You are building it for your salary, for shareholders, both private and public, and users.
There tends to be people who will screw over one or two of those groups to enrich the other group.
Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
81–90 of 354 posts
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#82I think people should do what they want and I find these articles meaningless. Don't like your company's values? Great, find another job. It's as simple as that. Let's not shame people for wanting to stick with a company. Everyone has their reasons to stay whether it's money, values, working environment, co-workers or personal reasons. If you really cared, shouldn't you try to change the company from within? Isn't th…
Whatever the issue is you can always find haters, I think its better to make oneself immune to this.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#83At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum." In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise. Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPh…
>Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank...
Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental.
People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when google touted their "don't be evil" philosophy.
For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil. It was about getting rich.
We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies like Facebook and Google from early on. (Again, if we're being honest, that understanding of the danger is one reason many of us don't even have a facebook.) But we compartmentalize. What we would put on our own home systems rarely reflects what we would put on work systems if someone is paying us enough money. What we would develop in hobby time is, again, very different than what we would develop if someone is paying us a lot of money.
I get it. We have to feed our families. I'm not faulting anyone. I'm just saying that it's a bit revisionist to put forth the "google/facebook/whoever tricked us into working for them" narrative. Most of us understood what google and facebook were going in.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, poverty is not decreasing everywhere. The graph shows absolute poverty decreasing.* Meanwhile in most developed countries, inequality is grotesque and the consequent poverty is on the rise. *Absolute poverty would decrease much faster if we exploited and expropriated from developing countries a little less.
Absolute poverty is the important measure. If I'm hungry, I'm hungry, no matter what my neighbours have. But if I have a 50" flat screen TV, and my neighbours have a 100" flat screen TV, that inequality does not make me poor. I can still watch TV.
The big expense right now isn't 50" TVs, it's housing - and the cost of housing is very much affected by how much your neighbours can afford to spend.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources that feed us are being destroyed. What’s…
> despite living in a rich planet people are starving A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...
It still exists in extremely large numbers, so it's not 'overused rhetoric'. Please don't dismiss an extremely large issue as 'rhetoric'.
Half of the worlds population lives in poverty, and ~650m live in extreme poverty [1][2].
[1] https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-p...
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources that feed us are being destroyed. What’s…
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to build the tech to cure cancer and filter pollution.
"All technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first." - Eleanor Saitta
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to build the tech to cure cancer and filter pollution.
Cure for cancer involves molecular biology and filtering pollution involves heterogeneous catalysis. Where does programming come into play in any direct way to these solutions? I understand that tech is involved indirectly, but so is the coffee that is served in laboratories to keep scientists working.
> Where does programming come into play in any direct way to these solutions?
* Literally every piece of lab equipment that uses any kind of controller/control board (most of them)... has needed programming of one sort of another. Hmmm, with the exception of older analog gear maybe (decades ago?).
* Every single piece of data collection, storage, analysis, and control software is created through programming.
* Even communication of results among team members, to management, to the public, often requires programming.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#88At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum." In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise. Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better, especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPh…
> Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of a bank... Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was coincidental. People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. Especially in the early days when…
good try but.. the Google'rs originally wanted to "index the worlds information" .. very, very smart engineers are motivated by that alone. They were competitive and highly-achieving coders from Berkeley-Stanford-MIT-CalTech-thatOtherOneIForget in an elite team environment.. There were ten other well-funded companies trying to be search engines with lots of publicity.. Google outperformed them..
In hindsight, after the money with so many zeroes, it is tempting to rewrite history, but this short "it was the money" doesnt tell the story
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#89For the over the decade I've been a software engineer I've always strived to work in products with a value proposition for the end user that I can understand. I can't understand how anyone could work without this understanding and not get their soul crushed. Maybe I'm just sensitive or underpaid.
Sometimes your don't have the luxury to choose your work.
Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
#90For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
The point of business should be for the betterment of humanity, not money
Get your dirty socialism out of here./s