Why can't a good employee be a dreamer? Google is keeping what I would imagine is a group filled with dreamers.

On tight leashes. The trade is this: you spend 50-60-70 hours a week doing what we tell you, and we'll give you 5 or 10 every week to work on things we're not telling you to do on the understanding that anything you come up with we own entirely and will derive all direct benefit from.

What does it mean "to dream?" Is your dream to come up with revolutionary software that will change the world? Or is your dream to help GOOGLE come up with revolutionary software that will change the world? 'cuz I guarantee you - Google is not invested in your dream. Google is invested in their dream and it's worth some bread and circuses to trick you into believing that their dream is yours.

My name is on half the civic works in Seattle. Thousands of hours of my life went into them. Blood, sweat, tears. I had a fucking gun pulled on me for a gig, I shit you not. And the only way you would ever know it is if you headed down to City Hall, dug through the blueprints, flipped to my pages, looked up my initials, and inquired with the company that did that work ten years ago who those initials stood for. Same as everyone else on the project. No architect, no civil engineer, no designer gets credit for that shit. NBBJ does. Callison does. Miller Hull does. Me? I was a tiny cog in a vast machine, grinding my bearings down to nothing in service of a juggernaut that didn't give the first shit about me.

And so are you.

Now? Now it's much the same. My name flashes by at light speed if you stick around to watch the credits. But I get to have drambuie in my coffee in the morning, I work all day on my own gear for my own clients, and if I come up with something revolutionary, it's mine.

True story - Steve Wozniak came up with much of the architecture for the Apple 1 while working at HP. under his contract with HP, HP owned everything he came up with. The only reason Apple exists is because HP decided nothing he was working on was of any value to HP.

Google isn't that stupid.

I'm definitely taking this too literally, because I can't imagine how the vast majority of people are able to do that with how specialized jobs have become.

Why does specialization matter? How much do you have in savings? How much do your friends have in savings? How much do your parents have in savings? I'm not talking retirement funds; retirement funds are the money you've set aside for when you've finally decided you're sick of letting someone else burn your life for money (and you don't have enough anyway). I'm talking actual discretionary cash set aside for expenses that you don't foresee.

What do you do with your tax return? Do you pay down your mortgage? BAM. Wage slavery. do you add it to your retirement fund? BAM. Wage slavery. Do you buy yourself a shiny trinket? BAM. Wage slavery. The purpose of the economy, from a capitalist perspective, is to make sure that every mutherfucking red cent you earn goes back into the economy as shit you buy. Saving is bad for capitalism. When the economy is in dire straits, what do they do? They lower interest rates. Why do they do this? So that saving is disincentivized. Why disincentivize saving? Because your job is to consume, bitch, get on it.

Yeah, it's the rantings of a manic street preacher. But, like all rantings of manic street preachers everywhere, there's a basis in truth.