The same day I quit the retail job someone told me that they thought doing online sex work is "exploiting myself." The work isn't exploitative, especially when compared with these low-wage positions where they overwork and mistreat employees.

https://www.businessinsider.com/great-resignation-teacher-onlyfans-bbw-model-money-jobs-work-careers-2022-1

  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    My perception of the software industry is that you make more money wasting time on stupid bullshit like being the guy building up the metaverse for facebook, or working on tools to more effectively advertise online than doing cool necessary stuff. Or working on ways to integrate twitter on a smart fridge. Or most of IoT.

    Yes and no, really. There are software engineers doing high-end GPU computing stuff for things like drug design, which are genuinely valuable (or at least should be--drug companies often chase drugs of questionable value to society) that get paid better than do the people working on any of the stuff you mentioned. At the same time, though, you're right that a ton of the money in software goes to work that is not actually valuable (my own job, working on health-care related software, is focused on the billing side of things, so I would classify it in the latter category, sadly).

    In general, though, I agree with what you're saying here; I think it was just a bit inelegantly expressed in your original comment.

    • thisismyrealname [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      obviously software engineers aren't the "most" important labor (if it even makes sense to rank most jobs by importance), but imagine what we could do as a species if 80% of them weren't working on the next bluetooth dildo or blockchain-enabled smart faucet