystopia. What a world to subject your children to.

No, "I have kids" is not an excuse. You do see how that makes this even worse, yes? To pretend to give a shit about future generations while gleefully destroying the liberties of those future generations?

I've got a mortgage and two kids, I don't have a FAANG job and live very comfortably. Stop spreading BS, FAANG doesn't have a monopoly on high paying tech jobs.

As the one employed member of my household (spouse is retired) I paid off a Silicon Valley mortgage in under 15 years working for a non-profit software outfit with no stock options or any of that, just a decent salary for a solid company for a good stretch of time. That you think it can only be done with a small handful of specific employers is silly.

They get paid lots of money.

But surely those folks can walk away and put in their CV that they quit because they were in charge of implementing one of the worst ideas the history of internet has seen so far. Wouldn't you hire someone that puts that in their resume?

People don't work for the dignity, they work for the paycheck. As long as people are willing to pay others more for doing this than saving the internet, it will continue the trend. Lashings will continue until morale improves.

> People don't work for the dignity, they work for the paycheck.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that. I do understand that line of thought if you are in a very complicated personal/financial situation but you're stating that the only driver is money, which is clearly wrong...

it may not be your experience, but 95% of us work because we need the money.

I do need an income too. I do pay rent, every single month. I do pay a loan, every single month. Bills? You guessed it: every single month. What's your point, really?

People are going to take their pay and do their job because to do otherwise could mean they can't maintain their lifestyle or keep their family provided to the same standard they're currently living at.

Altruism is not a default position, and is unusual in the real world.

I'm not saying that's how it should be, or that people shouldn't work to make it otherwise. But you say why don't all those people walk away from that? How far would you go? What if you had children depending on you? It's very easy to condemn other people as "greedy" but you show a lack of understanding, of empathy, perhaps, for how people in general function in the world if you assume they should just do what you say because "obviously, my moral stance trumps their concerns."

The good thing is that there are multiple sources of getting money.

those will walk away, others will come and to them money would be absolute motivator. If there's a thing humans can invent/implement, without any regulation, it'll be implemented (and often even with regulation it may be implemented)

If only there was some form of labor organizing that could allow workers to keep their job while collectively opposing building horrific things like this.

Why would the labor oppose building this? This makes their members tons of money.

>Wouldn't you hire someone that puts that in their resume?

To most employers, that would read as "prone to insubordination", and be an immediate red flag. Because each and every one of them will inevitably ask you to do something at some point that will be fucked up.

They won't need to be hired again. Work a few years, retire without a care in the world.

Yup, we've lost, what, two or three generations of developers to an industry that'd do better work by digging holes and filling them in? It's my guess that this is also why so much programming nowadays looks like it's being done by the bottom 10% of talent.

They do it because the money, though. I turned down a FAANG job partly because I'd have to relocate across the US and partly because I didn't think I could sleep at night working for them. Total compensation package for first year was $250-350K depending on performance, and there was a signing bonus. This was 2015 or so.

I often half regret that decision, because it hurts to know I could've ticked that income box rather than fighting month after month to keep work coming in (self employed/contractor).

Respect!

from random internet nobody...

Google is a big organisation, even if some people don't want to work on it, there are plenty of others who will. It's not as if every software engineer in the world shares your views and your principles.

Maybe there is still some who will fight the good fight and make the software purposely bad. How good is Google QA?

Fascists code too!

what has fascism got to do with ad blocking?

Ok but have you considered that making people watch ads to use an optional service is not a war crime

No, of course they haven't! Thanks for adding this insightful and revolutionary perspective to the debate. Everything which is less serious than war crimes is obviously morally ok.

found the google mole in this thread

It’s not the ads that are problematic. The corporate panopticon is.

That is the danger of a fat paycheck.

I can't recall where I read it but the biggest danger with having a fat paycheck is that your lifestyle changes drastically. More money? Well, now you can do/afford more expensive things, you can take more luxuries, have a bigger place, a fancier car, and so on.

And the problem comes when you have to cut back all that, you need a job that can support that lifestyle. I believe the best thing you can do if you have a fat paycheck is to exactly take the opposite approach: keep living simply, save as much as you can, yes give yourself a treat from time to time, but essentially keep an average lifestyle.

The day you need to go elsewhere and you find out that you are against the wall because you need that much money and you can't find a similar income is when you're basically screwed.

It is never about how much one makes it is always a matter of how much one spends.

That is... a gross simplification. There is a cost of living. If you include people giving you stuff for free in the "how much one makes" category, then you need shelter, food, healthcare, etc. There are plenty of people who struggle to make enough to pay for these necessities. We call this "poverty", and it absolutely is a matter of "how much one makes".

Even in poverty having to spend more than one makes is a problem. Therefore my statement maybe simple but true.

The best kind of truth in my book. I have lots of ideas about poverty but I was actually responding to the trap of high-earners. Careful spending is more critical in impoverished situations.

I'd go even further. If I was asked to run one of these projects I would subvert & sabotage the entire thing while pretending to be 150% on board.

Why not get paid by the devil while fighting his plans?

You don't even have to make it obvious that you are cratering it. There are so many shiny things in tech you could make it look entirely incidental.

Part of me reserves hope that this is what some of the engineers inside of Google are doing right now.

Let's hope that indeed is the case... But as a first reaction I'd expect some friction or resistance to this from within Google. What would be their rationale for exposing their plans on Github and not going silently as (I've recently learned) Apple did?

If you're listening to this message, you are the resistance.

Just look around in this thread you can find people defending Google. It is not hard to think an engineer would actually want to work on this themselves.

If it helps solve your puzzle: not everyone shares the same ideas as you. We're not a hivemind. I'm sure if you shared your profession and recent activities, someone will disagree with it.

A lot of engineers have to work everyday on detecting bots. They'll work on this to "solve" the problem. They don't care much about the open web and so on, it's not their job. There's only so much a single human can care about, and we all need to balance it to make sure what we truly care about isn't affected. The open web to us may be of importance. To them, the open web is a bunch of bots. Ethics, morals, etc. rarely plays a role.

There wouldn't be anything close to an open internet with the engineers of today. I despise my generation for this. Generalization yes, but the draw of big money to big tech did something. How about being smart for once and think two step ahead the next time...

For a while I worked at a company that did arguably worse things than Google does. Regardless of dignity and courage it's hard to just "walk away" from a paycheck when you have mouths to feed, a mortgage to pay, a family who gets sick and needs medical care, pets, hobbies, whatever. There's also the fact that for most of us work is a huge percentage of our time and our social lives can be deeply intertwined with our work lives--it can be a tough decision to walk away from all your colleagues and friends who you enjoy working with even if you don't particularly enjoy the work itself (sometimes shared hardships and commiseration can make those bonds even tougher to break).

Expecting engineers to die on this hill for us seems incredibly unfair. To balk at someone not upturning their life and (under the US healthcare system at least) endangering the health and well-being of themselves and their families in the name of dignity or morality when the net result of doing so would be exactly zero because Google can replace them in a heartbeat is, in my opinion, a gross and unnecessary misdirection of blame.

Those with conscience get filtered out of these kinds of projects.

I mean, we are in a climate crisis and massive worldwide inequality and some really competent people both made this happen and prevented the general public from being able to avoid this - because that happens to profit the few.

Most of the worldwide economy is predicated on this (capitalism). It's a logical outcome.

> How can software engineers work on something like this?

Sweet sweet advertisement money.