I spent 25 years in Silicon Valley, 100% of it working on making OSS happen, and 90% of it for a non-profit, while my peers from the early days almost all moved on to Big Tech by 2005-2010, most for 2x+ what I was making and a few for outrageously more than that. But I couldn't do it. The lure was attractive and I spent uncountable hours over about a decade debating whether to bite, but in the end I knew I couldn't feel good about myself if I was working for the absolute worst companies in the world.

I will leave this world with no meaningful legacy, but that's preferable to exiting knowing that I'd directly helped Big Tech get bigger and even more evil.

If I'd had kids, maybe my calculus would have been different. Maybe I'd have been motivated enough for their futures to sacrifice my conscience for them, but I did not, and so all I had to consider was whether or not I'd be able to live with myself, and the answer for me was no.

There have always been enough decent, even well paying jobs in software outside of the Big Tech companies, even in Silicon Valley, and so paying my bills and saving for a good retirement didn't require the soul sacrifice.

I don't begrudge anyone who bit that lure but I am entirely content to have said no myself.

▲

koverstreet a day ago | parent [-]

OSS is your legacy!

If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.

I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.

▲

asadotzler a day ago | parent [-]

I hear ya. Thanks for the reply. I'm glad you chose OSS and I fully share your views as expressed here.

I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.

I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.

	▲	koverstreet a day ago \| parent [-]
		OSS is even more important today. The days of the Unix vendors, early Google, when we had tech companies that were engineer focused - those days are gone. It's MBAs running the show, and that's how we get enshittification. There is no set future to what kind of technology we will build and end up with. We can build something where everything is locked away, and poor stewardship and maintenance means everything gets jankier or less reliable - or we can build something like the Culture novels, with technology that effectively never fails - with generations of advancement building off the previous, ever improving debugability, redundancy, failsafes, and hardening, making things more modular and cleaner along the way. I know which world I'd rather live in, and big tech ain't gonna make it happen. I've seen the way they write code. So if some people see my career as giving a middle finger to those guys, I'm cool with that :)