
Ask HN: Do you ever feel disillusioned with tech industry as a whole? - good_vibes
I find more and more that I don&#x27;t really care about a lot of startups or what the Big Four&#x2F;Five are doing. I care about how technology is shaping society and how design can improve my quality of life but beyond that, who really cares?
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marichards
We seem to be an industry with a severe lack of professionalism.

We fail to manage risk, we neglect security, we rarely know we are regulated
and we hold an air of contempt about the idea of being asked to pay for our
failings like any other industry (car manufacturer, drugs, etc). It's too hard
to make perfect software, but really easy to make everything else? The list
goes on... We have made huge innovations and made real impacts, but we largely
aren't doing it safely or respectfully and our attitude to privacy is
horrifying. You might think you are okay, but look around you: look at the
security of how you deploy, the missing tests, the broken accessibility, the
trove of user data in your company, the code maintainability strategy, the lip
service paid to copyright, the sheer number of hacks, etc. There are many who
would like things to improve and many who challenge the norm, but that
challenge will never be formalised until we lead from professional bodies
spearheading how we should do things, rather than corporate bodies and
celebrities pushing their agenda.

~~~
borplk
You could also say that the observations that you point out is simply the
outcome of economic forces at play.

That degree of professionalism is not rewarded enough. Or the lack of it is
not punished.

So from the perspective of a business person, why go chase more burdens when
you can hack together some polished turd on top of mostly free tools and sell
it for millions?

I guess this is embedded in the last part of the parent comment.

~~~
open_bear
What makes it worse is that programmers don't have an ethical code, akin to
what engineers and doctors have. CEO says we need to track every user? Sure,
boss! Show invasive ads up every user's orifice? Can do! Ship it, who cares if
we wipe out some poor bloke's photos.

And as long as programmers have very big salaries (compared to the rest) and
are in demand - they have no incentive to organize and fight for their rights
and rights to not do unethical things.

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atmosx
All the time. Take a look at the frontpage how many "DevOps" related
conversations:

    
    
        - what is
        - what is not
        - whois doing it (is it a verb?!)
    

I mean it's hilarious and I define myself as a DevOps engineer because if I
say sysadmin, for some reason ppl will ask me about AWS, Python/Ruby, Bash,
Ansible, etc.

Anyway, serves as a reminder that my time is better spent reading technical
books, watching keynotes (BCantrill's are nice) and not reading nonsense. It's
the internet, you need to protect yourself from topics that have a high noise
to substance ratio and these discussions are all noise.

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agitator
Yeah totally, 95% percent of what we do as humans is superficial garbage. Just
a bunch of apes thumping their chests. "Look I made a thing!" But does it
really matter? Probably not. I think having your mindset, you can make a
bigger and more important impact on the world. I wish more people would think
about real improvements to society, quality of life, our future as a species,
etc. As opposed to random stupid gadgets... We have soooo many engineers in
world, and a majority of them are working on mind sucking social media and
advertising.

~~~
good_vibes
Thanks for the encouragement. I've was rejected from YC and have been staving
off burn out. I just moved back home to 'start over' and try one more time.
Learning Adobe XD to design it myself and just whatever coding knowledge I
have to make it minimally functional. I'm not ready to quit just yet. :)

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ubikretail
We are not making the difference among cultural and technical determinism.
Hence, we are buying mere narcissistic inventions as progress. It could be
simply that Humanity needs a bit more experience handling IT. If I could
change something, I would turn every Snapchat addict into a Wikipedia editor
and would put Twitter to work like Reddit.

This is also a sign for a tech bubble; as long as startups keep creating no
value beyond aesthetics.

I recommend you read "You Are Not A Gadget" by Jaron Lanier ;)

~~~
good_vibes
I agree. A lot of me-too companies made by me-too entrepreneurs. If this was
rock n roll, a lot of these people would never sell more than a few records.
People respond extremely well to authenticity and originality, not so much
pretense (which can work for only so long).

Got a copy from my library, thanks for the tip. :)

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bsvalley
It's like any other industry. You need to build a good brand in order to sell
your products. What you mentioned are just brands... it's marketing. They all
aim at the same things anyway so it doesn't matter who does what.

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bradknowles
What ever made you feel like you should have any illusions to start with?

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jf22
Are we supposed to care about a lot of startups or whatever the big companies
are doing?

