That’s overly reductive, based on my experience working for one of the tech behemoths back in its hypergrowth phase.
When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base. The growth is exciting and its in the news and people you know and those you don’t are constantly talking about it.
In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects. Uninformed opinions abound, and this can make it easy to dismiss or minimize legitimate concerns. You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.
Obviously the money is a factor — it’s just not the only factor. When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.
> When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base.
Also known as "working hard to keep making money".
> In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects.
Gosh, that must be so tough! Forgive me if I don't have a lot of sympathy for that position.
> You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.
If that were the case for a given company, they could publicly commit to doing the right thing, publicly denounce other companies for doing the wrong thing, and publicly advocate for regulations that force all companies to do the right thing.
> When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.
I will say this as simply as possible: too bad. "Making your company a success" is simply of infinitesimal and entirely negligible importance compared to doing societal harm. If you "don't want to consider it", you are already going down the wrong path.
I’m disambiguating between your projected image of a cartoonish villain desperate to do anything for a buck, vs humans having a massive blind spot due to the inherent biases involved with trying to make a team project succeed.
Your original comment suggests a simplistic outlook which doesn’t reflect the reality of the experience. I was trying to help you understand, not garnish sympathy.
But why does that matter? I mean what is the practical relevance of whether they have a massive blind spot or are deliberately trying to make as much money as possible?
When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base. The growth is exciting and its in the news and people you know and those you don’t are constantly talking about it.
In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects. Uninformed opinions abound, and this can make it easy to dismiss or minimize legitimate concerns. You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.
Obviously the money is a factor — it’s just not the only factor. When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.