One thing I struggle with, with regard to leftist/pop-leftist approaches to environmentalism, is:
Our modern medical supply chain is dependent on fossil fuels to a boggling extent. Single-use sterile items; packaging for same; pharmaceutical precursors; etc. Obviously, defossilization of these supply chains is mandated --
but it's a hard problem. There are no quick or absolute fixes. So when I hear "just shut it down," I hear "my disabled brother is an acceptable casualty."
More generally, it drives me nuts that sloganeering and anti-institutional sentiment become excuses for disengagement from supply chain and lifecycle analysis. Hard problems are handwaved as shit "corporations" should fix, that the revolution will magically fix --
-- but thermodynamics cares little for moral suasion, folks. Transcending modern, environment-destroying approaches' limits requires a shitton of research, development, and operationalization work. & I see folks stepping down not up.
@danilo but as you also know, my basic position is "You hate software that much? Wow, I do too! That's why I stopped making it for a living. Consider your options!"
@danilo That requires being honest about the fact that most software devs are paid for either:
a) Giving a mature company an absurd revenue multiplier by automating other people out of jobs
b) Faffing about making a privately held company look like it might someday obtain that revenue multiplier, so that its owners can obtain private equity investment on that basis.
Which is a bit of an identity threat, especially for leftist SWE.
@danilo I mean I'm stating it strongly on purpose. But a few things...
A) Are "workflow automation" and "automating people out of a job" truly different? The style of SWE workflow GitHub & similar tools enable/encourage has basically eliminated QA and sysadmin as job categories, especially at the entry level.
B) What's the business model of the novel substrates and the tools that enable more efficient expression? AFAICT, (generally) data sales & ad-tech for the former, and B2B to other software companies for the latter....
C) idk, man, one of my partners is job hunting right now and 80% of the places biting are some flavor of fintech. Some are sketchy and some are less sketchy. He doesn't have any fintech background.
D) I don't actually think of job eating as inherently bad. Another partner works for a company that is increasing efficiency for patients and doctors in dealing with [obtaining treatment] -- or in other words, automating many medical billing and coding people out of jobs. I think that if those jobs are eliminated, it will be locally sad and societally good. Many such cases.
(So the question is how you give those folks soft landings instead.)
@danilo I suspect many people's actual answer here is "it's case by case," and that this creates a strong incentive to see one's personal job as one of the good cases, whether this is true or not. Easier to see the harms done by companies not paying one's rent.
Regardless of the individual utility of any given software job, revenue multiples in software are (after being filtered through several economic/marketing laundries) pulling smart people away from fields that the world needs more than it needs software.
I think there are a number of ethically integrated responses to that conclusion -- leaving software is the one I took.
@danilo However, I do NOT think that "MY datacenter usage is fine and YOURS is evil, for reasons that I cannot name but are totally unconnected to my kids' college fund" rises to the level of an ethically integrated response....