> My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees.
Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.
What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.
I'd say it's a bit of both. You can build yourself up and find such work in companies which have it. Not switching employers very frequently helps, because building credibility takes time.
After you've built up credibility in some interesting tech, other companies would find you based on your work.
This is just my observation, so take it with a grain of salt
Airbnb reviews suck. I once had a terrible experience with an issue. I worked with Airbnb to check out early. The host left me a terrible review which was false. Airbnb knows this because the facts were on their support chat with pictures, but Airbnb did not remove the review.
I stopped leaving reviews after that and have been avoiding Airbnb.
> It's a rare for-profit company that releases anything significant from pure niceness so I can't read it as a gift.
Philosophically speaking, do most people do something out of pure altruism? I personally don't believe so. Everyone has an agenda - be it to feel better, to score brownie points, to make people like them, etc. Why should we expect for-profit corps to be altruistic? We should remember their for-profit motives and also accept they can do good deed for non-altruistic reasons.
I guess this only changes the stable salary component, which will bring the first year's comp to more comparable levels. Amazon pays an insane amount of cash bonus the first two years to make up for their backloaded vesting and capped salary. Even then the total compensation was pretty high. It might be the case that their stock isn't growing as expected leading to employees to be unhappy.
Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.
What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.