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Comment by dbpokorny | Hacker News Reader

> we developers keep solving problems we would not have without developers

I genuinely don't understand. Do you not consider the organizational problems of society to be worth solving?

There was a time, when not every household had a computer. A time where kids were playing without stuff supported or made by computers. Not everything was better back then, but the world did not collapse due to unoptimized processes. In contrary, I believe that alot of things were more 'personal' in the past, but this is highly subjective.

Technology made alot of stuff possible which would not be possible without technology. But the tradeof is, that we must live with systems which increase in complexity each year we use them. And there's no end in sight.

We developers in some way are trying to get out of the hole we dug ourselves into. Think about this the next time a framework comes along which solves all problems of the previous one. At some point you'd wish back the former days, when everything was simpler...

From my perspective - there was a time, when not every household had a computer. I lived in that time. And compared to today, I'd absolutely hate it to get back.

But I also hate how the world is different from what it could be if we as a whole cared about actually solving real problems instead of making money. The world could be optimized more. It's not. We've created lots of cruft and triviality. Even our tools of social interaction are designed to be barely working, the minimum amount of value that will still make people use it so that they can be monetized.

We've created really powerful technologies. And we're using them to like 5% of their capabilities for actually making the world better.

As I interpreted it, the "problems we would not have without developers" isn't referring to the people, it's referring to the tools and processes of development. Especially the tools; don't let "the tools themselves [become] a problem".

Gotta say, people who consider that the "organizational problems of society" can be solved have been responsible for a lot of misery over the centuries.

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