(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.
Welcome, you have discovered the alienation of labour in the field of IT. People were dealing with this shit for decades and it will keep happening as long as we live under capitalism.
Without doxxing myself, I worked for a small firm that helped “tech for good” companies to build their MVP or product towards Series A-C funding.
In the four years I worked with them, I don’t remember a single project there that wasn’t tainted by corruption, dodgy owners, or outright lies. This ranges from:
- The owner of a popular wellness and workplace stress app getting pissed off with me because a bug was found in a Node backend I had built for her (a PDF upload didn’t fill the correct fields in the DB). Her support contract was up with us, so she took the sane approach - literally calling my employer out on LinkedIn, and me by name as being an “incompetent developer”. Legal got involved, and she had to issue an apology online.
- Several instances of outright lying in pitch decks about customer numbers and eco credentials to get “green” funding.
- The company itself transitioning to crypto, despite pushing the fact that they only work on tech for good projects, while being run by a COO with a history of being inappropriate, having heavy drug/alcohol use, and being genuinely fucking useless in the world of tech.
- A workplace surveying tool to unlock happiness in the workplace getting funding through our work, then deciding to fire the entire fucking team we had built to run their product because they wanted to cut costs and sell to the highest bidder - a company notorious for horrendous workplace practices.
- Someone bragging about their CTO working at Amazon for 5 years. While true, it was in a fulfillment center.
- Countless charities that burn through money in ways you wouldn’t believe, or act hypocritical to their main mission. Imagine trying to fire someone at a mental health charity because they needed time off from stress, or making dead kid jokes at a fundraiser for a children’s charity…
Working at that place made me realise that sometimes the best you can hope for is a leadership structure that aren’t total assholes, and to work on something that you at least have some faith in.
I work for the federal government and spend my time at work making open sourced software and outside of work contributing to open source. My job is centered around forwarding science for the betterment of society, not around making the company more money.
As a result, I’m happier. My salary could probably be about 25% higher in the private sector. However, my job is secure through retirement and the pension plan and work life balance is sensational. This year i will have taken a month off between vacations and use-or-lose. I also have banked over 2500 hours of sick leave that don’t drop off. I also work fully remote though my office is 7 minutes away with no traffic.
Several of your use cases are just a different career. I optimize factory Workflows for a living, it’s industrial engineering, and it’s a very different skill set from programming
Go into embedded software. You can’t do ads if there is no UI taps head.
Cli advertisements FTW - Ubuntu embedded edition
There’s plenty of work to be found in the public sector, the pay may be a bit less but I’ve always found the work to be satisfying and diverse. And, though this might be a European thing, the job security is usually quite high.
On top of that, the domain knowledge you build with working in these kinds of organizations can be quite valuable.deleted by creator
I simply refuse.
I work in a niche part of the IT world, and I have plenty of niche skills, so if they wanted me to do that kind of stuff they’re paying for the skills for which I was hired, while using me for something they could get someone much cheaper to do.
I’ll stick to my clustered storage racks and make things work in harsh environments. I like it, I’m good at it, it pays well, and I don’t have to deal with the awful shit that often falls under IT.
Disengage, mostly.
I’m good at tech stuff but I hate 99% of the work that I’m good at, so i just treat it as the revenue source that it is and try not to think about it too much.
If things in my life had gone differently I may have had to mine coal somewhere to get my paycheck, so overall it isn’t that bad.
The idea of getting paid to do stuff I enjoy is buried there with the rest of my youth delusions.
Unfortunately 90% of jobs require contributing to and reinforcing the worst aspects of society.
These examples of soul sucking jobs will be the loudest recruiting companies, because no one wants to work there. They can sometimes pay well too.
Highly skilled people are needed in a lot of practical industries that pay a bit less (but still well enough). You just need to seek them out.
