Everything wrong with tech in 2023 (in no particular order)
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
51. Using terribly thin fonts with low contrast colors leads to unreadable websites.
No one wants to read that at this time of the morning.
1. The obsession with short-term profits severely undermines long-term positive impact.
I don't think many of the companies who contribute development to OSS projects do it purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They are using said products and the alternative is to recreate the project internally
They’re playing checkers instead of chess.
But there's quite a bit of redundancy in the list. Would be more powerful (and easier for readers to absorb) if cut down to its core points.
Alright, fine, I agree tech has been taken over by investment banking personalities. I have no clue where all the nerds who programmed for fun went, but I miss that short-lived era when hackathons were actually something people got excited about.
"Copycat companies & products stifling innovation"
I feel like if as a company you've made something that's easily copyable, then that's your problem.
Successful products are both popular & hard to replicate
Anyway, I agree with you. Tech was great when folks were reverse engineering hardware to make cheaper / better copies that worked with existing software. Does it suck for the company that put all the r&d into it? Yeah. Did they make a fat load of profit off it already? Usually.
I agree the financialisation of everything really sours tech though.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
"tech" is just the most recent place this has happened but you can see it repeated through out the last century+ of industrialized corporations.
> 50. Disrupting journalism's advertising revenue threatens democracy by eroding public information.
...so addressing point 10 would worsen point 50 or am I reading it wrong?
And honestly, this list of complaints is quite timeless (and not even limited to tech, contrary to the title). Yes, there are a couple of specifically tech-related points as of 2023 (namely, those about AI) but other than that... "the concentration of disproportionate wealth and influence among a small group fosters plutocracy", how novel. "Utopian tech promises lead to disappointment when vision ignores complex human reality" — that happened with electricity, aviation, radio, and television, too, naming only the technologies, never mind the small- and large-scale ideologically-motivated social experiments.
I confess I am unable to come up with a line of reasoning where eliminating the amplification of bias, misinformation, and polarization has a negative effect on journalism's advertising revenue. The disruption to revenue, as I understand it is a direct outcome of Meta/Google/Twitter manipulating rewards and costs to drown out factual, thoughtful discourse in favor of whatever brings the most views to their platforms. Case in point: Twitter and the situation in Gaza as I write this.
> 2. The lack of diversity among founders and investors propagates harmful exclusion.
As an example. What kind of diversity? I assume she is writing about gender and ethnicity but in reality I think the diversity of opinions is what is most important to prevent harmful exclusion. I could read it like she mean diversity of opinions, diversity in a specific area like gender or just diversity in general. I assume what I assumed because I read the other points and people with left wing beliefs rarely care about diversity of opinion even if they claim to care about diversity.
Overall I don't understand several of the words that are being used, altough I am not a native english speaker I consider myself to be pretty well versed in the english language.
- use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder
- develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent
- add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code)
- sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth
- at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.
I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity.
And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year.
Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.
And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).
Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose.
If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better.
Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.
This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.
Why not? And what would?
> artificial diversity just creates divided teams.
Why do you consider diversity to be "artificial"? It's actually lack of diversity that's artificial.
Forget about gender and ethnicity for a second; what about the lack of age diversity in tech, and the rampant age discrimination? Oh, but it's a "meritocracy", and younger people are just "better", right? (See "Using terribly thin fonts with low contrast colors leading to unreadable websites." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068697)