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The post talks like tech jobs have a societal benefit but it's difficult to see it due to the many layers of abstraction. I would rather posit that most tech j

The post talks like tech jobs have a societal benefit but it's difficult to see it due to the many layers of abstraction. I would rather posit that most tech jobs have a negative societal impact and it's difficult to find a company which isn't focusing on fucking the maximum amount of profit out of their customers while utilising the cheapest lubricant.

morleytj 2y ago
It depends on the job for sure, but you're certainly not wrong that many technical jobs have a negative societal impact. I had a hard time finding jobs I actually wanted to apply to after college because I strongly disliked the idea of working for a company where the sum total of my contribution was making people more likely to click an advertisement or something like that. Felt pretty awful in terms of "meaning" in that way. But there are a lot of tech jobs that aren't like that as well, and I think people have similar feelings about wanting to escape into a more natural world in those ones too. The sum total of which are positive and which are negative is certainly up for debate though. I actually have another post I started writing about the negative second-order effects of certain outcomes of software development in the last decade or so.
achenet 2y ago
I'll put on my devil's advocate hat and try to argue for the positive social impact of tech companies. Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other. People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that. Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives. Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D) Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week. The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions. We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life. The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3
- bee_rider 2y ago
  There are also a ton of tech companies that we don’t have to play devil’s advocate to defend. Apple, AMD, TSMC, Intel, so on and so on… they make or design useful devices.

morleytj 2y ago

It depends on the job for sure, but you're certainly not wrong that many technical jobs have a negative societal impact. I had a hard time finding jobs I actually wanted to apply to after college because I strongly disliked the idea of working for a company where the sum total of my contribution was making people more likely to click an advertisement or something like that. Felt pretty awful in terms of "meaning" in that way. But there are a lot of tech jobs that aren't like that as well, and I think people have similar feelings about wanting to escape into a more natural world in those ones too. The sum total of which are positive and which are negative is certainly up for debate though. I actually have another post I started writing about the negative second-order effects of certain outcomes of software development in the last decade or so.

achenet 2y ago

I'll put on my devil's advocate hat and try to argue for the positive social impact of tech companies. Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other. People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that. Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives. Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D) Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week. The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions. We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life. The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3

bee_rider 2y ago
There are also a ton of tech companies that we don’t have to play devil’s advocate to defend. Apple, AMD, TSMC, Intel, so on and so on… they make or design useful devices.