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Do you struggle to find ethical work?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Do you struggle to find ethical work?

#81

Post by thfuran »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #67
prmoustache wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cons: - regulation by legislation is super slow. For example, disposables vapes should have never entered the market in the first place. They are an environmental nightmare, don't have any half decent purpose. Yet it will take years if not decades to ban them. - We already have too many laws. Legislations are like licences. The best ones are the simplest ones. Once you need lawyers and legal advisors and protection t…

"too many laws" is an ideological view, not fact. 99% of laws govern specific situations. It's like complaining that Linux has too much lines of code, disregarding the fact that giant majority of it touches some drivers or architectures.

You can't end up in jail for being unaware of one of the drivers you don't use.

Re: Do you struggle to find ethical work?

#82

Post by phagenlocher »

Even when you do ethical work there is a question about the effectiveness of the work. At least that is something that I struggle with. While the software I work on benefits healthcare workers I often question if and how my contributions are actually making a difference. Maybe a small one?

To me that raises the question whether it would make more sense to work for a bank / hedge fund and just donate the money I would make there to good causes -- effective altruism style. But that seems like extreme mental gymnastics to me.

Re: Do you struggle to find ethical work?

#87

Post by Teckentrup »

Extended0088 wrote: post #35
Teckentrup wrote: post #15

You may wish to consider government work. At least in the UK it can pay quite competitively[1] with our private sector, especially when you factor in the hours they ask of you and benefits like pensions, the full package of terms I think looks surprisingly competitive. But more importantly I think the work is meaningful. Whatever your view of government in general, or any executive of the day, often tech folk in gov…

This is great answer, thanks. I'm also in the UK and I'll take a look. I agree that the services that can be built for the government can be apolitical. I know that during the pandemic there was a lot of interesting work going on in the NHS. I think they created teams that were outside of the normal archaic structure of the service and allowed them a lot more freedom. Edit: Looks like the government is pretty focused…

There's actually a lot of variety.

Java is still popular around UK Departments but is by no means universal.

The UK Government Digital Service runs services in Ruby, Python, JavaScript / TypeScript and Java [1].

Other departments with strong programming teams would include:

- Department for Education (DfE) - Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) - Ministry of Justice (MoJ) - Home Office

Amongst others. They'll each have a tendency towards their own tech stack.

This is a useful resource [2] (unofficial but run by folks who love this stuff) for finding out what services are out there, and where possible who runs them and links to open source code.

Have a look around, see what you like the look of, then set some alerts or reach out to a department to ask if anyone there could tell you more about what it's like to work there... would be my advice.

There are even some local authorities with pretty respectable tech operations. Hackney used to get kudos for building good things, as did Surrey.

Outside of Gov, Citizens advice run off ruby last I heard, there are wonderful places like MySociety, the ODI as well as the privacy folks like EFF and Open Rights group.

I agree with your core point, finding work that is meaningful to you can be hard. Even harder if you want to get paid commercial rates for it.

But take heart, there's an ecosystem of folks working their socks off to make things better out there. Hopefully this links you into their networks.

Good luck.

[1]: https://github.com/alphagov/ [2]: https://govuk-digital-services.herokuapp.com/

Re: Do you struggle to find ethical work?

#88

Post by master-lincoln »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #66
master-lincoln wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want the enemies to do this first? How realistic is that. Sounds like you are ok with a stale mate

Either both, via some treaty for example, or no one. Nuclear treaties were working up till some time. Generally diplomacy works, but you need to have both the stick and the carrot. "West" has been using only carrots for way too long.

I don't understand what your proposal is here. You talk about diplomacy but then using the "stick". So do you think enemies should be threatened with the stick if they don't shut down nuclear powers as well?
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