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We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

(drewdevault.com)
215 points LaSombra | 1 comments | 05 May 20 13:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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spaced-out ◴[05 May 20 14:38 UTC] No.23080465[source]▶
We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right?

No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of that guy's engineering skills.

What would actually make the world a better place is if we recognized that we're really just well paid technicians, and that the true power in society is held by a relatively small number of people who hold a massive amount of capital. We need to give up the fantasy that we can change things with individual action, and start looking towards collective, society-level solutions to the problems today.

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1. neilv ◴[05 May 20 16:24 UTC] No.23081745[source]▶
Side note: Tim Bray isn't merely one technologist. I suspect his public writings about working at AWS, and his implicit endorsement, have helped AWS to attract some top talent.

Certainly, when I was considering going there, people pointed me to his writings, and overall the writings increased my positive impression of the idea of developing AWS, beyond my already positive impression from using it.

This also suggests one way in which we each could, perhaps should, make an individual difference: when we're working at an organization, we're implicitly endorsing and representing it to other prospective hires. We should hope that our presence there would make others want to work there more.