It's pretty obvious why people hate the tech industry - perhaps not recognizing this is symptomatic of the problem. (As a partial participant in this industry, I'm personally ambivalent.)
The most successful tech companies all drive negative social impact. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, et. al each inflict unique psychological damage on their users, widely seen as net negative for each of them. Amazon, Google, MSFT, and other huge players are all now known to be selling our data to just about anyone, eroding privacy and possibly also freedoms by providing data to governments. Many other tech companies are, at best, making it easier for companies to extract money from consumers and for employers to need fewer people. I like streaming shows and music, but even the net benefits of streaming are dubious since people are much more content to sit on ass instead of engaging each other and enjoying each other's company. Not to mention the effect social media all has had on political discourse.
I don't know how much of the above is actually tech's fault, but it definitely feels that way to me, and I'm pretty certain these are commom beliefs.
> I like streaming shows and music, but even the net benefits of streaming are dubious...
And you can only pull "Yeah, I know you liked that show, but it wasn't as profitable as we hoped, so we're not renewing it for another season!" so many times before people get irritated.
> ...since people are much more content to sit on ass instead of engaging each other and enjoying each other's company.
I've been trying to aggressively create opportunities for people to interact in person, usually around a firepit, and it's far, far better than any amount of hours spent in front of screens.
You’ve basically described one segment of the tech industry and assumed all tech is like that. You’re talking about consumer tech.
There is a wide range of tech that has nothing to do with consumers or anything social: manufacturing, medical, hardware drivers, command & control, finance, safety systems, etc…
I mean... what tech do people interact with most? Consumer fucking tech.
Someone said it better below
"You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits."
> they have little if any noticeable impact on my daily life
I mean, all of those modern technologies actually affect a large fraction of everything you do when you're not in front of a screen... (Maybe such technology has existed in a similar form your whole life, though, so you don't notice, but over a longer timespan we are are talking about the majority of modern society).
I am mostly considering developments over the past decade. I think people were really optimistic about tech progress until relatively recently. Maybe it's just me, though.
That’s fine, aside from being a source to extract money from, consumers don’t matter. They have no choice but to use whatever we build. We’re not talking about shitty apps, we’re talking about everything else they take for granted and is deeply embedded in daily life.
I think my point is people should just be quiet about things they know nothing about. 10% of tech is consumer tech and the other 90% of tech is the things that run daily life that people know nothing about. Think machine to machine communications, scheduling systems, fraud detection, facial recognition, infrastructure, manufacturing, etc… you can have a whole career in tech and never have to think about consumer markets. One of my first jobs in tech was writing programs to cut parts out of expensive materials so efficiently that waste was minimized as much as possible, saving so much money, getting fat bonuses.
If you hear the word tech and just think of websites, apps, social networks, ads, you have a very simple world view.
So yea, consumer tech sucks, but consumers also fucking suck, and get harder and harder to extract some kind of value from as time goes on.
Ah, well it was news to some people that tech entrepreneurs aren't exactly beloved and I was explaining why I think that is. I know something about that, anyway. Also not totally clueless about a steady march of technological progress that most people don't notice the benefits of. Since people don't notice it, it's not relevant to why people don't love tech entrepreneurs, hence the question. It's about perception.
The "consumers suck" attitude probably goes a long way towards explaining the problem.
> The most successful tech companies all drive negative social impact.
A positive social impact — that is, a net positive externality — is created value that hasn’t been captured. From a corporate perspective, that is waste. A negative social impact — a net negative externality — is a cost that has been passed off to other people. Eliminating the former in favor of the latter is the natural incentive of any business.
There is basic support because of another open source org mode app - Orgro (https://orgro.org), - the author was even gracious enough to relicense his code away from GPL, so that I could use it. since GitJournal is shipped on the iOS store and GPL would not be compatible.
However, GitJournal internally expects everything to be markdown + yaml. So anything else are hacks I've done on top. At some point, I want to refactor and remove this hard dependency on Markdown.
Edit: I mistakenly thought the app was Orgzy. I've updated the comment. Sorry.
GPL seems to be incompatible with the iOS store as that places some extra restrictions on it. [0] [1]. Some GPL apps such as KDE Connect have a special exception in their license for the ios App Store. [2]
As someone who has done both extensively, I humbly disagree. Writing involves thinking in a much less instrumental way, in my experience. In programming, there is often a clear pre-defined task, and the only question concerns the proper means of achieving that task. Writing, on the other hand, necessarily compels something much more dynamic & non-linear at the level of composition.
I'd toss this one under the category of 'wouldn't it be nice'. It would be nice if writing and programming were similar. It would be nice to have a bridge from the sciences to arts and letters. But if such a bridge could be merely posited, well, this positing would already be common parlance.
Writers tend to report very different ways of working. Some plan out everything and write a huge synopsis, others sit down and write start to finish. Some iterate somewhere in between.
For my part I plan out the high level plot, and a list of scenes. At most a 2-3 pages synopsis.
Then I write start to finish. No exceptions: Scene by scene, paragraph by paragraph, without going back.
Interestingly seeing as you suggest writing is more dynamic and non-linear, that method of writing a novel - which I've used twice so far, and in-progress with the third - is a lot less dynamic and non-linear than the way I write code.
I rarely plan out at anything but the very highest levels when I write code. I sketch out components and fill in pieces of code as I need them, and stub out other things, and then I test, and then fill in some more.
I can't write that way. I find if I try to produce any kind of in-depth synopsis I just end up changing most things when writing the full scenes anyway. I need to know the details of what went before to fill in the scene I'm currently working on, so I can't work effectively on it until I've written the previous ones out fully.
Some people do write by jumping back and forth, so I'm not suggesting you're wrong for you, but that's just not how it works for me. When I revise my draft I similarly go through them beginning to end. When I get it back from the editor, I gather up the notes, decides what to listen to and what to ignore, and go through my draft linearly, beginning to end.
I used the same process. I wrote the novel from the start to the end, never reading back during the first draft if not for recalling certain details that affected the latter part of the story. Before starting I had just a subject of a couple of pages and a few main characters descriptions. All the rest happened while writing. But while the first draft is so much a matter of inspiration and letting things happen in front of your eyes, what comes next is a lot more similar to improving a large software system. Reading again and again, finding weak spots, improving, reiterating this process.
> In programming, there is often a clear pre-defined task
How is this different from writing stuff? Most of the time you have some pre-defined thing you want to communicate. If you mean writing novels and not just writing memos or articles then the equivalent is coding games which is just as creative if not more than writing novels.
Sure, the goal of writing a piece of software is to have a piece of software, and the goal of writing a novel is to have a novel. That's trivial, though.
When I write a piece of software, I have more concrete goals that just write a piece of software. I'll usually have a goal (a TODO app), and maybe some ideas about which features. Sure, I might not know exactly how I'll get there, and along the way I might come up with the new ideas, but you don't start with the goal of writing a TODO app and end up with an application that processes DICOM images.
With writing a novel, well, very often the writer has no idea where it will go. This varies--some authors spend a lot of time planning everything out, scene by scene, chapter by chapter. But a lot of authors discovery write. That's what I do.. When I write, I'm waiting, hoping, to surprise myself. I want to go---oh what the hell is that!?
When programming, I go, Oh, I need to do that, to get this working. While writing, I'm constantly feeling my way through each word. I re-read it, outloud, tasting each word, and constantly asking myself: how does it make me feel?
That's fair and I guess highlights that I wasn't thinking about exploratory writing or even fiction. It is definitely very different if you aren't starting the writing process with an end in mind.
