If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on some interesting concepts that deserve thought...
Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant.
I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate journalism always trumps passion on its own.
As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths.
I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it was such a great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in a couple of years?
Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present, accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between them.
As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths.
Don't try to be manipulative, just lay out your case; neutrality doesn't have to be the goal, but readability would be a plus. One easy place to start is by removing all sentences that include the pronoun "I".
What do you think caused the decline and when do you think it happened?
Most of my direct experiences are in New York. I've never spent more than a week at one time in the Valley.
I don't think I'm the only person to spot the problem. Most people are afraid it will hurt their careers to speak up about it. I'm not as worried, because I know that I'm talented (i'm not worried about blackballing myself) and someone has to do the "dirty" work of blowing the whistle.
My first whistle-blowing experience was at Google, which was odd because people (a) acknowledged that some of this shit had been going on for a long time, but (b) really didn't want to hear it. They wanted to ignore it and still believe in their Googley workplace utopia. I literally have thousands of people (from G.) who've never met me but think I'm a loose cannon because I blew a whistle on someone else they never met. The thing is, though: it's a whistle, not a gun, that I'm waving. If you don't do scummy shit, you don't need to worry.
I had a longer response, but I think the short response is that this is just the way the corporate world is.
Things were also different when Silicon Valley companies were smaller and unknown...people seemed to join tech because they liked it, not because it was cool or they wanted to be like Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg or whatever.
I think the folks that would benefit most from an improvement in ethics are likely to read this without taking away anything more constructive than new ways to 'position' themselves to folks who aren't sociopaths.
still worth talking about tho. ( and yeah, a bit long for a blog post, but only minutes to read.. some things take more than 140 characters )
I'm not writing this for the unethical people. I'm writing it for the marginally good people who are lazing about while the world burns.
I'm a believer in a 10/89/1 model of human morality. (These numbers are approximate.) The Good are 10%. The Bad are 1%. The Weak are 89%. The Good outnumber the Bad and one might expect them to win, but the Bad just as often win because they are willing to go further in their manipulation of the Weak.
Fundamentally I think we agree. Shepherds, sheep and wolves.
If you think you're dealing with a wolf at your level in the company, look up. Ultimately, what the executive allows, it endorses. Odds are they see a man cut from the same cloth, admire his drive, his self interest and and his hard-headedness. If he's still there in a year, I'd say he represents the company's core values.
