Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by manfredo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

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"

What exactly makes one a "dudebro"? The overwhelming majority of usages of this kind of terminology (and related words like "brogrammer") seem to fall into either of two categories: slights against co-workers that work out, play sports, and engage in other kinds of physical "dude" activities - usually motivated by attempts to justify the unhealthy lifestyles of the words' users. Or as a derogatory term for men that don't fit the typical Silicon Valley mold of "geek" culture.

Neither of which necessarily relates to one's willingness to effect change in the world.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by intended » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

mindgam3 wrote: post #249

[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 o…

Knees is overselling it.

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

#274

Post by gersh » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

cryoshon wrote: post #216

gersh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to convince people to stop studying petroleum engineering and prepare for a different economy instead. If you'd like to work with me on this, please email me.

what do you have in mind?

1) Reach out to people studying Petroleum Engineering and convince them to study something else. This can be done through thing like websites, social media and handing out flyers. 2) Convince universities to end their Petroleum Engineering programs. This can involve petitions of students, faculty, alumni, and donors 3) Influence career counselors and make resources to help people study how to do things which are good for the world.

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

#275

Post by prolikewh0a » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:17 PM UTC

isodude wrote: post #89

fsloth wrote: post #33

For 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.

This is being said for Programmers, yet a good portion of HN goes out of their way to tell poor people they can just get a new job. Very contradictory!

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

#276

Post by manfredo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

prolikewh0a wrote: post #112

mc32 wrote: post #108

Some tech workers. Not all, not most. This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news. China presents a quandary, no doubt. On the one hand we have self determination and sovereignty, on the other hand we have “western values” and so forth. Not long ago “internationalists” argued for t…

>This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news. So you'd rather have an uninformed tech job force with no opinions, just walk into a private government every day which strips every right you have along with having absolutely no morals or ethics so you can live in a 34th story downtow…

Personally I'd rather just have a workforce that doesn't see themselves as some sort of techno-messiahs that are going to make some profound impact on the world.

The companies that often command the most of my respect are ones that are at peace with the fact that they're providing a product or service to meet a certain demand. They don't paint themselves as some sort of profound agent of change; they are honest that they exist to build a good product that people want to buy. I'd take that over a company that roots it's identity in high flung ideals.

I also agree with the notion that tech companies' need to have some sort of profound social mission is a big reason why tech (at least SV tech) has become so politically charged these days. Because SV companies often see themselves as agents of social change, they often only attract people that are enthusiastic for that kind of social change. In more extreme cases, these companies can become outright hostile towards employees that area skeptical of that change.

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

#277

Post by prolikewh0a » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

dubya123 wrote: post #107

They sure have strong opinions about working on Government projects but none of them have any issues creating tech that intrusively monitors and manipulates people for the purposes of serving them advertisements. What heroes they are...

You can directly blame the people who developed this stuff, the programmers, most perfectly able to move jobs with no real loss in economic stability.

I think it's one of the most immoral and unethical jobs that could be taken today.

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

#278

Post by manfredo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #71

ekianjo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

The way we measure a "decreasing poverty" is extremely laden politically (like most things that are supposedly "neutrally evaluated" are supposed to be, just because they're represented as spreadsheets of numbers). We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day crowd. Take this same peasant and send it working for…

The thing is, being a cog in the capitalist wheel really _is_ preferable to subsistence farming. The reality of subsistence farming is that you're living with no access to healthcare, education, often subject to food insecurity, and often lacking in basic utilities like electricity and clean water. Subsistence farming isn't all hunky dory like the Hobbits in the Shire. There's a reason people choose to escape it when given the chance

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

#279

Post by el_benhameen » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

xahrepap wrote: post #245

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 e…

I’ve been thinking about finding a new job, and finding something that I feel is moral and pushes society forward are important criteria for me. Medtech seems like the sort of thing that might meet them.

If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field? Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health? And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated? I don’t love asking that last one in the same breath as questions of morality, but I do have a family to take care of.

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

#280

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

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…

We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight

1) Alternative Energy has a lot of minds working on it already. Success is dependent on the establishment of large scale infrastructure and changing societal expectations. One "Ah-Ha!" moment isn't going to cut it.

2) Vertical Farming is a world-saving problem that needs solving? Color me skeptical.

3) Asteroid Mining: Also requires establishment of large scale infrastructure.

4) Carbon Sequestration: The laws of thermodynamics are against you on this, unless you can marshal self-replicators harvesting a significant portion of the sunlight falling on the Earth. If we've gotten that desperate, it must mean that building sunshades at L1 has been made unavailable by groundside politics and/or the Kessler Syndrome.

5) Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism.

projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good

Is that what the Industrial Revolution was? Or has industrialization raised 90% of the world's population out of poverty? Hint: It's the latter.

Another hint: Has there ever been a collection of intelligent, privileged young people who thought they could change the world into a utopia? I think you might want to study the history a bit. There was one utopian project which was implemented by privileged intellectuals, but which was also based on a good knowledge of history and human nature. Though flawed, that project worked, did some good, and has been going on for well over 200 years.