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Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs?

Posted by timothy on 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?"

4 of 559 comments (clear)

  1. get a job you unwashed hippie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    suck it up

  2. Re:Schrödinger's ethical Quantum Cat by shentino · · Score: -1, Troll

    Depends on who is playing the pipe.

    And if someone suffers, the blame falls on who caused the suffering to begin with.

    Suppose that I'm a victim of aids, and the only way to treat me would be to kill a million rats and find an antidote.

    Pretty unethical, but gee, maybe I wouldn't have gotten aids in the first place if I'd kept my pants on?

    Ditto for emphysema. It's pretty easy to be well if you don't get sick in the first place. Staying away from cigarettes and pollution is a good start.

    And for diabetes, lay the fuck off the sweets and get some damned exercise.

    I could go on and a lot of health problems that we torture rats for are much cheaper, both economically AND ethically, to prevent. You don't need to torture rats to get exercise, eat right, get sunshine, drink plenty of water, and so on.

    To be blunt, if I wanted to make the world a better place, there are sure as hell a lot of better ways to do it than to breed a pack of rats to test new pharmaceuticals on. If people simply got fresh air, exercised, ate right, and drank healthy fluids, and got sunshine, the pharmaceutical industry would go bankrupt in a month...

  3. Re:Ex-Gaming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Haha, ethics nuts.... I bet he's fucking vegan too.

  4. Re:Ex-Gaming by darjen · · Score: -1, Troll

    You should remind yourself that those people come home, drink milk and eat vegetables too.

    They kill innocent foreigners for a living. As far as I know, most religions/ethical systems frown on that sort of thing.

    Whether you fully agree with the military's current actions or not, you benefit from the military. Odds are excellent that you are undereducated as to how you benefit, and thus are acting from a point of limited visibility.

    Odds are unclear that any technological benefits we may or may not receive from the military (death) industry wouldn't be put to better use in civilized society.