Top tech grads are increasingly unwilling to work for Big Tech, viewing it as a new, unethical Wall Street

About five years ago, I was trying to get a bunch of Big Tech companies to take the right side of an urgent online civil rights fight, and I called an old friend who was very senior at one of the biggest tech companies in the world; they told me that it wasn't going to work, in part because the kinds of people who were coming to tech were there because they wanted to get as rich as possible, no matter what they had to do. My friend contrasted this with earlier eras -- even the dotcom bubble -- when the financial motive was blended with a genuine excitement for the transformative potential of tech to make a fairer, more equitable world. Now, my friend said, the kind of kid who would have gotten an MBA was instead getting an electrical engineering or computer science degree -- not out of any innate love for the subject, but because that was a path to untold riches.

But things are changing. Not only are young people far more skeptical of capitalism and concerned that it will annihilate the human race, but the tech companies' masks have slipped, revealing their willingness to supply ICE and the Chinese government alike, to help the oil industry torch the planet, and to divert their fortunes to supporting white nationalist causes. Companies that tout their ethical center have harbored and even rewarded serial sexual predators and busted nascent union movements.

The tech worker uprisings of recent years have caught the attention of the best and brightest grads of America's elite universities. Read the rest