link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675112
this thread is filled with insane shit
all about things technology has done to actively make life worse for us all
This is why I tell people outside of engineering majors that I despise my major and everyone in it. 90% aspire to make shit like this. Maybe they know what the end goal, maybe they don’t. I’d say those who are gleefully making hundreds of thousands of dollars without researching what they products do are worse than the ghouls who are self aware
Yup.
Everyone plays golf, half of them have 5 or 10 year plants to become management/executives, many of them love to network…
I know 1-2 people who seem remotely cool in my entire ass fortune 500 company, and I’m scared that 1 of those is some kind of weird ass libertarian
I’ve been making the same jokes about my law degree for the past 4-5 years. Even before I radicalized and moved left, I despised so many of the people in my classes. Like a solid third of all the men in my courses wanted to be Harvey Spectre SO badly, and they all just fell flat. Also, way too many fucking people showed up to class in a suit, but thankfully we were able to bully those people into not doing it again.
And yet it is controversial to say that this person has a parasitic relationship with the Global South.
Nooooooo they’re a WORKER, that means they’re inherently good!
And yet it is controversial to say that this person has a parasitic relationship with the Global South.
I don’t know that anyone has ever argued that logistics software engineers, or DOD Contractors are not pimples on the ass of humanity.
It’s when you extrapolate that proposition out to literally anyone & everyone who ever breathed the air of a country in the Imperial Core that you start sounding like a “Pol Pot Guy”.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the mass of American workers are not poor, misled souls controlled by the evil government, but largely rational actors who correctly see that they gain more from the American project than they are exploited by it, on an almost 1:1 basis that scales with how much money they make.
Just like the poor white settlers who undertook the project of Manifest Destiny, they correctly see where their interests lie.
of course the second top comment is saying they feel guilt for writing some tracking code for China.
edit: and another one, kinda spooky comment about how the western companies were using my tech totally wholesomely, but not Syria and Burma!!
I built software to track our traders. This was at one of the largest investment banks in the world and at the time they had a rudimentary system for tracking and recording their in-house traders activities - orders, trades, and other order/trade related information. At the time, the rudimentary system was built mostly to comply with government regulations, and was later modified by someone else to capture and report a larger scope of information about the traders to a higher-up department.
My system was built entirely from scratch because the existing system was antiquated, poorly structured, and really not conducive to future expansions.
After testing and implementing my system, a handful of traders lost their jobs as a result. One criteria often looked at was their number and reasons for failure to delivers (FTD’s).
Other than that, it’s mostly automating things that I almost sort of regret. A lot of folks in the bank were fired after I wrote a series of apps that could do the work they do. Mostly repetitive tasks. Still feel bad about that but if I didn’t do it, they would have hired someone else and at the time I was really, really in dire need for a paycheck.
lol
