Software engineers should be a little bit cynical

I don't know who this kind of cynic vs. idealist vs. optimist thinking works on/for, but it doesn't seem to give me any kind of conceptual edge. Instead of trying to frame things in terms of a mood or a feeling, it's better to try to understand things in terms of what is likely and unlikely to happen.

Large corporations are just groups of people with conflicting incentives, and that means they are basically incapable of performing certain kinds of tasks. It also means that when the incentives do align, some tasks are very likely to be completed, even with other corporations or governments working in opposition.

Some of those tasks might be things you care about, like making a product of a certain quality, or furthering some other goal you have. In all those cases, it is best to to first think about what is most likely to happen and what is unlikely to happen. You have to think of the organization as just another phenomenon that you could exploit if you properly understood it. Unfortunately, how to manipulate complex systems of humans is an open problem, and if anyone had effective, repeatable solutions, then investors would demand that they be implemented.

As it is, most corporations don't act in the interest of the investors a significant amount of the time, even though they are supposed to. The only thing we can reliably bet on is: all organizations tend towards dysfunctional bureaucracies, the longer they live, and the bigger they get.

Being british, I am cynical by default.

Its baffling to see US engineers repeatedly being shat on by the company, and yet still retain belief in the chain of command.

But, to be a good cynic, you need a rich information network to draw on to see what the wider business is doing and thinking. You must understand the motivations of the business, so that you can be correctly cynical.

> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.

I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.

> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.

You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.

Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.

What the post fails to understand is that a lot of the "top" people if big companies just doesn't understand the regular user because, well, they do not live a life like the regular users.

Just wanted to pop in and say that I think Sean is absolutely right here. I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.

However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!

My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.

Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.

This is just a coping mechanism.

We know that C-level doesn't understand the tech they are evangelizing at all, and we know that at some point, they end up approving a lot of new middle management hires that are just as power hungry as they are, so the feedback loop from the shop to the top is sealed off. These two catastrophes seal the fate of any company.

If your company is still not infected with these, you can still call plausible deniability or oversight or whatever excuse for them, and true, they are human. But if I look into their eyes and see nothing but desire for power, that's a toxic company and no amount of "healthy cynicism" will help me with that.

I do not understand the dilemma.

The sole reason I am hired for my position as an engineer is that I am expected to make the life of my hiring manager easier. Not to save the world, not to do "the right thing" (whatever this means), but help my manager. During the interview, I had a chance to a get a rough idea what I am going to be responsible for.

If the organization or the mission changes to the extent that it is no longer consistent with my values, I start pinging my former colleagues working elsewhere.

So where is the intrigue?

The author seems like a nice guy, but perhaps a bit naive regarding the efforts big tech companies go to to crush employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...). They appear to be a staff level engineer at a big tech company - I don't know how much money they make, but I suspect it's an ungodly amount.

The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.

If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.

It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.

This is a consequence of late-stage technology. When few people could make it work at all, the people who could were left alone to make it work. Once it was a routine job, management and political priorities began to control.

This has happened with other technologies as they matured. Bridges. Electrical power. Radio. (The story of Roebling, the Tweed Ring, and the Brooklyn Bridge is worth knowing. Tweed tried to steal too early in the history of the technology, and it backfired on him big-time.)

This happened to software a while back. Semiconductors had it less because keeping up with Moore's Law dominated the politics.

Learn more about the history of technology and this pattern reappears.

> It is just a plain fact that software engineers are not the movers and shakers in large tech organizations. They do not set the direction of the company. To the extent that they have political influence, it’s in how they translate the direction of the company into specific technical changes. But that is actually quite a lot of influence!

I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.

> It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.

People who run large tech companies want one thing: to increase shareholder value. Delivering "good software" (a very, very squishy term) is secondary.

I don't even think "good" is a quantifiable or effective measure here. C-level executives are deviating from reality in terms of what they say that their products are capable of versus how their products actually perform. If you're a CEO shipping a frontier model that adds some value in terms of performing basic technical tasks while simultaneously saying that AI is gonna be writing all code in 3-6 months, you're only doing good by your shareholders.

>> Cynical writing is like most medicines: the dose makes the poison. A healthy amount of cynicism can serve as an inoculation from being overly cynical.

I disagree. Cynicism is a toxicity and will fester. Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical (kinda like how people feel about Geddy Lee's voice).

>> Tech companies have a normal mix of strong and weak engineers.

Yes, that's not "a little cynical" that's a healthy perspective.

I think OP is really trying to tell people to be stoic, not cynical, and is confused on the vocabulary.

Props to Sean for this post. I have found his writings to be much closer to how I’ve learned to understand my career and companies than many standard reddit/HN posts portray things.

I too am an aussie swe (just 3700km up the road) who likes lots of things about working (on a much lower rung) in big (well, mid) tech. I have learned so much more in large orgs than startups, and I'm not done with it.

However:

We DO live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape.

Large companies ARE run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power.

I have compromised my principles by giving them (or anyone) my labor.

but I don't lie to myself or anyone else about it. I don't find any need to rehabilitate the structural and personal failings I encounter. When my friends call me out for working at EvilCorp, I don't argue. I know it's like any job: it's all dirty money. Instead, I deal with reality: weigh up pros and cons. I judge each year just how much Corporate I'm willing to swallow to support my dependents.

I enjoy the author's redefinition of cynicism and optimism. These are useful ideas to consider and I've given it some thought, arriving at an attitude of Becoming that I guess some would call idealism.

PS OMFG I just realised its MS. I believe this is what the kids call cringe.

In 2026 everyone could do worse than become a little bit more cynical

Lol thanks for reading my blog post! (Alex here) Your statement of my position:

> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix. The only thing an ethical software engineer can do is to try and find some temporary niche where they can defy their bosses and do real, good engineering work, or to retire to a hobby farm and write elegant open-source software in their free time.

Let me re-state this in another way, which says functionally the same thing:

> Companies are hierarchical organizations where you sell your specialized labor for money. You should do what they expect of you in order to collect a paycheck, cultivate as enjoyable of a working environment as you can, then go home and enjoy the rest of your free time and your nice big tech salary.

Is this cynical? In some sense, sure, but I don't think it's inaccurate or even toxic, and I think it's probably how something like 90% of big tech employees operate. Sometimes your writing makes it seem like this is actually what you think. If your "objective description" of big tech companies were in service of this goal -- getting along better and not fighting the organization to preserve your own sanity and career -- I don't think people would take issue with it.

But you make the analogy of public service and seem in some sense to believe in values that are fundamentally at odds with these organizations. Is your position that, through successful maneuvering, and engineer can make a big tech organization serve the public in spite of internal political and economic pressures? This seems far more idealistic than what I believe. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

This reads like a pickme LinkedIn post.

> > We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, [...]

This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...

Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.

Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?

Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.

(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)

(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)

> For instance, you might think that big tech engineers are being deliberately demoralized as part of an anti-labor strategy to prevent them from unionizing, which is nuts. Tech companies are simply not set up to engage in these kind of conspiracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Indeed:

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

George Bernard Shaw

A very good piece. Balance always. Ultimately, everything is politics, and always will be - that's reality; it's always people. Pick your poison, idealism or cynicism; in any organization you'll have to deal with the people. That's the balance. It's not easy.

They should at least understand why they are getting paid and basic business logic instead of thinking they are above it because they are 10x or whatever. You are a cost center unless you are making that line go up.

If we're doing cynicism - even if you write lovingly hand crafted free range OSS code - EvilCorp can still come along and use it as part of the EvilCorp backend.

Your just working for them for free rather than getting paid.

I appreciate that the author looks specifically at what elements of a given viewpoint are idealistic vs cynical.

Idealism about one’s own behavior vs idealism about others’ behavior is an interesting tension to explore further.

We're all just trying to do a good job. I think it's very rare for someone to be earnestly malicious attempting to block the company from doing well.

plain and minimally styled UI is going to make a huge comeback in 2026. i think people are tired of all the maximalism in web dev

Everybody (and not just Software Engineers) should keep this quote from Francesco Guicciardini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Guicciardini) always in mind when dealing with people/companies/world;

To get a reputation for being suspicious and distrustful is certainly not desirable. Nevertheless, men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to other's interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less.

-- No. 157, Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi)

> There are very few problems that you can solve entirely on your own. Software engineers encounter more of these problems than average, because the nature of software means that a single engineer can have huge leverage by sitting down and making a single code change. But in order to make changes to large products - for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.

Maybe, just maybe, when any single individual is unable to propose a product improvement due to the requirement of ass-kissing and favor-dealings involved... the company is too big and should (be) split up.

Corporate inertia is what is killing many a Western company against the competition from China.

It always sounds so ridiculous to me when people working for Meta, Microsoft or Google talk about idealism, or solving good problems, or really any kind of values. The likes of you have very much sold your soul to the devil in exchange for a lot of money. Any kind of idealism you may hold is nothing but a carefully crafted illusion to keep you from thinking too hard about what you are a part of, what are you are doing. If it hasn’t made click after big tech fell on their knees in front of Trump, there’s nothing left to say anymore.

So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.

A little bit?

i genuinely believe the correct response to a post like this is: "shut the fuck up"

> "you should do things that make your manager happy"

If doing things ethically (not defrauding investors and customers) keeps your manager happy, then do it. If not, do it fucking anyways.

I have a somewhat tangential question. If this is late stage capitalism, and tech CEOs are compared to robber barons to show how rich and greedy they’ve become, then what stage was capitalism in when the actual robber barons were doing their thing a hundred years ago?

>cynical: concerned only with one's own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them

Indeed you are, for calling software developers “engineers” meanwhile software development is actually writing, so they are more closer to writers than engineers.

[dead]

[dead]

> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix.

This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.