It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside – as the startup culture sees it – while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures. Ellen Ullman
Some Similar Quotes
  1. V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love. - Jess C. Scott

  2. My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism. - Jess C. Scott

  3. Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay. - Jess C. Scott

  4. I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do – to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited... - Jess C. Scott

  5. We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. - Douglas Adams

More Quotes By Ellen Ullman
  1. I fear for the world the Internet is creating. Before the advent of the web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one...

  2. It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a...

  3. I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress, ' computers are problematic, giving and taking away.

  4. Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

  5. People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.

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