What Happened (Oct. 17, 2017 Edition)

I was a big-name tech blogger who, one day in February 2016, just up-and-quit. From 4000 views per day, I went to zero.

I worked at Google in 2011. My manager was so bad that the company apologized for his conduct. Related to the fallout, and probably not Google’s fault, I was placed on (and later removed, but too late) a Silicon Valley unionist blacklist and had significant job search difficulties (for which I’ve collected settlements, but far from enough) due to that.

Being on the “suspected unionist” list put large tech companies out of consideration for some time; I ended up working, in the mid-2010s, for some very unethical companies. At one, I was offered a promotion (to the job title I was promised on hire) if I signed a stack of performance reviews, some of which pertained to people who left before I arrived. When I refused to do so, I was fired.

I discovered in the mid-2010s that my account on Hacker News was “moderated” because I wrote a blog post in 2013 that Paul Graham thought was about him (it wasn’t). The result of this moderation was that my comments fell to the bottom of the page, as if they had received no upvotes.

In August 2015, I was banned from Hacker News on false pretenses. The moderator edited my comment in order to make a misleading account of what happened. Then, in September 2015, I was banned from Quora, also on false pretenses. Y Combinator, which owns Hacker News, is also an investor in Quora.

Among adults, website drama would be a non-issue, but it actually prevented me from getting hired in certain places. Why? Because tech is full of risk-averse pansies with no backbone or character, who shrink from any hint of controversy. Bullshit website drama actually matters in the tech industry. Nowhere else.

In early 2016, I started receiving death threats. […] When the death threats started hitting other people close to me, that’s when I shut down.

There was a moment when I realized that I’m just Done with so many things. I’ll work for startups, if the terms are good, but I have no delusions about wanting to be a founder. When you become a boss, you can be a force for good, or you can become the worst thing in another person’s life. If you’re the CEO and you create a rotten culture, you can become (indirectly, since they’ll blame the middle managers) the worst thing in 500 peoples’ lives. If you’re the CEO and try to create a good culture… well, you’ll probably not be able to raise VC, and they’ll probably fund your competitors and crush you. No thanks, for any of that. It’s not for me. There’s a reason why Silicon Valley is run by psychopaths[…].

About three years ago, I did a bit of consulting for a trucking company that involved performance management software. One of the objectives was to catch city drivers who were eating off-route (costing full cents in gas) in order to eat with their families or get cheaper lunches. When you do that kind of work, you’re basically licking Satan’s taint. It’s full-on Spreadsheet Eichmann shit. When I realized what the job was, I quit and I never billed a cent. See, most software people would write that code. They don’t care that they’re writing employee surveillance tools that ruin lives.

I wanted to go back to research, possibly get a PhD in computer science, and have a life of purpose rather than chasing dollars. […] Corporate technology is 97% corporate and 3% technology, and life is too finite for that “corporate” aspect.