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 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
157 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 14 minutes ago

Most programmers suck ass, including myself

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 3 hours ago (1 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 19 minutes ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 9 hours ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 10 hours 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious โ€” 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

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, ok makes sence thanks!

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Hardly controversial I would say.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

My office forces everyone to use Microsoft (there's a lot of Mac and Windows users), and whenever I complain, people get pissed at me. God knows why.

As for SystemD, I think a lot of people think it's fine and people like me are exaggerating. I guess that's fine, but non-systemD systems (Void Linux being my favorite) are so much faster, it's unbelievable.

And then there's a lot of generic language programmers and business owners, who are very willing to defend their income source. Like everyone I know. (I'm really dying here; I gotta find a cool Rust or LISP company)

As for uBO, it's a "progress" thing. If using masses of third parties and trackers makes stuff more innovative (not to mention laggy), then it's good, they claim.

I'm happy to hear that Lemmy shares my opinion though, that's a little comforting :)

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

The systemd take is goofy, but everything regarding Microsoft is spot on. Teams is an eldritch horror.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

My school somehow broke it, so teahcers and students are on different organisations.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

lol your admin is a dumbass I wager

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Probably setup two entirely separate tenants

[โ€“] [email protected] 40 points 11 hours ago

Tech workers need to unionize

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago (3 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 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 staking ownership.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I 1000% agree with this sentiment and to be honest im similar (except engineering EE srufent) and I was managing the world fine with all the increased algorithm and whatnot till COVID hit. I went from immensely internet literate and techy to depressed and stuck on social media all the time from waking up to sleeping I'll check Instagram (even tho I avoided tiktok for that same reason) honestly I still struggle with this, cause social media is more toxic, pain, and mind destroying then ever before. I hope I can cut this addiction before it's too late

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

This is why I love lemmy so much. The only people here are people who have realised that mainstream social media is a steaming pile of trash and came hear to find a nice community.

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 16 hours 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 49 seconds ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (3 children)

  • IT reconversions are bullshit and dangerous to the industry. Everyone and their grandma are becoming "programmers". We're in the "fuck around" phase, the "find out" will be explosive. Companies are inundating themselves with these "reconverted" juniors and doing soft-layoffs to seniors..

  • crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment

  • If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level

  • marketing and middle management are mostly useless. A good, and small, sales+marketing team is very effective but the moment they start growing they start to degenerate pretty fast into BS world and imposing company culture

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago

Phhht....AI rocks. Nobody else tells me "you're absolutely right, I'm very sorry for any inconvenience caused" in every sentence. They make me feel so smart.

/s, obviously.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 15 hours ago
  • If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level

Eh, I have to say I find it quite usefull sometimes for brainstorming solutions. It is esentially a rubber duck that answers and sometimes gives good ideas.

Of course the answers are often bullshit, but they can sometimes point you in the right direction/to the right words to google.

(All of this ignoring the enviromental problems ofc.)

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

If you use chatgpt el al. Iโ€™ll look down on you from a technical competence level

If someone asks "But using google is the same", no they are not the same. Chatgtp is a toddler which has been force-fed information and is rewarded if the generated answer statistically makes sense. Google, or any search engine, points to a page where actual humans have discussed about the problem. They can also be wrong, but you can see the thought process of the individuals, and sometimes you can even ask the experts directly. It's a very different experience.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Google searches have become increasingly worthless over time. I find it depressingly difficult to find things now.

Considering grabbing a sub on one of the paid search engines like Kagi: the search actually works.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

You can also ask chatgpt its thought process and it's very easy to sniff out when it's hallucinating something. It's an incredibly useful tool and I really don't know anyone in tech that doesn't use it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Oh I use it (Gemini in my case) regularly, however in very specific scenarios. I use it for very mundane tasks. However, I don't want use it for highly technical fields. There's a nice quote regarding this "I use ChatGPT only when I'm sure of the answer"

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I literally just use ai for random obsecure linux commands that i am unable to get from google , and trying to find the names of things that i don't know.

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