Great career advice, courtesy HN

Often times, there are real nuggets in the comments section of a story posted on HN. I have, like my cohort who read HN, started reading comments first to determine whether the article is worth reading. While this doesn't give the requisite traffic to the source website and ends up taking up a lot more time than if I read the article, folks chiming in on the discussion have amazed me with their insights.

Here is the comment, pasted verbatim (thanks to braythwayt):

If you are sincerely interested in quashing abuse, and if the risk of being laid off does not frighten you, forget about the numbers and let’s talk about quashing abuse.

Twitter gets extremely mixed reviews from people who are the targets of abuse, and I believe I am putting that conservatively. So, what I would ask is not whether they are going to lay me off because they run out of money, but whether I am going to quit because when I get inside, I discover that they are not going to actually do much about it.

If Twitter has had a come-to-jesus moment about abuse, and there are no structural obstacles to doing something about abuse, this could be a job where you will one day look back and say, “I was part of the team that turned the corner on Twitter’s biggest problem. I made a difference.”

On the other hand, if Twitter doesn’t have quashing abuse in its cultural DNA, or if there are deep structural obstacles to quashing abuse, then you may discover that you cannot actually make a difference. That can be soul-crushing if you are passionate about the work.

I am not making a claim one way or the other about where Twitter is with this, I’m just suggesting that if you are motivated by making a difference, the biggest thing to figure out is whether you will actually be able to make a difference.
IMO, this matters more than the financial risk.

Note, not all commenters are this articulate. There is no dearth of trolls on HN. That's just the nature of online discourse.