(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.
-
Your attitude is correct, don’t support enshittification and don’t do anything you’re not comfortable doing
-
Don’t replace cursewords with stupid characters, this is Lemmy.
I thought, I was having text encoding issues for a hot second there…
- 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.
You can just fucking cuss here.
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
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.
-
This is one reason devs sometimes spend free time contributing to open source. It feels good to know your skills are going towards a passion, and builds a resume around what you love.
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.
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.
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.
Surely there are other programming jobs you can get? I work on IT service management software for mostly the public sector. We can’t even use Google Analytics. How about embedded systems? Automation for factories? Medical software? I once worked on AI for detecting lesions in eye-fundus photographs, to screen for diabetes. There’s plenty of specialized software for
niceniche sectors, for example I did cost estimation and planning software for the construction industry. Or you can go work for some indie developer to make games. Put away some money and you can eventually start your own company to make the kind of software you enjoy making.Without doxxing myself, I worked for a small firm that helped “tech for good” companies to build their MVP or product towards Series A-C funding.
In the four years I worked with them, I don’t remember a single project there that wasn’t tainted by corruption, dodgy owners, or outright lies. This ranges from:
- The owner of a popular wellness and workplace stress app getting pissed off with me because a bug was found in a Node backend I had built for her (a PDF upload didn’t fill the correct fields in the DB). Her support contract was up with us, so she took the sane approach - literally calling my employer out on LinkedIn, and me by name as being an “incompetent developer”. Legal got involved, and she had to issue an apology online.
- Several instances of outright lying in pitch decks about customer numbers and eco credentials to get “green” funding.
- The company itself transitioning to crypto, despite pushing the fact that they only work on tech for good projects, while being run by a COO with a history of being inappropriate, having heavy drug/alcohol use, and being genuinely fucking useless in the world of tech.
- A workplace surveying tool to unlock happiness in the workplace getting funding through our work, then deciding to fire the entire fucking team we had built to run their product because they wanted to cut costs and sell to the highest bidder - a company notorious for horrendous workplace practices.
- Someone bragging about their CTO working at Amazon for 5 years. While true, it was in a fulfillment center.
- Countless charities that burn through money in ways you wouldn’t believe, or act hypocritical to their main mission. Imagine trying to fire someone at a mental health charity because they needed time off from stress, or making dead kid jokes at a fundraiser for a children’s charity…
Working at that place made me realise that sometimes the best you can hope for is a leadership structure that aren’t total assholes, and to work on something that you at least have some faith in.
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.
I moved to EdTech from gaming - mobile gaming felt so damn focussed on value extraction.
Several of your use cases are just a different career. I optimize factory Workflows for a living, it’s industrial engineering, and it’s a very different skill set from programming
Web design is not the only option for someone who likes programming. Since you are still a student, there are so many options in front of you. You can be an embedded engineer and work closer to hardware, design firmware, electronic chips themselves or their verification environment. You can be a software engineer and work on business-to-business software which does not include adds and is very useful (e.g. CAD tools, inventory trackers for supermarkets and hospitals etc.). There is so much you can do, pursue something you are enthusiastic about.
Not sure myself, I’m trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren’t anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you’re starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.
But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there’s no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won’t align with yourself or the other workers fully, it’s just a question of degree.
imo you gotta take whatever you can as a first job to get started. If you hate it, make a goal to find a better job after the first year. Just try to learn whatever you can an remember to write down notable things you do on the job to make your resume sound better. Beggars can’t be choosers. You can focus on finding something fun and ethical after you have the experience and luxury to do so.
Also I don’t think you can really appreciate what ethical and unethical behaviour looks like until you experience it first hand. Besides you aren’t really contributing anything truly unique early in your career. Companies that can only hire desperate, under-performing or new engineers tend not to do so well (take a look at just about any bank for instance) and with how much of an arms race most of the unethical stuff is the effect can be very pronounced.
I strongly believe that the vulnerability google is starting to show is a direct result of them losing prestige as a good place to work.
I agree. I think it’s the same thing that Activision Blizzard has been experiencing. All their recent games have been mediocre at best, and it’s due to losing their best talent due to being a bad place to work.
I actually just switched to Kagi for my main search engine because I have been feeling disappointed with Google search lately. It’s fine if you’re only searching big websites but you’ll be lucky to get any results for niche stuff
Go into embedded software. You can’t do ads if there is no UI taps head.
Cli advertisements FTW - Ubuntu embedded edition
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.deleted by creator
This is a very appealing line for me to hear. I will be digging into this to see how impossible the gate of entry is
deleted by creator
