Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
At least to some extent, this is a &quot;Hegelian pendulum.&quot;<p>In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white &quot;calculation solutions&quot; for the enterprising enterprise.<p>Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can&#x27;t invent the iPhone wearing a suit writing business requiremnt compendiums.<p>Startups hired world changers and made a customer and emloyee happiness index. Google wrote &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; on a chalkboard. Gmail was better than outlook. All was good.<p>Then some tension surfaced. Advertisers thought they would be happier tracking users. Users thought this was creepy. Making generals happy did not make employees happy. Someone erased &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; from the blackboard.<p>Back to square one.<p>Google (and &quot;SV&quot;) have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank. Now, they use euphemisms and secrecy to avoid saying stuff that sounds bad.<p>Btw... It&#x27;s interesting how iconic &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; was as a slogan. They couldn&#x27;t live up to it, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it didn&#x27;t impact.