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> Software developers are the wizards and shamans of the modern age. We ought to use our powers with the austerity and integrity such power implies. This is on

> Software developers are the wizards and shamans of the modern age. We ought to use our powers with the austerity and integrity such power implies. This is one of the most powerful truths underlying the world we currently inhabit. The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly, the better our prospects for ripping the reigns of society from the hands of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitation.

mym1990 2y ago
This is not only a truth of the world we currently inhabit, it has always been a truth, of all the worlds we have inhabited. Power and greed go hand in hand for a reason and the struggle to find the balance is, and will always be present.
- joelfried 2y ago
  It was not true of this world 150 years ago that any person with sufficient learning could tap buttons to create an experience to be found in the hand of the majority of living humans. I agree power and greed go hand in hand - absolute power corrupts, absolutely - but this bit? This is new.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0097E4MEU https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-W... ("The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World") https://web.archive.org/web/20200915000000*/https://try.newrelic.com/rs/newrelic/images/The_New_Kingmakers.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20200915000000*/https://try.newr... [pdf]
dylan604 2y ago
The fact we have had less than benevolent wizards and shamans, why would we expect to have modern day equivalent of only benevolent coders? It's such a fairy tale level of expectation that it seems childish. Spending any energy in trying to make real world a fairy tale is just wasted.
- GenerocUsername 2y ago
  It's okay to shame bad actors. In fact, society would likely be better off if e brought back more public shaming
  - sudobash1 2y ago
    I think that this is predicated upon a reasonably well informed and educated public. And my estimation is that the general populous is not informed enough on cryptography to be in a position to shame Ticketmaster engineers. Also, my impression is that there is already copious amounts of public shaming. Some social media sites seem largely devoted to that. And unfortunately, I don't think most people fully deserve the verdict that they get in the court of public opinion.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    This is certainly not true. Can you name an existing or historical shame-based society that you would actually want to live in?
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  We wouldn't. You might expect that on an indivudual level. But at a society level, I would expect any company that's doing things that are specifically allowed by our goverment (who did approve the Ticketmaster Live Nation Merger) to get their jobs filled just like any other. I think Ticketmaster is evil, another developer might not. That's fine, they're not killing people or dumping toxic chemicals into reservoirs, we can agree to disagree. My outrage is directed entirely at the government agencies whose job it was to stop this, not the developers making a ticketing app.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Ultimately developers type the code in and hit "deploy." They have to share at least a fraction of the blame and accept at least a fraction of the outrage. Without them, the product wouldn't exist. There's a lot of blame to be spread around though. The developers themselves, their management chain all the way up to the decision makers, shareholders that demand ever increasing profits, governments who provide the legal framework and allow these huge, destructive companies. Everyone should get their share of the blame.
mattmaroon 2y ago
I still don't blame the developers, I blame government. It's not the job of rank and file workers to police companies. I wouldn't work for LN, but I'm not going to blame someone else for doing so. We've all gotta feed our families. (I realize there's a line somewhere, you wouldn't excuse a prison guard at Auschwitz the same way, but I can't get too worked up about a developer making a ticketing app even if I hate the ticketing company.) Developed countries long ago came to the conclusion that companies should not be allowed to have monopolies because it is bad for society as a whole, and it's hard to think of a current monopoly as egregious as this one. There is absolutely no reason one company should have exclusive rights to 85% of large venues, also be an evebt promoter, and also be the ticket seller. Anything their developers do is not the real issue, a society that allows this to happen in the first place is.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I mean would you say that developers who work for Facebook have crossed that line?
  - photonbeam 2y ago
    Depends on when they joined
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    No. Not even close.
  - NavinF 2y ago
    ...by doing what? FB is one of the largest employers of people on this site. If you ran a poll, I'd expect the majority to answer "no" to your question. Of the people who answered "yes", I bet the majority would still accept an offer from FB if it was just 20k more than the next best offer.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed. Right? Wrong? Discuss.
PUSH_AX 2y ago
It’s interesting, the more we agree and hold strong, the higher the demand grows for engineers who would help some companies create their hellscape. The incentive will grow higher and higher until people break rank. And you start over.
fmbb 2y ago
I dont think it’s a truth. Shamans and wizards (never heard this used to describe anyone in history but let’s assume it’s just any kind of supposed magic user) were people at the top tier of their societies in terms of political power. Not kings or chieftains, but above everyone else. Programmers are just making a living selling their labor power like every other office drone in the world. We’re one of the most common lines of work out there. If you want the mysticism angle, we are like those kids they used to catch “witches”.
- namaria 2y ago
  Are there any documented examples of societies where "magics", "shamans" or "wizards" were at the top of the hierarchy? I gotta say, I'm an avid reader of Ancient History and Anthropology and the closest I can think of is the Priest-Kings of Sumeria and your garden variety theocracy and the latter is much more of a priestly bureeacracy than anything else...
  - dgb23 2y ago
    Perhaps not at the top in terms of day to day decision making and wealth, but the first that came to mind would be celtic druids and bards.
    - namaria 2y ago
      I'd love to know more, can you point me to some sources?
      - dgb23 2y ago
        I'm sorry it's just a vague intuition from watching a lot of documentaries about the Celts and very light internet research. But generally speaking Druids had an oral tradition of maintaining knowledge in Celtic society. They had inter-tribe gatherings and went through long and difficult training. Specifically also law. So they had at least the power of judges and to some degree law makers. Perhaps you can find out more with some of these keywords.
lowdownbutter 2y ago
"In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells" t. Introduction of SICP
yread 2y ago
I personally think we are more like "plumbers but with JSON". I have principles and apply them but I don't expect the others to do that
- gowld 2y ago
  architect+builder+plumber. The suits at TM couldn't build the app+backend, even if they could hire someone to maintain and replace parts of it.
fooqux 2y ago
Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one. With age comes wisdom. There has been a lot of good that came from making coding more accessible; I'm not trying to gatekeep. But I do think that this is one instance where the outcome is worse. The martial arts masters still unquestionably exist among us. It's just that they're now surrounded by younger, less-wise people with guns. Both types can fight an army, but only one has the wisdom to know when it's better not to.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Yes I think there is truth to this. Something I have seen lately with Rust for example, is because the language is harder to learn, the discourse, tutorials, libraries are all much higher quality.
- leptons 2y ago
  >Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one. You can be a shitty wizard with only one year of training, same goes for programmers.
  - amar1729 2y ago
    that's kind of exactly OP's point. you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today ... that was not true in quite the same way 30/40 years ago. and we're in agreement that someone with a year of training is probably not all that good.
    - leptons 2y ago
      >you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today That might be true 3 or 4 years ago, but I find that difficult to believe in the current job market. All the programming jobs that have come across my screen lately require a 4-year CS degree. Companies aren't hiring noobs lately. They're laying off more than hiring.
akira2501 2y ago
> The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly People don't code out of a sense of duty, they do so to earn money, so there is no mechanism to enforce "behavior." > our prospects for ripping the reigns of society There are too many industries that take the mantle of improving society on their back. This is a mistake. There is no natural representative mechanism that ensures your actions are aligned to required outcomes. This should probably be left to congress. If you're concerned that they won't do it then that should immediately suggest the appropriate course of action to you. > of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitation. Short term thinking cannot lead to long term rewards without abject manipulation of the marketplace.
- survirtual 2y ago
  Congress is useless, along with the rest of the planetary corporate-fascist oligarch facsimiles of democracy. If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom, we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society. Open source implementations of: Universal cryptographic identification Decentralized voluntary anonymous voting, verifiable by every voter Sovereign algorithmic monetary policy Liquid representation Complete digitization of all necessary information to audit any authorities, at any time Full release of privacy for any "public official" -- service to society should be a burden, not a privilege This, and much, much more can ALL be done with software. An entirely new paradigm of society, with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine. Our rights digitized, our privacy, speech, and pursuit of happiness made into software. I would say software may have an impact, and the thinking of this impact extends far beyond the next quarter of profits. This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond. A continuously evolving, open source mechanism of human governance.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom You'd have better luck trying to remove jealousy from the human heart. If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you. Until then it is an absolute fools errand. > we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society. Autonomous societies have been tried before. They have no mechanism to correctly align their long term objectives so none of them have ever lasted. Planning to build another one based on nothing other than assumption is flawed. > with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine. Guns exist. The social machine is secondary to force. You have no plan for this. > This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond. Older people sell younger people pure unadulterated fantasies in order to extract cheap labor from them.
koromak 2y ago
This is a wild take. Software developers do the dirty work. We're one step below wall street.
anamax 2y ago
Ah yes, The Roads Must Roll. It's worth remembering that folks who can be bought, can be bought off and spend a lot of time enjoying their riches while true believers are somewhat more difficult to convince and don't take any time off. That's important because all of the big evils have been perpetrated by true believers in pursuit of their "one true way." (Yes, some large evils have been perpetrated by folks chasing money. I'm talking about things like wholesale slaughter of as many people as they could lay their hands on.)
kccqzy 2y ago
I cannot agree more. And this is exactly why the old Google motto of "don't be evil" was so important. And the decline of Google is highly correlated with the removal of this motto from its culture. I sincerely hope all tech companies can take a page from old Google and truly instill an innate rejection of evil among all software engineers.
imchillyb 2y ago
Except it's not truth. You want truth? The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Truth is that money is all that matters. Nothing else in the world of business matters not relationships, not customers, not Boards of Directors or CEOs. Money. Until a person realizes this, they will be forever caught in a cycle of thought that is not truth. "Follow the money!" is the best way to see how society works, and is why every government wants their hands in our money. Meaningful change in this world requires money. No amount of idealism or 'using our powers' can change that. Do the wizards have 'F-Off' money? No. Will they ever? No.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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cryptoegorophy 2y ago
The worst are the programmers of the mobile games for kids.

mym1990 2y ago

This is not only a truth of the world we currently inhabit, it has always been a truth, of all the worlds we have inhabited. Power and greed go hand in hand for a reason and the struggle to find the balance is, and will always be present.

joelfried 2y ago
It was not true of this world 150 years ago that any person with sufficient learning could tap buttons to create an experience to be found in the hand of the majority of living humans. I agree power and greed go hand in hand - absolute power corrupts, absolutely - but this bit? This is new.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0097E4MEU https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-W... ("The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World") https://web.archive.org/web/20200915000000*/https://try.newrelic.com/rs/newrelic/images/The_New_Kingmakers.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20200915000000*/https://try.newr... [pdf]

dylan604 2y ago

The fact we have had less than benevolent wizards and shamans, why would we expect to have modern day equivalent of only benevolent coders? It's such a fairy tale level of expectation that it seems childish. Spending any energy in trying to make real world a fairy tale is just wasted.

GenerocUsername 2y ago
It's okay to shame bad actors. In fact, society would likely be better off if e brought back more public shaming
- sudobash1 2y ago
  I think that this is predicated upon a reasonably well informed and educated public. And my estimation is that the general populous is not informed enough on cryptography to be in a position to shame Ticketmaster engineers. Also, my impression is that there is already copious amounts of public shaming. Some social media sites seem largely devoted to that. And unfortunately, I don't think most people fully deserve the verdict that they get in the court of public opinion.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  This is certainly not true. Can you name an existing or historical shame-based society that you would actually want to live in?
mattmaroon 2y ago
We wouldn't. You might expect that on an indivudual level. But at a society level, I would expect any company that's doing things that are specifically allowed by our goverment (who did approve the Ticketmaster Live Nation Merger) to get their jobs filled just like any other. I think Ticketmaster is evil, another developer might not. That's fine, they're not killing people or dumping toxic chemicals into reservoirs, we can agree to disagree. My outrage is directed entirely at the government agencies whose job it was to stop this, not the developers making a ticketing app.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Ultimately developers type the code in and hit "deploy." They have to share at least a fraction of the blame and accept at least a fraction of the outrage. Without them, the product wouldn't exist. There's a lot of blame to be spread around though. The developers themselves, their management chain all the way up to the decision makers, shareholders that demand ever increasing profits, governments who provide the legal framework and allow these huge, destructive companies. Everyone should get their share of the blame.

mattmaroon 2y ago

I still don't blame the developers, I blame government. It's not the job of rank and file workers to police companies. I wouldn't work for LN, but I'm not going to blame someone else for doing so. We've all gotta feed our families. (I realize there's a line somewhere, you wouldn't excuse a prison guard at Auschwitz the same way, but I can't get too worked up about a developer making a ticketing app even if I hate the ticketing company.) Developed countries long ago came to the conclusion that companies should not be allowed to have monopolies because it is bad for society as a whole, and it's hard to think of a current monopoly as egregious as this one. There is absolutely no reason one company should have exclusive rights to 85% of large venues, also be an evebt promoter, and also be the ticket seller. Anything their developers do is not the real issue, a society that allows this to happen in the first place is.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I mean would you say that developers who work for Facebook have crossed that line?
- photonbeam 2y ago
  Depends on when they joined
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  No. Not even close.
- NavinF 2y ago
  ...by doing what? FB is one of the largest employers of people on this site. If you ran a poll, I'd expect the majority to answer "no" to your question. Of the people who answered "yes", I bet the majority would still accept an offer from FB if it was just 20k more than the next best offer.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed. Right? Wrong? Discuss.

PUSH_AX 2y ago

It’s interesting, the more we agree and hold strong, the higher the demand grows for engineers who would help some companies create their hellscape. The incentive will grow higher and higher until people break rank. And you start over.

fmbb 2y ago

I dont think it’s a truth. Shamans and wizards (never heard this used to describe anyone in history but let’s assume it’s just any kind of supposed magic user) were people at the top tier of their societies in terms of political power. Not kings or chieftains, but above everyone else. Programmers are just making a living selling their labor power like every other office drone in the world. We’re one of the most common lines of work out there. If you want the mysticism angle, we are like those kids they used to catch “witches”.

namaria 2y ago
Are there any documented examples of societies where "magics", "shamans" or "wizards" were at the top of the hierarchy? I gotta say, I'm an avid reader of Ancient History and Anthropology and the closest I can think of is the Priest-Kings of Sumeria and your garden variety theocracy and the latter is much more of a priestly bureeacracy than anything else...
- dgb23 2y ago
  Perhaps not at the top in terms of day to day decision making and wealth, but the first that came to mind would be celtic druids and bards.
  - namaria 2y ago
    I'd love to know more, can you point me to some sources?
    - dgb23 2y ago
      I'm sorry it's just a vague intuition from watching a lot of documentaries about the Celts and very light internet research. But generally speaking Druids had an oral tradition of maintaining knowledge in Celtic society. They had inter-tribe gatherings and went through long and difficult training. Specifically also law. So they had at least the power of judges and to some degree law makers. Perhaps you can find out more with some of these keywords.

lowdownbutter 2y ago

"In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells" t. Introduction of SICP

yread 2y ago

I personally think we are more like "plumbers but with JSON". I have principles and apply them but I don't expect the others to do that

gowld 2y ago
architect+builder+plumber. The suits at TM couldn't build the app+backend, even if they could hire someone to maintain and replace parts of it.

fooqux 2y ago

Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one. With age comes wisdom. There has been a lot of good that came from making coding more accessible; I'm not trying to gatekeep. But I do think that this is one instance where the outcome is worse. The martial arts masters still unquestionably exist among us. It's just that they're now surrounded by younger, less-wise people with guns. Both types can fight an army, but only one has the wisdom to know when it's better not to.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Yes I think there is truth to this. Something I have seen lately with Rust for example, is because the language is harder to learn, the discourse, tutorials, libraries are all much higher quality.
leptons 2y ago
>Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one. You can be a shitty wizard with only one year of training, same goes for programmers.
- amar1729 2y ago
  that's kind of exactly OP's point. you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today ... that was not true in quite the same way 30/40 years ago. and we're in agreement that someone with a year of training is probably not all that good.
  - leptons 2y ago
    >you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today That might be true 3 or 4 years ago, but I find that difficult to believe in the current job market. All the programming jobs that have come across my screen lately require a 4-year CS degree. Companies aren't hiring noobs lately. They're laying off more than hiring.

akira2501 2y ago

> The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly People don't code out of a sense of duty, they do so to earn money, so there is no mechanism to enforce "behavior." > our prospects for ripping the reigns of society There are too many industries that take the mantle of improving society on their back. This is a mistake. There is no natural representative mechanism that ensures your actions are aligned to required outcomes. This should probably be left to congress. If you're concerned that they won't do it then that should immediately suggest the appropriate course of action to you. > of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitation. Short term thinking cannot lead to long term rewards without abject manipulation of the marketplace.

survirtual 2y ago
Congress is useless, along with the rest of the planetary corporate-fascist oligarch facsimiles of democracy. If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom, we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society. Open source implementations of: Universal cryptographic identification Decentralized voluntary anonymous voting, verifiable by every voter Sovereign algorithmic monetary policy Liquid representation Complete digitization of all necessary information to audit any authorities, at any time Full release of privacy for any "public official" -- service to society should be a burden, not a privilege This, and much, much more can ALL be done with software. An entirely new paradigm of society, with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine. Our rights digitized, our privacy, speech, and pursuit of happiness made into software. I would say software may have an impact, and the thinking of this impact extends far beyond the next quarter of profits. This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond. A continuously evolving, open source mechanism of human governance.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom You'd have better luck trying to remove jealousy from the human heart. If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you. Until then it is an absolute fools errand. > we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society. Autonomous societies have been tried before. They have no mechanism to correctly align their long term objectives so none of them have ever lasted. Planning to build another one based on nothing other than assumption is flawed. > with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine. Guns exist. The social machine is secondary to force. You have no plan for this. > This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond. Older people sell younger people pure unadulterated fantasies in order to extract cheap labor from them.

koromak 2y ago

This is a wild take. Software developers do the dirty work. We're one step below wall street.

anamax 2y ago

Ah yes, The Roads Must Roll. It's worth remembering that folks who can be bought, can be bought off and spend a lot of time enjoying their riches while true believers are somewhat more difficult to convince and don't take any time off. That's important because all of the big evils have been perpetrated by true believers in pursuit of their "one true way." (Yes, some large evils have been perpetrated by folks chasing money. I'm talking about things like wholesale slaughter of as many people as they could lay their hands on.)

kccqzy 2y ago

I cannot agree more. And this is exactly why the old Google motto of "don't be evil" was so important. And the decline of Google is highly correlated with the removal of this motto from its culture. I sincerely hope all tech companies can take a page from old Google and truly instill an innate rejection of evil among all software engineers.

imchillyb 2y ago

Except it's not truth. You want truth? The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Truth is that money is all that matters. Nothing else in the world of business matters not relationships, not customers, not Boards of Directors or CEOs. Money. Until a person realizes this, they will be forever caught in a cycle of thought that is not truth. "Follow the money!" is the best way to see how society works, and is why every government wants their hands in our money. Meaningful change in this world requires money. No amount of idealism or 'using our powers' can change that. Do the wizards have 'F-Off' money? No. Will they ever? No.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cryptoegorophy 2y ago

The worst are the programmers of the mobile games for kids.