On the other hand, when I contribute to OSS it is probably because it has a direct impact on my finances in some way...
I don't think many of the companies who contribute development to OSS projects do it purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They are using said products and the alternative is to recreate the project internally
You weren’t kidding. I like the list but the vast majority are really just more specific examples of #1. Not that that’s a problem, just telling how much of what is wrong (and I agree with pretty much everything on the list) really does boil down to that.
Isn't that just the result of late stage capitalism at work? The need for immediate, constant and infinite growth results by necessity in short-term gains having priority over long-term benefits.
I think maybe you have to go back further. 20 years ago. Companies seemed to care about building great products, stronger vision, more open web, engineering mattered etc etc. Now it seems the tech world is only about making money and increasing share price.
Once things go from product focused to profit focused, the ranks start getting filled with administrative roles. Then it's just a matter of time until the balance tips and the iron law of bureaucracy goes into full effect.
I don't think many people appreciated 10 years ago how social media, and specifically the algorithms that surface content, would undermine civilization.
Weird list with fancy words that don't offer much of explanation which opens up for making different interpretations.
> 2. The lack of diversity among founders and investors propagates harmful exclusion.
As an example. What kind of diversity? I assume she is writing about gender and ethnicity but in reality I think the diversity of opinions is what is most important to prevent harmful exclusion. I could read it like she mean diversity of opinions, diversity in a specific area like gender or just diversity in general. I assume what I assumed because I read the other points and people with left wing beliefs rarely care about diversity of opinion even if they claim to care about diversity.
Overall I don't understand several of the words that are being used, altough I am not a native english speaker I consider myself to be pretty well versed in the english language.
Yes, and also: if anything, technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything. There may be discrimination if you need to rely on external help (investors, etc), but there are many very successful bootstrapped tech startups. You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer.
True that the free availability of tools broadens the field, but you can’t solve inequality by that alone. “Time” is still a necessary ingredient in that success recipe and if you’re working two jobs just to keep a family afloat due to generational poverty you’re not also going to be starting Microsoft in your garage.
I won’t claim that these are perfect solutions, but I do believe they’re better than just making stuff open source and then feeling that you can ignore diversity. So with that, here are a few things that I think could be helpful:
- use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder
- develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent
- add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code)
- sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth
- at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.
For sure. But what do you think of the possibility that many people who are suffering from financial inequality may actually have quite a bit of free time? That's my sense at least looking at global screen time statistics not only in the US but in many poor countries.
I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity.
And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year.
Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.
I’m in agreement that increase in tech availability and accessibility are a big and positive factor. My point is mainly that we need to augment tech with some social solutions to solve this problem rather than treating it as only a problem of technology + waiting for the problem to solve itself.
And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).
> You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer.
Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose.
If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better.
Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.
> technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything
This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.
It's not just about "opinion". Diversity of gender and ethnicity is important, because many tech products fail for users who are non-male and/or non-white. Some examples off the top of my head: facial recognition that doesn't recognize black faces, tracking technologies that ignore the issue of stalking, only giving two options "male" and "female", input fields that require US-style formats for names, phones that are too big for smaller hands, etc.
> artificial diversity just creates divided teams.
Why do you consider diversity to be "artificial"? It's actually lack of diversity that's artificial.
Forget about gender and ethnicity for a second; what about the lack of age diversity in tech, and the rampant age discrimination? Oh, but it's a "meritocracy", and younger people are just "better", right? (See "Using terribly thin fonts with low contrast colors leading to unreadable websites." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068697)
Also diversity of age and ability. Examples include tiny, low contrast text. On-screen controls that challenge fine motor control. Also on the US-style formats, poor or non-existent support for non-Latin alphabets. Try booking a commercial airline flight with a name that includes anything but the 26 English letters.
So you claim that a group of pro-diversity ("left wing") leaders would do less to prevent harmful exclusion, than a group that is mixed on the issue? Am I reading this right?
Obviously it depends on the leaders in questions but yes that is my experience at least. They pretend to care about inclusivity but in reality it's the ones that talk about it that are the most exclusive.
> 10. Algorithms that amplify bias, misinformation, and polarization recklessly undermine democracy.
> 50. Disrupting journalism's advertising revenue threatens democracy by eroding public information.
...so addressing point 10 would worsen point 50 or am I reading it wrong?
And honestly, this list of complaints is quite timeless (and not even limited to tech, contrary to the title). Yes, there are a couple of specifically tech-related points as of 2023 (namely, those about AI) but other than that... "the concentration of disproportionate wealth and influence among a small group fosters plutocracy", how novel. "Utopian tech promises lead to disappointment when vision ignores complex human reality" — that happened with electricity, aviation, radio, and television, too, naming only the technologies, never mind the small- and large-scale ideologically-motivated social experiments.
I confess I am unable to come up with a line of reasoning where eliminating the amplification of bias, misinformation, and polarization has a negative effect on journalism's advertising revenue. The disruption to revenue, as I understand it is a direct outcome of Meta/Google/Twitter manipulating rewards and costs to drown out factual, thoughtful discourse in favor of whatever brings the most views to their platforms. Case in point: Twitter and the situation in Gaza as I write this.
Great list that I wish we all would consider more seriously. Version two should edit the list down to core ideas to avoid repetition, and suggest some ways to address one or more of the items.
I've noticed posts like yours get voted down early then voted up.
Anyway, I agree with you. Tech was great when folks were reverse engineering hardware to make cheaper / better copies that worked with existing software. Does it suck for the company that put all the r&d into it? Yeah. Did they make a fat load of profit off it already? Usually.
It all boils down to values. This author seems to value sincerity, truth, democracy and fair play, among other such things. It doesn't seem like other values are considered, values that other people might have. Like the value of earning massive amounts of money so you or your descendants don't have to work another day until end of time. Or the value that some people place in being coaxed from one inferior product to the next by ads that you just can't seem to escape. What about the interests of those people? Just askin'.
You forgot: The endless cynicism that sucks all the fun out of tech compared to the early 2000s
Alright, fine, I agree tech has been taken over by investment banking personalities. I have no clue where all the nerds who programmed for fun went, but I miss that short-lived era when hackathons were actually something people got excited about.
I think it has died right when services started ranking posts with engagement algorithms. The world changed a lot after Facebook ceased to display chronologically.
This is a good list, though it has some redundancy, I think it can be boiled down to a de-prioritization of ethics and a prioritization of greed. It's also not just in the tech sector. I see that in finance, entertainment (look at the struggle SAG-AFTRA has been going through), construction, and I'm sure there are others. I also bundle striving for long-term good through innovation into ethics.
This list is not unique to tech but many apply to business in general as pure capitalism is the cause. The industrial revolution had many similar problems.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI don't think many of the companies who contribute development to OSS projects do it purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They are using said products and the alternative is to recreate the project internally
They’re playing checkers instead of chess.
But there's quite a bit of redundancy in the list. Would be more powerful (and easier for readers to absorb) if cut down to its core points.
I agree the financialisation of everything really sours tech though.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
"tech" is just the most recent place this has happened but you can see it repeated through out the last century+ of industrialized corporations.
> 2. The lack of diversity among founders and investors propagates harmful exclusion.
As an example. What kind of diversity? I assume she is writing about gender and ethnicity but in reality I think the diversity of opinions is what is most important to prevent harmful exclusion. I could read it like she mean diversity of opinions, diversity in a specific area like gender or just diversity in general. I assume what I assumed because I read the other points and people with left wing beliefs rarely care about diversity of opinion even if they claim to care about diversity.
Overall I don't understand several of the words that are being used, altough I am not a native english speaker I consider myself to be pretty well versed in the english language.
- use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder
- develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent
- add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code)
- sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth
- at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.
I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity.
And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year.
Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.
And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).
Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose.
If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better.
Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.
This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.
Why not? And what would?
> artificial diversity just creates divided teams.
Why do you consider diversity to be "artificial"? It's actually lack of diversity that's artificial.
Forget about gender and ethnicity for a second; what about the lack of age diversity in tech, and the rampant age discrimination? Oh, but it's a "meritocracy", and younger people are just "better", right? (See "Using terribly thin fonts with low contrast colors leading to unreadable websites." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068697)
51. Using terribly thin fonts with low contrast colors leads to unreadable websites.
No one wants to read that at this time of the morning.
> 50. Disrupting journalism's advertising revenue threatens democracy by eroding public information.
...so addressing point 10 would worsen point 50 or am I reading it wrong?
And honestly, this list of complaints is quite timeless (and not even limited to tech, contrary to the title). Yes, there are a couple of specifically tech-related points as of 2023 (namely, those about AI) but other than that... "the concentration of disproportionate wealth and influence among a small group fosters plutocracy", how novel. "Utopian tech promises lead to disappointment when vision ignores complex human reality" — that happened with electricity, aviation, radio, and television, too, naming only the technologies, never mind the small- and large-scale ideologically-motivated social experiments.
I confess I am unable to come up with a line of reasoning where eliminating the amplification of bias, misinformation, and polarization has a negative effect on journalism's advertising revenue. The disruption to revenue, as I understand it is a direct outcome of Meta/Google/Twitter manipulating rewards and costs to drown out factual, thoughtful discourse in favor of whatever brings the most views to their platforms. Case in point: Twitter and the situation in Gaza as I write this.
"Copycat companies & products stifling innovation"
I feel like if as a company you've made something that's easily copyable, then that's your problem.
Successful products are both popular & hard to replicate
Anyway, I agree with you. Tech was great when folks were reverse engineering hardware to make cheaper / better copies that worked with existing software. Does it suck for the company that put all the r&d into it? Yeah. Did they make a fat load of profit off it already? Usually.
Alright, fine, I agree tech has been taken over by investment banking personalities. I have no clue where all the nerds who programmed for fun went, but I miss that short-lived era when hackathons were actually something people got excited about.