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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.

Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.

(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.