this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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The objective of a corporation is to make money. Doesn't really matter which corporation.
And most of them would be wrong I'm sure. They're just making profit for a corporation. I'm sure most OpenAI and Anthropic employees also feel like they're making the world a better place.
I've had exactly one job in my life that wasn't software engineering. I was definitely making the world a better place, as I reduced e-waste generation by tons upon tons. Specifically, I fixed thousands of laptops slated for landfill, many of them fairly new and high spec so they'd get several years of usage after refurbishing.
What did I get in return? Poverty, timed piss breaks so I'd hit my targets (since nearly half of the already low salary was paid out as a "bonus" - after I left they raised salaries to keep up with minimum wage increases, but then reduced the bonus so they wouldn't actually have to pay people more). The owners were also unhappy that the profit margin was only 55%, they wanted to see 60% profit margin. Probably so they could sell the company for even more money. This was a 3 year old company making over a hundred million in revenue... On a 55% profit margin. Renting a studio apartment was about half my income, utilities included.
Every job since then has been a tech job of one type or another. None of them AI companies, but it doesn't really matter if you're doing payroll, healthcare, whatever. Ultimately you're just doing your job so some rich dude can buy another yacht, or so that the owner's wife could sell the company to a private equity company after nagging her husband into suicide because he didn't want to sell but she wanted to retire. And I DO work for a small company now, as a contractor, but you won't believe the insane luck and circumstances that got me into this job when layoffs were already happening everywhere.
And I live in a mostly sane country where you can still theoretically get by on a job doing whatever. Now imagine you're in Silicon Valley, earning 200-300k a year, paying a mortgage on a tiny house that cost well over a million, and your options for getting a new job are McDonald's, Walmart and whatever other stores are shit enough to work for that they're always looking for people, which are now paying a super high wage of $20 an hour because California. You still sure you want to change jobs?
Only way to get out without ending up homeless is literally to save up for multiple years working in that job you hate. Golden handcuffs pretty much.
Do try to remember that it usually takes years to get into another field of skilled work and you start at the bottom of the ladder, making shit wages and not everyone can just share a small apartment with roommates, some people have families
This is just the same false dichotomy you've been presenting all the way along: starve or sell out.
The undeniable and obvious fact you're avoiding is that loads of people have jobs that they find satisfying in a "life well lived" kind of way. There are loads of corporations who's employees believe in what they're doing.
Your timed piss break anecdote is not an example of a satisfying job. A job where you make minimum wage is not an example of a satisfying job.
It doesn't take years to get into another field, and you don't start at the start because you take all your skills and experience with you, obviously. I'm in my 40s, young family, working on a postgraduate degree in something tangentially related to the field I've been working in for 20 years. I do find my current job satisfying, I'm just weary of it. People can and do change professions all the time.
Objectively, this is very much a case of "I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas".
Like I said at the start, you don't get a free pass just because you're not a CEO.
"Hurr durr I'm incredibly privileged and the job market has been kind to me so it'll be kind to everyone"
You realize that most people can't just drop everything they're doing and get a degree, right? And a lot of people have jobs that require them to actually be present more than a few hours a week so they can't do it while staying employed either?
A bachelor's degree alone takes three years. Then you're gonna have an internship at some point before anyone even considers you able to do a job in another field. How is that "doesn't take years to get into another field"?
And there are billions in the world who don't have that.
Yea, but they're still working for a corporation. They're all still contributing to the same machine, doesn't matter if they're directly working for a tech company or not.
It was an example of a job where you actually do good for the world. That's what those kinds of jobs are like. You get abused to pieces because the company has a noble mission so you're more likely to stay around. This btw was considered to be head and shoulders above the company it metastasized out of (founders of the original company sold it and had their family members start up a competitor so their noncompetes wouldn't matter, then everyone got laid off a while later by the new owners). It now employs 500 people, or about 0.5% of the city's population if you include pensioners, children and everything.
I've heard of tons of problems with so many other companies in other industries too. Not paying salaries on time or at all, closing down with zero notice when the owner moves abroad and transfers everything out of the company bank accounts so nobody can be paid their last salaries or severance, forcing people to work unpaid overtime... Tons of small businesses pay you in cash so they can save on tax, but that means you don't get national health insurance or pension contributions...
Quite literally, the job market out there is shit, getting worse every year. You should count yourself lucky that you're in an industry where you can just hop into a tangential industry and have skills carry over, or that your job affords you enough free time to get a degree, or that you're not working for capitalists. Gratz, it's a one in a million job you found yourself in, same as me. But the thing about one in a million jobs is that there are only a few thousand of them in the world.
IDK how you ended up feeling so trapped, but honestly most people believe that their job contributes something positive to the world.
All I can do is encourage you to re-evaluate your assumptions and find a way out.