@samir I see almost a majority are as jaded as I am

@samir judging by the job openings I see, I'd say around half of products in IT are very, very harmful, and out of the second half, 90% range from mostly pointless to somewhat/indirectly harmful.
Meanwhile I'm a professional programmer :blobcat_googly_notlikethis:

@samir but which is it? I do 100% pointless, and 0% harmful!

@samir I imagine if your definition of "pointless" expands to include "ripoffs of things that already exist" the number approaches 90%. I myself spent years writing "Instagram for beauticians" because the venture capitalists were willing to ignore "but why wouldn't the beauticians just use the Instagram they have at home?"

@samir If your product isn’t harming somebody, how did they raise the money to pay you

@samir My guess is that about 99% of professional devs work on either pointless or actively harmful stuff. But my definition of 'pointless' is wide. Anything that serves capitalist goals, i.e. exists for the purpose of profitability or financial growths is pointless in my view. Most of the not pointless stuff is developed by volunteers, i.e. unpaid devs or scientists, who need software for doing their science, but who are not software engineers by profession.

@samir I'd say that a good many of the government projects I've worked on could have been made irrelevant by a robust single-payer healthcare system and universal basic income.

@samir 0 - 25%. Anyone who thinks it's higher has succumbed to propaganda.

@samir

A key qualification was the word "professional".

In most places 'programmers' are not members of a professional association with codes of conduct/ethics, nor are there standards of education/training, nor licensure or bond.

Which ultimately means the professionals do not know they can refuse unethical/immoral work requirements, nor have they organized to enforce their rights.

@samir I like to feel that I'm somewhat positive about this.

@samir the number skews way downwards once one realizes that the vast majority of programmers are not only not in Silicon Valley, but really not in tech companies.

So many programmers all around the world working in local systems to help drive local businesses of all sizes and local governments.

The "tech industry" that is overrepresented in English-speaking social media is only a part of what programming as a global activity really is, even if they hold great power over that whole.

@samir I'm gonna say 20% work on software that is pointless or directly evil, but another 25% work on software that is harmless but exists to *enable* evil. (As an example, Peter Thiel's companies have websites)

@samir Those feeling that way should look at medical programming. It can be damn tedious sometimes but at least what I'm working on right now is trying to help people who are disabled. Feels great to be working on that rather than fleecing lonely, rich old ladies out of their money (slot machines on ipads--play is with virtual money but you buy it with the real thing and they were making MILLIONS from rich old ladies).

@samir including but not limited to enterprise business software

@samir

Sturgeon's Rule always applies to everything; programming is really not that different

@samir

*cough* A.I. *cough* *cough*

Creating the dystopia of your childhood sci-fi novels.

@samir Harmful to what?

@samir My perspective is skewed by having mostly worked on embedded systems the last 30 years. Things like roadside weather monitoring, cell culture growth and analysis systems for medical research, and printers for date markings on eggs. I'm used to working on things that by and large are both useful and arguably beneficial.
On the other hand, I did spend a couple of years working for a bank before going back to the embedded world...

@samir can you give me some examples of ‘actively harmful products”?

@samir@mastodon.functional.computer never in my career have i worked on something i could stand by ethically on its own merits. now, the fact that it cost the company more to pay me to make it than it will ever bring them income or savings... thats praxis but still overall useless

@samir anything to make line go up

@samir Ouch.

@samir pointlessness and harmfulness changes over time of a project, so those percentages are slightly meaningless

@samir all of them :>

@samir
It is known that in the software industry about 80% of work goes to trash, so essentially pointless. But one can't know which until they try.

@samir Really that depends on how 'professional' is defined. If merely being paid then quite a lot. If properly trained, qualified and a member of the professional body and signed up to its code of practice then lower.

@samir most of the software I've been paid to develop professionally (>10 years) has been to solve imaginary or man-made problems.

@samir Actually everyone who is coding for non free open source software.
That's probably like 99%.

Considering work as synonym for paid labor, it would be actually very interesting to know how many are coding free software in their spare time.

@samir I think the number is small, because of the sheer number of "invisible" programmers doing vital but thankless work behind the scenes on internal systems and integrations.

@samir I’m a little optimistic on this front, actually. I think grifts like AI and crypto get disproportionate attention, but I think an awful lot of developers are just keeping the lights on at boring, normal, non-tech companies.

@samir as a programmer, I would say 50-75%. Most programmers I know are either clinging to FAANG jobs for the life of them (which are, obviously, evil - I long for the days of "don't be evil") or they are in some random startup creating a super shitty, niche product that has no possibility for a future. Most of the second category is caused by middle managers fundamentally not knowing what is right from a product point of view, but doing shit anyway.

@samir Most professional programmers are making sure the accounting system continues to work and other similarly mundane things. Not pointless, just not exciting.

@samir
I suspect the majority of professional programmers are doing something tedious and uninteresting that basically amounts to "convert company business logic into code".

@samir

The question is: useful /to whom/ ?

Useful to the people who will have to use the grotesque, duplicative monster of a vanity project. They talk in terms of rules.

Do not listen to the people who talk in exceptions.

@samir

You could formulate the question otherwise, like if you are writing software, on a scale of 1 to 4, how pointless or harmful is it? And define pointless... like, #libcaca is uber-pointless but probably not harmful, compared to a video game, casino software, social media, emissions-cheating firmware, autonomous weapons?

@samir

A good fraction of those jobs were mine.

@samir I want my vote back, this is all posturing.

@samir That's funny, I was just reading this earlier:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-complex-problem-of-lying-for-jobs/

@samir The ones who are working on stuff that's not pointless or actively harmful mostly aren't getting paid for it, and I guess thereby don't fall under "professional"... 🤦

@samir actually i'd say 80-90% but somehow picked the third option weird me

@samir huh, didn't expect this much optimism about the profession. i'd say at least 95%. mind you, i'm jaded and bitter after somewhat abruptly realizing how much harm i've contributed to at my old job. leave tech to amateurs, everyone will be better off.

@samir the only reason I didn't put a majority is because I know there's a lot of professional programmers in boring companies making boring products, which are almost but not completely pointless, and are net harmless if not net harm reducing.

But then there's a lot of programmers in tech, military, banking, fossil fuels, which make me think the overall impact is pointless harmful work

@samir "Shapes on shapes, wasted time/Pointless points along a line;/Head down, straight on, you'll be fine." --Jonathan Coulton, "Robots.txt"

@samir There are few things here. Is there ever a point to anything? Also hasn't all progress been pointless or actively harmful to some folks? This is a philosophy question that most folks don't like or even think about. Progress for progress sake is very harmful. A lot of medical progress has been very harmful to some group of people because people think they have the moral high ground but most don't. Programmers are not immune to this too.

@samir pointless and actively harmful are very different things

@samir@mastodon.functional.computer 50-75%

Those evil corporations, sadly, pay bills.

@samir This figure used to be higher. Nowadays, a lot of professional programmers are working on pointless or harmful *services* instead.

It’s not that software is intrinsically antisocial, though. It’s just that prosocial programming tends to not pay.

@samir 0-25%. Anyone who thinks it's higher than that has succumbed to propaganda.

@samir

I think the vast majority of programmers are doing business logic inside non tech companies. Banks and insurance, manufacturing.
Think: database procedures and accounting. COBOL. The vast majority.

@samir "pointless"? If you include "someone else has already done this" in that, it must approach 100%.

@samir Yeah I hovered over 50-75%, then I remembered reading somewhere that 90% of projects never even get put into use.

@samir most of them are probably forced to make shit programs by corporate companies. I doubt all the programmers that work on fake ai stuff want this future

@samir i got my first tech job in 1998. i have been in this field a loooooong time. the correct answer is definitely 75-100. almost all of tech is completely toxic at this point.

@samir how many software guys work at meta, google and Microsoft again?

@samir 40%?

@samir when I use the official #mastodon app, clicking on the vote button lets the result switch to 75-100%. Voting in #fediverse is so buggy you could assume it is done by Microsoft.

@samir depends on what you think of side grades (maybe to use a more "modern" stack with no real purpose), pointless updates corporate clients want, what is a valid point (gaming? Convenience?), etc. I said pretty low, cuz I'm counting sidegrades & wrong-feeling opinions from clients & stuff that supports eye-rolley businesses

@samir
Who decides that the software is pointless or harmful?

If there is sponsor to give money then the sponsor expect a return of investment.

The world is to busy and money is often an issue, it means that it is easier to cancel a negative ROI product than investing more money in it.

@samir ITT: depressed and burned out programmers

@samir more pointless than actively harmful but maybe at that point in time, given the progress of climate catastrophe, pointsless is already harmful in itself and not active in the right direction is already active in the opposite direction?

@samir I don't think those categories are always clearly separated. I'm currently working on a great and useful product but the work environment makes sure that it will become useless in the end.

so in this case it is not a property of the product itself but of the organizational structure.

@samir I'm definitely one of them. I work in the advertising industry which actively violates everyone's privacy and gets away with it every day.

@samir I'm not a "professional programmer" (I'm a hacker whose job title says "security engineer") and I do R&D work that protects the surveillance capitalism "Ad Tech" ecosystem from fraud, but this work gets botnets shut down.

Also, I spend a large portion of my income from this on fighting human rights violations.

I have no idea how to answer this, it's complicated, I really dislike advertising, but think people doing fraud are worse. 🤷

@samir it's going to depend on what the definition of pointless and harmful is

@samir fascinating question! One interesting cause of "pointlessness" is when multiple folks work on implementing their own nigh-identical versions of a thing for which they don't think it makes sense to publicize or share it

@samir

Is there such a thing as a pointless project that's not actively harmful?

@samir My very uneducated guess, around 50%. I hope less, I fear more.

@samir I'm voting high because so many of my customers suffer from lost time, confidence and data because of badly-designed software; mostly UX but often locking data behind proprietary formats, or being difficult to backup.