IT Devs of of Lemmy, How do You Cope with Being Forced to Contribute to 'Social Media Pornshow of the Web'™ or Die?

1. Your attitude is correct, don't support enshittification and don't do anything you're not comfortable doing

2. Don't replace cursewords with stupid characters, this is Lemmy.

This is one reason devs sometimes spend free time contributing to open source. It feels good to know your skills are going towards a passion, and builds a resume around what you love.

Work that isn't super unethical exists. It pays well but not obscenely well like ad industry. If you are a highly in demand engineer you are making a choice by working for an ad company.

I work for the federal government and spend my time at work making open sourced software and outside of work contributing to open source. My job is centered around forwarding science for the betterment of society, not around making the company more money.

As a result, I'm happier. My salary could probably be about 25% higher in the private sector. However, my job is secure through retirement and the pension plan and work life balance is sensational. This year i will have taken a month off between vacations and use-or-lose. I also have banked over 2500 hours of sick leave that don't drop off. I also work fully remote though my office is 7 minutes away with no traffic.

Do not work for a company that defies your moral compass. Period. Integrity is what makes legends.

Companies are led by humans and their morals and priorities reflect all the way down.

Surely there are other programming jobs you can get? I work on IT service management software for mostly the public sector. We can't even use Google Analytics. How about embedded systems? Automation for factories? Medical software? I once worked on AI for detecting lesions in eye-fundus photographs, to screen for diabetes. There's plenty of specialized software for nice niche sectors, for example I did cost estimation and planning software for the construction industry. Or you can go work for some indie developer to make games. Put away some money and you can eventually start your own company to make the kind of software you enjoy making.

Without doxxing myself, I worked for a small firm that helped "tech for good" companies to build their MVP or product towards Series A-C funding.

In the four years I worked with them, I don't remember a single project there that wasn't tainted by corruption, dodgy owners, or outright lies. This ranges from:

• The owner of a popular wellness and workplace stress app getting pissed off with me because a bug was found in a Node backend I had built for her (a PDF upload didn't fill the correct fields in the DB). Her support contract was up with us, so she took the sane approach - literally calling my employer out on LinkedIn, and me by name as being an "incompetent developer". Legal got involved, and she had to issue an apology online.
• Several instances of outright lying in pitch decks about customer numbers and eco credentials to get "green" funding.
• The company itself transitioning to crypto, despite pushing the fact that they only work on tech for good projects, while being run by a COO with a history of being inappropriate, having heavy drug/alcohol use, and being genuinely fucking useless in the world of tech.
• A workplace surveying tool to unlock happiness in the workplace getting funding through our work, then deciding to fire the entire fucking team we had built to run their product because they wanted to cut costs and sell to the highest bidder - a company notorious for horrendous workplace practices.
• Someone bragging about their CTO working at Amazon for 5 years. While true, it was in a fulfillment center.
• Countless charities that burn through money in ways you wouldn't believe, or act hypocritical to their main mission. Imagine trying to fire someone at a mental health charity because they needed time off from stress, or making dead kid jokes at a fundraiser for a children's charity...

Working at that place made me realise that sometimes the best you can hope for is a leadership structure that aren't total assholes, and to work on something that you at least have some faith in.

This is my biggest problem with working as a programmer. I enjoy solving complex programming problems, learning about new algorithms, exploring new technologies. Instead every job seems to be "add new button with questionable requirements" or "add thing to the backend that nobody thought about for more than 3 seconds". All for questionable goals like advertisement, surveillance, big oil, fintech, or defense of course. It's kind of a bummer, but at least it pays well and it beats most other jobs.

I moved to EdTech from gaming - mobile gaming felt so damn focussed on value extraction.

Several of your use cases are just a different career. I optimize factory Workflows for a living, it’s industrial engineering, and it’s a very different skill set from programming

Web design is not the only option for someone who likes programming. Since you are still a student, there are so many options in front of you. You can be an embedded engineer and work closer to hardware, design firmware, electronic chips themselves or their verification environment. You can be a software engineer and work on business-to-business software which does not include adds and is very useful (e.g. CAD tools, inventory trackers for supermarkets and hospitals etc.). There is so much you can do, pursue something you are enthusiastic about.

Not sure myself, I'm trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren't anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you're starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.

But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there's no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won't align with yourself or the other workers fully, it's just a question of degree.

Go into embedded software. You can’t do ads if there is no UI taps head.

There's plenty of work to be found in the public sector, the pay may be a bit less but I've always found the work to be satisfying and diverse. And, though this might be a European thing, the job security is usually quite high.
On top of that, the domain knowledge you build with working in these kinds of organizations can be quite valuable.

While I do work for a giant, soulless corporation that definitely exploits people, the product I work on is actually useful to don't marginalized people.

So I'm not contributing to the enshittification of the Internet.

I work in bioinformatics, which is the application of computer science to biological problems. I have set up a genetic sequencing machine and nearly a petabyte of storage and backup for all the data because it's huge. I really like my field because it is the application of my skills to solving problems real world problems. I'm currently employed by a children's hospital creating tools to make genetic testing procedures better. Very fulfilling.

The field does have some issues. Many of the tools are research projects, not necessarily written by good programmers. Getting things working is a task in itself, but is becoming easier thanks to containerization technologies. Also, the pay for some reason is lower than IT work, even though it's an interdisciplinary field requiring knowledge of biology, IT and programming. But I worked as a programmer for a few years, fixing bugs and not really working on making anything new or interesting, and I wouldn't go back to that even though it paid better.

Well I chose my employers very carefully when I can, so after video games :-) it has been companies tied to government, research or the medical field and you actually do something good or at least useful IMO.

I'm not an IT guy though, I'm a developer, but I think it's the same battle in the end.

Not a developer but a recent engineering grad. I get SO MUCH spam from the literal US military and defense contractors looking for people to work on their actual weapons. Surface-to-air missiles, nuclear submarines, air warfare, electronic warfare ... these are actual "opportunities" that have landed in my inbox courtesy of my dipshit school career center's lack of morals. I need a job, but I would literally rather skin myself and eat it then work for those monsters at any salary.

I simply refuse.

I work in a niche part of the IT world, and I have plenty of niche skills, so if they wanted me to do that kind of stuff they're paying for the skills for which I was hired, while using me for something they could get someone much cheaper to do.

I'll stick to my clustered storage racks and make things work in harsh environments. I like it, I'm good at it, it pays well, and I don't have to deal with the awful shit that often falls under IT.

Unfortunately 90% of jobs require contributing to and reinforcing the worst aspects of society.

Disengage, mostly.

I’m good at tech stuff but I hate 99% of the work that I’m good at, so i just treat it as the revenue source that it is and try not to think about it too much.

If things in my life had gone differently I may have had to mine coal somewhere to get my paycheck, so overall it isn’t that bad.

The idea of getting paid to do stuff I enjoy is buried there with the rest of my youth delusions.

SWE's don't want to work in factories, generally, because pay is shit and hours are worse than selling your soul to bay area tech.

Even so, I'm planning to go back.

I work in a company where our 'customers' are from the same company. So, it makes little sense to fuck over our customers.
They do want to do things with GenAI now, and while I have no personal interest in them, nor think it's a terribly great strategic decision to go all-in with that, I don't have to care. My company can fuck itself over, that's fine by me. And well, while I prefer to and am significantly more efficient, if I work with tools that I care to use privately, at some point, it is a job and if you pay stupid amounts of money for me to learn that on the job, then so be it.

Everything’s generative-AI, GANs, LLMs… now, which do not produce any value,

hey, I think my LLM satire news thing is cool, at least I have fun with it

It sounds like youre helping making the world a worse place.

better things exist, but nothing is ever perfect.

it would be better to learn to dettach your self-esteem from the job. think on work like the chore it is, like taking out the trash and washing dishes, something you do to pay the bills

I took decades of experience plus adhd medication and depression medication to get where I am. I still feel annoyed to be using tech I don't like and doing stuff I don't like, but I'm handling it a lot better now

These examples of soul sucking jobs will be the loudest recruiting companies, because no one wants to work there. They can sometimes pay well too.

Highly skilled people are needed in a lot of practical industries that pay a bit less (but still well enough). You just need to seek them out.