this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024

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What opinions about the tech industry do you feel comfortable expressing here, but not in public/at work? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Short disclosure, I work as a Software Developer in the US, and often have to keep my negative opinions about the tech industry to myself. I often post podcasts and articles critical of the tech industry here in order to vent and, in a way, commiserate over the current state of tech and its negative effects on our environment and the Global/American sociopolitical landscape.

I'm generally reluctant to express these opinions IRL as I'm afraid of burning certain bridges in the tech industry that could one day lead to further employment opportunities. I also don't want to get into these kinds of discussions except with my closest friends and family, as I could foresee them getting quite heated and lengthy with certain people in my social circles.

Some of these negative opinions include:

I think that the industries based around cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have always been, and have repeatedly proven themselves to be, nothing more or less than scams run and perpetuated by scam artists.
I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.
I think that capitalism will ultimately doom the tech industry as it reinforces poor system design that deemphasizes maintenance and maintainability in preference of a move fast and break things mentality that still pervades many parts of tech.
I think we've squeezed as much capital out of advertising as is possible without completely alienating the modern user, and we risk creating strong anti tech sentiments among the general population if we don't figure out a less intrusive way of monetizing software.

You can agree or disagree with me, but in this thread I'd prefer not to get into arguments over the particular details of why any one of our opinions are wrong or right. Rather, I'd hope you could list what opinions on the tech industry you hold that you feel comfortable expressing here, but are, for whatever reason, reluctant to express in public or at work. I'd also welcome an elaboration of said reason, should you feel comfortable to give it.

I doubt we can completely avoid disagreements, but I'll humbly ask that we all attempt to keep this as civil as possible. Thanks in advance for all thoughtful responses.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 15 hours ago

It's all trash. Everything normal people use on a daily basis is pure dumpster fire level garbage with massive, HEINOUS, unforgivable amounts of tracking built in.

They know all of this. They just don't care.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

For many real world, day to day tasks, computers and the software that ran on them were faster and easier to use 20 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

I was using my school's website the other day and had a similar thought. I remember waiting a similar amount of time for many pages to load back in the dialup days. Why is it so slow to load a page that just shows some text and buttons??

[–] [email protected] 14 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I hate so much that this is true. How did we manage to go so far backwards despite an army of UX designers? Oh wait...

But seriously it's all this bullshit driven by engagement and weird metrics no one likes. For some reason even our ticketing system at work is built like it's supposed to hold my attention rather than be a purpose-built tool for making my job easier.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago

And it's because the same designers are building ticketing systems as are building the other apps.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, the upside of being autistic. I'll say anything i believe is true at work or here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

You don't need to be autistic to do that.

Wait a second...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Most programmers suck ass, including myself

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Fair, but it's also just a way of saying that programming isn't a task for humans. (At least not in the correctness aspect)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Partially, it’s not really a job for computers either

[–] [email protected] 21 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago

Only one in this thread willing to talk about the real problems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

I'm not verbose today but let me just get intro into my thoughts that I grew up in the 3rd world and then moved to Australia in my late 30s, and I think I had a better life where I grew up instead of where you are. The capitalism periphery has downsides but at least quality of life is minimally compatible with logic.

I've seen bigger concentration of power in my home country, but it still blows my mind how your country didn't get a revolution along side with rights movement decades ago when the momentum was there, and things are going down very fast since then. For you people I mean.

Your country is a cancer to the world democracy. Yes ussr was also a demon, and Russia is trying hard to match. Everybody else want you both to sink.

Economy like history is written by the victors.

Insert usual rant that your country doesn't even have a proper name..

Yep that's my short version. You should see me when I'm worked up by what evil CIA has done all around.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

Advertising passed that point a long time ago. Practically everyone is alienated as a result

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tech workers need to unionize

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago

This is more than self interest, self respecting tech workers would have refused to create our current panopticon-skinnerbox if they weren't at the mercy of the tech lords. Seniority based hiring and firing, that has to be demand number one, number 2 is layoff recall lists 5 years long.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago

A lot of what is sold to consumers is straight up shite.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

It will create a fully autonomous and self sufficient robot army one day and the 1% will genocide the working class with said army after our labor is no longer needed.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (10 children)

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.

Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).

SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.

Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.

Alright, I'm done ;)

Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

What sucks the most about rust is that 90% of rust jobs are some crypto bullshit. I love the language, but finding normal jobs is near impossible.

At the same time, i could find 20 Go positions but Go just isn't exciting. It's the new java imo, working with it probably good for job security, but i just don't see myself working in Go in the future as a main language.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Thoughts on rust? Is it a good programming language to learn as a beginner?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Fuck no. A beginner learning base concepts like arrays, conditionals, loops, variables, functions, etc. should use something much less punishing like Python. It's much easier to iterate, to understand your mistakes, and to learn from others when you use a simpler language.

When you're ready to learn about pointers, memory management, etc. then you can take on Rust.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago

Yeah, ok makes sence thanks!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

There is two types of languages, ones people bitch about, and ones nobody uses.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I'm a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I'm 98% sure I'm just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago

I really don't get the use of AI to replace creative roles. At worst I've used it as a sort of "lorem ipsum" generator but for various placeholders. I think AI's true value is in understanding the sometimes overwhelming amount of documents, records, datasets and databases that organizations can amass. Being able to have an AI help sift through the garbage is real helpful actually.

I've seen governments using it to do things like handle access-to-information type requests or help patent examiners find relevant patents: those uses make a lot of sense.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

companies don't know how to interview. i don't need someone to walk me through a sorting algorithm. i need someone who will be responsive, and interested in the problems we actually face.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Also, any number of interviews that is more than one is too many interviews.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

not sure i agree with that. I mean ok, i recently had three interviews for a company where each interviewer asked me almost the same questions. That was clearly a waste.

At my place, we do a 30min introductory call with the boss first, to quickly weed out unfit candidates and not waste employee and interviewee time with interviews. if that's ok, then there's three interviews of 45-60 minutes, one with the product owner that focuses on soft skills and team fit, one with the team your applying to and one with the other team (like frontend or backend) with more technical things, and also just if you'd like to work with this person.

no amount of interviewing will ever guarantee that things work out and unfit people can slip through cracks. And i hate wasting time in tons of interviews. But i'd also not want to work at a place where i know my coworkers were hired after just 1 hour quick chatting. That so little time to get an idea of a person, to spot any red flags. Heck, the 'tell me a bit about yourself' section of an interview is already 15 minutes and not usually very helpful.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (5 children)

So Just for context I work as an engineer but I consider myself pretty low level. I am completely self taught as I sort of flunked out of college and didn't pay much attention anyway. I've just been the sort of person who takes everything apart and tinkers around to figure things out or reads documentation. So I am not some genius programmer or anything. However what I have noticed over the span of my ( 40 + years ) is that the Internet and technology used to be a challenge but rewarding. Things were skewed towards creativity, sharing, community, and knowledge. I remember spending lots of time on forums like Usenet and later bulletin boards of various types. I remember when Wikipedia first became a thing and it really seemed to me that we were going to get this amazing platform to learn and self teach just about any subject imaginable. Then somehow the Internet just became an endless fucking scroll farm. My dumbass uncles and older family members who used to be content with just eating aerosol cheese while channel surfing got online and became complete fools. Instead of creativity and debate we just have endless AI slop, morons reacting to videos of nothing, Bots, and click bait. It seems like the industry just loves it because before they could barely figure out how they could make money off of this crap and now they have it figured out "turn everyone into fucking zombies". People at work are at times blown away at my stamina to work through problems and it's like bro I used to sleep next to my 486 so I could put in disk 20 of 50 to install something and it would take like all friggin night. I used to have to find a dude that got a catalog so I could get a CPU upgrade or part because there was no internet. I used to have to fight for every damn piece of documentation or software I could get my hand on. Now it's all right there and people have decided to watch Tik Tok instead of being able to do anything on their own. We screwed the hell up the Internet and tech has made people lazy, less capable, and focused on instant gratification. It was supposed to make us curious, creative, and engaged. Now with AI we are like "hmm how can I even be lazier?". I would get if they used AI to help solve really complex problems reserved that compute and stuff to assist on certain things that humans are not good at. However we are using this shit to just circumvent having to think and a substitute for community. Why ask a friggin bot when all the answers were in forums where you could interact with people make friends and learn? Now I am looking down the barrel of the gun of being replaced in the next 5 years or so going, Great so this shit which was "my thing" the only damn thing I was ever good at or interested in is going to be taken away from me because of some lazy ass people who just want to watch Tik Tok all day? -End rant.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I don't think it's really uncomfortable to say but whatever.

There used to be a digital social contract that we were all stewarding a global information database. That was before the era of "inflluencers" and information arbitrage. In other words people deriving monetized content from other content. Why would anyone want to do the leg work for some random jerk to take all for personal gain.

The whole proposition is a negative spiral. The paradigm changed from stewardship to something shit. This scroll zombie thing or whatever. We have the few users who are the "creators". Everyone else are consuming whatever is fed to them. It has discouraged people from thinking for themselves and maybe even adding something to the pot.

One thing I've noticed the git repo snipers. People will camp on forks looking at your work. If you don't submit to upstream then someone else will copy your patch(es) and make a pull request.

Also more generally things I do that I don't publish to posts/blogs is liable to be sniped. So might as well keep it to myself unless I'm will to go the full mile making a big show of ownership.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I would argue that people you are describing enjoying Tik Tok and being too lazy to look stuff up themselves, are not really engineers. You could also frame it as, information technology got so mainstream, even people with no technical background whatsoever are part of it. Engineers and tech nerds still exist, but they are a minority now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago

Engineers aren't the only people who should want to learn and look stuff up right? Everyone should want to learn. And tiktok is just not the way to do it at all. I think it's wild how many people "learn" from platforms like tiktok and tell it to others like it's a fact without doing any extra research.

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