I started gravitating out of the software bubble

I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.

Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.

When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources. You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.

Are you me? > but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech A wake-up call for me was when I requested fair trade coffee for the office due to potential human/child slavery issues with coffee, even sourced the roast from our supplier that was fair trade (which wasn't more expensive), then after getting one order of it, since one of the execs preferred the other coffee we stopped getting it. > These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs. How do you find work that aligns with your values?