I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech.
I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it.
These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.
It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.
> but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech
A wake-up call for me was when I requested fair trade coffee for the office due to potential human/child slavery issues with coffee, even sourced the roast from our supplier that was fair trade (which wasn't more expensive), then after getting one order of it, since one of the execs preferred the other coffee we stopped getting it.
> These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.
How do you find work that aligns with your values?
I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.
When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources.
You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.
You can however reduce your impacts substantially relative to peers with trivial behavior changes. Switch to biking instead of driving for just half your trips and now you’ve essentially doubled your fuel efficiency without any technological advancement necessary.
This is true, but the tech world is very interconnected and broadly supports/enables human rights abuses and war crimes to agree that most industries are not.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft develop tech used in the genocide of Palestinians, this is basically an IBM and Nazi Germany situation. And many more directly support genocide and human rights abuses as well, while many others are happy to pay those companies millions of dollars for their services.
Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.
