The Programmers' Identity Crisis: how do we use our powers for 'good'?

I feel like the article falls apart because it keeps referencing this central argument that the defense industry is an unmitigated evil, and it's just a given truth that the author doesn't need to defend. I don't like weapons spending and I'm a pacifist at heart, but realistically having no defense industry is impossible. There's some amount of money which needs to go into researching the weaponization of space, because other hostile nations are spending on it. Do I wish this weren't true? Of course. Do I pretend it's not true and there really are no gray areas in the world because I'm naive, or because my priors being accurate is irrelevant to the virtue signaling I'm trying to do? No I don't but it looks like this author does.

I'm sick of these proclamations on the Internet that are the total opposite of realism and really just amount to virtue signaling into the vacuum by their author. It's no surprise that this lady works for Mozilla which has been grazing on Google money for years to watch Firefox decay, I guess. Anyone at Mozilla seems to be light years away from the reality based world the rest of us are in these days.

Yes, the eternal struggle of the hypocrite who needs to reconcile his own bizarre world view with the fact that most of his time is spent perpetuating the power of the people who he claims to be his opponents.

I can confess to you why I work as an engineer, because I love doing it. That is absolutely all there is to it, it's not for the money or some political program I need to reconcile with my daily activity.

The article seems verbose, my rules are simpler... No adtech, no gambling, no cryptocurrency, no stealing people's content to regurgitate it (LLM/genai), no killing people with my code...

This is a long winded “permission slip” to avoid any personal responsibility for our actions. The fact is whether it’s eating beef or writing code for Raytheon you actually do have free will. The HN and tech crowd is also far more educated and empowered (individually and collectively) than the author would have us believe.

Even in something boring as programming software for the british Post Office, a scandal that is STILL ongoing, you can mess up not just the software but other people's life if you act like a coward who doesn't own up to the software they write or manage. Gareth Jenkins has just been grilled in the Inquiry and in my eyes insane that courts did allow him as expert testimony on the very software he was working on and responsible for. In a case where the subpostmistress Seema Misra was wrongly jailed WHILE pregant! Other's weren't that luck and at least four committed suicide. Adding to the stupidity of the scandal and continuous incompetence, just last month the Post Office accidentally published a document on its corporate website containing the names and addresses of 555 former sub-postmasters.

Courts have to level up quite a lot if they want to serve justice in cases where software is involved and those working on software need to be encourage to step back, let someone else assess the quality of the software and figure out bugs before courts can give a verdict.

Tech won't save anyone and won't do any more "good" to this society, quite the contrary. The best that we can do, as programmers, is to do the most boring jobs that bring a decent paycheck home (enough to pay mortgage/rent and to put food on the table) and then to call it a day, whoever still thinks that tech is a "force for good" is still living in the 2000s. Yes, taking boring jobs will also probably mean that 600k yearly comps (at least) are out of the question, but that's part of life and taking decisions.

Also, Ellul and uncle Ted were right on all of this, a long (comparatively speaking) time ago.

One guy from a city hall in Latin America, told me: "if you want to change things, go _into_ authorities" [e.g. get elected, or become a public official] He insisted there's almost no chance to change cities for better if you are just an architect in a bureau, or do some tech tool for city planning. Inside "the power", there's little you can change, but any change lasts.

I'd also say, the ending part about reinventing the bus, is a very common thing, not only among the tech crowd. Every educated person has recipies that they suggest to copy&paste from abroad, think of how they'd solve a problem, etc. Often times the solution already exists, it's the matter of execution (e.g. buses need dedicated lanes, and lanes need enforcement, with fines for parking or driving by them).

Often times, the educated folks propose fighting for things that are happening already by themselves. E.g. in post-Soviet countries, you can hear people argue for suburbia like in America, express grief & sorrow for living in apartment buildings, suggest subsidies BUT the fact is cities are already rapidly sprawling in suburbia themselves!

Another, opposite trend, is to suggest to evacuate people from depopulating villages. People get so emotional about it. "Villages are money black hole!" "Budget leeches!" Yet, the migration is happening at rapid pace itself already! (Fun fact: these guys call themselves "liberals", and are pro-western.)

Some people can be both proponents of American suburbia, and evacuation of villages.

I had hoped for such much more, given the title. (And yet, fewer words, maybe).

Like, how do we find industries where can actually do good?

Maybe mention Effective Altruism?

I guess I'll have to write my own, eventually...

Programmers don’t have powers. C-levels do.

Just define 'good' as 'not explicitly evil', and you're fine.

I have long since disabused myself of the notion that programming is morally anything more than a job in finance, investment banking, or any other bullshit job.

Bullshit jobs, as opposed to real jobs, don’t benefit the community the way a doctor, a teacher, a plumber or a farmer does. Bullshit jobs are there to make the boss man rich by inventing mechanisms by which money is funneled from the general public to a few elite pockets.

I think this is also in part why dreaming of buying a farm and living off the grid is common among programmers.

What makes something good or evil? Who decides that? Why then?

Who or what is good and evil is assumed and it’s not things that are universally agreed to. Even in the “west” which is less than 1/4 the global population.

This is where I find the article lacking. How do we know what is good to spot what to invest in?

Interesting how much tech scene has a hero complex. Always believing we can change the world so easy.

Why do other professions not have the same hero complex?

A lot of programmers are annoyingly predisposed to view themselves as wizards wielding power that society cannot possibly comprehend. As a result of this delusion, they invent moral quandaries in which they, the heroes of their own stories, nobly agree to constrain their own limitless powers for the good of humanity.

"If I write this command line options parser, what if someone uses it to write a tool that configures a guided missile's running light firmware? How will I live with myself?"

Fucking get over yourselves guys. The good/evil stuff is usually handled way higher up in the org chart.

Make a website for a non-profit growing cabbage in some poor country?

The recent trend of manipulating hackers into avoiding defense industry is interesting

Well, trade benefits both parties by definition, so I'd wager just doing your work is already pretty good in and of itself.

I guess if you discover your work has large, hidden externalities, you are morally obliged to quit, at the very least. But it would be surprising to claim that most programming work is like that.

We are about to lose that power, like Gunpowder it will be democratized.

Our special power was the full access to general purpose compute, which made us powerful gatekeepers to it. We dole it out in small, purpose bound chunks via interfaces.

And within a year from now, real time, purpose bound, personalized (“remember, bad eyesight”) and situational interfaces can be synthesized directly.

Not reliably it first but Claude is getting pretty damn good.

We won’t be extinct, but our main source of monopoly power is going to erode, massively.