Do I Regret Being 'Just' a Software Engineer?
jacky.wtf
jacky.wtf
Or read more about how the necessary components for our devices like cobalt maintains the slave labor in Africa backed by Western hegemonic forces: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/books/review/cobalt-red-s... or the case of oil being pushed for more energy production and the lobbying against green solutions from companies like Exxon and Shell via https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo185167...
It's not even really about you or how you feel but what this industry is doing. And with the recent Supreme Court rulings, we're going to be lucky if we know if _more_ things go down.
Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
https://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Anarchism/Unabom/manifest...
I think Kaczynski's take is overly pessimistic, but it does get the broad strokes right.
There's no counterbalance or consolidation of power that wouldn't go in accordance with the rules of a capitalist society, which necessarily includes the social class divide. Between those owning everything and those who sell their labor to survive.
Ugly or not, that is exactly what capitalism is supposed to be doing.
If you look at employees at Google, you can see that they are there to coast. Intelligent, sharp folks, reduced to mere optimizing for compensation while tweaking an algorithm here and there.
Instead what devs need to do especially those who are new to the industry, is to think like hackers of yore. Have total disdain of big tech and organizations.
I remember early 2000s and if you asked anyone who was a good hacker if they want to join IBM they would laugh in your face.
That culture needs to return. Where is the Napster of this era? That would give people the fulfillment they want and make them feel useful. A simple way of doing this is to take any popular piece of software and think what the "out there" version will look like and start building it.
Maybe punk rock and the hacker culture both need to make a comeback into the mainstream, otherwise FAANG and Leetcode will eat the soul of tech.
Sounds like you’re extrapolating from internet anecdata rather than first hand experience.
To be fair, the most talented and ambitious still want nothing to do with big blue. Different reasons, but still.
There's way too many jobs where the only reward for finishing your work is more work.
However, I don't think hacker or punk rock culture can make a come back here because there's too large of a pool of people willing to work even for underpaid tech jobs (since it's often a relatively a lot of money for them)
I'm glad you mentioned this. I was reading https://diversionbooks.com/books/the-spotify-play/ and the way that hacker culture has become effectively commercial (from anarchist ideals in finance being perverted into cryptocurrency, file sharing into cloud hosting, etc), we have to keep fighting to make control of it hard _while also_ protecting people's safety (bad actors - government or people - will always exist).
If you're reading this, just on a tactical level for job hunting one thing I would say is to remove the (+/-) part of the resume. People can do the math on the duration if they care. Maybe even just put the years. I hope you're able to find something that isn't quite as dismal as 99% of tech jobs
"Dr. Oppenheimer, when did your strong moral convictions develop with respect to the hydrogen bomb?"
"When it became clear to me that we would use whatever weapon we had."
Unfortunately, whenever you read an article about a new technology or read an interview of a founder or something, they spend all their time talking about the first two, and either ignore or give passing lip service to the third one. Even look at HN discussions. Few engineers here really care about the ethics of what they are working on. It's just "is it cool technology?" and (sometimes) "does it make money?" You ask someone if they are working on something good for the world and they look at you like you have an antler growing out of your head. "Yes, I'm making the Torment Nexus, but it uses blockchain and LLMs and it's written in Rust. It's written in RUST!"
Or perhaps "If it isn't me inventing the torment nexus, then someone else will"
Either way, I wish people cared more about how their inventions would be used
it's like Joe Rogan trashing factory farms and bragging about only eating wild elk be killed with his bare hands on his private game preserve.
writing software for an oil company doesn't make you evil it makes you like everyone else. not particularly helpful nor particularly harmful
Just about anything ever created can be used to oppress and do evil. But you don’t have to be the final step that enables that evil.
Rockets - you can build rockets to take us to the moon. And somebody will repurpose it for destruction. But you don’t have to be that somebody.
Now economy is going through a downturn, things are expected to be bad.
Economy rebalances. Things will get better eventually. But the shockwave will leave some remnants behind. Just need to hold on for a bit.
> Much of the time, the entire economy operates in periods of substantial hashtag#unemployment or hashtag#underemployment, affecting workers generally: even if they have a job, the cost of job loss is so high they have to put up with nearly any abuse just to hang on to an income. Meanwhile, employers use their power to design workplaces to create a fine-grained division of labor in which workers are deskilled and thus easily replaceable.
I try not to lean on economic theory as a means of driving society (as much as capitalistic governance wants us to - we don't have to accept it). Both of the layoffs I experienced were examples of that perceived health (both at Glitch and Code for America). Coupling that with the need for us to feel "grateful" for something that can be effectively guaranteed to make us a bit messed up in the head when talking about this.
Are we selling our selves and authenticity to companies? i guess in a way, but we try to get as much as we can out of companies too
As far as separating your self from tech and being technologist. I think its like music, the pop stuff sucks and is mass produced. tech that used to be cool is mass produced, im sure there is cool stuff out there if you put the work into finding it. like underground music. i think trying to label your self is a mistake in general.
I'll push back on this by adding something from the book, Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr.... She makes the case, with evidence and history, how no one in America can get by without using corporations to survive. Until we have free housing and healthcare (instead of bombs falling on the rest of the world), we have no choice but to demand better from corporate America.
> As far as separating your self from tech and being technologist. I think its like music, the pop stuff sucks and is mass produced. tech that used to be cool is mass produced, im sure there is cool stuff out there if you put the work into finding it. like underground music. i think trying to label your self is a mistake in general.
I'll quote what I mentioned at the end: "And to play on an idea of separation of the "art from the artwork" while actively defending their organizations (failing that, their outputs and indirectly their contributions) works to be a free agent of marketing for them. It's similar to a private company opening up a non-profit to launder the notion of doing good to build a moat of social capital. How does one comfortably reconcile that?" In the case of Haiti, a musician decided to run for president. Similar to what happened in America when an actor did, both invoked violent wars on the citizens (one was selling blood and killing people, another dropped bombs around the world and blamed a set of people for a viral disease that they refused to do any research on).
It's nigh impossible to separate something that _can't_ exist without the other. We can try to believe that (hence the use of money to create a bubble).
I think you missed my point. Tech is bigger then Google Facebook w/e. Is writing drivers for obscure hardware ruining the world? Or raspberry pi? Using computer vision to solve your problems at home. That's still tech imo and healthy to participate in.
Not necessarily exclusive from the other options in sibling posts.
Pairs well with
> I don't know how much longer I can comfortably call myself a "technologist"
i think it's pretty unfair to skip the rest of his sentence
When I "repaired" a Dell PC, I destroyed the machine.
Dell power-supplies looked like standard PC power supplies; they connected to the motherboard using the same Molex plug. But Dell's Molex connector wasn't wired the same as normal ones. Dell power supplies only worked with Dell motherboards, and vice-versa.
Things may have changed, but that experience blew away my illusions about Dells being repairable.
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=339053
Edit: Better source https://superuser.com/questions/905705/atx-dell-psu-to-offic...
Manufacturers who pull this type of incompatibility shit risk their reputation. I never went near anything with a Dell label again until last year, when I bought a second-hand laptop (I don't attempt laptop upgrades and repairs).