I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life.
Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn.
Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.
This, so much this. Except I'm Russian so for me it was VKontakte, the social network used by literally everyone, before it was bought by Mail.ru Group and started being turned into a profit machine, by which time I quit. It used to be a small team, maybe 10 developers, 4 sysadmins, 1 designer, and 1 Pavel Durov. Now it's several hundred people and I can't help but wonder where is so much work coming from to keep all of them busy. It's also engulfed by advertising and most decisions are driven by KPIs, not user needs.
Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet.
Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do.
I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.
I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life.
Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn.
Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.