| Virtually everybody in the industry is a participant in the impacts our industry has on the broader economy! This isn't a nit. It changes the way you have to look at this. You can't say "we need to better feel the impacts IT has on the broader workforce, therefore I should avoid working on things that automate jobs away". So long as you take anything resembling a market salary anywhere, you're supplying labor to the system that does that. Your options therefore are: * Adopt an ethical stance that doesn't intrinsically penalize work that increases global productivity and thus exerts downward pressure on labor. * Do work that somehow works against that pressure, for instance by donating 20-40% of your compensation to labor causes, or something like that. * Leave the industry. I don't look at this quandry and see an ethical imperative; I look at it and see a broken ethical calculation. From that observation, I get to: "I should shut up about things that impact employment for software developers, because there's nothing intrinsically bad about that." (Whether or not developers, or dockworkers, come out on net positive or negative is a separable question.) |