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Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

nytimes.com

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Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#221

Post by exolymph »

typomatic wrote: post #185
ams6110 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh well let's not throw corporations under the bus entirely. Corporate organization allows people to work together to take risks and tackle problems that are too big for individuals. This has given us the modern technology upon which most of us here earn our livings and given us huge advances in health and standard of living. Have corporations done bad things? Of course, and so they are regulated, and there are proce…

Are you serious? There's a better way to work together to take risks and tackle problems that are too big for individuals, and it's called "government": the original corporation that won't sell your grandmother to a meat company for a quarter.

Governments screw over their citizens all the time, on every scale. And their abuses are backed up by violence.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#222

Post by domador »

EdgarVerona wrote: post #140
lolive wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering abilities does not imply political awareness. Making things work is surprisingly hard and (imho) a soul crushing process. You need a specific kind of people's profile for that. From my experience, the presence of a political vision alongside the engineering skills is much lower than expected. When both are present, the political vision does not come from a kind of enlightenment in the engineer's inner sou…

Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from the actual act of your work and the compensation around it that you stop thinking about the consequences of your actions. This sounds terrible, but it's really just a small variant on the banality of evil. Solving problems, working on tight deadlines, and getting…

Sounds like engineers (and people in general) are good at optimizing locally (achieving what's good for me) and stink at optimizing globally (achieving what's good for everyone in society).

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#223

Post by kareemsabri »

I think we're in a bear market for technology, in terms of people's sentiments. Possibly for America as well. I don't really think it's justified though. Most people seem to think you can only go work for FAANG if you have a CS degree, cause they're in the news all the time. If those companies conflict with your morals, there are lots of problems in the world that can benefit from technology. A look through the YC batch every few months has a wide variety of companies, many of which would benefit humanity if successful.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#224

Post by Domenic_S »

saosebastiao wrote: post #151

Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance…

This is either going to resonate with you or seem totally out of left field, but I'm going to say it anyway: everything you're saying is unconscious defense against changing _yourself_. You don't need to affect policy on a national level to change the world. Changing the world can be as simple as putting the phone away and being present for your family, or volunteering at a local soup kitchen. Cleaning up the side of the highway or mowing an elderly neighbor's lawn. You can make a positive change for people in your own neighborhood.

This is where the defense comes in; acknowledging that there are things you can do _today_ means acknowledging that you're not doing those things which means you have to set up a straw man for yourself of world-sized problems that you can't fix so that you don't feel bad about not doing anything. We all have this heuristic in our minds whether we know it or not: feeling good > feeling bad, but feeling bad > the effort of changing yourself. So we accept feeling bad, and do mental gymnastics (I can't change America to the metric system, so I guess there's no point in doing anything) to minimize.

My advice: don't overthink it. Don't worry about doing something with your life. Just do something with your day!

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#225

Post by solidsnack9000 »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #210

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of mode…

Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources to other things and harder to keep people’s actions aligned with the goal.

Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently.

People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses.

Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#226

Post by hasbroslasher »

saosebastiao wrote: post #151

Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance…

Just saying: you can and should find a job that aligns more with your moral interests. I worked at a socially meaningless music startup for the last couple of years before moving into a job in Alternative Energy. While I still don't have all the control and can't instantly change the world at will, I do know that my time spent at work directly improves work in my field and that every good job I do is a good job for wind energy in general, which is one of our few hopes for doing something to fix climate change.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#227

Post by i_made_a_booboo »

saosebastiao wrote: post #151

Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their moral philosophy to compensate? I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance…

Interestingly, I think it was in the book The Elephant In The Brain, it remarks that sometimes people are depressed because they stop looking at the world through the normal veneer of self-deception and start seeing it for what it is and they realize how horrible, sad and shitty humanity and the world actually is.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#228

Post by Kalium »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #210

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of mode…

I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that so many smart, educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any problem they put their minds to!

Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to grasp how any person could be concerned with things as minor as governance structure when there is math to be done. It might be possible to press those people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it socially good for them.

Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly, than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're absolutely right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be others.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#229

Post by Dirlewanger »

jimmy1 wrote: post #133

Unpopular opinion: this is why the "dudebros" and their like keep getting hired. They are more than happy to do their work, accept their salary, and move on, and not have to turn everything into "changing the world"

Yeah I really doubt that, especially at a place like Google that has worked very hard make their work culture be the anthesis of a "dudebro". If anything, it's the modern left-leaning liberal millennial that wants to "make a change in the world" and to perform "meaningful work" that are getting lured in, propping up these companies, and are now the ones wondering how they got to working for these companies willingly work with the Chinese on censorship projects.

Re: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?

#230

Post by hasbroslasher »

acdanger wrote: post #214
hasbroslasher wrote: post #210

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of mode…

It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area. It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen. I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more s…

I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital.

Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.

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