> But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).
Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?
These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.
I especially like "do they show their work?" In a gold rush, obscurity is often part of the business model: vague claims, unverifiable demos, hand-wavy benchmarks, carefully managed customer stories. Companies serving serious professions eventually have to deal with people who ask boring, concrete questions and expect boring, concrete answers
I am CPA, former auditor, and a self-taught programmer. I am in a director level finance & technology role at an American, private-equity backed portfolio SaaS company. I have worked with all kinds of finance professionals.
I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions on me during my formative years.
There are many CPAs who believe strongly that part of their job is protecting the public interest. I have seen more than a handful go to the mat for things that were highly principled. Sometimes they did so knowing that they were risking their job / career / reputation. It's not a patient dying on the table sure, but I know many who take enormous pride in their responsibilities as accountants. I have seen lots of CPAs standing up for what is right, and I have watched executive teams yield to them almost as often.
It's easy to get cynical, but there's lots of good ones out there.
It may seem glib, but if there are good ones out there, they're not typically "private-equity backed portfolio SaaS companies". IME (3 times now) this is where good companies go to die. I'll reluctantly take the naked (but aligned) greed of the VC startup over PE from here on out; it's one thing to implode on the launch pad but I can't watch PE destroy real value any longer.
I'm not commenting on the the particulars of different ownership and operational business models. Certainly private equity backed portfolio company structures deserve their fair share of criticism; the balance of incentives they create can certainly be net negative for the business and its customers in the long run, however I think it's a separate conversation.
My point is just that there are lots of people that wake up every day and make serious, sustained efforts to exercise due care in their professional duties.
I'm not quitting the site myself, but the kind of cynicism evinced in the comment is toxic. If your response to the very ideas of accounting, law, healthcare and journalism is to wave your hand and nonspecifically declare that they couldn't possibly be respectable, you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people, even if you understand yourself to be doing it in a wise and savvy way.
It seems more to me like an acknowledgement of the realities on the ground, which is the first step to actually fixing things.
To be very clear, one of the things from the original Trump platform was to "drain the swamp", right? Now, clearly that's not what he meant... or maybe he did from different terms maybe from you and I. But for supporters? They saw a government that they felt was corrupt, wasteful, and out of touch. Propaganda or not, it doesn't matter.
That whole idea of the government being wasteful and untrusted reared its head again in the 2024 election with DOGE.
Now things politically have flipped, and more non-partisan or less radical individuals have been pushed out to make way for partisan yes-men. Now the people on the other side of that political equation no longer trust things like the Federal Judiciary, Department of Education (or that it will even be funded), things like the Center for Disease Control, etc.
Oh and journalism! Everything has been bought out, and been allowed to in massive mergers by the Trump administration. Then they stuck government-approved heads at each of them.
Not acknowledging these realities is the first step toward repeating them.
Somehow, trust in institutions in this country will have to be rebuilt.
The first profession listed was "accounting", yet you don't seem to have any concerns about accounting or accountants. I think the first step towards rebuilding trust in the institutions that have been destroyed is to be specific about the problems and their solutions, rather than laughing at the idea that anyone in any industry could be good in 2026 America. Indeed, as you touched on, this whole thing is Trump's schtick; his supporters are so willing to excuse his misdeeds because they've come to believe that everything everywhere in the US is corrupt and unworthy of respect.
> supporters are so willing to excuse his misdeeds because they've come to believe that everything everywhere in the US is corrupt and unworthy of respect.
Yes, and his WHOLE THING that got him elected was that he was going to "fix it".
He got a lot of independents too.
The problem, or perceived problem, predates Trump and will not end when he is gone.
I erased the extended response I'd written because, as I tend to, I got to the end of writing it and realized that it would be fairly disrespectful to dump a screed on someone when a concise witticism gets my sentiment across. I still have it, if anyone is curious to read it, though.
Suffice it to say, it was not a response to "the very ideas" of those fields, but to their state "In America, in 2026". GP suggests that people working in them automatically assume a sort of virtue just because they overpaid for an advanced degree, and I reject that, in light of how they've operated for most of my life.
>you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people
This is, ironically, my own point about what GP said.
it's evidently a dig at Trump and Republican morals, although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.
The giveaway is the "in 2026", which implies that it would not be a dark joke in other years.
Thus the poster is evidently indicating that:
The legal system has been undermined and been shown to have no integrity because it allows illegal actions by the rich and the political class.
Journalism has been undermined because major media outlets have been purchased by rich people who only allow the media to publish pro-conservative, pro-rich, talking points.
Healthcare is a larger stretch for their dark joke, but the governmental agency that sets the rules for healthcare research and what are the socially approved recommendations is run by RFK Jr. who is a well-known anti-vaxx guy, also the U.S has left WHO and may not get access to WHO data anymore, and last year the CEO of an insurance company got shot basically for denying insurance claims for healthcare, indicating some level of corruption. There may also be more dark joke levels in regards to healthcare if one is a female.
Accounting is also something of a stretch, but there are governmental shenanigans where common accounting practices are involved that indicate corruption and that might make you feel like "accounting, what a joke" /strawman quotes there
That, at any rate, is what I suppose can only be meant by the somewhat obtuse phrase dark joke in 2026.
On edit: no wait, CEO of United Healthcare got shot at the end of 2024.
> ...although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.
Speaking as a USian:
If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterioration of healthcare over the past several decades (with bonus acceleration of the healthcare deterioration around 2019 when folks decided to get the fuck out of a profession run by people who evidently gave few shits about the safety and wellbeing of its practitioners and the efficacy and timeliness of the care given to those served by it).
I'll not claim that this Administration isn't the most visibly worse one we've had in quite a while, because that's plainly untrue. This Administration does do absolutely awful things that -in a just world- folks would be tried and imprisoned for, and do those things very loudly and visibly. But, well, there's a lot of precedent for Administrations doing (and/or turning a blind eye to) just godawful things.
The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.
An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation.
I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique.
It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions.
I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true
Typically a strong account team builds processes with other teams (compliance, engineering, etc) that enshrines and insulates important accounts from accidents like this.
In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this.
If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account team would be paged. Because this may mean your important account was compromised, shipped a bug, has been hit by something and you should immediately start working _with_ them to figure it out.
Fairly basic for a company with any customer management motion at all.
Then they’re not doing their job OR Google has bad systems in place that make it so their account managers aren’t equipped to do their job. Neither is a good look!
The only reasonable explanation is Railway lost control of their estate and something was happening that warranted a group of humans to decide flipping the kill switch was the best of a set of bad alternatives.
It's almost certainly one of those Android Store related checks or YouTube account checks. It's why it's best to disable login for the services you don't want your staff messing with on Google Workspace.
Clearly a matter of opinion and circumstances. Plenty of people with effectively zero cost access to agents who see value in implementing an operating system from scratch. The team who made the demo for example, and those of us who see the possibilities the demo inspires for another example.
Because it would be sponsored by anthropic/google/openai? You cannot do it (typically) without paying for the tokens they only can offer. Programming used to be free, but slowly, we need to pay for every single line of code. It's sickening
Nobody has taken away the freedom to program like we used to. Punch cards may be more expensive now, but vim and emacs are still as free as they ever were.
The error and omission of not enforcing mandatory security training covering posting plaintext passwords to public sites for CISA contractors is itself an act of gross negligence.
So much so the contracting company’s insurer would cite it as the reason why the claim is not covered by their policy.
Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).
Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?
These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.