What do you not like about tech? I work in gov space sector and while it’s crazy bureaucratic and risk adverse, it’s a fulfilling mission and most people I work with are just excited to be working “in space” like their 12-year old self dreamed of.
That’s why the most popular services are/have been free.
The whole point of technology is to make things easier and cheaper en masse.
I feel that it's no longer about making quality products, but more about milking money by any means, even if immoral and/or obviously (self-)destructive. It may have been like that for some time already, but I wasn't able to realize that before.
It seems to me as if we've become the machine that we wanted to build.
I would love doing something that's more "down to earth". Optimally, in some sector that is involved with treating people with respect - "as if" they were real human beings. An alternative would be working outdoors and being nearer to nature in general.
I very much like the idea of building the thing I want to, to the quality and aesthetic I want (eg no ads or dark monetization patterns), and selling directly to customer. It’s still early days but it has put me in a good state of mind.
Check out the Handmade online community [0] and/or attend one of our conferences [1] this year.
I’m biased because I’m the organizer for the conferences, but we genuinely share your line of thinking. Wouldn’t hurt to congregate with like-minded folks :)
But let’s not underestimate the power of independent organizing. We haven’t seen much of it in our industry because us worker bees are historically well-paid.
Not to be a downer, but I just don’t see how you could convince a business to go slower for the sake of a better technical foundation.
It's a nebulous proposition, I get that, because you can't precisely engineer an outcome. My hope is there's enough of us organizing together to trigger the right shifts.
We'll see.