25 ms·

Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

418 points by siscia 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago
Now?! Tech is not only about coding away in a cubicle, what the company does is part of the job.
- alexgmcm 8y ago
  "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
pleasecalllater 8y ago
For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
- swiley 8y ago
  I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit.
  - treerock 8y ago
    I'm curious. I've read a few (mostly fictional) accounts of early companies, and the drive for profit seemed stronger (if anything) than it is now.
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      Companies began as a means to have an endeavour progress while the people involved changed [0]. The nature of the endeavour could be profit, but by no means had to be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History
    - adventured 8y ago
      I've read just about every non-fiction account I can get my hands on about business in the ~1850-1930 era. The drive for profit during the industrial revolution, was radically stronger than it is today. The giants of industry back then openly lusted after success, it was culturally acceptable to behave that way (right up to the point where you were dominant, then the people turned against you). They made no apologies for the all-out pursuit of profit back then. Rockefeller dressed it up slightly, by proclaiming that god wanted him to be rich, that to be wealthy was glorious. The so called robber barons lived in openly ostentatious ways that today's rich in the US would mostly never dream of; today most of them go out of their way to pretend they're not so rich and to hide it. Open shows of wealth today are considered closer to vulgarity, crude, disgusting, etc. Back then, it was far less widely believed that wealth was stolen from 'the people'; today, it's widely believed that the rich are all thieves in some considerable manner. There was no welfare state at all, income taxes were extremely low or non-existent, so the accumulation of wealth happened far faster. Companies often paid extremely high dividends 10 to 20 times higher than is normal today. Tactics, when it came to dealing with competition, were far beyond anything you see today. There were few regulations in the US, so companies were free to devise all manners of schemes to best their competitors. The treatment of labor in the pursuit of profit, was similarly far more brutal (there's really no comparison, Amazon's warehouse workers are treated like kings compared to sweatshop workers back then).
      - dieterrams 8y ago
        Do you have a short list of book recommendations?
  - quantummkv 8y ago
    The East India Company (amongst many others) did heinous stuff solely to make a profit. If anything, the drive for profit is a little less now.
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      I'm not sure the drive is less so much as PR is a thing, better regulation is a thing and the internet makes corporations misdeeds much more transparent. This is one of the reasons among many I regard the decline in proper journalism as so worrying.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    If anyone knows what I'm trying to say and can put it in clearer words that'd be lovely, I think I'm missing an important linking idea here. Anyway... Imagine there are two paths from A to B (the left and right path). 100 people walk from A to B. Half take the left and half the right, and none of them have any information not in this paragraph. There are wolves on the left path. Everyone who travels it gets eaten. Now, at B, we have 50 people. They all chose the right path voluntarily, they all made a choice. None of them knew about the wolves though. How do we catagorise this situation in term of having and not having made a "real" choice? I argue that in practice, whatever the people were thinking when they chose B was irrelevant, because they didn't know the thing that actually mattered and they didn't have a proxy variable for it. With that setup, I'd argue companies that "help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit" are a lot like my right path, in that the people may not have been focused on maximising profits, but if they didn't achieve them they wouldn't have lasted long. By evolution, there will be a decided drift towards companies maximising profits even if all the individuals actually making the choices think they are doing something real (or I suppose, the converse where they think that their job is meaningless).
    - jackpirate 8y ago
      This is something like "survivorship bias", but that term is usually applied to extreme outliers like CEOs rather that average case people like you're doing.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    That's not right. USA Antitrust law was invented around 1900 to fight excesses is service of profile. A corporation could be chartered for any reason. What is true is that in the early 19th century there was a legal pretense that corporations had to justify their charter to the government in order to be approved and renewed. One of the very first corporations in USA was Alexander Hamilton's bank, that ran a water utility as a front operation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company The old days weren't as honorable as the stories whitewash. But not-just-for-profit corporations have existed for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification... is a modern trend.
  - aikah 8y ago
    > I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit. You might want to have a look at an history book then. Companies had slaves, got kids working in mines, got to use the government to shout their workers who rebelled because they had no rights whatsoever, or just straight up used private armies. It was all pre 20th century already. If all this was not solely to make a profit, I don't know what it was. Furthermore the great majority of big ventures were family driven. There were not formal associations between "people with similar goals" who weren't blood related.
- artellectual 8y ago
  That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources that feed us are being destroyed. What’s the point of a pile of money when there is nothing else left?
  - tiredwired 8y ago
    Sounds like an opportunity for someone to build the tech to cure cancer and filter pollution.
    - j7ake 8y ago
      Cure for cancer involves molecular biology and filtering pollution involves heterogeneous catalysis. Where does programming come into play in any direct way to these solutions? I understand that tech is involved indirectly, but so is the coffee that is served in laboratories to keep scientists working.
      - fjsolwmv 8y ago
        Human Genome Project? Tunmmor detecting AI? Global weather simulations?
      - justinclift 8y ago
        > Where does programming come into play in any direct way to these solutions? * Literally every piece of lab equipment that uses any kind of controller/control board (most of them)... has needed programming of one sort of another. Hmmm, with the exception of older analog gear maybe (decades ago?). * Every single piece of data collection, storage, analysis, and control software is created through programming. * Even communication of results among team members, to management, to the public, often requires programming.
        8y ago
- EliRivers 8y ago
  The current obsession that companies exist solely for making money for shareholders is an historical aberration. If that's still the common view in a hundred years or so, it will carry more weight.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    > The current obsession that companies exist solely for making money for shareholders Making money for shareholders is an instrument to secure long term/regular investment. It's not the "end goal", and almost no company's mission is "to make money". Money is just the blood stream that enables everything else.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > It's not the "end goal", and almost no company's mission is "to make money". Sure seems that way, when every decision is optimized towards making money short-term. I think the more correct model of most companies would be money-focused entities that through path dependence ended up in the market sector they're in. That is, the actual thing they're doing is an artifact of history and is abstracted away for actual operations.
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      Yet there is a common belief that companies are legally obliged to make enriching shareholders their only priority.
- panic 8y ago
  Say I have an idea for how I want the world to be. I don't care about money at all, but my vision is too big to execute by myself. How do I get people to help me without forming a company?
  - vmateixeira 8y ago
    Tell people about it. Let it grow from being just your vision to become a small group's vision.
- yitchelle 8y ago
  Personally, it should not negatively impact lives. For example, I can't see myself saying "I will take this job for the money, and the gun I help engineered is used to kill humans during combat".
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    I don't work in the field and don't know exactly how I'd personally feel about it, but I can see a very strong argument that even one of the most heinous weapons every deployed on Earth likely saved a net million-plus lives. If that is the case, is it moral to refuse to work on the Manhattan Project if asked? (I also agree that working on the next generation of the atomic bomb or the next revision of the M16/AK47 does not hold the same promise of saving lives, of course...)
    - yitchelle 8y ago
      You are totally right, I am oversimplifying it. Do you know of any text, interviews or discussions with any of the scientists on the Manhattan project on the morality of their work?
      - blihp 8y ago
        It looks like this might be a good source: https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      Framed like that, it's basically the trolley problem[0]. For which I don't think there's a good answer. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
      - manigandham 8y ago
        There is. It's a solved problem. The only issue is lack of info (many evil people vs 1 good) but most people get stuck because of a "no compromises" attitude and lack of will to make that decision. Modern society has already made the choice though. We sacrifice a few for the many all the time, and they are called heros and duly celebrated.
- kopo 8y ago
  I think the quote goes recognition and praise trumps sex and money. Guys join the army for what? Loose their lives for what?
  - abledon 8y ago
    They join the army to protect their nation and the privileges we have. So your family can have dinner at night without worrying about people from a neighboring land busting in and stealing your property , kidnapping murdeing raping family etc They are people who are signing up for a job whose work benefits are medium probability of making their spouses widows and single parents overnight
    - kopo 8y ago
      Ceremony and tradition, parades and costume, medals and ribbons exist for what reason?
    - sailfast 8y ago
      They also join because of solid signing bonuses, good training, GI Bill, and a good resume item. Let’s not kid ourselves about the economic make-up of our enlisted military. I am not saying that they did not sign up for the other reasons as well, and by saying this I don’t think I am undermining their commitment to serve or their intent, but in a volunteer force it is also about money, and we’re going to have to pay a lot more to meet recruitment targets.
- abledon 8y ago
  The point of business should be for the betterment of humanity, not money
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    That literally defies the very definition of the word business.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    That is what NGOs are for.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    Get your dirty socialism out of here./s
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 8y ago
  It surprised me how many believed on the "don't be evil" motto, keeping customers and board members happy is all that counts.
michaelt 8y ago
I think this makes a good deal of sense. The tech job market is extremely buoyant in the present age, meaning very few programmers are in a position where they have to settle for a job they dislike just to make ends meet. I mean, every tech company talks about wanting engaged, passionate, proud employees - so why settle for doing work you can't take pride in when you could switch to work you could be proud of, and probably get a raise while you're at it?
- gms 8y ago
  Because you can’t get a raise - the big companies pay the most money.
  - huangc10 8y ago
    Not necessarily true. There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries and stock options for top talent. And also, I think he/she means if you can't get behind what Facebook is doing, maybe jump to Apple who "supposedly" have security and privacy as their top priorities and in the mean time receive a raise.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      >>There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries and stock options for top talent. Not everyone is top talent though - and I don't think there's anything wrong with being an average programmer and not wanting to work on morally wrong projects.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        Agreed, of course, but also don't think anyone suggested that there was anything wrong with it.
    - gms 8y ago
      Indeed - you can jump to another big company.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Workers can ask, until 2008 happens again. Then, free sodas and a lot of workers will go. Ask then :)
huangc10 8y ago
I think people should do what they want and I find these articles meaningless. Don't like your company's values? Great, find another job. It's as simple as that. Let's not shame people for wanting to stick with a company. Everyone has their reasons to stay whether it's money, values, working environment, co-workers or personal reasons. If you really cared, shouldn't you try to change the company from within? Isn't that the best place to start?
- matz1 8y ago
  Whatever the issue is you can always find haters, I think its better to make oneself immune to this.
dotdi 8y ago
Every person, tech or not, should evaluate what their work is contributing to and they should evaluate if they can ethically and morally accept what the company is doing or standing for. In the end, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be accountable for my actions, even if that would mean to forego money, prestige, etc.
- hef19898 8y ago
  True that. What I learned is that the official mission, say save the climate, of a given company is not enough tu judge that. I know companies in the renewable energy sector that are doing some shady stuff, the only guy getting rich is the CEO/founder regardless of how many bancrupcies occur. And the employees trying to work in "good" industry are just taken advantage of by some rich guy.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  > Every person, tech or not, should evaluate what their work is contributing to and they should evaluate if they can ethically and morally accept what the company is doing or standing for. > In the end, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be accountable for my actions, even if that would mean to forego money, prestige, etc. How would you like people to square this with providing for their families? No offense to coal miners or well operators, but I don't think they're willing to destitute their families over climate change -- what's a better world for their grandchildren if their children die starving in the miners arms? More to the point, I think the problem is "we as a society", not the individual. We're not willing to give slight inconveniences for massive increases in energy efficency. Look at how we design our cities and communities. People drive 2+ton vehicles upwards of 2 hours each day to go to work instead of living closer to the office and biking or taking public transport. (Many first and second ring suburbs of many/most/all cities have decent (or better) school systems than in the exurbs.) Do we really need to consume all of the plastic junk or waste nearly as much food as we do? Do we need to be so wasteful of energy in our homes? Do we need to keep stores and offices frozen in the dead of summer? There is a lot of really low hanging fruit (that people as a whole are unwilling to do because it's the slightest of inconvenience or expects them to acknowledge the world they live in), before we ask people to give up their jobs. Do you think coal miners, well operators, or big box retail associates wouldn't want a safer or more fulfilling job? We need to look at our excess consumption before pointing fingers at people for taking a job we find dirty (in the moral sense.)
fsloth 8y ago
For the over the decade I've been a software engineer I've always strived to work in products with a value proposition for the end user that I can understand. I can't understand how anyone could work without this understanding and not get their soul crushed. Maybe I'm just sensitive or underpaid.
- isodude 8y ago
  Sometimes your don't have the luxury to choose your work.
  - enraged_camel 8y ago
    Yes, but this is a much more rare scenario for techies than other white collar professionals.
    - isodude 8y ago
      Well that depends doesn't it. If you got skill and motivation to choose between gigs, that's fine, you'll most likely just start your own if you don't find anything fitting. Those you hear alot about. Succeeding is not easier in tech than anything else, given that success means doing exactly what you want and feeling good about it. I do interview people and try to find techies that fit in our org, but it's tough even if there's available people.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    This is being said for Programmers, yet a good portion of HN goes out of their way to tell poor people they can just get a new job. Very contradictory!
    - isodude 8y ago
      I guess you can't talk for everybody (which happens a lot in the comments for what I've seen, HN does this, HN does that). The commenters here may be very biased though. To be clear this article seems to refer to SF workers, but I guess the same applies there even if the pay is fat. You need to generate cash to pay for the hefty rents. I should add a disclaimer here that this is just an assumption based on what I've read though. Maybe someone could chime in on how easy it is to get a job with good morale in SF? I would imagine that it's like looking at the trees but only seeing the forest.
netcan 8y ago
At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum." In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise. Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPhone wearing a suit writing business requiremnt compendiums. Startups hired world changers and made a customer and emloyee happiness index. Google wrote "Don't be evil" on a chalkboard. Gmail was better than outlook. All was good. Then some tension surfaced. Advertisers thought they would be happier tracking users. Users thought this was creepy. Making generals happy did not make employees happy. Someone erased "don't be evil" from the blackboard. Back to square one. Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank. Now, they use euphemisms and secrecy to avoid saying stuff that sounds bad. Btw... It's interesting how iconic "don't be evil" was as a slogan. They couldn't live up to it, but that doesn't mean it didn't impact.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bitL 8y ago
  In the past one could escape "evil" environment in private life; now with overreaching/intrusive tech on a global scale and companies losing their initial (even if only public) philosophies under the pressure of making more profit after reaching market saturation that possibility is going to be vastly reduced, and only then we will see what they are really capable of (with warning signs already popping up).
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank... Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental. People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when google touted their "don't be evil" philosophy. For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich. We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. (Again, if we're being honest, that understanding of the danger is one reason many of us don't even have a facebook.) But we compartmentalize. What we would put on our own home systems rarely reflects what we would put on work systems if someone is paying us enough money. What we would develop in hobby time is, again, very different than what we would develop if someone is paying us a lot of money. I get it. We have to feed our families. I'm not faulting anyone. I'm just saying that it's a bit revisionist to put forth the "google/facebook/whoever tricked us into working for them" narrative. Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in.
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ageek123 8y ago
The article gives no measure of how many tech workers have adopted this mindset. It seems to largely be a narrative driven by journalists and a relatively small number of activists in some of the more high-profile tech companies (who are simultaneously pushing a number of unrelated issues like unionization, diversity, deplatforming conservatives, #resisting, and introducing identity politics into hiring and promotion decisions).
- cableshaft 8y ago
  Yeah, that seems to be how the media writes stories now. They overhear a friend of theirs mention something (or maybe somehow dream up the idea on their own), say "gee, that'd make a good article!", find 2 or 3 individual examples, preferably anecdotes, so they can pad the article length and make it seem legitimate, don't bother trying to show evidence for their hypothesis with any facts (or find some tangential fact about something else that they can invent some sort of bridge between that and their idea), and write the article. If the headline can be more salacious, the better. I keep seeing more and more articles written this way nowadays. It gets really annoying to see an interesting headline, click it hoping to read a good argument for their case, and then feeling I just wasted my time.
KaiserPro 8y ago
bold statement alert if you don't know what your company is doing, and your intricate part in that dance, you are not really providing value to the company, or more importantly to yourself. /bold statement How can you make decisions if you don't understand the business impact? How do you know what if that optimization is worth the cost of implementation? If you don't know the impact of a product release on your customers, what are you really doing? To say that as a tech person "I don't know the business side" you are being deliberately ignorant. "business" is simple[1]. You are being just as annoying at those useless managers who demand x feature yesterday and don't bother to think about the ramifications. 1)It really is, you are trying to make people give you cash for something. that might be things like food, or vapour (ie initial coin offerings). The mechanics are the same, monetary units in exchange for goods or services. To attach a special mystique to the process is to give power to charlatans. (see repacking of subprime debt) TL;DR: If you don't know what your buisness does, you are like the idiot manager dilbert.
- mLuby 8y ago
  Not necessarily true in big companies. A devops middle manager doesn't need to know whether the company is building widgets or dohickies; their job is to keep the software running securely. CTO/VP Eng should certainly know more about business priorities. At smaller companies it is more important. Also can improve morale.
  - KaiserPro 8y ago
    so how do you negotiate SLAs? How do you know what level of security is required? How do you prioritise requests? How do you know which team to ask favours from? How do you get more money for your department? How do you avoid the poop-gravity interaction cycle? All of this is intrinsically linked to the business logic/goals of the company. For example: Our team worked with $cashCow team to reduce time to live by x percent. We have saved the company y percent a year. Now give our team more cash we can do it for other teams. That requires a basic understanding of the business, and its priorities, so you can support the most important internal users and make them more efficient.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
qubax 8y ago
We do? Maybe a tiny fringe does. Most tech workers want to know the same thing nytimes employees do. The salary and benefits. That's it. That's what workers care about at the end of the day. Does the nytimes tech team ask "Why are we spamming HN everyday for"? I doubt it. They just do what they are paid to do. The same thing for all tech workers and all workers in general. The construction worker building a luxury tower isn't asking "why are we building this for". He just wants to get paid and paid well. "Do no evil" is no more real in the tech world as "fair and balanced" or "all the news fit to print" is real in the news world. It's just empty slogans for PR.
yosefzeev 8y ago
I find it surprising that educated people are "just now" doing this. What did people think corporations were doing to the world? Open up your eyes and look around and get your head out of the code and the bullshit slogans your companies have sold you. It's obvious something has gone wrong and is going on.
- lolive 8y ago
  Engineering abilities does not imply political awareness. Making things work is surprisingly hard and (imho) a soul crushing process. You need a specific kind of people's profile for that. From my experience, the presence of a political vision alongside the engineering skills is much lower than expected. When both are present, the political vision does not come from a kind of enlightenment in the engineer's inner soul. But from a feedback loop coming from accurate sources of informations.
  - PopeDotNinja 8y ago
    > Making things work is surprisingly hard and (imho) a soul crushing proces. I'm not able to turn off caring about what I work on, although I have picked up some tricks over time that help me turn that caring on. However, there's if I'm working on something that is ultimately lame, eventually I'll run out of stuff to care about. That's when the soul crushing starts to happen.
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > However, there's if I'm working on something that is ultimately lame, eventually I'll run out of stuff to care about. That's when the soul crushing starts to happen. A very important factor whether the work is soul-crushing or not is whether the work is intellectually stimulating or not.
  - EdgarVerona 8y ago
    Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from the actual act of your work and the compensation around it that you stop thinking about the consequences of your actions. This sounds terrible, but it's really just a small variant on the banality of evil. Solving problems, working on tight deadlines, and getting recognition, status, and money are all things that make a person feel like what they're doing is right. It gives an endorphin high, it's a sign that other people are recognizing their work. I hesitate to use the word "addictive" in this context, but it can certainly be compulsive. It's easy to lose sight of whether what you're doing is what you ought to be doing when the act of doing it is so compelling, financially rewarding, and celebrated by others. This isn't a justification; it is a warning to anyone coming into this field, a warning that I wish I'd thought more about coming into it. This is something we need to be vigilant about as engineers, because it's easy to look the other way on questionable activities by your business when everything else in your life is becoming enriched by it and they're telling you that the ethical issues are for "their side of the business" to worry about. It is not. Do not believe them. Understand where your paycheck is coming from, and make sure that you continue to evaluate it as your company changes and ask yourself if you're okay with it. In my career, I have: * Been lied to about the true purpose of a product we were building, and only realized the lie because another engineer was brave enough to call them out and force them to tell the truth. I was fully prepared to be the coward that didn't follow up on it and remain willfully ignorant, and his ethical bravery was the only thing that snapped me out of it. * Seen a company's financial plan gradually change from an ethical one to an unethical one, and have seen good people struggle and contort themselves to justify it: including myself, for a time. * Worked in fields where the profits gained by maintaining the status quo has created a desire for minimium compliance instead of continual improvements. The mandatory ethics class I took for my CS degree never prepared me for what to do, how to be vigilant, or how to take action when it is the company itself that is the unethical one. I feel like we need to have open and honest discussions with people coming into this field about this very real possibility, and about the need to evaluate not just the compensation and interesting problems being presented by a given business, but also the ways that they earn money and whether it is something you find acceptable. And what to do if that situation takes a turn for the worse. The ACM has some high-level recommendations in their ethics statements, and I think they're a good start. They should be required reading for all software engineers. https://ethics.acm.org/ https://ethics.acm.org/ I have been a coward. I have been an example of the banality of evil. And I don't think I'm alone in this field: not by a long shot. We've got to pay attention to the ethics of what we create, and we need to be much more brave than we have been.
anoncoward111 8y ago
You are building it for your salary, for shareholders, both private and public, and users. There tends to be people who will screw over one or two of those groups to enrich the other group.
drasticmeasures 8y ago
Google management gave too much freedom and independence to its techies and now they think they run the company.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Well, that’s what happens when you have an engineering-driven organization.
amelius 8y ago
I suspect there are plenty of people working on nasty adtech still ... Also, tech workers can often be replaced by others (e.g. Asians) who have different standards when offered the same salary.
dubya123 8y ago
They sure have strong opinions about working on Government projects but none of them have any issues creating tech that intrusively monitors and manipulates people for the purposes of serving them advertisements. What heroes they are...
- jriot 8y ago
  Which is most us don't care for their virtue signaling.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  You can directly blame the people who developed this stuff, the programmers, most perfectly able to move jobs with no real loss in economic stability. I think it's one of the most immoral and unethical jobs that could be taken today.
mc32 8y ago
Some tech workers. Not all, not most. This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news. China presents a quandary, no doubt. On the one hand we have self determination and sovereignty, on the other hand we have “western values” and so forth. Not long ago “internationalists” argued for the former, but given that that would result in something contra, they now prefer “western values” which they used to argue against (i.e. relativism).
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  >This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news. So you'd rather have an uninformed tech job force with no opinions, just walk into a private government every day which strips every right you have along with having absolutely no morals or ethics so you can live in a 34th story downtown penthouse with a mini australian shepherd and a Tesla? You realize the tech workers literally do all of the tech work, which actually makes the company run and function, right? Why should they just be drones with no say? This is exactly the problem. Do we just do this solely for money? Maybe the world would be a better place if workers had a say instead of shareholders and executives who are only in their positions to make extraordinary amounts of money in absolutely any way, morals & ethics often aside.
  - mc32 8y ago
    I’m not for tech workers becoming drones. I'm for them being informed. I’m not for them to be moulded by mass media who see them as a tool to carry out their vision or idea if what’s right or wrong. You see, if informed tech workers were to make contrarian decisions, let’s say with regard to domestic issues in the US and while informed they made a Libertarian decision, this decision would be derided never the less because it would deviate from mass media concensus. Who decides and should decide about, for example produce? Should the produce lady at the supermarket make the decision to stock conventional or organic, or consumer denand, of the owner/cooperative? The produce lady gets paid to put whatever the buyer gets. The burger flipper doesn't decide ti buy frizen or from this or that ranch. We get paid to do a job.
friedman23 8y ago
> According to Dr. Poulson, Mr. Dean said that Google complied with surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if the company should leave the United States market in protest. How clueless can you be? People can and will die if you cooperate and share private information on your users with the Chinese government.
CPLX 8y ago
This isn’t a novel concept. Didn’t anyone see Real Genius?
golergka 8y ago
Each time a topic like this get posted to HN, I feel like a broken record repeating the same thing over and over. There are many very talented software developers that have very different political and ethical opinions than those described here. They work for military and intelligence of their respective countries, enjoy it, and believe that they're doing it for greater good. You can debate whether they're right or not, but please, don't forget that they exist - and that there are a LOT of them.
jimmy1 8y ago
Unpopular opinion: this is why the "dudebros" and their like keep getting hired. They are more than happy to do their work, accept their salary, and move on, and not have to turn everything into "changing the world"
- strikelaserclaw 8y ago
  Even before the "dudebros", i'd argue most scientists and engineers didn't really care too much about the moral implications of their work. Guns, bombs etc... were all invented by brilliant minds, we'd like to think we as a society have collectively evolved cause we have small machines in our hands with all the world's knowledge but esp in the usa, looking outside you see that nothing has really changed that much in the way humans think.
  - neuromantik8086 8y ago
    I mean, scientists for the Manhattan Project were remorseful after the fact at least. In general though, scientists are primarily driven by curiosity with little regard for the safety of themselves or others. If IRBs didn't exist, I assure you that some experiment of dubious ethics would be in progress right now without it even occurring to the primary investigator that it might be morally problematic (it's important to note that with some researchers, moral issues just don't click mentally and there's not a question of malice). Even with an IRB, you still get studies like the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco at Cornell [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/0...
  - zeveb 8y ago
    > most scientists and engineers didn't really care too much about the moral implications of their work Have you considered that they might care very much about the moral implications of their work — and be proud to contribute to their nation's armed might?
    - stronglikedan 8y ago
sys_64738 8y ago
What the widget does or whom it is for is not my main concern. What is my concern is interesting puzzles for problem solving before I move on to the next widget. Widget building at a startup in not it as I won't make a profit. I want to see the money in my bank account every two weeks so I can put food on the table. In the words of Jerry McGuire: Show me the $$$!
saosebastiao 8y ago
Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance the entire way. Political change is even more out of reach. I grow tired of obviously bad policy ideas being promoted because of political party consensus (on "both" sides). I am exhausted of the generational warfare that is causing newer generations to face an uphill battle for the rest of their lives, with higher health care costs, higher housing costs, higher environmental costs, higher education costs, and lower wages. I'm sick of inaction on important issues, misguided action on petty issues, and the nonexistent potential for small unpolitical changes that could have big impacts but won't ever see the time of day because the need for political posturing doesn't allow for it (like for example, a change to the metric system). I feel trapped and helpless to change anything. And sometimes my feeling of helplessness has made it so I can no longer muster the effort to care for things that are so far beyond my control. I'm at the point on Maslow's Hierarchy where taking care of my family's survival is the only important thing anymore. I sometimes ponder whether I should just go out and get some kind of unethical job that pays a ton of money (and there is no shortage of those kinds of jobs for people of my talents) merely because it accomplishes that goal more efficiently. But then I feel bad about entertaining that thought. I don't really know what to do about it.
- mempko 8y ago
  Where the world needs changing is it's suicidal path towards extreme climate change.
  - gersh 8y ago
    I think we need to convince people to stop studying petroleum engineering and prepare for a different economy instead. If you'd like to work with me on this, please email me.
    - 8y ago
blueadept111 8y ago
This trend is nothing more than a reflection of the fact that unemployment is at record lows. It does not represent a new, heightened morality in employees (that would persist even if the job market soured, for example).
vinayms 8y ago
The idealism of a bunch of engineers won't make the slightest difference, except may be appease their own sense of morality, as long as there are enough engineers willing to be tech-whores. In this regard, the supply exceeds the demand. Technology is the proverbial knife which can cut a fruit to feed and can also cut a throat to terrorize. Take the current darling of tech, AI/ML. If you are working on this, at a megacorp especially, you should realize that sooner or later it will be used for nefarious activities. But should that stop you from contributing to the field? Would database engineers rue the fact that their products are used to store child porn? My point is, unless something as explicit as the ones depicted in the article happens, its highly unlikely to know what the tech you are developing is going to be adapted for besides the one it was designed and built for. The google employee notes it themselves. Having ethical concerns is always advisable, but constantly wanting to know if the tech will be used by evil doers (which is not same as wanting to know more about a specific requirement that looks questionable) just makes one come across as a dick because no one except the powers that be would know that. I hope engineers don't go from being sheep to full on hippies, but choose the rational middle path instead.
dekhn 8y ago
I once produced an open source product while working for Berkeley Lab, which is a DoE lab operated by UC. It does non-classified work. One day we got a visit from a couple employees of Lawrence Livermore Labs (classified research) and my manager glanced at their badges- he said something about "Q" and smiled while asking what they worked on. They said "multiphysics combustion codes" and my manager looked at me and said "they run nuclear weapons simulations" (they didn't confirm). After chatting for a while I realized they were using my code to manage nuclear weapons simulations. That's a consequence of licenses like MIT and BSD and Apache: you don't control who uses your software. I came to terms with this a long time ago but it's still odd to think that I can write software that my own government will use to ensure our destructive weapons work as expected.
- imranq 8y ago
  That’s an amazing story. Do you mind sharing the name of the library?
  - dekhn 8y ago
    pyglobus: http://toolkit.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.0/common/pyglobus/ http://toolkit.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.0/common/pygl... it was a grid computing library that made it easy to FTP large files at high performance and do automated job management.
    - Red_Pill_Phil 8y ago
      Don't share this...
    - imranq 8y ago
      Thanks!
- nraynaud 8y ago
  I wouldn't mind too much bing in your shoes: you have not developed your library for that, it's not its main use, and you didn't even know about it. I work in cloud related things (I do UI stuff for the cloud), I'm pretty sure 3-4 contracts from me, the code I work on could be used for weapons, but I'm clearly not developing a weapon nor something whose main goal is killing.
negamax 8y ago
Really interesting money vs ethics discussion. Everyone who can choose ethics, congratulations. Everyone who can’t, it’s a social failure that you have to make tough choice for financial goals.
hasbroslasher 8y ago
It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of modern life. Or you can do some third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline (energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the common man. I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary change.
- acdanger 8y ago
  It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area. It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen. I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more systemic. But that doesn't make it any less troublesome.
  - hasbroslasher 8y ago
    I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital. Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.
kareemsabri 8y ago
I think we're in a bear market for technology, in terms of people's sentiments. Possibly for America as well. I don't really think it's justified though. Most people seem to think you can only go work for FAANG if you have a CS degree, cause they're in the news all the time. If those companies conflict with your morals, there are lots of problems in the world that can benefit from technology. A look through the YC batch every few months has a wide variety of companies, many of which would benefit humanity if successful.
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
Unfortunately, the core business of Facebook, Twitter, and Google (driving engagement) is probably contributing to tearing the US apart politically. It's not just individual projects, it's at the very core of what they are. I don't see a happy ending here. I assume that the same thing is happening in other countries.
- elihu 8y ago
  It turns out that a lot of deep-pocketed organizations are willing to pay a lot of money to tech companies in exchange for the capability to manipulate large populations of people. The notion of a technology company selling products or services directly to customers hasn't gone away, but it's starting to feel quaint and nostalgic, like it belongs in a Norman Rockwell illustration.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That is more an information company thing really and so not old - look at newspapers for one. And the cure is worse than the disease. Besides, say what you will about Google and social media but they haven't started multiple major wars.
carapace 8y ago
Computers are war machines. They have other uses but their primary use has always been war. (Specifically code-cracking and modeling nuclear physics for weapon design.) As a thought experiment, try to imagine an alternate reality where WWII never happened and Alan Turing is just an obscure British queer mathematician. Would he have spawned the systems we have today? Or perhaps Konrad Zuse? War drives the information revolution. We're in the middle of WWIII now. If you don't want to contribute to the war machine you have to leave computer industry and take up gardening, specifically applied ecology such as "Permaculture".
wayanon 8y ago
“We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology..” - good luck with that! have they wondered which government departments financed the growth of tech in the Cold War ?
geebee 8y ago
The NYTimes discusses this question in the context of ethics, but the hiring process for software engineers, generally speaking, often avoids any discussion of what will be built. I've interviewed at google and a few other similar places, as well as smaller startups, and remarkably often, there was almost no discussion of the company or product. A tech interview goes like this "a list begins with an integer between 0 and 5. You then add a new set of integers that must sum to the value of the last added integer. How many different possible lists of 100 integers can be generated through this process?" I've done this at so many companies. They don't talk about what you'll be building. They don't want your opinion. You could go through two days of whiteboard exam style interview questions and have no idea what the company does. And you could get hired without ever answering a single question about what the company does. It's remarkable, but it's actually designed to work that way. I think tht the outside world really doesn't quite understand what goes on in tech interviews and tech hiring. If they did, they might know that the indifference to ethics may stem from general programmer unawareness of what the companies they work for actually do.
mindgam3 8y ago
[Reposting my comment shared on the earlier thread, I guess this one wasn’t marked as dupe] “In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.) “We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to be complicit in this gross misuse of power.” This is an incredibly powerful statement. A bunch of students getting together brought Google to its knees. Now these brave students might consider standing up en masse to Facebook and its rapidly shrinking signing bonuses before FB moves too fast and breaks reality again.
- intended 8y ago
  Knees is overselling it.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    Yeah, I’m probably being a little dramatic. They didn’t cripple GOOG or their business model. But still, getting Google to back down on a significant product direction is noteworthy.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  I'm confused on both of your points. 1. How is this powerful, in the slightest? 100 students is less than a rounding error. 2. How are these students in any way brave?
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    1. Powerful in terms of impact. Google discontinued the project, no doubt due in some part to the protest. 2. Brave in turning down lucrative job offers for moral reasons. Many, many engineers currently work at Big Tech co’s with similar doubts and fears. But to risk your salary and job security on ethical grounds, that’s what I call brave.
evadne 8y ago
I work in EdTech and would like to think that there is always $ for the kids.
el3ctron 8y ago
since when capitalism wants workers to be aware? oh yeah, since China Communist party do a demonstration on technologycal superiority. Problem for capitalism is that a system where workers are awakened is called SOCIALISM.

418 points by siscia 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

Now?! Tech is not only about coding away in a cubicle, what the company does is part of the job.

alexgmcm 8y ago
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

pleasecalllater 8y ago

For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.

swiley 8y ago
I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit.
- treerock 8y ago
  I'm curious. I've read a few (mostly fictional) accounts of early companies, and the drive for profit seemed stronger (if anything) than it is now.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Companies began as a means to have an endeavour progress while the people involved changed [0]. The nature of the endeavour could be profit, but by no means had to be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History
  - adventured 8y ago
    I've read just about every non-fiction account I can get my hands on about business in the ~1850-1930 era. The drive for profit during the industrial revolution, was radically stronger than it is today. The giants of industry back then openly lusted after success, it was culturally acceptable to behave that way (right up to the point where you were dominant, then the people turned against you). They made no apologies for the all-out pursuit of profit back then. Rockefeller dressed it up slightly, by proclaiming that god wanted him to be rich, that to be wealthy was glorious. The so called robber barons lived in openly ostentatious ways that today's rich in the US would mostly never dream of; today most of them go out of their way to pretend they're not so rich and to hide it. Open shows of wealth today are considered closer to vulgarity, crude, disgusting, etc. Back then, it was far less widely believed that wealth was stolen from 'the people'; today, it's widely believed that the rich are all thieves in some considerable manner. There was no welfare state at all, income taxes were extremely low or non-existent, so the accumulation of wealth happened far faster. Companies often paid extremely high dividends 10 to 20 times higher than is normal today. Tactics, when it came to dealing with competition, were far beyond anything you see today. There were few regulations in the US, so companies were free to devise all manners of schemes to best their competitors. The treatment of labor in the pursuit of profit, was similarly far more brutal (there's really no comparison, Amazon's warehouse workers are treated like kings compared to sweatshop workers back then).
    - dieterrams 8y ago
      Do you have a short list of book recommendations?
- quantummkv 8y ago
  The East India Company (amongst many others) did heinous stuff solely to make a profit. If anything, the drive for profit is a little less now.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    I'm not sure the drive is less so much as PR is a thing, better regulation is a thing and the internet makes corporations misdeeds much more transparent. This is one of the reasons among many I regard the decline in proper journalism as so worrying.
- roenxi 8y ago
  If anyone knows what I'm trying to say and can put it in clearer words that'd be lovely, I think I'm missing an important linking idea here. Anyway... Imagine there are two paths from A to B (the left and right path). 100 people walk from A to B. Half take the left and half the right, and none of them have any information not in this paragraph. There are wolves on the left path. Everyone who travels it gets eaten. Now, at B, we have 50 people. They all chose the right path voluntarily, they all made a choice. None of them knew about the wolves though. How do we catagorise this situation in term of having and not having made a "real" choice? I argue that in practice, whatever the people were thinking when they chose B was irrelevant, because they didn't know the thing that actually mattered and they didn't have a proxy variable for it. With that setup, I'd argue companies that "help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit" are a lot like my right path, in that the people may not have been focused on maximising profits, but if they didn't achieve them they wouldn't have lasted long. By evolution, there will be a decided drift towards companies maximising profits even if all the individuals actually making the choices think they are doing something real (or I suppose, the converse where they think that their job is meaningless).
  - jackpirate 8y ago
    This is something like "survivorship bias", but that term is usually applied to extreme outliers like CEOs rather that average case people like you're doing.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  That's not right. USA Antitrust law was invented around 1900 to fight excesses is service of profile. A corporation could be chartered for any reason. What is true is that in the early 19th century there was a legal pretense that corporations had to justify their charter to the government in order to be approved and renewed. One of the very first corporations in USA was Alexander Hamilton's bank, that ran a water utility as a front operation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company The old days weren't as honorable as the stories whitewash. But not-just-for-profit corporations have existed for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification... is a modern trend.
- aikah 8y ago
  > I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit. You might want to have a look at an history book then. Companies had slaves, got kids working in mines, got to use the government to shout their workers who rebelled because they had no rights whatsoever, or just straight up used private armies. It was all pre 20th century already. If all this was not solely to make a profit, I don't know what it was. Furthermore the great majority of big ventures were family driven. There were not formal associations between "people with similar goals" who weren't blood related.
artellectual 8y ago
That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources that feed us are being destroyed. What’s the point of a pile of money when there is nothing else left?
- tiredwired 8y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity for someone to build the tech to cure cancer and filter pollution.
  - j7ake 8y ago
    Cure for cancer involves molecular biology and filtering pollution involves heterogeneous catalysis. Where does programming come into play in any direct way to these solutions? I understand that tech is involved indirectly, but so is the coffee that is served in laboratories to keep scientists working.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Human Genome Project? Tunmmor detecting AI? Global weather simulations?
    - justinclift 8y ago
      > Where does programming come into play in any direct way to these solutions? * Literally every piece of lab equipment that uses any kind of controller/control board (most of them)... has needed programming of one sort of another. Hmmm, with the exception of older analog gear maybe (decades ago?). * Every single piece of data collection, storage, analysis, and control software is created through programming. * Even communication of results among team members, to management, to the public, often requires programming.
      - 8y ago
EliRivers 8y ago
The current obsession that companies exist solely for making money for shareholders is an historical aberration. If that's still the common view in a hundred years or so, it will carry more weight.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  > The current obsession that companies exist solely for making money for shareholders Making money for shareholders is an instrument to secure long term/regular investment. It's not the "end goal", and almost no company's mission is "to make money". Money is just the blood stream that enables everything else.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > It's not the "end goal", and almost no company's mission is "to make money". Sure seems that way, when every decision is optimized towards making money short-term. I think the more correct model of most companies would be money-focused entities that through path dependence ended up in the market sector they're in. That is, the actual thing they're doing is an artifact of history and is abstracted away for actual operations.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Yet there is a common belief that companies are legally obliged to make enriching shareholders their only priority.
panic 8y ago
Say I have an idea for how I want the world to be. I don't care about money at all, but my vision is too big to execute by myself. How do I get people to help me without forming a company?
- vmateixeira 8y ago
  Tell people about it. Let it grow from being just your vision to become a small group's vision.
yitchelle 8y ago
Personally, it should not negatively impact lives. For example, I can't see myself saying "I will take this job for the money, and the gun I help engineered is used to kill humans during combat".
- sokoloff 8y ago
  I don't work in the field and don't know exactly how I'd personally feel about it, but I can see a very strong argument that even one of the most heinous weapons every deployed on Earth likely saved a net million-plus lives. If that is the case, is it moral to refuse to work on the Manhattan Project if asked? (I also agree that working on the next generation of the atomic bomb or the next revision of the M16/AK47 does not hold the same promise of saving lives, of course...)
  - yitchelle 8y ago
    You are totally right, I am oversimplifying it. Do you know of any text, interviews or discussions with any of the scientists on the Manhattan project on the morality of their work?
    - blihp 8y ago
      It looks like this might be a good source: https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    Framed like that, it's basically the trolley problem[0]. For which I don't think there's a good answer. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
    - manigandham 8y ago
      There is. It's a solved problem. The only issue is lack of info (many evil people vs 1 good) but most people get stuck because of a "no compromises" attitude and lack of will to make that decision. Modern society has already made the choice though. We sacrifice a few for the many all the time, and they are called heros and duly celebrated.
kopo 8y ago
I think the quote goes recognition and praise trumps sex and money. Guys join the army for what? Loose their lives for what?
- abledon 8y ago
  They join the army to protect their nation and the privileges we have. So your family can have dinner at night without worrying about people from a neighboring land busting in and stealing your property , kidnapping murdeing raping family etc They are people who are signing up for a job whose work benefits are medium probability of making their spouses widows and single parents overnight
  - kopo 8y ago
    Ceremony and tradition, parades and costume, medals and ribbons exist for what reason?
  - sailfast 8y ago
    They also join because of solid signing bonuses, good training, GI Bill, and a good resume item. Let’s not kid ourselves about the economic make-up of our enlisted military. I am not saying that they did not sign up for the other reasons as well, and by saying this I don’t think I am undermining their commitment to serve or their intent, but in a volunteer force it is also about money, and we’re going to have to pay a lot more to meet recruitment targets.
abledon 8y ago
The point of business should be for the betterment of humanity, not money
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  That literally defies the very definition of the word business.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  That is what NGOs are for.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Get your dirty socialism out of here./s
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 8y ago
It surprised me how many believed on the "don't be evil" motto, keeping customers and board members happy is all that counts.

michaelt 8y ago

I think this makes a good deal of sense. The tech job market is extremely buoyant in the present age, meaning very few programmers are in a position where they have to settle for a job they dislike just to make ends meet. I mean, every tech company talks about wanting engaged, passionate, proud employees - so why settle for doing work you can't take pride in when you could switch to work you could be proud of, and probably get a raise while you're at it?

gms 8y ago
Because you can’t get a raise - the big companies pay the most money.
- huangc10 8y ago
  Not necessarily true. There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries and stock options for top talent. And also, I think he/she means if you can't get behind what Facebook is doing, maybe jump to Apple who "supposedly" have security and privacy as their top priorities and in the mean time receive a raise.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    >>There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries and stock options for top talent. Not everyone is top talent though - and I don't think there's anything wrong with being an average programmer and not wanting to work on morally wrong projects.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      Agreed, of course, but also don't think anyone suggested that there was anything wrong with it.
  - gms 8y ago
    Indeed - you can jump to another big company.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Workers can ask, until 2008 happens again. Then, free sodas and a lot of workers will go. Ask then :)

huangc10 8y ago

I think people should do what they want and I find these articles meaningless. Don't like your company's values? Great, find another job. It's as simple as that. Let's not shame people for wanting to stick with a company. Everyone has their reasons to stay whether it's money, values, working environment, co-workers or personal reasons. If you really cared, shouldn't you try to change the company from within? Isn't that the best place to start?

matz1 8y ago
Whatever the issue is you can always find haters, I think its better to make oneself immune to this.

dotdi 8y ago

Every person, tech or not, should evaluate what their work is contributing to and they should evaluate if they can ethically and morally accept what the company is doing or standing for. In the end, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be accountable for my actions, even if that would mean to forego money, prestige, etc.

hef19898 8y ago
True that. What I learned is that the official mission, say save the climate, of a given company is not enough tu judge that. I know companies in the renewable energy sector that are doing some shady stuff, the only guy getting rich is the CEO/founder regardless of how many bancrupcies occur. And the employees trying to work in "good" industry are just taken advantage of by some rich guy.
jimktrains2 8y ago
> Every person, tech or not, should evaluate what their work is contributing to and they should evaluate if they can ethically and morally accept what the company is doing or standing for. > In the end, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be accountable for my actions, even if that would mean to forego money, prestige, etc. How would you like people to square this with providing for their families? No offense to coal miners or well operators, but I don't think they're willing to destitute their families over climate change -- what's a better world for their grandchildren if their children die starving in the miners arms? More to the point, I think the problem is "we as a society", not the individual. We're not willing to give slight inconveniences for massive increases in energy efficency. Look at how we design our cities and communities. People drive 2+ton vehicles upwards of 2 hours each day to go to work instead of living closer to the office and biking or taking public transport. (Many first and second ring suburbs of many/most/all cities have decent (or better) school systems than in the exurbs.) Do we really need to consume all of the plastic junk or waste nearly as much food as we do? Do we need to be so wasteful of energy in our homes? Do we need to keep stores and offices frozen in the dead of summer? There is a lot of really low hanging fruit (that people as a whole are unwilling to do because it's the slightest of inconvenience or expects them to acknowledge the world they live in), before we ask people to give up their jobs. Do you think coal miners, well operators, or big box retail associates wouldn't want a safer or more fulfilling job? We need to look at our excess consumption before pointing fingers at people for taking a job we find dirty (in the moral sense.)

fsloth 8y ago

For the over the decade I've been a software engineer I've always strived to work in products with a value proposition for the end user that I can understand. I can't understand how anyone could work without this understanding and not get their soul crushed. Maybe I'm just sensitive or underpaid.

isodude 8y ago
Sometimes your don't have the luxury to choose your work.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  Yes, but this is a much more rare scenario for techies than other white collar professionals.
  - isodude 8y ago
    Well that depends doesn't it. If you got skill and motivation to choose between gigs, that's fine, you'll most likely just start your own if you don't find anything fitting. Those you hear alot about. Succeeding is not easier in tech than anything else, given that success means doing exactly what you want and feeling good about it. I do interview people and try to find techies that fit in our org, but it's tough even if there's available people.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  This is being said for Programmers, yet a good portion of HN goes out of their way to tell poor people they can just get a new job. Very contradictory!
  - isodude 8y ago
    I guess you can't talk for everybody (which happens a lot in the comments for what I've seen, HN does this, HN does that). The commenters here may be very biased though. To be clear this article seems to refer to SF workers, but I guess the same applies there even if the pay is fat. You need to generate cash to pay for the hefty rents. I should add a disclaimer here that this is just an assumption based on what I've read though. Maybe someone could chime in on how easy it is to get a job with good morale in SF? I would imagine that it's like looking at the trees but only seeing the forest.

netcan 8y ago

At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum." In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise. Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPhone wearing a suit writing business requiremnt compendiums. Startups hired world changers and made a customer and emloyee happiness index. Google wrote "Don't be evil" on a chalkboard. Gmail was better than outlook. All was good. Then some tension surfaced. Advertisers thought they would be happier tracking users. Users thought this was creepy. Making generals happy did not make employees happy. Someone erased "don't be evil" from the blackboard. Back to square one. Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank. Now, they use euphemisms and secrecy to avoid saying stuff that sounds bad. Btw... It's interesting how iconic "don't be evil" was as a slogan. They couldn't live up to it, but that doesn't mean it didn't impact.

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bitL 8y ago
In the past one could escape "evil" environment in private life; now with overreaching/intrusive tech on a global scale and companies losing their initial (even if only public) philosophies under the pressure of making more profit after reaching market saturation that possibility is going to be vastly reduced, and only then we will see what they are really capable of (with warning signs already popping up).
bilbo0s 8y ago
>Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank... Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental. People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when google touted their "don't be evil" philosophy. For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich. We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. (Again, if we're being honest, that understanding of the danger is one reason many of us don't even have a facebook.) But we compartmentalize. What we would put on our own home systems rarely reflects what we would put on work systems if someone is paying us enough money. What we would develop in hobby time is, again, very different than what we would develop if someone is paying us a lot of money. I get it. We have to feed our families. I'm not faulting anyone. I'm just saying that it's a bit revisionist to put forth the "google/facebook/whoever tricked us into working for them" narrative. Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in.

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ageek123 8y ago

The article gives no measure of how many tech workers have adopted this mindset. It seems to largely be a narrative driven by journalists and a relatively small number of activists in some of the more high-profile tech companies (who are simultaneously pushing a number of unrelated issues like unionization, diversity, deplatforming conservatives, #resisting, and introducing identity politics into hiring and promotion decisions).

cableshaft 8y ago
Yeah, that seems to be how the media writes stories now. They overhear a friend of theirs mention something (or maybe somehow dream up the idea on their own), say "gee, that'd make a good article!", find 2 or 3 individual examples, preferably anecdotes, so they can pad the article length and make it seem legitimate, don't bother trying to show evidence for their hypothesis with any facts (or find some tangential fact about something else that they can invent some sort of bridge between that and their idea), and write the article. If the headline can be more salacious, the better. I keep seeing more and more articles written this way nowadays. It gets really annoying to see an interesting headline, click it hoping to read a good argument for their case, and then feeling I just wasted my time.

KaiserPro 8y ago

bold statement alert if you don't know what your company is doing, and your intricate part in that dance, you are not really providing value to the company, or more importantly to yourself. /bold statement How can you make decisions if you don't understand the business impact? How do you know what if that optimization is worth the cost of implementation? If you don't know the impact of a product release on your customers, what are you really doing? To say that as a tech person "I don't know the business side" you are being deliberately ignorant. "business" is simple[1]. You are being just as annoying at those useless managers who demand x feature yesterday and don't bother to think about the ramifications. 1)It really is, you are trying to make people give you cash for something. that might be things like food, or vapour (ie initial coin offerings). The mechanics are the same, monetary units in exchange for goods or services. To attach a special mystique to the process is to give power to charlatans. (see repacking of subprime debt) TL;DR: If you don't know what your buisness does, you are like the idiot manager dilbert.

mLuby 8y ago
Not necessarily true in big companies. A devops middle manager doesn't need to know whether the company is building widgets or dohickies; their job is to keep the software running securely. CTO/VP Eng should certainly know more about business priorities. At smaller companies it is more important. Also can improve morale.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  so how do you negotiate SLAs? How do you know what level of security is required? How do you prioritise requests? How do you know which team to ask favours from? How do you get more money for your department? How do you avoid the poop-gravity interaction cycle? All of this is intrinsically linked to the business logic/goals of the company. For example: Our team worked with $cashCow team to reduce time to live by x percent. We have saved the company y percent a year. Now give our team more cash we can do it for other teams. That requires a basic understanding of the business, and its priorities, so you can support the most important internal users and make them more efficient.

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qubax 8y ago

We do? Maybe a tiny fringe does. Most tech workers want to know the same thing nytimes employees do. The salary and benefits. That's it. That's what workers care about at the end of the day. Does the nytimes tech team ask "Why are we spamming HN everyday for"? I doubt it. They just do what they are paid to do. The same thing for all tech workers and all workers in general. The construction worker building a luxury tower isn't asking "why are we building this for". He just wants to get paid and paid well. "Do no evil" is no more real in the tech world as "fair and balanced" or "all the news fit to print" is real in the news world. It's just empty slogans for PR.

yosefzeev 8y ago

I find it surprising that educated people are "just now" doing this. What did people think corporations were doing to the world? Open up your eyes and look around and get your head out of the code and the bullshit slogans your companies have sold you. It's obvious something has gone wrong and is going on.

lolive 8y ago
Engineering abilities does not imply political awareness. Making things work is surprisingly hard and (imho) a soul crushing process. You need a specific kind of people's profile for that. From my experience, the presence of a political vision alongside the engineering skills is much lower than expected. When both are present, the political vision does not come from a kind of enlightenment in the engineer's inner soul. But from a feedback loop coming from accurate sources of informations.
- PopeDotNinja 8y ago
  > Making things work is surprisingly hard and (imho) a soul crushing proces. I'm not able to turn off caring about what I work on, although I have picked up some tricks over time that help me turn that caring on. However, there's if I'm working on something that is ultimately lame, eventually I'll run out of stuff to care about. That's when the soul crushing starts to happen.
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > However, there's if I'm working on something that is ultimately lame, eventually I'll run out of stuff to care about. That's when the soul crushing starts to happen. A very important factor whether the work is soul-crushing or not is whether the work is intellectually stimulating or not.
- EdgarVerona 8y ago
  Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from the actual act of your work and the compensation around it that you stop thinking about the consequences of your actions. This sounds terrible, but it's really just a small variant on the banality of evil. Solving problems, working on tight deadlines, and getting recognition, status, and money are all things that make a person feel like what they're doing is right. It gives an endorphin high, it's a sign that other people are recognizing their work. I hesitate to use the word "addictive" in this context, but it can certainly be compulsive. It's easy to lose sight of whether what you're doing is what you ought to be doing when the act of doing it is so compelling, financially rewarding, and celebrated by others. This isn't a justification; it is a warning to anyone coming into this field, a warning that I wish I'd thought more about coming into it. This is something we need to be vigilant about as engineers, because it's easy to look the other way on questionable activities by your business when everything else in your life is becoming enriched by it and they're telling you that the ethical issues are for "their side of the business" to worry about. It is not. Do not believe them. Understand where your paycheck is coming from, and make sure that you continue to evaluate it as your company changes and ask yourself if you're okay with it. In my career, I have: * Been lied to about the true purpose of a product we were building, and only realized the lie because another engineer was brave enough to call them out and force them to tell the truth. I was fully prepared to be the coward that didn't follow up on it and remain willfully ignorant, and his ethical bravery was the only thing that snapped me out of it. * Seen a company's financial plan gradually change from an ethical one to an unethical one, and have seen good people struggle and contort themselves to justify it: including myself, for a time. * Worked in fields where the profits gained by maintaining the status quo has created a desire for minimium compliance instead of continual improvements. The mandatory ethics class I took for my CS degree never prepared me for what to do, how to be vigilant, or how to take action when it is the company itself that is the unethical one. I feel like we need to have open and honest discussions with people coming into this field about this very real possibility, and about the need to evaluate not just the compensation and interesting problems being presented by a given business, but also the ways that they earn money and whether it is something you find acceptable. And what to do if that situation takes a turn for the worse. The ACM has some high-level recommendations in their ethics statements, and I think they're a good start. They should be required reading for all software engineers. https://ethics.acm.org/ https://ethics.acm.org/ I have been a coward. I have been an example of the banality of evil. And I don't think I'm alone in this field: not by a long shot. We've got to pay attention to the ethics of what we create, and we need to be much more brave than we have been.

anoncoward111 8y ago

You are building it for your salary, for shareholders, both private and public, and users. There tends to be people who will screw over one or two of those groups to enrich the other group.

drasticmeasures 8y ago

Google management gave too much freedom and independence to its techies and now they think they run the company.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Well, that’s what happens when you have an engineering-driven organization.

amelius 8y ago

I suspect there are plenty of people working on nasty adtech still ... Also, tech workers can often be replaced by others (e.g. Asians) who have different standards when offered the same salary.

dubya123 8y ago

They sure have strong opinions about working on Government projects but none of them have any issues creating tech that intrusively monitors and manipulates people for the purposes of serving them advertisements. What heroes they are...

jriot 8y ago
Which is most us don't care for their virtue signaling.
prolikewh0a 8y ago
You can directly blame the people who developed this stuff, the programmers, most perfectly able to move jobs with no real loss in economic stability. I think it's one of the most immoral and unethical jobs that could be taken today.

mc32 8y ago

Some tech workers. Not all, not most. This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news. China presents a quandary, no doubt. On the one hand we have self determination and sovereignty, on the other hand we have “western values” and so forth. Not long ago “internationalists” argued for the former, but given that that would result in something contra, they now prefer “western values” which they used to argue against (i.e. relativism).

prolikewh0a 8y ago
>This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news. So you'd rather have an uninformed tech job force with no opinions, just walk into a private government every day which strips every right you have along with having absolutely no morals or ethics so you can live in a 34th story downtown penthouse with a mini australian shepherd and a Tesla? You realize the tech workers literally do all of the tech work, which actually makes the company run and function, right? Why should they just be drones with no say? This is exactly the problem. Do we just do this solely for money? Maybe the world would be a better place if workers had a say instead of shareholders and executives who are only in their positions to make extraordinary amounts of money in absolutely any way, morals & ethics often aside.
- mc32 8y ago
  I’m not for tech workers becoming drones. I'm for them being informed. I’m not for them to be moulded by mass media who see them as a tool to carry out their vision or idea if what’s right or wrong. You see, if informed tech workers were to make contrarian decisions, let’s say with regard to domestic issues in the US and while informed they made a Libertarian decision, this decision would be derided never the less because it would deviate from mass media concensus. Who decides and should decide about, for example produce? Should the produce lady at the supermarket make the decision to stock conventional or organic, or consumer denand, of the owner/cooperative? The produce lady gets paid to put whatever the buyer gets. The burger flipper doesn't decide ti buy frizen or from this or that ranch. We get paid to do a job.

friedman23 8y ago

> According to Dr. Poulson, Mr. Dean said that Google complied with surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if the company should leave the United States market in protest. How clueless can you be? People can and will die if you cooperate and share private information on your users with the Chinese government.

CPLX 8y ago

This isn’t a novel concept. Didn’t anyone see Real Genius?

golergka 8y ago

Each time a topic like this get posted to HN, I feel like a broken record repeating the same thing over and over. There are many very talented software developers that have very different political and ethical opinions than those described here. They work for military and intelligence of their respective countries, enjoy it, and believe that they're doing it for greater good. You can debate whether they're right or not, but please, don't forget that they exist - and that there are a LOT of them.

jimmy1 8y ago

Unpopular opinion: this is why the "dudebros" and their like keep getting hired. They are more than happy to do their work, accept their salary, and move on, and not have to turn everything into "changing the world"

strikelaserclaw 8y ago
Even before the "dudebros", i'd argue most scientists and engineers didn't really care too much about the moral implications of their work. Guns, bombs etc... were all invented by brilliant minds, we'd like to think we as a society have collectively evolved cause we have small machines in our hands with all the world's knowledge but esp in the usa, looking outside you see that nothing has really changed that much in the way humans think.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  I mean, scientists for the Manhattan Project were remorseful after the fact at least. In general though, scientists are primarily driven by curiosity with little regard for the safety of themselves or others. If IRBs didn't exist, I assure you that some experiment of dubious ethics would be in progress right now without it even occurring to the primary investigator that it might be morally problematic (it's important to note that with some researchers, moral issues just don't click mentally and there's not a question of malice). Even with an IRB, you still get studies like the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco at Cornell [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/01/facebook-cornell-study-emotional-contagion-ethics-breach https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/jul/0...
- zeveb 8y ago
  > most scientists and engineers didn't really care too much about the moral implications of their work Have you considered that they might care very much about the moral implications of their work — and be proud to contribute to their nation's armed might?
  - stronglikedan 8y ago

sys_64738 8y ago

What the widget does or whom it is for is not my main concern. What is my concern is interesting puzzles for problem solving before I move on to the next widget. Widget building at a startup in not it as I won't make a profit. I want to see the money in my bank account every two weeks so I can put food on the table. In the words of Jerry McGuire: Show me the $$$!

saosebastiao 8y ago

Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance the entire way. Political change is even more out of reach. I grow tired of obviously bad policy ideas being promoted because of political party consensus (on "both" sides). I am exhausted of the generational warfare that is causing newer generations to face an uphill battle for the rest of their lives, with higher health care costs, higher housing costs, higher environmental costs, higher education costs, and lower wages. I'm sick of inaction on important issues, misguided action on petty issues, and the nonexistent potential for small unpolitical changes that could have big impacts but won't ever see the time of day because the need for political posturing doesn't allow for it (like for example, a change to the metric system). I feel trapped and helpless to change anything. And sometimes my feeling of helplessness has made it so I can no longer muster the effort to care for things that are so far beyond my control. I'm at the point on Maslow's Hierarchy where taking care of my family's survival is the only important thing anymore. I sometimes ponder whether I should just go out and get some kind of unethical job that pays a ton of money (and there is no shortage of those kinds of jobs for people of my talents) merely because it accomplishes that goal more efficiently. But then I feel bad about entertaining that thought. I don't really know what to do about it.

mempko 8y ago
Where the world needs changing is it's suicidal path towards extreme climate change.
- gersh 8y ago
  I think we need to convince people to stop studying petroleum engineering and prepare for a different economy instead. If you'd like to work with me on this, please email me.
  - 8y ago

blueadept111 8y ago

This trend is nothing more than a reflection of the fact that unemployment is at record lows. It does not represent a new, heightened morality in employees (that would persist even if the job market soured, for example).

vinayms 8y ago

The idealism of a bunch of engineers won't make the slightest difference, except may be appease their own sense of morality, as long as there are enough engineers willing to be tech-whores. In this regard, the supply exceeds the demand. Technology is the proverbial knife which can cut a fruit to feed and can also cut a throat to terrorize. Take the current darling of tech, AI/ML. If you are working on this, at a megacorp especially, you should realize that sooner or later it will be used for nefarious activities. But should that stop you from contributing to the field? Would database engineers rue the fact that their products are used to store child porn? My point is, unless something as explicit as the ones depicted in the article happens, its highly unlikely to know what the tech you are developing is going to be adapted for besides the one it was designed and built for. The google employee notes it themselves. Having ethical concerns is always advisable, but constantly wanting to know if the tech will be used by evil doers (which is not same as wanting to know more about a specific requirement that looks questionable) just makes one come across as a dick because no one except the powers that be would know that. I hope engineers don't go from being sheep to full on hippies, but choose the rational middle path instead.

dekhn 8y ago

I once produced an open source product while working for Berkeley Lab, which is a DoE lab operated by UC. It does non-classified work. One day we got a visit from a couple employees of Lawrence Livermore Labs (classified research) and my manager glanced at their badges- he said something about "Q" and smiled while asking what they worked on. They said "multiphysics combustion codes" and my manager looked at me and said "they run nuclear weapons simulations" (they didn't confirm). After chatting for a while I realized they were using my code to manage nuclear weapons simulations. That's a consequence of licenses like MIT and BSD and Apache: you don't control who uses your software. I came to terms with this a long time ago but it's still odd to think that I can write software that my own government will use to ensure our destructive weapons work as expected.

imranq 8y ago
That’s an amazing story. Do you mind sharing the name of the library?
- dekhn 8y ago
  pyglobus: http://toolkit.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.0/common/pyglobus/ http://toolkit.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.0/common/pygl... it was a grid computing library that made it easy to FTP large files at high performance and do automated job management.
  - Red_Pill_Phil 8y ago
    Don't share this...
  - imranq 8y ago
    Thanks!
nraynaud 8y ago
I wouldn't mind too much bing in your shoes: you have not developed your library for that, it's not its main use, and you didn't even know about it. I work in cloud related things (I do UI stuff for the cloud), I'm pretty sure 3-4 contracts from me, the code I work on could be used for weapons, but I'm clearly not developing a weapon nor something whose main goal is killing.

negamax 8y ago

Really interesting money vs ethics discussion. Everyone who can choose ethics, congratulations. Everyone who can’t, it’s a social failure that you have to make tough choice for financial goals.

hasbroslasher 8y ago

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of modern life. Or you can do some third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline (energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the common man. I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary change.

acdanger 8y ago
It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area. It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen. I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more systemic. But that doesn't make it any less troublesome.
- hasbroslasher 8y ago
  I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital. Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.

kareemsabri 8y ago

I think we're in a bear market for technology, in terms of people's sentiments. Possibly for America as well. I don't really think it's justified though. Most people seem to think you can only go work for FAANG if you have a CS degree, cause they're in the news all the time. If those companies conflict with your morals, there are lots of problems in the world that can benefit from technology. A look through the YC batch every few months has a wide variety of companies, many of which would benefit humanity if successful.

amanaplanacanal 8y ago

Unfortunately, the core business of Facebook, Twitter, and Google (driving engagement) is probably contributing to tearing the US apart politically. It's not just individual projects, it's at the very core of what they are. I don't see a happy ending here. I assume that the same thing is happening in other countries.

elihu 8y ago
It turns out that a lot of deep-pocketed organizations are willing to pay a lot of money to tech companies in exchange for the capability to manipulate large populations of people. The notion of a technology company selling products or services directly to customers hasn't gone away, but it's starting to feel quaint and nostalgic, like it belongs in a Norman Rockwell illustration.
Nasrudith 8y ago
That is more an information company thing really and so not old - look at newspapers for one. And the cure is worse than the disease. Besides, say what you will about Google and social media but they haven't started multiple major wars.

carapace 8y ago

Computers are war machines. They have other uses but their primary use has always been war. (Specifically code-cracking and modeling nuclear physics for weapon design.) As a thought experiment, try to imagine an alternate reality where WWII never happened and Alan Turing is just an obscure British queer mathematician. Would he have spawned the systems we have today? Or perhaps Konrad Zuse? War drives the information revolution. We're in the middle of WWIII now. If you don't want to contribute to the war machine you have to leave computer industry and take up gardening, specifically applied ecology such as "Permaculture".

wayanon 8y ago

“We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology..” - good luck with that! have they wondered which government departments financed the growth of tech in the Cold War ?

geebee 8y ago

The NYTimes discusses this question in the context of ethics, but the hiring process for software engineers, generally speaking, often avoids any discussion of what will be built. I've interviewed at google and a few other similar places, as well as smaller startups, and remarkably often, there was almost no discussion of the company or product. A tech interview goes like this "a list begins with an integer between 0 and 5. You then add a new set of integers that must sum to the value of the last added integer. How many different possible lists of 100 integers can be generated through this process?" I've done this at so many companies. They don't talk about what you'll be building. They don't want your opinion. You could go through two days of whiteboard exam style interview questions and have no idea what the company does. And you could get hired without ever answering a single question about what the company does. It's remarkable, but it's actually designed to work that way. I think tht the outside world really doesn't quite understand what goes on in tech interviews and tech hiring. If they did, they might know that the indifference to ethics may stem from general programmer unawareness of what the companies they work for actually do.

mindgam3 8y ago

[Reposting my comment shared on the earlier thread, I guess this one wasn’t marked as dupe] “In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.) “We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to be complicit in this gross misuse of power.” This is an incredibly powerful statement. A bunch of students getting together brought Google to its knees. Now these brave students might consider standing up en masse to Facebook and its rapidly shrinking signing bonuses before FB moves too fast and breaks reality again.

intended 8y ago
Knees is overselling it.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Yeah, I’m probably being a little dramatic. They didn’t cripple GOOG or their business model. But still, getting Google to back down on a significant product direction is noteworthy.
jiveturkey 8y ago
I'm confused on both of your points. 1. How is this powerful, in the slightest? 100 students is less than a rounding error. 2. How are these students in any way brave?
- mindgam3 8y ago
  1. Powerful in terms of impact. Google discontinued the project, no doubt due in some part to the protest. 2. Brave in turning down lucrative job offers for moral reasons. Many, many engineers currently work at Big Tech co’s with similar doubts and fears. But to risk your salary and job security on ethical grounds, that’s what I call brave.

evadne 8y ago

I work in EdTech and would like to think that there is always $ for the kids.

el3ctron 8y ago

since when capitalism wants workers to be aware? oh yeah, since China Communist party do a demonstration on technologycal superiority. Problem for capitalism is that a system where workers are awakened is called SOCIALISM.