Dear lemmy,
This is my first post here after switching from the alien platform, so I am very pleased to meet you! The community seems still small but very welcoming, so I hope you can help me shed some light nonetheless.
As a long-term (“hobby” at first) programmer, and now finishing my Master’s, I have been deeply concerned (if not a bit too anxious, ngl) about what’s going around lately and what I want to do in the future. With the environmental crisis going broader, and the nasty evolution of SV companies to greedy giants, I am struggling to find a good alternative.
I am a CS grad from a large European city, with fairly good resumé (several unis, a couple of scholarships, good grades, a couple of FOSS projects + short internships), and I would be looking to find my first job (sigh, i know) in the next six months or so.
I first started studying CS naively thinking I could make a good impact through my code (and after a long while in the Linux/FOSS community), but this seems to be getting extremely hard with most corporations getting even greedier lately.
The first big issue is that I feel a bit more concerned than usual about the ethics of the work I do, even if it means earning a bit less. Money is less of a problem also because as long as I can live in a queer-safe place, and have decent quality of life and healthcare, I do not care about hoarding too much. In all honesty, not requiring a car is a priority, which means requiring a central, well-connected place, but also keeping transport expenses a bit lower.
My first “red flags” were raised when I did some projects with consulting companies. They initially came to me selling themselves as a golden place to “work on interesting projects with clients” - a claim which, don’t laugh, I first believed due to know knowing what they were. There’s no way to put it, I hated that kind of work so bad. Not only were the work ethics and communication absolutely terrible, but it felt like all I was taught was professional lying. Literally, I felt like I produced the worst quality material of my life and was told to sell it like gold to the naive companies in front of me.
Then I tried startups - young, lively companies, they said. The first group to welcome me were the endless VC-funded “ethical fintech” startups, and people I met there were the shallowest, most elitarian, and greedy I ever met - to the point nobody even cared about honesty and friendship if it did not mean immediate utility and networking. Not to mention the long working hours, and all-encompassing “no WLB” culture because “we’re a big family”, with toxically positive management all around and hiding issues under the rug. Personal issues I had with some managers were hidden and never addressed. I left.
Of course, Big Tech does not look good either. OpenAI, Meta, and Tesla are horrible companies, and Google and Apple seem to be following them on the same track.
At least 95% of my friends from similar background (praised by the same scholarships, etc.) went to either defense projects (think “using AI data to spy people” kind of projects), consulting, finance, big-tech, or (unethical) fast-growth startups.
In the risk of being overly dramatic (…isn’t the whole post already?), I was a bit saddened to see how nobody of them cared the least about “what are the consequences of the code I am writing?”. One of my friends offered me even to refer me for a high-paid HFT job in London on a tech I was working on, trying to comfort me by saying that “when they pay me so much money, you stop thinking about what you do”.
And in some cities, like the one I live in right now in Germany, it feels like there is no escape from the greedy, aggressively competitive, “LinkedIn startup-bro”, mentality.
University let me survive on my concerns quite happily, and I never felt the pressure to be greedy or give up ethics throughout these years. It feels so weird, after years of happiness, to be all at once to be “the one off”. The thing is, I never became more demanding about this, but maybe due to personality, or maybe due to my background, I just felt like privacy and human rights are a no-go in all the work I’ve been doing.
My question is simple: is there any way to start a career in “good” tech, contribute to creating positive impact, and not feel guilty about what I am doing in daily life? I have (entry level) experience mostly on embedded/firmware/kernel dev and in full-stack web/app design and development, so say e.g. Fairphone or Signal would appear as rare examples of ethical companies out there - though they don’t sadly take entry-level candidates.
A good middle ground would also be a job that does not make good impact, but at least does not worsen the situation: e.g., working at Texas Instruments, ARM, Intel, or some other chip company would sound like a fairly ethical and harmless choice.
Also, because I am happy to move anywhere in Europe or the UK, is there any city that has more of an ethical than of the usual competitive, SV-copycat culture all around? I get this idea that Berlin and Amsterdam must be slightly easier places to find ethically conscious companies than other towns, but I do not know the scene there in much depth.
Thanks for reading! Hope the wall of text was not too annoying to parse :) ~R
I’m always up for a wall of text! :)
Your focus seems to be on finding work at a software development shop or a software-based industry. Maybe you should broaden your search.
I’m retired now, but I had a very good career working directly in more “traditional” industries, mostly in direct production facilities. Thus, I worked at a specific mine or grain handling facility or manufacturing plant rather than at head office. Actually separating facility from head office was rarely a consideration since most were small businesses of fewer than 200 people. Many of my clients were little more than family businesses with 5-10 employees.
Some of that was as an employee, some as a contractor when running my own business. I almost never ran up against any ethical issues other than the regular labour relations stuff. I always went home at the end of the day feeling good because I could see the direct impact I was making on someone’s success.
I don’t know about today’s market, but I can’t imagine that small businesses are being served any better than they were a decade ago. Their needs were as varied as any major corporation, but their scale was too small for major development shops or even “consultant ware” (things like SAP Business One, etc).
As for variety and challenge, there should be plenty. I’ve written MRP-like software by combining data from AutoCAD and accounting systems. I’ve written software to break down purchase orders into specific work orders complete with engineering diagrams for shop floor terminals. I’ve written software to “upgrade” grades on crop purchases (this delivery of No 2 can be blended with that delivery of No 2 in this proportion to produce something that will test as No 1). I’ve helped develop production line automation (ie simple robotics).
There is almost no limit to the kinds of work you do and almost no limit on your processes and took chains.
The only potential downside is that they’ll also want you involved in networking, general support for operating system and office applications, and probably even a bit of in-house training on those systems. I never had a problem with that, but it’s not for everyone.