The only thing worse than an echo chamber is letting a self-created bad idea fester in the head.
I came to the conclusion a few months ago that software developers and coders who worked at Meta, Google, Amazon, etc are as culprit as their CEOs and the company itself. I will lay down my points below, but I understand that this might be a logical extreme of my distaste for these corporations.
Here’s my rationale:
- Actions of the company they serve: The corporations they serve actively disenfranchise users, track them, sell their private / personal information to unscrupulous parties without any care on how it affects the person, or the society. They thrive on engagement rather than content. They have “commodified” the fundamental right to privacy. This has real world implications that has directly resulted in the spread of misinformation, political unrest, threatened elections, riots, and deaths of thousands of people.
- Awareness of the consequences: By virtue of their position, these are people with the capacity to read, and think for themselves. There are news articles: across the political spectrum in all major news sites, that report how the platform/ company they serve negatively affects society. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Snowden’s expose, etc are credible and well documented examples that even non-tech people are aware. Yet they choose to ignore all this, and continue working / seek to join these companies.
- Cowardice: It is often wrapped in the garb of “self-interest”, but they do not raise their voice when they know that the software and platform they’re told to develop is going to be used to spy on their brethren. They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.
Being poor never helps. Quiet quit / be overemployed
problem here is you want to keep learning and growing which has the unfortunate consequence of improving the software.
Improve your software, not theirs.
If you are aware of criminal or unethical actions by your employer… By staying and contributing… You are as guilty as those doing those actions.
If your ethics can be altered for money or power or success
They weren’t really your ethics. Their Just lies you tell yourself
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Employees make a choice to work there and therefore choose to be part of that problem.
I generally agree but not everyone can choose where they work. For many people, the choice is starving on the street or work for Evil Corp.
Most, if not all, of those hired as a software developers at any of these companies has loads of other jobs they could take. The only thing setting them apart is the size of the paycheck.
For less in-demand skills I get your point though.
There are some major exceptions to that. Many people on work visas have almost no choice, like the theorized majority of people who stayed on at Twitter after Musk ruined the place. Their choice basically boils down to keep working for the company or be deported.
Don’t forget the best place to whistleblow and/or change the system is from within. Privacy minded people can better influence what policies and practices happen at a company when they work there.
cringecollective.io eh? I haven’t noticed that comm before
No one who qualifies to work for Evil Corp is going to fucking starve on the street if they decide to look for work elsewhere instead.
Exactly, if you choose to work for a company then that is in support and furtherance of that companies goals / operations.
We are not so helpless as we sometimes like to claim.
I’ve been an engineer for about two decades now and pretty much everyone I’ve ever worked with has expressed that they would never work for Facebook, betting companies or defense companies.
Amazon is probably next on the shit list and then Google, but each to a much lesser extent than the ones before. Working for Google still holds a level of prestige for some people.
I work at Microsoft and it’s well known that you get paid way more at Facebook and Amazon. We like to call it a “sin tax”. Their employee retention is basically how long you need to stay to get your whole signing bonus.
Microsoft is far from perfect but I thoroughly enjoy working there in gaming.
How hard is it to get into Microsoft?
The privacy nutter part of my brain hates them about as much as the other (insert acronym here) companies. The “I have a family” part wants me to get paid enough to secure our future, so I’m looking into getting a US tech job in the next ~5-10 years (I’m aware that it’s a PAIN of a process if I need sponsorship, but luckily Microsoft has EU offices too)
Loads of people working for these companies are also on special visas that have been described as modern slavery… so maybe they are culpable of signing up for such jobs/visas, but once you are in such a setup the threat of immediate deportation to some 3rd world country is quite real.
Sports betting is an interesting one. It’s a growing industry in the US. While things like Amazon are sort of nebulously evil, I think more people can agree betting is dangerous. I was unemployed from about July 2023 to Feb 2024. I turned down a sports betting job early on because I didn’t wanna do it for moral reasons but months later I pursued a different one because I was more desperate for a job. Luckily they turned me down and I found a different job. That sucks, but at least I don’t have to feel like I’m doing something wrong.
Not anymore!
I’m not gonna talk you down. U rite
For a large chunk of my career, I worked in aerospace and ‘defense’ machining. Made all kinds parts for all kinds of weapons, it was really cool! Murica! As I got older, I lost my religion, I lost the far right brainwashing I was raised with.
My hands were making weapons that the US government was often selling to other countries. My hands were making weapons to kill various groups of brown people all over the world. It really began to bother me.
I no longer make things to kill people.
Yes, you are culpable for the effects of what you produce in your profession. A thinking person should consider the effects of their work.
You’re not wrong. The whole system is governed by fear. It is the operating principle by which this world operates.
Anyone that says “I’m just doing my job” living their life based on fear, and not reason. All it does is give the psychopaths running everything more power.
We need to stop being afraid. Believe it or not, it is a choice. You can wake up every morning happy, and at total peace. No matter what is happening in your life. Mind over matter, as they say.
I’m more concerned about the sociopaths that try to run everything: the ones who have no qualms running through anybody who tries to get in their way.
This reminds me of something I worked on at my last job. I made software to detect plumes of dust pollution from a mining site blowing onto a nearby school and town. The EPA issued fines if they detected too much dust over the town. This system could catch it early for quick intervention.
After it was deployed, I got a glimpse of their production config. They hadn’t configured the alarms for early intervention. They had configured them so that they could get as close as possible to their allocated limit before they intervened at all. Because, ya know, spraying water on stockpiles of ore is expensive.
Fucking mining companies, man.
I think you should’ve reported them and probably even destroyed the software so the whole thing shut down.
Report them for what. Fact is the EPA set a limit and they set their software to get as close to it as they could without going over. This is how markets work. This is how corporations work. This is why self regulation is a joke.
Idk, I feel like the sort of technology you helped make can be used to help mining companies not accidentally (being generous) go over the limit because they can better monitor it, right? So on those grounds the limit could now be lower.
Like if my house randomly leaked water and I had no way of reasonably detecting it then the limit would probably need to be higher but once I had a way to spot and fix the problem I shouldn’t be able to get away with the same limit.
But at the same time I doubt the EPA is unaware of monitoring methods.
Report them for breaking the environmental laws? I thought what they did directly violated them.
Not if they stayed under the limits.
no. he was saying they would detect it and only take action at the last moment to avoid hitting the limit. Like they could have set it up to reduce it any time it was unusually high to head it off before it even got close. Obiously you don’t want to be constantly spraying it but you could do it when it was like one or two standard deviations above norm.
Then why did they need the software in the first place? Just for marketing or showing fake “environmental progress”?
they needed the software to be in compliance at the very slimest margin the software and sensors would allow for. The goal was to pollute as much as they are allowed to and not a drop less.
I get it but why did they want it to have the early alerts and stuff? But I guess it makes some sense to detect emergencies and analyse the situation better.
It’s just how limits work.
The issue isn’t with the software.
Imagine if I had photo radar sending tickets for people who were “almost” speeding.
The software config isn’t about “the markets” or “corporations”.
yeah that was my point. the regulators. whether self or an agency. will set where this goes.
You’re right but… Capitalism is a good system to chew that out of you. You touch on it in point three. Seeing how Snowden was treated was not reassuring that the electorate would back you, or the free market for that matter.
I would work at them but im sorta glad for the tech places I have worked but then again can you work anywhere and not be adding to it? I worked at an onlinemarketplace for consumer to business that had a fair amount of competition and it was easy for new competition to spring up. As such they had to balance what their businesses wanted with what consumers wanted because one paid but there was a lot of competition to keep the consumers. The businesses themselves compete with each other so they also had to be very neutral there. Still it was integrated with all sorts of data broker cookies and pixels and whatnot. Im now working for business software in a regulated field so that helps. We are a framework so the data collection happens at our business customer level and not us but it still happens. How do you get away from it? I mean seriously I have about the best your gonna get private sector wise but everyone cannot work in the public sector.
cant talk you down when i agree with you completely
At the end of the day people need to make a living. Also I am not sure why you are so upset by these companies. You don’t need to use there products.
Don’t you need to go really out of your way to not get caught in their web of data mongering by using any part of the internet?
You CAN take steps to limit your exposure in varying levels of effort, the problem is a lot of that means “not using the thing” (ie gmail, Facebook, etc) and most people are not about that life, gripe as they might.
I’ve paid for private email hosting for over 5 years, run grapheneOS on my phone, my fb is deactivated with messenger having limited perms on my phone and kept in an isolated container on desktop, self host a number of services like password management and storage - etc etc.
Am I safe from big tech? Not completely. There’s still 1000 ways your business gets out and about, and on desktop I still use YouTube logged in and all (no yt on phone though.) They’re still only getting a small fraction from me compared to other people though.
Sure, but if you really cared, then you’d put in the effort. Or are you “just following orders”?
The point is that he blames the people working for these companies with a blanket statement while not taking any responsibility for his own agency in the situation. It’s a lot more nuanced than just “why don’t these other people do x.” It’s like “vote with your wallet” vs. “no ethical consumption under capitalism.”
If you’re able to get a job at Meta/Google/etc, you’re also able to get a job at a less shitty company.
“No ethical consumption under capitalism” is the new “just following orders.” If you can afford the product, you can afford to buy something more ethical.
While I agree with the general ideas mentioned, each of them is much more complicated than that, except for the first point, that’s a point that’s nearly impossible to counter honestly.
Point 1 is, in my opinion, it 100% accurate, ad I mentioned above.
On point 2, pero everything, from my perspective, is absolutely correct, except for: “Yet they choose to ignore all this continue working / seek to join these companies.”. A lot of people don’t really have an option at the beginning. We all need to make a living, and finding well paying jobs is difficult enough across the board, and becomes infinitely harder if you get" picky" about where you apply or which companies you accept offer from. In a perfect world developers that get hired and well paid by any of these disgusting corporations would accrue some good cash to be financially secure for a few years and then quit and move to, like you said, creating the “counter-product/service” to what they were working on, adding the ethical factor. In reality, unless you’re loaded, we all need to start somewhere, and everything costs money.
Point 3, I would say there is some true to the cowardice side, but I also believe that, at least temporarily, some just don’t have a choice, for the factors mentioned in my response to point 2. “They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.”, as mentioned above, everything costs money. A more realistic approach would be getting that spiteful job, cashing out with a good sense of financial freedom, and then endeavoring into countering these companies.
It’s taken me 12 years to finally be in a place where I can make a slight difference in my industry by opening my own business, and after almost a year since I started, while my employees and contractors all earn good money and get paid always on time and gather pretty good benefits, and my clients are (I believe) the happiest in the industry, my wife and I (the owners) have still to get paid the first time. Imagine the shit show that my life would be I’d I had gone the ideallist way without considering all the financial aspects of trying to improve this industry.
I do not work in the tech sector, but we do use tech for everything. My platform is currently the most secure and private of the whole industry in the US, and that alone ate through around 75% of the starting budget, the rest has been allocated to pay staff and services while we bring this to cash-positive status.
It’s not as black and white as some may think.
I actually generally hear this phrase IRL from teenagers making minimum wage while trying to get some boomer to stop badgering them to accept an expired coupon.
You’re correctly assessing the situation but the conclusion you reach is wrong. Here’s how:
As another person said, just tack on no ethical consumption under capitalism and you’re golden. Soon you’ll be crunching through critiques of Goldman and speaking in ways that make normal ppl make the brotha eww face. But the big difference between just doing my job and just following orders is degrees of separation and situation.
Even though people in positions you describe at companies you’re talking about ought to be able to understand the connection between their work and the immiseration of all humanity, it’s very easy to imagine someone who through choice or ignorance doesn’t see that connection. Our higher education programs have been removing humanities and arts in favor of stem associated education and ideas like effective altruism are renewing the randian tradition. Further, the work of many people in engineering is partial and atomized. Who wouldn’t want to put in the time designing a hermetically sealed self oiling piston that never needs maintenance over a million cycles? Who wouldn’t refuse that job when shown the patent drawing in which it’s a crucial component of a captive bolt gun against a human head?
The situation itself can’t be undersold. Soldiers (and hired workers!) on trial for war crimes couldn’t claim they were just following orders because they saw directly what their labor wrought. There was no degree of separation. Our expectations for that closeness to atrocity are different than when there’s a few veils between us and the subject. We expect people to get a different job, to defect, to sabotage, to kill their COs.
