Honestly I managed to convince some suits that an ethical and compliance issue was important enough to get them to shove resources into it so that was cool. It's good when your technology is following the law instead of pretending like a consumer protection law doesn't matter to you. I managed to convince them hard enough that they were thanking me for keeping the company ahead of possible legal issues. So that's kinda cool.
Hell yeah, those are the small day to day wins i love
My thing is always accessibility, I do user facing client development and I'm a constant pain in the ass when design gives us some unreasonably inaccessible stuff
Suppressing the urge to strip naked and run through the halls shouting "Everything we do is fake!" is getting harder with every passing day and it's mainly the fault of this web site.
I never wear the techbro mask. Everyone at work thinks I'm grouchy and pessimistic cos i won't entertain their stupid ideas about crypto and AI. Being pragmatic about programming is bad actually gotta theory craft about efficient tree burning for problems that don't exist
I try to do as little evil as I can at work and I try to use my ill gotten gains to do as much good and genuine community building as I can. It's not perfect but I don't work for defense or banking or insurance or anything totally fucking awful and I help a lot of comrades do a lot of real genuine good so I sleep okay most nights. I just wish that real important skills were more valued and also that I was brave enough to reduce my quality of life to do more good. It's a seemingly impossible choice.
I am an immigrant who sends money home, and pretty old, so cant choose between tech jobs much.
I keep little money and basically try to make life of my extended family a little bit more bearable. I send some money to PCRF and such, but that's it.
I absolutely despise 90% of my software engineering colleagues who are either reactionary or infuriatingly idiotic libs.
I am happy I just got off a project for one of the biggest commodity traders in the world and if you think dystopian shows presenting rich capitalists as toxic, despicable scumbag psychos are exaggerated...think again. It's worse than most people imagine.
They are extremely toxic people and they intentionally hire people that have this toxic masculinity crap going on, because "they are traders" and "they are tough men".
They got this libertarian competition going on between departments which is incredibly toxic environment to work in.
Taking vacation (which is required by law there) is considered a show of weakness which will hurt your career, while "grind" is the ideal.
This resulted in our project manager breaking down and crying in the middle of one meeting, our team lead having a mental breakdown and just go missing for 2 months, shouting matches, name calling in the middle of open offices etc.
They make a huge amounts of money and literally give us (underpaid externals) unironical advice to buy ourselves yachts for birthday. We are talking here like $160k + over $200k in bonuses per year...for rookies.
They showed me their Christmas Party video, which is forbidden to share outside of the company. It's like a Hollywood produced ultra-kitschy and expensive party, where the hosts in tuxedos wear animal masks like in the "Squid Game". I am not kidding. The decadence is just off the charts.
Any normal person would absolutely be radicalized by just looking at that party, however, to my dismay, some of my colleagues seem to have been drawn to that despicable show of wealth and superiority.
Otherwise, they would make fun of me for being "politically correct" (I am not really), complain about "cancel-culture", LGBTQ+ people etc.
They also regularly make fun of climate activists. I tried to find a single redeemable person in there and I failed miserably. There's no fixing this, just Minecrafting.
There was a book about these companies called "The world for sale", written by some libs (I think), who admit these companies are terrible, but "necessary" for capitalism to work, and therefore OK. The author called them "The last swashbucklers of capitalism" in what it seems to be even admiration.
A couple of my co workers are comrades. Today one was saying they were glad they were not a manager because they care about labor issues lol so that was cool
My boss is a member of a different industry's union and participated in their (admittedly milquetoast) strike a few months ago.
I'm still really cagey and both my coworkers and different flavoured chuds. The Christian one appreciates my knowledge of comparative religion, since everyone else seems to be a "rationalist" that actively avoids knowing anything about religion.
Rust is awesome and I love writing and maintaining it, but also it seems like every rust job on the boards is crypto bullshit. I got lucky and was able to learn rust on the (non-crypto, lol) job, which is otherwise mostly python and TS.
Python is such a clean language; I love it to death and every time I have to go back to C++ I weep a little bit knowing how much cleaner and self-documenting my code could be
Unfortunately I'm not a programmer I do other technology things but really it depends on what kind of work you want to do. What kind of programming do you want to do? Data? Web? Enterprise bullshit? Something else? That's the real starting point of that question
I’m reserve army of labor. Didn’t major in STEM so all the businesses in the country think I’m a worthless village idiot and write me off. So since I never got an internship because of picky employers, now I can’t get an entry level job because I never did 5 years of work for free. If I ever get the luxury of an actual adult job masking will be hell, I cannot stand those fart-sniffers to the point where I have developed an admittedly irrational technophobia.
My mask is nearly sheer at this point and I've started wearing more goth clothing to work because fuck it.
Thankfully I'm tight lipped at work and my social media accounts are either private or deserted wastelands. So far everyone is pretending to have a live and let live mentality about their coworkers, but I have a feeling the moment career progression actually looks possible again that people will be snitching left and right.