(begin rant)
Hi. Do you ever have a feeling that you have technical skills to qualify as a programmer, and there’s a demand for specialists, but, ironically, nobody needs them to design some useful information system or optimize the workflow in the factories, or do real science and push the limitations of human knowledge, but rather, all is just to spread some crappy advertising message as cheap as possible to the broadest audience as possible, usually without giving any respect to consumers, that feels like you’re losing your brain cells when interacting with the app/content you create. Quality level zero, consumerism level over 9k. Tons of boilerplate because ‘everything must be kept proprietary’ and it probably won’t work after 2 years because the framework you were using is down and the very idea of the becomes dated. Also, the more advanced technology, the more it’s used for shit. Like, we have generative neural networks that are used for turdposting conspiracies and generating profit/influence for some party.
I would say this clearly: I am very, very angry when I’m seeing this. I don’t want to participate in something that forces consumers to eat shit. Fuck SEO and e-commerce. Everything’s generative-AI, GANs, LLMs… now, which do not produce any value, at least to the user, or extracting every single bit of data of the user. Everything’s just to bombard people with information nowadays. Even Project Managers get biased (mostly because of naïve hype) and promote this crap.
(end rant)
So, my question is, how do you go through all of it? Of course, devs are better paid, but I don’t care about money. I’m still a student and, although I really like programming, and I’m really good at solving Competitive Programming problems (been at ICPC several times), I’m tired of this junk, besides I have a feeling I’ll be forced to do it. But, if I’m going to do it, somebody’s gonna get hurt. But it seems that it’s the only thing I’m skilled at, and I have no alternatives. So, how do you get through all of it, and what do you see it as relief, what does reward you at the very end?
EDIT: uncensored all swear words at request. I hope now you’re happy.
Welcome, you have discovered the alienation of labour in the field of IT. People were dealing with this shit for decades and it will keep happening as long as we live under capitalism.
As someone that is quite unfamiliar with Marx’ ideology (yet I’m aware of it being the base of communism in what was the USSR) I find it quite ironic that both late-stage (aka extreme) capitalism leads to the same as what commuism lead to: which is what Marx describes, according to the Wikipedia page, as alienation of the worker. And it shows, funnily enough, contradictions with the implementation of soviet communism, which was supposedly based on marxist ideology.
I also think it would be quite amusing to see someone do an experiment, where groups of random people are presented with either a poster that shows this idea from Marx, or with a presentation/podcast/TED Talk where a person describes and presents the idea without ever mentioning it was Marx’ ideas. As someone that always steered clear of Marx and his ideas specifically because I thought it would be about promoting communism (and as someone with Eastern European roots, I know what real communism was like), so I looked at it the same way I would look at religious propaganda: with a spoonful of salt, a bottle of scepticism, and the idea that it would be better to just steer clear instead of wasting my time, and yet when I saw this link you posted I was like “this sounds interesting, let’s check it out” and so I did, and I was left pleasantly surprised.
While there is a good bit of nuance and western propaganda around the USSR, you are essentially right. For different reasons though. The USSR never fully abolished capitalism. They thought that capitalism was a “necessary evil” that had to be contained and shaped towards a socialist/communist end goal. They intentionally reproduced the exploitative conditions of capitalism post-revolution because they thought it had to happen that way.
Socialism is most broadly divided into statist and non-statist socialism. If you’re anti-capitalist or just don’t generally care for the present condition of the world, but don’t really care for the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao then you should check out libertarian socialism/anarchism. It’s a broad category of ideologies with a ton of overlap that essentially boils down to “hierarchy is the real problem and any successful egalitarian society should seek to eliminate heirarchy as much as possible”
Eliminate hierarchy by allowing anyone to enter the market and do business? Some kind of marketplace … where people are free to choose their economic relations at will. Freedom and markets. A market with freedom as a defining characteristic.
You’re describing anarcho capitalism or just regular capitalism if you’re including the state. Both of which blow for a number of reasons you likely wouldn’t accept if your sarcasm is anything to go by. Did you have a point to all of that or were you just being a goober?