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Comment by rStar | Hacker News Reader

when I went to university in 1999 it was my dream to work at a company like microsoft, then google. then i realized that big tech is just a way for those in control of society to control us more efficiently. i feel for those who just want to put their head down and do the work. nobody thought they were going to CS school to enable the exploitation of less lucky others. but now we have facebook, amazon, palantir, google, microsoft et al doing whatever their doing, not with the benefit of society but for the benefit of society’s owners. as a tech person, that makes me extremely uncomfortable, and someone who hasn’t figured out even a personal route around the problem, much less a societal one. god bless us all.

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>as a tech person, that makes me extremely uncomfortable, and someone who hasn’t figured out even a personal route around the problem, much less a societal one. god bless us all.

Work for a boring company that provides a core service and does not ruffle feathers or cause trouble to society. I write Angular/Python apps for a company that sells payroll products. Its not the sexiest job in the world but the company needs tech people, it operates pretty ethically, I am paid reasonably well, and the team does not cause unnecessary stress day to day.

Government tech jobs are probably similar depending on department. You probably won't be contributing to the downfall of society in many govt branches but instead providing a reasonable service to society. The pay is probably less though.

Fair, but nothing is disconnected in this world. Your company could be serving some unethical company that does really bad things and at this moment you would invoke same reasoning people who work at FB about like "someone would be doing it anyways" or "there is no way to do this kind of due diligence" or "we just do X and not responsible for Y". It's not at the same scale but you get what I mean, no one is pure.

This is fair. I have thought of this as well. As a response, I spent the last year and a half volunteering for multiple progressive challengers to established candidates. After a massive amount of effort: we won some races, lost many, and came close in others. This is a way to overcome some of the negativity caused by external forces influenced by my company.

The thing that that depressed me the most is how little the population cares about improving the country. They are checked out and don't see all the problems that they can fix. So it has led me to also question, why I am wasting my time instead of working on myself and what I can do to better my own self. But I guess that's a separate discussion.

Isn't this looking at the past with rose colored glasses though?

Time before using computers for business was terrible with much less transparency (no Googling prices, etc). Paperwork got lost all of the time. Companies could easily bury things, etc.

Newspapers charged $1 per word for classified ads.

Agreed, imo transparency, accountability, and general corporate "goodness" are probably at all-time highs. The thing is the public's level of awareness of the remaining shadiness is also at an all-time high, so it can feel like things have gotten worse because we see more of it, even if the amount of things that go unnoticed has gone down.

I'm still pretty young in my career, but I feel like I've figured out my own route around the problem. 3/4 organisations I've worked for have been NGOs, and I felt like I was doing meaningful work in all of them.

The one that wasn't an NGO has been by far the worst one. Worse salary, worse perks, worse problems I've solved, and while I didn't do any work I considered to be unethical, I'd definitely refuse some of the work my colleagues did.

I kinda wish more techies would look at the NGOs as a viable alternative to the corporate world and do some work that's actually meaningful to the society. Granted, the supply of jobs in the tech field isn't big enough for everyone to switch, but the jobs are there if you're willing to search for them.

That is interesting, what sort of NGOs did you find to have the most socially meaningful and ethical work available?

Personally, I'll always feel exceptionally proud of working on Panama Papers. My work was in no way particularly important to the project (just implementing some frontend), but it set such a high bar on meaningfulness so early in the career that it's going to be very difficult to top it.

Over all, I feel like EDRi (https://edri.org/) is doing exceptional work over here in Europe. Think of EFF, but instead of being one organisation on a federal level, it's made of a bunch of smaller organisations that work in different nations on intertwining issues, be it net neutrality, reverse engineering Big Tech's algorithms, or helping the citizens exercise their GDPR rights. It's a small front against the Big Tech, and they need as much help as they can get in order to put up a fight.

Many engineers I used to work with now work for Facebook. I wonder how they feel about it. Do they think Facebook does no harm? Do they think that their job itself isn't doing harm? ("I'm just writing spark jobs"). Do they try to ignore it because the salary conditions are so cushy? What amount of money is enough to ignore your conscience if you know that Facebook is part of the problem? Would I work for Facebook for 500k a year? 1M a year? I've heard as a reason "They have two kids, that's why they took the job, you'd do the same if you had kids".

I don't know. It's not black and white. Social media apps aren't creating poisonous ideas like the flat earth, antimask, or anti-vax movements, but they're certainly essential to their spread. They have also had a positive impact such as during the Arab spring a couple years back. Would measles have made a comeback in the US without Facebook? Probably not? Does that mean that Facebook is responsible for the resurgence of it? At least partially yes in my view. Did Facebook sway the elections in 2016? Probably. But so do journalists. What if Facebook swayed elections in a direction that aligns more with my views? Would I be as uncomfortable? I certainly don't have enough information to say "facebook good, facebook bad", but with the limited information I'm comfortable saying that Facebook is dangerous. My perception is that the negative impact of Facebook outweighs the positive; I can't prove it, but it's spooking me enough that I won't work for them. Maybe it's because I don't have kids.

Those are the fairly novel ways of exploitation. Finance, marketing, naked rent-seeking, and employment through temp/piecework have always been around, but technology has made them terrifying. And every single field involves mass surveillance.

I got into programming because I loved the machines and the abstractions, but I'm finding myself helpless because I can't make myself contribute to the goals of the people who want to employ me.

Yeah. And to have a good living, it helps to work at big tech. But if youre passionate about software, you are giving something up. sometimes I treat code like art, its my medium that I build things through. But im selling that, and losing out on that art, whilst building massive data collection and manipulation systems

To be fair, how many people can say otherwise? That you’re working for something more than money? Creatives? And people with “fk you” money? It’s ridiculously hard to go against the establishments and most people fail doing so.

One option is to work for academia on pure research, but you have to avoid defense applications which is tricky. :-( It's not for everyone though.

    > nobody thought they were going to CS school 
    > to enable the exploitation of less lucky others.

When you were in university, the students who did think so were the ones who wanted to work on Wall St. A decade later, they all wanted to be the next Steve Jobs.

I think the main problem is that exploitative business-models and platform economies have not been fully analyzed/modeled yet by economists, so we can hardly expect governments to do something about the problem with new competition laws etc.

I was just following orders.

> just a way for those in control of society to control us more efficiently

OK QAnon

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