(begin rant)
Hi. Do you ever have a feeling that you have technical skills to qualify as a programmer, and there’s a demand for specialists, but, ironically, nobody needs them to design some useful information system or optimize the workflow in the factories, or do real science and push the limitations of human knowledge, but rather, all is just to spread some crappy advertising message as cheap as possible to the broadest audience as possible, usually without giving any respect to consumers, that feels like you’re losing your brain cells when interacting with the app/content you create. Quality level zero, consumerism level over 9k. Tons of boilerplate because ‘everything must be kept proprietary’ and it probably won’t work after 2 years because the framework you were using is down and the very idea of the becomes dated. Also, the more advanced technology, the more it’s used for shit. Like, we have generative neural networks that are used for turdposting conspiracies and generating profit/influence for some party.
I would say this clearly: I am very, very angry when I’m seeing this. I don’t want to participate in something that forces consumers to eat shit. Fuck SEO and e-commerce. Everything’s generative-AI, GANs, LLMs… now, which do not produce any value, at least to the user, or extracting every single bit of data of the user. Everything’s just to bombard people with information nowadays. Even Project Managers get biased (mostly because of naïve hype) and promote this crap.
(end rant)
So, my question is, how do you go through all of it? Of course, devs are better paid, but I don’t care about money. I’m still a student and, although I really like programming, and I’m really good at solving Competitive Programming problems (been at ICPC several times), I’m tired of this junk, besides I have a feeling I’ll be forced to do it. But, if I’m going to do it, somebody’s gonna get hurt. But it seems that it’s the only thing I’m skilled at, and I have no alternatives. So, how do you get through all of it, and what do you see it as relief, what does reward you at the very end?
EDIT: uncensored all swear words at request. I hope now you’re happy.
Not sure myself, I’m trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren’t anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you’re starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.
But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there’s no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won’t align with yourself or the other workers fully, it’s just a question of degree.
imo you gotta take whatever you can as a first job to get started. If you hate it, make a goal to find a better job after the first year. Just try to learn whatever you can an remember to write down notable things you do on the job to make your resume sound better. Beggars can’t be choosers. You can focus on finding something fun and ethical after you have the experience and luxury to do so.
Also I don’t think you can really appreciate what ethical and unethical behaviour looks like until you experience it first hand. Besides you aren’t really contributing anything truly unique early in your career. Companies that can only hire desperate, under-performing or new engineers tend not to do so well (take a look at just about any bank for instance) and with how much of an arms race most of the unethical stuff is the effect can be very pronounced.
I strongly believe that the vulnerability google is starting to show is a direct result of them losing prestige as a good place to work.
I agree. I think it’s the same thing that Activision Blizzard has been experiencing. All their recent games have been mediocre at best, and it’s due to losing their best talent due to being a bad place to work.
I actually just switched to Kagi for my main search engine because I have been feeling disappointed with Google search lately. It’s fine if you’re only searching big websites but you’ll be lucky to get any results for niche stuff