[hackpelican]

I have long since disabused myself of the notion that programming is morally anything more than a job in finance, investment banking, or any other bullshit job.

Bullshit jobs, as opposed to real jobs, don’t benefit the community the way a doctor, a teacher, a plumber or a farmer does. Bullshit jobs are there to make the boss man rich by inventing mechanisms by which money is funneled from the general public to a few elite pockets.

I think this is also in part why dreaming of buying a farm and living off the grid is common among programmers.

[maigret]

Your comment is a bit of all or nothing and limits thinking. What about architects? They provide joy and housing, but also use natural land and benefit often investors. So, mixed. Car manufacturers? Move people from A to B at big cost for the environment. Police is usually helpful but not always. For all those necessary jobs, the how makes all the difference. Someone coding a website for a non profit is not the same as someone who codes a slotting machine. Also, think about the state of the world if all code stopped working tomorrow. We'd be in a very fragile state, much less able to respond to tragedies and problems. Supply chains and power delivery would probably stop, as critical function like cars ABS.

[hackpelican]

Architects produce buildings. These buildings are useful and remain useful for decades. We build software that may be useful to the average joe at first, but it's only to acquire users. Then the enshittification cycle begins to extract as much value as possible from said users. It's not the same.

We can sit here and provide examples of software that is useful, safety-critical, etc. And you're right, there is a lot of software out there keeping people alive in automobiles, airplanes, medical equipment etc. But this software is not borne of the tech industry culture, but rather one engineering culture or the other. Not the programming that I or most programmers do.

Policing is definitely a real job. Though abusers are plentiful, the ones harming society are rightly called abusers. Programmers writing software that harms society are just regular tech industry professionals. Same as banks that invest in companies profiting from apartheid systems or from destroying the environment.

I don't think I'm being unfair when I compare the morality of your average tech industry professional with the morality of your average finance bro or investment banker.