Comment by PartiallyTyped | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PartiallyTyped | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Reality is far more sad.

Companies like JaneStreet, 2Sigma, etc employ some of the best software engineers, mathematicians, physicists and what not just so they can

    - have better weather forecasts to identify whether a 1 degree delta in South CA can increase oil costs cents on the barrel,   
    - run pandemic simulations to identify how the spread might happen and where inflation will rise so they move faster,   
    - track occupancy rates for pharmacies, hotels, casinos, etc via satellite imaging to identify spikes in usage,
    - track the tiniest of things like butterfly populations to identify increase in earnings for certain brands of hotels,   
    - build some of the most efficient software and write their own compilers

all so that they can move money around [and do so quickly].

Finance is not alone either. A non-trivial amount of big tech is on tracking users and serving ads better.

Do I blame the engineers? No.

I am just lamenting the state of society since this is how we have the brightest among us function and work.

I can construct even more compelling arguments for the uselessness or active harmfulness of most tech jobs.

The only "actually useful" tech jobs if we're going to consistently apply a bar that excludes finance would be stuff like aerospace R&D or ERM systems. Which, to be clear, I would love if society incentivized more strongly. But finance is hardly the worst offender here.

Exercise for the reader; stay a while, and listen.

Once you start noticing things changing, try to identify how you could profit off of it. If it's a change, then there's profit to be made somehow.

Any anecdote is a potential lead.

Could we not make the same statement for most of the jobs people work here on HN?

Anyone who works in ad tech, sure.

But plenty of people here do work on real products. Planes need software, browsers need security patches, hell even your accounting app is good value over the days of doing that all by hand.

Fair, but let’s be honest: even in your accounting app example, the “value” is ultimately in helping a business capture margin more efficiently. That business, in turn, is usually extracting value as a middleman somewhere else in the chain. Same with ad tech, finance, or even a lot of enterprise software, you’re greasing the gears of profit capture, not curing cancer.

That’s not a moral indictment, just a reminder that most of our jobs (mine included) exist to make capital move faster or stickier. Calling one sector “real products” and another “not benefiting society” is a bit of a convenient fiction.

Sure, but it's still helpful to think of what components of production are 'intrinsic' to production (it is hard to imagine making things out of metal without some sort of manufacturing being done by someone) and which are accidents of the particular economic system we find ourselves in (a system without private ownership of capital would likely have little place for equity traders). Advertising as we understand it (push-based) would likely not exist in an economy not based on commodity production.

That's not too cast moral judgement -- just to point out that under a different economic system, these overhead costs could be avoided and these resources (human and otherwise) could thus be redirected to ends more concomitant with human flourishing.

I can't say that about my job; I am providing tools for engineers to use and making things better. As part of my job I am expected to contribute to CPython, and rustc among other things.

That’s great work, but even there you’re mostly building tools that make other engineers more efficient at building more tools. It’s not that the work lacks value it absolutely does, but it’s still part of the same recursive loop where the ultimate “benefit to society” gets pretty abstract. At the end of the chain, most of those tools are still helping businesses optimize, capture margin, or intermediate in some way.

It’s fine to take pride in craftsmanship, just maybe less fine to pretend it’s immune from the same critique applied elsewhere.

I am not critiquing the engineers… we are all rational agents looking at the data that we have in front of us and try to make sensible decisions about our lives.

I am just blaming society in that it doesn’t seem to prioritise “good” and “useful” things.

But you replied to my post saying your job is most definitely useful and my argument is that it’s not.

I don’t disagree there are certainly things each of us on this planet think is good or useful but in my opinion that’s the problem. How do you get a collective group of different humans to agree what that is. Capitalism with all its faults solves this problem pretty nicely. It’s not perfect but as far as I know it has been the best system so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com