Why I Didn't Do It
Why I Didn’t Do It Michael O. Church https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/why-i-didnt-do-it/
In July 2012, I wrote “Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs.” At the time, I wasn’t advising people to avoid startups– only to be selective about which ones to work for.
Advising tech employees to negotiate with employers does not earn love from all corners.
The problem with my earlier writing on technology is that it has diverged from my interests and, to a lesser extent, from my values. I spent years trying to inject efficiency and integrity into venture-funded, private-sector technology.
I experienced an aggressive public attack, starting in the fall of 2015. I was “de-platformed.” To wit, I was banned from Hacker News and Quora on false, defamatory pretenses. Why was I banned? It had nothing to do with my conduct on either site. First, I suggested that, instead of enduring the creep of micromanagement and surveillance, software engineers might consider collective bargaining. Second, I wrote a blog post that Paul Graham thought was about him– it wasn’t. Third, Y Combinator abused its power as an investor in Quora to force a ban on my account. It would have shut the company down, costing 120 innocents their jobs, had it not complied.
It must seem bizarre that I’m still upset about website bans from two years ago. In fact, […] I’m disgusted by the defamatory pretenses they used to do so, and the public statements they made. Their goal wasn’t to get me off the sites (I was a top contributor) but to damage my reputation.
In early 2016, I was informed that I had been turned down for a job because of these bans. The perception was that I’d been humiliated by Dan Gackle and Marc Bodnick and failed to strike back. This petty gangster shit ought to be beneath me.
I don’t want to “strike back”. I don’t want a damn thing to do with those sick fucks. Revenge keeps you involved. Life’s too short.
I spoke to a public relations specialist about that experience. She asked me what money I would have made if I had gotten the job. I told her. She laughed.
It amused her that, the stakes being so low, I’d even care to consult a PR coach at all. Here’s what I had to explain to her: the rest of the economy doesn’t want people from the startup world. […] In the tech industry […] it’s usual that one has to change jobs every 18 months to have a career, because those companies don’t invest in their people or promote from within. In real careers, that’s a sociopath’s résumé.
There are many undisclosed dangers of private-sector technology. Yes, it pays well, relative to most other careers, in the first 5 years. Still, it maroons almost all of them by middle age– and “middle age” in tech means 30. The job-hopping résumé that’s necessary in private-sector technology looks terrible anywhere else. Silicon Valley may think that it’s the future, but the rest of the country looks at five jobs in 6 years and says, “Nope.” Those who enter the startup scene often ignore the high probability of being stuck there. They think they’re younger and more invincible than they really are.
I ought to admit that I’ve never been great at processing the bizarre adversity that started with my first attempts to improve the tech industry. I have nightmares and panic attacks. I Google phone numbers I don’t recognize. I watch my back, especially in large cities.
The anonymous threats, the unjustifiable closing of doors, the necessary vigilance… that took a toll on me in 2015 and ’16. For an example of what I was going through, a homeless person in San Francisco chased me, brandishing a stick. He told me not to “fuck with” certain people, whom he named.
Even I have trouble integrating these experiences, years later. I’ll confess to this: the other-than-real aura of certain events in the 2010s has led me to seek professional assistance in their processing. The normal reaction to abnormal occurrences, sometimes, requires that.
At that rock-bottom point in March, I was considering my own exit. Why? [Until then] I held a certain opinion. Namely, that private-sector technology was a well-intended but wayward industry.
I had this sense of computer programming as this noble activity; we were automating away worlds’ worth of undesirable work. I learned, abruptly, that I was wrong about almost everything. I realized that I’d invested in almost 10 years in an immoral career.
[T]echnical matters are hills of sand compared to the shit mountain that is our industry’s ethical failure.
So, there I was, in March 2016, doubting whether I wanted to consider existing. Spoiler alert: I’m still alive. As a general rule, I’m not suicidal, for two reasons.
First, while I don’t ascribe to literal religion, I find it plausible-to-likely that (A) there’s more to consciousness than we see on the surface, and (B) that my conduct in this life matters. So, I see no upside in self-violence, even when it tempts.
Second, when I get to that point, I often pretend I am dead or dying, just for the exercise. “I’m dead already; what do I do now?” We’re all terminally ill, after all; we just don’t know the timeframe.
Over 2016, for reasons mixing protest and privacy, I accelerated my own de-platforming. It was bad for my reputation to be banned from Hacker News and Quora on the defamatory pretenses that were chosen, but it was good to be banned from them.
What I realized, that year, was that the addiction to internet microapprovals had damaged my focus. It became hard to read, much less write, significant work.
It’s a sad fact, but most of what we do in technology is destructive. Very few of us make new things under the sun. Most of us make business processes cheaper. There’s nothing wrong with that; we might think, naively, that the value we create would be invested into research and development. That’s not what happens. Businessmen lay people off to pay their own bonuses. We’re the ones who make that possible. Society gets worse with each iteration, and it’s our fault.
Life’s purpose is not to code people out of jobs. It’s not to wreck the reputations of innocents on social media. It’s not to get people addicted to meaningless social microapprovals. Whatever imperative I can find, in the moments when the darkness goes away, points in the opposite direction.
Create.