Where’s Your Tegridy?

Important disclaimer: this is an opinion thread. It’s based on my observations using this app in the last couple of weeks. Take it for what it is. Before i make my hypothesis, I’d like to share my observations of the Blind community. 1) Many of the people using this app are intelligent, higly motivated and very competitve. 2) The median age of users is relatively low. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably in the low-mid 20s. 3) There are a LOT of Asian immigrants (or the kids of immigrants) here , and whether you like it or not, many of you were raised to be what I described in item #1. 4) Working at the big tech companies is (by this order): a status symbol, a smart move for one’s career, a good way to make lots of money while having great perks, and may sometime be very challenging and interesting (tho to my knowledge, only a minority of engineers get to work on the really groundbreaking stuff). 5) The media (fueled by tons of money paid by said companies) will romanticize and glorify big tech. Sure, now there’s a wave of criticism against some of them, but the seeds have been planted a decade ago and many of you believe that these companies are the pinnacle of one’s career. 6) Big tech will go above and beyond to create the perfect comfort zone. It’s hard to get into these companies, but it’s even harder to leave to a smaller company with inferior perks. All of the above makes people around here to circlejerk big tech and boast their egos about TC and shit. It’s mostly the awful FAANG acronym, but its not limited to that. So WTF is my problem? I’ll tell you. I’m a bit older than most of the community and got to be a part of the early days of personal computing and the internet. Back then, many developers were just excited about the tech! There were so many critical leaps in technology that have allowed us to be where we are today, and without those people, I don’t know if we would be in the same place. Early geeks didn’t do it for money or fame, they did it because they were curious and really wanted to make technology accesible to the world, and as y’all know, they were pretty succesful in doing that. Unfortunately, the open-source movement got hijacked by captialism. Software is so cheap and accesible that companies have turned to making us the product. Think about it, we are the ultimate resource, we never deplete. Now more than ever, there’s a need for brave people to disrupt tech. We need to have non profit, open source companies to build: * Mobile OS * Search engine * Web services (email, maps, etc.) * Social media networks that would put an end to the evil tyranny of FB * E commerce platforms * And many many other services that we use on a daily basis Imagine living in a world where the internet is unbiased, unfiltered (except for the obvious things that needs to be filtered). Governement and corporations have no idea of your activites online, goods and services cost dramatically lower, and the whole work culture shifts to a system that values the individual over revenue. Sure, it sounds utopian and too good to be true, but I’m an optimistic. Instead of glorifying fucking Google or Facebook. Glorify people that take a job in Wikipedia, Mozilla, and so on. You are the people that can make this change happen. Make your short life count; be remembered as the people that have changed the world for the better, and not as greedy egomaniacs that have contibuted to certain tech companies becoming too big to fail - leave that for Wall Street. Remeber, this kind of change cannot come from companies that seek to maximize profit. TC is not what’s gonna make you happy. Healthy society, good work-life balance and a really fucking insane vision, like taking down Google, are in my opinion way more rewarding than bragging about how much money you make by making the world a miserable place. I wish I could wake up one day and see more people take pride in working for positive organizations that make the world a better place. #FUCKFAANG P.S I’m waiting for a lot of backlash because this is not a popular opinion around here, BUT if i was somehow able to make you think about things differently, it was well worth sharing these thoughts.