I understand his desire to leave tech (my name is "techxit"). Most people want out by the time they're 30. They realize that the job isn't about advancing the state of computer science or building useful things. It's about micro-optimizations of business processes that don't matter and that won't be rewarded.
I've actually considered an exit consultancy as a side project: helping techxiters find jobs in government, research, and business when they're 30-40 and the traditional career switches (e.g. MBA school, which only provides elite connections at the top-5 level) aren't available. There are a lot of highly talented people who have no idea how they're going to get out of the mess they started making at 22 when they thought this career (which pays very well in the early years but fails most people in mid-career) would do more for their careers than it did.
Donald Trump's campaign and the Silicon Valley scene are basically the same thing: High Frequency Experimental Assholery. You try things (in politics, nasty nicknames; in business, open-plan offices and "Agile" neo-Taylorism and reduced health benefits) and use what plays and toss aside what doesn't. Just as Trump A/B tested nicknames until he found ones that stuck (regardless of their truth value) the Silicon Valley economy is one that A/B tests new ways to squeeze workers, customers, and to a lesser degree because they're savvier and more in on the game, investors.
People with enough talent to comprise leverage are starting to realize that "startup" is just the new corporate ladder, but with worse health benefits and more instability. The promises of fast promotion and investor-level introductions and lucrative exits almost never come through.
Within 5 years, it'll be the leftovers who remain in the venture-funded scene. Good programmers will be extremely thin on the ground.
That's the good news. The Y Combinator/Donald Trump model of business is short-focused and won't survive. The bad news is that there aren't a whole lot of jobs in "regular" Corporate America for top talent either. There are a few, but most of what these large companies do is just as boring as what the VC-funded startups these days are doing.
My fear is that the toxic startup culture (open-plan offices, Agile) will spread into Corporate America proper and make those jobs just as bad as the SV-funded startup jobs.
What further evidence that she's an establishment hack could have convinced you?
I'm in my 30s, which means that I'm 97 in tech years. So I remember the 1990s. People were horrible to that woman. Her complaint about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is spot-on. The Establishment beat the hell out of her.
So she realized that she had to work with the Establishment to get things done. Like I said, I'd rather take a chance of planting a bomb in it than throw a brick at it. And if I'm wrong and Clinton proved a sellout, we could fire her in 2020.
Yes, she accepted her market rate for speeches at Goldman Sachs... after leaving public service. Wouldn't you? I despise Goldman Sachs and I applied to work for them at one point, because if I'd gotten the Core Strats gig, it would have been good for my career. Almost all of us are whores, or were at one time. That's how capitalism works.
The Democratic establishment sold out their base.
I dislike the Democratic establishment (although it is less onerous than the Republican one). I dislike the fact that left-leaning and rational people face a complacent one-party system. Not enough to vote for Trump.
Just saying that people are "dirty" because they have friends in the Establishment is bigoted and Trumpist. We have to accept that people have different strategies for dealing with corruption, corporatism, and national failure and that one only knows the right one in hindsight.
In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton got the shit kicked out of her by that same corrupt establishment for (a) trying to fix healthcare, and (b) being a woman and having an IQ over 140. (Sexism and racism both have a U-shaped distribution on the economic spectrum, but the top of our society is even more sexist than the bottom.) I'd rather plant a bomb in the Establishment, by electing a closet liberal who's been playing centrist in order to get in, than throw a brick at it and only do superficial damage by electing a political naif who'll surround himself by right-wing psychopaths.
Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Peter Thiel are categorically not what this country needs. I wish we had given Hillary a chance. If she had turned out to be an Establishment hack, we could fire her in 2020.
The problem is that we allowed this election to be cast as a clash between Corporate America's superego and its id. The fact that Hillary Clinton came from a middle-class Midwestern background and that, while she's absolutely terrible at optics, she's above-average for ethics and honesty among politicians... got missed. People went for raw id rather than what they perceived as the superego of a corrupt system.
I personally think that Hillary is far more liberal than she was given credit for. She's been turned into a cynical pragmatist by 20+ years of bitter experience in politics... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think her heart was in the right place all along. She'd probably twist arms and threaten careers of people on both sides of the aisle to get a public option passed, and that's the kind of ballbuster the country needs. However, she's the sort of person who does very well in 1-on-1 interactions but fails with rooms and groups. She has grace but no charisma. She let her self be painted as a duplicitous Establishment hack.
The irony is that Clinton and Trump voters both voted on the premise of their candidate being radically different from what they'd seen. Clinton voters believed that she was a liberal working within the establishment who'd bring us single-payer healthcare. Trump voters (except for the small percentage who actually are "deplorables", meaning racists and sexists and xenophobes) believed that Trump's dog-whistle rhetoric was just cynical game-playing. It bothers me that people accused Clinton of being "two-faced", while supporting a candidate in whom the best-case scenario is that he doesn't believe half the shit he says.
We also have a country where people hate the perceived cultural elite that is occasionally condescending ("flyover country") more than they hate the socioeconomic elite that is actually ruining their lives and that needs, for the good of red and blue staters, to be overthrown. Numbers may explain that. There are more of us in the 4.99% for them to hate than in the 0.01% that something actually needs to be done about (although I doubt that Trump is the solution).
I'm very liberal and have a lot of admiration for Obama and Clinton, despite their flaws. I don't hate Donald Trump or Donald Trump voters. I feel sad for them and for the fact that our country has disemployed so many people, and left so many people out in the cold, that they felt like their only living option was... this. I'd pity them, but they want my pity even less than my hate.
I hate the racism and sexism that his movement represents. I hate that people are treating his election as a vindication of the worst elements of our nation's history, rather than an expression of sheer desperation from the burping turtle at the bottom of the stack.
I've worked in tech for 10 years. It's full of people who did not vocally support Trump (and may well have voted for Clinton) but who perpetuate sexism and racism and think that they're doing so for valid business reasons ("culture fit"). I know who the enemy is and I know who to hate. It's not the guy in Milwaukee who lost his job and his dignity and can't afford to insure his family and gets socked with an "individual mandate" penalty for it.
This is great (although it's not enough) and more cities should do it. It's an effective use of public policy and a powerful statement and I'm thrilled to see it.
This is the good kind of nationalism, the kind where people band together to defeat the global elite and the upper class/0.1% instead of letting them divide-and-conquer us (Red States vs. Blue, white vs. black, immigrant vs. native, Boomers vs. Millennials).
I wish that our recent display of nationalism in the US had not been one of the disgusting kind.
I'm staying. Unless being in the US becomes presently dangerous to me or my family, I'm here. This is my country and I'm going to fight for it and I'm going to fight especially for the people (like my foreign-born, non-white wife, and like many friends who are black, Latino, or Muslim) who need someone to fight for them more than ever.
Fuck Thiel, fuck Y Combinator, fuck racism and sexism and fuck calling Clinton "the lesser of two evils" because people can't differentiate between a security violation [1] and a 40-year career of housing discrimination, fraud, misogyny, tax evasion, and brazen narcissism. And especially fuck the anti-intellectualism that has taken over not just corporate life and the software industry, but now political life wholesale.
[1] And as someone who's worked for the Feds, I am pissed as hell at Clinton for her email server. If the Republicans had put forward someone decent, I might have gone that way. Trump, on the other hand... just no.
If you live in California or NY, considered the tech hubs of U.S., there's not much worry. Those states are so liberal, a conservative House+Senate+Prez isn't going to make a difference. Republicans are usually for leaving laws to the state as well.
Bullshit. First of all, high house prices are there because most of the country is dying (another causative factor of this shocking election). Second, as much as "Obamacare" failed, it was better than doing nothing-- we had a 9/11 every 24 days under the old health insurance system-- and repealing it will kill people in blue states and red ones. Finally, the threatened trade wars will put our economy in a deep recession.
It's too early to tell. Trump could turn out to be a "normal" Republican and then we're probably fine. Or, this could be a complete disaster.
I've actually considered an exit consultancy as a side project: helping techxiters find jobs in government, research, and business when they're 30-40 and the traditional career switches (e.g. MBA school, which only provides elite connections at the top-5 level) aren't available. There are a lot of highly talented people who have no idea how they're going to get out of the mess they started making at 22 when they thought this career (which pays very well in the early years but fails most people in mid-career) would do more for their careers than it did.