Feeling really lonely as the only one who cares about ethical tech. Everyone around me just wants to build money making products and it doesn't matter if it adds value, only if it makes money. I wanna do good things with tech but it's getting harder. And my company just put a new CEO in charge who has a business plan but no vision. No added value. Just taking money from customers, making them addicted to the product. That's all that matters.

perhaps making a small indie game for others. that can be used for learning or just for fun.

Im so sorry you have to deal with this, half the reason I am sick and tired of programming is because of working for more companies like you are at, than for companies who actually care about what they make.

@Drmzindec Thanks, exactly I'm getting sick of it and I'm gonna start prepping for interviews so I can get out of here. Unfortunately it affects me mentally more than I thought.

programming is just a means to an end. It's like buying a nice table. You just care about its functionality first and if you have the money, you buy a better looking one. But first they are focusing on the profit part which makes total sense

What's your definition of "good" and "ethical"? My company prides itself on adding value for our clients and that's how we earn our money but the value we add to our clients might not seem good and ethical to everybody.

@cmarshall10450 adding value to clients is really good! It can't always be a super impactful thing, I understand that. But if the goal is to take value from the customers without adding any value to their life and on top of it all take money from them, I don't consider that to be good. It's just money grabbing, at least it's not harmful.

@merunas I disagree. Programming is somebody's time and skills used to build something. I think my time should be spent adding value to customers and playing the game of keeping the addicted to a brain numbing experience is not really my highest priority.

@merunas @MrSandman It entirely depends.

Right now I'm working on a rather big project with a good friend and since I thought of the idea and already made a big part of it, I get to call the shots on this one.

Thing is that I'm very privacy oriented and my friend is less.
Since I call the shots and also write the entire backend, I get to decide what data we store and I try to strip anything out that we don't absolutely need.
Also, no surveillance related services included or used like Google and Facebook and such, for anything at all.

The ethical part certainly matters for me and I'd resign at any company the moment I'd have to work on something I'm ethically not okay with (mostly intrusive user tracking and way too much data collection).

@linuxxx I completely agree with that sentiment. I've just been pitched an idea to learn user behavior and predict the choices that would better lead to have them spend money. Then use that knowledge to make targeted promotions for items they're interested in, because of our behavior prediction model. I'm like wtf no. Not cool. I do understand the business side of it but the motivation is not to help them better but to entice more spending. Maybe I'm being picky but I'm not a big fan of the idea.