when I went to university in 1999 it was my dream to work at a company like microsoft, then google. then i realized that big tech is just a way for those in control of society to control us more efficiently. i feel for those who just want to put their head down and do the work. nobody thought they were going to CS school to enable the exploitation of less lucky others. but now we have facebook, amazon, palantir, google, microsoft et al doing whatever their doing, not with the benefit of society but for the benefit of society’s owners. as a tech person, that makes me extremely uncomfortable, and someone who hasn’t figured out even a personal route around the problem, much less a societal one. god bless us all.
>as a tech person, that makes me extremely uncomfortable, and someone who hasn’t figured out even a personal route around the problem, much less a societal one. god bless us all.
Work for a boring company that provides a core service and does not ruffle feathers or cause trouble to society. I write Angular/Python apps for a company that sells payroll products. Its not the sexiest job in the world but the company needs tech people, it operates pretty ethically, I am paid reasonably well, and the team does not cause unnecessary stress day to day.
Government tech jobs are probably similar depending on department. You probably won't be contributing to the downfall of society in many govt branches but instead providing a reasonable service to society. The pay is probably less though.
Fair, but nothing is disconnected in this world. Your company could be serving some unethical company that does really bad things and at this moment you would invoke same reasoning people who work at FB about like "someone would be doing it anyways" or "there is no way to do this kind of due diligence" or "we just do X and not responsible for Y". It's not at the same scale but you get what I mean, no one is pure.
Isn't this looking at the past with rose colored glasses though?
Time before using computers for business was terrible with much less transparency (no Googling prices, etc). Paperwork got lost all of the time. Companies could easily bury things, etc.
Agreed, imo transparency, accountability, and general corporate "goodness" are probably at all-time highs. The thing is the public's level of awareness of the remaining shadiness is also at an all-time high, so it can feel like things have gotten worse because we see more of it, even if the amount of things that go unnoticed has gone down.
I'm still pretty young in my career, but I feel like I've figured out my own route around the problem. 3/4 organisations I've worked for have been NGOs, and I felt like I was doing meaningful work in all of them.
The one that wasn't an NGO has been by far the worst one. Worse salary, worse perks, worse problems I've solved, and while I didn't do any work I considered to be unethical, I'd definitely refuse some of the work my colleagues did.
I kinda wish more techies would look at the NGOs as a viable alternative to the corporate world and do some work that's actually meaningful to the society. Granted, the supply of jobs in the tech field isn't big enough for everyone to switch, but the jobs are there if you're willing to search for them.
Many engineers I used to work with now work for Facebook. I wonder how they feel about it. Do they think Facebook does no harm? Do they think that their job itself isn't doing harm? ("I'm just writing spark jobs"). Do they try to ignore it because the salary conditions are so cushy? What amount of money is enough to ignore your conscience if you know that Facebook is part of the problem? Would I work for Facebook for 500k a year? 1M a year? I've heard as a reason "They have two kids, that's why they took the job, you'd do the same if you had kids".
I don't know. It's not black and white. Social media apps aren't creating poisonous ideas like the flat earth, antimask, or anti-vax movements, but they're certainly essential to their spread. They have also had a positive impact such as during the Arab spring a couple years back. Would measles have made a comeback in the US without Facebook? Probably not? Does that mean that Facebook is responsible for the resurgence of it? At least partially yes in my view. Did Facebook sway the elections in 2016? Probably. But so do journalists. What if Facebook swayed elections in a direction that aligns more with my views? Would I be as uncomfortable? I certainly don't have enough information to say "facebook good, facebook bad", but with the limited information I'm comfortable saying that Facebook is dangerous. My perception is that the negative impact of Facebook outweighs the positive; I can't prove it, but it's spooking me enough that I won't work for them. Maybe it's because I don't have kids.
Those are the fairly novel ways of exploitation. Finance, marketing, naked rent-seeking, and employment through temp/piecework have always been around, but technology has made them terrifying. And every single field involves mass surveillance.
I got into programming because I loved the machines and the abstractions, but I'm finding myself helpless because I can't make myself contribute to the goals of the people who want to employ me.
Yeah. And to have a good living, it helps to work at big tech. But if youre passionate about software, you are giving something up. sometimes I treat code like art, its my medium that I build things through. But im selling that, and losing out on that art, whilst building massive data collection and manipulation systems
To be fair, how many people can say otherwise? That you’re working for something more than money? Creatives? And people with “fk you” money? It’s ridiculously hard to go against the establishments and most people fail doing so.
> nobody thought they were going to CS school
> to enable the exploitation of less lucky others.
When you were in university, the students who did think so were the ones who wanted to work on Wall St. A decade later, they all wanted to be the next Steve Jobs.
I think the main problem is that exploitative business-models and platform economies have not been fully analyzed/modeled yet by economists, so we can hardly expect governments to do something about the problem with new competition laws etc.
I'm honestly confused. Doesn't the Buzzfeed article publish her full name and excerpts from her LinkedIn profile? Protecting the author's private info is a hard reason to swallow when they literally reveal the author's full name and LinkedIn profile.
I've been involved in politics and software a long time. I was an elected Hillary Clinton DNC Delegate in 2008. I'm a senior software engineer today. And I'm not sure Democracy will survive contact with social media. I have a solution.
1. Ancient History - Historically politics was a hobby of the elite. You had to go out of your way, sometimes into the cold to attend party meetings. The discussions were academic and professional. People who were involved in politics had their lives very much together, on both sides of the isle.
2. Social Media was invented. I had the opportunity to work with a very fantastic and kind person. My role in the organization was software engineer. This person's role was warehouse operations. Because of Social media this person, who would otherwise never be politically engaged, rocks social media all day long. With the advent of Facebook on mobile, this person tweets political memes all day long. This person spends Xor time on reddit, and "chan" sites. This person now represents the main stream. This person is awesome, but shouldn't be shaping policy.
3. Solutions. I have a number of ideas. I think we should move away from ideas such as ballot initiatives and direct democracy and embrace the fact we are a Republic. We need professionals to determine policy not the twitter mob. Another solution I would seriously implement is a rule. No politics on social media. If its political, flag it, delete it. This would take care of twitters toxicity problem, and facebooks foreign interference problems.
I'm spitballing ideas here, but I am not sure Democracy can survive first contact with social media. It's a mess. people are angry. If you work at one of these big tech companies, I'd love to know your take!
> Solutions. I have a number of ideas. I think we should move away from ideas such as ballot initiatives and direct democracy and embrace the fact we are a Republic. We need professionals to determine policy not the twitter mob.
Congress people and senators are professional policy makers. The problem is that if they acted solely in the best interest of the nation then they wouldn't get reelected. So what, is not having elections a better solution? Should there be no parties so that actual conversations happen and require a consensus? Should terms be limited? No clue. I'm not sure we as a society can fix ourselves without a major kick in the butt.
I find it repulsive that no one is discussing that the original author was doxed by a news organization and this was done after a "whistle-blower" leaked their memo to the news org. One person discussing something internally with their peers, and maybe trying to make things better, has their life ruined now because everyone on the internet knows their name.
Readit News
Work for a boring company that provides a core service and does not ruffle feathers or cause trouble to society. I write Angular/Python apps for a company that sells payroll products. Its not the sexiest job in the world but the company needs tech people, it operates pretty ethically, I am paid reasonably well, and the team does not cause unnecessary stress day to day.
Government tech jobs are probably similar depending on department. You probably won't be contributing to the downfall of society in many govt branches but instead providing a reasonable service to society. The pay is probably less though.
Time before using computers for business was terrible with much less transparency (no Googling prices, etc). Paperwork got lost all of the time. Companies could easily bury things, etc.
The one that wasn't an NGO has been by far the worst one. Worse salary, worse perks, worse problems I've solved, and while I didn't do any work I considered to be unethical, I'd definitely refuse some of the work my colleagues did.
I kinda wish more techies would look at the NGOs as a viable alternative to the corporate world and do some work that's actually meaningful to the society. Granted, the supply of jobs in the tech field isn't big enough for everyone to switch, but the jobs are there if you're willing to search for them.
I don't know. It's not black and white. Social media apps aren't creating poisonous ideas like the flat earth, antimask, or anti-vax movements, but they're certainly essential to their spread. They have also had a positive impact such as during the Arab spring a couple years back. Would measles have made a comeback in the US without Facebook? Probably not? Does that mean that Facebook is responsible for the resurgence of it? At least partially yes in my view. Did Facebook sway the elections in 2016? Probably. But so do journalists. What if Facebook swayed elections in a direction that aligns more with my views? Would I be as uncomfortable? I certainly don't have enough information to say "facebook good, facebook bad", but with the limited information I'm comfortable saying that Facebook is dangerous. My perception is that the negative impact of Facebook outweighs the positive; I can't prove it, but it's spooking me enough that I won't work for them. Maybe it's because I don't have kids.
I got into programming because I loved the machines and the abstractions, but I'm finding myself helpless because I can't make myself contribute to the goals of the people who want to employ me.
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OK QAnon
According to it, the full version isn't going to be released because it contains privately identifiable information.
1. Ancient History - Historically politics was a hobby of the elite. You had to go out of your way, sometimes into the cold to attend party meetings. The discussions were academic and professional. People who were involved in politics had their lives very much together, on both sides of the isle.
2. Social Media was invented. I had the opportunity to work with a very fantastic and kind person. My role in the organization was software engineer. This person's role was warehouse operations. Because of Social media this person, who would otherwise never be politically engaged, rocks social media all day long. With the advent of Facebook on mobile, this person tweets political memes all day long. This person spends Xor time on reddit, and "chan" sites. This person now represents the main stream. This person is awesome, but shouldn't be shaping policy.
3. Solutions. I have a number of ideas. I think we should move away from ideas such as ballot initiatives and direct democracy and embrace the fact we are a Republic. We need professionals to determine policy not the twitter mob. Another solution I would seriously implement is a rule. No politics on social media. If its political, flag it, delete it. This would take care of twitters toxicity problem, and facebooks foreign interference problems.
I'm spitballing ideas here, but I am not sure Democracy can survive first contact with social media. It's a mess. people are angry. If you work at one of these big tech companies, I'd love to know your take!
Congress people and senators are professional policy makers. The problem is that if they acted solely in the best interest of the nation then they wouldn't get reelected. So what, is not having elections a better solution? Should there be no parties so that actual conversations happen and require a consensus? Should terms be limited? No clue. I'm not sure we as a society can fix ourselves without a major kick in the butt.
Wasn't that a new 'social media' of the time?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24477933
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Even targeted advertising, if done right is very good for both buyer and seller.
Bad part is data collection and predatory targeting, like for (rather mild) example “easy money passive FBA business” targeting aspiring enterpreners.