Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 354 posts

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

#241

Post by toofy »

ryderm wrote: post #231
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

Indeed. We need a new and more comprehensive set of metrics by which we measure value add or success.

When considering how successful a thing, a person, or a project is, innovation and market success certainly should be weighted heavily but we really need some other metrics to include.

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

#243

Post by hasbroslasher »

kareemsabri wrote: post #237
ryderm wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

It's really not. People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. They are answerable to their friends, family, community etc. If that were the case, why would people be resigning from Google over moral issues?

This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals.

And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.

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

#244

Post by geebee »

The NYTimes discusses this question in the context of ethics, but the hiring process for software engineers, generally speaking, often avoids any discussion of what will be built. I've interviewed at google and a few other similar places, as well as smaller startups, and remarkably often, there was almost no discussion of the company or product.

A tech interview goes like this "a list begins with an integer between 0 and 5. You then add a new set of integers that must sum to the value of the last added integer. How many different possible lists of 100 integers can be generated through this process?"

I've done this at so many companies. They don't talk about what you'll be building. They don't want your opinion. You could go through two days of whiteboard exam style interview questions and have no idea what the company does. And you could get hired without ever answering a single question about what the company does. It's remarkable, but it's actually designed to work that way.

I think tht the outside world really doesn't quite understand what goes on in tech interviews and tech hiring. If they did, they might know that the indifference to ethics may stem from general programmer unawareness of what the companies they work for actually do.

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

#245

Post by xahrepap »

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 work for a medical company. It's really a tech company that makes medical software. Runs like a pretty typical successful tech startup. Our customers are hospitals and doctor clinics. The software syncs the data between various networks. Can notify a patient's primary care giver when their patient is checked into the ER, can notify a doctor if that patient is bouncing between hospitals looking for meds, there was even a time I heard of a man going between hospitals, checking in, and vandalizing hospital equipment. Our software was able to notify the nurse who checked him in at his last destination.

It's actually an awesome place to work, and it's nice to know that I'm actually helping push the needle a little bit in the right direction to help the medical industry succeed.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

ryderm wrote: post #239
Kalium wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal. Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by [deleted] »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #232
Kalium wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as "the price paid" that you mention: the price is not paid in any way. The price is being put on a high-interest credit card and we're paying the minimum. Someday those cans we've kicked down the road (carbon emissions, pacific garbage patch, destruction of ocean ecosystems in general, deforestation, economic inequality, desertification, etc.) in order to sell more plastic trinkets will come back to collect o…

[deleted]

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

#248

Post by annabellish »

illumin8 wrote: post #220
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…

You can work on blockchain projects that might have the potential to bring financial services to the unbanked and poor in 3rd world countries, but, oh wait a minute, the technology will probably just be used to create predatory financial products for payday lenders to expand their market... The best way to make sure you are working on ethical projects is to start and run your own company. Any technology can be used f…

I have yet to see even a concept, never mind a product, that actually uses a blockchain in a net-positive way, especially for "the unbanked". Universally high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on anything that sees leitimate amounts of use with no clear path towards mitigating this situation, if it's even possible to mitigate at all, combined with several choices of security system each with devastating concequences - from the morally black proof-of-work burning precious resources at a time climate change is already threatening to destroy us, to the morally grey proof-of-stake that simply reinforces the idea that those with the most resources deserve even more resources - makes for something that doesn't seem to have much potential for _good_. The "Unbanked" aren't going to be served by these systems, they need efficient, reliable, and safe systems.

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

#249

Post by mindgam3 »

[Reposting my comment shared on the earlier thread, I guess this one wasn’t marked as dupe]

“In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.) “We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to be complicit in this gross misuse of power.”

This is an incredibly powerful statement. A bunch of students getting together brought Google to its knees.

Now these brave students might consider standing up en masse to Facebook and its rapidly shrinking signing bonuses before FB moves too fast and breaks reality again.

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

#250

Post by Finch2192 »

carapace wrote: post #213
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…

Study Buckminster Fuller. He's an engineer who had a kind of spiritual epiphany and dedicated his life to a kind of hyper-realist "Design Science Revolution". In his lifetime he was one of the most famous (world-wide) Americans ever to have lived. He traveled around the world more than eighty times. There is a form of carbon named after him: Buckminsterfullerene. Anyhow, he calculated that we would have the technolog…

How do you find such an experienced therapist? What do you mean by "all our problems are basically psychological or spiritual"?

Why do we have to slog through crackpottery for insight?

Post reply on HN