Technology

I have saved this, but I am also commenting on it so I don't lose this gem.

I started to hate the tech industry, especially with the AI bubble/hype and the whole tech powered Gaza genocide going on. I feel I am contributing to make this shitty world even shittier.

I worked on the public sector in my home country (Brazil) and even though I worked on very important initiatives (such as the information systems behind the COVID relief package for all Brazilians during the pandemic), I do feel the public sector is too contaminated by the tech industry mentality.

The hustle culture is very present, as well as the cost cutting mentality, and a cock sucking attitude towards US tech monopolies. I have stomach butterflies just for thinking on how many discussions I had with different people, especially in the top hierarchy, for their obsession in using bloated Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or any other Gartner magic quadrant listed tech, instead of just using a simple low cost Spring or name your OSS framework with a PostgreSQL instance so we wouldn't be vendor locked in. And the same mentality of working late hours and weekends just to appease potential clients and business to increase revenue is there. I think I had a much more exploitative relationship working in one of the big Brazilian public sector tech companies than I am doing right now in a private company.

The directors of the public state-owned companies are actually indicated from outside (politicians, top level bureaucrats and executives from the private sector) based on a neoliberal agenda that seek to provide services to provide data and public information for private companies. For example, there's an initiative called "empréstimo consignado", which is a kind of loan discounted directly from all government granted benefits. So whenever someone retires and receive a pension, banks and financial institutions are notified and start to offer pensionists (often in a difficult financial situation) loan packages with astronomical interest rates which often put those people in a even worse condition. Today, Dataprev earns more revenue on the "Empréstimo Consignado" than by processing social benefits for the population.

So, I think in the end, for our own survival and for the good of our society we need to fight back. While it is good to live outside of the tech industry but in the end we have no option but fighting it. So even if we need to take a break to work on more meaningful stuff in the name of our own sanity, we cannot avoid the fight which can only be done as workers, by taking possession of the means of production, doing strikes to halt the system down and breaking this profit making machine that only cares about increasing shareholder value.

i did this about six months ago with the public institution path that the author described and it was because i learned that i was helping to build bombs and also because lemmy taught me that i was entrenching american empirical hegemony upon this world.

the financial waste i'm seeing in the public institution i joined is staggering compared to the faang and old-silicon companies that i've worked for, but it's on par with the 2 other public institutions that I worked in over the last 25-ish years. i suspect that it has something to do with the experience/skill level disparities between the public and private sectors and, every time i bring this up w my management, their response is always the same: we lack the armies of engineers it takes to reduce costs.

this response was identical at each public institution and i think i heard it more often than most because of my open source proclivities. it's clear it's a bullshit talking point that the vendors fed to my management like the american oligarchy feeds to americans about 3rd party voting and i think i can smell some of it to in this article when it suggests working for an ngo.

the article only focuses on the ostensible mission statements of ngo's, but too conveniently fails to mention that a huge majority of the ngo's who can afford to pay tech workers a livable wage are sponsored by government organizations like usaid. like me, the tech workers might have successfully avoided having such a direct impact on building those bombs, but they're still re-enforcing the hegemony that uses them on innocent people.

Personally, I made a career change which is still in its infancy - but I'm excited about the prospects. I miss my tech salary, but was chronically underpaid in tech at the same time. I'm basically at the bottom, doing what is slightly above an entry level job (I started a bit over a year ago) but I feel so much better about my work.

I still take the time to teach my friends & community as many things as I can tech-wise & give them technical support when they need it, & have thought about teaching a community class based on tech literacy & more advanced concepts if there is an appetite for it. I was thinking about creating a sliding scale (down to free) for the class & using most of it for getting laptops for people who need it. I was also thinking about sending out a call for old computers/laptops & breathing in new life to them by installing Linux & making them run decently well again.

These are mostly just brainstorms, things I haven't gone fully in on yet - but I feel like the exodus from tech can be a really strong force organizing the people against the state, and I feel these days that tech literacy/tech support from people who have the knowledge is a huge part of that.