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.
I’ve always felt like the best course to stay ethical is to stay far far away from working on any projects that will be used or seen by “the general public”. Games, Social Media, any sort of Sales or Marketing - they’re all a shitshow, cause the variable they have to optimize for is income.
My father is a Delphi programmer for a small family business that writes software for Wood cutting factories. Yeah, getting money in is a factor for the company, but the pool of customers is so slow and stable that the programmers can just focus on creating the best software possible - so the thing they optimize for in this case is getting as many boards out of a tree as possible. You could spin it in an ethical direction and say they’re reducing waste from excess trees that would be cut if they didn’t have good optimized software. Or you could spin it in an unethical direction and say that they’re supporting an industry which can cause environmental trough over-consumption of resources. It’s a weird thing to think about and I feel like everyone draws the line at a different point.
So what I want to say, I guess, is that you just gotta focus on what your own values are and what you’d expect from a potential employer. Upheaving your whole life and moving to another country for your first job might be a bit much, as the sunken cost of having moved for a company will inadvertently make you more hesitant to leave them.
Maybe just look around in your area and see what small companies are around - not small as in Start-Up, I wouldn’t trust a company that hasn’t been around for a few decades, but rather small in their niche and their customer-base. Big Tech might just be a lost cause. Also don’t do that dumb americanized interview circus. A company that respects the people who work for them never lets you jump trough leetcode hoops and dozens of evaluations and interviews before even having a chance to speak to someone.
The company I work for has been noting but great so far, and they’ve hired me within five days of applying. It was one interview, no evaluations or personality quizzes or whatever.
I also don’t know how common that is, but they’re an AG that only employees can own stocks of - so there isn’t a centralized owner or CEO, just a board of majority-owners who still have to listen to everyone else who owns the stocks. The fact that it’s somewhat self-governing makes for pretty sweet employee benefits (free ebike and car charging, 29+2 days off per year, everyone has the option to do half-time or 4-day workweeks, up to 100% remote for everyone etc).
And again, they’re a small-ish business that stays far away from the general public. I write software for the German Energy Market. The companies that use it are extremely regulated by law and couldn’t even do anything unethical with it if they wanted to. They’re also bound by law to use software like ours to even oparate legally, so there isn’t much client turnover or financial pressure. A few deadlines per year exist, but the job is mostly open to actually improving the software instead of selling as much as possible to as many people as possible. I think that’s kind of a key point. Desperation and Greed can make people take bad turns, so maybe staying away from anything that can push you in that direction is the safest bet.
This is encouraging! Also, what’s an AG?
I came from an art background, but have now been working as a professional developer in network software automation for about 4 years. I got my first job (a lucky break) working for a large ISP here in the US. It was a pretty good gig, the people were mostly nice and I learned a lot very fast–the work was consistently interesting and rewarding.
A co-worker approached me two years ago with a contract offer (moonlighting for 20 hrs a week) at an NREN - National Research and Education Network based out of San Francisco. Fully remote, using software and languages I knew, and the contract pay was good.
Fast forward a year, contract was up and they offered me a FTE position. I accepted, because the international community that this NREN peers with is all about promoting science and research – essentially a “boutique ISP” that connects laboratories around the USA and the world. The “mission” isn’t to serve ads to people, or harvest any data; the only goal is to connect scientists and researchers. Look at this wiki for a list of how many there are!
Anyway, just giving you one option at least to see if there are any opportunities in this space, since I too despise what big tech has become (sorry for the long-winded response).
No one can make moral or ethical judgments for you. I recognize the hesitance towards defense, surveillance, attention-commerce, and tech consultancy. However, there can be positive moral and ethical perspectives even on those examples. The reverse is also true for industries that, on the surface, seem much more ethically marketable. I personally consider any automation that removes human work from the economy to be a positive contribution to humanity. You can make the perspective that robbing labor opportunities from real humans is a moral failure. My point is that moral choices are usually based on a combination of personal values and a certain understanding of the problem space.
I can’t make ethical suggestions for you, but here are some options that might appeal to you:
- Paperwork Automation for professionals (Lawyers, Notaries, Hospitals, Governments)
- Bioinformatics for medical and environmental applications
- Computer vision for medical tools (Detecting anomalies in scans)
- Agrotech (seed, grow and harvest food more efficiently for a better environment)
- Prosthesis Robotics (Help people in need of mobility)
- Accessibility Engineering (Help people with disabilities access websites, programs and games)
- Environmental modeling for sustainable planning
- Supply chain optimization (software to get goods from A to B with the least impact)
- Video Games!
A career is not only the industry or sector you service. It’s also about the relationships and colleagues you deal with. The work ethic and labor standards you have to deal with. The opportunities you get to build a reputation. The physical location of the opportunities. These are all things to consider when starting out on a career.
Edit: The best way to feel good about work is to set reasonable expectations for yourself to others and meet them consistently. Understanding human problems and solving them. That’s what telling computers what to do is all about.
If you are concerned about environment, maybe look for companies that make software for public transport. DB Systems, Init Group, PTVgroup are some companies of the top of my head. DB Systems is not the best working climate (or at least used to be, I had someone close to me work there and they hated it a few years ago).
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A small update: Thanks Lemmy! I found a great job in a green/electricity related business
I’m going to be the devil advocate here (so please, don’t take anything I write personally) but sometimes I wonder if people live in the real world or the Little Pony one. Your expectations on how the real companies work are imho completely off the mark. Now, I’m sure that ethics is not dead and you might find something that has the checks in the right spots, but ultimately the IT world is a shark tank where you either are hunting or are the prey. At BEST the work you do is to steal business from your company 's competitor to affirm itself in the market (thus causing the other company to potentially go out of business and layoff employees). At worst, you actively damaging some group of people somewhere. Hell, even the fact we keep datacenters close to deserts, increasing the amount of air conditioning needed so that we can share memes quicker is unethical, and yet here we are. So, on one hand I say “what were you thinking!”. On the other, I want to say that I admire you for your search. I hope you can find solace somewhere. Personally, I’m content with not causing direct damage to anyone (AFAIK, at least…)
I didn’t see you mention searching public sector jobs. Your post is really long, so maybe I missed it.
Besides other great recommendations here, there’s plenty of jobs supporting government services and education that you can feel really good about at the end of a
long(strictly union-negotiated length) day.No offence intended but this is a first world problem.
Things aren’t black and white, sometimes there are practical necessities, Not saying the end justifies the means always but that is something to consider, There is some research showing the people with neurotic personalities have less job satisfaction (along with a variety of other negative outcomes). Doing stuff like learning some psychology and mindfulness training can help with that.
With that said there is such a thing called effective altruism , You can just give a bit part of your income, iirc it costs 15$ to feed a hungry child for a month. If you make 500K and give half of it to feed starving children but people get a few ads pushed to them is that so bad?
You could also try to work on open source, companies like suse/gitlab/nextcloud, or take the time to find a company that works on something more impactful , medical devices? green energy ? maybe a company like solar edge.
