Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs?

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 10, 2012 @06:26PM from the all-depends-on-what-your-ethics-say dept.

First time accepted submitter hwaccaly writes "I'm a mid-career developer with a fair amount of experience working on data-intensive, mathematically ambitious software projects for fun — things like physics and systems simulations, written mostly in CUDA, targeted at Tesla GPUs and small clusters. Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"

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Re:I hate to rain on your parade... by Viol8 · 2012-06-10 23:43 · Score: 0, Redundant

If the simulation is only partially correct then any results will be worthless if they're supposed to be used in a medical cure as they could be worse than no results at all.