Having programmed computers for almost 40 years now the best advice I have for programmers is: what you’re doing is primarily a social job, not a technical one.
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Thomas 🔭✨ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 13:22:03 JST Thomas 🔭✨
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Thomas 🔭✨ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 13:32:37 JST Thomas 🔭✨
This isn’t just an empty aphorism.
Unless you are an ethical person who strongly cares about not making other human beings suffer—you cannot make high quality software.
This includes not making software at all when as a consequence of that software other human beings would suffer.
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Pär Björklund (paxxi@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 14:57:12 JST Pär Björklund
@thomasfuchs the tech is the easy part, relatively speaking
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Thomas 🔭✨ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 01:20:45 JST Thomas 🔭✨
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Dick Morrell (cloudguy@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 01:20:46 JST Dick Morrell
I posted about this the other week. I have told my kids if they follow me into technology I will be massively let down.
Because reinventing yourself every few years and having to certify against technologies that are crap and to listen to vendors and platform folk who are the same people in the same roles in 10 different companies in 10 years gets boring.
Because the world will never not need undertakers, plumbers, electricians, plasterers and carpenters.
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datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 01:20:46 JST datarama
@cloudguy @thomasfuchs I spent the last ten years of my life in education (teaching CS, mostly the applied part, at my country's version of community college), and now I'm back in the trenches as an industrial embedded dev.
I like my job, but my general exhaustion with the "tech sector" as a whole is getting worse and worse. Reading tech news increasingly feels more like "which horrors are they about to unleash on us all now?", less "which neat things can we do now?".
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Thomas 🔭✨ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 01:49:34 JST Thomas 🔭✨
@datarama @lachezar And withe everyone using your software. Computers don't exist in a bubble, they're a tool—always used by humans to do achieve some goal.
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datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 01:49:35 JST datarama
@lachezar @thomasfuchs You're still interacting with anybody who ends up reading your code.
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lachezar (lachezar@mastodon.nu)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 01:49:37 JST lachezar
@thomasfuchs but what about all the people who love programming because it does not require interaction with other people… have we been so gullible 🥲
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Thomas 🔭✨ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 02:28:51 JST Thomas 🔭✨
@snarfmason @reiterator I think in many other occupations people are more aware of it; computer science folk often pretend people don’t exist.
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Jon (Snarf) Mason (snarfmason@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 02:28:52 JST Jon (Snarf) Mason
@reiterator @thomasfuchs the statement probably applies to all jobs.
But the software industry is up there with oil and gas in our ability to pretend externalities of our job don't matter and we are all really sure that software is, in fact, a purely technical endeavour.
Most fields know they are social actors.
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reiterator (reiterator@mas.to)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 02:28:53 JST reiterator
@thomasfuchs is this unique to software? I can’t think of a job it doesn’t apply to.
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0 (https://gh0st.live/users/0)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 04:08:45 JST 0
@thomasfuchs post your git. likes this. -
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Alec Muffett (alecmuffett@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 16-Feb-2024 06:41:39 JST Alec Muffett
@thomasfuchs 42 years, and much of my career is in dual-use technology: writing password crackers and hacking tools and releasing them for the public good, promoting end to end encryption and privacy in the face of Government critics who demand that it enables child abuse and terrorism...
So: forgive me if I suggest that your perspective demands some nuance?
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Thomas 🔭✨ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 16-Feb-2024 06:41:39 JST Thomas 🔭✨
@alecmuffett This is a social network post, not a PhD defense in computer ethics.
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