Do I Regret Being 'Just' a Software Engineer?
jacky.wtfThe idea of tech as a tool of oppression is something that increasingly bothers me. I got into tech because I just liked building stuff with computers, and at the time I naively thought it seemed democratizing. Looking back I think this was largely because of the general public’s cluelessness about computers and the internet, so technically minded people with a little bit of access had a huge amount of power in shaping those early online spaces. I thought the future of tech would reflect the ideas of the builders, but I learned that’s not how it works. If something has potential as an instrument of power, that potential will be developed by those with power. Tech, especially the global internet has proven to have incredible scaling characteristics that can be harnessed for massive profit and control. AI is now promising a similar return in kind for whoever controls it. I’m not sure how to counterbalance this consolidation of power, but I do think it should be our major political project of the next 20 years or things are going to get ugly.
You should click through some of the links I've included, like https://dyingforaniphone.com/ and see how much money Apple pushes to hide how each of its innovations leads to corruption and straight-up sweat shop behavior (among other companies like Samsung, LG, Microsoft, HP and the like).
Or read more about how the necessary components for our devices like cobalt maintains the slave labor in Africa backed by Western hegemonic forces: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/books/review/cobalt-red-s... or the case of oil being pushed for more energy production and the lobbying against green solutions from companies like Exxon and Shell via https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo185167...
It's not even really about you or how you feel but what this industry is doing. And with the recent Supreme Court rulings, we're going to be lucky if we know if _more_ things go down.
>The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological sutfering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
https://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Anarchism/Unabom/manifest...
I think Kaczynski's take is overly pessimistic, but it does get the broad strokes right.
Kaczynski has a few good points about the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, but man is his extremely long screed about "leftists" tiresome. You could give that chunk to Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson and it wouldn't feel out of character.
I'm convinced things are going to get very ugly over the next decade or two. It won't be until things get tremendously bad before the government actually does something and tries to turn it around.
Better stop moralizing capitalism. AI is simply another tool, and like all the tools that came before, its #1 purpose is to generate profits for the owners.
There's no counterbalance or consolidation of power that wouldn't go in accordance with the rules of a capitalist society, which necessarily includes the social class divide. Between those owning everything and those who sell their labor to survive.
Ugly or not, that is exactly what capitalism is supposed to be doing.
I think a big reason why a lot of people in tech feel like this is because tech has been reduced to getting a job and optimizing for total compensation.
If you look at employees at Google, you can see that they are there to coast. Intelligent, sharp folks, reduced to mere optimizing for compensation while tweaking an algorithm here and there.
Instead what devs need to do especially those who are new to the industry, is to think like hackers of yore. Have total disdain of big tech and organizations.
I remember early 2000s and if you asked anyone who was a good hacker if they want to join IBM they would laugh in your face.
That culture needs to return. Where is the Napster of this era? That would give people the fulfillment they want and make them feel useful. A simple way of doing this is to take any popular piece of software and think what the "out there" version will look like and start building it.
Maybe punk rock and the hacker culture both need to make a comeback into the mainstream, otherwise FAANG and Leetcode will eat the soul of tech.
> I remember early 2000s and if you asked anyone who was a good hacker if they want to join IBM they would laugh in your face. That culture needs to return. Where is the Napster of this era? That would give people the fulfillment they want and make them feel useful. A simple way of doing this is to take any popular piece of software and think what the "out there" version will look like and start building it. Maybe punk rock and the hacker culture both need to make a comeback into the mainstream, otherwise FAANG and Leetcode will eat the soul of tech.
I'm glad you mentioned this. I was reading https://diversionbooks.com/books/the-spotify-play/ and the way that hacker culture has become effectively commercial (from anarchist ideals in finance being perverted into cryptocurrency, file sharing into cloud hosting, etc), we have to keep fighting to make control of it hard _while also_ protecting people's safety (bad actors - government or people - will always exist).
Coasting is fine in a sane company. Coasting is a sign of competence IMO as long as your work is also getting done and things are fairly estimated. We should get to coast because we practiced enough to be good at our job.
There's way too many jobs where the only reward for finishing your work is more work.
However, I don't think hacker or punk rock culture can make a come back here because there's too large of a pool of people willing to work even for underpaid tech jobs (since it's often a relatively a lot of money for them)
The hacker culture doesn't have to be larger than the corporate workforce to have a significant impact on the industry and the world. That was proven in an earlier era, too.
I went from a startup to Google in my last job hop. The former had way more coasters. You don’t survive long at google at L5+ if you coast.
Sounds like you’re extrapolating from internet anecdata rather than first hand experience.
> I remember early 2000s and if you asked anyone who was a good hacker if they want to join IBM they would laugh in your face.
To be fair, the most talented and ambitious still want nothing to do with big blue. Different reasons, but still.
Lots of respect to Jacky for writing this. The tech industry truly pays enough money that you can lose sight of solidarity with other workers. Even as shit gets worse and more human rights are privatized you can stay insulated. I once had a coworker brag about how he paid 10k a year for a special medical service to see the doctor faster. Public transit sucks? You just Uber from your condo everywhere. Housing crisis? Idk I got my fully renovated 3-bedroom house downtown.
If you're reading this, just on a tactical level for job hunting one thing I would say is to remove the (+/-) part of the resume. People can do the math on the duration if they care. Maybe even just put the years. I hope you're able to find something that isn't quite as dismal as 99% of tech jobs
Nixed that, thanks! I've been open to anything and the golden handcuffs have been released, so it's been fun. Right now, I'm focusing on helping other tech folks get organized (and folks outside of industry). I've spent not too much time helping folks with tech, but I'm eager to get "closer to the metal" of that process.
Tech is much like the fission bomb. Perhaps necessary, but the industry doesn't stop there. It must create bigger. Returns, investment, power, being a have and not a have not.
"Dr. Oppenheimer, when did your strong moral convictions develop with respect to the hydrogen bomb?"
"When it became clear to me that we would use whatever weapon we had."
Yeah. I only hesitate when we see people more eager to use things to exacerbate the harms of the world using technology. It sucks because we, as an industry, seem to only focus on the history of business gains and not on the sociological impact of said gains (the introduction of the smartphone and how that played into how people connect - or even what _was_ the first smartphone).
I think of worthwhile software projects as stools with three legs: The business opportunity, the interesting technical problem, and the social/ethical issues. They all need to be good in order to have an acceptable product, IMO.
Unfortunately, whenever you read an article about a new technology or read an interview of a founder or something, they spend all their time talking about the first two, and either ignore or give passing lip service to the third one. Even look at HN discussions. Few engineers here really care about the ethics of what they are working on. It's just "is it cool technology?" and (sometimes) "does it make money?" You ask someone if they are working on something good for the world and they look at you like you have an antler growing out of your head. "Yes, I'm making the Torment Nexus, but it uses blockchain and LLMs and it's written in Rust. It's written in RUST!"
I think a lot of it stems from a misguided sort of "yes I'm inventing the torment nexus, but it will never be used on me, because I'm the inventor"
Or perhaps "If it isn't me inventing the torment nexus, then someone else will"
Either way, I wish people cared more about how their inventions would be used
Nature of the system. The incentives are in place that you can either wallow in the torment nexus with everyone else, or try to invent it and get rich and escape to some little imagined slice of paradise. The world, and especially the USA, is no longer about trying to make things better and solve real actual problems - it's about trying to accumulate enough capital such you can personally opt out of the problems entirely.
very few people can afford to be ethical.
it's like Joe Rogan trashing factory farms and bragging about only eating wild elk be killed with his bare hands on his private game preserve.
writing software for an oil company doesn't make you evil it makes you like everyone else. not particularly helpful nor particularly harmful
But surely there’s a line somewhere? Maybe not a clear line, but at least a fuzzy one.
Just about anything ever created can be used to oppress and do evil. But you don’t have to be the final step that enables that evil.
Rockets - you can build rockets to take us to the moon. And somebody will repurpose it for destruction. But you don’t have to be that somebody.
Social media is incredibly destructive, yet look at all the money we've made from it. Probably one in 5 people believed in "connecting the world"...
The early days of Facebook still seem great. I could connect with friends and family and that was it. Now it's all business and politics. Perhaps this was inevitable and it should never have been developed in the first place I don't know. Is it moral to build something for the $$$ because if you don't someone else will? Probably not.
Instagram is going the same way honestly, it took a bit longer, but I'm at the stage where I just have to unfollow nut jobs. People who used to use it in quite a lighthearted fun way too.
I realize it's kind of a game of musical chairs when companies work so hard to shut down various forms of {labor,equality,ethics} activism in tech, but I found myself wondering at the end of this whether there are groups that are active now, and how to find them. Organizing anything is a coordination problem, but organizing in a context where one is opposed by companies who have positioned themselves as bottlenecks to organization and communication for humans in general seems a uniquely difficult task with unique challenges, and while perhaps financial motivation is prevalent, I like to think many technologists can still be motivated by a challenge
I'm not sure I followed all that, but maybe check out the EFF:
Like, fair. I like the EFF's work a lot, but I think they primarily function on the level of public policy and sometimes mounting strategic legal action, and I was more asking about whether there were ground level orgs in operation, unions, advocacy groups of tech workers, that kind of thing
The tech enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and many became super rich between 2010-2020.
Now economy is going through a downturn, things are expected to be bad.
Economy rebalances. Things will get better eventually. But the shockwave will leave some remnants behind. Just need to hold on for a bit.
I'll link something I wrote on LinkedIn and quote part of it here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jacky-alcine_private-governme...
> Much of the time, the entire economy operates in periods of substantial hashtag#unemployment or hashtag#underemployment, affecting workers generally: even if they have a job, the cost of job loss is so high they have to put up with nearly any abuse just to hang on to an income. Meanwhile, employers use their power to design workplaces to create a fine-grained division of labor in which workers are deskilled and thus easily replaceable.
I try not to lean on economic theory as a means of driving society (as much as capitalistic governance wants us to - we don't have to accept it). Both of the layoffs I experienced were examples of that perceived health (both at Glitch and Code for America). Coupling that with the need for us to feel "grateful" for something that can be effectively guaranteed to make us a bit messed up in the head when talking about this.
Thank you for writing this, Jacky. It's hard to read and really important. I learned a lot and am going to reread it.
I appreciate that (and def let me know if there's any part that's confusing and needs expansion)
i think this is expecting to much from corporate america. i dont think these problems are unique to tech companies. maybe i missed the point, the post kind of went all over the place at times
Are we selling our selves and authenticity to companies? i guess in a way, but we try to get as much as we can out of companies too
As far as separating your self from tech and being technologist. I think its like music, the pop stuff sucks and is mass produced. tech that used to be cool is mass produced, im sure there is cool stuff out there if you put the work into finding it. like underground music. i think trying to label your self is a mistake in general.
> i think this is expecting to much from corporate america.
I'll push back on this by adding something from the book, Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr.... She makes the case, with evidence and history, how no one in America can get by without using corporations to survive. Until we have free housing and healthcare (instead of bombs falling on the rest of the world), we have no choice but to demand better from corporate America.
> As far as separating your self from tech and being technologist. I think its like music, the pop stuff sucks and is mass produced. tech that used to be cool is mass produced, im sure there is cool stuff out there if you put the work into finding it. like underground music. i think trying to label your self is a mistake in general.
I'll quote what I mentioned at the end: "And to play on an idea of separation of the "art from the artwork" while actively defending their organizations (failing that, their outputs and indirectly their contributions) works to be a free agent of marketing for them. It's similar to a private company opening up a non-profit to launder the notion of doing good to build a moat of social capital. How does one comfortably reconcile that?" In the case of Haiti, a musician decided to run for president. Similar to what happened in America when an actor did, both invoked violent wars on the citizens (one was selling blood and killing people, another dropped bombs around the world and blamed a set of people for a viral disease that they refused to do any research on).
It's nigh impossible to separate something that _can't_ exist without the other. We can try to believe that (hence the use of money to create a bubble).
I mean expecting to much by thinking tech is any different then the rest. Leaving the career won't really lead to anything different, if your goal is to work. Which we all need to do. If you're lucky enough to not have the play the game and can leave software and work in general, that's good, but not typical.
I think you missed my point. Tech is bigger then Google Facebook w/e. Is writing drivers for obscure hardware ruining the world? Or raspberry pi? Using computer vision to solve your problems at home. That's still tech imo and healthy to participate in.
Do what everyone else does. Get into craft beer or coffee as a hobby and slip into a deep depression. It’s well documented.
I think woodworking is also a popular alternative, especially if you've always felt like ten fingers was too many.
I know a lot of woodworkers. It must be that it’s a largely solitary hobby where you get to build very very concrete and useful things that us “not really an engineer” software folks try to compensate for. Me included
Yep. I do a little bit of what someone who doesn't mind insulting carptners could call "woodworking". Having a concrete result is definitely one of the things I enjoy.
so is abandoning everything for a farm raising goats.
I have talked about this with people, in this forum.
It's funny you mention this. I did door-to-door sales for a bit and that's what provoked this post. I worked tech to get a check but the _mentality_ of folks outside of tech and in (which I imagine is the same gap that folks in finance, insurance, etc have) gave me a bit of pause when I was thinking about my tenure here.
This comment is even funnier for coming from an account called JSDevOps.
Prozac and weed/psychedelics also a well-worn path.
Not necessarily exclusive from the other options in sibling posts.
Best practices
> I'm looking for work as a senior software engineer.
Pairs well with
> I don't know how much longer I can comfortably call myself a "technologist"
>a "technologist" ...when this is what being a technologist is today
i think it's pretty unfair to skip the rest of his sentence
People tend to be selective in order to make their point. It makes it easier to not have to defend their stance (not saying that's the case here, but it's something I've routinely seen).
> get a Dell PC, ones I've read online that were serviceable
When I "repaired" a Dell PC, I destroyed the machine.
Dell power-supplies looked like standard PC power supplies; they connected to the motherboard using the same Molex plug. But Dell's Molex connector wasn't wired the same as normal ones. Dell power supplies only worked with Dell motherboards, and vice-versa.
Things may have changed, but that experience blew away my illusions about Dells being repairable.
You never ever swap cables between PSUs. It's not a Dell thing - you must use the cables that ship with the PSU. Many people have fried their mainboard like you.
You're talking about something different. In the early 2000s, before modular PSU cables, Dell used non-standard PSU power connector wiring arrangements. The 20-pin mobo power plug coming out of the PSU was wired differently than the ATX standard at the time, and swapping hardware could fry a motherboard.
https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=339053
Edit: Better source https://superuser.com/questions/905705/atx-dell-psu-to-offic...
Nvidia does something similar with their server GPU cards, to prevent people from using cheaper desktop GPUs in servers.
Yeah, I wasn't "swapping" PSU cables; the cable was part of the PSU. I replaced a Dell PSU with a standard one, and <smoke!> No more motherboard.
Manufacturers who pull this type of incompatibility shit risk their reputation. I never went near anything with a Dell label again until last year, when I bought a second-hand laptop (I don't attempt laptop upgrades and repairs).