I know it doesn’t sound like it but I consider myself a fairly principled person. Ruthless is a deliberately suggestive word I chose to drive home the extent to which I believe it’s necessary to self-optimize. I did not mean for it to imply ‘amoral’ or that a person should devote all their time to the pursuit of money.

My intent was simply that people should never be deluded into thinking that the fluff like emotional appeals, a company’s ‘mission’, a startup posturing as a family, internal propaganda, etc are things that really matter. If you are exchanging your time for money, my opinion is you should always get to the heart of what’s important: “What’s in it for me?” Related questions: “Can this business be successful?” “What are the true (non-bullshit) hard numbers that underpin this business?” “Will I be compensated according to the value I’m creating?” “What’s the value of the career capital I’ll get out of this?” My experience is that a good number of modern tech companies will leave the answers to these questions deliberately opaque.

Ideally you also avoid working for unprincipled organizations that are rationalizing bad behavior. But that’s not always feasible because it could imply a high opportunity cost. For example, having seen it from the inside, Facebook is in my opinion a shitshow. They will do absolutely anything that isn’t outright illegal (including things that would seem blatantly unethical to a neurotypical person) to pad their bottom line. But they pay well and it looks good on your resume.

And that tragic cycle of ‘do shitty things -> make more money -> grow -> hire more people -> repeat’ is the dumpster fire we’ve collectively chosen to base our society on. ‘Hate the game not the player’ more or less captures how I feel about all of this.

I think we're thinking much alike. I just cringe at the thought of "ruthless" being misheard as validation of some currently prevailing cultural behavior.

We can understand a new college grad naively walking into a well-paid "shitshow" (though we shouldn't forgive their college), but once the person understands better, they need to think rationally about who they want to be and what they want to do, not have help rationalizing.