
Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all? - rblion
Just curious. A lot has changed between 2009 and 2019. I still love design and engineering to solve valuable problems in day-to-day life and society at large. I am also aware of the public sentiment&#x2F;resentment towards the industry as a whole. There is much to be said and to discuss. I would love to hear what you think and feel, what you are doing with your time and skills.
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perfunctory
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real,
his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares,
how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won
for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into
the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep
alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do
not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the
abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the
age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too
long to strive and not to enjoy.

\-- John Maynard Keynes [0]

My personal conspiracy theory is that the age of abundance has already come
but we just don't know what to do with it other than keep working our BS jobs.

[0]
[http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf](http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)

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gervu
We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not
so equally distributed.

It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most
of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power
from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

~~~
wait-a-minute
Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone
would've expected?

[https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-
poverty](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)

"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a
reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the
25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme
poverty.17

On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline
reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since
yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our
world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on
this online publication.

Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the
headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000
since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the
number of people in extreme poverty ever."

~~~
gervu
The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are
simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource
allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced.

I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic
economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at
which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial,
which is...well, it's a thing.

~~~
wait-a-minute
The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth
hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not
the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire
planet.

So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated
the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of
solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely
relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.

Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty.
Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a
much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years
ago.

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perfunctory
When I am in the office I constantly hear my inner voice whispering into my
ear - b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t.

P.S.
[http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...](http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html)

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codingdave
I admit that some companies are better than other about being mission-driven,
and concerned about their impact on society. But I'm not sure we can
generalize about the tech industry as a whole on that level, even if the
general public does exactly that.

Working in this industry, in particular if you are not in SV, you see the
variety of people, purposes, and goals that comprise tech companies.

As far as what I do personally, I've focused my career in the public sector
since 2012, writing software that saves money for school districts. I watch
the pricing models that our sales team comes up with to be aware whether they
cross the line where our fees are greater than the cost savings, and therefore
would cut into student funding. My side projects focus on building tools to
help the creative efforts of my children. In short, I try to avoid work that
is purely money-driven.

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throw51319
Yeah 100%. I'm in my second job out of school working at a big bank in tech.
It's mindnumbingly uninteresting to me. And I also don't think it does
anything to help society. Though sometimes the technical problems fit the bill
of being interesting, it doesn't come close to filling the gap.

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CM30
No, not really. Honestly, I don't think there's much resentment towards tech
at all. There's a bit towards the largest companies like Facebook and Google
sure, but most companies in the tech industry have pretty good reputations,
and even the likes of Facebook aren't exactly 'hated' by the majority of the
population.

Most people appreciate what I... no we do. Every app and site I've worked has
been liked by both clients and customers.

Instead, the tech 'backlash' side is being played up by the media rather than
the public. Likely because technology and the internet in particular has
decimated their business model, and the people working there aren't exactly
happy about it. But that's not the sentinment of most, it's just looking like
it is because the folks with the largest megaphones are the ones most against
it.

Do I feel some dissonance in some things? Sure, I guess I've always found it
hard to reason that someone making say, hundreds of thousands or
millions/billions of pounds or dollars a year really deserves that much more
than everyone else. But that's not really a tech thing.

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bjourne
Yes.

To much tech is likely not helpful. I think social media makes people
lonelier, porn and online games are also not completely nonproblematic. If you
plot a curve with amount of tech on the x-axis and happiness on the y-axis
then I think it would look like a parabola (hill). And most people in the
Western world are probably beyond the maximum.

Someone will object that pacemakers save lives, Facebook helps people
reconnect with old friends and Fitbit motivates people to get in shape. That
is all true, but such tech-enabled activities seem to be in the minority...
Like reading news sites for 15 minutes per day is time well-spent. But
reloading news sites and idly browsing through headlines every 15 minutes per
day is a waste of time.

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mortivore
Nope. My conscience is clean. I don't work for a company with a spy/sell data
business model.

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winkeyless
We might as well imagine a company you work for that is trustworthy and does
none of the spy/sell data business. And also imagine that the product of the
company has been rapidly replacing a million jobs in 5 years and creating
merely 200 different jobs in San Francisco demanding higher level of
education. A bit extreme but I don’t think it’s unimaginable. Would you feel
the same if I may ask?

~~~
mortivore
If I were in such a job I would be very happy about it. I view work as a means
to an end. Work to live, don't live to work. A society without jobs would be
wonderful. If something I was working on would eliminate the jobs of millions,
then we would be closer to having no jobs at all. In such a position I would
feel like I was really contributing to a greater future.

~~~
zhaomizhi
It is true that lots of job in market do not treat people as human. Lots of
them are just repeatable labor work and require very minimal level of
creativity or innovation. In this sense, i agreed that eliminating these jobs
would be a huge step for the whole society. However, I don't think the
government and these giant capitalist tech company is ready or have a plan
about how to distribute resource and money they earned. Also, i am not sure
how you define the work here. Instead of eliminate work, i would think working
for what you truly believe can give you satisfaction since you are being
rewarded for what you do and make.

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tomjen3
I don't believe that the public as such hate tech. A bit more weary about
Facebook, perhaps, but not much more than. The rest is just obsolete media
hating tech for being better than them.

We are nerds, we should be able to spot bullies and their tactics well by now.
As a minimum we should not allow them to bully us.

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psv1
> I am also aware of the public sentiment/resentment towards the industry as a
> whole.

Can you or anyone else elaborate on this? I'm really not aware of this
negative sentiment.

~~~
hashkb
You can easily find this yourself. One major issue is that we're pricing
people out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for years.

~~~
psv1
Are you saying that tech salaries being generally higher than other
industries' is a problem?

~~~
hashkb
No, of course I am not saying that. I'm saying it's a complicated issue that's
currently playing out in public and you can read about it from many well-
articulated points of view if you do a bit of Googling.

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segmondy
No.

