[temp1928384]

Anyone else working in tech for the past few years having more frequent existential crises about what they have enabled?

I have never worked at FB, but I've worked at a few well known yet somewhat controversial companies (in fintech, marketplaces, etc.) that I sometimes feel uneasy about.

[asark]

Took me several years past school just to get used to the ordinary level of dishonesty and scumminess that's common to pretty much all business, let alone the worse stuff. Sometimes I think my parents (and, to be fair, children's media) messed up by giving me such a keen sense of right and wrong. Enough otherwise-decent people (like, almost all of them) seem to just look at you like there's something wrong with you when you bring this stuff up that I caved, since the alternative seemed to be becoming a living-off-the-land recluse, or a monk or something.

But I still hate it. Still feel like I'm kind of ruined in some sense for not going the really, really hard route to avoid it all. Every day. Some jobs more than others, but even at the best I sometimes go home catching whiffs of something that make me think my soul must have stepped in some dog shit on the way.

[frereubu]

It's difficult to tell from your comment how old you are, but I'm in my late 40s and it took me until well into my 30s to find the balance that works for me. It's difficult when so much work seems to require being unquestioning / amoral at best and immoral at worst. The only fixed ideas I had in my head were not working for defence or advertising companies (thanks, Bill Hicks). I now make a nice living running a digital agency that builds websites almost exclusively for third-sector clients (education, non-profit, government etc.) but it took me quite a while to build the skills that would allow me to do that. I can highly recommend starting your own business, no matter how humble, once you've gained enough skills to make what you do valuable to the kind of people you want to work with. The added benefit of working in the third sector is that I'm generally working with nicer people. I think this is partially just the kind of people the sector attracts, but also because the people who work in it aren't so conflicted about the value of what they're doing. So many people I've worked with in corporate environments get fixated on things like status and money, and it just seems to make them bitter and miserable. Along the way I remember one guy in HR in particular who got incredibly excited about me building a link between their HR system and their website so a job that was posted on their HR system automatically turned up on their website. I couldn't believe how small his world had become.

[codyb]

Empathy _sucks_.

But you're a better person for it, don't forget that.

Life's a shitty wooden roller coaster that jostles your neck too much for most of us, but the alternative is not experiencing it at all.

We're pretty fortunate. Start looking for jobs which align with your ideals.

Take a paycut and work at a non profit.

Find an open source maintainer role at a company somewhere.

Find a role at a company building a product you like.

You can do it relatively passively while still working. No harm in looking!

[forgotmypw3]

Don't lose hope. You will find your way.

[jaabe]

I work in the public sector, so we never do evil things like that. I do often wonder if we’re digitizing too much.

Like I pay for public transportation (I’m Danish, we have great public transportation) with an App, which is nice and all, but the user experience is actually worse than when it was just a piece of paper.

We’ve saved the public billions by making some processes easier, but we’ve also digitised a lot of stuff because there was (is) this general idea that digitisation is always better, and it’s just not. Especially not from a user perspective, if you’re a social worker you now have to know how to use 5-10 complicated and error prone IT systems, on top of your regular job, and we just keep on adding more. I mean,those 5-10 systems are linked to their work on top of that there are another 5-10 adiministrative systems and maybe 50 different digital forms.

None of these systems are necessary mind you, 30 years ago, almost none of them existed and our social workers performed better for less money back then.

Overall digitisation has been a benefit though. We’ve managed to eliminate a lot of repetition, we’ve made the total public sector cheaper and we’ve increased the overall quality of our services, but from a user perspective things have mostly deteriorated.

I have no idea how to fix it either.

[Dahoon]

I'm not sure I agree that the public sector doesn't do what you call evil things. Like right now in Denmark there are the whole watching every move everyone make via logging phones even though the EU says it is illegal. There's also the thing with forcing children to answer questionnaires that will likely be in the system for... ever basically.

Lots of public sector sites also use Facebook and have Google analytics on their site, so they partake in what Facebook does. Maybe not evil but not good either.

[jaabe]

I agree, I should probably have specified which part of the public sector I was in. At a municipal level we try not to do evil things.

[antpls]

> Especially not from a user perspective, if you’re a social worker you now have to know how to use 5-10 complicated and error prone IT systems, on top of your regular job, and we just keep on adding more. I mean,those 5-10 systems are linked to their work on top of that there are another 5-10 adiministrative systems and maybe 50 different digital forms.

The workers are users of those IT systems, but not the end-users of the social services. Those workers' jobs shifted in nature. Their new work is to interact with numerous different IT systems to provide a social service. In the long term, all those workers are currently gathering data that will help to build a new digital social service which won't have those inefficiencies. They work toward the transition to a "better" digital world for the end-users of the social service.

> None of these systems are necessary mind you, 30 years ago, almost none of them existed and our social workers performed better for less money back then.

"better for less money" : According to what sources? What indicators?

> but from a user perspective things have mostly deteriorated.

Same questions, from the end-users perspective of the social services. What indicators are you using?

We could imagine providing a social service without human social workers at all, enabled by digitization, like in all other sectors.

[jaabe]

> “better for less money" : According to what sources? What indicators?

I’m tempted to say “pick one”. Workers are less satisfied, more stressed and less efficient. Citizens are less satisfied and receive a lower quality of service. Financially it depends, on paper it’s better but if you add in the cost of sick days and the impact of lower citizen life quality has on society, then a lot of digitisation has been disastrous.

Not all of it, mind you, just some of it.

[antpls]

Again, you don't give any sources or references about what you are stating.

If I can chose an indicator, then I pick my personal experience. I live in Europe and I'm happy with the digital experience of social services I have. I'm 28 years old so I experienced a bit of the pre-internet administrative era and digitization is definitively an improvement. Oftentimes, processes are simplified and can be done remotely, which is definitively a net plus for all disabled people.

> Workers are less satisfied, more stressed and less efficient.

Digitization must be accompanied with change management, and the society's laws must be adapted to a digitized society. In my personal opinion, we should develop idea such as Universal Basic Income, and not make "work" as mandatory as it was. I agree with you that operating everyday administrative softwares isn't a fulfilling job to everyone.

[AlexMuir]

A lot of stuff that I worked on looked like a net-positive at first, but ended up as a zero sum game.

Now I'm producing an affordable, detailed video course that teaches ordinary people auto engineering. It's the most satisfying project I ever worked on but I'm very dependent on companies and products that I don't love: Google, YouTube, Facebook. I don't enjoy dealing with things like Instagram and that directly costs me a lot of money.

I think my Youtube stuff is amongst the best out there but I refuse to put yellow text, red circles, and my own grinning face on the thumbnails. I don't waste 30 seconds at the end of every video begging people to subscribe, ring the bell, support me on Patreon, comment, hit the thumbs up. I'd prefer to tell people what they need to know and send them on their way - that's directly at odds with YouTube who want to keep them from actually going out to the garage at all costs.

Unfortunately, even producing quality stuff you still end up taking a daily swim in a dirty sea filled with everyone else's floating bullshit.

[awodol]

That's what I feel conflicted with as well when I'm building my products as well. I actually am a huge fan of your content and I did find it through a google search asking about parts of a car. I am glad that it brought me to finding it but I feel that especially for content creators there's not a whole lot of options you can have if you want to spread the word. I definitely will be throwing a purchase towards your video series later today.

[forgotmypw3]

I worked for a bank, and did my small part to help bring about 2007-2008.

Later, I worked in advertising, helping increase consumption and creation of various plastic trash, sugar-rich concoctions, and other such stuff.

I worked for a company that helped pharmaceutical companies target advertising to people on Facebook and other social networks who were sharing their health issues.

In between, I worked on other stuff, which was not as unsavory, but most of the time it still felt like pushing lots of little squares into square holes, and so on.

Lately, I've decided to just work on my own projects, and not contribute my brainpower to destroying my own habitat.

I am much happier now.

[sizzle]

I work on GIS systems that enable organizations to be able to use the maps to spatially visualize their own data so their employees can do their jobs more effectively in the field everyday e.g. firefighters having all firehydrant locations on a ruggedized tablet when fighting fires, 911 dispatch operators use GIS, public utilities use it, government agencies uses it, non profits such as ecological conservation orgs use it. CDC to visualize epidemiology data, and scientists and universities use it to map data for studies and research.

It's very humbling tech with an amazing potential to do good and very developer friendly (they have been writing the code since the 60's) and my dev colleagues have been in this field for decades.

I just joined actually, any GIS nerds on HN care to share their experience and what they love/hate about GIS community/tech? Thanks!

[justaguyhere]

Years ago, I used to feel happy that I am not working for a bank or a wall street firm. Now I am not so sure who is worse - wall street or tech companies, especially the massive ones. Gone are the days of "do no evil" etc, it is just a shit show out there.

Problem is, for all this anguish, I don't know a way out. At least with banks, wall street etc, I can switch to a community bank or something. What exactly is the alternative to Android/iOS, for example?

[DyslexicAtheist]

here too. I'm trying to figure out which different field I could get into (even it means leaving Tech[0] totally) and do something that provides some kind of benefit for humanity and the future of my kids. It was foolish the way I felt in the 90ies thinking that Software and computing would be a net benefit.

there has to be a field which isn't just about data extraction, mass surveillance (or worse).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19202300

[asark]

> It was foolish the way I felt in the 90ies thinking that Software and computing would be a net benefit.

I'm so friggin' sick of looking at glowing rectangles (he wrote, looking at a glowing rectangle). Watching all the faffing about with software-enabled workflow insanity and other time-wasters across various industries (including dev itself) I'm even pretty skeptical of the benefits of all this crap.

I have a wholly unverified suspicion that computers and the Internet are very very beneficial in a tiny set of (often very important!) applications, and only potentially but not actually in practice beneficial in the vast majority of cases—and in fact often harmful—such that they're technically a big boon to the economy as a whole but in any particular instance you're likely to encounter are... usually not.

[sizzle]

Look into GIS tech, it's used by a lot of good people across government agencies, research universities and public utilities to do their jobs better by spatially visualizing their own data.