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Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop building
by rmsaksida 12y ago
Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop building bullshit and focus on real problems. An engineer at Kittygram is likely to be working on a bullshit, ultimately irrelevant job, but few people would question the value of an engineer's work if he's doing groundbreaking medical software.
Of course, people don't always choose to have bullshit jobs, and getting to the level where you can build something of impact is not easy. I'm far from there myself. But I have the feeling many of us don't really look for meaningful jobs - truth be told, we don't even _think_ about these things.
- heydenberk 12y agoIt's not quite that simple. Engineers at Kittygram might build a new, open source system for efficient object recognition which then revolutionizes medical imaging. ImportantMedicalCo, with its government contract to modernize medical records, might go over budget and out of business, having a chilling effect on investment in medical record modernization. People do think about these things, but they're hard to reason about.
- rmsaksida 12y agoVery good point. Isn't this kind of innovation restricted to the Kittygrams that operate at large scales, though? Kittygram will need to reach a large mass of users, get bought out, face the need to extract specialized data from images, and finally hire expert engineers to work on that problem before they can innovate. How many startups get to that point? Even if the Kittygram founder had a vision of building an innovative object recognition solution and merely used Kittygram as the means to an end, it feels as if there must be a more efficient way to solve these problems.