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Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?

22 points by rblion 7y ago

Just curious. A lot has changed between 2009 and 2019. I still love design and engineering to solve valuable problems in day-to-day life and society at large. I am also aware of the public sentiment/resentment towards the industry as a whole. There is much to be said and to discuss. I would love to hear what you think and feel, what you are doing with your time and skills.

mortivore 7y ago
Nope. My conscience is clean. I don't work for a company with a spy/sell data business model.
- pizzazzaro 7y ago
  We might have to expand our perspective a little more than just "I dont spy/sell-data at work, so Im cool." Does your company have other subsidiaries that do this work? Does your employer contract out for/to-do this erosion of freedom and human dignity? If not, that's awesome. But lets be honest here - if your company is declaring neutrality while the world drowns in bull...spit, they're not helping. If you all sell routers, you're probably selling routers to the abusers, as one example. In this, your router code (hypothetical of course) would assist that doubleclick datafarm. Unless you're at a firm that is actively making privacy-by-default routers, webbrowsers, hosting services, what-have-you? You're still feeding the madness on a less direct, more systemic manner. Since I doubt your company's leadership would pass up facebook money? Nobody at all can seriously claim neutrality.
- winkeyless 7y ago
  We might as well imagine a company you work for that is trustworthy and does none of the spy/sell data business. And also imagine that the product of the company has been rapidly replacing a million jobs in 5 years and creating merely 200 different jobs in San Francisco demanding higher level of education. A bit extreme but I don’t think it’s unimaginable. Would you feel the same if I may ask?
  - mortivore 7y ago
    If I were in such a job I would be very happy about it. I view work as a means to an end. Work to live, don't live to work. A society without jobs would be wonderful. If something I was working on would eliminate the jobs of millions, then we would be closer to having no jobs at all. In such a position I would feel like I was really contributing to a greater future.
    - zhaomizhi 7y ago
      It is true that lots of job in market do not treat people as human. Lots of them are just repeatable labor work and require very minimal level of creativity or innovation. In this sense, i agreed that eliminating these jobs would be a huge step for the whole society. However, I don't think the government and these giant capitalist tech company is ready or have a plan about how to distribute resource and money they earned. Also, i am not sure how you define the work here. Instead of eliminate work, i would think working for what you truly believe can give you satisfaction since you are being rewarded for what you do and make.
perfunctory 7y ago
When I am in the office I constantly hear my inner voice whispering into my ear - b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. P.S. http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
perfunctory 7y ago
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. -- John Maynard Keynes [0] My personal conspiracy theory is that the age of abundance has already come but we just don't know what to do with it other than keep working our BS jobs. [0] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
- gervu 7y ago
  We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed. It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.
  - snikeris 7y ago
    > The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them. A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.
    - gervu 7y ago
      Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply. But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter. It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it. Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.
codingdave 7y ago
I admit that some companies are better than other about being mission-driven, and concerned about their impact on society. But I'm not sure we can generalize about the tech industry as a whole on that level, even if the general public does exactly that. Working in this industry, in particular if you are not in SV, you see the variety of people, purposes, and goals that comprise tech companies. As far as what I do personally, I've focused my career in the public sector since 2012, writing software that saves money for school districts. I watch the pricing models that our sales team comes up with to be aware whether they cross the line where our fees are greater than the cost savings, and therefore would cut into student funding. My side projects focus on building tools to help the creative efforts of my children. In short, I try to avoid work that is purely money-driven.
throw51319 7y ago
Yeah 100%. I'm in my second job out of school working at a big bank in tech. It's mindnumbingly uninteresting to me. And I also don't think it does anything to help society. Though sometimes the technical problems fit the bill of being interesting, it doesn't come close to filling the gap.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
psv1 7y ago
> I am also aware of the public sentiment/resentment towards the industry as a whole. Can you or anyone else elaborate on this? I'm really not aware of this negative sentiment.
- winkeyless 7y ago
  There exits and now there’s a new word “Techlash”
- hashkb 7y ago
  You can easily find this yourself. One major issue is that we're pricing people out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for years.
  - psv1 7y ago
    Are you saying that tech salaries being generally higher than other industries' is a problem?
    - hashkb 7y ago
      No, of course I am not saying that. I'm saying it's a complicated issue that's currently playing out in public and you can read about it from many well-articulated points of view if you do a bit of Googling.
segmondy 7y ago
No.
bjourne 7y ago
Yes. To much tech is likely not helpful. I think social media makes people lonelier, porn and online games are also not completely nonproblematic. If you plot a curve with amount of tech on the x-axis and happiness on the y-axis then I think it would look like a parabola (hill). And most people in the Western world are probably beyond the maximum. Someone will object that pacemakers save lives, Facebook helps people reconnect with old friends and Fitbit motivates people to get in shape. That is all true, but such tech-enabled activities seem to be in the minority... Like reading news sites for 15 minutes per day is time well-spent. But reloading news sites and idly browsing through headlines every 15 minutes per day is a waste of time.
tomjen3 7y ago
I don't believe that the public as such hate tech. A bit more weary about Facebook, perhaps, but not much more than. The rest is just obsolete media hating tech for being better than them. We are nerds, we should be able to spot bullies and their tactics well by now. As a minimum we should not allow them to bully us.
Catsing_Cats 7y ago
Personally, I kind of like it. Smart people choosing not to go into tech or not pursue certain strategies means less competition. The resentment was there for a looong time, what's new I think is it has now spread into tech itself.
CM30 7y ago
No, not really. Honestly, I don't think there's much resentment towards tech at all. There's a bit towards the largest companies like Facebook and Google sure, but most companies in the tech industry have pretty good reputations, and even the likes of Facebook aren't exactly 'hated' by the majority of the population. Most people appreciate what I... no we do. Every app and site I've worked has been liked by both clients and customers. Instead, the tech 'backlash' side is being played up by the media rather than the public. Likely because technology and the internet in particular has decimated their business model, and the people working there aren't exactly happy about it. But that's not the sentinment of most, it's just looking like it is because the folks with the largest megaphones are the ones most against it. Do I feel some dissonance in some things? Sure, I guess I've always found it hard to reason that someone making say, hundreds of thousands or millions/billions of pounds or dollars a year really deserves that much more than everyone else. But that's not really a tech thing.

wait-a-minute 7y ago

Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected? https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty "In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17 On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication. Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."

gervu 7y ago
The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced. I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.
- wait-a-minute 7y ago
  The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet. So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game. Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.

simplecomplex 7y ago

By definition if person A pays person B for something, person A values that something. By definition a job is not meaningless or without value. David Graeber‘s “bullshit jobs” betrays an ignorance of basic economics, and an understanding of what a job is, what trade is, the fact that people have different preferences and values, etc. The idea that people pay other people for no reason at all is completely divorced from reality.

jlokier 7y ago
Meaningfulness of work is not transitive. Typically person A pays _someone else's money_ to person B, and the someone else (person C) isn't around to pay attention to the details. I think that makes all the difference, especially when it's iterated over many layers of indirection. A is in some sense a custodian of what person C values, but that indirection means A is also optimising to keep A in a job without distracting too much from the joy of running a fiefdom, hiding the fact they don't really know what they are doing, etc. So A is paying B for what A thinks looks good enough to C, not necessarily what C would actually value if they understood what was going on. Let's suppose that indirection only adds a tiny amount of BS, say B is doing 10% BS work to satisfy A's misguided impulses (using C's money not A's), and 90% what C values. Then add a full economy. Now B is paying D using money they got from A, who got it from C. B is optimising to keep B in a job, so they try to do things that look good to A, while avoiding too much effort for B. To keep ths model simple, let's say the BS adds up and C's money ends up paying for D to do 20% BS work and 80% what C values. But it's all in a good cause, as far as C knows, this is great stuff - literally, the best money can buy. Throw in a few more layers of indirection and the BS compounds. Of course the world isn't that simple. By your definition, D's work is all meaningfully valuable to B, B's work is all meaninfully valuable to A, and A's work is all meaningfully valuable to C. So this does not mean people pay other people for no _local_ reason. But it's not transitive. C's money may be paying for D to do work that is not meaningfully valuable to C, despite everyone in the chain providing value to each other. So is it BS work or isn't it? My take is that a significant fraction of work is BS when viewed from a wider perspective: what does this work do for society, people more broadly; yet at the same time, it is much more useful when viewed looking at neighbouring relationships, close up. After all, a job helping someone else keep their job is of immense personal value to the latter person, so that's a factor in how they allocate their ability to spend other people's money. Since "helping someone else keep a job" is highly valued by those people whose jobs are kept, it's almost inevitable that a big feedback system emerges in which a significant fraction of all work paid for is for the purpose of keeping people in jobs.