IT Devs of of Lemmy, How do You Cope with Being Forced to Contribute to 'Social Media Pornshow of the Web'™ or Die?
(begin rant)
Hi. Do you ever have a feeling that you have technical skills to qualify as a programmer, and there's a demand for specialists, but, ironically, nobody needs them to design some useful information system or optimize the workflow in the factories, or do real science and push the limitations of human knowledge, but rather, all is just to spread some crappy advertising message as cheap as possible to the broadest audience as possible, usually without giving any respect to consumers, that feels like you're losing your brain cells when interacting with the app/content you create. Quality level zero, consumerism level over 9k. Tons of boilerplate because 'everything must be kept proprietary' and it probably won't work after 2 years because the framework you were using is down and the very idea of the becomes dated. Also, the more advanced technology, the more it's used for shit. Like, we have generative neural networks that are used for turdposting conspiracies and generating profit/influence for some party.
I would say this clearly: I am very, very angry when I'm seeing this. I don't want to participate in something that forces consumers to eat shit. Fuck SEO and e-commerce. Everything's generative-AI, GANs, LLMs.. now, which do not produce any value, at least to the user, or extracting every single bit of data of the user. Everything's just to bombard people with information nowadays. Even Project Managers get biased (mostly because of naïve hype) and promote this crap.
(end rant)
So, my question is, how do you go through all of it? Of course, devs are better paid, but I don't care about money. I'm still a student and, although I really like programming, and I'm really good at solving Competitive Programming problems (been at ICPC several times), I'm tired of this junk, besides I have a feeling I'll be forced to do it. But, if I'm going to do it, somebody's gonna get hurt. But it seems that it's the only thing I'm skilled at, and I have no alternatives. So, how do you get through all of it, and what do you see it as relief, what does reward you at the very end?
EDIT: uncensored all swear words at request. I hope now you're happy.
Your attitude is correct, don't support enshittification and don't do anything you're not comfortable doing
Don't replace cursewords with stupid characters, this is Lemmy.
I thought, I was having text encoding issues for a hot second there...
EDIT: but mainstream web is really that bad.
You can just fucking cuss here.
Fuck yeah!
Fuckin' oath! Swearing is the shit!
Everything is better with fuck!
There are tons of IT jobs for more ethical companies where you can feel good about what you are working on.
Stay away from large, publicly traded companies, and companies whose user isn't the paying customer.
Startups, companies that are wholly privately owned (often by an individual into philanthropy or at least mostly concerned with their image and legacy), or those usually in smaller more focused markets are where the ethical jobs tend to be.
You guys are doing that in your interviews, right? Learning about the product, the company, its moral philosophy? Not just selling out to the highest paying job?... Right?
Maybe that's too much for some people. People do get squeezed and get desperate.
I’ll be honest, I do research companies and aim for ethical employers and all that, but
the job market is fucked, techies come a dime a dozen nowadays - anything you apply to the competition is fucking fierce so you can’t really afford to be picky
I care about how ethical my employer is, but not enough to be chocked in debt or live paycheck to paycheck without affording a single luxury in my life. I’m talking “eating out once per week” here, not yachts.
I usually try for the money if I see a job I feel will help utilise my skills.
I'm part SRE/system admin though, which means I don't care at all about the software that runs on top of the infra I handle. Except when I do need to care, and I try to minimise such interactions. For example: I'd like to work for a company that operates/uses a CDN heavily, because that's the kind of environment where the SRE mindset really shines. I don't care if Netflix is failing in the current market and their management is evil as long as I'm working on the SRE side. Of course, this is different from Devs whi are likely more hands-on with the product itself.
Local 👏 non 👏 profits (or govt)
I feel like those options are always immediately written off. It is possible to find good to great opportunities. Plenty of shit ones too of course but it's worth a look.
It feels good to work somewhere whose purpose is to support the community I live in.
I know this is completely beside the point, but one thing that just really activates my almonds for absolutely no reason is people "censoring" a swear word by replacing a couple of letters and then acting like they didn't swear.
Switching out one letter doesn't make it any less swearing (and since when is "porn" a swear word?), everybody knows what you wrote and you know what you wrote. If you think swearing is bad then don't fucking do it, but don't swear and then pretend you didn't just because you hid a letter.
It's just as silly as using darn or frick, except they have none of the punch which is the purpose of swear words, ya know?
I use those in some situations that don't call for a full-fledged swear, minor irritations like missing a metro when I'm not in any hurry.
It's good to have an escalation ladder for swearing 😀 don't have to go straight for the nuclear option
Thats a good point!
They’re not supposed to be pleasant. Swear words are part of your evolved self defense system, and generally speaking any time that’s active you won’t feel good.
This is one reason devs sometimes spend free time contributing to open source. It feels good to know your skills are going towards a passion, and builds a resume around what you love.
Welcome, you have discovered the alienation of labour in the field of IT. People were dealing with this shit for decades and it will keep happening as long as we live under capitalism.
As someone that is quite unfamiliar with Marx' ideology (yet I'm aware of it being the base of communism in what was the USSR) I find it quite ironic that both late-stage (aka extreme) capitalism leads to the same as what commuism lead to: which is what Marx describes, according to the Wikipedia page, as alienation of the worker. And it shows, funnily enough, contradictions with the implementation of soviet communism, which was supposedly based on marxist ideology.
I also think it would be quite amusing to see someone do an experiment, where groups of random people are presented with either a poster that shows this idea from Marx, or with a presentation/podcast/TED Talk where a person describes and presents the idea without ever mentioning it was Marx' ideas. As someone that always steered clear of Marx and his ideas specifically because I thought it would be about promoting communism (and as someone with Eastern European roots, I know what real communism was like), so I looked at it the same way I would look at religious propaganda: with a spoonful of salt, a bottle of scepticism, and the idea that it would be better to just steer clear instead of wasting my time, and yet when I saw this link you posted I was like "this sounds interesting, let's check it out" and so I did, and I was left pleasantly surprised.
While there is a good bit of nuance and western propaganda around the USSR, you are essentially right. For different reasons though. The USSR never fully abolished capitalism. They thought that capitalism was a "necessary evil" that had to be contained and shaped towards a socialist/communist end goal. They intentionally reproduced the exploitative conditions of capitalism post-revolution because they thought it had to happen that way.
Socialism is most broadly divided into statist and non-statist socialism. If you're anti-capitalist or just don't generally care for the present condition of the world, but don't really care for the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao then you should check out libertarian socialism/anarchism. It's a broad category of ideologies with a ton of overlap that essentially boils down to "hierarchy is the real problem and any successful egalitarian society should seek to eliminate heirarchy as much as possible"
Eliminate hierarchy by allowing anyone to enter the market and do business? Some kind of marketplace … where people are free to choose their economic relations at will. Freedom and markets. A market with freedom as a defining characteristic.
You're describing anarcho capitalism or just regular capitalism if you're including the state. Both of which blow for a number of reasons you likely wouldn't accept if your sarcasm is anything to go by. Did you have a point to all of that or were you just being a goober?
Work that isn't super unethical exists. It pays well but not obscenely well like ad industry. If you are a highly in demand engineer you are making a choice by working for an ad company.
Do not work for a company that defies your moral compass. Period. Integrity is what makes legends.
Companies are led by humans and their morals and priorities reflect all the way down.
Bro... Most people are bootlickers so they shill whatever their corpo daddy tells them and they do it for free on their time off
🤡
I work for the federal government and spend my time at work making open sourced software and outside of work contributing to open source. My job is centered around forwarding science for the betterment of society, not around making the company more money.
As a result, I'm happier. My salary could probably be about 25% higher in the private sector. However, my job is secure through retirement and the pension plan and work life balance is sensational. This year i will have taken a month off between vacations and use-or-lose. I also have banked over 2500 hours of sick leave that don't drop off. I also work fully remote though my office is 7 minutes away with no traffic.
Surely there are other programming jobs you can get? I work on IT service management software for mostly the public sector. We can't even use Google Analytics. How about embedded systems? Automation for factories? Medical software? I once worked on AI for detecting lesions in eye-fundus photographs, to screen for diabetes. There's plenty of specialized software for
niceniche sectors, for example I did cost estimation and planning software for the construction industry. Or you can go work for some indie developer to make games. Put away some money and you can eventually start your own company to make the kind of software you enjoy making.Without doxxing myself, I worked for a small firm that helped "tech for good" companies to build their MVP or product towards Series A-C funding.
In the four years I worked with them, I don't remember a single project there that wasn't tainted by corruption, dodgy owners, or outright lies. This ranges from:
Working at that place made me realise that sometimes the best you can hope for is a leadership structure that aren't total assholes, and to work on something that you at least have some faith in.
This is my biggest problem with working as a programmer. I enjoy solving complex programming problems, learning about new algorithms, exploring new technologies. Instead every job seems to be "add new button with questionable requirements" or "add thing to the backend that nobody thought about for more than 3 seconds". All for questionable goals like advertisement, surveillance, big oil, fintech, or defense of course. It's kind of a bummer, but at least it pays well and it beats most other jobs.
Why don't you go developing video games engines, aerospace soft, etc.? I'd assume this is where tasks go beyond "provide a CRUD REST API interface" or "add a button".
Aerospace is largely making killing machines and also some of the most soul destroying tedious fragmented work because the high safety stakes. Games industry is famously toxic. There are a few fun and rewarding good jobs out there but I don't think you're hitting examples.
I moved to EdTech from gaming - mobile gaming felt so damn focussed on value extraction.
Several of your use cases are just a different career. I optimize factory Workflows for a living, it’s industrial engineering, and it’s a very different skill set from programming
Web design is not the only option for someone who likes programming. Since you are still a student, there are so many options in front of you. You can be an embedded engineer and work closer to hardware, design firmware, electronic chips themselves or their verification environment. You can be a software engineer and work on business-to-business software which does not include adds and is very useful (e.g. CAD tools, inventory trackers for supermarkets and hospitals etc.). There is so much you can do, pursue something you are enthusiastic about.
Go into embedded software. You can’t do ads if there is no UI taps head.
Cli advertisements FTW - Ubuntu embedded edition
Not sure myself, I'm trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren't anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you're starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.
But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there's no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won't align with yourself or the other workers fully, it's just a question of degree.
imo you gotta take whatever you can as a first job to get started. If you hate it, make a goal to find a better job after the first year. Just try to learn whatever you can an remember to write down notable things you do on the job to make your resume sound better. Beggars can't be choosers. You can focus on finding something fun and ethical after you have the experience and luxury to do so.
Also I don't think you can really appreciate what ethical and unethical behaviour looks like until you experience it first hand. Besides you aren't really contributing anything truly unique early in your career. Companies that can only hire desperate, under-performing or new engineers tend not to do so well (take a look at just about any bank for instance) and with how much of an arms race most of the unethical stuff is the effect can be very pronounced.
I strongly believe that the vulnerability google is starting to show is a direct result of them losing prestige as a good place to work.
I agree. I think it's the same thing that Activision Blizzard has been experiencing. All their recent games have been mediocre at best, and it's due to losing their best talent due to being a bad place to work.
I actually just switched to Kagi for my main search engine because I have been feeling disappointed with Google search lately. It's fine if you're only searching big websites but you'll be lucky to get any results for niche stuff
Oh man I know how you feel. You need to find a balance. You don't have to work 5-7 days a week to live. As a skilled worker you can survive from 4 days or less. Especially if you can remote and live in a cheap place. You can spend your other work days on whatever you find to be valuable. I dunno works for me.
There's plenty of work to be found in the public sector, the pay may be a bit less but I've always found the work to be satisfying and diverse. And, though this might be a European thing, the job security is usually quite high.
On top of that, the domain knowledge you build with working in these kinds of organizations can be quite valuable.
It's all bullshit, and you've hit the nail on the head.
The only way out is through each other: change your workplace to be less bullshit. Demand dignity. Maybe bring your friends and make a co-op.
While I do work for a giant, soulless corporation that definitely exploits people, the product I work on is actually useful to don't marginalized people.
So I'm not contributing to the enshittification of the Internet.
I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.
There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.
We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!
Not a developer but a recent engineering grad. I get SO MUCH spam from the literal US military and defense contractors looking for people to work on their actual weapons. Surface-to-air missiles, nuclear submarines, air warfare, electronic warfare ... these are actual "opportunities" that have landed in my inbox courtesy of my dipshit school career center's lack of morals. I need a job, but I would literally rather skin myself and eat it then work for those monsters at any salary.
So imagine if the US military didn’t have any weapons. How do you think that would play out? Would the overall outcome be ethically preferable to our current state of affairs?
Every single day. I can only dream so much.
Great!
Fuck yeah fam!
No we don't fucking need anymore missiles thank you very much, LEAST OF ALL in the hands of the US government.
Because Russia is so friendly we don't any weapons going by your logic.
No, the US Government doesn't need fucking weapons. Neither does the Russian government or any world government, because they won't deserve to exist, so as a special case they certainly don't deserve to defend themselves.
We do. If you believe that the US government represents your interests you're either a billionaire, a defense contractor, or a fool.
I simply refuse.
I work in a niche part of the IT world, and I have plenty of niche skills, so if they wanted me to do that kind of stuff they're paying for the skills for which I was hired, while using me for something they could get someone much cheaper to do.
I'll stick to my clustered storage racks and make things work in harsh environments. I like it, I'm good at it, it pays well, and I don't have to deal with the awful shit that often falls under IT.
I do IT for a non profit. Luckily, it's one that is funded by membership dues so I don't have to fundraise, which includes a ton of advertising and the like. True, I'm not making bank like a lot of folks in IT. But my peace of mind is intact. I make a good living, and feel good about what I do. Jobs like mine are out there, but when you're a student all you hear about is the vast amount of money you can make quickly by selling your soul to amazon or whoever. If you keep at it, there is a path in IT that does not include losing sight of your values. Good luck!!
Sammeee except data analyst (by title, I guess) working in local healthcare. I'm under the impression I could make bank by selling out but I'm quite happy with 70k, a pension, and my dignity.
I work in bioinformatics, which is the application of computer science to biological problems. I have set up a genetic sequencing machine and nearly a petabyte of storage and backup for all the data because it's huge. I really like my field because it is the application of my skills to solving problems real world problems. I'm currently employed by a children's hospital creating tools to make genetic testing procedures better. Very fulfilling.
The field does have some issues. Many of the tools are research projects, not necessarily written by good programmers. Getting things working is a task in itself, but is becoming easier thanks to containerization technologies. Also, the pay for some reason is lower than IT work, even though it's an interdisciplinary field requiring knowledge of biology, IT and programming. But I worked as a programmer for a few years, fixing bugs and not really working on making anything new or interesting, and I wouldn't go back to that even though it paid better.
Well I chose my employers very carefully when I can, so after video games :-) it has been companies tied to government, research or the medical field and you actually do something good or at least useful IMO.
I'm not an IT guy though, I'm a developer, but I think it's the same battle in the end.
SWE's don't want to work in factories, generally, because pay is shit and hours are worse than selling your soul to bay area tech.
Even so, I'm planning to go back.
Unfortunately 90% of jobs require contributing to and reinforcing the worst aspects of society.
I work in a company where our 'customers' are from the same company. So, it makes little sense to fuck over our customers.
They do want to do things with GenAI now, and while I have no personal interest in them, nor think it's a terribly great strategic decision to go all-in with that, I don't have to care. My company can fuck itself over, that's fine by me. And well, while I prefer to and am significantly more efficient, if I work with tools that I care to use privately, at some point, it is a job and if you pay stupid amounts of money for me to learn that on the job, then so be it.
Disengage, mostly.
I’m good at tech stuff but I hate 99% of the work that I’m good at, so i just treat it as the revenue source that it is and try not to think about it too much.
If things in my life had gone differently I may have had to mine coal somewhere to get my paycheck, so overall it isn’t that bad.
The idea of getting paid to do stuff I enjoy is buried there with the rest of my youth delusions.
hey, I think my LLM satire news thing is cool, at least I have fun with it
Comedy is fine :)
It sounds like youre helping making the world a worse place.
These examples of soul sucking jobs will be the loudest recruiting companies, because no one wants to work there. They can sometimes pay well too.
Highly skilled people are needed in a lot of practical industries that pay a bit less (but still well enough). You just need to seek them out.
better things exist, but nothing is ever perfect.
it would be better to learn to dettach your self-esteem from the job. think on work like the chore it is, like taking out the trash and washing dishes, something you do to pay the bills
I took decades of experience plus adhd medication and depression medication to get where I am. I still feel annoyed to be using tech I don't like and doing stuff I don't like, but I'm handling it a lot better now