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.

Welcome, you have discovered the alienation of labour in the field of IT. People were dealing with this shit for decades and it will keep happening as long as we live under capitalism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Oh man I know how you feel. You need to find a balance. You don't have to work 5-7 days a week to live. As a skilled worker you can survive from 4 days or less. Especially if you can remote and live in a cheap place. You can spend your other work days on whatever you find to be valuable. I dunno works for me.

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.

It's all bullshit, and you've hit the nail on the head.

The only way out is through each other: change your workplace to be less bullshit. Demand dignity. Maybe bring your friends and make a co-op.

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’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!

I do IT for a non profit. Luckily, it's one that is funded by membership dues so I don't have to fundraise, which includes a ton of advertising and the like. True, I'm not making bank like a lot of folks in IT. But my peace of mind is intact. I make a good living, and feel good about what I do. Jobs like mine are out there, but when you're a student all you hear about is the vast amount of money you can make quickly by selling your soul to amazon or whoever. If you keep at it, there is a path in IT that does not include losing sight of your values. Good luck!!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.