I had a long and intresting conversation with my therapist just now. I’m not comfortable sharing exactly what we were talking about but I can rephrase it: basically I was complaining that tech companies don’t want to innovate.
I’ve been trying to bring new technologies to my boss because I thought it would give him a better opportunity to realize value from the products I’m creating/maintaining for him. That’s what I understand is my purpose in the workforce. I’m a programmer not a salesman I can’t go out to the market and get him the money so he can pay me with something, I can only make things put things in his hands for him (or hire someone to) to go out and collect the money we deserve (deserve within the limits of market demands and the nature of the product, not the labor invested). But he doesn’t want them… well he does when he needs them but I miss way more times than I hit which is making my professional feelings feel less valuable. And if I’m not valuable enough then I can’t work doing what I love.
When I started working I went in with a plan to upgrade and modernize everything I touch. I still believe that to be the case, or like… my “purpose”(as an employee not a person). But every company I’ve worked for so far has been running old ass shit. Springboot apps, create-react-apps, codebases in c and c++, no kubernetes, little to no cloud. And it feels like everything that tech companies want me to do is maintain and expand old existing codebases. And I understand why, I know that its expensive to rewrite entire code bases just for a 20% efficiency boost and to make it easier to add upgrades every once in awhile. But noone is taking advantage of innovative technology anymore and that’s what’s concerning me.
In my therapist’s opinion he thinks we as a soceity are not taking 100% advantage of technology we have. I can’t go into too many details bc our conversations are private but at the end I agreed with him. I’m seeing it now in my working day but he convinced me that it’s everywhere. Are people actually benefitting from technology enough such that nobody actually needs to work to maintain a long and healthy life?
Lets say that no, technology is underutilized in our soceity. Does that mean that if we use technology more we’d have enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI? Could we phase out the human workforce to some extent? Or do we actually need more workers to do work to make the value, in which case we can’t realistically do UBI because people need to get paid competitivily to do the work.
Lets say that yes, we are taking all advantages of technology. If so than there should be enough value to pay a UBI. But we don’t have a UBI, so why? If the value exists than where is it? I don’t believe its being funnelled into the pockets of some shadowy deep-state private 4th branch of government. If it was than there’d be something to take, is there? Are we sure that its enough?
Basically I don’t know if technology generates value.
Think about it like this
If its cheaper to use technology to grow an acre of corn than to use people, is that subsequent output of corn more valuable or less valuable because of the technology. And if you believe that scaling up corn production to make the corn just as valuable as if we didn’t have technology then you agree that the corn is now less valuable. If self-checkout machines are replacing cashiers, does that mean that the cashiering work being done by the machine is more valuable to soceity or less?
This is basically end stage capitalism. We need to recognize if the work we do for soceity (whether you derive personal fulfillment or not) is actually adding to soceity or not. I’d rather not give up my job as a programmer just so I can do something more valuable, but I might have to if that’s the case. And I feel like most people in the world are thinking like that too. Is soceity trying to hang on to the past, or do we just not understand the future?
Sorry for the wall of text. I feel like this might be to philosophical for this community but I couldn’t find a better place to post this. If you know of a better community for this discussion to take place then I’ll consider moving this post based on the comments already posted. Thank you for reading this and I’d love to answer any question you’d have about my opinions/feelings.
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Does that mean that if we use technology more we’d have enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI?
There’s already enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI.
But we don’t have a UBI, so why? If the value exists than where is it? I don’t believe its being funnelled into the pockets of some shadowy deep-state private 4th branch of government.
It’s being funneled into monopolies and doled out as stock dividends into the pockets of investors and billionaires such as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.
Yeah. It’s not a secret where the money is going. We put them on the covers of magazines and pretend that they are the peak of humanity and not rich sociopaths that stepped on every neck they could see to get more money.
dont blame the tech. blame the humans. humans suck, but not all, not even in aggregate. were nicer than we know, and were actually getting better!
that said, there is a small subset of outwardly powerful humans who deeply suck. these are the set who think that billionaires should exist. that the next quarters profits should come no matter what. i dont know what can be done about that other than humans regulating humans, which is difficult when you need to regulate the powerfully sucky.
its not a technology problem we have, its a human one.
Exactly. It’s a handful of private companies with oodles of money who are specifically choosing to develop technology that extracts the most from their customers, instead of developing technology to help people.
It’s isn’t glamorous, and it doesn’t pay well (or at all) but there’s plenty you can do with programming that are unequivocal good things for the world.
there is a small subset of outwardly powerful humans who deeply suck
Yeah the deep shadowy cabal of suited white men pulling strings. I’ve heard of that and I disagree with it. I don’t think it exists. Maybe there are some big people who basically own their industry, but I refuse to accept that they exist outside of the media and insurance sphere. Media has no power unless government reinforces it, and we regulate the shit out of insurance companies. Now that’s not to say that we don’t regulate insurance enough, there’s plenty more control we the people can and need to take. Maybe there’s one or two other industries that are owned by a powerful person. But I refuse to believe that my government that I pay tax to, vote on, and listen to is too weak to snuff out a company that grows to the size of a government. FAANG is 10% as powerful as the US Federal government and I refuse to accept that it’s more.
We’ve seen our government repeatedly stomp out monopolies in the US and outside of it. There are plenty more to stomp out, but just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t discount the strength of us Americans projected by our government. We can change, and its hard.
you misunderstand.
were not talking about some shady organization. these are CEOs, politicians, heads of state, etc. it isnt some organized cabal. its just terrible humans who dont understand/care that they cause the suffering in the world with their own inherent selfishness.
When I started working I went in with a plan to upgrade and modernize everything I touch. I still believe that to be the case, or like… my “purpose”(as an employee not a person).
I mean this with as much respect to you OP as I can possibly put into words, and if your therapist has already touched on this, absolutely ignore everything I say and listen to them.
I have been both been this person and dealt with this person. Believe me when I say that this behavior engenders little love from management and coworkers alike. You can quickly gain a bad reputation by trying to modernize everything you see. That reputation can be (meanly) described many different ways, from try-hard to kiss-ass.
- Developers like all human beings are subject to emotions and projection. They see you running around trying to replace the things they built, and they may conflate that with trying to replace them. They feel insecure, then they project that insecurity onto you - it makes you look insecure trying to prove yourself to the company. (Maybe you have fine relationships with your coworkers, maybe they admire this trait, take me with a grain of salt.)
- Managers begin to think that if they let you replace all their developers’ tools, they will have to rely on you and you alone to support all those tools. They may worry you try to gatekeep your tools, or become a bottleneck for new development. So you slowly lose their trust.
Don’t let your career suffer for this. There are few reasons to risk your reputation, your chance at promotion, the goodwill of your peers, and more: “using the latest and greatest” is not one of those reasons. Sometimes, following the crowd is fine.
Springboot apps, create-react-apps, codebases in c and c++, no kubernetes, little to no cloud.
Now, speaking as a developer instead of an armchair psychoanalyst, I don’t see why these traits or lack thereof make for bad software. Nor does it make you a lesser developer for working with them. It entirely depends on your industry, the applications, the users, security interests, available recruitable talent, and many more factors.
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You are making it sound like it’s a fault of managers and coworkers
Sorry, that’s not what I intended to imply. OP would definitely be the antagonist in that situation, I was trying to give them useful advice so they could avoid being that, and leave my own opinions at the door. “Cowboy Coder” is definitely what I’m going to call that behavior from now on though lol.
I like to leave a campsite better than I found it, but that can’t become rearranging the camping village.
I’ll say this though, give me a UBI and I’ll still work to add value. I’d probably still work my current job - just more confidently if there was a safety net. I think most well-adjusted people want a purpose.
If I didn’t work my job, then I’d be doing things with more obvious and direct social value. But if UBIs were a thing, some of that may not be necessary.
How is create react app or spring boot outdated? These are well-maintained frameworks. What would you replace them with?
There is a new framework every 6 months. Newer isn’t necessarily better, as plenty of new frameworks don’t catch on and die. Companies cannot just change their stack every 5 years even. It is not only expensive and time consuming, it requires hiring people with special skill sets that aren’t transferable to other apps in the company.
There is a new framework every 6
monthsminutes FTFY.Seriously, there’s so many to choose from and so little return on investment. Even migrating my work away from Java to NodeJS I am struggling to realize the efficiency gains because new tech is always has a learning curve.
Java to JavaScript isn’t exactly an improvement.
Agreed.
I also would like to add that a lot of old tech is reliable and limitations are well known and accounted for. New tech has inherent technical risk, you don’t always know what you are getting and behaviour can be unpredictable.
How is create react app or spring boot outdated
CreateReactApp was actually declared deprecated in favor of Next.js. I guess I think of springboot as outdated because we have much better ways of routing an HTTP request through buisness logic, going maximum k8s ingress is my preferred way, it scales way better than a springboot monolith.
Edit: the source of why I know CRA is deprecated
There is a new framework every 6 months. Newer isn’t necessarily better
“Newer isn’t better” is exactly the reason we have so many frameworks and technologies. When filtering a liquid you have to put pressure on it to push it through the filter. Just the same with technology, it’s more like an idea, you need lots of ideas to put pressure on the others to find which one is the best one. Springboot came from a time when there were less framworks to choose from, that’s the only reason its big, not by merit.
It is not only expensive and time consuming, it requires hiring people with special skill sets that aren’t transferable to other apps in the company.
I don’t agree that that’s the case anymore. Most softwares deployed today are so platform agnostic that the only thing limiting where it can run is the nature of the software itself. It doesn’t make sense to run an android app on a cloud vpc because litterally why would you? But since the advent of React, 99% of all UI components we see on screen can have their source in a library the app pulls from, then it could be an phone app, or a website, or a desktop program. Docker revolutionized how code runs on computers so now you can write any buisness logic in any language and then shop around for the cheapest cloud host or onprem hardware you want, you no longer have to consider the computer when writing code*.
I don’t believe programmers should be specalized, this litterally only comes from my experience and my opinion, but frankly whether its code to display things on screen or get data from a database or do some deep introspective calculation, it’s all the same code, even if its a different language. There’s a difference between buisness logic and implementation, any programmer should beable to put together any sort of buisness logic they’re asked to do.
That post about why CRA is depreciated was a great read, thanks!
Most “technology” these days are hardly more than gimmicky baubles that don’t actually bring much value to, well, anything really.
Look at all the Alexa devices. Amazon literally cannot figure out how to make a profit on it and they’re quickly trying to make it a footnote.
All that hardware dedicated to Alexa will be soon a pile of garbage.
But here’s the rub…
Simple technology is still technology. A hammer is technology of an early human era. We’ve only been in the era of modern medicine, for example, for hardly 100 years. When you talk about “technology” you’re talking about way the fuck more than just computers and technobaubles.
When it comes to medical tech alone if you consider how many diseases we’ve wiped out, and the new advances we continue to make in medical science (RNA vaccines, recently an entirely new class of antibiotics), the idea that these don’t contribute to our quality of life is a joke.
Medical advances and advances in food technology and food cleanliness have 100% improved the lives of people all over the world. We went from terrible infant mortality rates 200 years ago where half your fucking kids will die before adulthood to people basically choosing how many kids they want because by and large, most of them will make it to adulthood and onward. It genuinely wasn’t that long ago that our average life expectancy was a lot shorter.
Now, the bigger question is a societal one: How to we ensure the new technology that really brings value to human life is distributed equitably? Because currently, it really fucking isn’t.
As for you and your job: Technology and programming itself isn’t useless at all. It’s what it’s being used for that is at issue. There are plenty of things a programmer can do that benefit the world, they just won’t be the kind of job that pays well. Amazon, for example, isn’t going to pay you money to change the world in positive ways, they’ll pay you to make Amazon money. All companies are like this. We all have to have a day job, so my suggestion would be to find out how you can use your skills to help the world equitably (maybe contribution to Free Open Source Software, for example) in your spare time, and then save money with a goal to use your skills more equitably as a life-goal.
FoldIt and Folding@Home were both great examples of programming, games, and genuine forward-movement scientific research. Maybe you could contribute to new groups like this, with the aim of benefiting everyone with their research.
Some folks help the world through what some consider illegal means with their programming. Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, and Sci-Hub all exist with the purpose of giving people access to information. They use programming and networking skills to get around network blocks and so on.
Programming skills can be used for all kinds of good. You just have to choose to follow those paths.
I think you’re right.
TBH I can’t even see the real value in companies I see listing jobs on the job sites. I’ve been trying to talk any path, anything just so I can work. But what good is my work if it’s not actually working for the rest of the world. How can I secure my next hit (writing code presses my happy button, idk why I just accept it) if I’m working for someone who noone actually needs? I want to make a change for the world because I need to make a change for myself. I need to work because working feels good, it wakes me up in the morning, it gives me focus, it gives me a sense of success and I actually cherish it. Every little line of code I write is mine, that’s why I cryptosign my commits, so they’ll always be mine.
Maybe its actually not me, it’s the people I can work for.
TBH I can’t even see the real value in companies I see listing jobs on the job sites.
I agree, it can be discouraging, but the reality is we all gotta pay bills and eat. We gotta have a paycheck to put food in our stomachs and to give ourselves the opportunity to make our own goals outside of this framework we’re given.
It’s okay to take a job that isn’t benefiting the world if it means it’s a path towards you benefiting the world, you just can’t let yourself get caught up in the grind and remember its your personal goals of self-fulfillment and fulfillment of others that matter more.
It doesn’t mean you can’t work a job or not excel at your job. You can absolutely do both but also be willing to keep that thought at the back of your mind “Everything I do here is in pursuit of doing more and better, on my own.” Hell, if you are successful enough, that’s often option to use your largess to create your own non-profit aimed at helping others, or creating a new business for a market you know is under-served.
We can’t escape the reality of needing to eat and pay bills. We can accept that a lot of the jobs we work won’t give us some of the human values we all generally need to feel fulfilled (autonomy, mastery, purpose), but that doesn’t mean we can’t find those avenues for fulfillment elsewhere, outside of the business and working world.
I think the answer to that question would completely depend on what you value.
The only correct answer here
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If that employee is producing double because of technology than that’s all the employer deserves to ask for. If the employer wants the employee to double their efforts the employee will 4x their output which is an unreasonable thing to ask for, and those bosses loose people because of that. I don’t give much attention to people who fail upwards.
I’ll give this another read later but one thing I notice is what I’d call over-enthusiasm for software technology and rewrites. For your purely technical concerns you might have a chat with a senior programmer on your project. After dealing with real world software for long enough one gets disillusioned with the latest shiny. Keeping the existing stuff running is important and it’s easy to underestimate that.
As for the product itself and its value to the world, well that depends at least in part on what you consider valuable. And that’s a philosophy question rather than a technical one. If you were involved in making, say, movies instead of software, the same questions would apply.
I would say a few software jobs do real good in the world, a few do serious evil, and most are relatively neutral. If yours is neutral then I think you can feel ok about it at least for the near term. You have to take care of yourself after all. If your company is actively evil then that’s of course different. And if it’s doing good then you should be happy.
If its cheaper to use technology to grow an acre of corn than to use people, is that subsequent output of corn more valuable or less valuable because of the technology.
At first it is the same price, because the buyers would pay what they are used to pay. That makes the user of that technology rich. Later the price would probably decrease.
I am talking about ‘price’, not ‘value’. Value isn’t universally defined, but individually.
Warren buffet said, the price is what we pay, the value is what we get.
Very different views are possible about the term ‘value’. I went with a strictly monetary view here, and therefore I’m not sure if this aspect of your question…
if the work we do for soceity […] is actually adding to soceity or not.
… gets actually answered. Also, I didn’t read all of it.
You’re getting a lot of answers that are explaining to you that the value doesn’t go to society, it goes to the owner class, and I agree. It seems to me you’re experiencing the personal wounds that come from being alienated from your work. This is because a capitalist, hierarchical workplace is inherently low-information. Your manager is in a position of power over you, which means they don’t have to listen to you, and most workers figure out sooner or later that their efforts are wasted and they’ll get by easier if they just keep their heads down and don’t make waves, so they stop trying to get managers to listen.
Your manager doesn’t necessarily care about innovation, or making society better, or your personal fulfillment. That doesn’t mean you need to find a manager that does, because the problem is that positions of power over others breed indifference to those others. Management in particular tends to go to people who are good at taking credit and ingratiating themselves to their superiors. It doesn’t select for competence at the actual job. If you luck out and get a good manager, they’ll be replaced eventually. You have no power over that decision.
I would recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (that is a talk he gave on the topic for a brief overview). It explains the mechanisms by which companies fill themselves with bloat and create jobs where very little is achieved and the people in them are miserable.
I would also recommend you look into worker owned cooperatives (google renamed that subtitle from “a cure for capitalism” to “curing capitalism”, presumably because the former title leaves room to think we are curing ourselves from capitalism, but the latter implies we are making capitalism better; I suspect his intent was far more revolutionary than they would like). They give the workers that actually produce everything control over the company. Managers are elected and recallable, so if your manager doesn’t listen they can be replaced by the people they manage. Their job is actually management, not a generalised rulership where they can turn your entire department upside down at a whim or just ignore you in favour of their own comfort.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There are plenty of redundant jobs, and I believe it is important to feel fullfilment in your tasks, otherwise no motivation. One thing to note, that when companies do not upgrade, they risk being redundant and falling back behind disruptive newcomers with cutting edge tech.
Uh… The internet? Telecommunications tech in general, really.
The problem is not that these things are not valuable; it’s that the value they create is being hoarded by a small few at the top.
Tech companies only want new if it generates/saves short term money. Long term money only with a understanding, far-sighted upper level, which is rare. Reallistic risk mitigation (i.e. not the magic black box á la Fortinet) only with a boss who’s in tech himself.
There is a lot to unpack from your post. First of all, there is no doubt that technology in general adds value for the human race - like the another commenter said, foundational things like fire, tools all the way to the zipper and buttons you have on clothings, umbrellas you bring into the rain, the video chats you have with loved ones during COVID - those are all the fruits of technology.
But if you get down to the particulars, value can be very subjective. Some people value fancy new tech sneakers, primate NFTs whereas others value new computer vision technology or a new programming language. So are certain technologies adding value? Depends on who you ask.
As for who is capturing value in a capitalistic society, I think you already have the answer. Simply put, if your company operates at a 50% efficiency and you bump it up to 70% with tech and automation, rest assured that you are going to see job cuts to “become lean” and to “do less with more”, followed by increased targets to produce more. You are not going to get more leisure time but instead be asked to push ahead until you hit the physical limit and break.
Simply put, if your company operates at a 50% efficiency and you bump it up to 70% with tech and automation, be assurance you are going to see job cuts and increased targets to produce more
And there’s the point. I do not disagree that technology puts people out of a job. What I want to understand is whether or not that technology is creating more value. And if so than more technology means more value which means we can eventually get to a place of so much societal surplus that we can reorchestrate soceity to enjoy the benefits of it. That’s the end stage of capitalism, it will become outdated eventually. Capitalism is a growth phase, and growth hurts, I’m the last person in the world to deny that.
The reason it ends is because there are people who are poor and sick and starving and I AM NOT OK WITH THAT! If I was than capitalism can persist, but I don’t want it to because I don’t want my fellow Americans, my fellow people, to suffer. There’s no way to acknowledge my priviledge enough when I say that yeah, people have to suffer for all of us to grow, and it hurts that some of those people won’t be there with us in the end, and it’s terrifying to think that I could be one of those who don’t see the end.
So that’s where my question is. If a company experiences a +30% efficiency boost due to technology, does soceity benefit from it?
What I want to understand is whether or not that technology is creating more value.
I think the question to ask is value created for whom. Based on my personal and probably biased opinion, value is not created for the greater good but for the capital owners and shareholders.
And if so than more technology means more value which means we can eventually get to a place of so much societal surplus that we can reorchestrate soceity to enjoy the benefits of it.
Again, my opinion, but it’s not in the DNA of a capitalistic society to have surpluses so someone will capture it and try to squeeze out more. So in the event of a seismic technology advancement, my dystopian view is that the poor will not reap much benefits, and instead of billionaires, we will have trillionaires.
So that’s where my question is. If a company experiences a +30% efficiency boost due to technology, does soceity benefit from it?
I think if there is a counterbalance to capitalism and corporate greed then yes, some of that value will come back to society. Perhaps an improved medication at cost, better transit, emergency response technology… But if we leave it in the hands of capitalists they will enrich themselves very quickly.
I don’t feel like most of the work I’ve done in my career has generated value. A lot of the businesses I worked for were about inserting themselves between an actual business (e.g. hotels selling time in their rooms) and their users, and thereby generating economic rent.
Similarly, the obsession we have as developers and technologists with upgrading our stacks for, as you point out, marginal theoretical efficiency improvements - it’s just busywork. I swear a lot of what dev departments do is becoming more and more over-complicated wheel spinning purely to justify the size of the development team.
Not that I mind having a job that can be really rewarding and fits my skillset like little else.
