Trust me I know. It's a major reason why I haven't quit because I know the grass isn't greener on the other side. It's just a different shade of yellow

It's honestly not much easier sabotaging from the inside than from the outside

Everything is insanely locked down and needs a superior to approve

I couldn't get big tech compact interviews, just smaller companies

So I've heard that working at a big tech can lock you into only other big tech companies. Non tech or smaller companies won't give you a chance because they're scared you'll quickly leave to a higher paying job and are only using their job as a temporary measure while you look for something better

I've been casually looking for the last half year and the only people giving me interviews are hedge funds, Meta, Amazon, Doordash, Tiktok, and <10 people startups that want you to work 60-100 hours a week making an LLM wrapper to automate away workers or some stupid blockchain shit

ad blocking arms race

Thankfully it's not that bad, it's mostly making sure ads don't stop working because of normal reasons that any other website may stop working. Networking issues, bad code causing bugs, wrong config pushes, hardware failures, etc.

There's some other team working on circumventing ublock and other ad blocking systems

For more healthy coping skills compartmentalization.

I'll try this thanks

Lol I've read that article and some others and it's exactly how I've felt about this industry for a long time

Most my coworkers have usually been some combination of open Indian Hinduvists, purge all the homeless suburbanites, anti-woke incels, and now Zionists have also revealed themselves openly (cheering on the crackdown and deportation of student protestors)

but you have to live, right?

That's what I told myself the last few years to make it this far but it's not enough anymore