Technology

And that's one thing I like about the projects I work on. Nothing I've built has been directly responsible for profit, it has just supported other profit centers.

My current project helps us sell our main physical product by making the supporting software easier to use vs competitors. Yeah, the features highlight the benefits of our product vs competition, but the user is free to use any competitor they want, and we even have an open-ish API so they can make their own interface. We charge for it, but it's far from turning a profit since the main point is to be something our sales team can bundle with the main product.

We build software for reports, simulation, design, etc, and the entire goal is to be useful, not extract profit. We charge for computationally heavy features, but that's more to prevent abuse (i.e. keep costs reasonable) than anything.

My company also has direct competition and who has decided to go with the lockin approach, and customers seem to appreciate us as an alternative. The business itself isn't particularly ethical, but it's necessary, so it helps me sleep at night.

That said, our end goal is to replace good (but dangerous) jobs with automation. and that will be complete once we plug the leaks in our abstractions, and that's a little sad. So it goes I guess.