Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. I refuse to work on (or use) AI, ads and defence projects, and I'm far from being the only one.
Though let who is free of sin throw the first stone, I now stand on a high horse after having worked in the gambling sector, and now ashamed of it, so I prefer to focus the projects themselves rather than the people and what they choose to do for a living.
One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand programmers united together not to work on something? Now we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.
Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
> Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
Please avoid the regret. Do something kind instead. Take the high road. Take care of yourself.
People have wondered how so many people ever participated in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used for all of them.
I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There may be others.
It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing and what your principles allow.
If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all the people in your situation could be used to restore housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other principles?
As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where the underemployed could devote some energy while they licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history on your resume.
How do we get a monthly "What good causes need volunteers?" post on HN?
You're right, it doesn't. It feels more like an attempt to minimize. The rest was you spitballing some unrelated idea.
There’s no benefit to your ideological goals in kneecapping yourself.
There’s nothing morally wrong with using or building AI, or gambling.
> There’s nothing morally wrong with ... building... gambling.
Say you're building a gambling system and building that system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more? Gamble faster?
It creates and feeds addiction.
Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a personal line associated with it.
Let’s not confuse the issue. Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it’s bad or morally problematic.
We let adults make their own choices.
2) If you were devising more efficient sugar delivery systems for those acquaintances as a means to take every last cent they had, knowing they'd be unable to resist, you're complicit in robbing and killing them.
Hint: most of my consulting rate is not about writing fizzbuzz. Some clients pay me without even having to write a single line of code.
If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.
There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and not about making product decisions.
Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways that many artists have been able to make a comfortable living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take more of their money or influence their opinions isn't exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of art that would not have happened otherwise.
Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from extremely shortsighted companies who should have been delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare, low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how much of that came from poor choices (like paying for insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought up and came back requiring a subscription at which point I stopped paying any attention to it.
I'd consider word-of-mouth a type of advertising as well.
When it's totally organic the person doing the promotion doesn't stand to gain anything. It less about trying to get you to buy something and usually just people sharing what they enjoy/has worked for them, or what they think you'd enjoy/would work for you. It's the intent behind the promotion and who is intended to benefit from it that makes the difference between friendly/helpful promotion and adversarial/harmful promotion.
Word of mouth can be a form of advertising that is directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor too though. Social media influencers are one example, but companies will pay people to pretend to casually/organically talk up their products/services to strangers at bars/nightclubs, conferences, events, etc. just to take advantage of the increased level trust we put in word of mouth promotion exactly because of the assumption that the intent is to be helpful vs to sell.
There is a lot of support in favor. Consider:
- Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a very small minority.
- If product introduction was the primary purpose, then repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to shift your spending/consumption habits.
- Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality tradeoffs honestly.
For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to building military AI than work for an advertising company, no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.
I would agree with you if ads were just that. Here's our product, here's what it does, here's what it costs. Unfortunately ads sell the sizzle not the steak. That has been advertising mantra for probably 100 years.