All companies with investors are evil, make no mistake.

They may have nice looking save the world charity campaigns, but once you get even close to affecting their revenue stream, the axe falls. The charity is only a publicity stunt to reduce wages.

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Some level of government intervention is needed to conrol investor's greed.

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It is just a question of business model: some business models are eviler than others. Making people pay for operating systems being possible the most evil of all.

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One thing must be said however. You can learn a lot by working in a good company, because it ends up putting you in contact with practical real problems that you wouldn't otherwise see by just doing your own random low-tech startup. This is especially valuable if said company is also enlightened enough to use and contribute back to open source software, thus improving the world and paying back the moral debt of using other people's work for free.

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Another important point to consider is who in the company is evil. In a sane tech company, the lowly engineers are going to be non-evil. And then the more you go up the management chain, the more aligned you have to be with investors, and thus the more and more evil you get. HR is just evil from the bottom though, it's just the nature of their job.

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Ciro's everyone gets a raise story

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Once upon a time, when Ciro worked at a company, one day the company decided to give everyone a 20% raise.

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The likely reason was that Apple was coming to town, and was sucking the fuck out of the company's talent.

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Nothing ever drove it so clearly into Ciro's heart the obvious fact that even for skilled jobs, companies don't pay you what you're worth. They pay you as little as possible so you won't quit to join someone else. It is pure market forces in play.

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The annoying thing is that people are highly non-fungible, so much like painting auctions, you can only estimate your price by putting yourself on auction and seeing what people will pay for you, i.e. interviewing for new jobs.

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Another point is that people have all sorts of stupid restrictions such as not wanting to work on certain areas for moral reasons, or not wanting to move away from a certain area they like. Companies will of course readily exploit such weakness to be able to pay less. Silly non-rational beings.

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The place for beauty in companies

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Many/most companies are unable to give any beauty to its employees.

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Hiring is simply a process of "let's get this money making project working ASAP", bring people in, without considering Brooks's law.

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And then when that happens, companies put people in extremely narrow knowledge areas, making them unable to see or participate in the bigger picture of things, unless they spend 10 years there and reach architect status.

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This is perhaps particularly painful for high flying birds like Ciro Santilli.

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Companies need a higher top to down force that attempts to actually teach the business and tech to every employee to counter the low level manager get things done now pressure.

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Companies that are able to do that, will have many more employees with a sense of purpose, and with the ability to innovate. Those companies will win.

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Technology company

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Big tech

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Video 1. Humourous depiction of some big tech organization charts. TODO author.

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