(begin rant)
Hi. Do you ever have a feeling that you have technical skills to qualify as a programmer, and there’s a demand for specialists, but, ironically, nobody needs them to design some useful information system or optimize the workflow in the factories, or do real science and push the limitations of human knowledge, but rather, all is just to spread some crappy advertising message as cheap as possible to the broadest audience as possible, usually without giving any respect to consumers, that feels like you’re losing your brain cells when interacting with the app/content you create. Quality level zero, consumerism level over 9k. Tons of boilerplate because ‘everything must be kept proprietary’ and it probably won’t work after 2 years because the framework you were using is down and the very idea of the becomes dated. Also, the more advanced technology, the more it’s used for shit. Like, we have generative neural networks that are used for turdposting conspiracies and generating profit/influence for some party.
I would say this clearly: I am very, very angry when I’m seeing this. I don’t want to participate in something that forces consumers to eat shit. Fuck SEO and e-commerce. Everything’s generative-AI, GANs, LLMs… now, which do not produce any value, at least to the user, or extracting every single bit of data of the user. Everything’s just to bombard people with information nowadays. Even Project Managers get biased (mostly because of naïve hype) and promote this crap.
(end rant)
So, my question is, how do you go through all of it? Of course, devs are better paid, but I don’t care about money. I’m still a student and, although I really like programming, and I’m really good at solving Competitive Programming problems (been at ICPC several times), I’m tired of this junk, besides I have a feeling I’ll be forced to do it. But, if I’m going to do it, somebody’s gonna get hurt. But it seems that it’s the only thing I’m skilled at, and I have no alternatives. So, how do you get through all of it, and what do you see it as relief, what does reward you at the very end?
EDIT: uncensored all swear words at request. I hope now you’re happy.
I work for the federal government and spend my time at work making open sourced software and outside of work contributing to open source. My job is centered around forwarding science for the betterment of society, not around making the company more money.
As a result, I’m happier. My salary could probably be about 25% higher in the private sector. However, my job is secure through retirement and the pension plan and work life balance is sensational. This year i will have taken a month off between vacations and use-or-lose. I also have banked over 2500 hours of sick leave that don’t drop off. I also work fully remote though my office is 7 minutes away with no traffic.
I moved to EdTech from gaming - mobile gaming felt so damn focussed on value extraction.
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Do not work for a company that defies your moral compass. Period. Integrity is what makes legends.
Companies are led by humans and their morals and priorities reflect all the way down.
Bro… Most people are bootlickers so they shill whatever their corpo daddy tells them and they do it for free on their time off
🤡
Welcome, you have discovered the alienation of labour in the field of IT. People were dealing with this shit for decades and it will keep happening as long as we live under capitalism.
As someone that is quite unfamiliar with Marx’ ideology (yet I’m aware of it being the base of communism in what was the USSR) I find it quite ironic that both late-stage (aka extreme) capitalism leads to the same as what commuism lead to: which is what Marx describes, according to the Wikipedia page, as alienation of the worker. And it shows, funnily enough, contradictions with the implementation of soviet communism, which was supposedly based on marxist ideology.
I also think it would be quite amusing to see someone do an experiment, where groups of random people are presented with either a poster that shows this idea from Marx, or with a presentation/podcast/TED Talk where a person describes and presents the idea without ever mentioning it was Marx’ ideas. As someone that always steered clear of Marx and his ideas specifically because I thought it would be about promoting communism (and as someone with Eastern European roots, I know what real communism was like), so I looked at it the same way I would look at religious propaganda: with a spoonful of salt, a bottle of scepticism, and the idea that it would be better to just steer clear instead of wasting my time, and yet when I saw this link you posted I was like “this sounds interesting, let’s check it out” and so I did, and I was left pleasantly surprised.
While there is a good bit of nuance and western propaganda around the USSR, you are essentially right. For different reasons though. The USSR never fully abolished capitalism. They thought that capitalism was a “necessary evil” that had to be contained and shaped towards a socialist/communist end goal. They intentionally reproduced the exploitative conditions of capitalism post-revolution because they thought it had to happen that way.
Socialism is most broadly divided into statist and non-statist socialism. If you’re anti-capitalist or just don’t generally care for the present condition of the world, but don’t really care for the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao then you should check out libertarian socialism/anarchism. It’s a broad category of ideologies with a ton of overlap that essentially boils down to “hierarchy is the real problem and any successful egalitarian society should seek to eliminate heirarchy as much as possible”
Eliminate hierarchy by allowing anyone to enter the market and do business? Some kind of marketplace … where people are free to choose their economic relations at will. Freedom and markets. A market with freedom as a defining characteristic.
You’re describing anarcho capitalism or just regular capitalism if you’re including the state. Both of which blow for a number of reasons you likely wouldn’t accept if your sarcasm is anything to go by. Did you have a point to all of that or were you just being a goober?
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Your attitude is correct, don’t support enshittification and don’t do anything you’re not comfortable doing
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Don’t replace cursewords with stupid characters, this is Lemmy.
- Yes, but also, I do want to have a job because I want to make a positive impact. It’s too easy to become a NEET and be negative at everything.
- I understand your concern. Next time, I’ll go either no symbols or express my opinion without swearwords (because they are not pleasant, at least for me).
EDIT: but mainstream web is really that bad.
They’re not supposed to be pleasant. Swear words are part of your evolved self defense system, and generally speaking any time that’s active you won’t feel good.
express my opinion without swearwords (because they are not pleasant, at least for me).
I know this is completely beside the point, but one thing that just really activates my almonds for absolutely no reason is people “censoring” a swear word by replacing a couple of letters and then acting like they didn’t swear.
Switching out one letter doesn’t make it any less swearing (and since when is “porn” a swear word?), everybody knows what you wrote and you know what you wrote. If you think swearing is bad then don’t fucking do it, but don’t swear and then pretend you didn’t just because you hid a letter.
It’s just as silly as using darn or frick, except they have none of the punch which is the purpose of swear words, ya know?
I use those in some situations that don’t call for a full-fledged swear, minor irritations like missing a metro when I’m not in any hurry.
It’s good to have an escalation ladder for swearing 😀 don’t have to go straight for the nuclear option
Thats a good point!
Fuck yeah!
Fuckin’ oath! Swearing is the shit!
Everything is better with fuck!
There are tons of IT jobs for more ethical companies where you can feel good about what you are working on.
Stay away from large, publicly traded companies, and companies whose user isn’t the paying customer.
Startups, companies that are wholly privately owned (often by an individual into philanthropy or at least mostly concerned with their image and legacy), or those usually in smaller more focused markets are where the ethical jobs tend to be.
You guys are doing that in your interviews, right? Learning about the product, the company, its moral philosophy? Not just selling out to the highest paying job?.. Right?
Maybe that’s too much for some people. People do get squeezed and get desperate.
I’ll be honest, I do research companies and aim for ethical employers and all that, but
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the job market is fucked, techies come a dime a dozen nowadays - anything you apply to the competition is fucking fierce so you can’t really afford to be picky
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I care about how ethical my employer is, but not enough to be chocked in debt or live paycheck to paycheck without affording a single luxury in my life. I’m talking “eating out once per week” here, not yachts.
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Local 👏 non 👏 profits (or govt)
I feel like those options are always immediately written off. It is possible to find good to great opportunities. Plenty of shit ones too of course but it’s worth a look.
It feels good to work somewhere whose purpose is to support the community I live in.
I usually try for the money if I see a job I feel will help utilise my skills.
I’m part SRE/system admin though, which means I don’t care at all about the software that runs on top of the infra I handle. Except when I do need to care, and I try to minimise such interactions. For example: I’d like to work for a company that operates/uses a CDN heavily, because that’s the kind of environment where the SRE mindset really shines. I don’t care if Netflix is failing in the current market and their management is evil as long as I’m working on the SRE side. Of course, this is different from Devs whi are likely more hands-on with the product itself.
I thought, I was having text encoding issues for a hot second there…
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Oh man I know how you feel. You need to find a balance. You don’t have to work 5-7 days a week to live. As a skilled worker you can survive from 4 days or less. Especially if you can remote and live in a cheap place. You can spend your other work days on whatever you find to be valuable. I dunno works for me.
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These examples of soul sucking jobs will be the loudest recruiting companies, because no one wants to work there. They can sometimes pay well too.
Highly skilled people are needed in a lot of practical industries that pay a bit less (but still well enough). You just need to seek them out.
Unfortunately 90% of jobs require contributing to and reinforcing the worst aspects of society.
There’s plenty of work to be found in the public sector, the pay may be a bit less but I’ve always found the work to be satisfying and diverse. And, though this might be a European thing, the job security is usually quite high.
On top of that, the domain knowledge you build with working in these kinds of organizations can be quite valuable.This is my biggest problem with working as a programmer. I enjoy solving complex programming problems, learning about new algorithms, exploring new technologies. Instead every job seems to be “add new button with questionable requirements” or “add thing to the backend that nobody thought about for more than 3 seconds”. All for questionable goals like advertisement, surveillance, big oil, fintech, or defense of course. It’s kind of a bummer, but at least it pays well and it beats most other jobs.
Why don’t you go developing video games engines, aerospace soft, etc.? I’d assume this is where tasks go beyond “provide a CRUD REST API interface” or “add a button”.
Aerospace is largely making killing machines and also some of the most soul destroying tedious fragmented work because the high safety stakes. Games industry is famously toxic. There are a few fun and rewarding good jobs out there but I don’t think you’re hitting examples.
Work that isn’t super unethical exists. It pays well but not obscenely well like ad industry. If you are a highly in demand engineer you are making a choice by working for an ad company.
I do IT for a non profit. Luckily, it’s one that is funded by membership dues so I don’t have to fundraise, which includes a ton of advertising and the like. True, I’m not making bank like a lot of folks in IT. But my peace of mind is intact. I make a good living, and feel good about what I do. Jobs like mine are out there, but when you’re a student all you hear about is the vast amount of money you can make quickly by selling your soul to amazon or whoever. If you keep at it, there is a path in IT that does not include losing sight of your values. Good luck!!
Sammeee except data analyst (by title, I guess) working in local healthcare. I’m under the impression I could make bank by selling out but I’m quite happy with 70k, a pension, and my dignity.
