a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by briandmyers
briandmyers  ·  3454 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What is your job, hubski?

    I'm a programmer in the financial industry

Me too, at the moment. Embedded programmer, credit card machines now, but lots of other devices in the past.

    Maybe once a year I have a moral crisis about working in an industry that I hate and feel is fairly detrimental overall to society

It could be a lot worse! I had to leave a job a few years back, for similar reasons - I was working for a company that made training gear for military exercises - weapons simulators, etc. Very cool stuff to work on, and all non-lethal - it was even stuff designed to save lives, by training soldiers in proper weapons use. But I could not escape the fact that I was in the war business, and so I had to leave it eventually.





psudo  ·  3453 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, back when I was in college I was thinking about pursuing cyber security, but a little research quickly indicated that I'd most likely end up making software that helps 3rd World Despots better silence critics.

Currently I work on one of the myriads of markets that isn't the NYSE and while the problems are really interesting it's hard to feel right about what essentially amounts to helping HFT and my general distaste for the fact that it's legalized gambling that masquerades as a retirement strategy.