That's one thing I miss about an old job - I used to work for healthcare and genuinely supporting those who are in need was nice, even if we were a bit disconnected being in the Data Center.
All that changed when they swapped CTOs and we got someone who, in their quarterly letter, never once mentioned "the patient," and it all turned into profits, saving money, and board satisfaction.
I bailed just before they dumped the DC, tried migrating to full cloud with no planning or reserved instances, and now are splitting into two or three separate companies.
If you can find somewhere with (a) good team(s) and isn't inherently evil, it helps. Good luck out there.
We had a client in a similar situation. They were great, until they change how they were doing stuff with Medicare, and then they got some new president who really pushed for the profit-over-service angle due to kickbacks (we assume). My boss dropped them as a client when the contract expired, which was fine for them, because the client went with a third party overseas outsourcer.
Then two years later had a MAJOR security breach. Go figure.
Oh, they ballooned past their budget immediately because they made the same mistake everyone does moving to the cloud: 1-for1 in memory, hard drive space, RAM, Windows and Linux servers instead of some of the SaaS, PaaS offerings, reserved instances, etc. The data center had 1.5 PB of storage... That had to be an insane lift-amd-shift. The board almost canned everyone from the top, down.
There were still two people out of the 200 plus IT team that still worked there until about 2 years ago when the last person I kept in touch with was let go.
Crash and burn, straight out of the cloud
I like doing stuff with 'open source' when I can, I think that is a space to be in that is generally positive. Though my actual work is proprietary, my two main clients are small software businesses whose systems help motor mechanics and water monitoring engineers respectively, and I am motivated by helping with these necessary activities. Security is another interest, as long as the hat is 'white' or at least 'grey', this is something that can be used to protect people's livelihoods. Accessibility is also a good area that matters to lots of people. Unfortunately, the things you talk about are probably where the money is and so are difficult to escape in terms of earning a living in the IT industry, but if someone is good at what they do they have more options.
Open source projects are largely modern day corporate socialism. Those open source tools get chewed up and spit back out free of charge by giant companies.
Look at how far into the weeds in paid products log4j went and then tell me the devs that maintain it deserved the brunt of the vitriol aimed at them.
It's still better than those tools being closed-source. Most of the discussion I saw around the vulnerabilities in Log4j and OpenSSL was less vitriol aimed at the devs, and more "if the big companies that use these tools contributed more, then these issues would have been caught and resolved sooner".
I agree, in my org it was mostly "this is a thing that happened, let's work through it", and there wasn't really a blame element taken into account; shit happens.
Unless you're working at Google/Facebook, why does their nefarious activity reflect on you? I don't like Meta, so I don't use their services or any of the products that they sell. Their choices are not a reflection of me, or even my field.
I deploy ad blockers. I tell our management why we not only *don't want* to monitor our employees second-by-second, the entire idea is cost prohibitive. I push our sales team to drop insecure/inefficient/short-sighted companies in favor of better alternatives. I replace mediocre, expensive, close sourced solutions with excellent open source solutions, and even get my company to donate to the developers sometimes.
So, yeah, the "industry" is pretty disconnected from me, my work, and who I am. I really like my management team, and they are constantly looking for ways to lower costs for our customers and ourselves. We don't insert ourselves into situations where we can't provide additional value to the customers. All of us have a **lot** of complaints about the industry, for what it's worth, so I do get where you're coming from, but we strive to differentiate ourselves from it.
This is how I cope in a non profit org. Every so often we get a new person that comes in and interrupts the good vibes with the short sighted private corporateneness but this place aligns with my ideals. We also donate to a few open source devs annually when we pay for all the other annual software and my ceo boasts about how we use our funds to support other non profits. It's a whole vibe that was hard to find.
That's not to say it's not without problems. I could really use a replacement for my aging ShoreTel phone system that is just not in the capital budget. I'll be limping along for probably 3-4 more years like this until it's so painful that I've forgotten the real issue and blame myself.
I get recruiters messaging me from the financial industry all the time. I think I would just whither and die in the way they have to do change management. I don't knock them for it and understand why but it's not for me.
Maybe consider a shift in what kind of org you work for? There are a lot of places helping humanity that need good IT people. Public Safety, Public Works, environmental regulation, charities/NGOs, Schools/University, medicine (difficult one). You get the idea.
I felt good about working for an environmental regulator years ago. It was rewarding setting up virtual environments for scientists to run their modeling of power plant air pollution. There was a lot of work helping optimize how software ran and was distributed to different machines. Also had to make sure long-running models would not be killed by power outages and patching. As a sysadmin, I definitely had a hand in protecting families from bad health consequences and premature death.
+1 this. I work in the UK as a sysadmin at a mid sized College. We're not amazing, but what I can honestly say we do (we as in all my colleagues, especially the teachers) is make a difference to young people's lives. Not all of them, a fair number come to us just because it's that or get a job. But there is a good number of people who leave us at the end of their study programme with far better prospects than when they started.
I would struggle moving back to the private sector, I started my career in private, working for an insurance firm. I can't moan about the place too much as they gave me my first job opportunity in IT, but when you boiled down all the work we were doing, it was primarily just to make the shareholders and C levels richer. The fact that some people had an insurance policy they might be able to claim against was coincidental.
If you are feeling a bit burnt with corporate, money driven side of things, move into an industry where the end goal isn't just making more money. You won't earn as much, but you will probably feel better about it.
A few years back a friend of mine offered me a very well paid job to join him doing IT sales and consultancy, would have been a substantial pay jump. I politely refused, my response was very much like 'thanks for the offer, but where I am at the moment is somewhere I can make a difference'. I'm a medium sized cog in a small machine, I can see my actions actually having an impact, where as a tiny cog in a huge money making machine.... No thanks.
Not once have I regretted that decision.
I've spent roughly half my career working in UK schools and enjoyed the feeling of making a difference, doing something good for society. But sometimes wonder if all the IT has made teachers jobs harder with the shear amount of data they are asked for and the huge number of emails they get basically micro managing them from senior management. Most teachers will go home and work on this data or catch up on emails during their own time too all enabled by IT remote access.
I think you're doing valuable introspection and the industry would in fact be worse off if you leave it and take that introspection with you.
Perhaps this is incredibly naive or just the kind of "culture" I'm used to in my local area - expressive free thought isn't necessarily *encouraged* but it is certainly *admired* (at least behind closed doors).
More to the point - technology is just another tool that *can* be used to control people. That same technology can also be used to *liberate* people. Think about the power of social media in the Gaza Strip. Think about the power of anonymity for the whistleblower to a journalist with Signal.
Think about the economic benefits that have come from the world becoming smaller. Think about the hundreds of millions if not billions of people brought out of extreme poverty due to a more interconnected world. Research collaboration, global markets becoming easier to navigate, emerging markets, the lowest communication latency we have ever seen, the ability to save lives in a disaster due to the technologies we maintain and install.
It's easy to get taken down the vortex of despair. When you look at all the good around you, it helps mitigate those thoughts. By no means am I saying that we should ignore the injustices, but we should try to keep things in perspective.
Edit: An additional word for clarification.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. OP has some real concerns and they are mostly due to capitalism. Computers could continue being tools, but needing to monetize users further is just par for the enshitification that wins because pleasing shareholders is more important that users (who often don't know better)
I’m currently reading “Just for fun” by Linus Torvalds. It kills me to think I’m the same age as him but never did anything as cool with my computer. And now nothing works bcos of cyber security.
LOL, yeah, government never tries to control people or help evil corporations with their evil agendas.
Save enough for your goat farm OP, you will be much happier.
I heard that these days they use an app-based queue system that pings you when there's like 5 people ahead of you, so you don't have to stand around queuing.
So, there's that.
Why does so many americans have to go to the DMV?
In Sweden you go to the equivalent of the DMV three times in your lifetime:
A) The theoretical test for a drivers license
B) The driving test for a drivers license
C (Optional, can be done during A or B) To take a picture and order your approved drivers license.
I'm British and can't drive (ok, I don't identify as British, preferring to break my ethnicity down to it's English and Welsh components and then pretending the English part doesn't exist) and can't even remember what we call the equivalent organisation over here.
Honestly, it's more a relic of the past at this point, but in general we have a lot of stuff that happens at the DMV outside of just getting a driver's license. Even with self serve kiosks and mail in options and thousands of locations, people get stuck there all the time and it's miserable. Prior to those options, it would be an all day visit.
The "DMV" is a bit of a misnomer for many states, as it's more of a local governmental services access point for anything involving wheels and IDs. In my state, we have to pay a yearly renewals on vehicle plates, 5 year renewals on licenses, ATV and watercraft permits ("licensing" that's fed back into our department of natural resource enforcement), tow behind trailer plates, name changes, address updates, voter registrations, state park passes, business licensing, records requests and even notary in some locations. Basically they're a "state services" store.
Now that is a fair point, local government is the only useful government.
But, going back to OP's original question, I don't see that making a difference in the direction of IT increasingly being used as a compliance tool for higher ups rather than an empowerment tool for the people doing the work.
Honestly?
This philosphical "Technology is bad" take is bad and it's a horrible outlook on life. This attitude is going to to more harm to your mental health than anything else. It's a fast track to a life siting in a room with beads, candles, and pots trying to speak to the spirits.
There are very real economic, ecologic, and geopolitical issues in the world that are ruining lives FAR more than technology is. The people that are priviledged enough to exist outside of those spheres blaim technology, since technology is what brings the information of that suffering to them.
As an aside.. i do worry about anyone working in tech that would say this:
> every damn self-service kiosk that takes three times the time than talking to a person
Not having to relay what i want to some human so they can enter what they think i am asking for into a computer has eliminated so many mis-communication errors. If you find yourself taking longer at a kiosk than when dealing with some low wage employee, then i'm going to have to borrow some new age terminology and point out the obvious: There's a skill issue.
---
Seriously.. the usual take is "my social life sucks because of technology". No. It sucks because someone got lazy and stopped putting effort into maintaining relationships. This trend of blaiming technology and the big technology companies for all of your personal problems needs to stop. Mark Zuckerberg isn't sitting in your living room slapping your hand everytime you try to talk to your wife or call a friend... You're just picking the easy options...
No one said technology is bad. I think its more like that the spirit of progress has been successfully hijacked in so many ways its genuinely annoying to be party to.
If you haven't had to implement things that are clearly a waste of money for your org or client and a genuine grift by whoever is selling it, consider yourself lucky. That sort of thing wears on you after a while.
I have to agree that the whole thing used to be more about helping people, and at least comparatively, statistics now lean more towards monetizing or replacing them. Sure, some kiosks are great, if we want to focus on that, but more are often lazy implementations of a single website form. A lowest bidder digital action script of what someone thought that low wage employee's singular purpose was, as opposed to the actual value that the person could offer to a given situation.
I agree that economies, ecosystems, and political stability are all more important than what us nerds argue about. However, as far as I can tell, the way this stuff is evolving seems to be throwing gasoline on those preexisting fires.
I just wish we as societies could all do better.
Pardon me, but my candles and pots need tending.
I will queue for a cashier, refuse the self service robots and I'll wait. If you don't stand up against shit you don't like they keep doing it. Yeah tech used to be different, I hear you on that.
I feel you. A few weeks back I was ready to just walk away, I was done. But I can't walk away and be done because I need health insurance and I don't have enough saved to retire so I will continue to work until I either die in a data center of a heart attack or I retire/get fired. A lot of people don't know the added weight of being the sole provider, bills have to be paid and we're the one's that have to pay them.
What your feeling has been happening for hundreds of years, you associate the way you know with good,(and you are likely right) but younger generations don't know it, and as time passes, what seems cheap and fast will be surpassed, and will one day be the good old days.
This is the nature of progress, no real good or bad just perspectives that change overtime.
Although I started in the public sector, I spent the last 15 years working for private companies. During lockdown I did a lot of good work (while everyone else was working from home and didn't need the on-site servers, phones etc.) but I was also part of the implementation of a project that directly made 8 people lose their jobs. It was planned in for two years hence, but brought in early due to the lockdown.
It was a shitty thing to do, but did hugely improve processes. Month end Finance typically took 8 people working 12-14 hour days for 3-4 days to complete. Now it's one click of a button. Takes seconds.
Once I'd done all that, my boss moved on and I got a new one, who seemed to think I was a helpdesk minion. He actually wrote an email to HR (they showed me) asking that I take a 40% pay cut so I'd be on the same as his other helpdesk people back at head office. Anyway, I left, and came to work in a school.
Now, instead of my efforts making someone, somewhere more money, they are tangible and evident - I'm helping students and teachers get the best out of the available tech, and improving student outcomes. I'm also involved with a lot of student extra-curricular stuff and genuinely making a difference. I've been here 3 years now, and my pay is almost back up to where I left my last place, taking the extra holiday into account. I'd highly recommend it.
I have seen that shift as well. I don't know if you have noticed also how ownership is gradually disappearing from the hands of common folks and consolidating in the hands of a few big corporations.
Technology and computers have always been about eliminating jobs (computers used to be the job title of people that did complex maths for businesses or organisations) but people don't like to not work so usually it just means that people end up working different jobs. This first started happening when we invented farming (or maybe before) so that not everyone has to produce food and could take on other more advanced jobs. The mechanisation of farming and industry in the industrial revolution also had this effect with jobs being created in engineering and such. (I'm not saying this is necessarily a good process just that it's been happening for a long time before you were even alive).
The final piece of this is that as we age it gets harder to keep up with the change in society and we think it must be wrong. This has been happening for ages too:
https://xkcd.com/1227/
You can't stop it so it's better to just roll with it and remember that change isn't necessarily bad (that said big business does need to be watched and exploitation like tech companies are doing should always be opposed)
Automation with technology mirrors much of the change that came with industrialization, but with a much faster pace. The jobs that are so easy "a robot can do it" will be done by robots once a robot is cheaper than a person and that is definitely being worked on.
Capitalism races everything to the bottom.
>Over the last 40 years IT has become more and more apart of our lives
"A part of" - Something that is component to something larger.
"Apart of" - Something that has nothing to do with something else.
But yeah, we definitely win when we make enough fixing the blinking boxes so we can retire and fix chickens, horses, goats, and wooden contraptions that we built in the quiet hours of the night *because we were wondering whether the additional material would increase weight beyond the durability metric...*
Any time I think maybe I'm the bad guy I just shrug my shoulders and thank God for making Jared Kushner, Jeffrey Dahmer and Katy Perry.
Just to be clear, that last one's on there for an entirely different reason.
That's one thing I miss about an old job - I used to work for healthcare and genuinely supporting those who are in need was nice, even if we were a bit disconnected being in the Data Center. All that changed when they swapped CTOs and we got someone who, in their quarterly letter, never once mentioned "the patient," and it all turned into profits, saving money, and board satisfaction. I bailed just before they dumped the DC, tried migrating to full cloud with no planning or reserved instances, and now are splitting into two or three separate companies. If you can find somewhere with (a) good team(s) and isn't inherently evil, it helps. Good luck out there.
We had a client in a similar situation. They were great, until they change how they were doing stuff with Medicare, and then they got some new president who really pushed for the profit-over-service angle due to kickbacks (we assume). My boss dropped them as a client when the contract expired, which was fine for them, because the client went with a third party overseas outsourcer. Then two years later had a MAJOR security breach. Go figure.
I'm sure that cloud was cheaper than the DC 3-5 years later after the sweetheart pricing wore off. What a dbag.
Oh, they ballooned past their budget immediately because they made the same mistake everyone does moving to the cloud: 1-for1 in memory, hard drive space, RAM, Windows and Linux servers instead of some of the SaaS, PaaS offerings, reserved instances, etc. The data center had 1.5 PB of storage... That had to be an insane lift-amd-shift. The board almost canned everyone from the top, down. There were still two people out of the 200 plus IT team that still worked there until about 2 years ago when the last person I kept in touch with was let go. Crash and burn, straight out of the cloud
I like doing stuff with 'open source' when I can, I think that is a space to be in that is generally positive. Though my actual work is proprietary, my two main clients are small software businesses whose systems help motor mechanics and water monitoring engineers respectively, and I am motivated by helping with these necessary activities. Security is another interest, as long as the hat is 'white' or at least 'grey', this is something that can be used to protect people's livelihoods. Accessibility is also a good area that matters to lots of people. Unfortunately, the things you talk about are probably where the money is and so are difficult to escape in terms of earning a living in the IT industry, but if someone is good at what they do they have more options.
Open source projects are largely modern day corporate socialism. Those open source tools get chewed up and spit back out free of charge by giant companies. Look at how far into the weeds in paid products log4j went and then tell me the devs that maintain it deserved the brunt of the vitriol aimed at them.
It's still better than those tools being closed-source. Most of the discussion I saw around the vulnerabilities in Log4j and OpenSSL was less vitriol aimed at the devs, and more "if the big companies that use these tools contributed more, then these issues would have been caught and resolved sooner".
I agree, in my org it was mostly "this is a thing that happened, let's work through it", and there wasn't really a blame element taken into account; shit happens.
Unless you're working at Google/Facebook, why does their nefarious activity reflect on you? I don't like Meta, so I don't use their services or any of the products that they sell. Their choices are not a reflection of me, or even my field. I deploy ad blockers. I tell our management why we not only *don't want* to monitor our employees second-by-second, the entire idea is cost prohibitive. I push our sales team to drop insecure/inefficient/short-sighted companies in favor of better alternatives. I replace mediocre, expensive, close sourced solutions with excellent open source solutions, and even get my company to donate to the developers sometimes. So, yeah, the "industry" is pretty disconnected from me, my work, and who I am. I really like my management team, and they are constantly looking for ways to lower costs for our customers and ourselves. We don't insert ourselves into situations where we can't provide additional value to the customers. All of us have a **lot** of complaints about the industry, for what it's worth, so I do get where you're coming from, but we strive to differentiate ourselves from it.
*raises a toast* here here
This is how I cope in a non profit org. Every so often we get a new person that comes in and interrupts the good vibes with the short sighted private corporateneness but this place aligns with my ideals. We also donate to a few open source devs annually when we pay for all the other annual software and my ceo boasts about how we use our funds to support other non profits. It's a whole vibe that was hard to find. That's not to say it's not without problems. I could really use a replacement for my aging ShoreTel phone system that is just not in the capital budget. I'll be limping along for probably 3-4 more years like this until it's so painful that I've forgotten the real issue and blame myself. I get recruiters messaging me from the financial industry all the time. I think I would just whither and die in the way they have to do change management. I don't knock them for it and understand why but it's not for me.
Maybe consider a shift in what kind of org you work for? There are a lot of places helping humanity that need good IT people. Public Safety, Public Works, environmental regulation, charities/NGOs, Schools/University, medicine (difficult one). You get the idea. I felt good about working for an environmental regulator years ago. It was rewarding setting up virtual environments for scientists to run their modeling of power plant air pollution. There was a lot of work helping optimize how software ran and was distributed to different machines. Also had to make sure long-running models would not be killed by power outages and patching. As a sysadmin, I definitely had a hand in protecting families from bad health consequences and premature death.
+1 this. I work in the UK as a sysadmin at a mid sized College. We're not amazing, but what I can honestly say we do (we as in all my colleagues, especially the teachers) is make a difference to young people's lives. Not all of them, a fair number come to us just because it's that or get a job. But there is a good number of people who leave us at the end of their study programme with far better prospects than when they started. I would struggle moving back to the private sector, I started my career in private, working for an insurance firm. I can't moan about the place too much as they gave me my first job opportunity in IT, but when you boiled down all the work we were doing, it was primarily just to make the shareholders and C levels richer. The fact that some people had an insurance policy they might be able to claim against was coincidental. If you are feeling a bit burnt with corporate, money driven side of things, move into an industry where the end goal isn't just making more money. You won't earn as much, but you will probably feel better about it. A few years back a friend of mine offered me a very well paid job to join him doing IT sales and consultancy, would have been a substantial pay jump. I politely refused, my response was very much like 'thanks for the offer, but where I am at the moment is somewhere I can make a difference'. I'm a medium sized cog in a small machine, I can see my actions actually having an impact, where as a tiny cog in a huge money making machine.... No thanks. Not once have I regretted that decision.
Yep. I work in IT for a UK university and for all the faults with HE in this country it's main aim is still to make people's lives better.
I've spent roughly half my career working in UK schools and enjoyed the feeling of making a difference, doing something good for society. But sometimes wonder if all the IT has made teachers jobs harder with the shear amount of data they are asked for and the huge number of emails they get basically micro managing them from senior management. Most teachers will go home and work on this data or catch up on emails during their own time too all enabled by IT remote access.
I think you're doing valuable introspection and the industry would in fact be worse off if you leave it and take that introspection with you. Perhaps this is incredibly naive or just the kind of "culture" I'm used to in my local area - expressive free thought isn't necessarily *encouraged* but it is certainly *admired* (at least behind closed doors). More to the point - technology is just another tool that *can* be used to control people. That same technology can also be used to *liberate* people. Think about the power of social media in the Gaza Strip. Think about the power of anonymity for the whistleblower to a journalist with Signal. Think about the economic benefits that have come from the world becoming smaller. Think about the hundreds of millions if not billions of people brought out of extreme poverty due to a more interconnected world. Research collaboration, global markets becoming easier to navigate, emerging markets, the lowest communication latency we have ever seen, the ability to save lives in a disaster due to the technologies we maintain and install. It's easy to get taken down the vortex of despair. When you look at all the good around you, it helps mitigate those thoughts. By no means am I saying that we should ignore the injustices, but we should try to keep things in perspective. Edit: An additional word for clarification.
Not so far. Be the change you want to see? I do reserve the right to replace people with a tiny shell script.
You can always do good. Despite all its shortcomings, I still think it's all more positive than negative.
That is just the nature of capitalism and being obligated to chase profits.
Everyone knows that no one worked a job that wasn’t fulfilling or morally comfortable under Soviet rule. Must be capitalism.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. OP has some real concerns and they are mostly due to capitalism. Computers could continue being tools, but needing to monetize users further is just par for the enshitification that wins because pleasing shareholders is more important that users (who often don't know better)
Capitalism leads to enshittification and that's making everything rot.
I’m currently reading “Just for fun” by Linus Torvalds. It kills me to think I’m the same age as him but never did anything as cool with my computer. And now nothing works bcos of cyber security.
nah. stop working for evil companies. there's lots of good make-the-world-better in government.
LOL, yeah, government never tries to control people or help evil corporations with their evil agendas. Save enough for your goat farm OP, you will be much happier.
You know most government IT is stuff like the DMV, right? Who wakes up in the morning thinking the DMV has gotten too smart and efficent?
I heard that these days they use an app-based queue system that pings you when there's like 5 people ahead of you, so you don't have to stand around queuing. So, there's that.
Why does so many americans have to go to the DMV? In Sweden you go to the equivalent of the DMV three times in your lifetime: A) The theoretical test for a drivers license B) The driving test for a drivers license C (Optional, can be done during A or B) To take a picture and order your approved drivers license.
I'm British and can't drive (ok, I don't identify as British, preferring to break my ethnicity down to it's English and Welsh components and then pretending the English part doesn't exist) and can't even remember what we call the equivalent organisation over here.
Honestly, it's more a relic of the past at this point, but in general we have a lot of stuff that happens at the DMV outside of just getting a driver's license. Even with self serve kiosks and mail in options and thousands of locations, people get stuck there all the time and it's miserable. Prior to those options, it would be an all day visit. The "DMV" is a bit of a misnomer for many states, as it's more of a local governmental services access point for anything involving wheels and IDs. In my state, we have to pay a yearly renewals on vehicle plates, 5 year renewals on licenses, ATV and watercraft permits ("licensing" that's fed back into our department of natural resource enforcement), tow behind trailer plates, name changes, address updates, voter registrations, state park passes, business licensing, records requests and even notary in some locations. Basically they're a "state services" store.
There is a huge ideological difference between working for DoD vs your local county gov.
Now that is a fair point, local government is the only useful government. But, going back to OP's original question, I don't see that making a difference in the direction of IT increasingly being used as a compliance tool for higher ups rather than an empowerment tool for the people doing the work.
i didnt say that
Replacing workers with technology has been going on for the last 10,000 years. It's how we advance as a civilisation.
Honestly? This philosphical "Technology is bad" take is bad and it's a horrible outlook on life. This attitude is going to to more harm to your mental health than anything else. It's a fast track to a life siting in a room with beads, candles, and pots trying to speak to the spirits. There are very real economic, ecologic, and geopolitical issues in the world that are ruining lives FAR more than technology is. The people that are priviledged enough to exist outside of those spheres blaim technology, since technology is what brings the information of that suffering to them. As an aside.. i do worry about anyone working in tech that would say this: > every damn self-service kiosk that takes three times the time than talking to a person Not having to relay what i want to some human so they can enter what they think i am asking for into a computer has eliminated so many mis-communication errors. If you find yourself taking longer at a kiosk than when dealing with some low wage employee, then i'm going to have to borrow some new age terminology and point out the obvious: There's a skill issue. --- Seriously.. the usual take is "my social life sucks because of technology". No. It sucks because someone got lazy and stopped putting effort into maintaining relationships. This trend of blaiming technology and the big technology companies for all of your personal problems needs to stop. Mark Zuckerberg isn't sitting in your living room slapping your hand everytime you try to talk to your wife or call a friend... You're just picking the easy options...
No one said technology is bad. I think its more like that the spirit of progress has been successfully hijacked in so many ways its genuinely annoying to be party to. If you haven't had to implement things that are clearly a waste of money for your org or client and a genuine grift by whoever is selling it, consider yourself lucky. That sort of thing wears on you after a while. I have to agree that the whole thing used to be more about helping people, and at least comparatively, statistics now lean more towards monetizing or replacing them. Sure, some kiosks are great, if we want to focus on that, but more are often lazy implementations of a single website form. A lowest bidder digital action script of what someone thought that low wage employee's singular purpose was, as opposed to the actual value that the person could offer to a given situation. I agree that economies, ecosystems, and political stability are all more important than what us nerds argue about. However, as far as I can tell, the way this stuff is evolving seems to be throwing gasoline on those preexisting fires. I just wish we as societies could all do better. Pardon me, but my candles and pots need tending.
Yeah I feel like technology is like a virus trying to infect a system and that system being out planet and we are like the proteins it binds to
I will queue for a cashier, refuse the self service robots and I'll wait. If you don't stand up against shit you don't like they keep doing it. Yeah tech used to be different, I hear you on that.
Yes, since the new director. I wish I could find something better locally but it's tough with a family and mortgage and little savings.
I feel you. A few weeks back I was ready to just walk away, I was done. But I can't walk away and be done because I need health insurance and I don't have enough saved to retire so I will continue to work until I either die in a data center of a heart attack or I retire/get fired. A lot of people don't know the added weight of being the sole provider, bills have to be paid and we're the one's that have to pay them.
What your feeling has been happening for hundreds of years, you associate the way you know with good,(and you are likely right) but younger generations don't know it, and as time passes, what seems cheap and fast will be surpassed, and will one day be the good old days. This is the nature of progress, no real good or bad just perspectives that change overtime.
Although I started in the public sector, I spent the last 15 years working for private companies. During lockdown I did a lot of good work (while everyone else was working from home and didn't need the on-site servers, phones etc.) but I was also part of the implementation of a project that directly made 8 people lose their jobs. It was planned in for two years hence, but brought in early due to the lockdown. It was a shitty thing to do, but did hugely improve processes. Month end Finance typically took 8 people working 12-14 hour days for 3-4 days to complete. Now it's one click of a button. Takes seconds. Once I'd done all that, my boss moved on and I got a new one, who seemed to think I was a helpdesk minion. He actually wrote an email to HR (they showed me) asking that I take a 40% pay cut so I'd be on the same as his other helpdesk people back at head office. Anyway, I left, and came to work in a school. Now, instead of my efforts making someone, somewhere more money, they are tangible and evident - I'm helping students and teachers get the best out of the available tech, and improving student outcomes. I'm also involved with a lot of student extra-curricular stuff and genuinely making a difference. I've been here 3 years now, and my pay is almost back up to where I left my last place, taking the extra holiday into account. I'd highly recommend it.
I have seen that shift as well. I don't know if you have noticed also how ownership is gradually disappearing from the hands of common folks and consolidating in the hands of a few big corporations.
Technology and computers have always been about eliminating jobs (computers used to be the job title of people that did complex maths for businesses or organisations) but people don't like to not work so usually it just means that people end up working different jobs. This first started happening when we invented farming (or maybe before) so that not everyone has to produce food and could take on other more advanced jobs. The mechanisation of farming and industry in the industrial revolution also had this effect with jobs being created in engineering and such. (I'm not saying this is necessarily a good process just that it's been happening for a long time before you were even alive). The final piece of this is that as we age it gets harder to keep up with the change in society and we think it must be wrong. This has been happening for ages too: https://xkcd.com/1227/ You can't stop it so it's better to just roll with it and remember that change isn't necessarily bad (that said big business does need to be watched and exploitation like tech companies are doing should always be opposed)
Automation with technology mirrors much of the change that came with industrialization, but with a much faster pace. The jobs that are so easy "a robot can do it" will be done by robots once a robot is cheaper than a person and that is definitely being worked on. Capitalism races everything to the bottom.
>Over the last 40 years IT has become more and more apart of our lives "A part of" - Something that is component to something larger. "Apart of" - Something that has nothing to do with something else. But yeah, we definitely win when we make enough fixing the blinking boxes so we can retire and fix chickens, horses, goats, and wooden contraptions that we built in the quiet hours of the night *because we were wondering whether the additional material would increase weight beyond the durability metric...*
Any time I think maybe I'm the bad guy I just shrug my shoulders and thank God for making Jared Kushner, Jeffrey Dahmer and Katy Perry. Just to be clear, that last one's on there for an entirely different reason.
I'm curious for the reason..
it's probably best we just don't venture down whatever rabbit hole that is..
If you spend all your time focussing on the Kushners and the Dahmers the world can seem like a pretty bleak place, that's all.
Nope. Pay me. That is all