But here's what might happen when the good will and good faith of free labour that supports the machine is pushed too far. A little fictional retelling of "The Golden Goose" for our time [1]
[1] http://techrights.org/2022/01/21/peak-code-before-the-wars/
Edit: the worst of it was that because I stopped caring about office politics, I ruthlessly called out process problems, and accumulated ridiculous amounts of responsibility far beyond my job description. I hope everything went OK after I stopped showing up.
Buy a big house. Ok then what? Sit on my couch in my big house? What about the 2nd hour?
Sure I'd travel and consume amusements like ziplining in the jungle or something and seeing plays and concerts.
Ok but then what?
What I would do is buy a big workshop and fill it with all kinds of tools in all kinds of different disciplines, from woodworking to 3d printing to welding to machining to chemistry to glassworking to software to electronics... (ok I lack imagination because in fact my garage, basement, guest room, and a rented 10x20 self storage unit are already stuffed to the gills with those exact things, plus guitars and aquarium stuff and cycling stuf...) and not just to look at them but to play with them.
That IS my maitai on the beach.
The beach is very enjoyable, and I do enjoy it, but it is not interesting.
The users who get my stuff for free don't matter at all. I owe them nothing. If I care about a project or a project's reception or usefulness or quality, then I care about it. The users don't extract unwilling care out of me, I have to already care on my own, which means adressing bugs or features is just more of the same work I WANTED to do just like the developing in the first place.
It's totally backwards to think of the users as some kind of burden you hate.
I mean, let's say you do hate that burden: ok then just don't release any of the stuff you built. But then what was the point in that? Yes you can't help building stuff and it was engaging and interesting to build, and you chose to do it when you had the choice to do anything you wanted... but still, part of what makes something worth doing is that it's at least theoretically not totally pointless. Even if in reality your github gains no real audience, it's good enough that it's at least published and out there and could possibly be found interesting or useful by someone else sometime. The mere possibility is enough. But to me unreleased code is a dead end. It's maybe good for exercise but what good is the exercise if not to eventually use the strength for something somewhere that is something other than exercise?
So you build and publish and so what if some users whinge?
by this point the issue is maintaining boring old stuff everybody depends on
maybe that's what happens to most (google for example), from being a cool new research program in search and document analysis to just another company trying to make money to keep up
Martinis on a beach and hobby coding are also compatible.
I think this is a function of user base size, not so much profit or company size.
If you are spending your time at work exactly the same way you would spend your freetime then yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
Many of the jobs that pay well don't make you do things that are fun though, but more things the business needs in order to make more profit. Since it is like that for most software developers, I think that's the perspective that akvadrako has as well.
With that perspective, then it makes sense to work (on unfun work) for X amount of years in order to afford spending Y amount of years on actually fun work.
History shows that programmers tend to build more useful and groundbreaking work when there is no deadlines and it's for their own fun as well.
I am figting for the bad guys in my work time and for the good guys in my frer time?
Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. There are principal-agent problems between ad brokers and both buyers and sellers [0],[1] and attribution is nearly impossible [2] - which leads to increasingly invasive surveillance tools being deployed. Then there's the issue of asymmetric information: most consumers have no idea what information is being collected about them, or even by whom. Just outside the market, there is also the "clicks and attention == revenue" externality that is extremely costly to society. Every single ad tech company is either exploiting these problems in the market to generate outsized profits, or selling increasingly invasive surveillance technology to try to "solve" them.
The problem isn't any individual bad actor's behavior - it's the entire structure of the digital advertising market. There is no solution, because even assuming everyone is acting in good faith and in their best interests you'll see the exact same devolution to "What if we just find ways watch everything everyone does and track everything they do on and off their computers all the time? That's both profitable and clears up a lot of the market failures. Let's do that!"
[0] https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CF... (PDF)
[1] https://checkmyads.org/branded/
[2] https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attr...
Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts.
The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was).
I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.
Unless you're advocating for getting hired in adtech and then sabotaging their projects from within while collecting a salary, but I don't think that's ethical, legal, or what you're describing...
If we were just talking about paid distribution of memes to get people to drink beer and take vacations, I would have less of a concern.
Wut? ...You're ...gonna need to defend that assertion. Just because BigCo's tooling is fit for BigCo's purpose does not mean they set out to harm smaller devs.
I'm putting this on a poster and hanging it on my wall. Thank you.
I'm not a fan of React and use svelte. But I think k8s is way better than non-k8s, so I use it for client work.
health care is more expensive for my family than my property taxes + mortgage
If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money.
That's what I've been doing for a few years, doing about 6 months freelancing followed by a year of personal projects. If I were to go back in time it may have made more sense to spend 3-4 years at a FAANG then 10 years independent, but I also worry it may have changed my perspective.