Throughout my career I have tried my best to avoid work in industries that I consider as doing harm, e.g. oil & gas, defence and financial services companies like JP Morgan that have a large prescence locally.
In the last few years I have worked for a cloud consultancy with similar values, however, I have still found myself working on projects for clothing companies that I would consider as fast-fashion with questionable supply chains.
I am starting to wonder if I need to take my skillset in another direction to find more meaningful work. I took an interest in C# and microservices in the past and while that has worked out well for me, it seems to have locked me into a very enterprise world with values that rarely align to my own.
Has anyone faced a similar dilemna? Basically, I am struggling to find my Ikigai as I do not feel like the world needs the work that I am doing.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Lol of course. Being an engineer is like being a lawyer. You can do ethical work for very little money and a massive amount of time and a ton of competition or you can sell your soul for time with your family and a roof over your head
My hypothesis is that as long as work is kept as a mandatory thing for humans, most of it will be unethical.
I work in healthcare, so yeah, kinda. It’s tough trying to do the most amount of good possible in a very unethical system overall.
I think healthcare is a good balance. Obviously it’s still expensive but it helps people in need and can better society. But maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt because I program medical devices
The prospect of programming medical devices terrifies me. Like it obviously needs doing, and I have nothing against the act itself. But like, I know I’m fallible, I know that the code I write isn’t perfect. What if a device I programmed were to break down and cause someone else’s death?
I don’t know. I’m a bit neurotic, but the idea is terrifying.
This is exactly why I got out of healthcare IT, it wasn’t my fault half the products used by the hospital were outdated crap but i felt horrible whenever they would break and I was struggling to get this equipment/system working again that was used to diagnose or treat people’s life threatening conditions.
Now I work in an absolutely unethical business but at least no lives are dépendant on my work
That’s why there are rules set in place to make the software secure as possible. Checking everyone a value gets set and throwing the whole device in error Mode of something fails. And then there are unit tests, ISO, the hardware is also very secure to make sure a battery doesn’t explode or there is no super high current and stuff like this. Tbh I’m just a junior dev so I might not have the biggest grasp on the concepts but I’m pretty sure med devices do more good than harm
Absolutely, but there’ll always be outliers. Someone didn’t properly vet the PR because it was late on a Friday and they wanted to go home. Maybe it was a tricky piece of logic, or a poorly documented method that had some sort of side effect. Perhaps management had bought into AI hype and let a LLM deal with the PRs…
I always loop back thinking about Therac 25, which hopefully wouldn’t happen in today’s society, but who can say?
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I think one has to strike a balance really. I’ve worked with
- Developed various sales related tools for a Stellantis owned car manufacturer
- A resource management system for the government of a particular population
- Planning tools for a mining company
- CRM related stuff for a “green tech” company
- Various tools for government sectors
Like none of it is world changing, and some are a bit more questionable. Mining isn’t exactly environmentally friendly, though the company I did work for is arguably one of the “greenest”, and environmental sustainability is a big thing for them right now. As it should be for everyone.
I have some hard line stances though. I don’t want to work with the military. I don’t want to work with medical stuff, (out of fear that code I’d written somehow kills someone). I don’t want to work with companies that overtly exploit people (online casinos, mobile apps/games and that kind of BS). I’d say JP Morgan qualifies for that last bit.
Working for banks is now unethical 🤦♂️
Always has been, especially since we have offshore banking and banking secrecy laws. Not that credit was ever particularly ethical. Neither investment banking tbh.
