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It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or buildin

• acdanger 8y ago
  It's exceedingly depressing and it's one of the reasons I can't stomach the Bay Area. It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen. I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more systemic. But that doesn't make it any less troublesome.
  • hasbroslasher 8y ago
    I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital. Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.
    • intended 8y ago
      I read a line from a book review by Krugman where he says “free trade is not as important as saving the planet.” The context was the unlikely event of the WTO calling fouls if America and a few other regions levied carbon tariffs on imported goods. Of course, The article was written in 2013, and it’s cyncisim would be considered wildly optimistic in today’s climate. But perhaps his point is wrong. Perhaps for humans, it is free trade that is more important than the planet. Free trade is effectively our distributed human brain. Our ability to make choices and distributing those choices down information trees encompassed by entire industries. Society is one big exercise in managing complexity - obfuscating or dispersing away decisions and information. And maybe for human beings, that is just more important than saving the coral reefs or the elephants. The insects may die, so we lose almonds and other flowering trees. That just means almonds and other precious species disappear. But most human beings don’t even get almonds, Or meat, or fruit, as part of their diet anyways. It would be nice to save other species, but if the whole planet was just covered in bio crop species 1-299, and a few aesthetics, humanity would be alive and ok. Perhaps the awful truth is that for humanity as a species, free trade and economic growth is more important than saving the planet.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do Do you think tech can solve the problem of homeless addiction? There actually aren't that many homeless in the Bay Area. There is only one problem with socialism. There is no check and balance on the amount of appropriation, which cannot be voluntary. Unchecked power eventually leads to oppression. Systems which you can't opt out of often lead to evil. (This may apply to Capitalism, but there it's somewhat ameliorated by creative destruction.)
• nradov 8y ago
  There are many interesting opportunities in healthcare related to improving care quality, increasing interoperability, cutting inefficiencies, boosting EMR usability, and integrating wearable device data. Funding and jobs are available. I would also note that a Computer Science degree isn't necessarily the best preparation for a career building commercial software.
• illumin8 8y ago
  You can work on blockchain projects that might have the potential to bring financial services to the unbanked and poor in 3rd world countries, but, oh wait a minute, the technology will probably just be used to create predatory financial products for payday lenders to expand their market... The best way to make sure you are working on ethical projects is to start and run your own company. Any technology can be used for good or evil. Personally, I do think blockchain has a lot of potential, but the best way to ensure that your technology gets used for good is to design it yourself that way - in other words, build a micro-lending system that helps finance small business owners in 3rd world countries with fair interest rates, instead of building a predatory payday lending system that charges unfair interest rates.
  • annabellish 8y ago
    I have yet to see even a concept, never mind a product, that actually uses a blockchain in a net-positive way, especially for "the unbanked". Universally high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on anything that sees leitimate amounts of use with no clear path towards mitigating this situation, if it's even possible to mitigate at all, combined with several choices of security system each with devastating concequences - from the morally black proof-of-work burning precious resources at a time climate change is already threatening to destroy us, to the morally grey proof-of-stake that simply reinforces the idea that those with the most resources deserve even more resources - makes for something that doesn't seem to have much potential for _good_. The "Unbanked" aren't going to be served by these systems, they need efficient, reliable, and safe systems.
    • slimshady94 8y ago
      Ironically, it seems the 'banked' have become 'unbanked' after the recent speculative highs and subsequent crash of bitcoin prices.
  • ForHackernews 8y ago
    Even aside from the financial scams, any proof-of-work blockchain project is an ecological obscenity.
• solidsnack9000 8y ago
  Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources to other things and harder to keep people’s actions aligned with the goal. Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently. People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses. Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.
  • ryderm 8y ago
    > Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....
    • kareemsabri 8y ago
      It's really not. People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. They are answerable to their friends, family, community etc. If that were the case, why would people be resigning from Google over moral issues?
      • hasbroslasher 8y ago
        This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals. And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.
• Kalium 8y ago
  I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that so many smart, educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any problem they put their minds to! Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to grasp how any person could be concerned with things as minor as governance structure when there is math to be done. It might be possible to press those people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it socially good for them. Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly, than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal. I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're absolutely right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be others.
  • hasbroslasher 8y ago
    As far as "the price paid" that you mention: the price is not paid in any way. The price is being put on a high-interest credit card and we're paying the minimum. Someday those cans we've kicked down the road (carbon emissions, pacific garbage patch, destruction of ocean ecosystems in general, deforestation, economic inequality, desertification, etc.) in order to sell more plastic trinkets will come back to collect on our outstanding balance.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • ryderm 8y ago
• jcmoscon 8y ago
  You could build a decentralized version of facebook or twitter. That would be a truly amazing progress to humankind!
  • cubano 8y ago
    And I am sure the 20 users who manage to get it working correctly will be really happy that they can talk to each other. Of course, Social only works if a critical mass of users start actively using the network...achieving that number, no matter what the underlying tech is, is a very hard nut to crack.
• uhtred 8y ago
  I wonder if socialism done right (if that's possible, as no one has yet proven it is) would lead to smart people working on the kinds of things you listed. In theory it would, as there'd be no need for adtech, ecommerce, Wall Street, etc.
  • hasbroslasher 8y ago
    I'm not necessarily advocating for socialism, I'm just suggesting that the USA government spends more on incentivizing technological innovation in areas that have real payouts for humanity. It's almost a tautology that if you started offering government jobs at $100k a year and funding to work on interesting, novel problems, you'd attract a whole lot of people who are bored and disenfranchised with adtech or high finance.
• xahrepap 8y ago
  I work for a medical company. It's really a tech company that makes medical software. Runs like a pretty typical successful tech startup. Our customers are hospitals and doctor clinics. The software syncs the data between various networks. Can notify a patient's primary care giver when their patient is checked into the ER, can notify a doctor if that patient is bouncing between hospitals looking for meds, there was even a time I heard of a man going between hospitals, checking in, and vandalizing hospital equipment. Our software was able to notify the nurse who checked him in at his last destination. It's actually an awesome place to work, and it's nice to know that I'm actually helping push the needle a little bit in the right direction to help the medical industry succeed.
  • el_benhameen 8y ago
    I’ve been thinking about finding a new job, and finding something that I feel is moral and pushes society forward are important criteria for me. Medtech seems like the sort of thing that might meet them. If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field? Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health? And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated? I don’t love asking that last one in the same breath as questions of morality, but I do have a family to take care of.
    • skwb 8y ago
      I can't speak for xahrepap, but I'm working on my PhD where I operationalize deep learning for radiology. Whenever I do find myself sorta burned out on a project, I do take solace knowing that it's apply a complex technical field to bettering the way we deliver healthcare. I can't speak to compensation yet since I'm only on a PhD stipend, but there's plenty of blue chip companies (that bring blue chip salary and benefits) that are going into the healthcare field.
    • xahrepap 8y ago
      > If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field? I was recruited from a B2B company by an old friend/boss. I was skeptical because I had only ever heard bad things about working for medical companies. I was very impressed with the leadership, product, and direction of the company. So I took the job. > Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health? I don't feel like I'm making a direct impact, no. However, I can clearly see that the work I do is a single cog in a machine that actually makes a real-world difference for medical professionals. I talked to a family friend who is a nurse. He was complaining that software was horrible for medical professionals, then he went in about this new product they started using and how it's made a world of a difference. Turns out it was our product and I just didn't know he used it and he didn't realize I had switched jobs to that company. He went on and on about how it makes things better (easier to diagnose, easier to see patient history, etc etc) > And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated? I got a significant raise that beat out other job offers at the time for another B2B company. I have what I feel is a competitive salary (a respectable amount higher than the average in my area) and the benefits are quite amazing (401k, untracked PTO with management who actually does a good job encouraging vacation, 100% paid health insurance, etc)
• starpilot 8y ago
  The effective altruism perspective is to make as money as possible doing whatever, then use that to fund noble causes. At the individual level it's the Wall Street quant who donates his income. At the corporate level, it's FB using ad money to create the Chan-Zuckerberg Intiative to cure cancer.
• clubm8 8y ago
  I think there's a lot of good, moral work out there. I have a friend who's a security engineer at a bank. I was surprised when he took the job - he'd always been pretty to the left politically. But he takes pride in making sure the grandmas of the world don't get their accounts drained. He realizes he's not saving the world, but he's not swapping around debt vouchers until the economy crashes. It's counter intuitive, but in his mind he's more moral than someone working at Google or Facebook. (He also brags to me about the vacation - apparently they're encouraged to take their time for anti-fraud reasons?)
  • alleyshack 8y ago
    My understanding is that the anti-fraud vacation thing is related to being able to correlate a decrease in fraud with a specific person going on vacation. If you have money that mysteriously goes missing on the regular and 10 employees who touch it along the way, it's hard to determine which of those employees is responsible. If one of them goes away on vacation for a week and no money goes missing that entire week, you suddenly have a much better idea who might have been involved.
    • clubm8 8y ago
      Also, it makes sure there are no single points of failure. Apparently many embezzlers refuse to take vacation for fear someone will look over the books and notice irregularities.
• djohnston 8y ago
  applied tech to a physical engineering degree could wreak far more havoc on humanity than ad tech
• deleted 8y ago
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• stcredzero 8y ago
  We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight 1) Alternative Energy has a lot of minds working on it already. Success is dependent on the establishment of large scale infrastructure and changing societal expectations. One "Ah-Ha!" moment isn't going to cut it. 2) Vertical Farming is a world-saving problem that needs solving? Color me skeptical. 3) Asteroid Mining: Also requires establishment of large scale infrastructure. 4) Carbon Sequestration: The laws of thermodynamics are against you on this, unless you can marshal self-replicators harvesting a significant portion of the sunlight falling on the Earth. If we've gotten that desperate, it must mean that building sunshades at L1 has been made unavailable by groundside politics and/or the Kessler Syndrome. 5) Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism. projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good Is that what the Industrial Revolution was? Or has industrialization raised 90% of the world's population out of poverty? Hint: It's the latter. Another hint: Has there ever been a collection of intelligent, privileged young people who thought they could change the world into a utopia? I think you might want to study the history a bit. There was one utopian project which was implemented by privileged intellectuals, but which was also based on a good knowledge of history and human nature. Though flawed, that project worked, did some good, and has been going on for well over 200 years.
  • ubernostrum 8y ago
    Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism. Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms. We also see a denial that mixed economies with strong social safety nets can ever work on, say, the scale of a nation. Despite plenty of evidence available, in the real world, that they can.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms. Exactly what is the difference between "social democracy" and "socialism?" In particular, how is there a system of checks and balances to keep the voters from appropriating everything, thus handing all of the power to the central government and thus initiating totalitarianism? We also see a denial that mixed economies with strong social safety nets can ever work on, say, the scale of a nation. Despite plenty of evidence available, in the real world, that they can. It can be argued that all existing economies are mixed economies.
• sigstoat 8y ago
  > It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. uhhh. your bubble is astonishing. or your standards for "good" are unattainable by anyone. how about folks who work on CAD software? is that bad because it will be used to design plastic trinkets, or good because it'll design medical prosthetics? (are the medical prosthetics good because they help people, or bad because they make someone money?) if i write the software for a piece of test equipment for batteries, is that good because now people who buy consumer electronics are less likely to catch on fire? or bad because i helped the big company sell more plastic trinkets?
  • untilHellbanned 8y ago
    Not a generous interpretation of their argument. I’m in biomedical research which also wasn’t mentioned explicitly but I read it as a more general argument about finding something that is future-looking and helpful to many vs a few.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  So, I run a bunch of websites on a platform provided for free provided by that Evil Overlord Google and I make a few bucks that way, which matters to me because I remain desperately poor, and I also disseminate useful info for free that way to needy people, such as homeless people. BlogSpot is a robust platform and some of the folks who worked on it probably have compsci degrees. I'm also curing the incurable, but most people don't believe that, so probably no point in trying to convince you that I may yet win a Nobel Prize in medicine someday, if people will ever stop calling me crazy and take me seriously. Don't mind me. I'm just cranky cuz reasons.
• pimlottc 8y ago
  Might I suggest the civic tech sector as a place where coders (and designers and product managers) can find morally satisfying work? You can work directly for government in organizations like the US Digital Service and 18F that bring the lean startup model into the public sector or join purpose-driven private companies like Nava and Ad Hoc that contract on government project spaces like healthcare using modern development practices. And there's lots of charitable and volunteer opportunities at well. https://usds.gov/jobs https://usds.gov/jobs https://18f.gsa.gov/jobs https://18f.gsa.gov/jobs https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/ https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/
• deleted 8y ago
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• julienreszka 8y ago
  It's just your lack of imagination