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."