I'm not necessarily anti-capitalist, but it's so frustrating that a huge percentage of the best talent, compensation, and tech stacks goes to industries that aren't doing anything actually useful (finance, fintech, adtech)*. There are so many organizations in farming, space travel, healthcare, etc. that would be very well served with receiving the best talent and having the best tech stacks/workplace culture, but when the result of a business model is "acquire a huge pile of money" (finance, fintech, adtech), you'll end up with the biggest pile of money with which to find the best and pay better.
To be fair, there are huge piles of money in 2/3 of these as well. There is obviously the perception that tech labor cannot bring much value to these industries. (Or there are externalities: techies will work for less money if you let them work on space travel.)
It's not just that tech can't bring much value to these industries, it's that the legacy players in the industries are openly resistant to innovation via tech. (They say they're not, but the best engineers often leave big corporations due to the stifling bureaucracies and the insane management practices.)
At the last large organization I worked for, I spent two years trying to convince managers responsible for a critical-path item database to upgrade their tech stack. They had me work on tons of downstream problems, every single one of which was a direct consequence of "the data in the database is incorrect". They refused to fix their tech stack, pay more for good programmers, change their approach to DB management, etc., so I left.
> (Or there are externalities: techies will work for less money if you let them work on space travel.)
I guess the salaries are about the same in companies like SpaceX etc, but I would guess that working hours etc are not. Some engineer working for a bank will probably demand quite relaxed hours, negotiate low pressure tasks and have some holiday time with family, while with the same salary guy working for SpaceX will be busting his ass off and working weekends multiple times an year.
The engineers I know working for banks vs. those working for SpaceX confirm your thoughts; however, there are plenty of engineers working insane hours for fintech, finance, or even engineers-turned-financiers.
The problem is- let's say you're a brilliant genius who's willing to work 80 hours per week doing very difficult tasks. You can make $130-150k net working for space travel, or engineering traffic lights, or you can do similar very complex work for $200-800k in finance. They're hoovering up the smartest, most competitive people because the rewards are the most outsized.
From "Max Dama on Automated Trading" [1]:
> Quantitative trading is the job of programming computers to trade. It is the best job out of undergraduate - you commonly make $100k base salary, plus a bonus which is often larger, the hours are flexible as long as you produce, there is no dress code, the work is extremely fascinating, fast paced, and uses the most advanced technology, and your performance is evaluated objectively. Quant trading combines programming and trading. Programming is the fastest way to take an idea and turn it into reality (compare it to writing a book, publishing, etc or to architecting a building, getting zoning permits, doing construction, etc). Trading is the most direct approach to making money (compare it with starting the next facebook, programming, hiring, advertising, etc or to creating a retail chain, hiring, waiting for money to flow in to reinvest, etc. Combining programming and trading, you have the most direct path from an idea in your brain to cash.
> that aren't doing anything actually useful (finance, fintech, adtech)*.
Cut that crap. Most of the companies in these spaces are value-adding services and products. It is annoying that this kind of thinking is prevalent "If I don't understand how it generates value, it must be useless."
Not everyone buys into the ideology that equates monetary success with value. For a rational definition of what adding value means to all involved parties, they sometimes correlate and sometimes don't.
I'm personally fascinated by both financial and marketing strategy, it touches on interesting aspects of many dimensions, from mathematics to psychology and much more. And those fields do serve a purpose in an ever changing and evolving complex economy. But is that purpose really that "valuable"?
I and many others are jaded, because their incentives don't align with progress towards solving the big, important problems. They play their self-perpetuating games while putting on blinders.
All this time, energy, brainpower, centuries of stacked education and research only to manipulate people into constantly buying more stuff. Growth for the sake of growth, piles and mountains of concentrated wealth and power, while people die and suffer and are moved like pawns in a game that nobody signed up for.
Nature is furiously shaking and cooking our planet, while gigantic poisonous gas clouds are leaking from its pores. Our forests, insects, fish and fungi die in masses. Our springs dry up and our seas are covered in trash and poison.
Meanwhile our smartest and most fortunate are building gigantic machines and crunch data so they can "add value" covered by a smoke of ideology mixed with pretend skepticism to keep the gears turning.
There is no money in planting trees for the next generations and in facing the hardest challenges that our societies and nature pose, but I'd wager that this would be "value-adding".
That's a good way of putting it. I think that some tech-competitive or modern-conservative people are turned off by the eco-friendly prose you wrote there, but there is simply no denying it- there is trash everywhere and species are dying off within lifetimes. I just watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi and even he remembers when the fish were higher quality and quantity at the market. Unfortunately, there is no money in letting unfished tuna schools run amok, there's no money in restoring the Great Barrier Reef, there's no money in not flying to Hawaii for vacation.
And those are just the flashy ones- there's no money in wild birds, bugs, waterways, air quality, plants, nature.
Do people value the wild and getting through each day in a pure, healthy environment, or do they value efficiency for the sake of itself?
It's also a type of fake efficiency. The vegetables we grow have less nutrition in them, the technology is not built to last, products get thrown in the trash without being used and people are drained by their work instead of satisfied. We're doing something wrong, I don't know the solution but ideology seems to be clouding us from seeing the problems in the first place.
Dunno if you're talking to me or a child commenter, but my career has nothing to do with what I do on the side. I work in tech so I can pile enough cash to convince banks to give me land and doctors to give me surgery. If the U.S. enacted some sort of schema that allowed me to get land and healthcare without providing for banking shareholder's portfolios I'd quit tomorrow, raise dairy cattle, grow produce, or I'd just stand up buildings and clean the side of freeways. If I owned my own time I'd do nothing but fix broken things in the world, and as soon as I've got mine and can quit engineering that's just what I'll do. How many believers in better society have you swayed with snarky comments?
I've worked at adtech companies. They were not providing people with any value. The entire business model is built on manipulation and psychological trickery.
Nonsense. Our definitions of "value" are different. For instance, you likely would only ever work for money, or wish to live in a society that uses financial allocation to determine labor and resourcing. Personally, I do not find "money" to actually be useful except inasmuch to convince people to do actual value-producing activities. You don't need currency to keep the lights on, but right now you need currency to convince anyone to do the actual valuable work to keep the lights on.
I understand how the industries produce "value". I, however, do not find the "value" they produce to be overall beneficial to humanity. Furthermore, even if I accept the utility of currency, it is impossible to deny that these industries have grown into a parasitic nightmare sucking the world dry in the pursuit of ever-higher piles of cash.
