Dear lemmy,

This is my first post here after switching from the alien platform, so I am very pleased to meet you! The community seems still small but very welcoming, so I hope you can help me shed some light nonetheless.

As a long-term (“hobby” at first) programmer, and now finishing my Master’s, I have been deeply concerned (if not a bit too anxious, ngl) about what’s going around lately and what I want to do in the future. With the environmental crisis going broader, and the nasty evolution of SV companies to greedy giants, I am struggling to find a good alternative.

I am a CS grad from a large European city, with fairly good resumé (several unis, a couple of scholarships, good grades, a couple of FOSS projects + short internships), and I would be looking to find my first job (sigh, i know) in the next six months or so.

I first started studying CS naively thinking I could make a good impact through my code (and after a long while in the Linux/FOSS community), but this seems to be getting extremely hard with most corporations getting even greedier lately.

The first big issue is that I feel a bit more concerned than usual about the ethics of the work I do, even if it means earning a bit less. Money is less of a problem also because as long as I can live in a queer-safe place, and have decent quality of life and healthcare, I do not care about hoarding too much. In all honesty, not requiring a car is a priority, which means requiring a central, well-connected place, but also keeping transport expenses a bit lower.

My first “red flags” were raised when I did some projects with consulting companies. They initially came to me selling themselves as a golden place to “work on interesting projects with clients” - a claim which, don’t laugh, I first believed due to know knowing what they were. There’s no way to put it, I hated that kind of work so bad. Not only were the work ethics and communication absolutely terrible, but it felt like all I was taught was professional lying. Literally, I felt like I produced the worst quality material of my life and was told to sell it like gold to the naive companies in front of me.

Then I tried startups - young, lively companies, they said. The first group to welcome me were the endless VC-funded “ethical fintech” startups, and people I met there were the shallowest, most elitarian, and greedy I ever met - to the point nobody even cared about honesty and friendship if it did not mean immediate utility and networking. Not to mention the long working hours, and all-encompassing “no WLB” culture because “we’re a big family”, with toxically positive management all around and hiding issues under the rug. Personal issues I had with some managers were hidden and never addressed. I left.

Of course, Big Tech does not look good either. OpenAI, Meta, and Tesla are horrible companies, and Google and Apple seem to be following them on the same track.

At least 95% of my friends from similar background (praised by the same scholarships, etc.) went to either defense projects (think “using AI data to spy people” kind of projects), consulting, finance, big-tech, or (unethical) fast-growth startups.

In the risk of being overly dramatic (…isn’t the whole post already?), I was a bit saddened to see how nobody of them cared the least about “what are the consequences of the code I am writing?”. One of my friends offered me even to refer me for a high-paid HFT job in London on a tech I was working on, trying to comfort me by saying that “when they pay me so much money, you stop thinking about what you do”.

And in some cities, like the one I live in right now in Germany, it feels like there is no escape from the greedy, aggressively competitive, “LinkedIn startup-bro”, mentality.

University let me survive on my concerns quite happily, and I never felt the pressure to be greedy or give up ethics throughout these years. It feels so weird, after years of happiness, to be all at once to be “the one off”. The thing is, I never became more demanding about this, but maybe due to personality, or maybe due to my background, I just felt like privacy and human rights are a no-go in all the work I’ve been doing.

My question is simple: is there any way to start a career in “good” tech, contribute to creating positive impact, and not feel guilty about what I am doing in daily life? I have (entry level) experience mostly on embedded/firmware/kernel dev and in full-stack web/app design and development, so say e.g. Fairphone or Signal would appear as rare examples of ethical companies out there - though they don’t sadly take entry-level candidates.

A good middle ground would also be a job that does not make good impact, but at least does not worsen the situation: e.g., working at Texas Instruments, ARM, Intel, or some other chip company would sound like a fairly ethical and harmless choice.

Also, because I am happy to move anywhere in Europe or the UK, is there any city that has more of an ethical than of the usual competitive, SV-copycat culture all around? I get this idea that Berlin and Amsterdam must be slightly easier places to find ethically conscious companies than other towns, but I do not know the scene there in much depth.

Thanks for reading! Hope the wall of text was not too annoying to parse :) ~R

  • PythonEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    I’ve always felt like the best course to stay ethical is to stay far far away from working on any projects that will be used or seen by “the general public”. Games, Social Media, any sort of Sales or Marketing - they’re all a shitshow, cause the variable they have to optimize for is income.

    My father is a Delphi programmer for a small family business that writes software for Wood cutting factories. Yeah, getting money in is a factor for the company, but the pool of customers is so slow and stable that the programmers can just focus on creating the best software possible - so the thing they optimize for in this case is getting as many boards out of a tree as possible. You could spin it in an ethical direction and say they’re reducing waste from excess trees that would be cut if they didn’t have good optimized software. Or you could spin it in an unethical direction and say that they’re supporting an industry which can cause environmental trough over-consumption of resources. It’s a weird thing to think about and I feel like everyone draws the line at a different point.

    So what I want to say, I guess, is that you just gotta focus on what your own values are and what you’d expect from a potential employer. Upheaving your whole life and moving to another country for your first job might be a bit much, as the sunken cost of having moved for a company will inadvertently make you more hesitant to leave them.

    Maybe just look around in your area and see what small companies are around - not small as in Start-Up, I wouldn’t trust a company that hasn’t been around for a few decades, but rather small in their niche and their customer-base. Big Tech might just be a lost cause. Also don’t do that dumb americanized interview circus. A company that respects the people who work for them never lets you jump trough leetcode hoops and dozens of evaluations and interviews before even having a chance to speak to someone.

    The company I work for has been noting but great so far, and they’ve hired me within five days of applying. It was one interview, no evaluations or personality quizzes or whatever.

    I also don’t know how common that is, but they’re an AG that only employees can own stocks of - so there isn’t a centralized owner or CEO, just a board of majority-owners who still have to listen to everyone else who owns the stocks. The fact that it’s somewhat self-governing makes for pretty sweet employee benefits (free ebike and car charging, 29+2 days off per year, everyone has the option to do half-time or 4-day workweeks, up to 100% remote for everyone etc).

    And again, they’re a small-ish business that stays far away from the general public. I write software for the German Energy Market. The companies that use it are extremely regulated by law and couldn’t even do anything unethical with it if they wanted to. They’re also bound by law to use software like ours to even oparate legally, so there isn’t much client turnover or financial pressure. A few deadlines per year exist, but the job is mostly open to actually improving the software instead of selling as much as possible to as many people as possible. I think that’s kind of a key point. Desperation and Greed can make people take bad turns, so maybe staying away from anything that can push you in that direction is the safest bet.